I Love Dick

by Chris Kraus

  That spring everyone in Judy Chicago’s class collaborated on a 24 hour performance called Route 126. The curator Moira Roth recalls: “the group created a sequence of events throughout the day along the highway. The day began with Suzanne Lacy’s Car Renovation in which the group decorated an abandoned car…and ended with the women standing on a beach watching Nancy Youdelman, wrapped in yards of gossamer silk, slowly wade out to sea until she drowned, apparently…” There’s a fabulous photo taken by Faith Wilding of the car—a Kotex-pink jalopy washed up on desert rocks. The trunk’s flung open and underneath it’s painted cuntblood red. Strands of desert grass spill from the crumpled hood like Rapunzel’s fucked-up hair. According to Performance Anthology—Source Book For A Decade Of California Art, this remarkable event received no critical coverage at the time though contemporaneous work by Baldessari, Burden, Terry Fox boasts bibliographies several pages long. Dear Dick, I’m wondering why every act that narrated female lived experience in the ’70s has been read only as “collaborative” and “feminist.” The Zurich Dadaists worked together too but they were geniuses and they had names.

  By the time I turned off Route 126 onto Antelope Valley Road I really had to piss. You were expecting me at 8 and it was already 8:05 and pissing suddenly became so problematic. I didn’t want to have to do it the moment I walked into your house, how gauche, a telltale sign of female nervousness. And yet considering everything I knew about Route 126 I was afraid to take a slash outside. Every 20 seconds the headlights of another car clipped by: marauding rednecks, cops, angry migrant workers? I pulled over at the Antelope Valley turnoff, turned off the headlights, stopped the car. Outside the grass was wet with rain. Who was it, Marx or Wittgenstein, who said that “every question, problem, contains the seeds of its own answer or solution through negation”? There was a half-drunk styrofoam cup of coffee in the car. I rolled down the window, dumped it, slid my jeans down past my knees and pissed into the empty cup. The cup was full before my bladder emptied but what the hell, I’d hold the rest. With shaking hands I tipped the brimming cup of urine in the grass.

  That left the evidence. Several large drops still clung to the styrofoam, what if it smelled? I was afraid to litter. Dear Dick, sometimes there just isn’t a right answer. I scrunched the cup up, tossed it under the back seat and wiped my hands. By this time I was feeling very drawn.

  It was after midnight when our bus finally crossed the border into Guatemala. Klieg lights, a guard shack, barricades and the start of seventy miles of unpaved rutted road where Belize’s National Highway ended. We were separated into groups by nationality and questioned while soldiers searched the luggage on the bus. The visa officer, a suave middle-aged mestizo with a handlebar mustache, scrutinized my passport, deep in thought, pretending not to recognize my picture. Finally he smiled and said: Welcome to Guatemala, Christina. When I got back to the bus the Rigoberta Menchú book was gone.

  Hundreds of little colored Christmas lights were draped around the cactus plants outside your house. And there you were: sitting by the picture window in the living room, grading papers or pretending to, deep in thought. You got up and at the door we kissed hello kind of brusquely without lingering. The last time I was at your house for dinner back in January you kissed me when my husband, Mick and Rachel and the two men from the Getty were seven feet away. That kiss radiated such intensity I stumbled past you through the door.

  Later on that night in January, when all the other guests had gone and the three of us were drinking vodka, Sylvère and I confessed to twelve years of fidelity. And suddenly that concept seemed so high-school and absurd we started laughing. “Ah but what,” Sylvère said, “is fidelity?” That night the Some Girls album cover with the chicks in pointy bras was still propped up against your wall. I’d spent eleven weeks deliberating whether your display of it was camp or real and decided I agreed with Kierkegaard, that the sign will always triumph through the screen of an ironic signifier.

  But tonight you were expecting me alone. I looked around the living room and saw the Some Girls album cover missing. Were you responding to my second letter, questioning your taste?

  After the kiss, you invited me to sit down in the living room. Right away we started drinking wine. After half a glass I told you how I’d left my husband.

  “Hmmm,” you said compassionately, “I could’ve seen it coming.”

