A Ticking Clock: On David Wojnarowicz’s “Memories that Smell Like Gasoline”

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David Wojnarowicz was dying when he finished writing Memories That Smell Like Gasoline. The book was published posthumously, just two months after his death from AIDs at thirty-seven. It was 1992 and AIDs had become the leading cause of death for American men between the ages of twenty-five to forty-four. By then, he had grieved many friends, including his mentor, the photographer Peter Hujar. Wojnarowicz’s art was always motivated by rage, but in his final years, his art became fueled with scorn for the government and medical institutions that watched silently as he and his loved ones died inhumane deaths. 

Memories That Smell Like Gasoline encapsulates this rage and twists it with a disarming tenderness—the kind of magnanimous generosity and understanding I can only imagine comes from looking back at one’s own life from the deathbed. The book is composed of four short sections that span from his early years to his final days. It chronicles the frequent danger he encountered working as a teenaged sex worker in New York, violent flashbacks from an abusive childhood, the relentless agony of watching loved ones die of AIDs in his young adulthood, and ultimately the daily horrors of a deteriorating body and the anguish of reckoning with his own impending death. Memories That Smell Like Gasoline was republished a year after what would have been David’s seventieth birthday. It is a retrospective of violence, and how, as a young gay man in the ’90s, desire and sexual pleasure were sometimes inextricable from destruction. 

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The book opens with a gray-scale watercolor painting of an expressionless figure on his knees, his hard dick in one hand. Behind him, two figures hold their dicks on either side of his head, their own heads cut from the frame entirely. It is one of several images of David’s that accompany his text. There are also paintings of the Times Square porn theaters he visited frequently and of his own sexual encounters. Every figure in his art has a nondescript face, an illegible expression, and a hard dick. They are disquieting images. Just looking at them one can feel an invisible threat hanging over each painting like a vapor: men aching with pleasure, almost incapacitated by it. These paintings, like the stories in Memories that Smell Like Gasoline, thrum with complicated emotion—they are solemn, frightening, titillating, beautiful—not in turns, but all at once.

 Although Wojnarowicz’s distinctive voice propels readers through Memories that Smell Like Gasoline, this book strikes a quieter tone than most of his prior writing. His prose is less lyrical, more crystalline, and one might argue it is more vulnerable for it. As the collection’s title suggests, the book is dense with sensory description that at times takes on a synesthetic quality. Wojnarowicz recalls the mildewed blanket that lined the truck camper where a stranger violently raped him, the hospital wings that smelled like human shit, the honking sound of an AIDs patient gasping for the air coming through his oxygen tank, the feeling of violent man’s gaze on his skin and the way it lingered like the stink after a bad fire. 

Memory is illusory—faces are obscured in shadow, features reveal themselves in mirrors, and faces materialize in puddles on the bathroom floor. A single story might include scenes from across  decades. His unconscious connects these images to form a new meaning, with no regard for time. In the book’s title story, Wojnarowicz sees a familiar man across a movie theater lobby and realizes it was the man who brutally raped him at fifteen. In the moment of recognition, he returns to the violence. “It was like he was bleeding me right there in the crowded room. All my history and language had suddenly been erased. I knew somewhere that I could finally beat him up but I was stuck looking at him through the eyes of a fifteen-year-old skull. I just kept thinking I wanted to kill his gaze.” He recalls being picked up while hitchhiking back into the city, the rough texture of the man’s jeans, the sound his belt made as he buckled it, the thwack it made across his ass, the smell of wet metal and baby oil. “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.” 

These darker moments, of which there are many in this small book, testify to David’s resilience, who, by the age of fourteen, had experienced more violence than most do in a lifetime:

“I had been drugged, tossed out a second story window, strangled, smacked in the head with a slab of marble, almost stabbed four times, punched in the face at least seventeen times, beat about my body too many times to recount, almost completely suffocated, and woken up once tied to a hotel bed with my head over the side all the blood rushed down into it making it feel like it was going to explode, all this before I turned fifteen. I chalked it up to adventure or the risks of being a kid prostitute in new york city. At that point in my life dying didn’t mean anything to me other than a big drag. I had mixed feelings about death. When I was trying to get enough money to eat or find a place to sleep for the night, death actually seemed attractive, an alternative.”

Despite the litany of violent acts described in these stories, David renders his experiences as testimonies that resist reduction to “trauma porn” without sanitizing the brutality he endured. By choosing not to censor or moralize his sexual encounters, David also refuses to frame the queer experience as traumatic, delinquent, or victimizing. 

