Close to the Knives by David Wojnarowicz Page A

the vision I see beneath the tiniest gesture of wiping one’s lips after a meal or observing a traffic light.
    four . I went up to see him in the hospital, it’s all septic green or pale brown and yellow, hazes of light filtering in the windows, drenching the day’s new flowers with color. There he is propped up in the white sheets with all the inventions of his day leading in and out of his body in the form of tubes and generators and pumps and dials and hisses and his eyes are bare slits with pearly surfaces glimmering inside them like somehow they’ve stopped reflecting light. Today, as yesterday, his nose is no longer the first thing I see—it’s covered in the gray and white color of cancer and it looks bulbous and he said weeks ago when he was out visiting his family in the country for the last time that the little kids playing in the park thought he had the job of a clown somewhere and how he pretended he did—and, today, as yesterday, I am amazed at the fine color of his face and how as he slips closer to death his body looks more healthy. I thought of how he’d expected at least another year but in the last two days he has died twice and now he is taking his time before the third time which would be the final time. At least the doctors had finally agreed to stop jumping up and down on him if he died again and somehow through all of this I realized how much more afraid of death they were than he.
    five . man on second avenue at 2:00 A.M. (N.Y.C.) : “This guy I know was walking with a friend of his around West Street. They had gone into one of the bars and had a beer and after they left they were walking down the street when this car from Jersey cruised by … kids come around all the time throwin’ bottles and screamin’ ‘QUEER!’ and then taking off—so this car cruised by them real slow and some kid leans out the window sayin’, ‘Suck my dick!’ and my friend flipped him the finger and said something; all of a sudden the car slams on the brakes and five kids come piling outta the doors and start kicking the shit out of my friend … for the next ten minutes about a hundred guys came outta the bars and from around the corner and surrounded these five kids beating the shit outta my friend—his friend took off right away and later my friend found out that he’d just run home, didn’t bother calling the cops or nothing … and all these guys crowding around watching five guys beat up one guy and none of them said or did a fuckin’ thing … my friend said the five kids stomped on his head and chest and broke a lot of his ribs and stomped on his legs … at one point he could hardly feel them hitting him—they were jumping up and down on his head and arms and legs and finally he said he remembers jumping up and plowing through the crowd and running … his face was just a puddle of blood … the kids chased after him but he ran faster and faster and through the streets and outta the neighborhood and he kept running till he collapsed somewhere on some side street … later he woke up in the hospital and found out that he had been unconscious for about six days … the doctors told him that he was found by the cops unconscious on West Street surrounded by a bunch of guys who didn’t do nothing; apparently he had hallucinated the whole thing of getting up and running away … he had never gotten up … the kids from Jersey got away before the cops even got there.…”
    six . In the skid-row section of town, the only movement in the streets was the automobiles cruising along the curbside and river parking lot. In the dusk they were like aquariums on wheels: amphibious stares of strangers pressed behind glass. Tall granite buildings with tiny windows speckled with fluorescent lights; gray vague shapes in the dripping alleyways and shit and garbage rattling in the wind along the flooded gutters,