  And then I wanted you to understand the reasons. “It’s like last night,” I said, “I met Sylvère in New York for a French department dinner. Régis Debray, the guest of honor, never showed and everyone was kind of tense and uneasy. I was bored and spacing out but Sylvère thought I was suffering from a linguistic disability. He took my hand and said in English to the Beckett specialist Tom Bishop, ‘Chris is an avid reader.’ I mean, C’MON. Does Denis Hollier say this about Rosalind Krauss? I may have no credentials or career but I’m way too old to be an academic groupie.”

  You sympathized and said, “Well, I guess now the game is over.”

  How could I make you understand the letters were the realest thing I’d ever done? By calling it a game you were negating all my feelings. Even if this love for you could never be returned I wanted recognition. And so I started ranting on about Guatemala. The femme seduction trip seemed so corrupt and I was clueless how to do it. The only way I knew of reaching you apart from fucking was through ideas and words.

  So I started trying to legitimize the “game” by telling you my thoughts about Case Studies. I was using Henry Frundt’s book about the Guatemalan Coca-Cola strike as a model.

  “’Cause don’t you see?” I said. “It’s more a project than a game. I meant every word I wrote you in those letters. But at the same time I started seeing it as a chance to finally learn something about romance, infatuation. Because you reminded me of so many people I’d loved back in New Zealand. Don’t you think it’s possible to do something and simultaneously study it? If the project had a name it’d be I Love Dick: A Case Study.”

  “Oh,” you said, not too enthusiastically.

  “Look,” I said. “I started having this idea when I read Frundt’s book after getting back from Guatemala. He’s a sociologist specializing in Third World agribusiness. Frundt’s a structural Marxist—instead of ranting on about imperialism and injustice he wants to find the reasons. And reasons aren’t global. So Frundt researched every aspect of the Guatemalan Coca-Cola strike during the 1970s and ’80s.

  “He recorded everything. The only way to understand the large is through the small. It’s like American first-person fiction.”

  You were listening, eyes moving up and down between me and your wine glass on the table. I saw what I was saying register across your face…cryptically, ambiguously, shifting between curiosity and incredulity. Your face was like the faces of the lawyers in the topless bars when I started telling Buddhist fairy tales with my legs spread wide across the table. Some Strange Scene. Were they amused? Were they assessing their capacity for cruelty? Your eyes were slightly crinkled, your fingers wrapped around glass. All this encouraged me to continue.

  (Dear Dick, I always thought that both of us became political for the same reason. Reading constantly and wanting something else so fiercely that you want it for the world. God I’m such a Pollyanna. Perhaps enthusiasm’s the only thing I have to offer you.)

  “The more particular the information, the more likely it will be a paradigm. The Coca-Cola strike’s a paradigm for the relationship between multinational franchises and host governments. And since Guatemala is so small and all the facets of its history can be studied, it’s a paradigm for many Third World countries. If we can understand what happened there, we can get a sense of everything. And don’t you think the most important question is, How does evil happen?

  “At the height of the Coca-Cola strike in 1982, the army killed all the leaders of the strike and all their families. They killed the lawyers too, Guatemalan and American. The one they missed—her name was Marta Torres—they found her teenag
e daughter on a city street, disappeared and blinded her.”

  Did it cross my mind that torture was not a sexy topic of conversation for this, our first, our only date? No, never. “’Cause don’t you see? By recording every single memo, phone call, letter, meeting that took place around the strike, Frundt describes how casually terror happens. If Mary Fleming hadn’t sold her Coca-Cola franchise to John Trotter, an ultra-rightist friend of Bush, the strike might not have happened. All acts of genocidal horror may be nauseatingly similar but they arise through singularity.”

  I still hadn’t gotten round to explaining what Guatemalan genocide had to do with the 180 pages of love letters that I’d written with my husband and then given you, like a timebomb or a cesspool or a manuscript. But I would, I would. I felt like we were facing each other from the edges of a very dark and scary crater. Truth and difficulty. Truth and sex. I was talking, you were listening. You were witnessing me become this crazy and cerebral girl, the kind of girl that you and your entire generation vilified. But doesn’t witnessing contain complicity? “You think too much,” is what they always said when their curiosity ran out.

