I Love Dick (25 page)

“What about Christa Woolf?” I asked. (At that moment she was founding a neo-socialist party in Germany.) And all Félix's guests—the culturally important jowelly men, their Parisianally-groomed, mute younger wives just sat and stared. Finally the communist philosopher Negri graciously replied, “Christa Wolf is not an intellectual.” I suddenly became aware of dinner: a bleeding roast, prepared that afternoon by the bonne femme, floating at the center of the table.

9. There's a lot of madness in New Zealand. A famous poem by Alistair Campbell,
Like You I'm Trapped
, was written to his unnamed suicidal wife who'd been diagnosed as schizophrenic.
Like You I'm Trapped
claims the poet's right to project himself into another person's psychic situation. It's a beautiful poem but I don't know if I believe it. There's a lot of madness in New Zealand because it's a mean and isolated little country. Anyone who feels too much or radiates extremity gets very lonely.

Winter, sometime in the '70s, on Boulcott Terrace, downtown Wellington: I'm visiting my girlfriend Mary McCleod who's been in and out of mental hospital several times for no good reason. Mary's a part-time student, full-time resident of Paul Bryce's halfway house for “schizophrenics.” Except for the respectful silence that falls on each of Paul's platitudinous remarks (Paul's a licensed therapist), Boulcott Terrace runs more or less along the lines of every other Kiwi hippie commune. Anyone who wants to can move in or out so long as they pay their rent and food money to the kitty. Perhaps Paul's read up on R.D. Laing and Kingsley Hall, though this really isn't likely. Boulcott Terrace is not so much an experiment as an outlet for misguided hippie altruism. It's an offshoot of Jerusalem, the poet James K. Baxter's rural Catholic commune. Outside it's howling wind and rain. Every southerly comes tearing through the broken lead-glass windows. A bunch of residents, mostly guys, sit around a three-bar electric heater in the living room drinking tea and beer. A typical Boulcott Terrace evening.

Mary's 22, a big pouty blonde dabbling in witchcraft. Long stringy hair falls all around the baggy thrift-store coat she wears to hide her babyfat. I'm drawn to Mary because she is so wantonly unhappy. Apart from this we don't have much in common but this is not a problem because in this world there're hardly ever any private conversations. Suddenly there's a rustling in the brush that masks the trashed French windows. It's Fuckwit Nigel, the most seriously crazy of the crew, smushing his face against the glass and licking it. A chorus of “Ouggghhhh, Gross! Fuck Off” goes up around the room. Paul fills me in on Nigel's sad case history. Later on that night Nigel puts his fist straight through the window.

Years later I see Paul in a hardware store on Second Avenue. In his late 30s, neat and trim, he's much diminished. Paul's visiting New York to take a psychodrama class. He lives in Sydney. I throw my arms around him, feel as I'm embracing him like I'm reaching down a hall of mirrors back into the past. Encountering any piece of Wellington in New York City is magic, cinematic synchronicity. I want to tell Paul everything that's happened since leaving. I'm overwhelmed. But since Paul's never really left and Wellington, for him, isn't frozen in the mythic past, he isn't.

10. Last winter when I fell in love with you and left Sylvère and moved back alone up to the country, I found the second story that I'd ever written, 20 years ago in Wellington. It was written in the third person, the person most girls use when they want to talk about themselves but don't think anyone will listen. “Sunday afternoon, again, again,” it led off. “The possibilities are not endless.” Names and actual events were carefully omitted, but it describes the heartbreak and abandonment I'd felt after spending Christmas Eve with the actor Ian Martinson.

I met Ian at a late night party at the
BLERTA
house on Aro Street.
BLERTA
was a travelling rock & roll roadshow commune—a bunch of guys and friends and wives. They toured around the country in an old bus painted with cartoons by Ruffo. Ian Martinson had just directed a short TV film of Alistair Campbell's poem
Like You I'm Trapped
, and I'd reviewed it for the daily paper. I was the only girl who'd showed up at this party on her own, the only journalist, nonhippie, the only person under 21, all serious disadvantages, so I was incredibly flattered when Ian hung around the edges of the chair near me. Fane Flaws rolled around the carpet like a drunken centipede, Bruno Lawrence kept the party going with a string of dirty jokes. Ian Martinson and I talked about New Zealand poetry.

