Magazine - The New York Review of Science Fiction - 309 - 2014-05

by vol 25 no 09

  During her “beard” marriage/association with George Leite, they ran a Berkeley bookshop and coffeehouse called daliel’s (always affectedly lowercase), a gathering place for the likes of Philip Lamantia, Kenneth Rexroth, Anais Nin, Darius Milhaud, Harry Partch, Jean Varda, and Henry Miller. Beats, surrealists, poets, and queers. Jody was rarely willing to speak of those days, but sometimes I wheedled it out of her.

  She and George edited a literary magazine called Circle. Jody was the real editor, but George was the outgoing social butterfly who took most of the credit while Jody worked her ass off keeping the coffeehouse and magazine afloat and functional. George’s personality was expansive and eccentric, a would-be mystic whose hero was Madame Blavatsky, button-holing anyone who was easily impressed and imposing his opinions on all things without caring about the opinions of others.

  George had a whole mythology about himself as the new Abraham Lincoln at the forefront of the struggle for racial equality. Just another guy full of shit, I strongly suspect his glamour captivated Jody and for a brief while she thought there were two geniuses upon the Earth, but she never admitted that to me. It seemed to me another part of her was still angry that all those transiently important artists and authors never realized the woman stuck washing the dishes and organizing the bookshelves was the actual genius while they were kowtowing to a fool and fraud. But I could get little out of her about it; she hated to speak of George either positively or negatively.

  As the finances of the coffeehouse fell behind, and as George played from within his closet without helping her one bit, she wanted out of their business arrangement and certainly did not require a beard as much as he seemed to.

  Soon she was on her own, making a good living directing porno movies for a lowlife she met through George. When that guy got in trouble with the law, owing Jody money, he gave her his entire company, contacts, and equipment and skipped town. So now she produced, wrote, and directed dirty movies for the lowest of X-rated theaters, which were numerous in the ’60s and ’70s.

  It was profitable, except it meant being buddy-buddy with the Mafia to get distribution, and it meant getting harassed by the Feds. You could do time in those days for doing what she was doing. One day the Feds descended upon her crappy little film studio and confiscated all her equipment. Although they never charged her with a thing, it wasn’t like she could just ask them to give her stuff back. So she just went on to new things.

  She made a lot of money for a while selling encyclopedias door to door. Would I kid you? She was the only woman doing it, and she was the only member of the sales force who seriously sold much. She was the sort, as they say, who could sell ice cubes to Eskimos.

  As soon as she had a saved a small bundle of funds, she switched to real estate scams. She bought desert property in Eastern Washington, divided it up, then would take “marks” on fabulously choreographed journeys and show them the exact little square of nothing they were buying. Though there was no water, no electricity, barely even a road, she made it sound like the only safe investment anyone could have, land, eternal land, and you could sell it dear in few years, or you could build your dream home on it when you retired.

  The deals she offered sounded fabulous, and she sold this worthless land with great ease. For a not too dreadful down payment and small monthly payment for a decade, you’d be a landowner. After a few months or years, the buyers would realize they bought something worthless, stop paying, so she’d regain the property to sell again.

  Now it was a while before I realized this was at least halfway if not entirely a scam. Once when I had an advance for a book in hand, I tried to get her to sell me a piece of property. She absolutely refused. I was startled, since she was forever selling people land they could almost afford. Why not me? Later, I slapped my forehead and realized she just wasn’t the sort to rip off the people she cared about. She was a flimflam artist, not a sociopath.

  I forget when or where we met. Probably just knew her from here and there, and we slowly began hanging out more and more. She lived in a house in Shoreline, Washington, and was breaking up with a woman she’d lived with for some years—a really great woman, I should add, an artist. The breakup was a tragic loss for Jody. But she immediately went “on the make,” and because we were friends, she tried everything to get me to move in with her.

