I Love Dick (9 page)

Dick, you may be wondering, if I'm so wary of the mythology you embrace, why'd my blood start pumping 15 miles west of Amarillo? Why'd I used to get dressed up to go meet JD Austin in the Night Birds Bar? So he could fuck me up the ass, then say he didn't love me? Tight jeans, red lips and nails this morning, feeling really femme and like time for this isn't on my side. It's a cultural
study. To be part of something else. Sylvère and I are twinned in our analytic bent, content with “scrambling the codes.” Oh Dick, you eroticize what you're not, secretly hoping that the other person knows what you're performing and that they're performing too.

Love,
Chris

Brinkley, Arkansas

December 19, 1994: 11 p.m.

The Brinkley Inn

Dear Dick,

Tonight I actually felt like reading as much as writing you. Talking on the phone to Ann, my family, took the edge off.

Everything felt so dismal earlier today in Oklahoma I gave up trying to make good time. I needed to adjust to Northeast landscape. By 2 o'clock the green started looking pretty, and I got off the Interstate in Ozark and walked in a park beside the river. Golden green and blue. In the car I started thinking, once I accept the failure of
Gravity & Grace
it won't matter anymore what I do—once you've accepted total obscurity you may as well do what you want. The landscape in the park reminded me of Ken Kobland's films…that bit of video that The Wooster Group used in
LSD
…camera stumbling around the woods, end of winter, stark blue sky, patches of snow still left on the scabby ground…as evocative as anything of that moment when you're starting to Get Off. Ken really is a genius. His work is pure intentionality, everything is effortless and loaded and I learned how to make films by watching his.

And now the femme trip's over. Everything's different being back in the Northeast. I'm back to basic camouflage. Good country & western song on the radio today:
I Like My Women A Little On The Trashy Side
.

Since this is such a dead-letter night, Dick, perhaps I'll transcribe a few notes that I made in the car:

“12:30 Central Time, Saturday, now in Texas. Looks just like New Mexico. Thinking about Dick's video—the sentiment, Sam Sheppard cowboy stuff, is a cypher. The video was shown in response to my criticism of Sylvère's sentimentality when he writes fiction. I said, you have to do what you're smartest at, i.e., where you're most alive. Then Dick pulled the video out as a manifesto or defense of sentiment.”

LATER THAT DAY
—

“I'm in Shamrock now—great emptiness. It feels like a resting point or destination. I forgot to mention, D., the menorah on your refrigerator—that impressed us.”

THE NEXT MORNING
—

“I guess the Northeast hit overnight. When I got out of the motel this morning I was no longer West but East in Shawnee, Oklahoma—there're hills and clumps of skinny trees and lakes and rivers. It'll be the same now 'til I hit New York—a landscape full of dreary childhood memories I have no use for. There's a teariness about the worn-down hills and shivering trees, like in Jane Bowles' story
Going to Massachusetts
, emotion overwhelms this landscape 'cause it's so unmonumental. It elicits little fugues of feeling I'm not ready for. The desert overwhelms you with its own emotion but this landscape brings up feelings that're far too personal. That come inside out, from me. The West is Best, right? I'm nauseous and asleep and the coffeepot is buried underneath the washstand I bought in Shamrock. But all will change. I miss you—

Love,
Chris

“The Wicked Witch of the East”

Chris reached Tennessee and Eastern Standard Time on December 20. She needed to stop driving and stayed two nights in Sevierville. She went hiking through wild mountain laurels in the national park and bought an antique bed for 50 dollars. On the morning of the 22nd she reached Sylvère in Paris. Peaceful and contented, she pictured them returning to Sevierville together for a vacation but Sylvère didn't understand. “We never have any
fun
together,” she sighed into the phone. Sylvère replied gruffly: “Oh. Fun. Is that what it's supposed to be about?”

Chris wrote Dick two letters from Sevierville.

