Collected Essays (74 page)

Also in 2002, I reprised the theme of the beleaguered Silicon Valley native in my novel
Spaceland
, which is a thematic sequel to Abbott’s
Flatland
. Not many people are aware of it, but
Flatland
was set on December 31, 1999, and I set
Spaceland
then as well. Joe Cube, a middle manager at a computer company, receives a Y2K visit from a being from the fourth dimension.

In both
As Above, So Below
and
Spaceland
, I created my characters out of whole cloth. As I get older, the idea of modeling my characters on myself and my friends seems less and less like a viable commercial proposition. Most readers aren’t interested in old people!

For my twenty-fifth book, I decided to write a fat science-fiction novel, an epic galaxy-spanning adventure. I’d never tried to hit the long ball before. To get in the spirit, I read Tolkein’s
Lord of the Rings
for the first time. I wanted to write something that I could have read aloud to my own kids, and I made my hero a twelve-year-old boy named Frek. Frek goes on a quest for a potion to restore the ruined ecology of year 3003 Earth: the title is
Frek and the Elixir
.

In order to organize my long book, I decided to employ a technique of object-oriented software engineering, that is, to base my work’s design on a well-tested pattern. I made a close study of Joseph Campbell’s,
The Hero With a Thousand Faces
—another book I’d never happened to read before. Campbell identifies seventeen possible stages of the universally recurring monomyth, and I decided to write one chapter for each stage. In the event,
Frek and the Elixir
grew so long that I compressed two pairs of stages into single chapters, making fifteen chapters in all.

In 2002, while I was working on
Frek and the Elixir
, I took a semester’s sabbatical from SJSU, finding a position in Brussels as a guest of the Flemish Academy of Arts and Sciences. Sylvia joined me for about half of the time. A house believed to have been Bruegel’s studio and dwelling place still stands in Brussels. I received my first printed copy of my Bruegel novel, and that night I walked alone past the master’s old house in the rain. I felt that his spirit was at my side. He said he liked my book, and I was glad.

Also while in Brussels, I learned that there had been a “Ruckers” family of harpsichord-builders in Antwerp in the sixteenth century, and that one of them, Andreas Ruckers, had belonged to the same guild as Peter Bruegel! It’s probable that the Peter Rucker who came to America in 1690 was from the Antwerp clan.

The sabbatical semester proved to be so heady a taste of freedom that, in the end, it made me unwilling to stay in academic harness. In the spring of 2004, I retired from teaching. The endless hours of keyboarding and mousing were getting to me. The California state budget was a mess, and our teaching loads and committee obligations were going up. I felt like I was beginning to repeat myself in my lectures. And I longed to spend my remaining years on what I love most: writing and traveling.

The whole family in Santa Cruz, 2009: two daughters, two sons-in-law, one son, one daughter-in-law, four grandchildren.

As a farewell to computers, I wrote a substantial book about computation and reality. I’d meant to write this work much earlier on, but I’d gotten in too deep to have enough time or perspective. You might say that I went native on the Silicon Valley story. But now, with my teaching load gone, I had the time to step back and figure out what I’d been doing for the last eighteen years.

I’d written a first draft of the book in Brussels, where I was teaching a course on for the philosophy department at the University of Leuven. I’d jokingly entitled these lecture notes
Early Geek Philosophy
. Hoping for a better-than-usual advance for my tome about computation and reality, I engaged the prominent science-book agent John Brockman. He helped me work out the proposal, and we adopted the title,
The Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul
. As of Fall, 2004, I’m putting the finishing touches on the book. I’ll probably add a long, explanatory subtitle:
What Gnarly Computation Taught Me About Ultimate Reality, the Meaning of Life, and How To Be Happy
.

Like many writers, I spend too much time fretting about the relative success of my books. But I also work at being grateful for what I have. After all, the vast majority of people don’t get published at all. My books are printed and find a substantial audience; I get money and respect in return. I’m lucky to have the ability to write.

