Close to the Knives. David Wojnarowicz

reported a teenager driving a dark-colored camaro who chased him down a one-way street. The cyclist narrowly avoided being run over by abandoning his bike and scrambling on top of a row of parked cars. The bicycle was left mangled and the camaro scraped along the sides of the cars in a fury before making a U-turn and disappearing. Two middle-aged women came forward with a story of having been menaced in the previous week while crossing an intersection not far from the state campus. Other sightings of the kid were reported in the next twenty-four hours. One woman told of being grazed by a dark-colored auto that purposefully accelerated and swung toward her as she got into her own car. A slow private history was beginning to reveal itself. The hotel I stayed in was an ex-prostitution hotel with a nonfunctioning swimming pool in a former skid-row section of town. It was in the general striking area of the camaro. Every time I walked down the street or got out of my car I thought of a body stripped of flesh turning slowly on the end of a rope, I thought of the wind reeling through the red skulls of flowers, I thought of the face of our current president floating disembodied and ten stories tall over the midnight buildings. I wondered why any of these things, like the kid in his camaro, are a surprise. Why weren’t more of us doing this?

      There were times in my teens when I was living on the streets and selling my body to anyone interested. I hung around a neighborhood that was so crowded with homeless people that I can’t even remember what the architecture of the blocks looked like. Whereas I could at least spread my legs and gain a roof over my head, all those people down in those streets had reached the point where the commodity of their bodies and souls meant nothing more to anyone but themselves. I remember times getting picked up by some gentle and repressed fag living in a high-rise apartment filled with priceless north american indian artifacts and twentieth-century art who was paying me ten bucks to suck on my dick. As I studied his head bobbing against my belly while seated on a leather couch, I marveled at how simple it would be to lift the carved stone fish from the glass coffee table and smack the top of this head in and live on easy street for a while. I thought of the hundreds of times standing in a moving subway car, a cop standing with his back to me, his holster within easy reach and me undoing the gun restraint with my eyes over and over. I thought of the neo-nazis posing as politicians and religious leaders and I thought of my genuine fantasies of murder and wondered why I never crossed the line. It’s not that I’m a good person or even that I am afraid of containment in jail; it may be more that I can’t escape the ropes of my own body, my own flesh, and bottom line in the pyramids of power and confinement one demon gets replaced by another in a moment’s notice and no one gesture can erase it all that easily.

