Close to the Knives (22 page)

D.
: Yeah … You have a headache, you take aspirin. You have a
normal
life, you take drugs. Is that what it boils down to?

SYLVIA
: Well, like I said, I took them just to get rid of the mundane aspect of everything I am seeing, but I've never seen anything mundane in anything, so I must be taking it to eliminate the depth, to get through the everyday and
see
it that way. You talk about this nation of zombies, what do
they
do? I know they don't question things but how do they do it? I don't think I'm special—

D.
: I think we are. We see something about the structure that others take for granted or seem blind to; the structure consumes them and all they know is to get that job, get that food, get that comfort and, hopefully, get that retirement.

SYLVIA
: I've always envied people like that on some level, people who knew what they wanted to do, what they had to do, didn't question it. And they don't want you around; they'll fuck you so bad if you say, “Excuse me, stop and lets talk about all this for a minute. Why are you doing this?” They'll fucking kill you.

Last night I called my mother. I said,
“I'm really fucking smart.”
Everyone has been saying I'm too smart for my own good. I say, “Get the fuck away from me—that's right, I'm too smart, that's all I have.”

D.
: I've been told all my life that I'm “too sensitive,” as if you could just turn the tap off and feel a little less sensitive for the rest of your life and everything will be okay.

SYLVIA
: “Too sensitive”—oh, definitely. Too smart, too sensitive, intuitive. It is
“much sensitive,”
not “too sensitive,” as if it were derogatory. Excuse me, that is what I am. I'll spend my whole life trying to maintain this rather than trying to turn it off. That's why it is hard. I want to be as smart and as sensitive as I am and see things the way I do. I want to be strong enough to stay that way. I don't want to dull that. I did drugs to dull these feelings, to avoid paying bills I couldn't pay. On the other hand I can face shit head-on. I'm even stronger than I want to be. No matter what happens technically, no matter what kinds of jobs I've worked—it's all incidental to thinking. That's all that is important is the thinking. I don't know how to make money from it. It would be great to pay the rent. And I don't want a million bucks and then just sit around thinking all day—I also have to be in the middle of it, I don't care what it is. I'm not justifying the horror of the last five years—that's
mine
; that's my
choice
, that's my
reason
—I'll move on from here. None of that is going to set me back because I've been thinking all along through it; I cared about it. It doesn't matter what's happening, it's how you look at it. I'll never let anyone take that away from me, with, “You're too sensitive.” Fuck you—you're lucky there's people out here thinking about why we're doing anything. But
one
is not good without the
other
. Even if someone can go through the motions and not know it, they're not getting anything out of it. They are just getting through it. We can't be alive and questioning it without doing a little of that “maintaining.”

TAPE RECORDING:

JOE
: … I know a lot more about what I was feeling back then than I did at the time. Someone asked me recently about the movies I made, and I said, “My only intent is to destroy sex.” They said, “What do you mean?” It occurred to me that whatever we are denied or whatever we do not get in the way that we want, we want to smash it. I could never understand romance and shit—it never seemed to work out like in the picture books or the movies, so, naturally, I wanted to destroy it. It is just that in your twenties you don't realize that you don't necessarily want that which you cannot have—it just seems that way. It is
states of life
that end up being attractive; things where other people seem to be content. Like—I wish I had a wife. And a house. And a car. But my desire for that makes me hate it. Such as, seeing a couple kissing; I hate it. It makes me sick. Just because I don't have it.

DAVID
: Do you mean media images of
happiness?