David lived through the rise of the Christian Right, through Anita Bryant’s anti-homosexuality crusade, Reverend Jerry Falwell’s “Moral Majority,” and Reagan’s War on Drugs. He watched loved ones receive inhumane medical treatment that directly led to their deaths. While living with his disease, he became a staunch activist with ACT UP, and his art took on an even more sharply political edge, expressing his rage at a government that sought to erase him. While Wojnarowicz is best known as an artist of the AIDs generation, this book reminds us that is also a writer whose life was punctuated by violence, poverty, drug use, and sex work. His voice is steeped in the alienation of those regularly ignored, punished, and demoralized by public silence and institutional neglect: people who turn tricks on the same streets, spend their hours cruising the same parks, truckstops, and public bathrooms. They are as much his community as the queer art scene he would later become a figurehead of. 

In “Doing Time in a Disposable Body,” the third story in the collection, Wojnarowicz describes an encounter with a man he meets at a cafe. The man is mute and has an air of danger around him, Wojnarowicz thinks. When the barista turns to prepare his order, he steals pastries from the display case. On a dark, desolate subway platform, the man blows David. “I like you,” he mouths before taking David’s dick into his mouth. The moment is strangely sweet and wildly sexy to David, not despite, but because of, the implicit danger. The man caresses his ass, and soon David realizes he’s trying to pick-pocket him. “We both understood each other,” David writes. Beneath the pleasure and the sweetness lies the brutal desperation that necessitates doing whatever it takes to survive. It is a drive David identifies with, one that draws him towards those who do not understand or adhere to society’s manufactured code of conduct. 

It was almost painful the way he twisted his fingers until I let go and his hands insistently went to my pockets; he was starting to get rough. I leaned over and kissed the top of his head and thrust my knee forward sudden and sharp catching him in the chest, sending him backwards down a couple of stairs, that startled mouth gaping and those eyes opening wide. 

This moment is conjured with a sense of awe, as though he were describing a beautiful, feral animal.  

For a book composed of memory, David writes with striking immediacy, collapsing past and present so that  moments from different periods of his life seem to exist simultaneously. Despite the vividness of his writing, he often feels ambivalent about life itself. His writing possesses a dual consciousness that both welcomes the idea of death, the potential salvation of it, and clings to life desperately, his animal instinct for survival bringing him over new thresholds of pain and fear. 

 David’s life was one of extreme violence and sensitivity. Writing Memories That Smell Like Gasoline was one of his final acts of resistance against the repression he abhorred. It was his way to rid his body of its private rage and make that rage public and meaningful. “I wish my eyes were like video cameras,” he writes. Even at death’s door, David is remarkably alive in these pages, each word carrying with it a deep vitality. “The earth has a volume, my brain has a volume and I can’t turn it down; I can’t shut it off, but it’s moments like this that I sure know how to swim in it.”

Memory is the only way to breathe life back into someone, and art was the only way for David to archive his own life as he felt it slipping away from him. He feared his death, and he feared being forgotten in death, as he so often had felt forgotten in life. Memories That Smell Like Gasoline is a living record of the kind of life mainstream publishers, curators, and politicians tried to silence, and this reprint is a reminder that it is up to individuals to build the archives that give David and artists like him a lasting place in our cultural memory. 

David was so sick and tired at the end—from illness, but also the unrelenting horror unraveling around him. War footage and presidential addresses played on TVs in hospital waiting rooms when he went to visit his dying friends; thirty-three thousand unhoused people with AIDs died in the streets; celebrities were plastered on advertisements for teeth whitener and diet cleanses all around the dying. These were the dispatches from the margins, and it was enough to make David feel as though he was not from this world. “Oh I feel so sick. I feel like a human bomb tick tick tick.” 

Rage can be just as much a lifeforce as pleasure, but one cannot survive too long in a state of complete alienation, which is what David felt as he grew nearer to death. Memories That Smell Like Gasoline ends not with memory, but a kind of premonition: “I am waving. I am waving my hands. I am disappearing. I am disappearing but not fast enough.” He was right to fear disappearance. After all, countless others from his generation did vanish, their lives cut short and their stories untold. He had seen death around so many corners, yet what he feared most was that he would die before he felt he had left something to show for his life. It was his work that sustained him through the sickest and most painful years. How apt, then, that we have his work to remember him by.