Chris Kraus - I Love Dick

Last week at school Pam Strugar wondered why the brilliant girls all die. Both Katherine Mansfield and the philosopher Simone Weil lived lives of passionate intensity. Both died alone of tubercular starvation in rooms attached to flakey “institutes,” dreaming in their notebooks about childhood happiness and comfort at the age of 34.

It moved me so that tears came into my eyes.

For weeks they had been talking about Butterfly Creek. “Let’s go to But-ter-fly Creek!” Eric Johnson intoned, mimicking the plummy baritone of his father, the Reverend Cyril Johnson.

All January long there’d been record heat in Wellington. Miraculously still and cloudless days, sunlight glinting off the cars on Taranaki Street. That January all the offices shut down at 3 p.m. Clerks and typists mobbed the sandy crescent beach at Oriental Bay.

High up on The Terrace overlooking Willis Street, even the fieldstone stucco’d walls and lead-glass windows of the Vicarage gave no protection from the heat. But the Vicar and his wife, Vita-Fleur, who’d emigrated here from England after Cyril’d finished university and seminary school, were prepared for this colonial eventuality. All summer long Vita-Fleur made ginger-beer for her children. The recipe’d been handed down by her mother, an Anglican missionary’s wife who’d spent 16 hellish years in Barbados. Five great stone jugs of ginger-beer sat outside the kitchen-garden on The Terrace: enough to last at least that many New Zealand summers. Mother to Laura, Eric, Josephine and Isabel, Vita-Fleur was a large, conservatively-dressed, pigeon-breasted woman who’d married well. No more trundling round the globe to dark-skinned colonies. Cyril was acerbic, brilliant and everybody knew that he’d eventually be made a bishop. And Vita-Fleur’s mission was to set a good example of wifely domesticity at St. Stephen’s, the largest Anglican church in Wellington. Wellington is the capital of New Zealand. New Zealand is the cultural center of the whole Pacific Rim. Therefore, Vita-Fleur was a a role model to at least one third of the world.

(All rise, hats off, for the singing of the National Anthem at the 8 p.m. show on Saturday night at the Paramount on Courtney Place. Jaffas rolling down the aisles… Because the Paramount shows “popular” films, the audience is often mixed with Maoris…)

It was 2 p.m. that January Sunday afternoon at the Vicarage and the dinner plates had just been cleared away. Eric Johnson and Constance Green sat on the floor beside the window seat in the living room playing records. Both were in their teens. They had an ongoing debate about the merits of English folk-rock versus American rock & roll. Eric played Lydia Pence and Fairport Convention; Constance countered with Janis Joplin and Frank Zappa. Every 15 minutes the grownups (Cyril, Vita-Fleur and Constance’s parents, Louise and Jaspar Green) hollered from the bloated depth of armchairs to “TURN THE RECORD DOWN!” Eric’s sisters were reading Elle and English Vogue in their rooms upstairs, and Carla, Constance’s little sister, was outside playing in the garden. Dull-dull-dull. But for Eric and Constance, the promise of this summer afternoon was still not killed.

The Greens had only just arrived in New Zealand in December, emigrating from a Connecticut suburb about 20 miles northeast of Westport/Greenwich, Episcopal nirvana. The Johnson’s knowledge of geography did not extend to all the differences contained within the twenty miles between Bridgeport and Old Greenwich. Jaspar and Louise, both Anglophiles, were both still thrilled with their move to Wellington, which compared to Bridgeport was an epicenter of English-speaking culture. Meanwhile Eric and Constance circled round each other like two strange animals. Neither had met anyone like the other before.

That summer, Eric was permanently “home” from Wanganui Boy’s Collegiate. He’d been expelled. After putting up with six years of torture—beatings from school prefects, classmates, even younger boys; being picked last for every team; weeping in the toilets, the School decided Eric “lacked character.” That is, he wasn’t using queerness as a means of negotiating power in Wanganui Boy’s Collegiate hierarchy. He was a full-time queer. The very sight of him—blonde tousled hair, gray shirt tails, pale and thin as a pre-Raphaelite Ophelia—became disruptive to the school. “Sent down” (from Wanganui back to Wellington, New Zealand) at 17, Eric wanted to go straight to university. His parents refused. He was socially “not ready.” They insisted he attend the new, optional seventh-form, created for future math and science majors. Eric rebelled. In desperation, Cyril agreed to let Eric choose from any school in Wellington.

At 14, Constance was a jumble of orange polyester miniskirts, plastic earrings, dirty words. Louise and Jaspar, hoping to raise her shabby self-esteem, also decided to let Constance choose a school. She’d be going into Sixth Form. Constance and Eric’s first revelation to each other was that they’d both enrolled at Wellington Trades and Tech. It was a decision they’d each made separately and perversely and to the horror of their parents so of course they bonded instantly.

Located at the edges of the city’s only slum, Wellington Trades and Tech had an impressive Latin motto carved above the door: Qui Servum Magnum . But no one there could read it since the school had not taught Latin for at least 20 years. “He Who Serves Is Greatest.” Well, the future was no secret: lifetimes spent in auto body shops and typing pools. So everybody made the most of those last three years of school, getting stoned and fingerfucking each other in Biology and Study Hall.

Unlike his parents, who were impressed by the Green’s Connecticut credentials, Eric knew straight off that Constance’s cultural pretensions were strictly trailer-park. Tough-talking Constance became Eric’s creature, his Pygmalion. Their first job was to get rid of her hideous American accent, replace it with the educated Yorkshire intonations he’d picked up from his Dad. Eric told Constance what to read and what to listen to. Sometimes they reviewed scenes from her past life for Eric’s judicious editing. Eric approved of Constance’s political transgressions—suspended from elementary school for reading Lenny Bruce and leafletting for the Black Panthers. But all the rest would have to go—the shoplifting, the biker gangs and blowjobs, the arrests for drug possession, breaking and entry—were just too tacky.

All summer long Eric and Constance had the most fabulous adventures, unfolding like the pages of an Enid Blyton storybook. Nights, they hung out at the Chez Paree. Afternoons they caught the trolleybus and rode out around the bays, scaling volcanic rocks to watch the sunset. One day they packed a picnic lunch and went hiking in the hills above Karaka Beach, scene of Katherine Mansfield’s famous story “At The Bay.” Eric did a wicked impersonation of Mansfield’s alter-ego, Kezia, and they laughed so hard they didn’t notice when a Tasman fog came rolling in. Cyril himself drove out to find them. He looked so Midlands-serious with his torch and oilskin parka, like the man in the Gorton’s Fishcake ads, that Eric and Constance punched each other in the ribs to keep from laughing on the long ride home. “What a Dag!” (New Zealand slang for laugh or sheepshit), Constance learned to say. Eric had a color photo of a hippie-gypsy couple hitch-hiking beside a wheatfield, torn out of one of Laura’s Vogues . Could this be him and Constance?

Cyril’s voice droned on in favor of the Diocese’s liberal stand against apartheid to general clucks and nods. “Let’s go to Butterfly Creek!” Eric said again. “You drive out through Petone, turn right on Moonshine Road, drive past the Eastbourne Cattery. Did you know it’s owned by Alexander Trocchi’s former wife? She moved out here from London. You park up in the hills, and for the first two hours walking it’s native bush, all dark and jungly. And then you come out to a clearing, a meadow really, and there’s a brook and waterfall. And everywhere you look there’s butterflies.”