Close to the Knives by David Wojnarowicz Read Free Book Online Page B

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.