In the Shadow of the American Dream (20 page)

Finally it came on and I stopped readin' the mags, swept them off the bed and lay back, oh yeah, oh yeah, and lay there feeling warm and not wanting to budge. Television on in the corner with no sound. Later Viola shuffles out the door trying to figure an excuse to get outta work but heading there nonetheless for night duty. Gary leans across the bed and kisses me good-bye first time, I loved him for that gesture though I couldn't move and conversation seemed silly so I stayed silent. Val and I sitting there for a while then getting our coats on and leaving, walking downtown in the rain, a quick bite at Tiffany's restaurant on Fourth Street and down into Soho via Italian neighborhoods, all-night bars, neon in the drizzle, we're talking friendly and I'm feeling mellow and I say, I feel like I've really lost my innocence, now that I finally have fucked with needles, the whole romantic attachment to them being blown with the first shot. Now it's just down to the simple level of intake and warmth. Whatya mean? he says. You think we'd be walkin' in this fuckin' rain talkin' like this if we'd lost our innocence? And he was right. We walked through Chinatown checkin' out kung-fu movie posters and over into his old neighborhood where we caught the train, shook out our wet jackets, and made it home.

In the spring of 1980, David sent his Rimbaud series of photographs, “Arthur Rimbaud in New York,” 1978–79, to
Soho News,
a local weekly that covered the art world and downtown scene at the time. Its publication significantly affected his ability to see himself as a visual artist. That same year, his work appeared in three group shows in Lower Manhattan
.

May–June 1980

May 11, 1980

Julius Bar, 7:00—7:30
P.M.
Standing around in Julius Bar. Minutes earlier I had run into Jim. He asked me why I hadn't come to Danceteria last night. John had me down on the guest list but I had felt this ache in my stomach probably from the past few days of nervousness because of the
SoHo News
photo deal: the continual delay of definite answer as to whether they planned to use the Rimbaud series or not. So I told him why I hadn't come but mentioned that I was interested in working for him. He said the only stuff available was the same job John was doing. I said fine, and he said to call him Tuesday night. He introduced me to a guy named Riccio, a stage manager for Danceteria. I was so nervous and elated at getting the job I almost fell over a chair on my way out. So I call John, hip him to the news, and fall into Julius, some interesting characters hanging out in the dark open doorway, sounds of conversation floating out, clinking of glasses, jukebox music, etc. I make my way over to the counter and order a beer and the bartender slaps this cool wet bottle on the counter and I make my way with it back to the door. Standing there for some minutes drinking from it slowly, watching this character looking like one of the guys in a Jean Genet prison movie scene with low white T-shirt over powerful hairy chest. My eyes follow down to his stomach packed tight beneath the shirt, down his legs to his highly polished black leather shoes, thinking I've seen this all before, feeling a bit weary suddenly, and my beer is half finished and all the chattering in the bar is getting louder in waves like when you have a fever, I'm thinking suddenly about leaving, eventually turning towards the door, the streets out there leading to other scenes, people, sounds, and occurrences. As I'm turning towards the door, this guy walks up, turns the corner of the street and moves up to the door. I have a sudden snap of recognition—a different quality—something in that stranger tells me he's either transient or different in terms of his sensibilities. I feel something not usual about him, not routine in my daily revolution of faces and personalities and leanings. He steps up into the noisy darkness of the bar, moves slow into the crowded space, steps past and moves over to the counter, hands buried deep in his pockets, hair unruly and sweeping back over his ears, brown lovely hair, strong face, a look around his temples and eyes, a gaze that suggests real thinking and other concerns. I'm taking swigs from my bottle, tapping time, feeling a sense of myself there and nowhere else, not my usual drift where I'm standing silent in a bar in my head moving through other places in the city or the world. Our eyes met a number of times. I remember looking away when the gaze reached a point when it was obvious and strong, turning away to deal with that, feel it through and make some kind of sense of what was coming up inside. Then suddenly he walked up to me and spoke. We talked loosely for a few minutes and I learned he was a filmmaker. I told him of my thoughts about doing a film in Super-8. He was all for it—working with Super-8—said that's how he started.

What followed is difficult to write about, as it's difficult to write about most things that affect me in such a way as to rearrange my view of the world and the lines my life follows within it. But it was beautiful and amazing. We walked in various directions finally ending up by the river. Somewhere out on the docks he turned towards me and embraced me and we made love out there. Later, sitting by the side of the river, he kept leaning over while talking and staring into my eyes. He slipped his hand into mine and my reaction to that was almost bewilderment insofar as people rarely do that in this city, much less when they hardly know you, and I really dug it. A defenseless warmth. We made plans to get together in a couple days, and we left each other after an embrace on the corner of Christopher and Hudson Streets. After walking half a block I turned to look back, and he was standing there, hand in pocket, the other hand up waving. I waved back and turned towards the subway and home.

[No date]

Walking off the curb on 10th Street and 7th Avenue I ran into Arthur. He was making his way towards Julius Bar where we'd agreed to meet. I was remembering him from the other night when I'd met him there, the ensuing walk down into the darkness of the avenues bordering the river, the long stroll out along the broken boards of the pier and the stretch of winds out there, the whole canopy of darkness swelling out from the river's surface and erasing the lines of the dock, the forms of people that moved like silhouettes against the Jersey coast, the removal of ourselves from the rushing city, out there hundreds of yards from the highway and the drag queens and the cruising autos along the asphalt strip, never really having seen his face so clearly as just then bumping into him on the street corner with late sunlight revealing every detail of the street and the characters rushing by him.

