Interview Text with Richard Kern by Diana Kamin and Marvin Taylor on 8-30-2016

For Glenn Wharton at Fales Library, NYU Diana Kamin (DK) and Marvin Taylor (MT) interviewing Richard Kern (RK) on August 30, 2016 at Fales Library.

DK: This is Diana Kamin and Marvin Taylor interviewing Richard Kern on August 30th, 2016 at Fales Library. So, we will start off with a broad question, though, which is, can you tell us more about your earliest meetings with Wojnarowicz? You met him through Tommy Turner, I believe?
RK: Yes, I think I met him through, yes, Tommy was a busboy at Peppermint Lounge, the one that was uptown on, I guess it was in the 40s or somewhere. And he said, ‘I’ve got this other friend of mine; he likes to do crazy stuff.’ And it was David. And I think he was a busboy there, too. This would have to be probably ’79, ’80, somewhere around there. Did you read the Cynthia Carr book, I suppose?
DK: Yes.
RK: So, I’m curious to see how what I say now __[0:01:00] (laughing) to that, because I don’t remember that at all. But okay, so,
DK: We can cross check. I think it was around that time.
RK: David was, let’s see. It was, I hung out with him and Montana Houston and Tommy. And a lot of it had to do with, I was making fanzines and I had started making movies. I met Montana first. I think he was the first person I met here. And oh yeah, I started dating some girl that was the roommate of a girl Tommy was dating. That’s how I met him. And then I met David through Tommy. And then I met Lydia through David. It was all like the way things happen, I guess.
DK: What were your early impressions?
RK: Well, you know, you’re always looking for people that don’t think you’re doing weird stuff, and David was one of those, Tommy was one. And we were all into this young fascination with weirdness, I guess, like young people are. And I didn’t know David was gay, I didn’t know Montana was gay, for like years. Not Years, maybe like four or five years. I just never even thought about it because David was like super macho. He was like the opposite of what me coming from North Carolina imagined as a gay guy. So. And so was Montana, by the way. Montana even went so far as to fabricate this girlfriend he had that we never met. David wasn’t like that, though. But yeah.
DK: And how about his work? When did you first learn about the work he was doing? Did he talk about it?
RK: No. Now I remember, it was those things on the docks, whatever that was called.
DK: The Pier Project? The Ward Line Pier Project?
RK: Did it have a name?
DK: I’ve just seen Ward Line Pier Project because that was the name of the pier. It was at Pier 34 and Pier 28.
RK: And David said he’s doing this thing on the piers on the West Side, because he knew I had made -- at the time I was doing this art stuff, but it was more like, it wasn’t really art. It was just me taking Xeroxes of photos that I had shot and I’d print the same photo 50 times, and Montana would put one of his concrete, his cut-out poems, in the middle, and I’d make a whole wall. And we would wheat paste everything. They were super anal, like, arranged. And it would be some kind of hopefully dark, surrealist looking image. And he said, ‘You can have a room in there. I’m just telling anybody I know they can come over there and have a room.’ And I went over to look at it, and it was great. So I did something there. I had a wall. I can picture it in my head. I never photographed it, which was stupid. I did photograph his stuff in there. And he would tell me all these stories about the piers. And then I realized he was gay. [laughter] Yeah, that was a really amazing thing. And it was typical of the kind of thing that me and my friends liked to do. Like the fanzines. Oh, he was doing drawings for my fanzines and things, too. So it was typical of the kind of things we liked to do, that was kind of like illegal or. I don’t know; it was a different New York then. You could – that’s such a cliché but it’s true – where you could do these things. You could just do all kinds of stuff without, first, without anyone noticing. In school, I was really into this idea of like, where I studied I’d got into the idea that art was supposed to be pure. It couldn’t be purchased. Once it was purchased, it was tainted. And I was into process pieces and conceptual stuff, and David seemed to be, too. He was into doing big things in places where nobody was going to get it. There was a lot of people – Keith Haring was doing that, too. And yeah, it just fit right in with what I was doing. And Montana did a lot of drawings. Tommy, he did taxidermy. He did weird stuff like that. He was even weirder.
DK: What were the fanzines, what was the content, and the subject?
RK: They were, the first one was called “The Heroin Addict.” That was before I had ever done drugs. And the second one was called “The Valium Addict.” And the next one was called “Dumb Fucker.” And then there was one called “Car and Truck Coloring Book.” And then with Montana, I did “A Key to the Streets of Fear” and “How Magic Works.” Those were two different ones. And this was all HA Productions, or something like that. It was just all like stuff – Montana had – do you guys know all this?
