I Love Dick (16 page)

The next morning I got up early to take a walk around Chetumal. According to the map it was a coastal town. The bus to Guatemala didn't leave 'til later on that afternoon. I caught a local city bus and time slowed down. Suburban Chetumal looked kind of like Mar Vista—stucco bungalows and tiny yards—except there were no bus stops, the bus stopped for anyone who flagged it down. And then seven miles and 60 minutes later the bungalows thinned out and the bay leapt out of nowhere when the road curved round. Sleepy dullness opening up to startlingly blue water, every particle of air locked into a glistening frame. The coastal land was jungly. I got off and walked along a jungly path to a waterfront cafe at the end of a round peninsula but it was closed. I gasped when I saw a tree monkey tethered to a pole. Finally a man came out and said in English that he'd bought the cafe and the beachfront and the monkey after working in a car shop in America. The monkey didn't seem to mind. I watched it, squatting, tracing circles on the ground. Its fur was dusty, cream smudged with cinders. It had ten perfectly articulated fingers, scrunched up toes.

Jennifer Harbury was 39 years old when she met Efraim Bamaca in a rebel training camp in the Guatemalan highland jungle. Until that time her life had been one dry and dusty road. From Baltimore to Cornell. From Cornell to North Africa, then to Afghanistan, backpacking around the outer reaches of these countries without any special plans. She met exiled Palestinians. She saw a lot of poverty and was moved to ask: Must people starve so that we can live the way we do? It's a question that can drive you crazy. Asking it sent Jennifer to Harvard Law School at a time when being a feminist meant refusing to be a co-dependent fuck-up. Lots of women were finding self-empowerment through careers in corporate law. But Jennifer-the-bad-feminist took a job defending immigrants in East Texas at a Legal Aid storefront. Many of the clients were Guatemalan Mayans facing deportation. People of another timescape who sat patiently on plastic chairs radiating thick and strange charisma. Jennifer wanted to know more. Unlike, perhaps, her colleagues, or the Texas lawyer she'd been married to for just a little while, “Mayan people have an ability to be completely communal. They are very humble, very sweet, very giving.” Her work took her to Guatemala to substantiate theft claims for asylum from the war. In Guatemala City she met members of the underground and she became involved. 1989 saw her reaping the career rewards for twenty years of impassioned brilliant activism during the Bush and Reagan years: a battered pickup truck, a cheap apartment paid for by loans or gifts from old friends, a contract with an obscure small press in Maine for a book of oral histories she'd made with Guatemalan activists and peasants. Since Jennifer's a girl, we can't help measuring the distance between her burning vision and her sad and scrappy days when we think about her life. Even the article lionizing her in the
New York Times
calls her “quirky.” “Really,” an old school friend told the
Times
the week Ted Turner bought the character rights to her life, “she was a
tank
.”

The story of Route 126 reads like a secret history of southern California. It runs west into Ventura County from Valencia, a former Indian burial ground. In the 1940s, Val Verde and Stevenson's Ranch were Black upper middle class resorts. Before the gated subdivisions of “northern LA county” were built here in the '80s, corpses were often dumped around the desert near Valencia. These facts inspired the horror movie
Poltergeist
. Of course Valencia is also the location of the Disney-funded art and animation school, CalArts. “Valencia is Smiles, Not Miles Away,” a downtown billboard of a happy lion boasts. The locals like to call Route 126 “Blood Alley” for its freakily high number of fatal car accidents.

The geography and land-use blurs as you drive west from orange groves to onion fields to flower farms. But who does the work is clear: small produce stands owned by second generation Chicanos “banking on America” line the road; undocumented Mexican and Central Americans still work six or seven days a week in the fields. They live in rented propane-heated shacks. Several years ago a virtual slave-trade was discovered operating out of Camarillo. Shades of Rigoberta Menchú's childhood on plantations along the Guatemalan coast: desperate people rounded up in villages, packed standing into the airless backs of trucks—just an introduction to the horrors that await them. Dachau South.

Route 126 is a trucker's detour to Ventura around the weigh-station on Highway 101. It's a good place to buy speed. The road behind the town of Fillmore running to what used to be the National Condor Preserve is the venue for illegal drag races. When the Condor population dropped to three, they were rounded up and moved. The artist Nancy Barton recalls a project made in 1982 by Nan Border: she located the unsolved murder sites of eight female hitchhikers and prostitutes along Route 126 and mounted plaques beside their shallow graves.

In 1972 the artist Miriam Shapiro began a Feminist Art Program at CalArts. Mostly, the Program happened because her husband was then President of the School. But CalArts was a Jeffersonian democracy, so Shapiro had to spend six months playing Scheherazade: inviting every male department head, separately, to dinner, to coax and charm and guarantee their votes.

Artists in the program wanted, according to Faith Wilding, to “represent our sexuality in different, more assertive ways… ‘Cunt' signified to us an awakened consciousness about our bodies… [We made] drawings and constructions of bleeding slits, holes and gashes…” The program lasted for one year. “Our art…which was meant to contest formalist standards,” Wilding continues, “was subjected to scathing criticism by many in the school.”

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.