I Love Dick (15 page)

Laura and I met Saturday morning in Pasadena for coffee, sat in a courtyard off Colorado pretending we were in Mexico or Ibiza, continuing a dialogue we'd started months ago circling around mysticism, love, obsession. Our conversations are not so much about the theories of love & desire, as its manifestations in our favorite books & poems. Study as a Fan Club meeting—the only kind.

There's an implicit understanding between us that we accept it (love, extremity, desire) & can share some personal information/vision best by swapping favorite epigrams and poems. It was Laura who told me about this proverb about tooth & tongue—“That means, I guess,” she said, looking straight at me with wide and ice-blue eyes, “that the one you love the best has the most power to hurt you.” And we both nodded, smiling slightly, like we knew. But since this's school, not girltalk, we both work hard to keep our conversations on a referential but ever so suggestive plane. Meeting Laura's always like inhaling ether; like ladies in the Heian Court, we're always conscious of ‘the form.'

When I first met Laura Paddock I was impressed by the fat notebooks she was keeping, full of favorite quotes and drawings & her own lines. Remembered how I used to do that years ago. And now—

Thurman, New York

February 9, 1995

—All yesterday on the train and today I've been reading your last book,
The Ministry Of Fear
, which I checked out from the Art Center library. It's so amazing that the book came out in 1988 because even though the title comes from Orwell it took four more years for fear to drive everybody back into the fold. 1988 was the year when
Seven Days
, a magazine about real estate and restaurants swept New York and ending up living in the park no longer seemed impossible. Famous-Artist dinner party talk included stories about former colleagues seen scavenging in dumpsters. Money rewrote mythology and the lives of people I'd admired now seemed like cautionary tales. Paul Thek died of AIDS in 1986 and David Wojnarowicz was dying and there was all this academic shit out there about The Body as if it were a thing apart. And in the midst of this you wrote the most amazing thing about the need to bring things
DOWN
:

“The biological,” you wrote (quoting Emanuel Levinas) “with the notion of inevitability it implies, becomes more than an object of spiritual life. It becomes its heart. The mysterious urgings of the blood…lose the character of problems to be solved by a sovereignly free Self. Because the self is made of just these elements. Our essences no longer lie in freedom but in a kind of chaining. To be truly oneself means accepting this ineluctable original chain that is unique to our bodies, and above all in accepting this chaining.”

And then in
Aliens & Anorexia
you wrote about your own physical experience, being slightly anorexic—how anorexia arises not from narcissism, a fixation with your body, but a sense of its aloneness:

“If I'm not touched it becomes impossible to eat. Intersubjectivity occurs at the moment of orgasm: when things break down. If I'm not touched my skin feels the flip side of a magnet. It's only after sex sometimes that I can eat a little.”

And that by recognizing the aloneness of your body it's possible to reach outside, become an Alien, escape the predetermined world:

“Anorexia is an active stance. The creation of an involuted body. How to abstract oneself from food fluxes and the mechanical sign of the meal? Synchronicity shudders faster than the speed of light around the world. Distant memories of food: strawberry shortcake, mashed potatoes…”

This's one of the most incredible things I've read in years.

It's now 2 o'clock in the afternoon and as I copied these lines out from your book by hand I felt a shudder of connection with myself when I was 24, 25. It was as if I was right back there in the room on East 11th Street, all those pages of notes that I was writing then, tiny ballpoint letters on wrinkly onion paper about George Eliot, diagrams of molecular movement and attraction, Ulrike Meinhof and Merleau-Ponty. I believed I was inventing a new genre and it was secret because there was nobody to tell it to. Lonely Girl Phenomenology. Living totally alone for the first time, and everything I'd been before (a journalist, New Zealander, a Marxist) was breaking down. And all that writing eventually cohered or was manipulated (the mind's revenge over dumb emotion!) into
Disparate Action/Desperate Action
, my first real play.

The arteries of the hand & arm that write lead straight into the heart, I was thinking last week in California, not seeing then that through writing it's also possible to re-visit a ghost of your past self, as if at least the shell of who you were fifteen years ago can somehow be re-called.