MT: Some of it.
DK: Some of it, yes.
RK: Montana worked at the Ford Foundation, and they had the first Xerox 9500 that I’d ever seen. It was like the first Xerox machine that made photo quality printing in black and white. So, we would go there and print at night. He’d let us in and we could print just like thousands of magazines. So, and that was called, Montana Printers. And then the magazines were free. I just put them out all over the place. Yeah, that was the kind of thing that, you know, was like, we’re doing this for free, for fun. And David was, you know, it was like-minded spirits, I guess.
DK: I think I’ll move into the filmmaking practice and the work that you did with David there. Was Stray Dogs, Manhattan Love Suicide, the first film that you asked Wojnarowicz to participate in?
RK: Yes. I’d know him and then lose track of him, then meet up with him again, it seems. It’s all so foggy because I became a bad drug addict at one point there. So it was, Manhattan Love Suicides, that Stray Dogs movie. I had made a couple of shorts. They were all short, but I made a couple of shorts and yeah, in fact, I shot David, one of the shorts was, I shot David making those heads. And that’s a pretty funny movie. It’s very short, like, three minutes of him, like, making these heads and making these faces that go with the heads.
DK: What’s the name of that film? I must have it but it’s not
RK: It doesn’t have a name.
DK: Okay.
RK: It’s just a, I never put it out or anything.
DK: I’ve never seen it.
MT: I’ve never seen it. I didn’t know anything about it.
RK: Oh, it’s a great one. It’s so shitty. The quality is really bad, and it’s in his apartment, I guess it was on Third Avenue or somewhere, if he lived there; I don’t know. It was an apartment he had. The whole place was like a studio. It was just a big mess. And he was making those heads for that head show.
DK: At Civilian Warfare?
RK: Yes. Now, I could have shot this, this could have been before or after Manhattan Love Suicides. It depends on when that was, because Manhattan Love Suicides was ’85. I don’t know when that Civilian Warfare
DK: It says ’84, the heads, the head show.
RK: Oh, okay, so, I shot it before.
DK: It opened in May, so it would have been.
RK: Okay. So. He was making those things and I was just making these dumb kind of gestural movies. And I knew he did that so, the premise, if there was one, was, it was a guy trying to make his own face look like – I don’t have to describe it. You’d have to see it and then tell me. It’s not very long. But it shows him making those things, and they’re all around the apartment, all over the place. And then he wanted to be in something else, so I put him in -- after seeing him make faces, I put him in this Straw Dogs. He knew Bill Rice, so he asked Bill Rice for me if he would be in it. How much detail do you want?
DK: Detail is great.
RK: Okay. So, Manhattan Love Suicides was supposed to be, I’d seen this movie called, this Oshima, I think, movie called The Love Suicides at, and it’s a famous forest in Japan where people go to kill themselves. Someone just told me Gus Van Zandt just made a new movie about it. But I saw that movie, and it’s this young couple who are so in love and they can’t be together, so they go there and kill themselves. And I thought, wow, his is really what it’s like. So the premise of the movie was, people that are so in love that their love kills them. They just can’t handle it. Because that was how all my relationships were. So Stray Dogs was Bill Rice playing an older artist who is being, has this young artist played by David, following him – not a young artist; a young guy, like a young hustler type, following him around. And Bill is not interested in him at all. All he wants to do is paint. And David plays this guy that gets so frustrated like first his neck explodes, and he just keeps getting madder and madder at different things. Like, he sees some photos in Bill’s apartment, he sees a photo of himself, then he sees photos of all these other guys, and he freaks out; he starts blowing up. And then he keeps trying to kiss Bill, Bill won’t let him kiss him, he says because he has bad breath. And David gets so upset then that his arm blows off. And he’s lying on the floor dying. And now that he’s dead, the artist is finally interested in him. Which is also typical of the relationship thing, or not necessarily dead but when somebody’s gone then you become interested. So yeah, that was that movie. And then we immediately, I shot the rest of those with other people, based on, I did one with Tommy, I did one with Zedd, I did one with my girlfriend at the time. Then, David and I were hanging out a lot, and doing drugs a lot. Yeah, he was doing drugs. So we went to cop some heroin on Eighth Street, between C and D, and it was beat, so we were – is this in that book?
MT: I don’t remember.
DK: I’m not sure about this particular story.
