I Love Dick

by Chris Kraus

  Dear Dick I think you won. I’m totally obsessed with you. Chris will be driving across America. We have to talk this over—

  Sylvère

  What do you think of that, Dick? I promise not to do you any harm. I mean, I’m on my way to France to see my family, they have security at the airport, I can’t afford to be caught carrying a gun. But it’s time to put an end to this craziness. You can’t go on messing people’s lives up like this.

  Love,

  Sylvère

  Chris and Sylvère laugh hysterically, sitting on the floor. Because Chris is a 90 wpm typist she and Sylvère maintain eye contact while he talks. Sylvère’s never been so prolific. After plodding along at a rate of about 5 pages a week on Modernism & The Holocaust he’s exhilarated by how fast the words accrue. They take turns giving DICK-tation. Everything is hilarious, power radiates from their mouths and fingertips and the world stands still.

  Crestline, California

  December 10, 1994

  Dear Dick,

  Two days ago Sylvère and I were discussing methods of disposing of dead bodies. I thought the best place might be in a rural storage facility. We visited one this week in Crestline and it occurred to me that a body could be left for quite some time so long as the rent was paid. Sylvère, however, objected that the corpse would rot and smell. We discussed refrigeration, but as far as I recall the bins have no electric outlets.

  Highway medians are a notorious place for corpse disposal, and a real commentary on the public architecture of the ’80s, wouldn’t you say? Like Self Serve Filling Stations (and doesn’t that description say it all?) they’re a densely yet anonymously travelled public space where no one seems to be in charge. You don’t see people picnicking around the highway, do you? It’s not a place where children play. Medians are seen only from fast moving vehicles: a perfect condition for disposing of remains.

  For a long time now I’ve been interested in dismemberment. Did you ever read about the Monika Beerle murder in the East Village, circa 1989? The case was apocryphal of conditions in New York at that time. Monika’d come from Switzerland to study Martha Graham dance. She made money part-time topless dancing at Billy’s Lounge. She met a guy named Daniel Rakowitz hanging around the outside of her building and she liked him. One thing led to another and she invited Daniel to move in. Maybe with someone sharing rent she could cut down on dancing? But putting up with Daniel Rakowitz was worse than Billy’s Lounge. He disappeared for days, then brought groups of crazy people from the Park back home. She said he’d have to leave. But Daniel wanted Monika’s rent-stabilized apartment lease. And maybe he set out to kill her, ’cause the New York City Council, in the wake of AIDS, had passed a bill entitling non-related roomates to inherit leases of the deceased. Or maybe he just hit her in the throat with the broom handle accidentally too hard. But Daniel Rakowitz found himself alone on 10th Street with her corpse.

  Getting rid of bodies in Manhattan must be very hard. It’s bad enough trying to get out to the Hamptons without a car or credit card. A carpenter friend loaned him a chainsaw. Parting out the arms-legs-head. He jammed the different body parts in garbage bags and hit the street like Santa Claus. A leg turned up at Port Authority Bus Terminal in the trash. Monika’s thumb came floating to the surface of some Welfare Soup in Tompkins Square Park.

  And then there was the airline pilot in Connecticut who killed his wife, strapped a rented woodchipper onto the bed of his pickup truck and drove around the streets of Groton in a snowstorm, chipper whirling skin and bones. Sylvère says this story reminds him of the Romance of Perceval. The blood must’ve been a sight.

  Speaking of Sylvère, he now thinks the best way of disposing of a body would be to cement a basketball hoop above it. This presumes a suburban setting (perhaps like yours). The land I own is in the Town of Thurman, upstate New York, 3000 miles away—although I will be driving there next week.

  Dick, did you realize you have the same name as the murdered Dickie in Patricia Highsmith’s Ripley books? A name connoting innocence and amorality, and I think Dick’s friend and killer confronted problems much like these.

