Close to the Knives. David Wojnarowicz
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section of town and the interviewed neighbors could recall nothing more alarming about the kid than that he had an obsession with keeping his car cleaned and polished. One neighbor said that the kid loved to peel out from the gravel driveway sending cascades of stones into the air. I read all this in the local paper in the curtained hotel room just before leaving town. Outside the window of the balcony room, three Metal guys were building a new patio for the defunct pool. The pool was slowly filling with red dust carried across the roads by intermittent breezes. At some point I stood up from the table and pulled back the curtain a hair and watched the half-naked bodies of the guys climbing in and out of their truck for tools or to turn the volume of the music up. I watched them leaning for extended moments in various positions creating sexy tableaus like museum paintings, like bleached out Vermeers and Rembrandts in all that hot sunlight and shadow. I felt like a detective with only the window glass and the curtains camouflaging my desire. For a moment I was afraid the intensity of my sexual fantasies would become strangely audible; the energy of the images would become so loud that all three guys would turn simultaneously like witnesses to a nearby car crash.
Out the side window of the car I see the thick whirling vortex of a red dust devil on the plains. I abruptly pull the car over and grab my super-8 camera to film it and it disappears. I stare at the place where I saw it, waiting for it to reappear but it doesn’t so I drive on. My balls are sliding in lonesomeness. The windows are down because of the heater and the motion of the vehicle brings a false breeze onto my face and bare chest and through my scalp. For one brief moment in time no one in the world knows where I am. Not family, friends, nor members of government and that causes me to drift, gives me room to experience charges of frustrating sexuality. Turning the radio knob I come across a seductive country song. I close my eyes for periods of time as I drive on up into the mountainside, listening to the sound of the singer’s voice. In fact, I turn up the volume so I can hear the reverberation of sound in the man’s throat – that way I can better imagine him whispering sweet things in my ear as he fucks me, holding firm to my hips with his calloused hands. I was lost in the heat of his torso and the taste of his tongue unreeling behind my closed eyelids when I felt a bump and a pop as I knocked over a cactus on the roadside. I twisted the steering wheel in a hypnotic daze of calamity and thumped back onto the asphalt roadway leaving a scattering of surprised buzzards shifting into the air like umbrellas. The sun was slipping toward the edge of the world when I pulled over at a highway rest stop on the crest of the mountain. No one else was around so I kicked about in the red dust for a while among the various species of cactus and tumbleweeds. I took a piss behind the adobe outhouse pointing my dick in different directions so the urine formed a dark outline of a face in the dry earth. I felt sad and exhilarated simultaneously. I walked around watching the light fade over the curve of the earth, creating krazy-kat silhouettes of the cactus and scrub. Occasionally the twin beacons of light from a distant car or truck coming from the direction I was heading would float across the folds of earth and the silence would be broken by the hum of the motor. One flippy bat came out early, a baby one, wobbling through the gathering breezes under a roadside lamp, getting knocked around by the currents as it tried to catch the insects attracted by the light. Over by the drinking fountains a bunch of honey bees trying to drink water from the steel rim of the flooded basins fell in and were drowning. I spent a while picking them out one by one with a soda straw and laying them on the concrete walkway where they stumbled around in stupid circles. At the sound of each approaching car my dick grew more hard but each car continued without stopping. I wanted to run out into the dusk and throw myself headfirst onto the earth and then roll sideways for miles until the sun came back. I remembered a friend of mine dying from AIDS, and while he was visiting his family on the coast for the last time, he was seated in the grass during a picnic to which dozens of family members were invited. He looked up from his fried chicken and said, “I just want to die with a big dick in my mouth.”
Sitting on the warm hood of the car as the temperature fell, a sixteen-wheel rig pulled through the distance and entered the parking strip. With a compressed hiss of brakes, the cab door swung open and a young guy swung out. He was shirtless and covered in marks of sweat and dirt. As he rounded the side of the truck he nodded: “What’s up?” and proceeded to walk around the entire truck kicking each tire a couple of times while I held my breath. Then he climbed back into the cab, shifted gears and drove out of the lot, taillights blinking. Darkness had completely descended onto the landscape and I stood up and stretched my arms above my head and I wondered what it would be like if it were a perfect world. Only god knows. And he is dead.
I’m in a building, a high-rise building resembling the interior of an enormous ship, middle-aged sailors all around, guys that have been working on the oceans for up to twenty-five or thirty years. At times it’s a building I’m standing in, at other times it becomes a ship with long rolling motions, then it becomes a building again.
I’m walking down a hallway and come to a room where this young man is standing and beginning to remove his clothes. Next to him is an open door where clouds of steam are billowing out as if a shower is running. On the floor is a newspaper with a story about the navy trying to give a dishonorable discharge to a guy because he was a homosexual. There is a photograph accompanying the story and I realize the face in the picture is the same as the guy undressing. I look up from the paper just as he drops his pants to the floor and steps out of view into the clouds of steam.
Something shifts in this sleep and I am standing in a room that has only three walls; as I turn around I realize I am in the ruins of a building, standing on a balcony. The building has different levels to it. As I walk through doorways and hallways I see that some sections are only a story tall, others are five or six stories tall and all of them belong to a dilapidated hotel. Judging by what remains of the molding on the walls and ceilings, and the chandeliers hanging from the center of each room, it was once a place for the rich maybe a century ago. Large sections of walls are missing and there is nothing but jumbles of steel rods twisted and caked with broken slabs of concrete. Off in the distance behind a line of waving palm trees, the sky is developing a dark stormy patch of gray and coal black. The funnel of a tornado is forming and I stare at it for a while before moving into the next room. There is a stranger standing in the corner of the room; he looks like a guy who would work with machines; he has dark hair, strong forearms and he’s wiping his hands with a dishcloth. Behind him through the tangled rupture of broken walls, the backdrop of sky is woven through with flashes of rose and turquoise. The colors are swimming into the shape of funnels making up a couple of tornados that grow larger as I watch. The guy wiping his hands doesn’t notice them or else seems unconcerned. “I think we’d better find shelter,” I say as the funnels grow closer and closer. Turning from the guy, I move quickly through a series of rooms and wonder if the hotel has been through an earthquake or fire or bombings and strafing as in war. Twisted silhouettes of girders and shells of rooms with large sections of ceilings, roofs, walls and floors missing, each of them revealing different views of the tornadoes and framed horizon. The whole sky is revolving furiously and beautifully as I wake up, my eyes opening on the cool light of morning slipping between the hotel curtains.
The sun in the part of arizona I was traveling through was so strong it made my eyes half close and all the earth seemed like one enormous field, dry as bone. The sun was bleaching the color out of every surface and shape so my brain had to wrestle to give things form. Anything, bush, cattle, vehicle or human, immediately turned to silhouette against the bright sky. With the combination of heat and light, the air had a frail white quality. The whole sky seemed closer to the road in these parts and I could barely stand the magnesium glimmer of light burning up my lower body. My arms stretched to the steering wheel, I was skimming over the pale gray asphalt and the speedometer was measuring between eighty and ninety miles per hour. The road was so flat in stretches, or there was so little in the landscape to distract the eye, that it was impossible, without looking at the dashboard, to tell when I was speeding. It was a landscape for drifting, where time expands and contracts and vision is replaced by memories; small filmlike bursts of bodies and situations, some months ago, some years ago.
I was headed toward Meteor Crater. It’s a blemish on the earth’s skin where twenty-one thousand years ago a half-billion-ton chunk of iron blew through outer space and slammed into the planet leaving a hole three miles in circumference. The collision has been calculated as having had the force of a multi-megaton bomb, and now,