Free I Love Dick by Chris Kraus Page B

him for oh, a software engineer from Amherst, good for forty minute’s chat about restoring country houses. But he turned out to be a genius who read Latin, Spanish, French and Mayan and believed that Chrissy Hynde and Jimi Hendrix were avatars of Christ. David Drewelow lived out of a storage bin in Santa Fe, New Mexico and travelled round the country raising money for a Jesuit mission on the Guatemalan coast. More than a liberationist, he saw the church as the only force still capable of preserving vestiges of Mayan life. Of course Drewelow had read Simone Weil’s Gravity & Grace . He owned Plon’s first edition of it, recalled the thrill of finding it in Paris. For several hours we talked about Weil’s life, activism and mysticism, France and trade unions, Judaism and the Bhagavad Gita. I told him all about the title sequence I’d been making in Columbus for my movie, named after Weil’s book…pans across medieval battle maps and scenes superimposed with static WW2 aerial surveillance target maps…history moving constantly and sometimes visibly underneath the skin of the present. Meeting David Drewelow was like a miracle, an affirmation that some good still existed in the world.
    Back in Columbus, Bill Horrigan, Media Curator at the Wexner, asked me how I “really” managed to support myself. I was picking up the restaurant check and driving a new car and obviously this cover story about an art school teaching job fooled no one. “It’s simple,” I told him. “I take money from Sylvère.” Was Bill bothered that such a marginal sexless hag as me wasn’t living in the street? Unlike his favorites, Leslie Thornton and Beth B, I was difficult and unadorable and a Bad Feminist to boot.
    Oh Bill, you should’ve seen me in New York in 1983, vomiting in the street. I was bruised with malnutrition on the Bellevue Welfare Ward and hooked up to IV not knowing what was wrong because the City’s mandatory catastrophic care plan doesn’t cover diagnostic tests.
    â€œSylvère and I are Marxists,” I told Bill Horrigan. “He takes money from the people who won’t give me money and gives it to me.” Money’s abstract and our culture’s distribution of it is based on values I reject and it occurred to me that I was suffering from the dizziness of contradictions: the only pleasure that remains once you’ve decided you know better than the world.
    Accepting contradictions means not believing anymore in the primacy of “true feeling.” Everything is true and simultaneously. It’s why I hate Sam Shepard and all your True West stuff—it’s like analysis, as if the riddle could be solved by digging up the buried child.
    Dear Dick, today I drove across the panhandle of North Texas. I was incredibly excited when I hit the flatland west of Amarillo knowing that the Buried Cadillac piece would come up soon. Ten of them—a pop art monument to your car, fins flapping, heads buried in the dust. I passed it on the highway, turned back and took two photos of it for you.
    Dick, you may be wondering, if I’m so wary of the mythology you embrace, why’d my blood start pumping 15 miles west of Amarillo? Why’d I used to get dressed up to go meet JD Austin in the Night Birds Bar? So he could fuck me up the ass, then say he didn’t love me? Tight jeans, red lips and nails this morning, feeling really femme and like time for this isn’t on my side. It’s a culturalstudy. To be part of something else. Sylvère and I are twinned in our analytic bent, content with “scrambling the codes.” Oh Dick, you eroticize what you’re not, secretly hoping that the other person knows what you’re performing and that they’re performing too.
    Love,
Chris
    Brinkley, Arkansas
    December 19, 1994: 11 p.m.
    The Brinkley Inn
    Dear Dick,
    Tonight I actually felt like reading as much as writing you. Talking