David Wojnarowicz - Close to the Knives: A Memoir of Disintegration

Close to the Knives

A Memoir of Disintegration

David Wojnarowicz

This Book Is For: Peter Hujar

Tom Rauffenbart

Marion Scemama

longer than China, bigger than Berlin

I go to a far away place within

taking a journey with 67 eyes

flying through fire all over the skies

Keiko Bonk

every stinking bum should wear a crown.

Iggy Pop

SELF-PORTRAIT IN TWENTY-THREE ROUNDS

So my heritage is a calculated fuck on some faraway sun-filled bed while the curtains are being sucked in and out of an open window by a passing breeze. Id be lying if I were to tell you I could remember the smell of sweat as I hadnt even been born yet. Conceptions just a shot in the dark. Im supposed to be dead right now but I just woke up this dingo motherfucker having hit me across the head with a slab of marble that instead of splitting my head open laid a neat sliver of eyeglass lens through the bulls-eye center of my left eye. We were coming through this four-and-a-half-day torture of little or no sleep. Thats the breaks. We were staying at this one drag queens house but her man did her wrong by being seen by some other queen with a vicious tongue in a darkened lot on the west side fucking some cute little puerto rican boy in the face and when me and my buddy knocked on the door to try and get a mattress to lay down on she sent a bullet through the door thinking it was her manafter three days of no sleep and maybe a couple of stolen donuts my eyes start separating: one goes left and one goes right and after four days of sitting on some stoop on a side street head cradled in my arms seeing four hours of pairs of legs walking by too much traffic noise and junkies trying to rip us off and the sunlight so hot this is a new york summer I feel my brains slowly coming to a boil in whatever red-blue liquid the brains float in and looking down the street or walking around I begin to see large rats the size of shoeboxes; ya see them just outta the corner of your eyes, in the outer sphere of sight and when ya turn sharp to look at them theyve just disappeared around the corner or down subway steps and Im so sick my gums start bleedin everytime I breathe and after the fifth day I start seeing what looks like the limbs of small kids, arms and legs in the mouths of these rats and no screaming mommies or daddies to lend proof to the image and late last night me and my buddy were walking around with two meat cleavers we stole from Macys gourmet section stuck in between our belts and dry skin lookin for someone to mug and some queer on the upper east side tried to pick us up but my buddys meat cleaver dropped out the back of his pants just as the guy was opening the door to his building and clang clangalang the guy went apeshit his screams bouncing through the night off half a million windows of surrounding apartments we ran thirty blocks till we felt safe. Some nights we had so much hate for the world and each other all these stupid dreams of finding his foster parents who he tried poisoning with a box of rat poison when they let him out of the attic after keeping him locked in there for a month and a half after all dear its summer vacation and no one will miss you heres a couple of jugs of springwater and cereal dont eat it all at once were off on a holiday after all its better this than we return you to that nasty kids home. His parents had sharp taste buds and my buddy spent eight years in some jail for the criminally insane even though he was just a minor. Somehow though he had this idea to find his folks and scam lots of cash off them so we could start a new life. Some nights wed walk seven or eight hundred blocks practically the whole island of manhattan crisscrossing east and west north and south each on opposite sides of the streets picking up every wino bottle we found and throwing it ten feet into the air so it crash exploded a couple of inches away from the others feeton nights that called for it every pane of glass in every phone booth from here to south street would dissolve in a shower of light. We slept good after a night of this in some abandoned car boiler room rooftop or lonely drag queens palace.

