Free I Love Dick by Chris Kraus Page A

Sylvère, Félix and Josephine were French theory’s Sid and Nancy…
    Tomorrow’s another time zone (Central) and the Texas panhandle. Then Oklahoma, then the South. I bought three pairs of earrings yesterday in Gallup.
    Dick, it’s hard for me to access you tonight. All your cowboy/loner stuff seems silly.
    Chris

    As Chris drove East she felt herself being sucked forward into a time tunnel. Christmas was getting closer. There were more Christmas songs on the radio, more Christmas decorations in every little town, as if Christmas was a cloud that descended on New York and feathered out across the West in broken strands. She was literally losing time by crossing time zones to the east and driving pulled her farther away from what she knew. It was like that spatial/optical illusion, being in a car stalled in a single lane of traffic. You panic ’cause you think your car is moving by itself and then you realize it’s the other cars that’re moving. Yours is standing still.
    Shawnee, Oklahoma
    December 18, 1994: 11:30 Central Standard Time
    The American Motel ($25 a night)
    Well Dick,
    I got lost in Oklahoma City, nearly out of gas and couldn’t find a room. The motel in the AAA book turned out to be a fuck palace by a topless bar and everything else was full. It took another hour driving to find a vacancy here in Shawnee. There’s a meat works right across the road.
    By the time I realized I was on the wrong Oklahoma City bypass there was construction and it was too late to get off. I had to drive the 50 miles of loop. Panic flashed me back to when I was travelling between New York, Columbus and Los Angeles last year.
    Panic. Late winter 1993: Getting off the plane from LA in Columbus around midnight, suddenly and brutally ejected from the tube of business travel into the reality that Radisson and Hyatt, airline platinum cards and Hertz Preferred all insulate you from. The car I’d driven from New York was being fixed at the Columbus Subaru dealership under warranty. I caught a taxi to the auto mall industrial park zone 15 miles outside the city. The duplicate car key was ready. But when we got there the car was nowhere to be found. Suddenly after seven hours in the tube, motel-taxi-plane-to-taxi I’m left at 1 a.m. standing under car yard klieg lights in the snow, guard dogs howling. The driver took me to the city, all barriers between us broken down, and he’s ranting about wogs and how reading William Burroughs made him different from all the other cab drivers in Columbus and could I tell him how to make a living as an artist? Well, no.
    And then the next day, driving through northeast blizzards, West Virginia, Pennsylvania, torn inside out. It was that Piscean time of year. I thought the snow would never melt—white everywhere and skinny shaken stakes of Northeast trees. Insulation makes us increasingly unable to respond to weather. All that month I was seized by this unnameable emotion. Nature’s vengeance. The week I spent doing post-production at the Wexner Center in Columbus I was sick with Crohn’s Disease, as if my body was negating the illusion of momentum. Functioning over waves of pain by day, throwing up at night, it’s like a hysteria of the organs, walls of the intestine swollen so it’s impossible to eat or even drink a glass of water.
    The week before on the plane ride from Columbus to Dallas the entire business cabin’s filled with salesmen from the Pepsi-Cola Corporation. The one beside me’s drunk and wants to talk about his reading habits, his passion for Len Deighton, let me out oh no. And then we’re stuck in Dallas because a blizzard grounded the connection from Chicago…and it was there in the Garden Room of the DFW Hilton that I met David Drewelow, the Jesuit priest.
    That night I felt like something had been sucked out of me and meeting David Drewelow replaced it. Making eye contact in the restaurant line I mistook