I Love Dick

by Chris Kraus

  All summer long Eric and Constance had the most fabulous adventures, unfolding like the pages of an Enid Blyton storybook. Nights, they hung out at the Chez Paree. Afternoons they caught the trolleybus and rode out around the bays, scaling volcanic rocks to watch the sunset. One day they packed a picnic lunch and went hiking in the hills above Karaka Beach, scene of Katherine Mansfield’s famous story “At The Bay.” Eric did a wicked impersonation of Mansfield’s alter-ego, Kezia, and they laughed so hard they didn’t notice when a Tasman fog came rolling in. Cyril himself drove out to find them. He looked so Midlands-serious with his torch and oilskin parka, like the man in the Gorton’s Fishcake ads, that Eric and Constance punched each other in the ribs to keep from laughing on the long ride home. “What a Dag!” (New Zealand slang for laugh or sheepshit), Constance learned to say. Eric had a color photo of a hippie-gypsy couple hitch-hiking beside a wheatfield, torn out of one of Laura’s Vogues. Could this be him and Constance?

  Cyril’s voice droned on in favor of the Diocese’s liberal stand against apartheid to general clucks and nods. “Let’s go to Butterfly Creek!” Eric said again. “You drive out through Petone, turn right on Moonshine Road, drive past the Eastbourne Cattery. Did you know it’s owned by Alexander Trocchi’s former wife? She moved out here from London. You park up in the hills, and for the first two hours walking it’s native bush, all dark and jungly. And then you come out to a clearing, a meadow really, and there’s a brook and waterfall. And everywhere you look there’s butterflies.”

  They walked deeper into the bush, along a narrow track shaded by macrocarpa trees and kowhai. They’d left the meadow and its brilliant sun behind. The ground was cold and damp. Hardly any light penetrated the broad umbrella canopy of punga ferns. The boy stopped to catch his breath. He looked up in the sky through a tiny crack in the deep green foliage. And he was overcome with wondrous signs.

  28. Your “previous engagement” Friday night, April 7, turned out also to be mine. And here things start to get a little strange. Our “previous engagement” was an opening of the Charles Gaines/Jeffrey Vallance/Eleanor Antin show at the Santa Monica Museum. The Antin piece, an installation called Ghost Story—Minetta Lane, had just been moved out here from the Ronald Feldman Gallery in Soho. Ghost Story was the piece I wrote to you about last January in Every Letter Is A Love Letter. The piece I’d Fed-Ex’d out to you in February before arriving on your doorstep in Antelope Valley. The piece that, if you’d read before I got there, might’ve made you be less cruel.

  My stomach flipped when I saw your yellow Thunderbird in the Main Street parking lot. I moved closer to my friend and escort Daniel Marlos as we crossed the street and entered the Museum courtyard. “He’s here!” I said. “He’s here.” And sure enough, I saw you talking to a group of people as I crossed the room to buy a drink. You saw me too—threw up your hands as if to shield yourself from danger. Then you pointedly ignored me as you circled round the room.

  The Gallery rocked back and forth like a drunken boat. I felt like Frederic Moreau arriving late and uninvited at Monsieur Dambreuse’s elite salon in Flaubert’s Sentimental Education—a paranoiac treasure hunt, incriminatory, clues planted everywhere around the seasick room. Everywhere I looked I found you, eyes turned away, yet seeing. I couldn’t move.

  Finally I resolved to talk to you. After all, we weren’t enemies. We had a date for Saturday afternoon. I waited ’til you were alone with just one another person, a young man, a student. “Dick!” I said. “Hello!” You half-smiled and nodded, waiting. You didn’t introduce me to your friend, your creature. Waited for me to start some conversation, so I burbled on about the show. When this dead-ended I stopped short. “Well,” I said. “I’ll see you later.” “Yes,” you said. “I’ll see you very soon.”

  That night your Thunderbird got broadsided and my rental car got towed. Coincidence Number Two. And isn’t schizophrenia just an orgy of it? You got drunk after the opening, spent the night at a motel.

