Waterfront Journals by David Wojnarowicz

whole apron thing … I just wanted to run around … I mean there’s just so much going on in the States alone that it makes me dizzy to think of what I’m missing sitting here. My father said he’d cut me out of the will if I didn’t go to school so I split … it’s kinda romantic I mean I’ve been hitching for the past five years … lived just about everywhere and mostly followed the migrant people picking produce and stuff. What got to me was that it was only romantic because I had the choice … I mean there was security behind me if I chose to go back … but no, I was tough and could make it on my own. So I worked this waitress job because I was tired and I thought maybe I could settle down and do some thinking instead of all that continuous experiencing but man after two years of serving all those people … let me tell you there’s two things in life people get really bitchy about: one’s money and the other’s their food … I’d hassle with these people over food and then sit down and like the counter is over here and the kitchen is over there and the windows are here and the door is there … that’s the only part of the job I really liked … walking out that fucking door. I mean everything’s outside and I was thinkin how much it picked me up to walk through the door so I said: That’s it I quit I have money saved up not a whole lot but enough to make some plans to go somewhere else. Right now I’m just taking it easy and thinking. I come down here because there’s a lot going on on this street … all these people rushing around helps me to make sense, to see how to live. This afternoon I was sitting out here watching those prostitutes across the street and one of them stepped out of the doorway and took this little guy with a guitar by the hand, he had just jumped off some dump truck from Arizona, she took him by the hand really gentle like he was a kid going to school for the first time and they walked down the street to the hotel together, him carrying this guitar without a case, like he played that guitar all around the country just to end up in some squeaky bed in a ratty hotel where somebody’s gonna hold him for a while, even for ten minutes ya know … and like I felt kind of sad because that’s really it … it’s never any more than that scene … and when it becomes more … then the whole idea of measure in your life is forgotten … you never make sense of nothing …

Guy Waiting for a Bus
    NEW JERSEY
    This friend of mine went on a trip to Portugal last summer … he was there for a few weeks … one day he was walking on this beach along a stone wall where all these natives were walking around carrying large machetes, they use them to cut down bananas, well this one guy came up to my friend and pulled his machete on him and robbed him. My friend gave him forty dollars which was all he had on him. The guy dragged him over the stone wall where they couldn’t be seen then he pointed the machete at my friend’s crotch and went into this harangue about the rich tourists who fuck over the country … the guy demanded more money and my friend told him, I don’t have any more if I had ten thousand dollars I’d give it to you … the guy went back into his harangue and kept the machete on him and started pulling off his pants … he told my friend he wanted a blow job … my friend started crying and begging him to let him go but the guy continued taking off his pants … just then my friend remembered something a friend of his had told him … so he gets down on his knees and clasps his hands together and starts praying out loud to all the saints and religious figures he could think of: Oh please St. Francis Mother Mary of God St. Peter … the guy freaked out … his eyes got wide and he stumbled into his pants and jumped over the stone