A memoir of a former
Times Square hustler who made his way up in the
art world of the '80s through the
punk scene, along with Jean-Michel
Basquiat and
Nan Goldin. Subtitled "A Memoir of Disintegration," it recounts many of his experiences and political beliefs. Wojnarowicz died of
AIDS in the early '90s, but he left behind a brilliant (though small) body of work and was a true
revolutionary.
According to some theorists, we start dying as soon as we are born, but it usually takes a terminal illness to come to grips with this. Wojnarowicz could not avoid his fate, so he made the most of it, and produced more than twice as much quality work as most people with twice his lifespan.
Quote:
There were so many days of waiting for him to die the third and final time and we'd been talking to him daily because they say hearing is the last sense to go. Sometimes alone with him, the nurse outside the room, I'd take his hands and bend over whispering in his ears: hey, I don't know what you're seeing but if there's light move toward it; if there's warmth move toward it; if you see nothing then try to imagine that one period of calm in the midst of that sky just where it reaches the ocean. That one place I've always seen as a point of space and time where everything is possible, where I could dream myself anywhere and in any position and I said move into that, become that, merge with it. Death. I don't necessarily believe that it's part of some cycle that repeats in other lifetimes and what difference does it make anyway? Are you supposed to save all your living for the next life? I just tend to see it as some final moment where all the energy of my body will disperse. So now it's day three of four or five, I can't remember, and his parents and two sisters are visiting the empire state building; me and philip and betty, one of his other sisters, are standing in the room. The doctor comes in and removes him from the pumps and hisses of hoses and he leaves the room immediately afterward. There's this cloudy kind of sunlight moving about the room. The guy on the bed takes two breaths and arches his back almost imperceptibly, his lips slightly parted. I have hold of one leg and his sister one hand philip another hand or part of his arm and we're sobbing and I'm totally amazed at how quietly he dies how beautiful everything is with us holding him down on the bed on the floor fourteen stories above the earth and light and wind scattering outside the windows and his folks at this moment standing somewhere on the observation deck of the empire state building hundreds of stories up in the clouds and light and how perfect that is to me how the whole world is still turning and somewhere it's raining and somewhere it's snowing and somewhere forest fires rage and somewhere else something moves beneath dark waters and somewhere blood appears in the hallway of the home of some old couple who aren't bleeding and somewhere else spontaneously self-combusts and somehow all the mysteries of this world as I know it offer me comfort and I don't know beans about heaven and hell and somehow all that stuff is no longer an issue and at the moment I'm a sixteen-foot-tall-five-hundred-and-forty-eight-pound man inside this six-foot body and all I can feel is the pressure all I can feel is the pressure and the need for release.
Chapters:
1. SELF-PORTRAIT IN TWENTY-THREE ROUNDS
2. LOSING THE FORM IN DARKNESS
3. IN THE SHADOW OF THE AMERICAN DREAM
Soon All This Will Be Picturesque Ruins
4. BEING QUEER IN AMERICA
A Journal of Disintegration
5. LIVING CLOSE TO THE KNIVES
6. POSTCARDS FROM AMERICA
X-Rays from Hell
The Seven Deadly Sins Fact Sheet
Additional Statistics and Facts
7. DO NOT DOUBT THE DANGEROUSNESS OF THE 12-INCH TALL POLITICIAN
8. THE SUICIDE OF A GUY WHO ONCE BUILT AN ELABORATE SHRINE OVER A MOUSEHOLE