Around 3 a.m. we staggered up the road to my place for a fuck. “Aro” Street means “love” in Maori. Words left us the minute that we left the party. We were just two people walking up the street outside our bodies. Both of us were pretty drunk, and there was no way of making that transition, to sex from conversation, but anyway we tried. We took our clothes off. At first Ian couldn't get it up, this pissed him off, and when he finally did he fucked me like a robot. He weighed a lot, the bed was old and squishy. I wanted him to kiss me. He turned away, passed out, I may've cried. At 8 a.m. he got up without a word and put his clothes on. “This must be the most sordid Christmas that I've spent in my whole life,” the Catholic Ian mumbled, leaving.

Six weeks later
Douglas Weir
, the first TV drama produced by New Zealand's brand new second channel, aired. The aviator Douglas Weir was played with subtlety, brilliance and conviction…by Ian Martinson. Sitting up that night at the typewriter in my bedroom, writing a review for the Wellington
Evening Post
, I felt like Faye Dunaway being slapped by Jack Nicholson in
Chinatown
. I was a journalist…a girl…a journalist …a girl. Hatred and humiliation gathered, soared out from my chest into my throat, as I wrote ten paragraphs in praise of Ian Martinson. That year he won Best Actor.

This incident congealed into a philosophy: Art supercedes what's personal. It's a philosophy that serves patriarchy well and I followed it more or less for 20 years.

That is: until I met you.

11. On April 19 I called you at 10 p.m. and 1 a.m. from my apartment in the East Village. You weren't home. The next night I tried again three times between 11 p.m. New York Time and midnight. Long distance bills fill the gaps left in my diaries. The next day, April 20, a Thursday, I left New York and drove upstate to Thurman. Freezing wind, stripped trees, gray thunderheads. It was the beginning of Easter weekend. That night between 9:30 and 11:30
EST
my time I tried your number four more times but hung up on your machine without leaving any message. Every call to you, according to my phone bill, was preceded by a desperate phone call to Sylvère in New York City. These calls lasted for durations of 6:0, 19:0, 1:0 and .5 minutes. At 1:45 a.m. (10:45 p.m. for you) I tried again. This time your phone was busy. I sat and chainsmoked at my desk for 20 minutes. And when I called your number once again at 2:05 a.m. this time it rang and you picked up, I finally reached you.

12. In a science fiction story whose name and author I forget, a group that's organized around utopian feelings sanctions, sanctifies group sex by describing elements of sex as Gifts from Aliens…“the touching gift,” “the whispering gift.” I am convinced that I've received “the writing gift” from you.

13. Schizophrenics have a gift for locking into other people's minds. Direct current flows without any spoken language. Like the
Star Wars
robot that can unlock any code just by reaching into a machine, schizophrenics can instantly situate a person: their thoughts and their desires, their weaknesses and expectations. And isn't “situation” such a schitzy word, both noun and verb?? “The schizophrenic…will suddenly burst out with the most incredible details of your private life, things that you would never imagine anyone could know and he will tell you in the most abrupt way truths that you believed to be absolutely secret,” Félix said in an interview with Caroline Laure and Vittorio Marchetti (
Chaosophy
). Schizophrenics aren't sunk into themselves. Associatively, they're hyperactive. The world gets creamy like a library. And schizophrenics are the most generous of scholars because they're emotionally
right there
, they don't just formulate, observe. They're willing to become the situated person's expectations. “The schizophrenic has lightning access to you,” Félix continued. “He internalizes all the links between you, makes them part of his subjective system.” This is empathy to the highest power: the schizophrenic turns into a seer, then enacts that vision through his or her becoming. But when does empathy turn into dissolution?

14. When my phone bill came in May I was surprised to see that that night—the night of April 21, the night of our last-ever conversation—we'd talked for 80 minutes. It hardly felt like 20.

15. No one, and schizophrenics least of all who do it best, can live in this heightened state of reflective receptivity forever. Because this empathy's involuntary, there's terror here. Loss of control, a seepage. Becoming someone else or worse: becoming nothing but the vibratory field between two people.

