I Love Dick (8 page)

EXHIBIT J:   HER LONG DRIVE ACROSS AMERICA

Flagstaff, Arizona

December 16, 1994

The Hidden Village Motel

Dear Dick,

I got here around 10, 11 last night depending on which time zone you figure, wondering if I can really drive another 3000 miles. The town is wall-to-wall motels, and the billboards advertise a race war between the local rednecks (“American Owned and Operated”) and the Indian immigrant majority who offer “British Hospitality.” Competition keeps the prices down to 18 bucks a night.

This morning I woke up early and outside it was brilliantly cold and clear, that bright almost-weatherless mountain kind of cold with frosty ground. I made coffee and took Mimi for a walk back behind the train tracks through a scabby mix of low-rent complexes and trailer parks. 200 Dollars Moves You In to Blackbird Roost.

Walking, I thought about you or about the “project.” How I'm realizing that even though the movie “failed” I'm left with a wider net of freedom than I've ever had before.

For two years I was shackled to
Gravity & Grace
everyday; every stage of it an avalanche of impossibility that I dismantled into finite goals. It didn't matter, finally, that the film was good or that I wrote 10 upbeat faxes every day, that I was accountable, available, no matter how I felt.

Anyway Dick, I tried my best but it still failed. No Rotterdam, no Sundance, no Berlin…just neg cut problems in New Zealand that drag on. For two years I was sober and asexual every day, every ounce of psychic anima was channeled into the movie. And now it's over; amazingly, and with your help, I almost feel okay.

(Last night I woke up in bed with cold feet, forgetting where I was, curled up and afraid.)

(And sometimes I feel ashamed of this whole episode, how it must look to you or anyone outside. But just by doing it I'm giving myself the freedom of seeing from the inside out. I'm not driven anymore by other people's voices. From now on it's the world according to me.)

I want to go to Guatemala City. Dick, you and Guatemala are both vehicles of escape. Because you're both disasters of history? I want to move outside the limits of myself (a quirky failure in the artworld), to exercize mobility.

I don't have to topless dance or be a secretary anymore. I don't even have to think that much about money. Through the last five years of building Sylvère's career and real estate I've bought myself a very long leash. So why not use it?

This morning I called a New York magazine about my article on Penny Arcade's
Bitch! Dyke! Faghag! Whore!
The assistant maybe did, maybe didn't know who we were, but at any rate she was discouraging and snippy. Is there any greater freedom than not caring anymore what certain people in New York think of me?

It's time to pack and call Sylvère. It's just fine here, being on the road.

Love,
Chris

FAX TO: CHRIS KRAUS C ⁄ O THE HIDDEN VILLAGE MOTEL

FROM: SYLVÈRE

DATE: DECEMBER 16, 1994

Sweetie,

I woke up in the middle of the night last night and wrote you a letter.

Things seem a little rough…

Santa Rosa, New Mexico

December 17, 1994: around midnight

The Budget 10 Motel

Dear Dick, Sylvère, Anyone—

I wouldn't be writing anything tonight if it weren't that I'd left my books out in the car. Now I'm too tired to get dressed again just to read another few pages from the life of Guillaume Apollinaire.

There were some low moments out there on the road tonight—abandonment and what's the point?—but then I pulled in a radio station from Albuquerque playing historical rap and breakdance circa 1982. Kurtis Blow and disco synthesizers made me feel like I could drive all night.

I didn't write anything last night in Gallup and I got a late start after that terrible phone call with Sylvère. Since when're you so impressed with Isabelle that her opinion counts for what we do? And then I got an oil change, had lunch and it was noon…

…but I detoured anyway off the Interstate at Holborn to see the Petrified Forest, which wasn't a forest at all but a museum of boulders and stones. There were very few of us, walking aimless on the mesa, exposed.

Back in the car I started thinking about the Orphan Plan, how what you “want” (our life in East Hampton) can suddenly seem repugnant. What a torture for someone from the Central American rain forest to have to live in East Hampton and attend Springs School.

Somewhere on the drive the whole sex/Dick thing disappeared. I guess I'm ready to go back to asexuality for another year. I don't know what I'm driving towards…

And later thinking about John Weiner's
Poem for Vipers
—

Soon I know the fuzz will

interrupt, will arrest Jimmy and I

shall be placed on probation. The poem

does not lie to us. We lie

under its law, the glamour of this hour
…

What were his career strategies? Hah. Pessimism's what Lindsay Shelton liked so much about
Gravity & Grace
and now it's clear the film has no chance in movie terms. I may as well own it but ohhh, I thought there'd be more movies after
G & G
. If there are no movies I need to figure out what it's gonna be.

And now Sylvère's confused and ready to disown this whole escapade, and he's mad at Jean-Jacques Lebel for his depiction of Félix and he's mad at Josephine's boyfriend for writing a book about the pair. But Sylvère, Félix and Josephine were French theory's Sid and Nancy…

Tomorrow's another time zone (Central) and the Texas panhandle. Then Oklahoma, then the South. I bought three pairs of earrings yesterday in Gallup.

Dick, it's hard for me to access you tonight. All your cowboy/loner stuff seems silly.