RK: Okay. So we go to buy drugs on Eighth between C and D. David had a car. We could just cruise around, he had a station wagon. And at that time you could park anywhere in the East Village. And I was living on 13th between A and B at the time, where I shot a lot of my movies. Anyway, so we go and buy the drugs, we’re sitting there, and there’s nothing like when you’re expecting to get high and you shoot up and it’s fuckin’ beat, and your arm just swells up and you go, “Fuck. That was like fifty bucks.” And I think I was selling Ecstasy at the time, because I sold pot and stuff to pay for those films. And I said, “Hey, let’s shoot up some Ecstasy; see what that’s like.” So we did that, and it was, I mean, you’d shoot up anything when you’re trying to get high. And it was just like such a, like, I picture that warp speed thing in Star Trek. That’s what it felt like. And then you come back and you go, “Hey; I’ve got a great idea!” And you start talking like, we had this, I had met this girl named Lung Leg, one of the Nick Zedd’s girlfriend. Like, this girl Cassandra Stark, she was Nick’s girl. So she comes over one day and says, “I think you should meet Lung.” And that was going to be my girl, but not my girlfriend, just my person I work with. And I had just met her and I couldn’t figure her out. She was probably ten years, fifteen years younger than me, and I couldn’t figure out her scene, even though I had been in this downtown scene forever. Because it was a different generation. They were even more nihilist than we were. I mean, there were subtle differences between the different scenes. But they all amounted to kind of the same thing, but just like a super negativity and thinking everything should be destroyed. That was my scene. And in fact, most of the films I made back then, the whole point of everything was just to fuck up people’s ideas about sex and to make them – I wanted to ruin the way they thought about sex, and I think I was successful with the movie Fingered, according to a lot of people. But, anyway, so, I met Lung Leg, and I couldn’t figure out what is going on with this person, because she had a big X carved in her head – not carved, but she shaved her head a big X on top of her long hair, and it just looked so weird. And this real witchy kind of outlook. She was into demons and all of that stuff. Completely different than – I guess it was kind of a pre-Goth thing, but it was very different than the kind of punk scene that I came from, which was just nihilism. And this had a more kind of a supernatural twist to it, to her scene. Those girls were all into this witchy thing, and the music had changed from like the Sex Pistols to like Einstürzende Neubauten and Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds. That was their thing. And bands like Crass, these political bands that I had never really got into. I was more interested in the ones that said let’s tear everything down. So anyhow, I’m giving you all this detail; this is such a qualification.
DK: You’re in the car.
RK: Okay.
DK: With David.
RK You said you wanted detail, so.
DK: Yeah, no, it’s great.
MT: It is.
RK: So anyhow, David and I are sitting there, and I said, ‘I met this girl and I’d like to make a movie with her. And I could make one where I try to figure out why she is like she is. And I’m going to interview everybody I know and ask them what their parents did.’ And I had this whole plan about how we could be at a dinner, and then you could show – flashback – could show all this stuff. And David said, ‘Well, I’ve got these skeletons I want to do something with. I’ve got this whole family of skeletons I bought.’ And then we worked out that show right there.
DK: Quick question about the skeletons. Were those skeletons he had bought in Paris?
RK: No idea right now. I just know he said he’s got a bunch of skeletons.
MT: I have one question, too. Did he have the child skeleton at that point?
RK: Yes.
MT: Okay; that’s great to know.
RK: I’m pretty sure he did; yeah, because it was in the show.
MT: Thanks.
RK: So we pretty much planned out the entire thing sitting there. I said, I’m gonna make this movie. He said, I’ll help. And I think he already had the show for Ground Zero set up.
DK: So the film and the installation were conceived at the same time?
RK: Yes. Yes. It was all part of the same thing. So I shot the movie really fast. I still had a job at the time. I worked for this artist, and he went out of town. He would always leave me the keys to his loft, so we shot it in there. And David was the father. And I quickly interviewed everybody, but most of the stories came from David. It was all stuff of David. I think, in the movie, Lung sees her parents having sex. That was from her. And the rabbit getting killed, that was David. The gun, putting a gun to the wife’s head, that was David. These were all stories he talked about, his father. So I just made an outline. We shot it in one day at this loft. David bought the turkey. He said, ‘I’ll get a turkey.’ And David had the car, so we could move stuff around, and just did it really quick.
DK: What were other props that you guys needed?
RK: I had the gun, which was such a, it was a starter pistol, and that didn’t really matter. And it was the first thing I shot with Lung, so. I’m just trying to remember this. Montana was in it. I was trying to remember who the original person who Karen Finley replaced was. It was somebody else, and.
DK: This is in your interview with Lotringer.
RK: Oh, it is?
DK: I believe so, I just can’t remember the name. I’m pretty sure you had the names in that interview, so we can look that up.
