I Love Dick Read Online Free PDF Page A

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