Chris

As Chris drove East she felt herself being sucked forward into a time tunnel. Christmas was getting closer. There were more Christmas songs on the radio, more Christmas decorations in every little town, as if Christmas was a cloud that descended on New York and feathered out across the West in broken strands. She was literally losing time by crossing time zones to the east and driving pulled her farther away from what she knew. It was like that spatial/optical illusion, being in a car stalled in a single lane of traffic. You panic 'cause you think your car is moving by itself and then you realize it's the other cars that're moving. Yours is standing still.

Shawnee, Oklahoma

December 18, 1994: 11:30 Central Standard Time

The American Motel ($25 a night)

Well Dick,

I got lost in Oklahoma City, nearly out of gas and couldn't find a room. The motel in the AAA book turned out to be a fuck palace by a topless bar and everything else was full. It took another hour driving to find a vacancy here in Shawnee. There's a meat works right across the road.

By the time I realized I was on the wrong Oklahoma City bypass there was construction and it was too late to get off. I had to drive the 50 miles of loop. Panic flashed me back to when I was travelling between New York, Columbus and Los Angeles last year.

Panic. Late winter 1993: Getting off the plane from LA in Columbus around midnight, suddenly and brutally ejected from the tube of business travel into the reality that Radisson and Hyatt, airline platinum cards and Hertz Preferred all insulate you from. The car I'd driven from New York was being fixed at the Columbus Subaru dealership under warranty. I caught a taxi to the auto mall industrial park zone 15 miles outside the city. The duplicate car key was ready. But when we got there the car was nowhere to be found. Suddenly after seven hours in the tube, motel-taxi-plane-to-taxi I'm left at 1 a.m. standing under car yard klieg lights in the snow, guard dogs howling. The driver took me to the city, all barriers between us broken down, and he's ranting about wogs and how reading William Burroughs made him different from all the other cab drivers in Columbus and could I tell him how to make a living as an artist? Well, no.

And then the next day, driving through northeast blizzards, West Virginia, Pennsylvania, torn inside out. It was that Piscean time of year. I thought the snow would never melt—white everywhere and skinny shaken stakes of Northeast trees. Insulation makes us increasingly unable to respond to weather. All that month I was seized by this unnameable emotion. Nature's vengeance. The week I spent doing post-production at the Wexner Center in Columbus I was sick with Crohn's Disease, as if my body was negating the illusion of momentum. Functioning over waves of pain by day, throwing up at night, it's like a hysteria of the organs, walls of the intestine swollen so it's impossible to eat or even drink a glass of water.

The week before on the plane ride from Columbus to Dallas the entire business cabin's filled with salesmen from the Pepsi-Cola Corporation. The one beside me's drunk and wants to talk about his reading habits, his passion for Len Deighton, let me out oh no. And then we're stuck in Dallas because a blizzard grounded the connection from Chicago…and it was there in the Garden Room of the DFW Hilton that I met David Drewelow, the Jesuit priest.

That night I felt like something had been sucked out of me and meeting David Drewelow replaced it. Making eye contact in the restaurant line I mistook him for oh, a software engineer from Amherst, good for forty minute's chat about restoring country houses. But he turned out to be a genius who read Latin, Spanish, French and Mayan and believed that Chrissy Hynde and Jimi Hendrix were avatars of Christ. David Drewelow lived out of a storage bin in Santa Fe, New Mexico and travelled round the country raising money for a Jesuit mission on the Guatemalan coast. More than a liberationist, he saw the church as the only force still capable of preserving vestiges of Mayan life. Of course Drewelow had read Simone Weil's
Gravity & Grace
. He owned Plon's first edition of it, recalled the thrill of finding it in Paris. For several hours we talked about Weil's life, activism and mysticism, France and trade unions, Judaism and the Bhagavad Gita. I told him all about the title sequence I'd been making in Columbus for my movie, named after Weil's book…pans across medieval battle maps and scenes superimposed with static WW2 aerial surveillance target maps…history moving constantly and sometimes visibly underneath the skin of the present. Meeting David Drewelow was like a miracle, an affirmation that some good still existed in the world.

Back in Columbus, Bill Horrigan, Media Curator at the Wexner, asked me how I “really” managed to support myself. I was picking up the restaurant check and driving a new car and obviously this cover story about an art school teaching job fooled no one. “It's simple,” I told him. “I take money from Sylvère.” Was Bill bothered that such a marginal sexless hag as me wasn't living in the street? Unlike his favorites, Leslie Thornton and Beth B, I was difficult and unadorable and a Bad Feminist to boot.

Oh Bill, you should've seen me in New York in 1983, vomiting in the street. I was bruised with malnutrition on the Bellevue Welfare Ward and hooked up to IV not knowing what was wrong because the City's mandatory catastrophic care plan doesn't cover diagnostic tests.

“Sylvère and I are Marxists,” I told Bill Horrigan. “He takes money from the people who won't give me money and gives it to me.” Money's abstract and our culture's distribution of it is based on values I reject and it occurred to me that I was suffering from the dizziness of contradictions: the only pleasure that remains once you've decided you know better than the world.

Accepting contradictions means not believing anymore in the primacy of “true feeling.” Everything is true and simultaneously. It's why I hate Sam Shepard and all your True West stuff—it's like analysis, as if the riddle could be solved by digging up the buried child.

Dear Dick, today I drove across the panhandle of North Texas. I was incredibly excited when I hit the flatland west of Amarillo knowing that the Buried Cadillac piece would come up soon. Ten of them—a pop art monument to your car, fins flapping, heads buried in the dust. I passed it on the highway, turned back and took two photos of it for you.