I Love Dick (18 page)

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.

“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.”