Close to the Knives (12 page)

I can't form words these past few days, sometimes thinking I've been drained of emotional content from weeping or fear. I keep doing these impulsive things like trying to make a film that records the rituals in an attempt to give grief form. It's almost winter and I drive west of New York to film myself bathing in a lake in some of the only virgin forest left on the eastern seaboard. I hold a super-8 camera in my hands and spin around and around in the woods thinking of dervishes; thinking of the intoxication of freedom witnessed in death.

Now I've driven north of New York City to the gravesite on a gray day filled with random spots of rain on a dirty windshield. All those birds' nests high in the winter trees. Everything rich and black and wet and brown, the serious rich darkness of his photographs. I'm kicking around the cemetery mud among huge lifeless tractors and the ravines they've made strewn with boulders and wet earth, talking to him; first walking around trying to find him was so difficult I started laughing nervously, “Maybe I can't find you, Peter.” And these erratic pacings back and forth from his ground soil back to the car, cigarettes lit, camera retrieved from the backseat and brought back to the unmarked gravesite for a picture of Neal's flowers, “He loved flowers; loved them …” Months and months of illness and the house was always filled with flowers; some so big and wild they didn't even look like flowers; more like beings from some lunar slopes. All these erratic movements till finally I stopped myself, forced myself to contain my movements. Walking backward and forward at the same time, I realized how rattled I was. I was talking to him again. I get so amazingly self-conscious talking to him a thousand thoughts at once. The eye hovers in space inches from the back of my head; seeing myself seeing him, or, the surface extension of him—the wet tossed earth—and further seeing his spirit; his curled body rising invisible just above the ground; his eyes full and seeing; him behind me looking over my shoulder at himself rising over my shoulder, watching me looking at the fresh turned earth where he lies buried.

I try talking to him wondering if he knows I'm there, if he sees me. I know he sees me, he's in the wind, in the air around me. He covers the fields in a fine mist. He's in his home in the city. He's behind me. It's wet and cold but I like it like that. Like the way it numbs my fingers, makes them white and red at the knuckles. Strangers pat the earth before various stones around me; cars idle at the roadsides and long valleys and ridges on into the distance and everything is torn up and uprooted in this section—all the wet markings of the earth and the tractors, all these graves freshly developed and those birds' nests giant and wet-leaved as if they've been dropped by unseen hands into the crooks of tree limbs. I talk to him, so conscious of being alive and talking to my impressions, my memories of him, suspending all disbelief. I know he's there and I see him. I sense him in the hole down there under the surface of that earth. I see him without the covering of the plain pine box. The box no longer exists in my head, there's just a huge wide earth and grass and fields and crowfeet trees and me, my shape in the wet air and clouds like gauze like gray overlapping in fog and I tell him I'm scared and confused and I'm crying and I tell him how much I love him and how much he means to me and I tell him everything in my head, all the contradictions all fear and all love and all alone.

And his death is now as if it's printed on celluloid on the backs of my eyes. That last day when friends came to speak reassurances to him or to read letters from other friends to him or touch his hands or feet or to simply sit by his bed—there were people arriving and departing all day long—there was some point when I was sitting at the far corner of the bed in a chair thinking about leaving when I looked toward his face and his eyes moved slightly and I put two fingers up like rabbit ears behind the back of my head, a gesture, a high sign we had that we'd discreetly give when we bumped into each other at a crowded gathering in the past. I flashed him the sign and then turned away embarrassed and moments later Ethyl said, “David … look at Peter.” We all turned to the bed and his body was completely still; and then there was a very strong and slow intake of breath and then stillness and then one more intake of breath and he was gone.

I surprised myself: I barely cried. When everyone left the room I closed the door and pulled the super-8 camera out of my bag and did a sweep of his bed: his open eye, his open mouth, that beautiful hand with the hint of gauze at the wrist that held the i.v. needle, the color of his hand like marble, the full sense of the flesh of it. Then the still camera: portraits of his amazing feet, his head, that open eye again—I kept trying to get the light I saw in that eye—and then the door flew open and a nun rushed in babbling about how he'd accepted the church and I look at this guy on the bed with his outstretched arm and I think: but he's beyond that. He's more there than the words coming from her containing these images of spirituality—I mean just the essence of death; the whole taboo structure in this culture the mystery of it the fears and joys of it the flight it contains this body of my friend on the bed this body of my brother my father my emotional link to the world this body I don't know this pure and cutting air just all the thoughts and sensations this death this event produces in bystanders contains more spirituality than any words we can manufacture.

So I asked her to leave and after closing the door again I tried to say something to him staring into that enormous eye. If in death the body's energy disperses and merges with everything around us, can it immediately know my thoughts? But I try and speak anyway and try and say something in case he's afraid or confused by his own death and maybe needs some reassurance or tool to pick up, but nothing comes from my mouth. This is the most important event of my life and my mouth can't form words and maybe I'm the one who needs words, maybe I'm the one who needs reassurance and all I can do is raise my hands from my sides in helplessness and say, “All I want is some sort of grace.” And then the water comes from my eyes.

I go into these rages periodically that can find no real form where I end up hitting the backs of my hands against the television set instead of giving in to my real urge which is to rip the thing out of the wall and toss it blaring out the window into the traffic. Or I wake up from daydreams of tipping amazonian blowdarts in “infected blood” and spitting them at the exposed necklines of certain politicians or nazi-preachers or government health-care officials or the rabid strangers parading against AIDS clinics in the nightly news suburbs. I carry this rage in moments like some kind of panic and yes I am horrified that I feel this desire for murder but it all starts with a revolving screen of memories that mixes past and present. It contains the faces and bodies of people I loved struggling for life, people I loved and people who I thought made a real difference in the world, or at least who lent some kind of balance to those whose images and intents we get served daily through the media. It begins with the earliest memories, when sexuality first stirs beneath one's skin in an organized social structure that would kill you spiritually or physically every chance it has.

