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.
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 Ann, 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.”