I revel in the craft of writing; I like being able to control these little worlds where things work out the way I want. My emotional makeup is such that it doesn’t require any special exercise of willpower to stay focused during the weeks and months that it takes to turn out a book. Writing is simply what I like to do. If anything, it could be that I’m a bit compulsive about my writing, preferring it to the uncertainties and disappointments of daily life. It’s no accident that so many of my heroes leave the ordinary world for adventures in fabulous other lands—for the real me, those other lands are my books.

Even so, writing is hard, and after each book is finished, I wonder if I’ll manage to write another. So far, I always do. But I can imagine the day coming when I feel comfortable setting down the pen for good.

I’m currently preparing to write an SF novel about a woman and a couple of mathematicians; kind of an isosceles love triangle. As for the future, I sometimes think of going back and writing another historical novel about a Lowlands painter; this time I’d tackle Hieronymus Bosch. I’d enjoy writing a sequel to
Frek and the Elixir
; I like being in that universe. And then there’s the tantalizing prospect of the books I haven’t even thought of yet.

Another future project I think about is writing my memoirs. I have hundreds of thousands of words of journals that I’ve been keeping for the last twenty years—I might either draw on these as source material, or find some way to publish the journals as is.

A grandiose approach would be to create what I call a “lifebox,” that is, a large data base with all my books, all my journals, and a connective guide/memoir—with the whole thing annotated and hyperlinked. And I might as well throw in some photographs—I’ve taken thousands over the years. With some programming help, I could endow my lifebox with interactive abilities; people could ask it questions and have it answer with appropriate links and words. The result could be a construct that’s within hailing distance of being a simulacrum of me.

A finished lifebox might take the form of a website, although then there’d be the thorny question of how to get any recompense for the effort involved. A commercial alternative would be to market, say,
Rudy’s Lifebox
as a set of files on a portable data storage device of some kind.

And then? One of these days I may well end up where I began: fingerpainting with my own shit. God willing, I’ll still be enjoying myself.

Note on “Autobiographical Overview (2004)”

Written November, 2004.

Appeared in
Contemporary Authors
, 2007.

I was honored to write about myself for
Contemporary Authors
in 2004. Later I incorporated much of this material into my book-length autobiography of 2011,
Nested Scrolls
, published by PS Press in the UK and by Tor Books in the US. I’ve used mostly different illustrations from those that appear in
Nested Scrolls
.

I print my “Autobiographical Note (2004)” first among my section of memoirs in
Collected Essays
, as it gives an overview and a context for the other memoirs.

