“What’s the—what?—NMR?”
“Nuclear magnetic resonance, but don’t bother your pretty little head about it,” she said, but oh! so kindly. “It’s a way of taking diagnostic pictures of living tissues without invading them, watching chemical reactions, watching fibroid tissue taking over a lung, just for example. Very new, very fancy, and my friend is very much in demand for calibrating the thing. Nine times a day, if they want it and no more X-rays.”
“But that’s like being in the state pen!”
“Oh no! Not one bit! He comes and goes except when he has his dates with the doctors, and that’s only once in a while.”
“I think you’ve changed the subject, Grizzly.”
“No I haven’t.… Do you know what I really want?” She asked suddenly, touching my hands again. (Did you ever hear someone play a scale on the tympanum? That’s what went on in my solar plexus every time she touched me, only nobody could hear it but me.)
“If it’s something I can give you, or do,” I said, my imagination getting noisy. “I hope I can.”
“So I,” she said. “A sandwich. And more tea.”
I could do that, and disappointedly, I did. “You’re saying that your friend has turned his minus into a plus.”
“Oh yes. Plus the skill.”
“What skill?”
“Why he plays that Medical Center like a piano. If he wants some extra little goodie, a bigger TV or an extra dollar, he mentions it around. Then a couple of days later he’ll start yearning to go back East or get a job in San Francisco or some such. It’s never very long before someone bribes him to stay, with whatever it is he wants. And he always keeps it reasonable.”
“I’m slowly beginning to understand why you … but Grizzly: AIDS? Grizzly, half the people who get that, die!”
“I don’t know if it’s half,” she said thoughtfully. “Some say forty percent, some say eighty. What’s Twonk’s Disease?”
“But you’re so beautiful, Grizzly! And so bright! Surely you could get a job, a good job, something you’d really like.”
She leaned forward. I could smell her. She used no perfume. She smelled good. She said soberly, “Bright. I graduated from high school when I was sixteen. I couldn’t look at colleges since Old Charisma raised tuitions and lowered the loans. I sold sandwiches at the front end of the Kmart on 54th Street and saved my pennies to buy a computer course because everybody said programmers and processors were the crest of a beautiful wave. As soon as I graduated from that I got my job, bang like that, just like everybody said.” She took a healthy bite of her bacon-and-cheese on whole-wheat bun. I’ve never known anyone who could articulate so freely with half a mouthful of food. The cello was muted but the music played on. “It was a long room with fifteen word processors clicking away. It took me about forty minutes to understand that nobody there would talk more than a grunt or three words, and that without a boss in sight. Just that chuckety-check from the fifteen keyboards. Lunchtime was a buzzer, lunch was over after a five-minute warning honk and another buzzer, quitting time was a honk. And you better be there. On the second day the manager came out of an upstairs somewhere and told me I was twelve minutes behind my diary. My diary was a mainframe console in his office. He could key in any one of the fifteen processors and his computer would display work performed versus work assigned. Which is why nobody ever leaned back even for a minute to say something to somebody. I stayed in that sweatshop until I had earned my unemployment and got myself immediately fired.”
She drank tea. “I did all the right things, wrote resumes, made the rounds, stood in lines, waited in personnel departments. There were jobs. Making submarine sandwiches in the front end of chain stores. Sweatshops. Door-to-door sales. (That’s rapesville.) I said no either to the job or to the gropes that came with them or both.”
“In between times I did what I really liked, the libraries, museums, parks, the San Diego zoo. I met the fibrosis case at the zoo. He bought me a sack of animal food and we got to talking, and that’s how I found out about how he made his living. He’s a nice man.
“I thought about it a lot. One thing I thought about was syphilis, but that’s only good for two or three days and once next week. I thought about unwed mothering. You can get taken in and cared for, living with thirteen-year-old incest veterans, runaways and hookers, for clothes, a bed, make-work and a little money, but it’s only good for eight months maximum and then you have some difficult decisions to make and repeats of all that did not inspire me.