  I lived with and loved greatly an alcoholic whom Jody felt justified in trying to “steal” me from. Sheri came home once and found us getting nasty on the sofa and nearly beat the shit out of Jody, who was more careful thereafter and afraid of Sheri, a vet of the Viet Nam era. I hugely enjoyed hanging out with Jody, but her always wanting to seduce me was a nuisance. It was at the same time good for my not totally strong ego, so I was at fault for not being discouraging enough. But when at last she met Mary and they fell in love, it was a relief to me, as Jody became more purely a friend and not a horndog friend, a comforting soul to be around.

  Mary was a minor. But fortunately (for Jody) Mary’s mom, about Jody’s age, all too eagerly said, “You want her, you can have her.” They lived together in the messy Shoreline house for many years, not always an even-keel relationship but largely a good one. Her ex (who’d been selling handcrafted Victorian style toys in the Seattle Farmer’s Market) had in the meantime gone blind and opened a music box store downstairs in the Farmer’s Market. A great shop it was, too.

  I was at the time involved with the Expository Lump, an sf/f writer’s group, mostly members of Science Fiction Writers of America. It followed Milford rules, which were too narrow for art; we critiqued one another’s manuscripts in progress. Sometimes it all got too predictable, though, and now and then new blood was needed. For the first time, I was to suggest a new member.

  Jody showed up with a short story, copies for everyone, which we critiqued. First one, then the next reader ripped the story asunder on the basis of the “rules.” I was dumbfounded. These were working writers who knew what the market demanded, and their advice and opinions were perfectly respectable. But Jody’s story was absolutely amazing and would need comparison to Virginia Woolf had Woolf written science fiction. Everyone in that room expected E. E. Doc Smith or at best Robert A. Heinlein, and they didn’t even comprehend something transcendent.

  It came around to me last. I was almost hyperventilating I was so shocked. I said, “I can’t believe none of you recognize the brilliance of this story! If your opinions reflect what the market demands, and Jody can’t sell this, then I’m going to scrape up the money and publish it myself, as this is one of the coolest stories I’ve ever read!”

  Now I was and am glad to be the only one, now and then, who recognizes brilliance. It confirms my sentiment that the world is ruled by banality and that people crushed by these rules can’t even see what’s destroying them. But from the members’ point of view, they were right, absolutely right; the story was unsalvageably shitty, and I was just blindly sticking up for a friend.

  So Jody finally told us, told them, “It was a test to see how dumb this dumb critique circle could be! The story might not be publishable, but I’ve already sold it. It’s the first chapter of Passing for Human, slated for publication by DAW Books.”

  Now they were even angrier. The Lump did not exist to give pointless advice on stories already sold but for revisions and improvements or for honing one’s skills. Yes, they were tricked, and the trickster was evil for tricking them.

  Later, I was contacted by a couple members of the group who gave me alpha-behavior talking-tos for bringing a rabble-rouser into their nice, calm, literary gathering. I was told never to bring Jody again; she was not welcome, and I had better tell her so. I said, “I don’t think I’ll need to tell her.” From her point of view, there was no reason to suffer the same fools more than once.

  So yeah, she was the best author in that room, bar none, not the most successful, best paid, or best known, but the best. She knew it. I half suspect they realized it, however belatedly. But she didn’t have a method of makin
g friendships out of these realities. She had a way of making people really peevish with her “I’m God, you’re not” attitude and behavior. I found her charming as hell and one of the most rewarding friends I ever had, but then, I really didn’t mind that she thought she was god. She always let me tell her, “You’re not god,” and never got mad at me for that, so why should I be mad that she thought I was wrong?

  Between the first and second sf/f novels she wrote for DAW, she felt obliged to peddle her wares and involved herself in various aspects of fandom, including NorWesCon. Nowadays NorWesCon is for geeks and dweebs of the barely literate sort, but in those days out of a membership of one or two thousand, three or four hundred would be working writers, and it attracted editors from the East Coast. It was a great convention in its heyday.