When I got here yesterday the house was banked in snowdrifts three feet high. The pipes are frozen so I'm shitting in the yard and making coffee out of boiled snow. As I was writing this Tom Clayfield and his wife Renee pulled up with a load of firewood. Quick cut to winter coat and gloves, icy breath, hurling logs onto the ground. And suddenly it's Survival Time in the Great Northwoods—the inescapable part of living here, not good or bad, just takes you someplace else… But even though this winter's real it doesn't seem as real as this… At least not for a little while.

What I was about to start writing before this poor Tom Clayfield (32 years old, a torn-up face and his few remaining teeth completely rotted) came by was The 1st Person. The difference between now and fifteen years ago is I don't think I was able, ever, to write any of those notebooks then in the 1st Person. I had to find these ciphers for myself because whenever I tried writing in the 1st Person it sounded like some other person, or else the tritest most neurotic parts of myself that I wanted so badly to get beyond. Now I can't stop writing in the 1st Person, it feels like it's the last chance I'll ever have to figure some of this stuff out.

Sylvère keeps socializing what I'm going through with you. Labeling it through other people's eyes—Adultery in Academe, John Updike meets Marivaux…Faculty Wife Throws Herself At Husband's Colleague. This presumes that there's something inherently grotesque, unspeakable, about femaleness, desire. But what I'm going through with you is real and happening for the first time.

(Is there a place in this to talk about how wet I've been, constantly, since talking on the phone to you 8 days ago? Talking, writing, teaching, working out and dealing with this house, this part of me is melting & unfolding.)

Back to the 1st Person: I'd even made up art theories about my inability to use it. That I'd chosen film and theater, two artforms built entirely on collisions, that only reach their meanings through collision, because I couldn't ever believe in the integrity/supremacy of the 1st Person (my own). That in order to write 1st Person narrative there needs to be a fixed self or persona and by refusing to believe in this I was merging with the fragmented reality of the time. But now I think okay, that's right, there's no fixed point of self but
it exists & by writing you can somehow chart that movement. That maybe 1st Person writing's just as fragmentary as more a-personal collage, it's just more serious: bringing change & fragmentation closer, bringing it down to where you really are.

I don't know what I'll do with this writing, & I don't know what I'll do if because of circumstances of your own, Dick, it proves impossible to connect with you. Before I started writing I flashed forward briefly to a scene two weeks from now when I visit you: alone in bed the next day at the Pear Blossom Best Western with a bottle of scotch & two fresh percoset refills. But when I'm feeling (rarely) suicidal it's 'cause I'm stuck and right now I feel very much alive.

But all I want right now, if nothing else, is for you to read this, so you'll know at least some of what you've done for me.

Love,
Chris

ROUTE 126

And then everything came to pass almost exactly like I thought it would. The preset lights and music, the smokey kiss, the bed. Stumbling sunblind round the driveway the next morning. The motel scotch, the percoset. But that was just a story. Reality is in the details and even if you can predict what's going to happen you can't imagine how you'll feel.

It's taken me eleven months to write this letter since our visit. Here's how it began:

Pear Blossom Best Western

Februay 24, 1995

Dear Dick,

Yesterday afternoon I was driving towards Lake Casitas in sheets of grief and rage. I hadn't started crying yet, just a little welling up of tears around the eyes. But shaking, shaken, so much I couldn't see the road in front of me or stay in the right lane
…

Ann Rower says “When you're writing in real time you have to revise a lot.” By this I think she means that every time you try and write the truth it changes. More happens. Information constantly expands.

Eagle Rock, Los Angeles

January 17, 1996

Dear Dick,

Three weeks before I met you I caught a Sun Charter Jet Vacation plane to Cancun, Mexico alone en route to Guatemala. I was wrapped in blankets with laryngitis and a temperature of 102. When the plane landed I was crying: low concrete molds of airport seen through a veil of misty tears. All fall I'd been living in Crestline, California with Sylvère, my husband, pretty much against my will. I thought I'd spend September in Wellington putting
Gravity & Grace
through the lab, then on to festivals in Rotterdam, Berlin and France. But in August Jan Bieringa, my contact in New Zealand, stopped returning calls. Finally in October she called me from an airport to say the plug was pulled. The funders hated it. The major European festivals hated it. I was sitting up in Crestline broke and 14,000 dollars short of finishing the film. Michelle at Fine Cut faxed from Auckland to say that 10,000 numbers on the Canadian EDL were fucked. Would I rather she just throw away the film?

