dan fishback, from jason & david, from between certain death and a possible future, edited by mattilda bernstein sycamore, 2021
["Earlier, I referred to David Feinberg's writing as sadistic. As a fan of his writing, I think we both know what that makes me.
In the thirtynothing performance, I mentioned that David accused everyone in ACT UP of having failed. Often, older audience members would approach me after the show and say "Oh, I was there that night. It was horrible." Eventually, I found footage of the speech at the New York Public Library. David looks like he's already dead.
"I'm going to be nice for, like, five minutes, and then I'm going to switch to real nasty."
He's sitting in front of the crowd, reading from papers. You can hear the audience shuffling anxiously.
"These are all the ACT UP T-shirts I've bought over the past few years. I'm donating them back to ACT UP."
He tosses a garbage bag of shirts onto the floor.
"This is probably the last time I'm going to be here." He takes a photo of the audience with a disposable camera. "Joe Keenan's gay episode of Frasier is on tomorrow. Okay, that's it. This is called 'ACT UP NEW YORK'S FAILURES SINCE THE DEATH OF ROBERT RAFSKY'. Can everybody hear me?"
They can.
He launches into a diatribe about how ACT UP New York has become too politically correct, losing its focus on actually saving, he says, "our friends' lives."
He screams: "I AM A TOTALLY SELF-ABSORBED, NARCISSISTIC PIG. I DON'T CARE ABOUT LATEX DENTAL DAMS IN EL SALVADOR. I DON'T CARE ABOUT AIDS IN AFRICA, ASIA, EUROPE, AUSTRALIA, ANTARCTICA, OR SOUTH AMERICA.
"I AM A CORPSE," he says. And that's what I see: a withering, decaying corpse, shouting at the top of his lungs.
"I am no longer fighting with ACT UP," he says, finally. "If ACT UP continues in this fashion, it may as well be plowed over into the same mass grave that is already overflowing with the rotting corpses of our friends who hav. Died. Of. AIDS. And if anyone applauds, they are just applauding their own stupidity. Thank you. I have to go now."
He pauses.
"I have to go. I don't want to talk to anybody."
He starts gathering his things. "I've had it."
There's an exhausted silence while he gets up, tottering to his feet like some kind of homicidal marionette. As he hobbles out of the room, he says, oozing sarcasm, "Thank you for your attention."
I hear Avram's soft voice in the audience calling out, "Thank you, David." And another repeats, "Thank you."
It's a horror movie.
What's most terrifying is how clearly the disease had corroded not just his body but his moral center. This was a guy who had been committed to activism for years, not just to save his own life but to save the lives of everyone infected with the virus. He had been arrested in demonstrations that were focused only on women with HIV; that suggests to me that he wasn't a fundamentally self-centered person. Not totally, not irredeemably. The rapid approach of death did that to him. Death brought him to that place of desperation, cruelty, selfishness.
When I saw that footage for the first time, it made me bolt from the library like I was running from a monster. Walking is hard enough with chronic fatigue syndrome—I don't run unless I'm fleeing for my life. It was freezing, raining, and late. At night, when it rains in New York, the water and darkness wash off any sense of the contemporary. Dark, cold, rainy Manhattan could be any year. I was walking through everyone's New York, hearing David screaming in my head. I felt a dull pain throughout my body. On the subway, my jaw was clenched shut. When I got to my apartment, I walked in circled around my room, head down, fingers stretched out. I watched TV obsessively, miserably. I wanted to bathe in television to scrub David out of my brain. I didn't talk to anyone. I didn't leave my apartment. I didn't write about the experience. I didn't write anything for a month. All I really remember is that feeling. My body, changed.
Earlier this year, I started a new trauma therapy, where I'm supposed to write for twenty minutes every day in the voice of the pettiest, meanest, most immature versions of myself, and then destroy the paper I was writing on. The idea is, that if I release all of the thoughts and feelings I'm repressing, then my body will somehow become healthier. The first few months are supposed to be pretty rocky. Sure enough, the things I write terrify me. But the sensation in my body is familiar. Eventually, I realize I recognize the voice on the page. It's David. Or: David and I are both that voice. Or: David and I both have that voice deep inside ourselves. Or: we all have that voice deep inside ourselves. And:
What will we do with it?"]
