In the Shadow of the American Dream (27 page)

This guy was one of the first people I ever truly trusted, this sense of him as father and brother, my real dad being some heavy alcoholic who was a sailor and hated living whereas I fear living at times. Fear and hate, hate and fear—I don't know what the difference is other than aggression.

Started seeing this woman today, started crying when I reached the point of trying to explain how I felt about Peter, what he meant to me. I told her I didn't want to cry and she asked me why, tears running down my cheeks. Because I feel fake seconds into crying. What does this mean? So, yes, this guy was like a father, but was it really that, because I also saw him as sexual, handsome, beautiful mind, beautiful body, his was similar to mine, even with twenty years' difference. He could finish my sentences, I say to people, and he could, even though I realize through talking to people that he was such a different person to different people. Some people talk to me about their relationships to me and I feel like I'm listening to a description of a stranger. Who we are and who we are to others—it's so clear how it varies. All these people carrying small parts of this one man and with some people the parts are similar, with others it's almost alien to me.

Today I drove from the appointment onto the West Side Highway through the tunnel to Brooklyn. I wanted to film the beluga whales. These whales are so beautiful. Pale, almost gray-white bodies, streaming through the sun, luminous waters of a giant tank viewed from the side in a darkened building. Peter, Charles, and I went there months ago in his exhaustion and watched them for some time. All the mysteries of the earth and stars are contained in their form and their imagined intellect. I had read a newspaper description with a photo eight months ago that made me weep. A painted newsprint photo, black and white, of a bald thirteen-year-old girl who was in a body of water surrounded by porpoises. Some organization that grants last wishes to dying children was told she wanted to swim with dolphins before she died of cancer. The lovely face she contained in the photo and the idea of animals that embodied such grace and intellect and the gentleness of it all seemed so perfect to me. I think of Peter. I think of these whales. I think of sad innocence in the face of death and the turning of this planet.

The glass case was emptied of water when I reached the aquarium, four whales were swimming in a recessed shallow pool. Some old woman told me they would fill it on the weekend. I felt disappointed and left right away. The obsession with this film and the order of things—I get confused in these moments about why things don't work when I want them to. What I want to do is so clear to me—to reflect the beauty of the world. I tend to believe in links with the workings of the world—maybe something spiritual—and when things stop momentarily, when I can't complete an action, I am confused. My emotions won't allow a detour or a wait. It's beliefs like this that kept me alive all these years. And it is in this season that for the first time these beliefs are falling apart. It started with Peter becoming ill.

1988

[No date]

[Notes for exhibition]

The Futurists thought that the machine was God. Take a walk along any river in any country and one can see that the machine is almost defunct. God is rusting away leaving a fragile shell. Factories are like the shell of an insect that has metamorphosed into an entirely different creature and flown away. But the eggs left behind in the Second World War have yet to hatch, and they have an unseen effect on all that follows.

[My] paintings sometimes deal with aspects of human technology and their mirrored counterparts in nature. Some combine self-created myth with historical mythic symbols. Printed matter from daily life is used as collage, sometimes in the shape of creatures, and sometimes buried in layers of paint to suggest memory or things considered while viewing associations of information. Food posters which have an encoded meaning of consumption are used as backdrops for information dealing with consumption on a psychic or moral level.

The photographs are arranged into a series of six groups: Religion, Control, Sex, Language, Time + Money, and Violence.

[No date]

