[Review] David Wojnarowicz: Memories That Smell Like Gasoline

By Trey Burnette 

Memories That Smell Like Gasoline:

David Wojnarowicz’s bold and vulnerable art-and-prose memoir tells of the most human of experiences.

Art itself is never shocking; it is the audience’s reaction that may be of shock, provocation, or indignation. Yet, David Wojnarowicz’s written and visual work has been described as such. It would be most accurate to say his work is honest, bold, and human. And readers need to understand who he was and his world while writing before his death in 1992.

Wojnarowicz was born to Ed and Delores in Red Bank, New Jersey, on September 14, 1954. After his parents’ bitter divorce, Ed, an abusive husband and father, kidnapped David and his two siblings, taking them first to Michigan and then to Long Island. The kids eventually found their mother’s name in a New York City phone book and moved in with her. While attending the High School of Music and Art, David began working as a street hustler in Times Square. By seventeen, in 1971, he was homeless, sleeping in squats and halfway houses. He moved to Paris but returned to New York. Most of his work was produced in the 1980s during the government-neglected AIDS epidemic and the rise of extremist Reagan-era conservatism. 

In 1979, Wojnarowicz completed his photographic series on French poet Arthur Rimbaud. He expanded his work to drawing, painting, cinema, music, and multimedia. After his friend and mentor photographer Peter Hujar died on November 26, 1987, Wojnarowicz moved into Hujar’s apartment and was shortly thereafter diagnosed with AIDS. Along with the apartment lease, Wojnarowicz inherited Hujar’s darkroom and photography supplies, including a stash of rare Portriga Rapid paper—a godsend to Wojnarowicz’s artistic process and his Sex Series and Untitled (Buffalos). During his lifetime, he wrote two memoirs, Close to the Knives and Memories That Smell Like Gasoline.

Memories That Smell Like Gasoline, originally published (and long out of print) by Artspace Books in 1992,  will be released on July 22 by Nightboat Books. The new edition includes a note by Wojnarowicz’s friend and editor Amy Scholder and a foreword by writer Ocean Vuong. Furthermore, Nightboat believes that in this time of state-sponsored censorship—which Wojnarowicz disavowed—it is essential to publish his archived work so it can reach a broader audience. 

The eighty-page memoir includes four essays and about twenty drawings. The essays are candid and forthright, dealing with adolescent abuse, sexual power, societal neglect, and stigmatized death—much rooted in homophobia. 

Gasoline opens with the short essay “Into the Drift and Sway” about anonymous sex with a trucker in a roadside bar’s bathroom and the cab of the man’s rig. After describing the darkness that he feels behind his eyes and in his body, Wojnarowicz writes, “I hate highways but love speeding and I can only think of men’s bodies and the drift and sway of my own sex was a dance …” The act of sex seems to be both a connection and release to the screams he himself cannot vocalize.

“Memories That Smell Like Gasoline” is the second essay and recounts Wojnarowicz recognizing an abusive john fifteen years after their first encounter and touches on other experiences of violence. However, the essay is more about how he experiences and carries memories, writing, “In the codes that I carry in the sleepy part of my head, personal histories can turn on a dime and either rush away into disintegration or else turn and speed towards me looking to envelop.”

In his third essay, “Doing Time in a Disposable Body,” he tries “to understand this sensation, why the remote edge of violence attracts [him] to a guy.” Wojnarowicz, unlike many of today’s writers, does not overanalyze and sanitize his experiences with popular psychology; instead, he writes of his experiences of the unification of sex, violence, and pleasure in unflinching candidness. The reader is rightly left to make the conclusions Wojnarowicz doesn’t do for them. He writes of a stranger he engages with: “I understand that his body and mind have no understanding of the proscriptions of this society’s values…” When he opens himself up to interact with a stranger, he opens up trust and gets lost. And as Wojnarowicz finds whatever is to be discovered, so does the reader.

“Spiral” is the last and a ten-part essay, written during Wojnarowicz’s final phases of his AIDS-related death. The piece apprises readers of his recollections of sex and dying, the loneliness of those events, and reflects on the surreal and real aspects of those experiences. “I am all emptiness and futility. I am an empty stranger, a carbon copy of form. I can no longer find what I am looking for outside of myself. It doesn’t exist out there,” he writes. Later, continuing, “I am vibrating in isolation among you.”

In addition to the essays, the memoir contains about twenty ink drawings and watercolors of Wojnarowicz’s. The first set, scattered among the first three essays, portrays adult men in what seem to be anonymous and consensual sexual acts in public spaces, like porn theaters. The images are erotic and have both an innocence and a darkness about them. The drawings within the last essay are of a different style. Many of the last images are accompanied by text about sexual violence and illness, contrasting the almost childlike execution of the artwork. All the images relate to and support the themes of Wojnarowicz’s essays.

The memoir is written in a diaristic style and is essential reading for those who care about truthful and courageous work. In his foreword, Ocean Vuong writes that compared to Close to the Knives, “Memories That Smell Like Gasoline is a quieter book, whose tone also signals its subversive power.” Editor Amy Scholder writes that much of Wojnarowicz’s work forms “a diary of desire. Of memory and the ways we keep pleasure alive by imaging.” Vuong’s and Scholder’s points can be seen in Wojnarowicz’s art and writing styles. His work explores darker moments while keeping a matter-of-fact tone that highlights any moment of pleasure he could find. His writing style is unique in that it mirrors the structure one might have while remembering past events, forgoing typical grammar and structural styles of one who prescribes to the methods of the Chicago Manual of Style and more of one seeking the visceral response of memory.

Art and literature can be gratuitous if it means nothing, but Wojnarowicz’s work doesn’t lack reason or depth. It tells of the human condition in its most vulnerable states without comprise and without apology. His work may cause reactions of fear or anger or horror, but that is not his work’s undoing; it is the reader’s confrontation and expansion of their own conditioned norms and boundaries. Memories That Smell Like Gasoline is a beautifully telling part of Wojnarowicz’s story.

Trey Burnette is a Palm Springs-based writer and photographer. A third excerpt from his unpublished memoir will be out in September in Absolute Pleasure: Queer Perspectives on Rocky Horror, published by the Feminist Press and featuring Carmen Maria Machado and other notable writers.  His work has appeared in The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, NBC News/NBC THINK, Los Angeles Review of Books, Kelp Journal and Books, Coachella Review, Hellbender Magazine, Tulsa Review, the Los Angeles Center of Photography, DAP Health, and The Sun magazine. Furthermore, he has an MFA from the University of California at Riverside and a BA in psychology from the University of Southern California. He studied comedy writing with The Groundlings and The Second City and copyediting at the University of California at San Diego.