RK: Okay.
DK: And she bailed at the last minute.
RK: Yes. And then David said, ‘Well I can get Karen Finley to do it,’ which was so great. That like saved a lot of things; she was so good. And there was no script or anything. I just had a list of – this is the way I made all of those movies; I just had a list of what people were going to talk about or what they were going to do. And I would tell them right before the scene, and then we’d just shoot it. And Karen was great, because some of her lines we so fuckin’ funny. And the same for David. Lung, who had never been in anything, said, ‘Hey, I want some drugs.’ So she’s doing Ecstasy in every scene. Like, she would snort a bunch of Ecstasy right before we shot. Like, in the dinner scene, she’s just like __[22:20] and it’s all Ecstasy. For all I know, she was doing other drugs too. Montana helped me with the special effects.
DK: What kind of special effects?
RK: When they get shot. When David gets shot, you see the stuff shoot out of his mouth. If you look down at the table, you can see Montana’s knee sticking up there. [laughter] There’s a lot of funny stuff like that that I see now that I didn’t notice at the time. And let’s see, who else is in there? Anyway, all of the people went on to bigger and better things, I guess. Lung, I don’t know about her, but anyway, so we made this movie. It was a quick turnaround.
DK: What kind of camera were you using at the time?
RK: At that time I had a Canon, it was a 1250, maybe a 1050. Canon made like three levels of Super 8 sound cameras at one point that were professional cameras. And I think I had the second from the top, whatever that was. And I can remember buying that. It was such a great investment, 300 bucks. But a lot of the old ones I shot on like a really cheap one that I bought from Film Video Arts for like 15 bucks. But this one was great because you could do sound, you could do slow-mo, and all this; you could do manual. It was great.
DK: And how was the film edited? Did you do all the editing?
RK: Those little tiny Super 8 things. Yeah, that’s the way I edited all of that stuff. And it’s funny because I remastered all of this stuff recently, a couple of years ago. And I tried to look at stuff on one of those things. And I even bought the brightest bulbs I could find. And I don’t know how I did it. I have no idea. You can’t see anything. I don’t know how that was possible. But even in the pitch black you can’t see anything. So do you have more specific?
DK: Just also wondering if there are any alternate cuts.
RK: No. There’s tons of outtakes but I probably just did like one take because a lot of it was things like David chopping up that rabbit. I couldn’t do it twice. It was done. But, let’s see. Incidentally, the artist, I hadn’t seen him for twenty years, and I went to have dinner with him; he’s still alive. And he said, ‘I never did tell you that one time I came back from a trip and there was a dead rabbit in my refrigerator all chopped up.’ And I completely forgot about that, I mean, to like take it out. And when David chops up the table, I had to sand – it was a butcher block table. I had to sand the table. I had to do all this stuff to make sure nobody knew. And then I finally told, the reason he was telling me about the rabbit is, twenty years later, I said, ‘By the way, I shot this movie in here once. I hope you don’t mind.’ And that’s when he told me about the rabbit. [laughter] So, quickly edited it and transferred it to video. I don’t remember where I did it; probably at Brodsky Treadway up in – if that’s what they were called – up in Boston. Because they were the only place I could find that didn’t freak out over my content. Back then, people wouldn’t do your stuff. They would just say, ‘We’re not touching this.’
DK: That’s so interesting. Even the downtown labs wouldn’t?
RK: Nope. I mean, they did really good transfers. There was not many places that did incredible transfers, especially for Fingered. Like, nobody was going to do that. So yeah, got it transferred, and it was playing on a loop in the show. Using David’s station wagon, we went around to construction sites and we stole all of the materials to make this room inside the gallery. And I had done construction so I knew how to do all this junk. We built a wall with a window in it. The window was cracked so you could look in. We hauled all these leaves and dog shit and everything into the front, so when you opened the door, you were in a back alley, is what it looked like. I don’t know how effective it was, but, it was dark. David, I think he had recorders in there that had like – this was David’s design, you know. Like, I wanted to do the wall, but he designed, he did all the placement of all the junk. And he had tape recorders hidden that were playing, like, outdoor sounds. And then when you got to the window,
DK: What kinds of outdoor?
RK: I don’t know, whatever you’d hear outside, like
DK: Country outside?
RK: Maybe like sirens, things like that.
DK: Okay, so city outside.
RK: City outside, yes. And when you got up to the window, you looked in and you see the skeletons all bloody and blood all over the place, because that’s the way the movie ends. And up on a loop is, on this monitor, you know how people have a television in their, sometimes when they’re eating, had that set up, and it’s just playing over and over and over. And for the opening, since I was a pot dealer, I would pass out joints before people went in, and say, “You should smoke this before you go in there, just to get a special effect.” And yeah, so that was the show.
