by Chris Kraus
December 15, 1994
Sylvère gets off the plane in Paris, France. Seven thousand miles and 15 hours later he’s lost the drift of what it was in California that made writing love letters to his colleague seem like a good idea. He’s experiencing Virillian free-fall. His plastic hip is killing him. He carries Percoset and Darvon, searching everyday for the magic mix that’ll cut the pain without completely numbing him. Sylvère limps from his mother’s tenement apartment near the Bourse across the right bank to Bastille. Of course he hasn’t slept. At noon, it’s dark and freezing. He feels like an ancient animal. His first meeting is with Isabelle, an old acquaintance, sometime-lover from New York who’s acquired an important work of dubious provenance by Antonin Artaud. Nominally, Isabelle’s an independent film producer, though in reality she’s an ex-cokehead on a trustfund now in four-day-a-week analysis. Sylvère had always thought of Isabelle as one of the wildest and most reckless girls. Therefore, he can’t wait to sound her on the Dick adventure. Isabelle listens carefully. “But Sylvère!” she says. “You’re crazy. You put yourself in danger.”
Back in Crestline, Chris sits hunched over her Toshiba. The truck is packed. She has a vague belief she’ll write to Dick throughout the trip. She has a vague belief that writing is the only possible escape to freedom. She doesn’t want to lose the drift. She types this story:
EXHIBIT I: “LAST NIGHT AT DICK’S”
I wake up wired, tired, but still running on nervous energy. The sunlight hurts my eyes, my mouth’s still fuzzy from last night’s booze and cigarettes. The day’s not slowing down for me and I’m not ready.
Did we fuck? Yes …but the fuck seems insignificant beside the lengths we went to to get there. The daze I’m in right now seems realer. What’s there to say? It was sensationless, pro-forma.
When I got to Dick’s around 8 he was expecting me. ‘Date’ arrangements had been made: dimmed lights, reggae music on the stereo, vodka, condoms waiting by the bed though of course I didn’t see them until later. Dick’s place suddenly seemed like a cut-rate banquet hall or funeral parlor—generic props waiting to be cleared away for the arrival of the next corpse, bride, girl. Was I entering the same setting of seduction as poor Kyla?
I started out embarrassed and conciliatory, quite willing to admit I was a fly caught in the web of your enormous sex appeal, charisma. But then you deviated from the seducer’s role by freely voicing the contempt that lies beneath it. You asked me questions, held up my desire to the light as if it were a strange and mutant thing. As if it were a symptom of my uniquely troubled character. And how was I to answer? I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t want to fuck. Your questions made me feel ashamed. When I turned them back on you, you answered bored and noncommittally.
Because you patronize me and refuse to see the possible reversibility of our situations it is impossible for me to state my love for you as totally as I feel it. You make me backtrack, hesitate. Then later, confused and psychically dismantled, I fall into your arms. A last resort. We kiss. The obligatory first contact before fucking.
Months later, parts of Chris’ story would turn out to be remarkably prophetic.
EXHIBIT J: HER LONG DRIVE ACROSS AMERICA
Flagstaff, Arizona
December 16, 1994
The Hidden Village Motel
Dear Dick,
I got here around 10, 11 last night depending on which time zone you figure, wondering if I can really drive another 3000 miles. The town is wall-to-wall motels, and the billboards advertise a race war between the local rednecks (“American Owned and Operated”) and the Indian immigrant majority who offer “British Hospitality.” Competition keeps the prices down to 18 bucks a night.
This morning I woke up early and outside it was brilliantly cold and clear, that bright almost-weatherless mountain kind of cold with frosty ground. I made coffee and took Mimi for a walk back behind the train tracks through a scabby mix of low-rent complexes and trailer parks. 200 Dollars Moves You In to Blackbird Roost.
Walking, I thought about you or about the “project.” How I’m realizing that even though the movie “failed” I’m left with a wider net of freedom than I’ve ever had before.
For two years I was shackled to Gravity & Grace everyday; every stage of it an avalanche of impossibility that I dismantled into finite goals. It didn’t matter, finally, that the film was good or that I wrote 10 upbeat faxes every day, that I was accountable, available, no matter how I felt.
Anyway Dick, I tried my best but it still failed. No Rotterdam, no Sundance, no Berlin…just neg cut problems in New Zealand that drag on. For two years I was sober and asexual every day, every ounce of psychic anima was channeled into 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…
…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 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 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.
“Sylvère 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 cultural study. 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 on the phone to An
n, my family, took the edge off.
Everything felt so dismal earlier today in Oklahoma I gave up trying to make good time. I needed to adjust to Northeast landscape. By 2 o’clock the green started looking pretty, and I got off the Interstate in Ozark and walked in a park beside the river. Golden green and blue. In the car I started thinking, once I accept the failure of Gravity & Grace it won’t matter anymore what I do—once you’ve accepted total obscurity you may as well do what you want. The landscape in the park reminded me of Ken Kobland’s films…that bit of video that The Wooster Group used in LSD…camera stumbling around the woods, end of winter, stark blue sky, patches of snow still left on the scabby ground…as evocative as anything of that moment when you’re starting to Get Off. Ken really is a genius. His work is pure intentionality, everything is effortless and loaded and I learned how to make films by watching his.
And now the femme trip’s over. Everything’s different being back in the Northeast. I’m back to basic camouflage. Good country & western song on the radio today: I Like My Women A Little On The Trashy Side.
Since this is such a dead-letter night, Dick, perhaps I’ll transcribe a few notes that I made in the car:
“12:30 Central Time, Saturday, now in Texas. Looks just like New Mexico. Thinking about Dick’s video—the sentiment, Sam Sheppard cowboy stuff, is a cypher. The video was shown in response to my criticism of Sylvère’s sentimentality when he writes fiction. I said, you have to do what you’re smartest at, i.e., where you’re most alive. Then Dick pulled the video out as a manifesto or defense of sentiment.”
LATER THAT DAY—
“I’m in Shamrock now—great emptiness. It feels like a resting point or destination. I forgot to mention, D., the menorah on your refrigerator—that impressed us.”
THE NEXT MORNING—
“I guess the Northeast hit overnight. When I got out of the motel this morning I was no longer West but East in Shawnee, Oklahoma—there’re hills and clumps of skinny trees and lakes and rivers. It’ll be the same now ’til I hit New York—a landscape full of dreary childhood memories I have no use for. There’s a teariness about the worn-down hills and shivering trees, like in Jane Bowles’ story Going to Massachusetts, emotion overwhelms this landscape ’cause it’s so unmonumental. It elicits little fugues of feeling I’m not ready for. The desert overwhelms you with its own emotion but this landscape brings up feelings that’re far too personal. That come inside out, from me. The West is Best, right? I’m nauseous and asleep and the coffeepot is buried underneath the washstand I bought in Shamrock. But all will change. I miss you—