THE THING THAT'S IMPORTANT ABOUT MEMORIALS IS THEY BRING A PRIVATE GRIEF OUT OF THE SELF AND MAKE IT A LITTLE MORE PUBLIC WHICH ALLOWS FOR COMMUNICATIVE TRANSITION, PEELS AWAY ISOLATION, BUT THE MEMORIAL IS IN ITSELF STILL AN ACCEPTANCE OF IMMOBILITY, INACTIVITY. TOO MANY TIMES I'VE SEEN THE COMMUNITY BRUSH OFF ITS MEMORIAL CLOTHES, ITS GRIEVING CLOTHES, AND GATHER IN THE CONFINES OF AT LEAST FOUR WALLS AND UTTER WORDS OR SONGS OF BEAUTY TO ACKNOWLEDGE THE PASSING OF ONE OF ITS CHILDREN/PARENTS/LOVERS BUT AFTER THE MEMORIAL THEY RETURN HOME AND WAIT FOR THE NEXT PASSING, THE NEXT DEATH. IT'S IMPORTANT TO MARK THAT TIME OR MOMENT OF DEATH. IT'S HEALTHY TO MAKE THE PRIVATE PUBLIC, BUT THE WALLS OF THE ROOM OR CHAPEL ARE THIN AND UNNECESSARY. ONE SIMPLE STEP CAN BRING IT OUT INTO A MORE PUBLIC SPACE. DON'T GIVE ME A MEMORIAL IF I DIE. GIVE ME A DEMONSTRATION.

In New York on the way to the airport, the cabdriver, a tall aged man who looked somewhat Indian, said he was from Trinidad, lived in New York for twenty years: I like driving, always loved it. You work for no boss, you're your own boss. Sometimes you wait all day sitting around for a job but you make your own hours and I'm out on the streets when I like, out driving. My grandfather was brought to Trinidad when he was ten years old. Trinidad was British-owned, but we got our independence. In Trinidad there are Chinese and white men and they control most of the businesses: restaurants, stores, airlines, agencies. You know, things like that. They have the money. You have the blacks and Indians, Indians from India. You see, my grandfather in the last century, he was a boy in India and the British men would come through India and they would give the boys what you call candies, we called them sweeties. So the British men would give a boy seven to twelve years old some sweeties and you know the drug in the hospital that makes you sleep for the operation? Well they would put that in the sweeties and my grandfather met a British man in the Nad and the British man gave him some sweeties and he ate it and does not remember anything after that. He wakes up on a ship heading for Trinidad. For a while he is very scared and the British men, they give him something to eat and some clothes and they bring him to Trinidad to plant and cultivate and farm. In India my grandfather was the son of a farmer. The British would learn this about each child and then give them the sweeties and take them away to Trinidad for what knowledge they had in their heads. This happened to many children, and eventually when my grandfather grew up they gave him a little land, a little money, and he continued to live there and he married a black woman from there and they had children. My grandfather died some years ago. When I was twenty-seven I came to New York and I have lived here ever since.

David's work was included in
I Bienal de Pintura,
in Spain, 1989
.

[No date]

Feeling better today. Finally got the cycle of sleep together. Had lunch with the gallery owner, her husband/boyfriend, and her son, a sweet kid who goes to school in England. I go through a variety of emotions. She asked me if my childhood was true, what she'd read of it. She said Luis said there was some exaggeration. I was angry that he said that. He doesn't know. But I told her I no longer talk about my childhood, that I once did because I thought it was important, that as a kid I would have busted had I read an interview with an artist or writer who had experiences similar to mine, that it would have let me feel change was possible.

[No date]

Paris

Pat's having her baby. I was sleeping in the guest room and late at night I woke with the sound of a door clacking against walls and saw a sliver of light around the frame. I thought maybe she had to pee, the weight of the baby against her bladder, whatever, but sounds later woke me, doors again, and I thought how odd, Denis is usually quiet when he prepares for work. And I fell asleep again.

Woke up at 6:30
A.M.
Denis's alarm was sounding for him to go to work. I lay there waiting for him to shut it off. Lying there with my glasses on, I was too tired to get up and say something to him. Finally I got up and walked into the hall, their bedroom door was open and the bed was in disarray. Calling out to them—no answer. It finally dawned on me that they had left and gone to the hospital to have their baby. I suddenly burst into tears. Then stopped just as suddenly as I started.