DK: And could you see – we were wondering, because there was this tiny television and it was perched pretty high, you could see it though through the window?
RK: Yes, it was like from here to the back wall; you could see it. It was about this size, the table was here, and the people were there, and there was a monitor there.
DK: And so people could stand at the window and watch the duration of the film.
RK: Yes.
DK: Like a viewing room.
RK: Yes and James and Marguerite who owned that gallery, they lived on the wall behind it. And they said that they listened to that thing so much, and they said their kid could recite it from memory. [laughter] But yeah.
DK: How did you guys find the television that was used?
RK: And then it sold for a million dollars! [laughter] That would be funny. How did we what?
DK: The television that was used.
RK: Davey got that.
DK: He found it?
RK: Yeah, David came up with all kinds of stuff. But I really remember driving around, because there were lots of construction sites around. We might have gone to Brooklyn, places like that, and just stealing all this stuff, and then just put it in the gallery. It didn’t cost anything, basically, except for the film, the film and the transfer. That’s about all it cost. And I guess David paid for the skeletons. What happened to those, do you know?
MT: We have the child skeleton.
RK: Oh, you do?
MT: But I don’t know what happened to the others.
RK: Is it the messed up one from the installation? Because he made a bunch of them.
MT: Yeah, this one may be a later one. We have photos of David with this skeleton, walking around. Though it was interesting; I was reading something the other day about the installation, and there was a discussion, I think it was this installation, of a child’s skeleton in a white dress. And ours is in a white dress.
RK: Yeah, that could have been it because it was a, but it would have been covered with blood. And I have photos of all that from then. I have slides and all that.
MT: This one’s not covered in blood.
DK: Was it real animal blood?
RK: I would imagine it was cow blood because you could buy cow blood on First Avenue from the Polish butcher for about three bucks a pint. It was super cheap. And we used that for everything because it looked real, for one thing, and it wasn’t as sticky as the special effects blood, which was hugely messy. But I also bought the body parts, fake stuff I used in a bunch of the other special effects from the same store where you could buy intestines and all kinds of stuff.
DK: So I have one image of the sort of alleyway exterior here.
RK: Wow; see, I don’t even have that. Nice. Where does this come from?
DK: That was another researcher on the project found that. I’m still trying to figure out where she dug it up because I hadn’t seen it before either.
RK: Wow, this is crazy. Because I don’t remember that part, I just remember the inside.
DK: Yeah, that was all I had seen as well.
RK: So that’s David’s painting, too. He would have painted all of that junk.
DK: He would have painted all of that including the sort of graffiti tags?
RK: Yes.
DK: In order to capture the alleyway.
RK: Yes. It’s interesting because it looks like I didn’t make the wall go all the way to the top. I mean, it looks like I just did the bricks for part. We must have run out of bricks. Can I get a copy of that?
DK: Sure.
RK: Can you send it to me?
DK: I will.
RK: Great.
MT: It’s interesting; he’s got his blue going in there, too.
RK: Yeah.
DK: Yeah, so it looks like there’s blue and red lights.
RK: Yeah, there was a lot of that inside the window, too.
DK: Mm-hm.
RK: And that film really resonated with people. I still didn’t understand Lung, though. [laughter] I found out later she was mentally ill. So then I understood it, finally.
MT: Yeah, I remember the first time I saw the film. A lot of us. It’s really powerful.
RK: Did it seem – I have no idea what people’s effects were, but
MT: Well, no, it seems funny and real and weird at the same time, and sort of – it’s great. You had to have – there’s no way you could not have a powerful reaction to it. It felt real in a funny way.
RK: Because I showed these things in Copenhagen, somewhere in Denmark, like, five years ago, a short film thing. They paid me a bunch of money to come, so I did it. And the first thing I got asked was, ‘Why did you make these films? Are we supposed to think they’re good? The acting is terrible, it’s shot bad and everything.’ And I said, ‘Dude; I don’t know. They paid me a lot of money to come here. I don’t care what you think.’ [laughter] But that was the first time I ever thought about the people as actors, or that they were acting. It was more like just going through some motions and, so.
DK: And was the installation the first time you were screening the film for an audience?
RK: Yes.
DK: Subsequent to that, were there other screenings that year?
RK: Not of that. No. That was pretty much a rush job. Do you have the date on that installation? Because I don’t remember.
DK: That was ’85.
RK: But does it say
DK: Oh, the specific?