  Jody attempted to go into Sales Mode and unload a few ice cubes on this warehouse full of Eskimoes. But she wasn’t pumping out the stuff; there wasn’t much to sell, so she fell back to that other position, having the kind of “fun” that made people hate her forever. Oh, not everyone, fortunately. She did a reading event that was packed standing room only, and how many writers with one book from DAW can do that? The fans were impressionable and lined up for her self-important pronouncements and either believed her (she was always at least half right) or, like me, thought it was all oddly sweet and very entertaining.

  One of her promo bits was a flyer that offered cover-blurb style quotes about how great a writer is Jody Scott, praise credited to Shakespeare, Poe, Hemingway. One living writer was quoted—a living writer who was a member of the Expository Lump and who did not have loving feelings toward Jody and who took very, very seriously any cover blurb provided.

  That author said (paraphrasing from memory): “I’m going to sue Jody! I never said that about her book, and it is harmful to my reputation to have such opinions put in my mouth!” I talked her down. “No one thinks you and Shakespeare praised her book. It was a joke.” Jody wasn’t finished, though. She buttonholed this author on the false premise of apologizing and instead said, “I know you’re in the closet. Just come out, and you won’t be such a miserable soul. I’ll introduce you to some gals.”

  Now this author so far as I know is not gay, and if she was, I can’t imagine she’d be in the closet about it. But as her ears turned bright red and the hate grew deeper, I knew this one chance of gaining a friend of honest value was forever lost to Jody. Later I said to her, “What the fuck’s the matter with you?” But being the Perfect Creature she regarded herself as being, she couldn’t possibly be wrong. “Some day she’ll come out of the closet, and you’ll know I was right.” “I doubt it, but even pretending you were right, that was just crude, with no possible benefit to you, her, or anyone.”

  Had something like that happened to Jody, though, she wouldn’t have minded a bit. She hated nobody. She was angry at the world and humanity collectively, but she didn’t dislike people individually and seemed puzzled anyone could dislike her as an individual.

  In time, because Jody had become, with Mary, more recluse than not, she’d lost whatever social niceties she once had. And as years passed, it seemed to me, she became increasingly withdrawn from a world that wouldn’t understand her, so why try?

  I was enough like her that I was going through the same withdrawals from community, too, not excluding Jody, so eventually I never saw her any more. Wanted to. Just lost the energy to be social. Have never regained it. I’m practically an agoraphobe now. I don’t think Jody was that bad, but maybe she was. Maybe she had a busy social life I knew nothing about. I can only comment on what I saw. And I saw someone less and less inclined to leave the house unless it was time to sell some more worthless property, since even finding it easy enough to sell her novels, that wasn’t going to pay the bills.

  Certainly there was more I didn’t know of Jody’s life than I knew. Mine is a narrow portrait. She rarely spoke of her son, Tom, for example, and when she did mention him, it was always in a vague but positive context. And yet, he only came to see her once in twenty years. I don’t know that they were estranged, but they sure as hell weren’t close.

  In her will, she left him an antique rifle and the artwork of his late father, O. T. Wood. She left the rest of her estate, notably the Shoreline house, to Mary, who had by the end been her partner for 30 years. And then her son did show up with attorneys to contest the will. There was no such thing as gay marriage back then, and Tom hoped the court would declare their lifelong relationship invalid on the face of it, that Mary’s relationship to Jody constituted “moral turpitude” and “undue influence,” and therefore everything should be given to him.

  I bet that kind of shit worked in a lot of places, perhaps still works in some places. Didn’t work for Tom, who even had to pay Mary’s court costs for his trouble. Which induced him to file yet another claim—that the court was gay friendly and had treated him as “a gay basher”; that he was a victim of “reverse discrimination”; and that the proof of his assertion was that his entire attempt to gain the property was called “a frivolous waste of time” by a Superior Court commissioner.