“And who are you?” Brion Gysin's question, asked to ridicule the authenticity of authorship (“Since when do words belong to anybody? ‘Your very own words' indeed. And who are you?”) gets scarier the more you think about it. In Minneapolis when I collapsed with Crohn's Disease after realizing Sylvère didn't love me I lay on a stranger's couch feverish and doubled up with pain, hallucinating through swirling particles to a face behind my face. Before they stuck the tubes down through my nose I knew “I” “wasn't” “anywhere.”

16. Calling you that night was torture that I'd pledged myself to do. “I have to let you know,” I said, “how I felt last weekend in LA after I saw you.” (It'd been ten days and my body was still locked up with sickness). “If I can't tell you this I'll have no choice except to hate you in my heart, perhaps in public.”

You said: “I'm sick of your emotional blackmail.”

But I went on, and told you how when I got back to New York that Wednesday, April 12, I had three different kinds of rashes: a rash that made my eyes swell closed, a rash across my face and a different rash around my body.

You said: “I'm not responsible.”

Somehow on the plane that Tuesday night I'd been able to exorcize the stomach pain that'd started in LA the night before, the night I called to say goodbye, the way you'd asked me to. Pacing in the tiny space behind the cabin, shouting down the Airphone to Sylvère as the plane flew over Denver, I'd barricaded myself against another Crohn's Disease flareup but the somatic body won't be denied, it's like a freeway. Open up an extra lane of traffic and it'll fill up too. On Wednesday morning I crashed with rashes, tears, a yeast infection and cystitis. A malady diffuse enough for Dr. Blum to write five separate prescriptions. I got the drugs and drove upstate. And now it was overcast Good Friday.

17. Because identifying so completely with someone else can only happen by abandoning yourself, the schizophrenic panics and retreats abruptly from these connections. Connect and cut. Connecticut. Schizophrenics reach beyond the parameters of language into the realm of pure coincidence. Freed from signifying logic, time spreads out in all directions. “Think of language as a signifying chain.” (Lacan) Without the map of language you're not anywhere.

“Even if everything between us was 80 percent in my own mind,” I said, “20 had to come from you.” You disagreed; insisted everything that passed between us was my own fabrication. I wondered if that's possible. Granted, fan-dom is an engineered psychosis. But what went on with us was singular and private. And by the end of 80 minutes the conversation looped around. You listened; you were kind. You started talking in percentages.

Schizophrenia is metaphysics-brut. The schizophrenic leaves the body, transcends himself, herself, outside any system of belief. Freedom equals panic because without belief there is no language. When you've lost yourself to empathy, a total shutdown is the only way back in.

And when does empathy turn into dissolution?

18. On Wednesday, April 5 I left New York to “teach for a week” at Art Center in Los Angeles, hoping I might see you. All winter, spring, I was shuttling between the rural poverty of upstate New York to Avenue D, New York, to Pasadena. That Wednesday afternoon I took a cab to JFK, upgraded my ticket in the Admiral's Club Lounge, caught the 5, got in at 8 to Los Angeles. I picked up a rental car and drove out to a motel in Pasadena. My entire existential-economic situation was schizophrenic, if you accept Félix's terms: schizophrenia as a paradigm for the internalized contradictions of late capitalism. I wasn't travelling as Chris Kraus. I was travelling as the wife of Sylvère Lotringer. “You may be brave,” you said to me that weekend, “but you're not wise.” But Dick, if wisdom's silence then it's time to play the fool—

That night I got lost on the 405, found myself driving towards your house in Piru. I turned around, cut back across the 101 to Pasadena. I didn't have to be at school 'til Friday but I came in Wednesday night 'cause I thought it would increase the chance of seeing you. Besides, on Wednesday night I'd been invited to a party for my friend Ray Johannson's 40th birthday.

At 10p.m. I checked into the Vagabond Motel on Colorado. I ran a bath, unpacked my clothes, then called you. Your phone rang eight times, there was no answer. I washed and styled my hair, then called again. This time your answerphone kicked on. I didn't leave a message. I smoked a cigarette, then thought about an outfit for Ray's party. Wisely, I decided against the Kanae & Onyx gold lame rubber jacket. But after getting dressed (black chiffon shirt, English military pants, black leather jacket) I reached another impasse. If I left a message on your answerphone I couldn't call again. No, I had to talk to you directly. But could I skip Ray's party just to sit beside the phone? Finally I decided to wait until 10:30. If you weren't home I'd leave and call you in the morning. At 10:35 p.m. I called again. You answered.