“Dear Dick,” she wrote, “I guess in a sense I've killed you. You've become Dear Diary…”

She'd begun to realize something, though she didn't think much about it at the time.

Frackville, Pennsylvania

December 22, 1994: 10:30 p.m.

Central Motel

Dear Dick,

All day and into this evening I've been feeling lonely, panicky, afraid. Tonight I didn't see the moon at all until about 8:30 but suddenly, driving north on 81,
THERE IT WAS
, deep & huge like it'd just risen, nearly full and red orange like a blood tangerine. It felt ominous, and I'm wondering if you feel as I do—this incredible urge
TO BE HEARD
. Who do you talk to?

On the road today I thought a little bit about the possibility of creating great dramatic scenes out of material that's diaristic, vérité. Remembering Ken Kobland's video
Landscape/Desire
—all those motels, everything flattened to a point where you don't expect a story and so just settle in for the ride. But there has to be a point, to give some point to this shifting landscape of flapping laundry, motel bathroom tiles. Perhaps the aftermath of something? But aftermath rarely is that way. You never sense the “aftermath” because always, something else starts up along the way.

To initiate something is to play the fool. I really came off the fool with you, sending the fax, etcetera. Oh well. I feel so sorry we were never able to communicate, Dick. Signals through the flames. Not waving but drowning—

Chris

December 23 was the brightest clearest winter day on the road across the Poconos into upstate New York. Dark red barns against the snow and winter birds, Cooperstown and Binghamton, colonial houses with front porches, kids with sleds. Her heart soared. It was the image of American childhood, not hers of course, but the childhood she'd watched as a child on TV.

Four thousand miles away Sylvère Lotringer sits reminiscing about the Holocaust with his mother on rue de Trevise. She serves him gefilte fish, kasha, sauteed vegetables and rugelach in the tiny dining room. There's something comical about a 56-year-old man being waited on like a child by his 85-year-old mother, but Sylvère doesn't see it this way. He's started taping their conversations because details of the War remain so hazy. The Paris roundup following the German Occupation, the escape, false papers, letters coming back from all the relatives in Poland stamped “Deportee.”

“Deportee,” “Deportee,” she intones, her voice like steel, rage keeping her so vibrantly alive. But for himself, Sylvère feels only numbness. Was he there at all? He was just a child. Yet all these years he's been unable to think about the War without tears springing to his eyes.

And now he's 56 years old, and soon he'll need another plastic hip. He'll be 63 before his next sabbatical. The young Parisians in the street belong to a bright impenetrable world.

Chris arrived to an empty house in Thurman, the Southern Adirondack town she and Sylvère discovered when they were looking for an “affordable estate” seven years ago. They'd come upon it one November driving down from a Bataille Boy's Festival in Montreal that co-starred Sylvère and John Giorno. Leaving Montreal they started screaming about which bridge to take, and hadn't spoken since. Chris' own gig at the Festival had been furtively arranged, a Bataille Boy's favor to Sylvère, but when they arrived her name was not on the program. Liza Martin took her clothes off to an enthusiastic prime-time crowd; they put Chris on at 2 a.m. to read to 20 drunken hecklers. Still, Sylvère didn't understand why she was unconsolable. Hadn't both of them been paid? On the Northway near Elizabethtown a pair of falcons flew across the road: a fragile link between themselves and Liza Martin's g-string and
The Falconer's Tale
of medieval France. They stopped to walk, and Sylvère was eager to share something, so he shared her enthusiasm for the Adirondacks and two days later they bought a ten room farmhouse in the Town of Thurman just west of Warrensburg, New York.

EXHIBIT K:   MESSAGES FROM THE COUNTRY

Thurman, New York

December 23, 1994

Friday, 11:30 p.m.

Dear Dick,

I got here before dark in time to see Hickory Hill and the two humpbacked mountains west of Warrensburg come into view.

