Collected Essays

by Rucker, Rudy

  It was Friday. I walked to the 7-Eleven to get another twelve-pack of beer. On the way back, I saw Cal mowing his lawn. I gave him the finger and yelled:

  “Christ sent me here to take you and Jerry out!”

  We got into a kind of discussion then. I said that I was a “Christian” myself, a member of St. John’s Episcopal church, and that I didn’t like him and Falwell to be using Jesus as a club to beat people over the head with.

  “Did you learn to give the finger like that at St. John’s?” sneered Cal, a tall guy with a mustache.

  “No! I learned it from LSD!” I said, by way of invoking the ‘60s.

  Cal wanted to know who I was—I repeated my name several times, and pointed out my house, its red roof visible down the hill.

  “I’m the second most famous person in Lynchburg,” I cried, “And you don’t take account of me!”

  I ranted some more, then I went on home, and a little later I was walking over to a friend’s house. By then I’d forgotten about talking to Cal. But he hadn’t forgotten about me. He was still mowing his lawn, and when he saw me go by he jerked, and turned off his mower and came over and said things to me. I don’t remember exactly what. I think he was worried that I might try and do something violent. His wife called out to him from his porch.

  “Gay,” says Cal to her, “Gay, go in the house and get the gun.”

  I split fast.

  Next day I still thought it was funny, but the day after that—Sunday—I was desperately scared and remorseful. How much power do the god-pigs have? I wrote Cal a letter which was basically begging him not to have me assassinated.

  Sunday, April 29, 1984

  Dear Cal:

  I do feel I owe you an apology for having bothered you Friday evening. Obviously, there are some issues on which you and I do not see eye to eye, but you certainly have a right to mow your lawn in peace. A neighborhood is a neighborhood. I promise not to repeat my performance, and I hope that, in the long run, we will be on good terms with each other. You are clearly a man of patience and intelligence, and I really regret having acted the way I did. Here’s one of my books—which may or may not interest you—if you get around to it, please send me one of yours.

  All the best, Rudy Rucker

  I put the letter inside a copy of Infinity and the Mind—not The Sex Sphere, for god’s sake, and set it by his door. I was nervous doing this, as Friday he’d intimated that he’d shoot me if I ever stepped on his property again. But I had to get it delivered right away, before the final order to the God-Squad went down!

  I hadn’t told anyone yet about all this, but now my wife, noticing my furrowed brow, asked what was up. I told her about giving Cal the finger and telling him that everyone in Lynchburg hates him and Jerry.

  “Boy, you’re stupid, Rudy.”

  A few days later I got a letter back from Cal.

  May 3, 1984

  Dear Rudy:

  Thank you for your gracious note and the book. I appreciate the spirit in which you wrote the letter.

  I must say that this was the most unique introduction I have ever received to anyone!

  Enclosed are a couple of my recent newspaper columns. I am now writing for the Los Angeles Times Syndicate. I’ll give you a copy of my book, Book Burning, when I get a chance.

  Again, thanks for your note.

  Sincerely, Cal, “Vice Ayatollah”

  Which was a real load off my mind. Before the letter, I’d reached the point of paranoia where I was wondering if it wouldn’t be wise to go ahead and preemptively firebomb Cal before Jerry’s minions could burn down my house and have the police shoot us as we ran out screaming. But this really isn’t El Salvador here.

  Cal’s letter is quite classy—it’s kind of unnerving, the fact that when you actually get to some one super media pig, there is sometimes actually a person there, a person who wears a certain kind of public mask. Not that I particularly like Cal now, or believe anything he writes—but it is interesting to know that he has a certain sense of humor about having worked as Jerry’s “Vice Ayatollah.”

  A few months later, I was talking to the assistant minister of St. John’s Episcopal, a gentle and thoughtful man my age whom we knew socially. He said, “Rudy, your name came up the other day in a very strange context. I was talking to Cal Thomas about a student exchange program, and he asked me if I knew you. I said, yes, and then Cal told me that you’d flipped him the bird and told him that Jesus sent you here to fight him, and that everyone at St. John’s hates him.”

  “Well, yeah, I did that. I wish I hadn’t. I was pretty drunk.”

  “Cal asked me if you might have been drinking. I said that it was…possible.”

  “Was he pissed off?”

  “It was more that he wanted to figure out…what had happened.”

  * * *

  Note on “Jerry’s Neighbors”

  Written 1984.

  Appeared in Science Fiction Eye, August 1987.

  I met Steve Brown, editor of Science Fiction Eye at an SF conference. I seem to recall that we had some pot, but no rolling papers, and we began rolling jays using squares torn out from the Book of Revelations in a hotel-room Gideon bible. Each jay would have something really weird written on the side, like “into the pit of fire” or “eternal damnation.” Smoking these jays, Steve and I laughed a lot.

  The somewhat painful memories described in “Jerry’s Neighbors” make me glad I don’t drink or get high anymore. Jerry Falwell continued to appear in the news for many years, always advocating the absolute worst possible ideas. He even hated science fiction!

  The decline in American pride, patriotism, and piety can be directly attributed to the extensive reading of so-called ‘science-fiction’ by our young people. This poisonous rot about creatures not of God’s making, societies of ‘aliens’ without a good Christian among them, and raw sex between unhuman beings with three heads and God alone knows what sort of reproductive apparatus keeps our young people from realizing the true will of God. [Jerry Falwell, “Can Our Young People Find God in the Pages of Trashy Magazines? Of Course Not!” Reader’s Digest, August, 1985.]