RK: I’ve got it somewhere. But I mean, we turned it around really fast, because I think we shot on Thanksgiving, and it seems like the show was like immediately after that, or, I can’t remember.
DK: Right. So, yeah, if it was within the same year, it would have been a month later or a few weeks later. I think that makes sense; December, that’s what I remember, too. So it must have been cold outside.
RK: Yes, it was fall, I remember that.
DK: And just generally, how would you say David, what was he like as a collaborator? It sounds like there were some decisions that were sort of completely his domain, and others that were completely your domain.
RK: For that project, I was the film and he was the installation. It was his installation, and I was just making the film that was part of it. And I helped him with the wall. That’s it. When I came to see it, I was like, ‘Oh, this is what it looks like.’ It was good. I do remember he gave me money for the turkey; or he bought the turkey and stuff. And for one of the films, I don’t know if it was Stray Dogs or if it was this one, he gave me like 300 bucks or something to help pay for it. But I don’t remember which one. Maybe it was this one. I’m not sure. Because I think he must have been having shows. I don’t know where he was getting money, but he seemed to have some money. But another thing about him, he was already kind of like a little bit into the art world, because we made fun of him being an artist. Because I myself, I had a whole different image. I told you what I studied and stuff. I was so naïve when I got to New York and found out what the art world was really like. So my reaction was to reject it; that was the basic reaction. And so we all were like that. Tommy didn’t come from an art background; Montana didn’t either. So when David was hanging around with the art people, we thought – kind of like, supposedly he talked about Basquiat when he started hanging around with Warhol and stuff, all that. You know, we’re not the same. I’m sure his friends thought a lot differently of him at that time.
DK: Did you guys really think differently of him? Or were you just sort of giving him a hard time.
RK: Just giving him a hard time.
DK: How did he react?
RK: Well, he reacted more negatively about the drug use. He really was fed up with that. And he moved into my building. I got him an apartment that was right above me. And my scene was getting darker at that time, it seems, probably because of the drugs. And he told me that he could feel the bad vibes coming up from my apartment. And he didn’t stay there more than a year. But we had a falling out over -- oh, he made a comic for Tommy called, not Redrum, that was the magazine, but a Betty and Veronica comic. Do you guys have that?
MT: We do.
RK: I’d love to have one of those. I probably do somewhere. But anyway, that was a really, that’s exactly how he thought about it. Because he was a lot of times, if somebody does speed or something like that, they look down at people who are doing heroin. Everybody does. And like, ‘Oh, I’m above that, you know, because I only do speed.’ I’ve seen this, or I used to see it a lot, when I was a drug addict. But David was one of those types. And it was also this trip we took to South Carolina or somewhere. I think it was South Carolina. And I had a big falling out with him because I’m so homophobic; I’m so paranoid about my own sexuality. Back then I was. It was probably a lot of the drug stuff, because I had messed around with guys, too. And David was just always like, there was a few times where he said, we’d get these hotel rooms, and it’s Tommy and Amy, who are sleeping in one bed; there’s the other bed. And David would say, ‘You can just sleep with me in the bed.’ And I’m like, ‘Dude, I am not fucking sleeping with you!’ [laughing] And we’d have these big arguments about it, and I would sleep on the floor. And I’d say, ‘You’ve got to sleep on the floor next time.’ Even though David was probably paying for everything. It was that kind of thing. And at the end of the trip – this is probably in that book, too -- one of my things I would do was, I’d say, ‘I’ll be right back,’ and then I’d, we were in Washington D.C., and I’d just walk to the train station and get on the train, and said, ‘Let them try to figure out where I went.’ And that really kind of ended it there, right up until he got AIDS, and then I started hanging out with him again. Because I’d got clean at that point. (Sigh.) So. And then I was out of touch with him for a long time, until I got clean. When I got clean, we started talking again. And I think I have letters and stuff from him from when I was – I moved to San Francisco to do my bottom. And when I came back, I think he already had AIDS. I do remember though – do you know when the AIDS started? Was it ’85, ’86?
MT: Actually it’s earlier. ’81 is really the beginning.
RK: Well I remember David showing me this article, and I guess it was in New York Magazine, about the new gay cancer, and it was this double-page spread of people in the arts that had died. And he said, ‘Look, I slept with this guy, this guy, this guy, this guy.’ And he was terrified from then on. And he was really concerned that he was going to get it. And his stuff really shifted. And when he got it, it really shifted. But I think he – well, I don’t really know, but it seemed to me, that when he got it, it was not at a good time to get it. It was before they figured it out or he’d still be alive. Because man, when I went to visit him right before he died, in his apartment, it was just like, there was a shelf around the kitchen that was just like drug bottles. And he had a nurse that was, they were just trying everything. I don’t feel like he would have died. But anyway. Some more questions.