JOE
: Yeah. But that's all we have to go on, especially if you don't have a strong family environment. I mean we all come from fucked-up homes. Most of our fucking input is from fairy tales, from the movies, tv, magazines, and from all that shit. It took me
forever
to figure out that that's all definitely a bunch of fairy tales. I feel like an idiot for not seeing that when I was a kid …

Q.
Why did the monkey fall out of the tree?

A.
Because it was dead.

JOURNAL EXCERPT:

I was sitting in Joe's house trying to figure out where I am and where I am going. That question was solved when he took out a syringe and started uncapping a hit of ecstasy. I joined him in the kitchen and talked him into letting me use the needle after him. It was the only needle he had. He resisted at first, something to do with me being queer and all. I felt insulted and then he remembered bleach could kill the virus if I had it. When he was fixing he dropped the cotton ball out of the spoon onto the dirty floor, cursed and picked it up saying, “Oh what the fuck,” and rolling it around between his filthy paint-covered fingers. After he hit up I cleaned the needle with Clorox and spring water a few times. When I hit the vein and pushed in the depressor it was like a golfball of heat and light blew through my heart and sped up into my brain. An inaudible pop behind the chest and skull and the world was instantly beautiful. I left and walked downstairs and pushed through the group of people waiting on line to score from the old lady on the third floor. The streets were emptying out with the falling of the sun.

Later tonight I was walking around like a loaded pistol, out and around the streets where the air is so thick with pollution and death. The streetlamps burn dim and over in the dusk above the buildings there's a blimp hovering in a torturous drift, with “McDonalds” written on its side. I wish someone would take an elephant gun and blow it out of the sky. Over on A venue A, near 11th street, three little puerto rican kids are beating the shit out of a giant Snoopy doll with nail-studded boards. They beat its head until the white guts of cotton stuffing were completely emptied. An insulting vision appeared in the burnt-out streets, in the poverty of the block, the broken tenements and doomed kids; the little park filled with broken glass and shacks made of cardboard; and the o.d. sleepers and the puke and shit and the stains of yesterday evening's bloody knifing and the hungry stray dogs and the old man they sleep with in winter to keep from freezing in the abandoned building; and the little brats waiting to grow old enough to sell dope and shoot other kids that step on their turf and the people with disease selling their used hypodermics—into the middle of all this walks a stupid boy cop fresh from queens and pale with fear trying to twirl his baton like a seasoned pro.

I get back to Joe's house and he's still going strong with the needle. I got no other place to live and all the rents are up because the rich people decided the suburbs are really hell and are moving back to the cities. Joe informs me that people die of heart attacks all the time from one i.v. shot of ecstasy. It's the last time I do it. The darkness that comes from this shit is so pervasive that it taps into the dark tone of american structure. Everything that is horror-filled and powerfully ugly about the american dream and its resulting nightmare descends like a twenty-mile-wide blanket over this part of the city. I wish I was travelling in a disposable body through the landscape of the u.s.a. map and I was like a blinking light moving from state to state. I could be a killer stalking a president or I could be engaging in some sordid and tender sexuality with a stranger I've yet to meet in the folds of landscape or among the monoliths of foreign city canyons. I could be on a warm current of air drifting towards the wet and smelly center of someone's butt in the turning of dirty sheets and summer humidity and neon shop glow and breaking bottles and fistfights down in the streets and abandoned lots and I could live forever in this drift; my body could last a hundred centuries or my brain could last a thousand more without benefit of my body's weight and it's all possible and it's all false and it's every which way and its all edgy and surreal and maybe I just want to scream a bit right here and even if I were to scream it would do nothing; everything is blowing out sideways: this elliptical stretch of flesh and mortality, the death implied in a refrigerated existence, the mounting and piling up of these words; these fragmented shapes called letters, the piling up of words in the pages of this book and the reader's eyeball at the voyeuristic microscope or telescope pouring over these sound-images and rattlings and bursts of thoughts and fuck you maybe I should be in some ratty ballerina outfit wearing the mask of a salivating mad dog twirling like some psychotic diva in a circular spot light all for your edification, for your discreet voyeuristic pleasure, and I should make a wild pirouette through the frameworks of my social death; a wild pirouette and a leap through the air to land at your feet only to throw up on your shoes. jerk.

