I Love Dick (19 page)

In the Guatemalan rainforest I saw wild monkeys and Toucan parrots. I stayed at a hotel attached to a villa owned by the environmentalist Oscar Pallermo. Oscar was the black sheep of one of the Guatemalan oligarchy's leading families…though not so black he didn't have the villa, a house in Guatemala City and an apartment in New York. Oscar included me in a routine with his extended family straight out of
Stealing Beauty
—two hour lunches, trips along the river. Three years ago a farmhouse on his land was torched by Mayan rebels.

On the 29th day of Jennifer Harbury's hunger strike
60 Minutes
aired a segment about her plight. On Day 32 her lawyer flew down from Washington with the news: “People in the White House will talk to you now.” On March 22, New Jersey Congressman Robert Toricelli unveiled the findings of a House Intelligence Committee investigation of the CIA in Guatemala. The three years and ten days that Harbury spent trying to find the truth behind Bamaca's disappearance had led her—or rather, led the media and government—to discover what she'd surely always known: her husband's killer had been hired by the CIA. Colonel Julio Alberto Alpirez, Guatemala's answer to Mengele, also kidnapped, tortured, killed Michael Devine, an American innkeeper.

Didn't Alexander Cockburn say, for every dead American we read about there's always 30,000 nameless peasants? Alpirez's CIA-funded outfit, the Archivo, killed and tortured countless Guatemalan priests, nurses, trade unionists, journalists and farmers. They raped and tortured the American nun Diana Ortiz and stabbed the anthropologist Myrna Mack to death on the streets of Guatemala City at 3 o'clock in the afternoon. On March 24 the US government withdrew all military aid to Guatemala. Several CIA section chiefs were fired. Jennifer Harbury was off her garbage bag and testifying before Congress. (Though just last month in Washington on the eve of Guatemala's first elections, a bomb exploded in her lawyer's car.)

For months I thought this story would be something about how love can change the world. But that's probably too corny.

Fassbinder said once, “I detest the idea that love between two persons can lead to salvation. All my life I have fought against this oppressive type of relationship. Instead, I believe in searching for a kind of love that somehow involves all of humanity.”

I got my voice back several days after leaving Guatemala.

Love,
Chris

THE EXEGESIS

“Entry 52 shows that Fat at this point in his life reached out for any wild hope which would shore up his confidence that some good existed somewhere.”

—Philip K. Dick,
Valis

Thurman, New York
March 4, 1995

Dear Dick,

1. Some Incidents In The Life of a Slave Girl

How do you continue when the connection to the other person is broken (when the connection is broken to yourself)? To be in love with someone means believing that to be in someone else's presence is the only means of being, completely, yourself.

And now it's Saturday morning and tomorrow I'll be 40 which makes this the last
Saturday Morning In Her 30s
to quote the title of an Eileen Myles and Alice Notley poem that I've thought of with a smile maybe 60 times while making phone calls, running errands during scattered Saturday mornings over the last ten years.

Yesterday afternoon I drove back here from New York. I was disoriented and confused (and I'm confused now, too, whether to address you in the declarative or narrative; that is, who'm I talking to?). I got back to New York on Tuesday night after spending those five days in LA “with” you. And then Sylvère and I spent Wednesday, Thursday, moving all our stuff from Second Avenue to Seventh Street. All through the move I was regretful, and I'm trying not to be regretful still.

In the late '70s when I was working in the New York City topless bars there was this disco song that stayed around forever called
Shame
by Evelyn Champagne King. It was perfect for that time and place, evoking the emotion without owning it—

Shame!

What you do to me is a shame

I'm only tryna ease the pain
…,

Deep in your arms

Is where I want to be

'Cause shame was what we always felt, me and all my girlfriends, for expecting sex to breed complicity. (“Complicity is like a girl's name,” writes Dodie Bellamy.)

“Is that what you wanted?” you asked me Friday morning. It was nearly 10. We'd been arguing in bed without our clothes for hours. And you'd just charitably, generously, told me a sad story from your life to make amends for calling me psychotic. To try and make things right. “Is that what you wanted? A ragged kind of intimacy?”