  Love,

  Chris

  Crestline, California

  December 10, 1994

  Dear Dick,

  On December 15 I’ll be leaving Crestline to drive our pickup truck and personal belongings and our miniature wire-haired dachshund Mimi back to New York. Six or seven days, three thousand miles. I will drive across America thinking of you. The Idaho Potato Museum, every landmark that I pass, will draw me closer to the next and they’ll all be meaningful and alive ’cause they’ll trigger different thoughts of you. We will do this trip together. I will never be alone.

  Love,

  Chris

  Crestline, California

  December 10, 1994

  Dear Dick,

  I bet if you could’ve done this with Jane you never would’ve broken up with her, right? Do you envy our perversity? You’re so priggish and judgmental but deep down I bet you’d like to be like us. Don’t you wish you had someone else to do it with?

  Your friend,

  Sylvère

  Crestline, California

  December 10, 1994

  Dear Dick,

  Sylvère and I have just decided to drive out to Antelope Valley and post these letters all around your house and on the cactuses. I’m not sure yet whether we’ll hang around next door with a video camera (machete) to document your arrival, but we’ll let you know what we decide.

  Love,

  Chris

  Crestline, California

  December 10, 1994

  Dear Dick,

  We’ve decided to publish this correspondence and were wondering if you’d like to write an introduction? It could read something like this:

  “I found this manuscript in the drawer of an old kitchen cabinet that I picked up at the Antelope Valley Swapmeet. It makes strange reading. Obviously, these people are very sick. I don’t think there’s much film potential in it because none of the characters are likeable.

  “Still, I believe these letters will interest the reader as a cultural document. Obviously they manifest the alienation of the postmodern intellectual in its most diseased form. I really feel sorry for such parasitic growth, that feeds upon itself…”

  What do you think?

  Love,

  Sylvère

  PS: Could you Express Mail us a copy of your latest book, The Ministry of Fear? We feel that if we’re going to write for you we should get more familiar with your style.

  Love,

  Chris

  Crestline, California

  December 10, 1994

  Dear Dick,

  Chris and I have spent the whole morning lying around with our computer thinking about you. Do you think this whole affair was just a means for Chris and me to finally have sex? We tried this morning but I think we’ve gone too far into our morbid imaginations. Chris continues to take you seriously. She thinks I’m sick, now she’ll never touch me again. I don’t know what to do. Please help—

  Love,

  Sylvère

  PS: Thinking about it further, these letters seem to open up a new genre, something in between cultural criticism and fiction. You told us how you hope to revamp the writing program at your institution along these lines. Would you like me to read from it in my Critical Studies Seminar when I visit next March? It seems to be a step towards the kind of confrontational performing art that you’re encouraging.

  Regards,

  Sylvère

  By now it was 2 o’clock in the afternoon. Sylvère was triumphant, Chris was desperate. All she’d really wanted, for the past seven days was a chance to kiss and fuck Dick ——, and now all hope was receding, their meeting grew more distant every day, leaving everfewer pretexts for her to call. Clearly the letters were unsendable. And Sylvère was so excited by their writing, and aroused by it, and he knew that if there wasn’t another event soon, another point of contact to f
uel Chris’ expectations, all this would end. For all these reasons, the pair decided they would write a fax.

  FAX TO: DICK ——

  FROM: CHRIS KRAUS & SYLVÈRE LOTRINGER

  DATE: DECEMBER 10, 1994

  Dear Dick,

  It’s a pity that we missed each other Sunday morning. It’s funny, both of us thought a lot about your video—so much that we’ve had an idea for a collaborative piece, inspired by and hopefully involving you. It’s kind of like, Calle Art. We’ve written about 50 pages over the last few days and were hoping we could shoot something with you out in Antelope Valley soon before we leave (Dec. 14).

  Basically our idea was to paste the text we’ve written all over your car, house and cactus garden. We (i.e., Sylvère) would videotape me (i.e., Chris) doing this—probably a wideshot of all the papers flapping in the breeze. Then, if you like, you could enter and discover it.

  I guess the piece is all about obsession, although we wouldn’t think of using images that belong to you without your agreeing to it. What do you think? Are you game?