Warrensburg looked as timelessly rundown as ever—Potter's Diner, Stuart's Store, LeCount Real Estate lined up along Route 9… that total absence of New England charm that we find so appealing. I drove 12 miles along the river, past Thurman Station to the house to find Tad, a friend who stays with us there. But he wasn't in, so I went down to the bar in Stony Creek to find him.

The O'Malley's trashed the house before leaving, as I expected. The entire Town of Thurman looked just as bad. The new zoning gives everyone the freedom to do anything. Now there's an ugly little homemade subdivision right next door. No one's crazy enough to waste money gentrifying the Southern Adirondacks. It's a diorama of A Hundred Years of Rural Poverty, each generation leaving relics of its failed attempts to make a living from this land. Tad and I had drinks and then came back to unload the truck. He's been living here since the O'Malley's left.

But I wanted to tell you how exhilarating it felt to step out of the truck and feel the cold dark air around Stony Creek's four corners. There's just one streetlight so you can see every single star. Five hundred people 15 miles away in all directions from anything. Unlike California, upstate New York doesn't lend itself to spiritual retreats or communes. People like Tad who moved here 20 years ago found out the only way they could make it through eight months of winter was by turning into locals themselves.

But that was earlier. My hands are dry and dirty and I'm tired. So Dick, I guess we'll pick this up later.

xxxxo,
Chris

Thurman, New York

December 24, 1994

Saturday, 10:30 p.m.

Dear Dick,

Right now I'm sitting up against some pillows on the floor of the front-north bedroom looking up at the bed I bought in Tennessee—this stupendously beautiful thing I've been working on tonight, massaging with rags dipped in walnut oil, then shining. It's made of poplar, “the pauper's hardwood,” and Tad says you can tell it's old because the curves were made without electric tools. There was a lot of pleasure in this, rubbing in the oil and feeling with my hands how it was made. I've always wanted something like it.

Tonight I said to Tad we're starting a Shaker commune here: no sex and we work without ceasing. I've been enjoying the comfortableness of the time here with him very much. Tonight I felt tremendous admiration for Tad, his brave cheerfulness. It's Christmas Eve and here we are alone, he much more so than me: no tree no families no plans. And Tad is such a sentimentalist. Last year his ex-wife ran away with their three children to Australia. Now he's downstairs finishing a woodwork project, not feeling sorry for himself at all.

I realize I haven't told you anything about this place—will I be able to make you understand? It's so different here from California. At the hardware store this morning Earl Rounds asked me where I was living. I said, across the road from Baker's. Oh, Earl said, the old Gideon place.

No matter who else comes and goes this house will
always
be “the old Gideon place” to the locals. The Gideons were an older couple from Ohio who bought the house when it was the Great Dartmouth Tract, a farmhouse/dude ranch on 125 acres. This was in the 1970s and people must've still taken “family vacations” though of course the place was closed eight months a year. One night in January Mrs. Gideon ran screaming, naked across High Street and pounded on Vern Baker's door for several freezing minutes 'til he woke up and let her in. Exposure. Two days later the Gideons packed up and drove away never to be seen again. Did they go back to Ohio?

Last New Year's Eve a New Jersey oil company executive walked off into the woods at Harrisburg wearing nothing but a cashmere cardigan, slacks and loafers. He died quickly of exposure.

Down the road from Baker's there's Chuck and Brenda. I loved Brenda, she was my Hick Correlative—a manic depressive chain talker who threw her energy into buying up distressed slum houses. Chuck, an otherwise unemployable alcoholic, renovated them. She owned about 15 of them, even got a HUD grant to build apartments in Minerva, but everything collapsed when she refinanced them. She and Chuck began a 1500 foot addition to their house to accommodate her four children. But it's five years later and the two kids by her first marriage have long since moved out, back to Warrensburg with their father, because they couldn't stand Chuck and Brenda's screaming. Now she's working as a chambermaid and selling Amway products. All that's left of Brenda's empire is a pink Jacuzzi with brass faucets gleaming in an unheated shell of plywood nailed to 2x4's. If you live here long enough everything becomes a story.