      In the last evening in the motel room, falling to sleep amid the sounds of splintering glass from a fight in another room, I found myself walking in this rural section of the country. It was dirt roads and a thick strangling brush and woods appearing over the tops of brambles that lined the road. There were groves of beautiful firs and leafy oaks and some beech trees. I came into this area where the road turned triangular. The triangle had a stretch of sidewalk with small-town stores. There was a coffee shop, a ma and pa-type restaurant with formica counter and shining stools and a gallon bottle of hard-boiled eggs in vinegar and maybe some containers of beef jerky. I stepped up onto the sidewalk which was built like a slightly raised boardwalk of slatted wood and in the shadows of a wall there’s this fourteen-or fifteen-year-old kid with long black hair and a denim jacket with cigarettes in the top pocket. He’s standing outside this open screen door of the coffee shop with one leg folded beneath him the sole of his foot flat against the wall of the building and hands in pockets. As I pass the doorway of the shop, I glance inside out of the corner of my eyes and see three or four teenage guys playing a couple of pinball machines, riding the flippers and machines with bucking hip motions and thrusts and they’re actually in the process of breaking open the machines to get the money. I flinch a little in that moment, realizing there is danger and I don’t know where I am. I’m a stranger in these parts. My body is in motion as I take all this in and the kid leaning outside the door says what the fuck you lookin at? and before I can answer he whips out this long knife. It’s about nine inches of thin steel blade and with a flick of his wrist slashes my bare arm open from wrist to elbow. I look down in slight shock and step back waving my hands in front of me saying, “Nothing, man . . . nothing . . . sorry.” He seems satisfied and lets me pass on down the sidewalk. I’m holding my arm to keep the wound as closed up as possible and when I reach a section of the sidewalk where there’s an alley I step inside to lean shakily against a wall. I notice two other guys about my age all cut up on the arms, legs and bellies. I stumble out of the alley and suddenly this policeman shows up. He’s wearing tan pants, shirt and cap and black boots and he’s holding a whip about a yard long. The kid spots him coming and starts running down the road in the direction I came from. The officer starts chasing him and I run after the two of them to see what happens to the kid. The kid is in the distance and the officer stops in the middle of the road. The kid turns while running to see where we are just as the officer snaps his arm and the whip elongates into the distance and wraps around the kid’s head bringing him to a halt – his hands come up to his face completely wrapped in leather thong. The officer runs the distance and catches up to the kid and hog-ties him like a rodeo calf. By the time I reach them the officer steps back a few feet and pulls out a shotgun taking aim on the kid. I’m thinking, “Oh man . . . he ain’t gonna shoot him – he wouldn’t do that.” And as I’m thinking that, the officer pulls the trigger and blows a hole open in the kid’s side. The kid’s side is gaping open near the waist showing pulsating intestines and stomach. I’m crouching near the kid’s head looking into his eyes as the officer comes up and squats down next to me. The kid is no longer a kid; he’s some kind of stray dog with bristly black fur and frightened eyes. The officer takes the kid’s knife from the ground and with the other hand carefully parts the flesh of the wound until the organ that seems to be the stomach is revealed, its delicate pink grayish bloat quivering like a lung puffing in and out. The officer delicately cuts it open and clear liquid pours out. I look into the dog’s eyes and watch the terror and pain change into an opiumlike daze. A sensual pleasure passes beneath their surface, a strange state of grace in the flight behind the eyes speeding up, the fading of life into the pale glaze of death.

      Americans can’t deal with death unless they own it. If they own it, they will celebrate it, like in the air force base museum of the atomic bomb, where whole families of camera-toting tourists gather after the required i.d. security checks. In the gray-carpeted rooms, they walk the mazes of portable screens and platforms and enlarged photographs of death and incineration as seen from a discreet distance. The distance is far enough so you can’t see the bodies, only the architecture. The tour in this museum is led by an ancient matronly type who explains various levels of the bomb’s invention with all the glad bearings of a parent who has just given birth to her first child. I couldn’t deal with the clouds of perfume and the decaying personalities of the crowd so I wandered off by myself to walk the maze. There were machines that clicked on, set off merely by my presence and I’m walking through a paranoid blur of mechanical men’s voices crawling out of hidden speakers and image after image floating and shifting into fragments of large grainy black-and-white blow-ups of sullen men standing half conscious with pride next to sinister fat canisters looking like overturned pot-bellied stoves. The voices have all the tone and texture of high school film soundtracks explaining the abstract motions of the sperm entering the side of the egg and fertilizing it, or the hunger and desire implicit in the tiny snake swallowing the egg ten times the size of its own head.

      Outside the shedlike buildings are the constant shrill vibrating sounds of jets taking off into the afternoon heat. Through a back window that overlooks the concrete edges of the runways I see a playground with defunct miniature jets and spare broken engines from spacecraft of the past decades. It is a playground for the kids and at that moment there is a family gathering among the hulls of bomber planes and world war two relics for a photo op. Standing in the shadow of a late-model bomber cabled to the asphalt surface of the ground a grandmotherly type gathers three kids in close to her body, fitting them in the frame of their parents’ camera shutter. It’s three generations of a family and everything is so clean and abstract that I’m feeling dizzy. I’m watching all this surrounded by two screens showing speeded-up videos of a nuclear reactor being built by men the size of ants. They build and rebuild the reactors in twenty seconds flat. I’m thinking if I owned the place I’d hook the constant