Drugs and Live Sex, NYC 1980

“What do you want to do now, Rudy?” Eddie and I are standing out on Fifth Avenue. We’ve just been to see the photos at the Museum of Modern Art. It’s a sunny February day. Fifth Avenue near the park is about as dull a place as you’ll find in NYC. Eddie’s the only White Rastafarian in sight. “Let’s go downtown and score some dope, Ed.” “Okay.” I’d expected Eddie to have a good stash when I visited him. But I’d happened in on a trough—and this was before the era of the marijuana stores. Early 1980. All Eddie has is some poisonous-green home-grown, good for brewing headache tea. Listening to his huge reggae record collection last night, we’d tried smoking some anyway. Better than cigarettes, and my head’s still a little…loose. “
Ja-ja be my eyesight.
” Singing that and walking cross-town to the B-way line. It’s Burning Spear, he sings with his neck stretched forward like a black goose. “
My way is long, for the road is so foggy foggy.
” You can hear the fog in his voice. My road is so foggy. That means the future is uncertain. Time branches. The music is like garbage underfoot. Beautiful garbage, blowing all up and down the streets of NYC. The graffiti on the subway cars has evolved during the two years I’ve been in Germany. You can’t read the names at all anymore. The wild abstract expressionist “lettering” covers all the windows so you have to just know where to get out. Everyone does know, except the junk-sick stick-thin black man shouting, “Mah
numbuh
come in,” shuddering there with empty seats around him, running his fingers through an astral heap of zero-dollar bills. Blank Eddie hovers there in the fluorescent light like a big, cautious fish. “Mah
numbuh
come in!” Crash, roar, crash, roar, crash—we’re on Fifteenth Street. Down the stairs uptown, up the stairs downtown. Who needs matter-transmitters when he’s got subways? It’s teleportation, just crash-roar and everything’s different! It’s still a sunny February day, a cold day, a street of houses. Down the block there’s a liveried chauffeur smoking a spliff outside his dark-blue Buick. Secret smiles. “We should try Union Square,” Eddie says, “I had to wait for someone there this summer and twenty guys must have come up to me.” “You think they’ll be there today?” “Are you kidding?” There’s an interracial cordon of smilers blocking the entrance to Union Park. Heads down, we try to break through. “Pot?” “Powders?” “Black beauties?” I stop on a dime. It’s like the New York Stock Exchange here. Futures, pasts and presents. “Let me see it first,” I say. “Sure you can see it,” a red-faced little dealer says, handing over a tiny manila envelope. Lots of seeds in there. On the street you’re glad if there’s seeds. “I’ll give you four bucks.” “Make it four-fifty.” “Four.” “Okay.” I give him a five-dollar bill. Suddenly it is clear that there is no way in hell he is going to give me a dollar back. “
Black
beauties.” The next dealer starts in. “Let me do my thing now, man.” He’s happy and bouncing, a walking endorsement for his pills. “It’s a beautiful world, folks.
Black
beauties.” Eddie is pulling me away. “I don’t let him take pills,” he explains to the dealer. “I may be back,” I call. We still need papers, and a place to roll. The Lone Star is a block away, I read about Bo Diddley playing there two years ago, before I was exiled to Germany, I want to check it out. “Do you sell cigarette papers?” I ask the bartender. A slim jock, he looks at me like I’m out of my mind. I guess he doesn’t like pot-smokers. “No,” he says finally, “I don’t sell
cigarette papers
.” Maybe I’ve been gone too long. “Give us two Dos Equis,” Eddie says. Nobody drinks regular beer in the Village. This is by no means a head-bar at two in the afternoon. It’s all…
executives
drinking boilermakers. I peer into my little manila dope envelope. The seeds wink up at me. I haven’t been really high in over a year. You ever try scoring in Germany? “I’ll make some phone calls,” Eddie says and disappears. The Mexican beer is worse than German, worse than American. “Three chilled vodkas straight up!” someone calls. Oh, man. Then Eddie’s back. “My friend Dan says we can come over. He’s very busy, but he’ll give us a jay. He smokes only the
best
.” Eddie says this with absolute conviction, his Paul Newman lips compressed to a line inside his Moses beard. Who needs telepathy if you’ve got telephones? We walk two blocks…all this motion, from here to there…how is it possible? Everything is teleportation! Dan meets us in the hall. We have to look over his shoulders to see inside. Wet paint. “This is Rudy,” Eddie says. “He’s my favorite science fiction writer.” True enough, since Eddie never reads. “Eddie’s told me about you,” Dan tells me with an old pro’s warm smile. He hands Eddie a fat spliff. “This stuff is very…resinous. Have a good time with it.” The only time I ever scored in Germany was from a Turk in the street. A bar of hard, light-brown “hashish.” It wouldn’t fluff up or burn right, so I chewed a lot of it. It’s funny how you can recognize the taste of camel shit the very first time you encounter it. Almost two years I’ve been in Germany. I make Eddie give me the reefer as soon as we’ve walked a block. Two hits and the air has that great clear-gelatin look to it. Communing with space! I can feel the pressure between the buildings, the long trough of the street, the art nouveau complexities trailing my hands…not just space, but
