In the Shadow of the American Dream (28 page)

When someone is dying in their nineties it seems somehow acceptable. Growing up I never had a notion that one need fear death. It was an extension of age, old age. Childhood memories of old people—they were ancient-looking, wrinkled like alien species, but they had familiar names like grandma or grandpa. I would think of death in terms of time—tortoises that lived 200 to 500 years old—that was enticing. Wouldn't it be great to be a tortoise? Why do we only get seventy to ninety years in comparison? But look how slowly they move. All day long eating cactus and weird plants. They can't drive cross-country, hop freights, go to the moon, except if they're dogs or monkeys strapped into a vessel by Americans or Russians—no real regard for their lives. (Monkey that wrecked capsule control panel: Hero.) In mating practices one male tortoise will knock another on his back leaving him to lie for days in hot sun till his heartbeat stops. What about cicadas? My favorite insect, living underground for seven to thirteen years, nursing like a baby at a tit, the tiny drops of water from the roots of a tree. Two weeks, maybe, of life to fuck, lay eggs, and die. Then become meaningless in that immeasurable grunge.

As a kid I thought I'd die amidst a tumble of horse legs in the dust. Some notion of wanting to live in the 1800s West, maybe beyond laws as they subsequently were formed. Less laws years ago.

I feel like it's happening to this person called David, but not to me. It's happening to this person who looks exactly like me, is as tall as me and I can see through his eyes as if I am in his body, but it's still not me. So I go on and occasionally this person called David cries or makes plans for the possibility of death or departure or going to a doctor for checkups or dabbles in underground drugs in hopes for more time, and then eventually I get the body back and that David disappears for a while and I go about my daily business doing what I do, what I need or care to do. I sometimes feel bad for that David and can't believe he is dying.

Smack makes everything so black that it takes a long long time for things to come back to your eyes. That's what I remember about it.

Looking in the eye at the possibility of real death, I haven't gotten all religious (I got as much spirituality as a humpback toad). That's not being sarcastic just that if I believe in God it's innately and that's okay. (I mean I love the idea of invisible angels walking little kids to the river and back or steadying them as they walk along a branch 200 feet above the forest floor. I even like the idea of little plastic bug-eyed saints doing magic looking like assembly-line zombies in rows by the dozens in the botanica.)

The idea that nothing matters or that nothing means anything—that's bullshit. You take a gun (that's extreme) and shoot someone: it means something (at least to them). You touch something (that's subtle): it makes a change maybe not gigantic but it does shift things, displaces air or space or thinking. Who the fuck knows what it all means? Who cares? It's all happening anyway with or without you (that's the thing about watching someone die, you turn from the deathbed or the sidewalk and then look out the window or down the street and the world is still in motion and that's both a tragic and a beautiful part of it). And days come and go and 3,000 miles away the crust of the earth spins just as fast and everything you feel and translate into images or writings can at least make someone else in the world feel like they're not alone or not crazy 'cause they feel the same things. Experience is valuable.

The only hero I have or can think of is the monkey cosmonaut in the Russian capsule that got excited in space and broke loose from his restraints and began smashing the control board. The flight had to be aborted.

Dreamt I was telling or about to tell my sister or brother that I had ARC. Started crying violently. All this tension of telling her or him almost like I had just got the news. Dream disappeared before I did.

November 9, 1988

In this sleep it was some guy from ACT-UP. Never really saw him before but it made sense and he's trying to organize an action and I'm falling in love with him but thinking I've got ARC and that prevents it or prevents me from being acceptable or attractive. At some point I'm witnessing an ACT-UP meeting only it's outdoors and indoors at the same time. Some aggressive lesbian is treating this guy like his ideas are a waste of time. I finally tell her to shut up and that if she continues I'm going to have to raise my voice. I feel this is socially dangerous, that I'll be rejected if I do by the group but I go ahead anyway and in doing so I realize I hate the Right and that there is support or at least acknowledgment and she goes away, disappears into the crowd. The guy pulls me over onto a platform semiprivate on the street but somehow like a bedroom, a sense almost of privacy. We kiss and he's flirting with me touching my arms and shoulders taking small kisses. I'm very attracted to him sexually but it's more than that I feel like he'd love me and even protect me take care of me and that makes me feel very happy but then I think of my diagnosis. Scene shifts. We're near a series of large fences being constructed. He goes over to one and with another guy (who may be a construction worker but I mistake him for an ACT-UP member) he scales the fence partway then leans back pulling the top of the fence almost to the ground. It's like he is showing me how to perform an intended action. Construction boss comes running and I tell the guy to stop. Suddenly we're in a construction shack. He's got no shirt on and he's pulling me on top of him to kiss, workers all around and boss is too and some make fun of our homosexuality and anyway we answer some of their questions about our sexuality while kissing, etc. I'm really nuts for this guy, desire so strong it's a matter of being happy the rest of my life. Scene shifts. We're getting on an escalator that's miles up into the sky with the sense we're going up over a side of a very high cliff, large cables looping through rings on the sides near where our hands rest. We go up several levels, twenty stories it feels like, and crowds of people all around, at some point the escalator breaks into different upward directions. I find myself on the opposite track going towards a tunnel. A guy is moving on another track. We're about to be separated. I get upset and try to climb up to his track with a pull-up motion, got my hands on the banister, metal cable is pulling me along but I have no strength to pull myself over. He's trying to pull me over. Wall is coming up where I'll be knocked down and fall several stories. He pulls up cable ahead of me and loops it in a way to stop escalator, a knot. I get over but escalator has stopped and I get worried knot will cause cable to snap and I think of people getting killed by its snap and escalator suddenly continues and I'm still wondering how the knot was undone and I realize the guy is disappearing above me. I see the coolness of his white T-shirt. Suddenly I've arrived at a place where everyone is waiting in line in semidarkness for an elevator or something to continue the upward ascent. It looks backed up, lines of people. I feel upset and need to find this guy also wondering when I'll tell him about my diagnosis. Suddenly the gladness I feel with contact with him turns to memory of Tom. Sadness and feelings of love for Tom. I think that I don't want to lose him. I can't envision breaking up with him. I wake up sad and exhilarated simultaneously.