  29. Eric Johnson caught a Railways bus from Wellington to Ngaruwahia. It’s sometime in the early ’80s. Félix called these “the Winter Years.” Eric is now 34 years old. He doesn’t have a bank account and he’s carrying about 50 dollars. In desperation, after counselling, Vita-Fleur and Cyril finally cut off his allowance. “I’m looking for a job of work,” Eric says to anyone he sees. Voice rattling through his hollow chest and craggy body, he looks like Hamlet’s father’s ghost wandering the moors in King Lear’s storm.

  Katherine Mansfield craved a slice of life so badly she invented it as genre. Small countries lend themselves to stories: backwaters where the people stuck there don’t have much to do besides watch each other’s lives unfold. Eric’s carrying an army surplus rucksack, an oilskin parka and a wool jersey knit by Vita-Fleur. The rest of his possessions are a sleeping bag, one extra pair of longs, a knife and a canteen. After 13 years of vagrancy, more or less, Eric knows a thing or two about survival. The bus lets out on the Main Street of Ngaruwahia’s downtown.

  “Jerusalem! A Golden Land!” was how he’d described this place years ago to Constance. Ngaruwahia, with it’s wide river, rolling hills, was the scene of Maori legends about ancestors as mythic as Greek gods. There’d been a rock festival here 15 years ago, then a commune. But now at 4 p.m. with thunderheads rolling in across this late spring sky, Eric curses the very size of it. Walking, walking, past used appliance shops and greasy burger bars. Eric was back from travelling “overseas.” He’d got as far as Sydney, failed. Somehow he never caught the drift of what it was he was supposed to do. Social work? Ceramics class? He’d never met the right people. For every affirmation there were a hundred qualifying negations. Sort-of-raping Constance in the backroom of Bert Andrew’s country shack when they were two years out of school had been his only foray into heterosexuality. And yet he wasn’t queer. He’d figured that one out in Family Therapy. Voices spoke; they never told him what to do. Eric walks ten blocks down Main Street to the edge of town, sticks out his thumb to hitch a ride to Vincent’s, keeps walking. At least it isn’t raining.

  A week before in Wellington Eric’d had the most confusing visit from Constance Green, who he hadn’t seen now in eight years. She’d tracked him down on one of her whirlwind trips from the East Village in New York by phoning Cyril Johnson, now Archbishop of the Auckland Diocese. Shallow, flighty Constance, still a welter of opinions and hip clothes, asked Eric if she could shoot a video of him. “About what?” he asked cautiously. “Oh, you know, you,” she’d said. He turned her down, mobilizing his large voice behind his chiseled features: “Why should I let you make fun of me?” This stopped her cold. Perhaps the distances between them were not so interesting.

  30. On Saturday, April 8 we spent a perfect afternoon together. You arrived at the motel around noon and I was kind of shaky. Instead of going to the gym that morning I’d stayed home writing about Jennifer Harbury. She was in the news that month after almost singlehandedly bringing down the military government of Guatemala. Jennifer, an American leftist lawyer, had spent the last three years demanding that the Guatemalan army exhume the body of her husband, a disappeared Indian rebel leader. Jennifer’s story was so inspiring…and I was glad to’ve discovered it, even though my only motivation to write about her story was to take the heat off you. I’d cut back and forth between Jennifer and Efraim, me and “Derek Rafferty.” You’d been so horrified to see your name in the last two stories and I thought if I could write about how love can change the world then I wouldn’t have to write about you personally.

  Fuck her once, she’ll write a book about it, you or anybody else might say.

  I was becoming you. When I pushed you from my thoughts you came back into my dreams. But now I had to prove my love for you was real by holding back and considering what you wanted. I had to act responsively, responsibly…I was spewing words and syntaxes I remembered reading in your book, The Ministry of Fear.