“But it was Mr. Fibrosis that tipped me off to the medical underground. There is a whole army of patient, skilled research subjects well-fed and happy all over this town. There’s a man living very comfortably in the clinic of the La Jolla Medical Clinic on Genesee Avenue with incurable ulcers on his leg. They’ll be incurable as long as his girlfriend keeps inoculating the ulcers when they begin to heal. She’s from the West Indies and has what they call down there an ‘oldsore.’ The fact that he’s the only Caucasian ever known to have a genuine oldsore makes him eligible. Okay: he’s a fake and Mr. Fibrosis is not, but if the fake, or any other fake makes the medics come up with a cure for oldsores or anything else, he might just end a lot of misery somewhere in the world. So he might as well live easy while he does it.
“You can’t just walk into a hospital or research center and get a spot like that without knowing what you’re doing. Research and medical scientists aren’t stupid, and they have some humongous tools to work with. You have to read everything you can reach, up and down the whole field of what they call ‘the healing arts.’ ” She paused to pour hot water thoughtfully on her tea bag. “You have to use your imagination and a lot of tact. Finding something obscure isn’t enough; some old codger who used to be a country doctor is likely to swab your trouble with boric acid and cure it on the spot. Or some pink-cheeked kid who got his MD last June might connect you to a black box you’ve never heard of, and it lights up and shows you up for a fake, if you are one. It has to be something interesting and challenging, and maybe threatening if it gets out of hand, like herpes or AIDS; and most of all, they must never suspect that you want something from them; they have to want something from you. And you can’t just agree; you have to be persuaded. Are you married or anything?”
I came to with a start, my mind swirling with oldsores and research, the wonder of her soft yet muscular lips and shy swift tongue as she spoke. “Not even anything.”
“There’s lots of them in the mental hospitals. It’s easy enough to make that scene; all you have to do is go there and sign yourself in. But you’d better know what you’re doing. Some places are not snake pits at all, but to walk that fine wire of being an outpatient inpatient, you better have something interesting or you’ll have a thin part of a funnel in your face with the drug factory at the other end. Mr. Fibrosis told me of a man who was a genius with mental hospitals. He would walk in and start talking to the admitting doctor in a quiet cultivated voice, talking absolute logic. Mr. Fibrosis says if you anchor one end of a logical chain in truth, and break no links, you can put the other end anywhere you want. He persuaded one of the doctors to believe that since some chemicals used in injections were derived from the organs of pigs, he ran a real risk of turning into a pig if he was injected. He was so persuasive that he got a room of his own, not locked or padded, for seven months. Then he moved on to another hospital away from San Diego but still in the Sunbelt. What is Twonk’s Disease?”
That brought me back to earlier words. “Not AIDS. Please, Grizzly; not that, not you.”
“You have something better?”
“But that’s so … so …”
“Darling—” (My God; did she call me that?) “Don’t worry. The big danger of AIDS is not AIDS. All AIDS does is depress the immune system so that something else can get in and take over—viruses, bacteria, fungi, yeast, and you die of the flu or meningitis or something stupid like mono. But you see, darling—(again!)—if I’m a research subject with AIDS,
in a really good hospital like Scripps, there just won’t be anything else getting in and taking over. They’ll take care of that, right down to filtered air and forks and spoons taken out of an autoclave with surgical gloves. I’ll be all right.”
I shook my head very slowly and said “Balboa Park. Black’s Beach. The libraries. And Grizzly; the Zoo. Are you going to sit there in a sterile bubble away from anyone who coughs, or sneezes or—” my tone dropped to that which Thorne Smith described as “a voice as low as his intentions.” “—puts his arms around you, Grizzly, holds you close …?”
“Are … are you crying?”
“Of course not,” I said hoarsely, swabbing my eyes with my napkin. For the first time, I couldn’t look at her. When at last I did, she was looking at me out of a face full of tenderness. Her head was tipped a little in that way of hers, and I had the mad urge to plunge my whole self into that cave of warm flesh and sheltering hair, in and in and altogether in.