For three weeks I'd been bursting into tears so often it became a phenomenological question: at what point should we still say “crying” or instead describe the moments of “not-crying” as punctuation marks in a constant state of tears? I'd completely lost my voice and my eyes were swollen closed. The doctor at the Crestline clinic looked at me like I was crazy when I asked him for a “sleeping cure.”

I was going to Guatemala because I'd heard Jennifer Harbury talk about her hunger strike on NPR. Jennifer Harbury, briefly married to the captured Mayan rebel leader Efraim Bamaca, said: “It's my last chance to save his life.” It's unlikely at that moment—three years after Bamaca's disappearance and 17 days into the hunger strike—that Harbury, a life-long activist, had much illusion Bamaca was alive. But the human interest story she created let her speak against the Guatemalan army in
Time
and
People
magazine. “The only thing unusual about this case,” Harbury told the press, “is that if a Guatemalan spoke as I do, they would be dead. They would be immediately dead.” Harbury's voice was quick and light but formidably informed. Her heroic savvy Marxism evoked a world of women that I love—communists with tea roses and steel-trap minds. Hearing her that November in the car made me reflect, however briefly, that perhaps the genocide of the Guatemalan Indians (150,000 people, in a country of six million, disappeared and tortured in ten years) was an injustice of a higher order than my art career.

I caught a taxi to a bus station outside the tourist zone and bought a one-way ticket to Chetumal. Blasts of radio and diesel fumes. I liked the bus's springy orange seats, the broken windows. I imagined it being driven someplace in America maybe thirty years before. Tulsa, Cincinnati, sometime before the sectoring of cities, a time when not just derelicts rode buses and people in bars and streets crossed between different modes and walks of life. Sex and commerce, transience and mystery. The dozen other riders on the bus to Chetumal all seemed employed. It was six weeks before the peso crashed and Mexico seemed like an actual country, not just a free-world satellite. When the diesel engine finally kicked over I wasn't crying anymore. Radio music blared. A lead blanket lifted off my chest as we drove south through towns and villages. Banana trees and palms, people passing food and money through the windows everytime we hit another town. It didn't matter who I was. Cypress yielded to bamboo as the amperage of the sun faded slowly down.

At that moment (November 9, 1994) Jennifer Harbury was on the 29th day of her hunger strike outside the Guatemala City government buildings in the Parque Nacional. She was sleeping in a garbage bag because tents were not allowed.

“I learned that if you see stars,” she told the journalist Jane Slaughter later, “which after day 20 was every ten minutes, you bend down and tie your shoelaces. After awhile you know you're starting to die. I didn't want to lie down. They were going to drag me to a hospital, strap me down and put me on IV so I didn't want anyone to think that I'd passed out.”

At that moment Bamaca had already been reported ‘killed in action' by the Guatemalan army for three years. But when Harbury legally forced the exhumation of his body it turned out to be another man's. In 1992 Bamaca's friend Cabrero Lopez escaped from a military prison with the news he'd seen Bamaca being tortured by some soldiers trained at a US army base. Two years later was there any chance that he was still alive?

In a photo taken just before the hunger strike Jennifer Harbury looked like Hillary Clinton on a budget: a well-proportioned face with good WASP bones, blonde tousled bubble-cut, a cheap tweed coat, clear gaze and and heavy knowing eyes. But four weeks later, starving, Jennifer looks more like Sandy Dennis after five martinis in
Who's Afraid Of Virginia Woolf?
The resolution in her face has broken down, she's running now on something we can't see beyond the openness, confusion. Jennifer Harbury was a zealot with a Harvard law degree camped out in a park in Guatemala City on a garbage bag. Passersbys look at her with fear and wonder, a strange animal like Coco Fusco's native on display in
Two Undiscovered
AmerIndians Visit
… Yet Jennifer is not a saint because she never loses her intelligence.

