Close to the Knives (27 page)

PHONE CALL:

“Hi David. Remember at the beginning of February … I looked down at my leg and saw this purple spot and everybody's trying to convince me it wasn't a purple spot? Uh, uh—no mole here. I knew it was a K. lesion. I decided to go to Berlin to the film festival, had a great time, came back and had an appointment with the ophthalmologist. I've never gone to see an ophthalmologist, but everybody is talking about C.M.V. retinitis—it's the latest dance craze … I decided to check it out, you know—me and my nineteen T-cells—I have to be aware of these things before any symptoms appear. So she didn't find any C.M.V. retinitis, thank god, but she did find P.C.P. in my eyes, which is the pneumonia thing, and this is very very unusual—she said she's seen only three or four cases … whatever … and I didn't have any symptoms or anything. She called up my doctor right away, and he took the phone call, which is very unusual in and of itself. He gave me a thorough examination without an appointment, which is even more unusual. He told me I had to go to the hospital right away and start treatments. I thought: What is going on here? I went, in one month, from being asymptomatic to having one little K. lesion and now to having P.C.P. It was that nightmare of moving from stage to stage in the disease's progression that everybody fears … and … uh … alright. I didn't have a place to live at this point; everything was upside down. I felt very out of place in the world. So I went into the hospital. I've never been hospitalized in my adult life. I went into co-op care. My doctor comes in and puts in this heparin lock, which is an intravenous line, and they started my treatments and I stayed there for fourteen days. By the end of my stay there the pentamidine started overwhelming me to the point where I became anorexic, and I couldn't eat anything. Everything tasted like it had a chromium edge to it. They took chest X rays and found P.C.P. in my lungs even though I'd been doing the aerosol pentamidine treatments. Then it was over. I moved into a new apartment and thought things were more or less in order and I went to the doctor to get a blood test and my red blood cell count went all the way down. I was white as a ghost. I don't know if you know that feeling of looking at yourself in the mirror and going: “Oh my god—there is definitely something
wrong.”
They took me off all medication—I'd been doing D.D.I. That was frightening, too, because there is some sort of psychological dependency where you go: “well, I'm doing this stuff, so, good things have a chance of happening.” The doctor thought, maybe it's just a transient anemia, we'll wash the pentamidine out of your body and maybe it will just have been a drug reaction. He didn't want to give me a transfusion because that's dangerous for people with AIDS because you never know what kind of infection you'll pick up from other people's blood. I mean, if you can do without it—fine. So I said okay. For three weeks in a row I went to the doctor, but the red blood cell count didn't go up much. He told me that he really wanted me to have a bone marrow biopsy. That frightened the shit out of me. They come at you with a needle that is quite long, quite sharp, and they put it in a spot that is quite painful. I'm getting really anxious—I've never been this scared. My parents came into the office while the procedure was being done. They shot the whole area up with Novacaine, which really burns, and while the whole thing was happening I knew what was going on—that the doctor was going into my body with a giant needle and taking out part of my bone. It wasn't that painful. It was sore for a couple of days afterward—I couldn't walk around that well. I haven't heard back on the results yet and I'm in the middle of an anxiety attack over what that will be …”

JOURNAL ENTRY:

I picked up an envelope from the staircase where all the mail gets pushed through the slot. It was simply addressed to David W.—Why is it we know when something is up? I stepped into the street with my arms full of packages trying to get this envelope open. Rain clouds are covering the whole earth and the construction workers are standing around eating baloney sandwiches and ogling women. Kiki once said she wished she could raise her hand and their dicks would wither and fall off. I'm trying to get this fucking envelope open with cold fingers and the paper is fibrous and I couldn't get the letter out, so in impatience I bent back the top fold in the letter and read:

“.… committed suicide around january …”

and I stopped in shock. I'd built the armor well, I thought. I learned how to freeze out death and the intensity of reactions to it. But the death I was freezing out was the death of people who were fighting to live and, despite that, were killed by a microscopic virus and a conservative agenda. Suicide slipped through a minuscule chink in the armor. I thought of my friend in Philadelphia and wondered if he didn't really die of AIDS-related pancreatic cancer like I'd been told. Then I thought of Johnny and Joe; I thought of bodies with blank faces waiting to be filled in with identity. I yanked the letter out. It was from his father. It was unsigned and had no return address and informed me that Dakota had committed suicide in January.

I felt like my soul was slammed against a stone wall. I started crying, something I haven't done in months. There was something about the last half year, about all the deaths in the air. I'd been wondering if death has become so constant that I will never feel anything again. I fear losing the ability to feel the weight and depth of each life that folds up, sinks, and disappears from our sight. I thought of whether anyone will be able to feel anything about my death if it takes place. Is it all becoming the sensation one feels when they pass a dead bird in the street and all you can do is acknowledge it and move on. I thought of the late night tv announcer's voice saying, “In the Insect World, after the attack, the slaughter, and the massive loss of life in the colony is over, life simply goes on. Each insect goes back about its job without any thought towards fortification or defense …” Dakota's suicide left me with a sensation that there was something that was so irretrievable. Suicide is a form of death that contains a period of time before it to which my mind can walk back into and imagine a gesture or word that might tie an invisible rope around that person's foot to prevent them from floating free of the surface of the earth. I keep going back there and I am on a jet plane that is arriving in texas and I am seeing his dogs and his pickup truck and I am seeing him and he is vanishing and his dogs are sitting lonely in the yard. All I see is his absence, a void, a dark smudge in the air where he previously occupied space: “Man, why did you do it? Why didn't you wait for the possibilities to reveal themselves in this shit country, on this planet? Why didn't you fucking go swimming in the cold gray ocean instead? Why didn't you call?”