Well yes and no. “I'm just trying to be honest,” I'd confessed to you that morning, and it sounded oh so lame. “Whenever someone makes a breakthrough into honesty,” David Rattray'd said in an interview I'd arranged for him with the editor Ken Jordan, “that means not just self-knowledge but knowledge of what others can't see. To be honest in a real absolute way is to be almost prophetic, to upset the applecart.” I was just trying to promote his book and he was ranting in a way that made me cringe about his hatred for everyone who'd kept him down, who were out to silence “every bright young person who comes along with something original to say.” The interview was made just three days before he collapsed on Avenue A with a massive and inoperable brain tumor.

“Because after all,” I typed, following his deep and unmistakable patrician voice, “the applecart is just an endless series of indigestible meals and social commitments that are useless and probably shouldn't even be honored, and futile pointless conversations, gestures, just to finally die abandoned, treated like a piece of garbage by people in white coats who are no more civilized than sanitation workers…that's what the applecart means to me.”

Shame is what you feel after being fucked on quaaludes by some artworld cohort who'll pretend it never happened, shame is what you feel after giving blowjobs in the bathroom at Max's Kansas City because Liza Martin wants free coke. Shame is what you feel after letting someone take you someplace past control—then feeling torn up three days later between desire, paranoia, etiquette wondering if they'll call. Dear Dick, you told me twice last weekend how much you love John Rechy's books and you wish your writing could include more sex. Because I love you and you can't or you're embarrassed, maybe this is something I can do for you?

At any rate in order not to feel this hopelessness, regret, I've set myself the job of solving heterosexuality (i.e., finishing this writing project) before turning 40. And that's tomorrow.

Because suddenly it seemed, after arriving from LA, jetlagged and moving boxes between apartments, that there was so much more to understand and say. Was this the bottom of the snakepit? In the restaurant Monday night we talked about our favorite Fassbinder movie,
The Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant
. I was wearing a white long-sleeved tailored shirt, looking pointedly demure, the whore's curveball, and I felt like suddenly I'd understood something. “Fassbinder was such an ugly man,” I said. “That's the real subject of his films: an ugly man who was wanting, looking to be loved.”

The subtext rested on the table in between us like the sushi. Because of course I was ugly too. And the way you took this in, understanding it without any explication, made me realize how everything that's passed between us all came back to sex and ugliness and identity.

“You were so wet,” Dick
_——
'd said to me in the bar that Monday night about the sex we'd had on Thursday. My heart opened and I fell beneath the polite detente that we'd established in the restaurant, your black Italian jacket, my long-sleeved buttoned shirt. Were you seducing me again or just alluding to things I'd written in my manifesto
Every Letter Is A Love Letter
which you'd finally read that afternoon? I didn't quite know how to take this. But then Dick glanced brusquely at his watch and turned to look at someone else across the room. And then I knew you never wanted to have sex with me again.

I came back devastated by the weekend, begging Sylvère to give me some advice. Even though his theoretical side is fascinated by how this correspondence, love affair, has sexualized and changed me, all his other sides are angry and confused. So can I blame him when he responded like a cut-rate therapist? “You'll never learn!” he said. “You keep looking for rejection! It's the same problem that you've always had with men!” But I believe this problem's bigger and more cultural.

We looked great together Monday night walking into the Ace of Diamonds Bar. Both of us tall and anorexic and our jackets matched. “Here comes the Mod Squad,” the barman said. All the regulars looked up from their beers. How hilarious. You're a mod and I'm a modernist. “Buy you a drink?” “Sure.” And then suddenly I'm back in 1978 at the Nightbirds Bar, drinking smoking flirting, shooting sloppy pool with my then-boyfriend Ray Johannson. Ha ha ha. “You can't sit on the pool table! You've gotta keep both legs on the floor!” Within minutes of arriving we trashed the whole agreement of mature neutrality we'd worked out in the sushi bar. You were flirting with me, anything seemed possible. Back to English rules.

Later, legs pressed close under one of those tiny barroom tables, we were talking one more time about our favorite ghost, David Rattray. And I wanted to explain how I made allowances for David's bad behavior, all those years on alcohol and heroin, how he got bigger while his wife who'd been on the scene with him shrank until she nearly disappeared. “He was part of the generation that ruined women's lives,” I told you. “It's not just that generation,” you replied. “Men still do ruin women's lives.” And at the time I didn't answer, had no opinion, took it in.

But at 3 a.m. last Wednesday night I bolted up in bed, reaching for my laptop. I realized you were right.

“
J
'
ACCUSE
,” (I started typing) “Richard Schechner.”

