Chris Kraus - I Love Dick

December 15, 1994

Sylvère gets off the plane in Paris, France. Seven thousand miles and 15 hours later he’s lost the drift of what it was in California that made writing love letters to his colleague seem like a good idea. He’s experiencing Virillian free-fall. His plastic hip is killing him. He carries Percoset and Darvon, searching everyday for the magic mix that’ll cut the pain without completely numbing him. Sylvère limps from his mother’s tenement apartment near the Bourse across the right bank to Bastille. Of course he hasn’t slept. At noon, it’s dark and freezing. He feels like an ancient animal. His first meeting is with Isabelle, an old acquaintance, sometime-lover from New York who’s acquired an important work of dubious provenance by Antonin Artaud. Nominally, Isabelle’s an independent film producer, though in reality she’s an ex-cokehead on a trustfund now in four-day-a-week analysis. Sylvère had always thought of Isabelle as one of the wildest and most reckless girls. Therefore, he can’t wait to sound her on the Dick adventure. Isabelle listens carefully. “But Sylvère!” she says. “You’re crazy. You put yourself in danger.”

Back in Crestline, Chris sits hunched over her Toshiba. The truck is packed. She has a vague belief she’ll write to Dick throughout the trip. She has a vague belief that writing is the only possible escape to freedom. She doesn’t want to lose the drift. She types this story:

I wake up wired, tired, but still running on nervous energy. The sunlight hurts my eyes, my mouth’s still fuzzy from last night’s booze and cigarettes. The day’s not slowing down for me and I’m not ready.

Did we fuck? Yes …but the fuck seems insignificant beside the lengths we went to to get there. The daze I’m in right now seems realer. What’s there to say? It was sensationless, pro-forma.

When I got to Dick’s around 8 he was expecting me. ‘Date’ arrangements had been made: dimmed lights, reggae music on the stereo, vodka, condoms waiting by the bed though of course I didn’t see them until later. Dick’s place suddenly seemed like a cut-rate banquet hall or funeral parlor — generic props waiting to be cleared away for the arrival of the next corpse, bride, girl. Was I entering the same setting of seduction as poor Kyla?

I started out embarrassed and conciliatory, quite willing to admit I was a fly caught in the web of your enormous sex appeal, charisma. But then you deviated from the seducer’s role by freely voicing the contempt that lies beneath it. You asked me questions, held up my desire to the light as if it were a strange and mutant thing. As if it were a symptom of my uniquely troubled character. And how was I to answer? I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t want to fuck. Your questions made me feel ashamed. When I turned them back on you, you answered bored and noncommittally.

Because you patronize me and refuse to see the possible reversibility of our situations it is impossible for me to state my love for you as totally as I feel it. You make me backtrack, hesitate. Then later, confused and psychically dismantled, I fall into your arms. A last resort. We kiss. The obligatory first contact before fucking.

Months later, parts of Chris’ story would turn out to be remarkably prophetic.

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.

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.