Chris Kraus - I Love Dick

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.

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—

’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.