I remember when I was eight and a half, some nineteen-year-old kid brought me up the elevator to the rooftop. Under the summer night sky he placed my face against his dick and I almost lost consciousness because of the power of the unconscious desires suddenly surfacing and how for a week afterward this eight-year-old plotted murder because of fears that the guy would tell someone and I'd be locked up or institutionalized and given electroshock and how I studied my face in the mirror day after day to see if what I'd experienced was written there and the confusion I felt wondering if I'd become this hateful thing, and yet my face remained the same. For months afterward I searched the public library for information on my “condition” and found only sections of novels or manuals that described me as either a speedfreak sitting on a child's swing in a playground at dusk inventing new words for faggot—“… butterfly, wisp …”—or that people like me spoke with lisps and put bottles up their asses and wore dresses and had limp wrists and every novel I read that had references to queers described them as people who killed or destroyed themselves for no other reason than their realization of how terrible they were for desiring men and I felt I had no choice but to grow up and assume these shapes and characteristics. And I grew up living a schizophrenic existence in the family and in a social structure where every ad in every newspaper, tv and magazine was a promotion for heterosexual coupling sunlit muscleheads and beach bunnies. And in every playground, invariably, there's a kid who screamed, FAGGOT!, in frustration at some other kid and the sound of it resonated in my shoes, that instant solitude, that breathing glass wall no one else saw.

I hear endless news stories of murder around the nation where the defendant claims self-defense because this queer tried to touch him and the defendant being freed and I'm lying here on this bed of Peter's that was the scene of an intense illness and the channel of the tv has been turned to some show about the cost of AIDS and I'm watching a group of people die on camera because they can't afford the drugs that might extend their lives and some fella in the healthcare system in texas is being interviewed—I can't even remember what he looks like because I reached through the television screen and ripped his face in half—he's saying, “If I had a dollar to spend for health care I'd rather spend it on a baby or an innocent person with some illness or defect not of their own responsibility; not some person with AIDS …” and I recall Philip's description of finding someone he knew almost dead on a bench in Tompkins Square Park because no hospital would take him in because he had AIDS and no health insurance and I read the newspaper stories about the politician in Arizona saying on the radio, “To solve the problem of AIDS just shoot the queers …” and his press secretary claimed the governor just didn't know the microphone was on and besides they didn't really think this would affect his chances for reelection. And I have the memory of Peter eating alone one morning a couple of months before he died at Bruno's restaurant on Second Avenue and 12th Street and Bruno himself in the middle of the packed restaurant coming up to Peter saying, “Are you ready to pay?” And Peter saying, “Yes, but why?” And Bruno taking out a paper bag and saying, “You know why … just put your money in here.” Peter put five dollars in the bag and Bruno went behind the counter and brought back his change in another paper bag and tossed it onto the table. And what all this says in an instant. At first I wanted to go into Bruno's at rush hour and pour ten gallons of cow's blood onto the grill and simply say, “You know why.” But that was something I might have done ten years ago. Instead I went in during a crowded lunch hour and screamed at Bruno demanding an explanation and every time a waitress or Bruno asked me to lower my voice I got louder and angrier until Bruno was cowering in back of the kitchen and every knife and fork in the place stopped moving. But even that wasn't enough to erase this rage. A former city government official concerned with administering AIDS policy, in a private city meeting on housing for poor people with AIDS, said, “What you want is a little place; an island where you can isolate these people so they can bang each other up with this AIDS virus …” Statements like this are not uncommon in government meetings and the city of New York is dragging its feet on this disease just like every other city and federal agency in the country—they simply don't care—and they're allocating just enough money so it looks good on paper; not good, but at least on paper their asses are covered so in the future when the finger of responsibility points in their direction they can say, “But we did something.” The government is not only withholding money, but drugs and information. People with AIDS across the country are turning themselves into human test tubes. Some of them are compiling so much information that they can call government agencies and pass themselves off as research scientists and suddenly have access to all the information that's been withheld and then they turn their tenement kitchens into laboratories, mixing up chemicals and passing them out freely to friends and strangers to help prolong lives. People are subjecting themselves to odd and sometimes dangerous alternative therapies—injections of viruses and consumption of certain chemicals used for gardening—all in order to live. And then you get these self-righteous walking swastikas claiming this is god's punishment and Buckley, in the daily newspaper, asking for a program to tattoo people with AIDS and LaRouche in California actually getting a bill up for vote that would isolate people with AIDS in camps and when I react with feelings of murder I feel horrified and tell myself that it is fascist to want to murder these people and in my horror at my feelings I attempt to rationalize them by going further saying but in this culture we accept murder as self-defense against those who try to murder us and what's going on here but public and social murder on a daily basis and it's happening in our midst and not very many people seem to say or do anything about it. There's not even an acknowledgment of this murder from most of my friends. In the evening news I'm told that violent acts against homosexuals are up forty-one percent over last year and to get away from all this I go to a cinema in the neighborhood to see a movie and it's called
Hollywood Shuffle
and it's about the plight of certain minorities in the movie industry and halfway through the movie I have to watch this stereotypic fag with a dick and designer perfume for a brain mince his way through his lines and I want to throw up because we're supposed to quietly and politely make house in this killing machine called America and pay taxes to support our own slow murder and I'm amazed that we're not running amok in the streets, and that we can still be capable of gestures of loving after lifetimes of all this.