  31. Why can’t I get just one screw

  Why can’t I ge
t just one screw

  Believe me I’d know what to do

  But you won’t let me make love to you

  Why can’t I get just one fuck

  Why can’t I get just one fuck

  Bet it’s got something to do with luck

  But I’ve waited my whole life for just one

  DAY…

  32. We talked awhile and drank some fruit juice. You liked the way I’d rearranged things in the motel room. (It was crammed with talismans and artworks that my LA friends had given me, thinking rightly that I needed some protection.) We looked at Sabina Ott’s scratched-up yellow drawing, Daniel Marlos’ photo of people with banana-dildos in the desert. You were intrigued by this, by images of sex that weren’t heterosexual, a bit disturbed that dicks could be the butt of jokes. The photos of Keith Richards and Jennifer Harbury—motifs for this bogus story about my fictional cowboy love for “Derek Rafferty”—scotch-taped to the wall didn’t go unnoticed. We talked some more and you explained how you’d ignored me at the opening last night because everything was getting too referential. I understood. Then both of us were hungry. We ate lunch at a soul-food restaurant up on Washington and I told you all about the failure of my movie. Then you confessed how, over the past two years, you’d stopped reading. This broke my heart. Outside the storefront restaurant the East Pasadena Saturday afternoon was clanging. You paid the bill, then we drove my rental car up to the wilderness preserve above Lake Avenue.

  “Let’s go to But-ter-fly Creek!”

  Walking up the dirt track along the still-green mountain, everything between us flattened out. You seemed so open. You told me all about yourself at 12 years old, a young boy sitting at the edge of a playing field somewhere in the English Midlands, reading stories of great emperors and wars in Latin. You’d read your way into the world just like my husband. You told me other things about your life and what you’d left behind. You were so unhappy. Emotional seduction. The sun was very warm. When you took your shirt off you seemed to be inviting me to touch you but I refrained. To yearn responsibly. You had the softest palest skin, an alien’s. “The Pacific starts here,” I said. The landscape on the hill reminded me of New Zealand.

  Run down catch’em at the top of the stairs

  Can I mix in with your affairs

  Share a smoke, make a joke

  You gotta grasp and reach for a leg of hope

  Words to memorize, words hypnotize

  Words make my mouth an exercise

  Words all fail the magic prize

  Nothing I can say when I’m in your thighs

  There weren’t any butterflies on the hill in Pasadena. But come out to a clearing, and there’s a waterfall, and then I told you how I admired you, and you said or you implied that what I’d done had helped you burn through some things in your life. And everything seemed as pliant as a macrocarpa branch, fragile as an egg.

  33. In the blinding sunlight of the Vagabond Motel parking lot you asked me if I’d call again before I left LA. Perhaps we could have dinner. We embraced, and I was first to break away.

  34. Sunday, April 9: Writing in my notebook after visiting Ray Johannson in Elysian Park: Bliss.

  35. And so I called you up on Monday night. I was booked to leave at 10 p.m. on Tuesday. “The schizophrenic reacts violently when any attempt is made to influence him. This is so because a lack of ego boundaries make it impossible for him to set limits of identification.” (Róheim) The schizophrenic is a sexy Cyborg. When I reached you you were cold, ironic, wondering why I’d called. I hung up sweating. But I couldn’t leave like this, I had to try and make it better.

  I called you back, apologized, “I—I just felt like I had to ask you why you sounded so distant and defensive.”

  “Oh,” you said. “I don’t know. Was I defensive? I was just looking for something in my room.”

  Visions of you vision of me

  Things to do things to see

  This’s my way to cut it up

  You better wait a minute honey

  Better add it up

  I threw up twice before getting on the plane.

  36. Dear Dick,

  No woman is an island-ess. We fall in love in hope of anchoring ourselves to someone else, to keep from falling,

  Love,

  Chris

  DICK WRITES BACK

  Chris finished writing Add It Up before the end of August. The next morning she accidentally cut her right hand on a broken glass. The cut left a bumpy scar. She knew that Add It Up would be the last letter.

  Chris posted it to Dick after getting back from the hospital. She wanted a response, and fast, because things were finally happening with her film and she’d be travelling, starting in September. Perhaps the only reason Dick had never written back was she’d failed to express her feelings for him forcefully? Surely Add It Up would convince him. She waited for his letter, but by Labor Day, Dick still hadn’t phoned or written.