spacetime
! The light is clear and yellow. It’s a whole different city again, like taking the subway, crash-roar and
wham
you’re in a…new place. I start trying to explain this to Eddie. “You dig how the subway is the same as matter-transformation, moving you around in ordinary space?” He doesn’t care. He doesn’t
not
care. He just strides along, his clotted welcome-mat of hair behind him. My mouth is still running. “But just now, getting high, everything changed again…as if we had taken a subway. It’s
parallel worlds
, you dig. You can walk cross-town, get a subway downtown…you can take an elevator
up
. But dope is like moving in a different dimension. The fourth dimension. We didn’t move at all in regular space, but now we’re in a different place.” “In my building,” Eddie says, “This is what somebody scratched in the elevator: THIS IS A BOX THAT CANNOT WALK! SO? YOU?” We cross Avenue A. The blocks are smaller way down here in the East Village. It’s a good feeling to know that I’m by no means the first person to walk these sidewalks completely stoned. Eddie has his camera along and stops to take a picture of something on a church. I stand there, like a bodyguard in my long black German overcoat, and old people shuffle around us, anxious of sudden gestures. Stoned and loitering, there’s a feeling of being
on the other side
, an alien. Eddie wants to show me a place called Reggae Record Ranch. It’s on Seventh Street near Avenue B. A storefront with the windows covered. No way I would ever have found it alone, much less gone in. Good loud Jamaican music in there, highly evolved. There’s like no record racks. Just a three meter by four meter floor covered with linoleum patterned like a zebra-hide. The light is yellow, gelatinous. A high counter across the back of the room, with a Jamaican behind it talking to two others. They know Eddie. He was cameraman on
Rockers
, a movie sort of like
The Harder They Come
. Eddie was down in Jamaica shooting for months. That’s when he became a White Rastafarian. I can’t understand what anyone’s saying at all, but walk up to the high counter and hold my hand out to the man behind it. He touches my hand. “Garfield.” He’s wearing a very high-crowned felt hat, sort of a space-dilated derby. It’s wooly and a nice pink and gray plaid. There’s an X scar on Garfield’s nose. I ease back to the wall. There is a record rack after all, and I lean on it, keeping an eye on Eddie, feeling like a gunsel. But, hey, the music is really
good
. The guy across the room is clearly a Jamaican musician. He has the dreadlocks, about ten rings, and a ROCKERS button. We keep making and breaking eye-contact. I’ve got to say something, just to relieve the pressure. “Who’s this record by?” I ask whitely. “Oh this is a round thing some brothers razza jive fa-tazz comin’ in you say I mean diggin’ it out the burnin’ seed in there sha-bazzo wrap in there the burnin’ seed you gettin’ got…” There’s more, and while he talks, a big stoned grin crawls out of my mouth. He stops and cracks a slight smile. “You know what I’m talking about?” “Well, yes, I mean generally speaking…” Eddie’s been conferring with Garfield all this time. Garfield cuts off the record…this is Garfield’s
disco
, I realize. He puts on…but can’t be! He’s playing “Memo from Turner!” My all-time favorite Jagger song that I’ve never heard again since I saw Performance in Berkeley these ten years gone. I still know the words, I can still see Jagger, there’s a light swinging back and forth over his head, and Jagger is dressed like a businessman, leaning across a desk and shaking his finger. I hold my coat out like bat-wings and start dancing. The Rastas watch impassively, more alien than anything any fevered middle-class imagination has ever come up with. The song is over and I ask the guy with the dreadlocks his name. “Richard…but they call me Dirty Harry.” This is a good parallel world we’ve hit on. Eddie buys me the Jagger record and a pack of Big Bambu, and we hit the street. “What’s it like in Jamaica, Eddie?” “Like in there, but when you walk out the door you’re still inside.” We hunker down in a sunny doorway and get out my little thumb-sized envelope of street weed. It’s full of seed and ashes and rocks and mouse turds…if you really cleaned it, there wouldn’t be anything left. We split it in two, and each roll