I Love Dick

by Chris Kraus

  “I want to be your lapdog.”

  You’re floating like you haven’t really heard so I repeat it: “Will you let me be your lapdog?”

  “Okay,” you say. “C’mere.”

  And then you ease me, small and Pekinese, ’til my hands are braced above your shoulders. My hair’s all over.

  “If you want to be my lapdog let me tell you what to do. Don’t move,” you say. “Be very quiet.”

  I nod and maybe whimper and then your cock, which until now’d been very still, comes rushing up, waves pulsing outward through my fingers. Sound comes out. You put your fingers on my lips.

  “Come on little lapdog. You have to be real quiet. Stay right here.”

  And I do, and this goes on for maybe hours. We have sex ’til breathing feels like fucking. And I sleep fitfully in your turquoise room.

  I wake up around six and you’re still sleeping.

  Rain’s made the weeds outside your window very green. I find a book and settle on the living room sofa. I’m scared about the morning part, don’t want to make my presence too invasive or demanding. But soon enough you’re leaning in the doorway.

  “What’re you doing out there?”

  “Resting.”

  “Well rest in here.”

  So we had fuzzy halting morning sex, the sheets, bright daylight, everything more real, but still that flood, the rushing of endorphins and for a long time after it was over neither of us said a word.

  And this’s when things get pretty weird.

  “Get weird?” Scott B. said on the phone tonight when I was telling him the story. “What did you expect? The whole thing was completely weird.”

  Well yeah, I see his point. But still—

  “So,” I said as we sort of shifted out of sex, “what’s the program?”

  “What program do you mean? The Brady Bunch?”

  “Noooo…I mean, I’ll be in town ’til Tuesday and I was wondering if you think we should see each other again.”

  You turned and said, “Do you want to?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Definitely. Absolutely.”

  “Definitely… absolutely” you repeated with an ironic curl.

  “Yes. I do.”

  “Well, actually I have a Friend (you somehow feminized the word) arriving for the weekend.”

  “Oh” I said, this information dropping like a stone.

  “What’s the matter?” you asked, seizing an idea. “Did I burst your balloon—destroy the fantasy?”

  I struggled for a way to answer this without my clothes.

  “I guess you were right about the disappointment. Probably if I’d known I wouldn’t’ve stayed.”

  “What?” you laughed. “You think I’m cheating on you?”

  Well this was very cruel, but loving you’d become a full-time job and I wasn’t ready to be unemployed. “No,” I said. “I don’t. You just have to help me find a way to make this more acceptable.”

  “Acceptable?” you mimicked. “I don’t have to do anything for you.”

  You were assuming a position, mockery heightening your face into a mask. Ultra-violence. Attack and kill.

  “I don’t owe you anything. You barged in here, this was your game, your agenda, now it’s yours to deal with.”

  I wasn’t anything at that moment except shock and disappointment.

  Changing gears, you added archly: “I guess now you’ll start sending me hate letters. You’ll add me to your Demonology of Men.”

  “No,” I said. “No more letters.”

  I had no right to be angry and I didn’t want to cry. “You don’t have to be so militantly callous.”

  You shrugged and made a point of looking at your hands.

  “So militantly mean?” And then, appealing to your Marxist past, “So militantly against mystification?”

  This brought a smile.

  “Look,” I said, “I’ll admit that eighty percent of this was fantasy, projection. But it had to start with something real. Don’t you believe in empathy, in intuition?”

  “What?” you said. “Are you telling me you’re schizophrenic?”

  “No…, I just—” and then I lapsed into the pathetic. “I just—felt something for you. This strange connection. I felt it in your work, but before that too. That dinner we had three years ago with you and Jane, you flirted with me, you must’ve felt it—”

  “But you don’t know me! We’ve had two or three evenings! Talked on the phone once or twice! And you project this shit all over me, you kidnap me, you stalk me, invade me with your games, and I don’t want it! I never asked for it! I think you’re evil and psychotic!”