TAPE RECORDING:

D.
: What attracts you to the “dark” things: murder, medical deformities, and other stuff like that?

J.
: It just shows the difference between “normal” and “abnormal.” People walk around and everyone thinks they're normal—like people in suburbia—and anybody could have stuff like that happen to them, like a genetic defect—it's possible, it's in everybody's genes. There are recessive chromosomes for all kinds of unfamiliar stuff. It always fascinated me; the things that determine what the world is made up of or what defines “normal.” Some of the stuff is dark and upsets me but I just can't stop looking at it—I'm drawn to it. Like murder, I can really see … well, sometimes I can and sometimes I can't. I'm just fascinated by what makes some guy climb up a fucking tower and start shooting at a McDonalds. The fact that somebody can lead a “normal” life like Son of Sam—working in a post office for years and years, carrying on this regular life while he's killing all these people. Everyone else thought he was a regular joe. There's all this stuff hidden inside of people. I'm attracted to what's hidden. That's why I'm into the occult too. Things that you don't see everyday. It breaks up the boredom. When I was making that magazine,
MURDER
, I was dealing with the imposed line that people put up inside themselves, where they think they are different from those who commit murders or violent acts. Part of my fascination is bringing up these things and putting them in the faces of snobs to see their reactions and make them think about it. I think death is a part of life; death is the end of life, the end of the circle—it's a new beginning. The mystery of death is seductive. I want people to think about the fact that death is in
front
of us as well as around us. It's something we have to look forward to. Also the fact that “normal, everyday people” do go out and cut somebody's arm off and kill their children, and this happens all the time. There are people who are snobs about it and think that nothing like that could ever happen to them and they're full of shit. It can happen to anybody. Look at Donald Manes. He fucking cut his heart out. It's in everybody. The possibilities of violence to themselves or to others. People still believe that cops don't kill innocent people. Let's do an experiment: you go kill a cop on the corner and let's see what people say about it. My work is an outlet for these feelings. I've thought about killing, like when I got ripped off—I used to have a gun but I got rid of it because I felt I would end up using it—like Dakota ended up killing someone. I remember I'd be dopesick and I'd have forty dollars left and somebody'd go and take it from me and I'd end up going nuts and want to kill somebody. The drugs are part of that feeling but even without the drugs I get pretty emotional when somebody is taking away my liberty. Dealing with this material is a catharsis. A lot of people say that after they punch a wall they feel a lot better, but their hand is broken. I've done that too. It helps to get it out. Some people say that doing this stuff, or obsessing with this stuff or handling it, that you're adding to the violence in the world. But most people
aren't
living peacefully and happy, especially in a city like this with millions of people stacked up on top of each other. I came across one of the letters Dakota sent me, where he said he had been sleeping in Central Park during this one winter in 1984 and he said he was getting really tempted to just give away everything he owned and just duke it out with nature. He said, “I just can't think of anything else to do. Can you?”

D.
: I've had those feelings—why just help maintain the structure you're surrounded by; why try and struggle and survive in it? Why not just drop everything and go out and do things that are absolutely raw and without boundaries and laws and deal with survival on a real level, not one surrounded by all these fucking illusions? That was my impulse for years.

J.
: Yeah. It's giving up on the world and the imposed structure of everyday life; it gets really frustrating—like living where I am now, living in an apartment where there's been a fire and there's soot everywhere and I got a kid and I still have to pay the landlord money to live there and there's this fucking killer; this guy John who's killed a bunch of people—I found him stripping my bicycle and I came out in the hall with my sword and was going nuts. This guy is friends with and lives with the woman downstairs with all those kids. He's been hanging out there and he told me when I came out with the knife, “Don't pull a knife on me. You don't know how many people I've killed for doing that.” He recently came out on parole after years in prison for killing people. I told him that if he keeps fucking with me, something's gonna happen. I'm trying to deal with this guy and he's a scary guy; all muscular and bigger than me …