ourselves a big, tapering bomber. There’s no rush in the stuff, but it does touch up that initial spacey high like a coat of fresh paint. I puff cautiously at first, waiting for my feet to go PCP-wooden, but it’s just harmless roach-weed, we smoke and walk a few blocks, pitch the butts…stoned and clean. Hundreds of Puerto Rican kids are out of school and swarming up and down the short blocks, staring at us, first Anglos they’ve ever seen here. A man cool and muscular as a snake watches us, unblinking, standing in the doorway of the Family Social Club. “I’m getting uptight, Eddie. Get us out of here.” “Okay.” But there’s no subway, no more dope, no matter-transmission, just step after step in the cold wind, weaving down the street like aliens from NGC 38, the kids look at us with open curiosity, por favor, y’all…God it’s cold. I wish I was back in Jamaica, man, with three red suns overhead and a methane rainbow…”Let’s get a cab, Eddie.” He looks at me unbelievingly. Eddie knows every subway station in Manhattan and I want to spend money on a cab? “I’ll be happy to
ride
in a cab, Rudy.” “Don’t worry, I’ll pay.” He makes me walk another block first, though, so we can hail a cab on a street that runs uptown. I’m dying. Finally we’re in the cab. It’s warm and like a kountry kitchen with brick-patterned vinyl paper glued to the back of the front seat. “Do you want to go back to the apartment?” Eddie asks. But I know there are children there, Eddie’s two-year-old and a little friend or two, mothers and noise and hassles as if I were back with
my
family. I’m fading, but it’s only four o’clock and…”I ought to check out Times Square first.” I finger two Reactivins out of my change pocket and swallow them dry. “What was that?” Eddie demands. “It’s over-the-counter in Germany. A psychic energizer. It’s like for when everything is…
made of wood
. That’s a P. D. Ouspensky line.” In truth, the Reactivins are little more than caffeine and sugar, but I’m trying to act
bad
. “I better go home,” says Eddie. We get out at Times Square, I pay the cab and Eddie catches a subway. I’m standing there on Broadway, looking around with bright, omnivorous interest. There used to be a peep-house here with some really hot film-loops, but I can’t spot it. But there’s plenty else. There’s porno in Germany of course—it’s completely legal there, and even the weekly newsmagazines have nudes on their covers…but I’ve never seen a live sex show. That’s what I’m really looking for here in Times Square, live sex and a place to take a crap without getting gang-fucked. Right on 42
^nd
Street just east of Broadway is the place I’m looking for, an ex-movie theater with Live Love Sex on the marquee. Twelve Boy-Girl Shows A Day. The admission is an utterly reasonable $3.49, and I scuttle on in. I’m a little nervous going into the bathroom. There’s piss on the floor and heavy breathing in the next stall. I squeeze out my turd, keeping my feet well back from the space under the partition, fearful of powerful hands. The theater is huge, and they’re filling in the time between acts with a giant porno movie. Projected to big-screen size, the 16mm images are milky, translucent. I check out my fellow sex-enthusiasts. Except for one young couple, who look like their marriage counselor sent them over from Bayonne, it’s all Japanese tourists and sixty-year-old men. And me. Up on the screen they’re just getting into a nifty three-way: a guy dog-humping the top girl in a female 69 while the girl on the bottom eats his eggs…then click, buzz, the film stops and a spotlight comes on. There’s a bed on the stage, I notice now, it’s tilted up about 10 degrees for better viewing and…everyone starts moving up…will I be able to see? The first row is packed as solid as the Steelers defensive line, sixty-year-old men slotted in there shoulder-to-shoulder,
they
know the score. I grab a seat in the second row. The music comes on and the girl steps out on stage. She’s…beautiful! A Fifth Avenue model, with the perfect curly hairdo and dark lipstick, cool shades that are dark at the top and light at the bottom…she’s wearing a sort of silk swimsuit or teddy or camisole and
dancing
. This woman is going to fuck and I can watch her! Her face is expressionless, but her slim ass is dimpling at us, she’s casual but not too casual, excited but not too excited. One song one tit, two songs both breasts, and then she’s
naked
up there, dancing naked with real cunt hair. I feel like cheering! It’s a blow for freedom, it really is. I haven’t felt so uplifted since going to see the Stones at the Buffalo Stadium, two months before we had to leave the country. Now I’m back at last, and there’s live pussy! She swivels onto the bed and freezes, sitting on the edge toward us with her feet together and drawn up, her knees spread wide, showing pink. If she wiggled or smiled now it would be…whorish. But as it is, it’s