  “I want to own everything that happens to me now,” I told you. “Because if the only material we have to work with in America is our own lives, shouldn’t we be making case studies?”

  OH EGYPT I AM WASHING MY HAIR TO GAIN KNOWLEDGE OF YOU, and by this time we were eating dinner. It was packaged fresh linguini, packaged sauce and salad. I couldn’t eat a bite. “That’s fine,” you said. “Just don’t take me down along with you.”

  “He took me by the shoulders and shook me out.” That’s how Jennifer Harbury described meeting Efraim Bamaca.

  Jennifer was interviewing rebel fighters in the Tajumulco combat zone in 1990. She felt so pale and large. “Compared to everyone else I’m huge, I’m 5’3. A giant.” Bamaca was a Mayan peasant educated by the rebel army. At 35 he was notorious, a leader. Meeting him surprised her. “He looked almost like a fawn,” she said. “He was so quiet and discreet. He never gave orders but somehow everything got done.” And when she interviewed him for her oral history book, that most self-erasing lefty genre, he turned the questions back on her and listened.

  They fell in love. When Jennifer left Tajumulco, Bamaca promised not to write. “There’s no such thing as a fantasy relationship.” But then he did, notes smuggled from the highlands to a safehouse, mailed from Mexico. A year later they met again and married. “It was a side of Jennifer I’d never seen,” another law school friend told the New York Times. “She seemed so happy.”

  After dinner, then, you leaned back in your chair and fixed me with your gaze and asked: “What do you want?” A direct question tinged with irony. Your mouth was twisted, wry, like you already knew the answer. “What did you expect by coming here?”

  Well I’d come this far, I was ready for all kinds of trials. So I said, out loud, the obvious: “I want to stay here tonight with you.” And you just kept staring at me, quizzically, wanting more. (Even though I hadn’t slept with anyone but my husband for 12 years, I couldn’t remember sexual negotiations ever being this humiliatingly explicit. But maybe this was good? A jumpcut from the cryptic to the literal?) So finally I said: “I want to sleep with you.” And then: “I want us to have sex together.”

  You asked me: “Why?”

  (The psychiatrist H.F. Searles lists six ways to drive another person crazy in The Etiology of Schizophrenia. Method Number Four: Control the conversation, then abruptly shift its modes.)

  The night Sylvère and I slept over at your house I’d dreamt vividly about having different kinds of sex with you. While Sylvère and I slept on the sofabed I dreamt I’d slipped into your bedroom through the wall. What struck me most about the sex we had was, it was so intentional and deliberate. The dream occurred in two separate scenes. In Scene One we’re naked on your bed, viewed frontal-horizontally, foreshortened like Egyptian hieroglyphics. I’m squatting, neck and shoulders curved to reach your cock. Tendrils of my hair brush back and forth across your groin and thighs. It was the most subtle, psycho-scientific kind of blowjob. The perspective changes in Scene Two to vertical. I sit on top of you, you’re lying flat, head slightly arched, I’m sinking up and down your cock, each time I’m learning something new, we gasp at different times.

  “What do you want?” you asked again. “I want to sleep with you.” Two weeks ago I’d written you that note saying the idea of spending time alone with you was a vision of pure happiness and pleasure. On the phone you’d said, “I won’t say no” when I asked you what you thought, but all the reasons, factors, desire splintered in a hundred hues like sunlight through a psychedelic prism came crashing with a thud when you asked me: “Why?”

  I just said, “I think we could have a good time together.”

  “We were in love,” Jennifer Harbury told the New York Times about her life with Efraim Bamaca.

  “We hardly ever fought—”

  And then you said, “But you don’t even know me.”

  Route 126 runs west along the base of the San Padre mountains. The landscape changes when it hits the Antelope Valley from rounded rolling hills to something craggier, more Biblical. The night (December 3) Sylvère and I stayed at your house because, as you said in a letter to him later, “weather reports had indicated that you might not be able to make it back to San Bernardino,” we were amazed by where you lived. It was an existential dream, a Zen metaphor for everything you’d said about yourself…living, “all alone,” you kept repeating, at the end of a dead-end road on the edge of town opposite a cemetery. A roadsign outside your place said, No Exit. And all night long as the three of us got drunker you found so many ways to talk about yourself, so many ways of making loneliness seem like a direct line to all the sadness in the world. If seduction is a highball, unhappiness has got to be the booze.