“There was another reason I stopped on the Women’s Clinic steps when you spoke to me,” she said softly.
Oh Lord.
She said, “I was coming out. You were going in. Why were you going into the Clinic?”
“Oh, I was just—I mean, I—” I stalled.
She laughed suddenly, wind-chimes. “You’re blushing!”
“No I’m not,” I said out of a hot face.
“Why? Tell me.”
“Twonk’s Disease.”
“Come on …”
“All right,” I said gravely, “I’ve got a wart on my stomach.” I got up. “Will you come home with me?” She didn’t say anything. She came home with me.
It was maybe three weeks later when I was reading Not the Reader sitting alone in the kitchen over my coffee, when Grizzly came in, dancing and shouting, “We did it! We did it!”
“Damn, you’ve been away a long time!”
“Listen to me! We—”
“Where did you go? Oh, right … But what about the rash, your poor dear rash?”
“That’s it, that’s it!” She danced in a circle and suddenly rushed me, pulling my head down and between her breasts, and holding it there. She is very strong. I couldn’t say a word.
“Now that I have your attention,” she said quietly out of a deep pool of laughter, “you will be pleased to know that a dermatologist, an allergist, a biochemist and two graduate students earnestly request our presence at Vista Hill Hospital, where they have prepared a three-room suite, in which, for a suitable fee, we are asked to reside, sometimes apart, often together, for research purposes, for an indefinite period.”
“Because of the rash?” I muffled.
She released me. “Because of the rash.”
“What is it? Twonk’s Disease?”
“No it isn’t. And they’re fascinated. There are only a few such cases in the records, and none of them has ever seen one before, and they want to know everything about it, no matter how long it takes!”
“What is it, then?”
“Darling—I’m allergic to you!”
“Grizzly—that’s awful!”
“No it isn’t. I don’t mind a rash. And they’ll cure it and induce it and cure it and induce it, until they’ve analyzed it down to the atom. What is Twonk’s Disease?”
It’s a mild old gag I carry around to use to break up dull conversations, or to wreck other people’s train of thought when I need time of my own. I put on my grave face and said, “Very serious. It’s a falling of the armpits.” And we both shouted and danced.
AFTERWORD
Theodore Sturgeon, Storyteller
Paul Williams
I
The best short story writer in America lives on a hill on the outskirts of Los Angeles. He works on TV scripts, gives lectures, teaches a class, writes book reviews and does introductions to other people’s books. That’s all. He’s sold four new short stories in the last four years. Of the twenty-three books he’s written in the course of his career, only three are still in print in the United States. His old masterpieces are not being read; and his new ones are not being written.
And he has no one to blame for this state of affairs but himself.
Theodore Sturgeon.
I’m twenty-eight years old (or will be when this is published) and the man I’m writing about is more than twice my age. And when I was just half this age, fourteen, it occurs to me now, I was at a party on the fourteenth floor of the Pick-Congress Hotel in Chicago at about five in the morning, the last night of my first science-fiction convention, and Judith Merril, famed anthologist and author/editor of some of my favorite books, turned to me and asked—just about everyone but me had consumed a fair quantity of alcohol by this time—“Doesn’t it bother you to see that your heroes have feet of clay?” And I said, “They couldn’t be heroes if they didn’t,” or some such clever fourteen-year-old’s remark. Then the sun came up over Lake Michigan while the drunk science fiction writers told stories and sang folk songs, and I was indeed filled with quiet awe—not at the great names made flesh around me, but at whatever miracles had brought me, at age fourteen, to this inner sanctum, this place of dreams.
Theodore Sturgeon was Guest of Honor at that particular science-fiction convention (Labor Day Weekend, 1962), and I shook his hand but didn’t actually talk with him. He had his wife and his children with him, and was very much the center of attention wherever he went in the convention hall, and anyway I had nothing to say; I loved the man and I loved his stories and there was no way I could tell him that.