  Once again her husband, Sylvère Lotringer intervened, phoning Dick and soliciting his compassion. “If nothing else, you must agree that Chris’ letters are some new kind of literary form. They’re very powerful.” Dick hesitated.

  On September 4, Chris went to Toronto to put Gravity & Grace through the lab. Stumbling into bed after watching the final answerprint at 5 a.m. a few days later, Chris wrote to Dick: “This is the happiest day of my life.” She never mailed the letter.

  She went back briefly to LA before leaving to premiere her film at the Independent Feature Market in New York. Still no word from Dick. Sylvère phoned again and this time Dick promised he’d write Chris a letter.

  The Independent Feature Market was a nonstop trial of screenings, meetings, cocktail parties. Gravity & Grace wouldn’t screen until Day Four. On the first day of the Market, Dick left Chris a message asking her address. He’d like to send his letter via FedEx. The next day Dick left Chris another message, saying that his houseguest had accidentally erased her message. “This time I’ve instructed him not to touch the answering machine, so if you call back, I promise you, I’ll get your message.”

  Dick’s Fedex arrived before 10 a.m. on the day of Chris’ screening. She stuck it in her bag and promised not to read it. But as the taxi rounded Second Avenue, she scrutinized the airbill, changed her mind and ripped it open.

  There were two white envelopes inside the package. One was addressed to her; the other to her husband, Sylvère Lotringer. She opened Sylvère’s first.

  September 19

  Dear Sylvère,

  Here’s the book on altered states and trance that I told you about. Georges Lapassade writes in Italian and French and I suspect this book also available in French. However it hasn’t been translated into English. See what you think. The other, more mysterious tract on tarantulism seems to have vanished for now. If and when it turns up I’ll send it on.

  I apologize for being so resolutely incommunicado and for not following up sooner on this and other matters. I really didn’t want to cause either you or Chris unnecessary pain. A large part of the silence and awkwardness between us is undoubtedly attributable to what I still believe to be the unwarranted and uninvited aftermath of your overnight stay at my home at the end of last year when weather reports had indicated you might not be able to make it back to San Bernardino. In retrospect I feel I should have been absolutely unambiguous in my response to the letters you and Kris sent over the following months instead of opting for bemused silence. I can only say that being taken as the object of such obsessive attention on the basis of two genial but not particularly intimate or remarkable meetings spread out over a period of years was, indeed still is, utterly incomprehensible to me. I found the situation initially perplexing, then disturbing and my major regret now is that I didn’t find the courage at the time to communicate to you and Kris how uncomfortable I felt being the unwitting object of what you described to me over the phone before Christmas as some kind of bizarre game.

  I don’t know how our connection stands now tha
t you’ve both received this package. Friendship, as far as I’m concerned, is a delicate and rare thing that’s built up over time and is predicated on mutual trust, mutual respect, reciprocal interests and shared commitments. It’s a relation that ultimately is lived out, at least, as if it were chosen not taken for granted or assumed in advance. It’s something that has to be renegotiated at every step, not demanded unconditionally. In the circumstances it may be that, for now at least, too much damage has been done on all sides for the kind of negotiated rapprochement that would be needed if we were to restore the trust in which real friendship thrives. That said, I still have immense respect for your work; I still enjoy your company and conversation when we meet and believe, as you do, that Kris has talent as a writer. I can only reiterate what I have said before whenever the topic has been raised in conversation with you or Chris: that I do not share your conviction that my right to privacy has to be sacrificed for the sake of that talent.

  Regards,

  Dick

  A strange coincidence. Sylvère already was familiar with Georges Lapassade (the name means “fling” in French argot). In fact, Sylvère knew Lapassade very well. In Paris, 1957 trance-master Lapassade was at the Sorbonne, practicing an early form of psychodrama. Among the puzzled volunteers was a first-year student by the name of Sylvère Lotringer, who was waiting to leave school the following year with the French mouvement to lead a Zionist kibbutz in Israel. Georges Lapassade was fascinated by this ambitious youth who had no personal ambition.