  Best regards,

  Chris & Sylvère

  But of course the fax was never sent. Instead, Sylvère left one more message on Dick’s answering machine:

  “Hi Dick, it’s Sylvère. I’d like to talk to you about an idea I had, a collaborative piece we could do before I leave on Wednesday. I hope you won’t find it too crazy. Call me back.”

  Expecting no more response from Dick than they’d had all week, Chris left to do some errands in San Bernardino. But at 6:45 p.m. that Saturday, December 10, around the time that she was driving up the mountain, he called.

  Upper Crestline seemed so dismal that night. A liquor store, a pizza parlor. A single row of woodframe facaded storefronts from the ’50s, Depression-era recollections of the West, half boarded up. Wendy and Michael Tolkin had visited last month with their two daughters. Michael’s film The New Age had just come out, following his other great films, The Rapture and The Player. He was a Hollywood intellectual and Wendy was the wittiest and nicest psychotherapist Sylvère and Chris had ever met. After expressing their delight in Crestline’s quaint-ness, Wendy remarked: It must be very lonely living in a place you don’t belong. Chris and Sylvère had no children, three abortions, and they’d been shuttling between low-rent rural slums on both coasts for the past two years in order to put money into Chris’ film. And of course Michael, who was Sylvère’s friend, really, because Sylvère was someone in LA who knew more than he about French theory, couldn’t, wouldn’t, do anything to help her with the film.

  When Chris got home and Sylvère told her he’d talked to Dick, she nearly swooned. “I don’t want to know!” she cried. And then she wanted to know everything. “I have a little present, a surprise,” he said, showing her the audiotape. Chris looked at Sylvère as if seeing him for the first time. Taping their phone call was such a violation. It gave her a kind of creepy feeling, like the time the writer Walter Abish’d discovered the tape recorder Sylvère had hidden underneath the table when they were having drinks. Sylvère laughed it off, calling himself a Foreign Agent. But to be a spy is being no one. Still, Chris had to hear it now.

  EXHIBIT C: TRANSCRIPT OF A PHONE CONVERSATION BETWEEN DICK ——AND SYLVÈRE LOTRINGER

  December 10, 1994: 6:45 p.m.

  D: So, could we talk about the possibility of your coming out in the next semester—

  S: Yeah. I guess the easiest for me would be between March 10 and 20. Do you want me to do something about cultural anthropology? Is that what you’re doing now?

  D: If it’s not something you’re interested in, we can maybe, uh, forget about it but—(inaudible).

  S: Yeah?

  D: (inaudible)—I don’t know if you’d be enthusiastic about you know summarizing James Clifford and other discourses around anthropology, but if you want to do something more original, more, uh, primary, it’s up to you.

  S: Okay. And the fee would be 2500 dollars for two lectures and one seminar?

  D: Two lectures and a seminar and maybe some studio visits.

  S: Oh. Marvin said the crits paid extra…500 dollars more?

  D: Uh, look, I’ll see what I can do. I hope coming here is worth your while.

  S: (inaudible) Well, I want it to be worth your while too.

  D: We’ll get a clearer picture of what’s coming up in the semester in the next couple of weeks, and well, I can phone you in New York. (Inaudible)

  S: Well, that’s what I wanted to talk to you about. We—I want to sound you about a project that’s a little weird, but I know you don’t mind things that are weird—(laughs)—(silence) Right?

  D: I don’t think so, it depends. There’s weird and weird. There’s weird, and there’s impossible weird. Impossible weird is more interesting.

  S: Well okay, I might have something you’re looking for then. (Laughs) Well, let me—it’s a, uh, it’s a collaborative project we were thinking of possibly doing before we leave on Wednesday, otherwise we’d have to postpone it to the end of January. And, uh, it started really with our visit to your place. And how we didn’t reconnect in the morning—

  D: (Inaudible)

  S: Yeah, it was very odd. And then you—

  D: I got back about 10:30 and you’d gone.

  S: Uh huh, uh huh.

  D: I’d crept out the back. I didn’t expect you to know that I’d done that, but I thought I’d find you here so that was very weird.

  S: Uh huh. Chris thought that somehow you were in your bed and you were just waiting for us to leave because you were in a different mood.