  “But what about my letter? When I left Sylvère I wrote it trying to break through this thing with you. No matter what I do you think it’s just a game but I was trying to be honest.”

  (“Honesty of this order threatens order,” David Rattray’d written once about René Crevel and I was trying then to reach that point.)

  I continued: “Do you have any idea how hard it was for me to call you? It was the hardest thing I’ve ever done. Harder than calling William Morris. You said to come. You must’ve known then what I wanted.”

  “I didn’t need the sex,” you barked. And then a gentlemanly afterthought: “Though it was nice.”

  By now the sun was very bright. We were still naked on the bed.

  I said, “I’m sorry.”

  But how could I explain? “It’s just—” I started, foraging through fifteen years of living in New York, the arbitrariness of art careers, or were they really arbitrary? Who gets to speak and why? David Rattray’s book sold only about 500 copies and now he’s dead. Penny Arcade’s original and real and Karen Finley’s fake and who’s more famous? Ted Berrigan died of poverty and Jim Brodey was evicted, started living in the park before he died of AIDS. Artists without medical insurance who’d killed themselves at the beginning of the onset so they wouldn’t be a burden to their friends…the ones who moved me most mostly lived and died like dogs unless like me they compromised.

  “I hate ninety percent of everything around me!” I told you. “But then, the rest I really love. Perhaps too strongly.”

  “I’d rethink that, if I were you,” you said. You were leaning up against a dusky wall. “I like 90 percent of everything I see, the rest I leave alone.” And I listened. You seemed so wise and radiant, and all the systems that I used to understand the world dissolved.

  Of course the truth was messier. It was only Friday morning. The drive to Lake Casitas, the motel room, the percoset, the scotch were still to come. I lost my wallet, drove 50 miles to find it on 1/8 a tank of gas. There was still the phone call Sunday, meeting you for dinner and then the bar together Monday night. A production-number medley of all the highlights of the show. It wasn’t ’til I reached Ann Rower on Saturday on the phone that I stopped crying long enough to start shifting things around. Ann said: “Maybe Dick was right.” This seemed so radically profound. Could I accept your cruelty as a gift of truth? Could I even learn to thank you for it? (Though when I showed Ann the outline of this story, she said she never said that. Not even close.)

  On Saturday I spent the night on Daniel Marlos’ couch. José made beans and carne asada. Daniel was working three jobs seven days a week to make money for an experimental film and not complaining. Sunday morning I walked through Eagle Rock down Lincoln Avenue to Occidental College. “Even here,” I sat writing in my notebook, “in this bunched together neighborhood, people are taking Sunday morning walks. The air smells like flowers.”

  At the library I looked up Gravity & Grace by Simone Weil:

  “It is impossible,” she wrote, “to forgive whoever has done us harm if that harm has lowered us. We have to think that it has not lowered us but revealed to us our true level.”

  In the Guatemalan rainforest I saw wild monkeys and Toucan parrots. I stayed at a hotel attached to a villa owned by the environmentalist Oscar Pallermo. Oscar was the black sheep of one of the Guatemalan olig
archy’s leading families…though not so black he didn’t have the villa, a house in Guatemala City and an apartment in New York. Oscar included me in a routine with his extended family straight out of Stealing Beauty—two hour lunches, trips along the river. Three years ago a farmhouse on his land was torched by Mayan rebels.

  On the 29th day of Jennifer Harbury’s hunger strike 60 Minutes aired a segment about her plight. On Day 32 her lawyer flew down from Washington with the news: “People in the White House will talk to you now.” On March 22, New Jersey Congressman Robert Toricelli unveiled the findings of a House Intelligence Committee investigation of the CIA in Guatemala. The three years and ten days that Harbury spent trying to find the truth behind Bamaca’s disappearance had led her—or rather, led the media and government—to discover what she’d surely always known: her husband’s killer had been hired by the CIA. Colonel Julio Alberto Alpirez, Guatemala’s answer to Mengele, also kidnapped, tortured, killed Michael Devine, an American innkeeper.

