I don’t know what I’ll do with this writing, & I don’t know what I’ll do if because of circumstances of your own, Dick, it proves impossible to connect with you. Before I started writing I flashed forward briefly to a scene two weeks from now when I visit you: alone in bed the next day at the Pear Blossom Best Western with a bottle of scotch & two fresh percoset refills. But when I’m feeling (rarely) suicidal it’s ’cause I’m stuck and right now I feel very much alive.
But all I want right now, if nothing else, is for you to read this, so you’ll know at least some of what you’ve done for me.
ROUTE 126
And then everything came to pass almost exactly like I thought it would. The preset lights and music, the smokey kiss, the bed. Stumbling sunblind round the driveway the next morning. The motel scotch, the percoset. But that was just a story. Reality is in the details and even if you can predict what’s going to happen you can’t imagine how you’ll feel.
It’s taken me eleven months to write this letter since our visit. Here’s how it began:
Pear Blossom Best Western
Februay 24, 1995
Dear Dick,
Yesterday afternoon I was driving towards Lake Casitas in sheets of grief and rage. I hadn’t started crying yet, just a little welling up of tears around the eyes. But shaking, shaken, so much I couldn’t see the road in front of me or stay in the right lane…
Ann Rower says “When you’re writing in real time you have to revise a lot.” By this I think she means that every time you try and write the truth it changes. More happens. Information constantly expands.
Eagle Rock, Los Angeles
January 17, 1996
Dear Dick,
Three weeks before I met you I caught a Sun Charter Jet Vacation plane to Cancun, Mexico alone en route to Guatemala. I was wrapped in blankets with laryngitis and a temperature of 102. When the plane landed I was crying: low concrete molds of airport seen through a veil of misty tears. All fall I’d been living in Crestline, California with Sylvère, my husband, pretty much against my will. I thought I’d spend September in Wellington putting Gravity & Grace through the lab, then on to festivals in Rotterdam, Berlin and France. But in August Jan Bieringa, my contact in New Zealand, stopped returning calls. Finally in October she called me from an airport to say the plug was pulled. The funders hated it. The major European festivals hated it. I was sitting up in Crestline broke and 14,000 dollars short of finishing the film. Michelle at Fine Cut faxed from Auckland to say that 10,000 numbers on the Canadian EDL were fucked. Would I rather she just throw away the film?
For three weeks I’d been bursting into tears so often it became a phenomenological question: at what point should we still say “crying” or instead describe the moments of “not-crying” as punctuation marks in a constant state of tears? I’d completely lost my voice and my eyes were swollen closed. The doctor at the Crestline clinic looked at me like I was crazy when I asked him for a “sleeping cure.”
I was going to Guatemala because I’d heard Jennifer Harbury talk about her hunger strike on NPR. Jennifer Harbury, briefly married to the captured Mayan rebel leader Efraim Bamaca, said: “It’s my last chance to save his life.” It’s unlikely at that moment—three years after Bamaca’s disappearance and 17 days into the hunger strike—that Harbury, a life-long activist, had much illusion Bamaca was alive. But the human interest story she created let her speak against the Guatemalan army in Time and People magazine. “The only thing unusual about this case,” Harbury told the press, “is that if a Guatemalan spoke as I do, they would be dead. They would be immediately dead.” Harbury’s voice was quick and light but formidably informed. Her heroic savvy Marxism evoked a world of women that I love—communists with tea roses and steel-trap minds. Hearing her that November in the car made me reflect, however briefly, that perhaps the genocide of the Guatemalan Indians (150,000 people, in a country of six million, disappeared and tortured in ten years) was an injustice of a higher order than my art career.
I caught a taxi to a bus station outside the tourist zone and bought a one-way ticket to Chetumal. Blasts of radio and diesel fumes. I liked the bus’s springy orange seats, the broken windows. I imagined it being driven someplace in America maybe thirty years before. Tulsa, Cincinnati, sometime before the sectoring of cities, a time when not just derelicts rode buses and people in bars and streets crossed between different modes and walks of life. Sex and commerce, transience and mystery. The dozen other riders on the bus to Chetumal all seemed employed. It was six weeks before the peso crashed and Mexico seemed like an actual country, not just a free-world satellite. When the diesel engine finally kicked over I wasn’t crying anymore. Radio music blared. A lead blanket lifted off my chest as we drove south through towns and villages. Banana trees and palms, people passing food and money through the windows everytime we hit another town. It didn’t matter who I was. Cypress yielded to bamboo as the amperage of the sun faded slowly down.
At that moment (November 9, 1994) Jennifer Harbury was on the 29th day of her hunger strike outside the Guatemala City government buildings in the Parque Nacional. She was sleeping in a garbage bag because tents were not allowed.
“I learned that if you see stars,” she told the journalist Jane Slaughter later, “which after day 20 was every ten minutes, you bend down and tie your shoelaces. After awhile you know you’re starting to die. I didn’t want to lie down. They were going to drag me to a hospital, strap me down and put me on IV so I didn’t want anyone to think that I’d passed out.”
At that moment Bamaca had already been reported ‘killed in action’ by the Guatemalan army for three years. But when Harbury legally forced the exhumation of his body it turned out to be another man’s. In 1992 Bamaca’s friend Cabrero Lopez escaped from a military prison with the news he’d seen Bamaca being tortured by some soldiers trained at a US army base. Two years later was there any chance that he was still alive?
In a photo taken just before the hunger strike Jennifer Harbury looked like Hillary Clinton on a budget: a well-proportioned face with good WASP bones, blonde tousled bubble-cut, a cheap tweed coat, clear gaze and and heavy knowing eyes. But four weeks later, starving, Jennifer looks more like Sandy Dennis after five martinis in Who’s Afraid Of Virginia Woolf? The resolution in her face has broken down, she’s running now on something we can’t see beyond the openness, confusion. Jennifer Harbury was a zealot with a Harvard law degree camped out in a park in Guatemala City on a garbage bag. Passersbys look at her with fear and wonder, a strange animal like Coco Fusco’s native on display in Two Undiscovered AmerIndians Visit… Yet Jennifer is not a saint because she never loses her intelligence.
This letter’s taken almost a year to write and therefore it’s become a story. Call it Route 126. On Thursday night I got off a plane from JFK to LAX. I was going to your house, if not by invitation, at least with your consent. “I don’t feel so sunny and terrific or able to pull things off,” I wrote somewhere over Kansas. “I’m ragged, tired and unsure. But WWBWB. On the other side of sleep I could feel different—” And then I dozed but still I didn’t.