DK: Before we get to that period, one of the things we’re trying to ask about, with all of these interviews, and sometimes people have this recollection or had these conversations with him, and sometimes not, but we’re trying to get some of the details about the equipment that he used, the sort of camera equipment. Or labs, or people he worked with. And it’s surprisingly difficult to pull out.
RK: Well, Tommy should know some of that stuff, but Tommy’s memory is probably shot, too. I believe David had a camera like I did. I’m not sure.
DK: A Super 8 Canon?
RK: Yes. I think he had one. But when he went off to Mexico and made those films, we weren’t talking. I was off on my trip somewhere. I’m trying to remember. I know he had a camera. I don’t know his exact stuff. I remember him showing me stuff in his loft, but I don’t know what it was.
DK: And he would have been doing his own editing, do you think?
RK: I suppose; yes. There were other filmmakers he was doing stuff with, because I saw, in that Berlin show, there was one film and it said David Wojnarowicz and somebody else. And it was like a dance film or something. And I was like, this had nothing to do with the cinema of transgression. And then I said, David would flip out if he knew this was being advertised as this and part of this. Because he, a lot of the people that were involved were like, we want nothing to do with this any more because this is super nihilistic and negative.
DK: With the cinema of transgression?
RK: Yes. And so he was working with these other people. They might know, if you could figure out what those films were. I know that the catalogue for that show would list that film.
DK: The Beautiful Strangers, [sic; People] maybe? That sort of dancing guy.
RK: It could have been; yeah. Yeah, it could have been that. That sounds about right.
MT: Is that Jesse Hultberg?
DK: Yes.
RK: But there’s that period when he – I didn’t even know he was making Super 8s until – I didn’t know about the Mexican films, anything, until I saw them in some show. I did know about Where Evil Dwells because we were doing that kind of the same time. I know Tommy used my camera a lot. But David would have bought his own for that other thing. And there was a lab. I do know the lab, but I can’t remember the name of it, unfortunately. There was a Super 8, the use before video was to shoot your football team or your sports team. And there was a lab in the 40s that, I suppose that’s where it was, and you could get your film back in three hours. So you could, that’s what everybody used, that place. And they didn’t care what it was because they’re not looking at it. It’s just like a processing thing. And it was super cheap, maybe like three bucks a roll, quick turnaround. You’d drop it in the morning, come back in a few hours and get it. And yeah, everybody used that. But that was the last place. There’s still a couple of places I hear, around, but I don’t know why anybody would shoot it. But anyway, that was the lab. Tessa Hughes might know. She has a pretty good memory. Actually, she’d be a good person to ask about this stuff, because he might have borrowed cameras from her or something. But she was still in touch with him a lot more than me in the period when we split up. Yeah, she would know all that stuff. She has a much better memory than Tommy, than me, than everybody.
DK: That’s great. We’ll put her on our list. Were there other sorts of discussions you guys may have had about work, other kind of media he was working with, paint, or the plaster of the plaster heads, or the sort of sculptural work he was putting together? Were those the topics of the discussions that you guys would have? Or?
RK: Only that I would look at his paintings. When he was living in my building, he gave me this beautiful huge painting as big as this wall. And then he came down and said, ‘I’m going to need to sell that so I can have some money.’ And he took it back. And that was a sad day.
DK: Which painting was it? Do you know?
RK: I don’t remember. I just remember it was great. But yeah, his art thing was, I only saw it in his studio. I never really saw his shows, except until after he was dead, then I saw a lot of that stuff.
DK: Could you describe what his apartment was like then?
RK: That apartment was just like mine, except his was renovated. Mine was, it was a six-room railroad. It was probably dirt cheap. He was probably paying about maybe $600 a month. Fifth floor of 13th Street between A and B, 529 East 13th was the building. And I was on the fourth floor, he had the fifth floor. I don’t know if he had a bathroom in his, because mine was a cold water flat with a toilet around the corner that was shared with another apartment. But mine had been walled off, so that I had it to myself. And my apartment was $178 a month and I had moved in when the building was completely, it was all drug dealers and shooting galleries. So I renovated mine myself. I did just a basic tearing out all the stuff that the roaches were hiding in, and kept it like that. And he, his had been renovated by the landlord. And the way I think we both had it set up was, the bedroom at one end, there’s a kitchen in the middle, and then you have like three or four rooms that you could just do whatever you wanted. But they were all open. In his place on wherever it was, maybe on Bowery – do you guys have him living there?