TAPE RECORDING:

DAVID
: What was familiar to you in terms of his desire to kill himself?

SYLVIA
: I just think it's a constant struggle. It could be a daily thing, I mean for me—I know I'll always be here—its probably the
vision
; just the idea of having to go through this for fifty more years; whatever it is, or just being aware that life is something that we have to
get through
, and you have to work so hard to make sense of it. It makes me mad when someone kills themselves, it makes me feel bad that I wasn't there, and what could I do? Besides that, I don't blame him, for him to stay alive; it was probably easier for him to kill himself rather than sit around thinking of it and try not to. It seems as if your life is trying to stay alive as opposed to just living. Just looking at things from the negative side and trying to make it positive
wears on you
. How do you maintain an element where you're happy; how do you find a little scope that you're the center of—you can't stay in the center of it—there's too much other life coming in.

D.
: What creates that pressure or that feeling of struggling to survive rather than just living?

SYLVIA
: I think the problem is not so much that there's something that
we can't fit into
, because I don't think the society or the situation is sitting there waiting to reject people; I don't think it's aware enough to say, “You don't fit in.” I don't think it's that aware—I think that's what the problem is. So I think of who makes it and who doesn't and the pressure; a lot of it comes from us. We set a standard that we can't even live up to. We expect too much of a society that is probably going to reject us—it's probably not even thinking of us. I don't want to have that struggle that's trying to knock on the door and get in, and just sort of be invisible and float so you can do your own thing—I think that's the part that comes from us; I don't think that was set up; that's the part that is hard to maintain. I mean, I want to
adapt
. I don't think I'll be giving anything up. I don't care if I don't value the thing I want to adapt to; it's there—it's a structure. I want to adapt to it; I don't care if it's something I don't revere. I think the fact of
wanting to adapt
is what makes a difference whether we stick around or not. Some of us can't. I wouldn't think Dakota killed himself because he couldn't stand the structure that was there and because he didn't believe in anything it stood for and just would have no part of it, because if he felt that way, he'd just go and design his own. I think it was just not being
able
to fit into it no matter what it stood for.

D.
: Can the bigger structure make room for the smaller structure you design?

SYLVIA
: If you measure it against anything else, then you will always be susceptible to the other structure. You have to first get a little place inside the larger structure and then make your own. That's the problem. If you want to stay separate completely you can't, because you will always end up measuring it against the larger structure …

PHONE INTERVIEW:

B
ETH
: I've known a lot of friends who've killed themselves but for some reason with Dakota I feel okay. I think he knew what he was doing. He was pretty reclusive—he lived only two miles away from me and we never saw each other, and he explained that he didn't want to see anybody because he felt his personality was too absorbed in other people and he needed to be his own self. He had just recently got fired from his job because he got caught—he wrote his friend in Dallas and they found the letter, it came back to work—he wrote in full detail how he lied to his boss about his grandfather being sick and how he stayed home and got drunk every day. He got off drugs when he came to Houston. He was going to an asylum during the day but he didn't think he was going to stay there at night. He killed himself with gas and a plastic bag. It sounded pretty painless. I feel like he comes in and out. I wish he could have left a book of his mind behind. I think he was too kind for this world. It kind of makes me cry to remember the sad parts of it, but with Dakota, more than anyone else who's done it, I can understand it more. Sometimes I wonder if when people kill themselves they don't leave as quickly; they circle around a bit longer. I told his brother to call me when he came to town, I was real anxious to get his ashes scattered. They're in an urn at his parents' house. I don't think it really matters, but for a while I was anxious to get him beyond that spot. I hope his family doesn't burn his stuff.

TAPE RECORDING:

D
AVID
: What was the first thing you felt when you heard he killed himself?

J
OHNNY
: I was really upset that I never resolved my relationship with him—like when he ripped me off and then he moved away. He had a lot of guilt; he kept writing me all these letters saying: can you ever forgive me? Every time he called me he'd be really drunk. I have this feeling of being responsible in a way, but not really. So, one part of me, I feel awful that I never got to finish something with him and also help him get the burden off his back. The other side of me feels almost relieved for him because he tried to kill himself so many times. He was just a very unhappy person. Almost the entire time I knew him, he was that way. One thing was that he thought he was really ugly. He had a big crush on Joe and at one time maybe on me. He hung around people like us and we weren't gay or anything but he would always hang around us. He hung around people he couldn't have relationships with and I think that that was part of it. I think he'd had enough. In death you know
you
can't come back but you know what you come back for. Some people believe in reincarnation and I'm sure some people commit suicide so that they can pop into another life. It doesn't work like that but …

D
AVID
: As far as I'm concerned, if there is reincarnation, I'm refusing to come back. Once is enough. If there is somebody you appear before who determines where and when you'll come back—I'll punch them in the face. Maybe that will put me on the end of a
very
long line for the return flight.

J
OHNNY
: That's the way I feel too.

D: Why do you think he killed himself?

J: A person like Dakota couldn't live for too long in a place like texas. He couldn't be satisfied. Did you hear how he'd amuse himself down there? One thing I'd heard that he was doing was breaking into people's houses and putting on these cowboys' cowboy hats and like putting on their gun belt and walking around the house naked and fantasizing about being involved in these people's lives, I guess, and jerking off into their beds. I mean, if those people found him they probably would have shot him, y'know, like he was just going to great lengths to amuse himself in texas. I think in general he was a brilliant guy and who was he going to find in texas, I mean, as his peers—where could he find people that think like him, I mean nobody thought like Dakota anyways, at least no one I ever met. I think the boredom was too great.