(D for desire, doom, debauchery, deviancy, depression, drunkenness, degeneracy, depravity, despair, disorder, destruction, disintegration, dissolution, death…)
Clouds blowing through dark sky as I cross the Bay Bridge. The lit skyline rises before me. It is approaching midnight. I stick my head out of the car window and howl. The school is silent under the moonlight and the stones are cool. It is the first stop I make and I pee on the outside walls thinking “this is my new home.” In front of the hotel where I will stay strut half a dozen big-legged whores with thickly made-up faces and numb looks. I buy cheap scotch, find a place in the park, listen to Seventeen Seconds, and fall asleep in my car. When I awake a Chinese man stands before me swinging a chain around his body and blowing a flute. I check into the hotel, meet my future roommate, a nice, cute and tough girl. At nighttime I go out, towards South of Market, looking for something to eat. Police cars are interspersed between hookers, pan-handlers, street people, and thugs. Later, I feel that a sinister presence is trying to get into the room through the keyhole in the door. The next morning I see small burn marks around the doorknob, and a cloven footprint on the carpet just before the door. This is a bad omen, and I feel fear and strangeness moving in. My car is broken into and the stereo is stolen. The signs are clear to me: if I am to succeed (or even survive) here I must swim with the current and embrace the craziness head on. I walk up Haight street, look for freaks, and score some acid…
The drug-induced, sensory-overload, subconscious plundering tactics are a way to establish inner necessity, to discover what’s meaningful by deconstructing previous notions of art (sacrificing previously held notions of identity). Pulling out that which is hidden. A questioning by contradiction of various conventions I have concerning painting, myself, and society. Looking for something in the repressed, the hidden.
I drink from a bottle of beer wrapped in a paper bag sitting against a wall and watch the prostitutes down around the corner. I‘ve never seen any this close before and I’m fascinated. They call to each other, get into cars which take them away, get driven back and emerge from the cars gesturing and calling to each other again. I watch for a few nights until one of them approaches me. She tells me she’s seen me watching her night after night, and that she knows what I need. She asks if I have a car around, and without thinking I point to it—it is sitting only fifteen feet away—she gives a big grin—her two front teeth are missing—and says, “let’s go.” I can’t think of any reason not to, and soon we are in the car. After she asks me to put my money on the dash, I place the fourteen dollars down that I have, and she swipes the bills away, she leans over me, supported by her knees on the passenger seat, gets my seat reclined and my pants down, and lowers her round, black face down into my lap. Her cool mouth slides around my stiffened flesh. I pull up her skirt and run my fingers over the warm, dark skin that’s bare underneath. She moans and gyrates, sticks ass out, her cheeks press up against the passenger window. Formally dressed, elderly white people leaving the theatre walk by, trying to look away and keep composed. The street seems to glow and my mind spreads tingling outward…
*
San Francisco struck me as an enchanted city. It was small enough to walk across, and yet packed with interesting architecture, people, and energies. A year or two before this I had gone to the city to visit a friend, and he had taken me around and showed me some sights. I had hung out and gotten loaded with some neo-hippies on Haight, seen a beautiful, tough tattooed goth chick fetch a huge snake out from behind an apartment off Market, went to a trippy, dark and dreamy party full of sexy, made-up people moving in slow motion through dim, colored lights, and wandered around the halls and studios of the Art Institute. The whole place seemed exciting and alive, and I started to think about the idea of moving there and going to art school. It seemed to be the perfect environment to creatively rearrange oneself and encounter something inspiring.