DK: I think so.
MT: Third Avenue.
RK: Third Avenue, yes.
MT: Peter’s apartment, Peter’s loft.
RK: No, no.
DK: Before he moved to 13th Street, it was either Third or Second Avenue.
MT: It’s earlier.
RK: Yes, it was on an avenue, I remember that. But that was a very similar setup. That was when he was in 3 Teens Kill 4, that period. It was the same kind of setup except that was completely dilapidated.
DK: That was where he was working on the heads, where you would have filmed the heads film.
RK: Yes. Actually, I mean, you can see it in the.
DK: Yeah. [laughter]
RK: And then he moved, after my place, he moved into this place on Third Street or Second Street between A and B that was right across from the fire station. I remember there was a girl named Medoca [? 50:20], this photographer, and she got him an apartment in that building. I vaguely remember that. And then the one that he moved in, the next time I was talking to him, he was in that, in Peter’s loft on Second Avenue above the theater.
DK: I was wondering what the kind of studio and work areas looked like.
RK: Like a mess. But that would be normal. I mean, even, I remember the one in my building was less messy than all of the other ones.
DK: I think at some period in there he wasn’t painting for a while. After the Whitney Biennial supposedly he took a break from painting.
RK: See, I didn’t even know about the Whitney Biennial. We were like so out of touch with that world that David went into, that art world. I do think he got, like, was it, Civilian Warfare, was that guy a bad drug addict?
DK: Yeah, Dean Savard.
RK: Yeah, and I know David got ripped off tons, for a lot of money, I recall him saying. So.
DK: I want to go back to this question of, you said you were seeing these other films of David’s and thinking that it wasn’t consistent with the cinema of transgression, it seemed so different. RK: Well, just that one.
DK: Okay.
RK: But that seemed to, I don’t know. That had nothing to do with it at all. But the Mexican movies and – but we didn’t think of him as a cinema of transgression filmmaker.
DK: That was going to be my question, yeah, I you considered him part of that.
RK: No. I mean, it was just me, Tommy, Nick. The whole cinema of transgression, that was Nick’s idea and he was just adding people to it to make it seem like it was a bigger scene than it was. But we had pretty much quit – what were the dates for those Mexican movies? Do you know? Was that like in the late ‘80s?
DK: Late ‘80s, yeah.
MT: Yes.
RK: Yeah, see, the cinema of transgression was over for us, for me anyway, at like ’87 or something. Although I did make stuff after, but that period was about ’81 to ’86, ’87, something like that. And then that’s what I would consider the real period. And then, like I say, I didn’t even know David made films. I’d follow this stuff about – I think that Jesse Helms stuff was happening, it started happening when he was – I can’t remember when he figured out he had AIDS. It seems like he was in my building and he had figured it out because I remember him telling me about the censorship thing. And his lawsuit; I remember that.
MT: ’88 is when he was diagnosed. So about six months
RK: He wasn’t in my building then. He had already moved on then. And I left around that time myself. I left around ’87 for six months.
DK: Is there anything else that you feel like hasn’t been discussed in your previous interviews about Wojnarowicz or that we haven’t touched on today that you think is important for researchers to know about that period, about his sort of values or?
RK: The only thing, I don’t know if I said this in the other – I probably just repeated everything the same, but, he always told these crazy stories about being a hustler and stuff and being a runaway and all that. And that gave him an authenticity. Then Cynthia Carr, it seems like she told me that a lot of that wasn’t true, that he didn’t live like that. Do you guys know? I have no idea. He had an apartment -- his mother lived in Hell’s Kitchen and that’s where he actually lived.
MT: It’s complicated. I think he fabricated some of it.
RK: Yeah, that’s what I think.
MT: There may have been some of it, but not nearly as much as he let on.
RK: Yeah, I do remember him telling me him sleeping in a building with a clock tower or something, that he lived in there for a while, him and some other guys. And when he was telling me this stuff back then, I was like, wow, this is so heavy, man. But I don’t know if that was real or not. And the same thing, like, Montana told us how he stabbed this drug dealer and I think he killed him, and we never could figure out of that was real either. It could have been. I could never figure out if Richard Prince actually grew up in the Canal Zone. [laughter] Who knows.
MT: A lot of self fabrication going on back then.
RK: Got it?
DK: Yes, well thank you so much.
MT: Thank you.
RK: Yeah, because it’s time for your other interview.
MT: This was great; thank you.

END at 0:55:58