Close to the Knives by David Wojnarowicz Page A

top of the boulders I also had a clear view of the bathrooms and the pathway. More cars were arriving than departing and families were going back and forth from their cars to the rest rooms. Finally the guy from the first stall stepped into the hot glare of sunlight shielding his eyes with an enormous hand. He was what some would consider a freak: a circus giant in american bloodlines and genealogies, the lumbering object of surprise and fear. Had he been of average size and carrying a machete or gun, no one would have given him a second glance. But to have a massive body and height and the two large hands broad as palm leaves caused kids and even adults to unconsciously move backward or sideways a couple of extra steps as if his height took up horizontal space along the path. His body was well proportioned to his height, slightly muscular like he’d been a farm laborer in his youth, but now he looked like a salesman: cheap cotton short-sleeved shirt and beige car-dealer pants. I found him very sexy because I love difference. An unbearably handsome face bores me unless something beneath its surface is crooked or askew: even a broken nose or one eye slightly higher than the other, or something psychological, something unfamiliar and maybe even suspect.
    He looked up toward the boulders from under the roof of his hands, then crossed the pebble garden to begin climbing up. In case there were cops, I pretended not to see him and wandered out of view. State police get lots of overtime pay lurking around interstate rest stops hoping to catch some hungry queer kissing another in the loneliness of the tiled bathrooms. Some cops make it a point to step back from urinals and flash their hard dicks at a suspected queer and then arrest him when he makes a move to show he’s interested. In new jersey, an undercover cop used his eighteen-year-old son who would stand at the urinals five hours at a stretch and display a hard-on to anyone entering the bathroom. In north Carolina I read a newspaper story in which the columnist was worried about how the sleaze types, attracted to the highway rest stops because queers supposedly made such easy robbery targets, might accidentally beat up and and mug a family man. Funny thing was I’d seen and met family men on their knees in rest stops around the nation. The best part of the article was a map of the state that noted which rest stops had the most homosexual activity—that helped keep me from feeling lonely that day.
    We met at the far end of the landscape and both acted shy, but within minutes were in our separate cars heading onto the interstate to look for a side road that would give us cover away from the eyes of the world, a place away from the trooper patrol cars where we could get to know each other. There is no such place in that part of arizona. I was tailing him when he finally pulled onto the service road leading over a small bridge and crossing the interstate in the direction of Meteor Crater. Our cars drifted down a service road in a swirl of dust and pebbles, past a low-set gas station offering free pieces of petrified wood to customers. About a quarter mile farther down the road, a mile from the crater parking lot, he pulled over onto the shoulder and stopped the engine. I pulled up behind him and walked to the passenger side of his car, opened the door and slid into the hot front seat. He was staring straight ahead out the windshield at a plume of dust that grew larger and larger because it contained a car filled with vacationers. His hands were gently smoothing over the folds in his trousers around the general area of his crotch.
    The service road leading to the crater is made of a brown asphalt material, roped on both sides with dry red earth and plains of scrub brush and an occasional loping boulder pocked with holes made by the friction of wind-driven sand. In the distance, in any given direction, all you can see is the general curve of the earth and maybe the