Free I Love Dick by Chris Kraus

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.
    Love,
Chris
    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…
    â€¦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.
    Back in the car I started thinking about the Orphan Plan, how what you “want” (our life in East Hampton) can suddenly seem repugnant. What a torture for someone from the Central American rain forest to have to live in East Hampton and attend Springs School.
    Somewhere on the drive the whole sex/Dick thing disappeared. I guess I’m ready to go back to asexuality for another year. I don’t know what I’m driving towards…
    And later thinking about John Weiner’s Poem for Vipers —
    Soon I know the fuzz will
    interrupt, will arrest Jimmy and I
    shall be placed on probation. The poem
    does not lie to us. We lie
    under its law, the glamour of this hour …
    What were his career strategies? Hah. Pessimism’s what Lindsay Shelton liked so much about Gravity & Grace and now it’s clear the film has no chance in movie terms. I may as well own it but ohhh, I thought there’d be more movies after G & G . If there are no movies I need to figure out what it’s gonna be.
    And now Sylvère’s confused and ready to disown this whole escapade, and he’s mad at Jean-Jacques Lebel for his depiction of Félix and he’s mad at Josephine’s boyfriend for writing a book about the pair. But