Close to the Knives by David Wojnarowicz Read Free Book Online

interchangeable and that most of the people in the landscape of my birth insisted on having one or both determine the form of their lives. I recognized the fact that the landscape was slowly being chewed up and that childhood dreams of autonomy in the form of hermetic exile were quickly becoming less possible. (I was also in the threads of a childlike crush on a guy I’d met in a times square movie house who’d taken me home for twenty-four hours of sex. He was a college student who looked like he’d grown up in some part of the country like kentucky and in the angles of his chest and abdomen and face, I’d gotten him mixed up with the characters in the movie we were watching when we first noticed each other in the dark seats of the balcony. It was a movie about sexy moonshiners who walked around half naked and eventually died in a shootout with the federal authorities. After carrying on a secret affair with this guy for a number of weeks, he broke it off with the explanation that I was too young and when I got old enough I would understand the range of possibilities for different lovers and that at that abstract moment of time I would leave him.) I lay in a hotel room one night after selling my body to a customer who had gone back home to his wife and kids, and I wished I’d had a motorcycle and that I was in a faraway landscape, maybe someplace out west. I saw myself riding this machine faster and faster and faster toward the edge of a cliff until I hit the right speed that would take me off the cliff in an arcing motion. At that instant when my body and the machine cleared the edge of the cliff and hit the point in the sky where I was neither rising nor falling—somewhere in there: once my body and the motorcycle hit a point in the light and wind and loss of gravity, in that exact moment, I would suddenly disappear, and the motorcycle would continue the downward arc of gravity and explode into flames somewhere among the rocks at the bottom of the cliff. And it is in that sense of void—that marriage of body-machine and space—where one should most desire a continuance of life, that I most wish to disappear. I realized that the image of the point of marriage between body-vehicle and space was similar to the beginning of orgasm. I may be living a life that is the equivalent of a ride on an upside-down road but it is only to shake all the ropes off, even the ropes of mortality. Even in the face of something like gravity, one can jump at least three or four feet in the air and even though gravity will drag us back to the earth again, it is in the moment we are three or four feet in the air that we experience true freedom.
    So what is that feeling of emptiness?
    Maybe it’s that the barren landscape becomes a pocket of death because of its emptiness. Maybe the enormity of the cloudless sky is a void reflecting the mirrorlike thought of myself. That to be confronted by space is to fill it like a vessel with whatever designs one carries—but it goes farther than these eyes having nothing to distract them as vision does its snake-thing and wiggles through space. There is something in all that emptiness—it’s the shape of a particular death that got erected by tiny humans on the spare face of an enormous planet long before I ever arrived, and the continuance of it probably long after I have gone.
    The Indian kid and his camaro got picked up by the cops in a suburban 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