  D: (Inaudible)

  S: Yeah?

  D: I’d just gone out and done a few errands and—I’m a bit of an insomniac so I’d driven around to Pear Blossom and Palmdale and I picked up some eggs and bacon. That was what I’d been doing.

  S: Uh huh. So. What happened was, we had a very strange thing, I don’t know how I can summarize it but basically, Chris felt very attracted to you.

  D: (Snickers, exhales)

  S: And uh, then we started talking about it, and writing you letters?

  D: (Laughs, exhales)

  S: (Laughs) and uh, these letters included you, both as yourself and as some sort of object of, you know, seduction or desire or fascination or something, and then—Well, I wrote a letter and she wrote a letter and we planned to send them to you and get you involved in a kind of fax correspondence. But somehow it got a little out of hand and we started riffing around it and getting paranoid and writing all these letters.

  D: (Laughs, exhales)

  S: And it kind of grew…into a, um, 20, 30, 40 pages and then it became impossible to send you that or sound you about it or involve you (laughs)—So we thought maybe we should do something a little bit more drastic to involve you in some way, and that’s what I wanted to sound you about. We, uh, we got the idea that maybe we should just go back to your place before we leave on Monday or Tuesday with a video camera. Is that something you would like? I mean, I didn’t want you to feel invaded in your territory and all that, but basically it would turn into some kind of an art piece with a text that could be, maybe, hanged on the cactuses and your car and something like that? And you’d come upon it and you know, we’d basically improvise from there.

  D: (Inaudible)

  S: The Invasion of the Heart Snatchers. Uh, it’s a Calle Art piece. You know, like Sophie Calle? (Laughs) And it involves—I mean we’ve been caught up in a strange storm for several days, it just got a little out of hand—in our emotions and there’s all these ups and downs where we connect and disconnect and somehow it seems so strange that you may not be connected to it at all, because we were totally convinced that you were a part of it—(Laughs)—But then we couldn’t get hold of you, and, well, I don’t know if you had a sense of it but we had such storm in a teapot here. (Laughs)

  D: You mean a—tempest?

  S: (Laughs) Yeah. Anyway what do you think about it?

  D: Well I, I, uh, I need a
little bit of breathing space to work out the—, wade through what you’ve told me—(Laughs) But uh, I mean it’s—if we can just ah… Let me think about it yet.

  S: Of course.

  D: And I’ll phone you back tomorrow and say what my dreams are and—kind of—creating a disposition in relation to this project.

  S: Okay that’s perfectly legitimate. In any case we liked your piece a lot, the video, seeing you rambling got us rambling too. After all, Chris is a filmmaker and she’s working in video too.

  D: Maybe the timing isn’t great but the timing never is, I suppose. Let’s think about it and I’ll give you a call tomorrow.

  S: Okay we’ll be here all day.

  D: Thank you for letting me in on the secret. I will think about it. Bye bye.

  S: Okay you too. Yes don’t tell anyone. Take care. Bye bye.

  And then Chris went alone into her room and wrote a letter, thinking she would send it, about sex and love. She was all confused about wanting to have sex, sensing that at this point if she slept with Dick the whole thing would be over. THE—UNEXAMINED—LIFE—IS NOT—WORTH—LIVING flashed the titles of a Ken Kobland film against the backbeat of a carfuck 1950s song. “As soon as sex takes place, we fall,” she wrote, thinking, knowing from experience, that sex short circuits all imaginative exchange. The two together get too scary. So she wrote some more about Henry James. Although she really wanted both. “Is there a way,” she wrote in closing, “to dignify sex, make it as complicated as we are, to make it not grotesque?”

  Sylvère must’ve known that she was writing and at the same moment, in his room, he wrote:

  “Dear Dick, it’s funny how things have a way of turning around. Just when I thought I was taking some initiative I find myself in the position of the Dumb Dick, pushed around by other people’s drives. Actually what hurt me most was how confused and disoriented Chris was, reverting to her reaction to younger crushes that I wasn’t around to witness the first time. And then the difference between our ages widened to the half century. And I felt old and sad. And yet we’re sharing something.”