  Didn’t Alexander Cockburn say, for every dead American we read about there’s always 30,000 nameless peasants? Alpirez’s CIA-funded outfit, the Archivo, killed and tortured countless Guatemalan priests, nurses, trade unionists, journalists and farmers. They raped and tortured the American nun Diana Ortiz and stabbed the anthropologist Myrna Mack to death on the streets of Guatemala City at 3 o’clock in the afternoon. On March 24 the US government withdrew all military aid to Guatemala. Several CIA section chiefs were fired. Jennifer Harbury was off her garbage bag and testifying before Congress. (Though just last month in Washington on the eve of Guatemala’s first elections, a bomb exploded in her lawyer’s car.)

  For months I thought this story would be something about how love can change the world. But that’s probably too corny.

  Fassbinder said once, “I detest the idea that love between two persons can lead to salvation. All my life I have fought against this oppressive type of relationship. Instead, I believe in searching for a kind of love that somehow involves all of humanity.”

  I got my voice back several days after leaving Guatemala.

  Love,

  Chris

  THE EXEGESIS

  “Entry 52 shows that Fat at this point in his life reached out for any wild hope which would shore up his confidence that some good existed somewhere.”

  —Philip K. Dick, Valis

  Thurman, New York

  March 4, 1995

  Dear Dick,

  1. Some Incidents In The Life of a Slave Girl

  How do you continue when the connection to the other person is broken (when the connection is broken to yourself)? To be in love with someone means believing that to be in someone else’s presence is the only means of being, completely, yourself.

  And now it’s Saturday morning and tomorrow I’ll be 40 which makes this the last Saturday Morning In Her 30s to quote the title of an Eileen Myles and Alice Notley poem that I’ve thought of with a smile maybe 60 times while making phone calls, running errands during scattered Saturday mornings over the last ten years.

  Yesterday afternoon I drove back here from New York. I was disoriented and confused (and I’m confused now, too, whether to address you in the declarative or narrative; that is, who’m I talking to?). I got back to New York on Tuesday night after spending those five days in LA “with” you. And then Sylvère and I spent Wednesday, Thursday, moving all our stuff from Second Avenue to Seventh Street. All through the move I was regretful, and I’m trying not to be regretful still.

  In the late ’70s when I was working in the New York City topless bars there was this disco song that stayed around forever called Shame by Evelyn Champagne King. It was perfect for that time and place, evoking the emotion without owning it—

  Shame!

  What you do to me is a shame

  I’m only tryna ease the pain…,

  Deep in your arms

  Is where I want to be

  ’Cause shame was what we always felt, me and all my girlfriends, for expecting sex to breed complicity. (“Complicity is like a girl’s name,” writes Dodie Bellamy.)

  “Is that what you wanted?” you asked me Friday morning. It was nearly 10. We’d been arguing in bed without our clothes for hours. And you’d just charitably, generously, told me a sad story from your life to make amends for calling me psychotic. To try and make things right. “Is that what you wanted? A ragged kind of intimacy?”

  Well yes and no. “I’m just trying to be honest,” I’d confessed to you that morning, and it sounded oh so lame. “Whenever someone makes a breakthrough into honesty,” David Rattray’d said in an interview I’d arranged for him with the editor Ken Jordan, “that means not just self-knowledge but knowledge of what others can’t see. To be honest in a real absolute way is to be almost prophetic, to upset the applecart.” I was just trying to promote his book and he was ranting in a way that made me cringe about his hatred for everyone who’d kept him down, who were out to silence “every bright young person who comes along with something original to say.” The interview was made just three days before he collapsed on Avenue A with a massive and inoperable brain tumor.