This letter's taken almost a year to write and therefore it's become a story. Call it
Route 126
. On Thursday night I got off a plane from JFK to LAX. I was going to your house, if not by invitation, at least with your consent. “I don't feel so sunny and terrific or able to pull things off,” I wrote somewhere over Kansas. “I'm ragged, tired and unsure. But
WWBWB
. On the other side of sleep I could feel different—” And then I dozed but still I didn't.

This visit would be my first time ever seeing you alone. Eleven weeks ago I fell in love with you and started writing letters that were turning into—what? I hadn't told you how three weeks ago I'd left my husband and moved upstate alone. But two days before I'd Fed-Ex'd
Every Letter Is A Love Letter
, the manifesto I'd addressed to you about snowy woods and female art and finding the 1st Person, so I thought you'd know. You never read it. And if you had, you told me later, you might've been less cruel. You were a rock & roller from the English Midlands. Whatever made me think these subjects would interest you?

My love for you was absolutely groundless, as you'd pointed out that night in January in the company of my husband. It was about the only time you ventured an opinion past your sexy cryptic silence, the silence that I'd written on. But what does “groundless” really mean? My love for you was based upon a single meeting in December which you finally described in an exasperated letter to my husband as “genial but not particularly intimate or remarkable.” Yet this meeting had driven me to write more words to you than there were numbers on that EDL, 250 pages and still counting. Which in turn led to the rental car, this rainy drive along Route 126, this plan to visit you.

At that time in your life, you said, you were experimenting with never saying No.

I got off the plane at 7 buzzed with warm air, palms and jetlag serotonin, picked up a rental car and started north on 405. But I was nervous too, like walking through a script you know's already been written except the outcome's been withheld. Not giddy nervous. Nervous as in dark with dread. My outfit's dreadful. I watch the road, smoke and fiddle with the radio. I'm wearing black Guess jeans, black boots, an iridescent silver shirt, the black bolero leather jacket that I bought in France. It's what I planned but now it's making me feel gaunt and middle-aged.

Eleven weeks ago I'd tailed your gorgeous car along 5 North en route to that “genial but not particularly intimate or remarkable meeting” at your house between my husband, you and I. And everything then seemed different: delicious, charged. The three of us got very drunk and there was all this strange coincidence. There were just three books in your living room. One was
Gravity & Grace
, the title of my film. I was wearing the snake pendant that I'd bought in Echo Park; you told a story about shooting a video outside your house when a snake magically appeared. All night I was playing Academic Wife, helping you and Sylvère Lotringer exchange ideas and then you mentioned David Rattray's book and that was very weird. Because all night long I'd felt his ghost beside me and David had been dead almost two years. You looked at me and said: “You seem different than the last time that we met. As if you're ready to come out.” And then I did—

What touched me most that night was how freely you admitted being lonely. That seemed so brave. Like you'd accepted it as the price for clearing all the garbage from your life. You told us how you stayed alone most nights, drinking, thinking, listening to tapes. If you're prepared to do something anyway it doesn't matter if you're afraid. You were the greatest Cowboy. And Sylvère and me, with our two-bit artworld hustles, projects, conversation skills—well, we were Kikes. You made me ready to recant on 15 years spent studying wit and difficulty in New York. I'd become a hag. And you were beautiful. Let the desert burn it out.

And now I'm heading out to visit you again alone along Route 126 but something's wrong. Nothing takes me past my body, plain-faced thin and serious, crammed into this rental car. I'm a schoolteacher in flashy clothes. The jeans are tight. I have to pee. I'm sensing that the farthest point of synchronicity is fear and dread.

It was nearly dark when the bus arrived in Chetumal. Friday night —a shopping night in this five block city of appliance stores. A city founded so Belizeans and Guatemalans who weren't rich enough to shop in Dallas or Miami could still buy duty-free TVs. The benefits of civil war? I took a taxi to the Guatemalan embassy but it was closed. Fittingly, there's a huge new glass and steel Museum of the Mayan Indian with very little in it at the edge of Chetumal. On the bus all afternoon I'd been reading the autobiography of Guatemalan rebel leader Rigoberta Menchú and thinking about Jane Bowles. Two different kinds of misery, alertness. After that, I checked in to a twenty dollar a night hotel.