Chris Kraus - I Love Dick

“Well, actually I have a Friend (you somehow feminized the word) arriving for the weekend.”

“Oh” I said, this information dropping like a stone.

“What’s the matter?” you asked, seizing an idea. “Did I burst your balloon—destroy the fantasy?”

I struggled for a way to answer this without my clothes.

“I guess you were right about the disappointment. Probably if I’d known I wouldn’t’ve stayed.”

“What?” you laughed. “You think I’m cheating on you?”

Well this was very cruel, but loving you’d become a full-time job and I wasn’t ready to be unemployed. “No,” I said. “I don’t. You just have to help me find a way to make this more acceptable.”

“Acceptable?” you mimicked. “I don’t have to do anything for you.”

You were assuming a position, mockery heightening your face into a mask. Ultra-violence. Attack and kill.

“I don’t owe you anything. You barged in here, this was your game, your agenda, now it’s yours to deal with.”

I wasn’t anything at that moment except shock and disappointment.

Changing gears, you added archly: “I guess now you’ll start sending me hate letters. You’ll add me to your Demonology of Men.”

“No,” I said. “No more letters.”

I had no right to be angry and I didn’t want to cry. “You don’t have to be so militantly callous.”

You shrugged and made a point of looking at your hands.

“So militantly mean?” And then, appealing to your Marxist past, “So militantly against mystification?”

This brought a smile.

“Look,” I said, “I’ll admit that eighty percent of this was fantasy, projection. But it had to start with something real. Don’t you believe in empathy, in intuition?”

“What?” you said. “Are you telling me you’re schizophrenic?”

“No…, I just—” and then I lapsed into the pathetic. “I just—felt something for you. This strange connection. I felt it in your work, but before that too. That dinner we had three years ago with you and Jane, you flirted with me, you must’ve felt it—”

“But you don’t know me! We’ve had two or three evenings! Talked on the phone once or twice! And you project this shit all over me, you kidnap me, you stalk me, invade me with your games, and I don’t want it! I never asked for it! I think you’re evil and psychotic!”

“But what about my letter? When I left Sylvère I wrote it trying to break through this thing with you. No matter what I do you think it’s just a game but I was trying to be honest.”

(“Honesty of this order threatens order,” David Rattray’d written once about René Crevel and I was trying then to reach that point.)

I continued: “Do you have any idea how hard it was for me to call you? It was the hardest thing I’ve ever done. Harder than calling William Morris. You said to come. You must’ve known then what I wanted.”

“I didn’t need the sex,” you barked. And then a gentlemanly afterthought: “Though it was nice.”

By now the sun was very bright. We were still naked on the bed.

I said, “I’m sorry.”

But how could I explain? “It’s just—” I started, foraging through fifteen years of living in New York, the arbitrariness of art careers, or were they really arbitrary? Who gets to speak and why? David Rattray’s book sold only about 500 copies and now he’s dead. Penny Arcade’s original and real and Karen Finley’s fake and who’s more famous? Ted Berrigan died of poverty and Jim Brodey was evicted, started living in the park before he died of AIDS. Artists without medical insurance who’d killed themselves at the beginning of the onset so they wouldn’t be a burden to their friends… the ones who moved me most mostly lived and died like dogs unless like me they compromised.

“I hate ninety percent of everything around me!” I told you. “But then, the rest I really love. Perhaps too strongly.”

“I’d rethink that, if I were you,” you said. You were leaning up against a dusky wall. “I like 90 percent of everything I see, the rest I leave alone.” And I listened. You seemed so wise and radiant, and all the systems that I used to understand the world dissolved.

Of course the truth was messier. It was only Friday morning. The drive to Lake Casitas, the motel room, the percoset, the scotch were still to come. I lost my wallet, drove 50 miles to find it on 1/8 a tank of gas. There was still the phone call Sunday, meeting you for dinner and then the bar together Monday night. A production-number medley of all the highlights of the show. It wasn’t ’til I reached Ann Rower on Saturday on the phone that I stopped crying long enough to start shifting things around. Ann said: “Maybe Dick was right.” This seemed so radically profound. Could I accept your cruelty as a gift of truth? Could I even learn to thank you for it? (Though when I showed Ann the outline of this story, she said she never said that. Not even close.)

On Saturday I spent the night on Daniel Marlos’ couch. José made beans and carne asada. Daniel was working three jobs seven days a week to make money for an experimental film and not complaining. Sunday morning I walked through Eagle Rock down Lincoln Avenue to Occidental College. “Even here,” I sat writing in my notebook, “in this bunched together neighborhood, people are taking Sunday morning walks. The air smells like flowers.”

At the library I looked up Gravity & Grace by Simone Weil:

“It is impossible,” she wrote, “to forgive whoever has done us harm if that harm has lowered us. We have to think that it has not lowered us but revealed to us our true level.”

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.)