Called the clinic and asked in broken French about Denis Bernier and eventually he came on the line and told me it would be in the afternoon and he would call me when it happened and not to call back. That upset me. I felt unwanted. As if I had no right to call. No right to be there. I hung up and sat in a stunned sensation. Angry. Then breathed deep. Said out loud: I am alone. They have a separate life. I am not in that life. I feel unwanted. I want to feel wanted and loved. I feel as if I am a problem. I think Denis is stupid—a right-wing asshole with his John Wayne movies saying the movies of Israelis breaking the arms of Arab youths are just propaganda filmed in a special way to make it look like they are breaking arms. But it's really a matter of two views that are different. I won't change mine, he won't change his. We'll probably never talk about it at all. We'll never be close as in loving each other as brothers-in-law. I know that's not possible in any case. So what. I finally decide that if I want to go to the clinic I will. With or without his consent. He is not my parent. I love Pat and will move on those feelings. I feel a little tense but that's my problem. Everything is okay.

I can't go without knowing if I'm wanted there or not. All day long this tension of wondering and waiting—. I sometimes think maybe it's because I'm queer. Maybe they are afraid of what I carry, if I have AIDS or not. This fear returns often. Maybe they won't allow me to see the baby until some time. I can't imagine what it's all about. I ask myself if it's my imagination or feelings about rejection, if it's all in my head, because then it could be something that has grown out of nothing—the way I sometimes imagine the worst rejections and project them onto others who I place in power positions. It's terrible. I imagine conversations with Denis, like him telling me I can't go to the clinic. I see myself taking my bags and leaving in anger. I am unhappy with my thoughts. Angry. I want to cry and turn to someone bigger than me—emotionally or physically bigger. Am I a child again in this state?

Denis called at six o'clock. The baby was born at four. I went to the clinic. Pat was still in the delivery room, baby on a platform against the wall. I got very emotional. Tried to extend something beyond words to all of them. Later went out and walked and walked. Took photos of them all. A lot of the baby. Sweet thing. Makes more faces a minute than I did in all of Richard's movie
Stray Dogs
. The strangest thing is imagining this large creature came from Pat's belly. It's a drift back in time, then to the present, baby lying there, Pat's belly one day before, baby superimposed on memory of her (Pat's) belly, imagining baby floating in fluid, baby wrapped in cloth on a desklike surface, Pat's face weary and tearstained. Baby looks older than I imagined: pearly gray-blue eyes, one opens at a time, then both. Pat's belly, the light from the window upstairs, the color of the baby's skin, red, then faint, then red, tiny fingers with tiny nails, little working mouth. Peter. Peter's death. The shape of the earth clouds stars and space. The darkness of the delivery room shadows around the floor and ceiling all the memories in those shadows like films.

[SONG FRAGMENTS]

and the birds are rollin'

rollin' through the trees

and the forest is folding into the dark

in the cradle of your hands

last night I dreamed of a wind

that circled around the world

that blew around the world

and one bridge

and a bridge that touched all the continents

and a sky heavy with rain

and a wave that rose and covered everything

(Was lost in some self-absorbed melancholy walking through the forest near Pat's home in the late dusk, singing these lines and drifting in the isolation and beauty of landscape and emotions when some ratty dog rushed out from under a bush and tried to bite me. Men playing cards in the grass nearby burst out laughing. Later picked up rock to throw at dog but owner put it in his car.)

[No date]

[slip of paper]

At times I feel like there's nothing to be afraid of about dying. I mean, look at how many people have done so before me.

[No date]

So I came down with a case of shingles and it's scary. I don't even want to write about it. I don't want to think of death or virus or illness and that sense of removal that aloneness in illness with everyone as witness of your silent decline that can only be the worst part aside from making oneself accept the burden of making acceptance with the idea of departure of dying of becoming dead. Ant food, as Kiki would say, or fly food, and it's lovely the idea of feeding things after death, becoming part of life in death but that's not the problem—the ceasing to exist in physical motion or conception. One can't effect things in one's death other than momentarily. One cannot change one's socks, tuck the sheets or covers around one's own body. In death one can't be vocal or witness time and motion and physical events with breath, one can't make change. Abstract ideas of energy dispersing, some ethical ocean crawls through a funnel of stars, outlines of the body, energy in the shape of a body, a vehicle then extending losing boundaries separating expanding into everything. Into nothingness. It's just I can't paint. I can't loosen this gesture if I'm dead. I fight this weariness from drugs and take a glimpse of sunlight as a conducive shot of movement of excitement of living but these drugs make me weary and frustrated.