If I were to leave this country and never come back or see it again in films or sleep I would still remember a number of different things that sift back in some kind of tidal motion. I remember when I was eight years old I would crawl out the window of my apartment seven stories above the ground and hold on to the ledge with ten scrawny fingers and lower myself out above the sea of cars burning up eighth avenue and hang there like a stupid motherfucker for five minutes at a time testing my own strength dangling I liked the rough texture of the bricks against the tips of my sneakers and when I got tired Id haul myself back in for a few minutes rest and then climb back out testing testing testing how do I control this how much control do I have how much strength do I have waking up with a mouthful of soot sleeping on these shitty bird-filled rooftops waking up to hard-assed sunlight burning the tops of my eyes and I aint had much to eat in three days except for the steak we stole from the A&P and cooked in some bum kitchen down on the lower east side the workers were friendly to us that way and we looked clean compared to the others and really I had dirt scabs behind my ears I hadnt washed in months but once in a while in the mens room of a horn and hardarts on forty-second street in between standing around hustling for some red-eyed bastard with a pink face and a wallet full of singles to come up behind me and pinch my ass murmuring something about good times and good times for me was just one fucking night of solid sleep which was impossible I mean in the boiler room of some high-rise the pipes would start clanking and hissing like machine pistons putting together a tunnel under the river from here to jersey and its only the morning 6:00 a.m. heat piping in to all those people up above our heads and Im looking like one of them refugees in the back of life magazine only no care packages for me they give me some tickets up at the salvation army for three meals at a soup kitchen where you get a bowl of mucus water and sip rotten potatoes while some guy down the table is losing his eye into his soup he didnt move fast enough on the line and some fucked-up wino they hired as guard popped him in the eye with a bottle and Im so lacking in those lovely vitamins they put in wonder-bread and real family meals that when I puff one drag off my cigarette blood pours out between my teeth sopping into the nonfilter and that buddy of mine complains that he wont smoke it after me and in the horn and hardarts theres a table full of deaf mutes and theyre the loudest people in the joint one of them seventy years old takes me to a nearby hotel once a month when his disability check comes in and he has me lay down on my belly and he dry humps me harder and harder and his dick is soft and banging against my ass and his arm is mashing my little face up as he goes through his routine of pretending to come and starts hollering the way only a deaf mute can holler like donkeys braying when snakes come around but somehow in the midst of all that I love him maybe its the way he returns to his table of friends in the cafeteria a smile busted across his face and Im the one with the secret and twenty dollars in my pocket and then theres the fetishist who one time years ago picked me up and told me this story of how he used to be in the one platoon in fort dix where they shoved all the idiots and illiterates and poor bastards that thought kinda slow and the ones with speeth spitch speeeeeeech impediments that means you talk funny he said and I nodded one of my silent yess that Id give as conversation to anyone with a tongue in those days and every sunday morning this sadistic sonuvabitch of a sergeant would come into the barracks and make the guys come out one by one and attempt to publicly read the sunday funnies blondie and dagwood and beetle baily and dondi, with his stupid morals I was glad when some little delinquent punched his face in one sunday and he had a shiner three sundays in a row full color till the strip couldnt get any more mileage out of it and some cop busted the delinquent and put him back in the reform school he escaped from, and all the while these poor slobs are trying to read even one line the sergeant is saying lookit this stupid sonuvabitch how the fuck do you expect to serve this country of yours and you cant even read to save your ass and hed run around the barracks smacking all the guys in the head one after the other and make them force them to laugh at this guy tryin to read until it was the next guys turn, and when we got to this guys place there was three cats pissing all over the joint crusty brown cans of opened cat food littering the floor window open so they could leave by the fire escape and he had this thing for rubber hed dress me up in this sergeants outfit but with a pair of rubber sneakers that they made only during world war two when it was important to do that I guess canvas was a material they needed for the war effort or something and anyway so he would have me put on these pure rubber sneakers and the sergeants outfit and then a rubber trenchcoat and then hed grease up his dick and he would start fucking another rubber sneaker while on his belly and Id have to shove my sneakers sole against his face and tell him to lick the dirt off the bottom of it and all the while cursing at him telling him how stupid he was a fuckin dingo stupid dog aint worth catfood whered you get your fuckin brains surprised they even let ya past the m.p.s on the front gate oughta call in the trucks and have you carted off to some idiot farm and whered you get your brains and whered you get your brains and when he came into his rubber sneaker hed roll over all summer sweaty and say oh that was a good load musta ate some eggs today and Im already removing my uniform and he says he loves the way my skeleton moves underneath my skin when I bend over to retrieve one of my socks.