Fourteen years later I visit his home, we talk about anything and everything, I enjoy his hospitality and see his feet of clay—we’ve been friends of a sort for two or three years now—and each time I read a story of his he is again my favorite writer, a worker of miracles; but in between times he’s just a friend, attractive and annoying and as blind as the rest of us.… To write this story I need a hero, because this is a story of great achievements. But even after months of careful research, the man slips away from me, he’s too human—I know him and his life so well but I still can’t understand where his miracles come from.
Sturgeon wrote, just to give you an example, the all-time great story about Senator Joseph McCarthy, who he was and how he did what he did. The story is called “Mr. Costello, Hero,” and it starts out on a spaceship. This man Costello is a passenger on the ship—wonderful guy, everybody likes him. Except maybe the skipper, an uptight old coot who doesn’t approve of the progressive influence Mr. Costello has had on his crew. Like they’ve started playing draw poker without the draw, because that way there’s less opportunity for anyone to cheat. And volunteers stand watch in the galley, to make sure the cook isn’t poisoning the food. True, it makes for a crowded kitchen, but Cooky doesn’t mind—this way he knows everybody can trust him.
Costello gets off at a city on a frontier planet and manages to drive a wedge between the city-dwellers and the trappers who provide the fur that is the planet’s chief export, by making people deathly afraid of anyone who likes to be alone. Pretty soon he’s running the place. It’s utterly terrifying and utterly believable, particularly because Sturgeon tells the story from the viewpoint of a guy (the ship’s purser) who really likes Mr. Costello and doesn’t see anything wrong in the way he does things.
It’s a triumph of skilled storytelling—great characters, absorbing narrative, hair-raising conclusion. But there’s more to it than that. The story was written and published in 1953, at the height of the McCarthy era, and it is a devastating, thinly disguised attack on the man and his methods … but more than that, it’s a beautifully lucid presentation of exactly how a man like McCarthy can use fear and vanity and gullibility to divide people and set them against each other and put himself in power.
“Mr. Costello, Hero” is one of the finer pieces of writing to come out of the whole McCarthy experience, and it was written for a science-fiction magazine by a genre writer who had listened to the Army-McCarthy hearings on the radio and had once
in his youth written speeches for a local politician in a Texas seaport, and that was the extent of his involvement in the world of politics.
How does Sturgeon do it? No two stories of his are alike, but of the 160 he’s written in the last four decades, I count at least fifty major works, stories as beautiful and important as anything you might care to compare them with. And none of these stories is known to anyone but science fiction readers and Sturgeon fanatics; and forty-five of the fifty are not even in print in this country.
And Sturgeon sits in his house in Los Angeles, full of ideas, and stares at his typewriter, and doesn’t write.
II
Theodore Sturgeon was born February 26th, 1918, on Staten Island in New York City. His name at birth was Edward Hamilton Waldo. “I was born a Waldo,” Sturgeon told science fiction scholar David Hartwell in an unpublished 1972 interview, “and had kind of an interesting family. Peter Waldo was a dissident priest in the 12th century who got ahold of the dumb idea that perhaps the Pope at Rome ought to go back to the vows of poverty and obedience, get rid of the Swiss Guards and the jewel-encrusted cross, and put on a monk’s habit and go out amongst the people. The Pope took a very dim view of that indeed, and they persecuted the Waldenses all across Europe for 200 years.”
“That was the Waldensian Heresy, that you should go back to Apostolic Christianity. Nobody wanted to go and do a thing like that. And they settled in Flanders, and in England, and in 1640 two ships of them decided to go to the New World. They got separated by a storm, and one of them went to Connecticut; there are still Waldos in Connecticut to this day. The other ship went far south, and it wound up in, of all places, Haiti. Well, Haiti in 1640 was already a refuge for runaway slaves; and when they found they had a shipload of dissident priests, they welcomed them with open arms. Waldo became corrupted to Vaudois, which became Voodoo, which is the etymology of the word ‘voodoo’…. There’s been a whole line of gurus in my family: Ralph Waldo Emerson was one of them.”
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