  Fact is, Jody didn’t have much beyond the house, and that had a reverse mortgage on it, so what really was Tom after? Some kind of revenge? He certainly didn’t care about Jody’s legacy. When the case was done, I read the court documents. And I was struck by the lack of any reference to her literary effects.

  Jessica Amanda Salmonson lives in Bremerton, Washington.

  Sergeant Chip and Other Novellas by Bradley Denton

  reviewed by Don Webb

  Burton, Michigan: Subterranean Press, 2014; $40.00 hc; 292 pages

  Writers are not competitive. If we were competitive, I’d keep a list of who were better writers than me in Austin. Of course I’d check off Bruce Sterling and Lewis Shiner, who both left town—and with a sigh remove Neal Barrett when he joined the Hereafter Gang. But I would never do that. I just worry about South Austin—and that leads to the problem of Bradley Denton. You see, he’s oddly talented—so I was pretty stoked when I got his latest collection to review.

  It had a talking dog story, a tribute story drawn from his best-known novel, and a novella from a themed collection with a dead writer in it. Three marks of a loser. I was stoked. It simply couldn’t be good.

  Then I read it. Damn it, it’s good.

  The first novella, “Sergeant Chip” (2005), isn’t a talking dog story; no, it’s a goddamn telepathic dog story. The modified dog is in the Army, and it’s engaging in a revolt against moral-less authority and Army stupidity. The theme of decency versus abuse is Denton’s mainstay, and in an era of writing without a moral compass, he stands out like the Pole Star. The dog is not a human in fur; he thinks like a dog. He both understands and fails to understand the humans who train him as a dog would—he has the loyalty-to-the-pack morality of a dog. And in time of warfare this makes him the most moral being around. The narration does not spare blood nor hide the horror of war, yet certainly it does not glorify these things. After his master dies and Chip becomes the Alpha male, I found myself rooting for him every step of the way. His heart is clearly better than those in charge, and so likewise is his mind. The science fictional trope that allows him to communicate to some humans is presented in a believable way and has its roots in current research. The ending is left open, and as always with Denton the prose is crisp—somewhere between Stephen King (on his good days) and Mark Twain.

  The second novella, “Blackburn and the Blade” (2006), features the return appearance of Jimmy Blackburn, the perfect killer-with-a-code eponym of Denton’s 1993 novel Blackburn. The state of Texas put Jimmy to death a few years ago. Jimmy is perfectly appealing: he kills those people who (as we say in Texas) need killin’. You know them—the folks in line at the “Ten Items or Less” checkout line with their goddamn fourteen items. Denton has told us that Jimmy killed 17 people—but he left out some details, leaving room to go back for more. Jimmy gets a worthy opponent this time: Joe Lansdale
’s “God of the Razor.” Jimmy has to make things right against a smarter, socially protected, crueler opponent. In other words, Denton once again pits evil against evil. He doesn’t let Jimmy’s self-righteous anger be seen as good—but it does appeal to the dark side of the good reader. If you’ve ever looked askance at the aforementioned fourteen-item shopper, you will eat up this masterful exercise in narrative voice as though it were pecan pralines.

  The third novella—to use an over-used reviewer’s phrase—is what you buy the book for. “The Adakian Eagle” (2011) is a story of murder and shamanism in the Aleutian Islands during World War II. A scheming lieutenant colonel sets up a young Army boxer on a murder charge. The young boxer meets an older corporal with the initials D. H., who wrote some book about a bird. In this contrafactual tale, which we used to call “alternative history” until Michael Chabon won the awards that Howard Waldrop should have—never mind; Howard’s face is on a stamp in another dimension and besides he lives in North Austin and doesn’t screw up my schemes.... As I was about to say: In this contrafactual tale the reader gets a literary hard-on when he recognizes the real historical figure being used. Yet Denton violates this structure by telling us that it’s Dashiell Hammett in his introduction. In a really good contrafactual, the story is so compelling that the added history is a cherry on the banana split of plot, characterization, and imagery. A friend of Howard Waldrop’s for some decades, Denton has learned from the best.