David was out of contact with his mother, Dolores, for most of his adult life. He had received a letter from her, to which he responded with the following, but he probably did not send it
.

February-November 1989

February 22, 1989

On my way to Dallas. Who am I? Who are you? These questions, I'm wondering if I can write this stuff without including all its references. What is this mind I carry in this body? Last day I saw myself as a moving man of nerves and love and fears and anxieties and need and contradiction. I was at the gallery and Barbara Kruger sticks her head in the door to say that the work I'd done is great. What that meant to me emotionally—. Who is she? telling me she cares for my work or that my work has an effect on her—It's in the midst of my facing my mortality, I need so much in terms of what gestures I make in my work. I put all this stuff out there in a state, a whirl of sensory examination, and what is it I want or need? I want to open a window on my soul on my body on my loves and anxieties. I want to open a window on who and what I am. I want to create a myth that I can one day become. I want to adjust myself through my work—the compelling need to see the strength outside of myself before I can become it, embrace it. And simultaneously wanting to be anonymous, wanting to be faceless. The two desires can't click can't merge can't exist together. As an artist or a writer, I can at times be faceless and thus anonymous, but I really don't want anonymity. To get feedback you can't be completely anonymous. So what can I do? I am what I do, but not really. I get angry at the pressure of strength. I get resistant to the idea that I should be clear and strong in this part of my life. I want to be raw, I want blood in my work. This is why I don't revise my writings very much. Why I stop short of the ideal construction of painting or photo or whatever …

PETER MADE PHOTOGRAPHS

PETER HAD SEX WITH MEN

PETER HAD SEX WITH WOMEN

PETER MADE PHOTOGRAPHS

PETER COOKED FOOD

PETER ATE HEALTHY FOOD

PETER WENT TO PERFORMANCES

PETER WENT OUT ON HALLOWEEN

PETER MOVED AMONG THE RICH

PETER MOVED AMONG THE POOR

PETER MADE PHOTOGRAPHS

PETER LISTENED TO MUSIC

PETER EXPLORED THE WAREHOUSES

PETER DREAMED

PETER WEPT

PETER FUCKED

PETER PHOTOGRAPHED

PETER MADE MOVIES

PETER HAD AIDS

PETER DIED

All this stuff life is made of

[No date]

(Driving between Albuquerque and Holbrook, Arizona) I felt something loosen what with the long barren interstate and the slow withdrawal from population. It eases the eyes to see just dirt and rocks and low scrub bushes for miles and miles and clear to the smoky blue horizon. There's just rising buttes and sandstone formations and it's Krazy Kat country and in the late part of the day the trucks come shimmering through the distance bouncing sunlight off their metallic bodies into my face and beyond. Then the sun almost set and it's getting pale yellow at the horizon and the earth is turning red deep red and purple and there's tiny little cows the size of peas black against the red landscape and dotting the hills and slopes beneath the enormous Erector Set electric stanchions that look vaguely fetishlike, like kachinas of the industrial world. And somewhere out in all that distance I feel something slipping in the back of my head. I am a member of the industrialized tribe, the illusory tribe that catapults this nation, this society into something thick and hallucinogenic. What is this in these wrists that grab the driving wheel? What blood flows through these arms and hands? What color and sense in the blood? What do these views have in common with electric wiring? Looking through the windshield into the horizontal distance, the scrub-dotted plains, the gray-black slopes of sudden mounds of earth appearing on the ocher and green yellow plains, the soft buttes and mountains in the distance—what can these feet level? what can these feet flatten? what can these hands raise?

It's a shock in the dusk, the light dusty rose color of the sloping hills, the pearly white spherical shapes of gas tanks glowing in the fading light …

David's collaboration with Ben Neill,
Itsofomo: In the Shadow of Forward Motion,
a multimedia performance, was presented in raw version for four nights at the Kitchen in New York City
.

Ben Neill Performance

Someone once said that the Ancients believed that light came from inside the eyes and that you cast this light upon things, whenever you turned you cast light from your eyes onto the world.

March 3, 1989