  You said, “There’s no such thing as a good time. It always ends in tears and disappointment.” And when I blundered on about blind love, infatuation, you said, “It’s not that simple.” We had totally reversed positions. I was the Cowboy, you were the Kike. But still I rode it.

  “Can’t things just be fabulous?” I said, staring out the window. Things were getting dreamy, elongated, metaphysical. Moments passed. “Well then,” you asked, “have you got any drugs?”

  I was prepared for this. I was carrying a vial of liquid opium, two hits of acid, 30 Percoset and a lid of killer pot. “Relax, you’ve got a date!” Ann Rower’d said when she counted out her gift of Burmese flowerheads. Somehow this wasn’t going how either of us had planned. But I rolled a joint and we toasted Ann.

  The record ended and you got up to make some coffee. In the kitchen we stood fumbling accidentally-on-purpose brushing hands but this was so embarrassing and clunky we both withdrew. Then we talked some more about the desert, books and movies. Finally I said: “Look, it’s getting late. What do you want to do?”

  “I’m a gentleman,” you answered coyly. “I would hate to be inhospitable. If you don’t feel you can drive…”

  “It’s not about that,” I said brusquely.

  “Ah then… Do you want to share my bed? I won’t say no.”

  Oh come on, had mores changed this much while I’d been married?

  “Do you want us to have sex or don’t you?”

  You said: “I’m not uncomfortable with that idea.”

  This neutrality was not erotic. I asked you for enthusiasm but you said you couldn’t give it. I made one final stab within this register: “Look, if you’re not into this, it’d be more—gentlemanly—just to say so and I’ll go.”

  But you repeated, “I’m not…uncomfortable…with the…idea.” Well.

  We were electrons swimming round and round inside of a closed circuit. No exit. Huis clos. I’d thought and dreamt about you daily since December. Loving you had made it possible to admit the failure of my film and marriage and ambitions. Route 126, the Highway to Damascus. Like Saint Paul and Buddha who’d experienced
their great conversions as they hit 40, I was Born Again in Dick. But was this good for you?

  This is how I understood the rules:

  If you want something very badly it’s okay to keep pursuing it until the other person tells you No.

  You said: I won’t say no.

  So when you got up to change the record I bent down and started to untie my bootlace. And then things changed. The room stood still.

  You came back, sat on the floor and took my boots off. I reached for you, we started dancing to the record. You picked me up and now we’re standing in the living room, my legs are braced around your waist. You tell me “you’re so light” and now we’re swaying, hair and faces brushing. Who’ll be the first to kiss? And then we do…

  Here are some uses of ellipses:

  • …fade to black after ten seconds of a kiss in a Hayes Commission censored film.

  • …Celine separates his phrases in Journey to the End of Night to blast the metaphor out of language. Ellipses shoot across the page like bullets. Automatic language as a weapon, total war. If the coyote is the last surviving animal, hatred’s got to be the last emotion in the world.

  You put me down and gesture to the bedroom. And then the record changes to Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid by Bob Dylan. How perfect. How many times have each of us had sex in the foreground of this record? Six or seven tracks of banjo strum and whine that culminate around Minute 25 (a Kinsey national average) in Knocking At Heaven’s Door. A heterosexual anthem.

  And then you’re laid out on the bed, head propped on pillows and we take our shirts off. The blue lamp beside the bed is on. I’m still wearing the black Guess jeans, a bra. I watch you feel my tits and we both watch my nipples as they get hard. Later on you run your index finger across the outside of my cunt, not into it. It’s very wet, a Thing Observed, and later still I think about the act of witnessing and the Kierkegaardian third remove. Sex with you is so phenomenally…sexual, and I haven’t had sex with anyone for about two years. And I’m scared to talk and I’m wanting to sink down on you and then words come out, the way they do.