  “Because after all,” I typed, following his deep and unmistakable patrician voice, “the applecart is just an endless series of indigestible meals and social commitments that are useless and probably shouldn’t even be honored, and futile pointless conversations, gestures, just to finally die abandoned, treated like a piece of garbage by people in white coats who are no more civilized than sanitation workers…that’s what the applecart means to me.”

  Shame is what you feel after being fucked on quaaludes by some artworld cohort who’ll pretend it never happened, shame is what you feel after giving blowjobs in the bathroom at Max’s Kansas City because Liza Martin wants free coke. Shame is what you feel after letting someone take you someplace past control—then feeling torn up three days later between desire, paranoia, etiquette wondering if they’ll call. Dear Dick, you told me twice last weekend how much you love John Rechy’s books and you wish your writing could include more sex. Because I love you and you can’t or you’re embarrassed, maybe this is something I can do for you?

  At any rate in order not to feel this hopelessness, regret, I’ve set myself the job of solving heterosexuality (i.e., finishing this writing project) before turning 40. And that’s tomorrow.

  Because suddenly it seemed, after arriving from LA, jetlagged and moving boxes between apartments, that there was so much more to understand and say. Was this the bottom of the snakepit? In the restaurant Monday night we talked about our favorite Fassbinder movie, The Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant. I was wearing a white long-sleeved tailored shirt, looking pointedly demure, the whore’s curveball, and I felt like suddenly I’d understood something. “Fassbinder was such an ugly man,” I said. “That’s the real subject of his films: an ugly man who was wanting, looking to be loved.”

  The subtext rested on the table in between us like the sushi. Because of course I was ugly too. And the way you took this in, understanding it without any explication, made me realize how everything that’s passed between us all came back to sex and ugliness and identity.

  “You were so wet,” Dick ——’d said to me in the bar that Monday night about the sex we’d had on Thursday. My heart opened and I fell beneath the polite detente that we’d established in the restaurant, your black Italian jacket, my long-sleeved buttoned shirt. Were you seducing me again or just alluding to things I’d written in my manifesto Every Letter Is A Love Letter which you’d finally read that afternoon? I didn’t quite know how to take this. But then Dick glanced brusquely at his watch and turned to look at someone else across the room. And then I knew you never wanted to have sex with me again.

  I came back devastated by the weekend, begging Sylvère to give me some advice. Even though his theoretical side is fascinated by how this correspondence, love affair, has sexualized and changed me, all his other sides are angry and confused. So can I blame him when he responded lik
e a cut-rate therapist? “You’ll never learn!” he said. “You keep looking for rejection! It’s the same problem that you’ve always had with men!” But I believe this problem’s bigger and more cultural.

  We looked great together Monday night walking into the Ace of Diamonds Bar. Both of us tall and anorexic and our jackets matched. “Here comes the Mod Squad,” the barman said. All the regulars looked up from their beers. How hilarious. You’re a mod and I’m a modernist. “Buy you a drink?” “Sure.” And then suddenly I’m back in 1978 at the Nightbirds Bar, drinking smoking flirting, shooting sloppy pool with my then-boyfriend Ray Johannson. Ha ha ha. “You can’t sit on the pool table! You’ve gotta keep both legs on the floor!” Within minutes of arriving we trashed the whole agreement of mature neutrality we’d worked out in the sushi bar. You were flirting with me, anything seemed possible. Back to English rules.

  Later, legs pressed close under one of those tiny barroom tables, we were talking one more time about our favorite ghost, David Rattray. And I wanted to explain how I made allowances for David’s bad behavior, all those years on alcohol and heroin, how he got bigger while his wife who’d been on the scene with him shrank until she nearly disappeared. “He was part of the generation that ruined women’s lives,” I told you. “It’s not just that generation,” you replied. “Men still do ruin women’s lives.” And at the time I didn’t answer, had no opinion, took it in.

  But at 3 a.m. last Wednesday night I bolted up in bed, reaching for my laptop. I realized you were right.

  “J’ACCUSE,” (I started typing) “Richard Schechner.”