Richard Schechner is a Professor of Performance Studies at New York University, author of
Environmental Theater
and several other books on anthropology and theater and editor of
The Drama Review
. He was once my acting teacher. And at 3 a.m. last Wednesday night it occurred to me that Richard Schechner had ruined my life.

And so I'd write this broadside rant and wheatpaste it all around Richard's neighborhood and NYU. I'd dedicate it to the artist Hannah Wilke. Because while Hannah's tremendous will to turn the things that bothered her into subjects for her art seemed so embarrassing in her lifetime, at 3 a.m. it dawned on me that Hannah Wilke is a model for everything I hope to do.

“
J
'
ACCUSE RICHARD SCHECHNER
who through sleep deprivation amateur
GESTALT THERAPY
and
SEXUAL MANIPULATION
attempted to exert
MIND CONTROL
over a group of 10 students in Washington,
D
.
C
.”

Well, it was a plan. And at that moment I believed in it as strongly as the plan Sylvère and I made one night on 7th Street when I was so depressed and he joined me in my suicide attempt. We each drank some wine and took two percosets and decided to read Chapter 73 of Julio Cortazar's book
Hopscotch
out loud into your answerphone. “Yes but who will cure us of the dull fire, the colorless fire that at nightfall runs along the rue de la Huchette…” At the time it seemed so daring, apropos and brilliant but Dick, like most conceptual art, delirium can get so referential—

At Richard Schechner's Aboriginal Dream Time Workshop in Washington,
D
.
C
., he and I were the only people in the group who got up before the crack of noon. We drank coffee, shared the
Post
and
New York Times
and talked about politics and world events. Like us, Richard had some kind of politics and in that group I was the only other person interested in the news. I was a Serious Young Woman, hunched and introspective, running to the library to check out books about the Aborigines—too dumb to realize in that situation that the Aborigines were totally beside the point.

Richard seemed to like our morning conversations about Brecht and Althusser and Andre Gorz, but later on he turned the group against me for being too cerebral and acting like a boy. And weren't all these passionate interests and convictions just evasions of a greater truth, my cunt? I was an innocent, a de-gendered freak, 'cause unlike Liza Martin, who was such a babe she refused to take her platforms off for Kundalini Yoga, I hadn't learned the trick of throwing sex into the mix.

And so on Perilous Journey Night, I went downtown and took my clothes off in a topless bar. Shake shake shake. That same night Marsha Peabody, an overweight suburban schizophrenic who Richard'd let into the group because schizophrenia, like Aboriginal Dream Time, breaks down the continuum between space and time, decided to go off her medication. Richard spent Perilous Journey Night on the football field behind the changing sheds getting a blowjob from Maria Calloway. Maria wasn't in our group. She'd come all the way from NYC to study with Richard Schechner but she'd been shunted into Leah's workshop on Body/Sound because she wasn't a “good enough” performer. The next day Marsha disappeared and no one asked or heard from her again. Richard encouraged me and Liza Martin to work together in New York. I gave up my cheap apartment and moved into Liza's Tribeca loft, topless dancing several nights a week to pay her rent. I was investigating the rift between thought and sex or so I thought, letting lawyers smell my pussy while I talked. This went on for several years and Dick, on Wednesday night I woke up realizing you were right. Men still
do
ruin women's lives. As I turn 40 can I avenge the ghost of my young self?

To see yourself as who you were ten years ago can be very strange indeed.

On Thursday afternoon I walked over to Film/Video Arts on Broadway to make a copy of the videotape of
Readings From The Diaries of Hugo Ball,
a performance piece I'd staged in 1983.

Though he's remembered as the person who “invented” Dada at Zurich's Cabaret Voltaire in 1917, Ball's art activities lasted only about two years. All the other years were fractured, restless. He was a theater student, factory worker, circus attendant, journalist for a leftist weekly and amateur theologian chronicling the “hierarchy of angels” before his death of stomach cancer at age 41. Ball and his companion Emmy Hennings, a cabaret performer, puppet maker, novelist and poet, zigzagged across Switzerland and Germany for 20 years recanting and revising their beliefs. They had no steady source of income. They moved around Europe looking for the perfect low-rent base where they could live cheap and work in peace. They broke with Tristan Tzara because they couldn't understand his careerism—why spend your life promoting one idea?—and were it not for the publication of Ball's diaries,
Flight Out of Time
, all traces of their lives probably would've disappeared.