We stopped in a dive Greek coffee shop I'd never been in before and had sandwiches and an omelet and afterwards walked down to the river. I was feeling kinda self-conscious, mostly in the aftermath of all those sensations having come up the previous night, of real honesty, of talking and touching, something that at times seems so foreign in this city, times when I start feeling like that communication and contact I have with some characters is what the movements of the world is all about, senses that are really a part of me and my vision of things but haven't much of a place to be expressed. I wanna try and make this more clear—it's like after so many contacts with characters who have lined their bodies and mannerisms and visions with so much guard like gate after gate over solitary rooms, there are these experiences of dealing honestly with people, of laughter and an unguarded movement through living and time and aging, that some of us rarely have a chance to express, rarely feel the freedom to express, rarely feel the freedom to express in the company of others. And so in those moments that previous evening it kind of all opened up at once with him and left me feeling amazed and excited and so here it is a couple days later and I'm wondering what the contact is gonna be like, if the senses will remain real and warm or if a great deal of that was some kind of projection, that kind that some of us put on the forehead of another in unexpected times and moments.

So we hit the pier just as the sun was starting to lose its intensity, and we strolled out towards the end of the dock, couples sitting on the long square timbers lining the edges of the dock, joggers out making the rounds with sweaty bodies and hair drifting and dogs racing back and forth and the waters of the river gliding by nonstop like the unraveling of a film. Arthur was explaining his ideas for this next film he's gonna shoot, these scenes of child abuse: a film of a man making a film on child abuse, in particular, scenes of the kid's exit from his family into the life and arms of the filmmaker, of loving between the filmmaker and this fourteen-year-old kid. Some of his comments: These changes in personality or roles where kids when they're having sex with an older person grow up suddenly, assume postures and manners of an older person, become more serious, whereas the older guy becomes much more like a child. Yet when the scenes are over and they're out on the street, the kid becomes a kid again and the older person resumes the manners and posture of the older person he is. It amazed me, that sense of perception, my flashbacks of the times I'd taken off from home and lived on the streets and the scenes I became involved in, the older men I'd lain down with and the recollection of my movements, my mannerisms with them, those scenes in dim-lit rooms in Jersey swamp motels manipulating a cigarette in my fingers and reflecting on my life and past while talking in a purposefully more sophisticated manner, out loud to the man unseen in the bathroom combing his hair before a fluorescent-lit mirror. A sense of my life at that moment came circling back to me as I lay down there on the hard boards of the dock with the sun turning this strong rose color and slipping so much faster behind a bank of clouds. We lay on our sides facing each other and every so often he reached over and placed a hand on my arm or my leg or my neck and I felt that sense of amazement from the previous night renewed and the sky and the turning of the earth and river on its axis assumed that quiet and timelessness that comes only in the more peaceful moments when the body is in some state of grace and ideas and thoughts become thoroughly bound up in the quiet state of the unfolding scenes around me.

This Chinese kid was standing nearby and working with two rods and reels baiting them with large worms and casting them off into the river, and at some point when the sky became more dense and darkness was descending behind the light he caught an eel which he reeled in and unhooked from the line and left tossing on the boards of the dock, the animal's looping dives and thrusts against the rapidly turning blues of the water, reaching for that flow again and again, finally I couldn't stand to see it that way no more and got up and moved over asking the kid if he planned on keeping it. He said no, and I leaned over picking it up and tossed it back in, this iridescent shine left in the palm of my hand which reflected the light of the disappearing sun when I turned it certain ways. There was an intense blue there when I lay back down and turned my face towards the sky, an intense blue with one line of wind-strewn clouds much like northern sunsets I'd seen revolving over Canada from the ridge overlooking the St. Lawrence River, and as Arthur talked, murmuring words that fell across the boards, and later as he started singing, this clear voice unraveling across the river's surface, gently probing the gathering night, I felt this warmth in my belly, a contentedness which had long been foreign. Things got more quiet and the faces of the characters standing, leaning, or lying by the edges of the dock grew more distant and faint and eventually indiscernible. And later we got up and slowly walked back towards the city, the sounds of the traffic like swells on the river, the movements like clockwork overtaking the distance and prolonged time felt way back there by the waters.

[No date]

In the darkness of the room, at various times in the midst of lovemaking, my hand moving through layers of darkness to rest on his chest, on the broad curves of his back, bringing his face close to mine and peering at each other, some words murmured occasionally of how good he felt or how he enjoyed just looking at me, at my being handsome, the spark within his eyes, the sensation of desire in my chest and belly, the relief of being touched and talked to so clearly …

He said, You know, I don't think you've been appreciated; you've been loved and bedded and desired, but I don't think anyone's ever appreciated you. There's a sense of sadness about you, a streak of it, something I'm responding to …

I was kneeling in the darkness, hands on the ledge of the bed, knees straddling his shoulders feeling this explosive orgasm, the dim light from the courtyard windows easing across the surface of the wall, the sense of his body beneath me, his voice broke through. Put your mouth on mine. I inched back and swung my legs to the side, placed my mouth, my hands on his chest. He put his palm on my chest and raised me away from his face. Now on my cock. And I swung down over him, placed his hard cock in my mouth and immediately he began coming and I heard soft sounds come from his mouth and the darkness in the room moving, stirring with the low breeze over the sill.