  Access To Tools

  Why write a semi-pro-zine column in a…uh…Mr. Wizard vein? Net Blowage. That’s the word I woke up with in my head yesterday or was it Belgium. Once my college friend, and later Viet Vet, Don Marritz wrote me a letter that starts…uh…”Dear Rudy & Sylvia, Of all possible ways to start a letter, this is probably the worst…”

  When I was at Seacon in Brighton, etc., some guys—I mean, real Brit punks—are yelling at me, sitting on the hotel porch and…now right in this period I was reading Scanner Darkly…uh, yesterday my dog winked at me//my piles just died//trucked in from Toledo//gosh you’re a lovely audience.

  Broadway Danny Rose. What a great movie. Woody, he gives…uh…short weight, you dig, B&W and you get out 20 mins. earlier than the kids who are…uh…seeing Footloose.

  Recently I did some library research—and that’s really what I’d like this column to be, viz., a sharing of the facts I glean in my diffuse, but wide-ranging investigations. What’s in it for me? Hopefully (and I do mean “hopefully,” which is as much of an authentic US word as…uh…net blowage), hopefully this totally lame sentence will end. Yes!

  Yeah…uh…I found a book in the library, the Lynchburg (called L’burg for short)…uh…library and I looked up Ike’s memoirs. At Ease: Stories I Tell To Friends. Yeah. I had this rap…a running joke, like, that I’d been telling my stories to…uh…friends. Okay, now the idea was that I’m writing the story of my life—I was working on it, a novel I’m now working on [SHOP TALK! YES!] it’s called THE SECRET OF LIFE. It’s basically a UFO novel. I feel, by the way, that it is high time for a lot of UFO novels. The virtue of this form is that one has as many aliens as one needs (rival races of saucer-aliens fight it out on Earth) without having to haul all that shit through all them light-years.

  “Where’s the UFOlogy section?” was the question
that one of those fabled Brit punks axed me back up the page a piece (hyuck-hyuck) cut/reset yeah really I mean someone did once say the word UFOlogy to me and I understood him, so instead of killing me, he went in and got evicted by the dicks. Hotel.

  Okay, now Ike’s memoirs. I was telling my friend Greg Gibson (who runs a wonderful bookstore called The Ten Pound Island Book Shop in Gloucester, Massachusetts, tell “Gib” you know me, and he’s liable to treat you to a real “Down East” hoedown. Or is it clam-bake. Actually, he might kill you. No, really, it’s a nice shop.) Greg and I roomed together in college, and we were great admirers of Jack and the Beats. I’d always wanted to write a book like On the Road. And the way Jack actually did it was to get a teletype roll (photographs exist!) and…uh…put it in his typewriter and go on and on and not have to be subject to the tyranny of the PAGE. (Of course now a scrolling word processor is just such a “paper.” It seems likely to change the texture of commercial prose. Or lead to a great artistic advance. Whatever.)

  Right. Now I do want to finish this story. The one thing, I mean, I think the fair thing to the readers of this column is that whenever I begin a story I will eventually finish it within the body of the piece—modulo, of course, considerations of artistic polish and natural reticence. At Ease: Stories I Tell To Friends, by Dwight David Eisenhower. We’re talking actual fucking library research here. I get the book, it’s wonderfully greasy. The cover crinkling in the light and all covered with sebum (which is the scientific name for the skin grease that humans ooze, q.v. T. Pynchon, “…covering everything with an offensive coat of sebum.”) sebum…yeah. Ike. In…uh…Desolation Angels, I guess, Jack is down in Mexico City and living downstairs from him is some guy called “Old Ike the Pusher.” In college, Greg was a big jogger. He ran before any of the others. He had a rap, how when he was running and it hurt first so his lungs were falling out, then the legs and the liver, the thing to cheer himself up was to think of “Old Ike the Pusher.”

  I like Ike, but does Ike like me?

  Right! Okay. Now what I was telling Greg when I was working up my psych to write another book, was this idea that Ike’s At Ease should be a cult classic, a book that any “true communicant” must have at least a nodding acquaintance with…a book of the stature of Jean-Paul Sartre’s Nausea, perhaps (which I’ll get back to next issue). Okay, now it’s a funny idea, and one wants it to be true. For years I laughed about the title. I remember once saying, blown-away at Don Marritz’s wedding in Gettysburg, “At Ease: Stories I Tell To Friends, what an incredibly feeble title, I mean, it’s like a limp dick, at ease, but yet…”

  But yet. So the running joke I’d had with Greg was that…uh…my rap about my book when I’m trying to up the…uh…net blowage or some shit…uh…” If I have only begun to approach the transcendent clarity of ‘Ike’ in his immortal…” Yeah. Right. So I’m at the Lynchburg Public Sebum and I do find Ike’s book. This is like one day I’m too burnt-out to write…but I’ve still got my job to do, a type of behavior to exhibit—as opposed to watching, oh, basketball games. And I’m thinking, “Well, maybe today I’m not going to write much, but hell, it’s only Monday or Tuesday. I like Ike!”

  And plan to gut it for good quotes, right.

  And go in there…past the…uh…sebum…and…uh…

  …uh…

  Well, there’s not much of what you might call fine writing. I did find two or three interesting things. He calls the intro by the line, “A Man Talking To Himself.” And is here, his voice in yer ear, via DICTAPHONE. Poor guy couldn’t type I guess…

  Anyway, he had a big dick. That’s the one heretofore subtextual transrealist fact that I ferreted out. I mean…maybe. Larry Flynt has been an example to us all. I’m glad the Seventies are over. Disco, Jerry F., it all fades. “Only real people survive,” Henry was telling me last night. Henry and his wife Diana own two ladies’ clothes stores. Henry and I got into this rap about “net blowage.” It’s a phrase that came to me a few days ago, out of nowhere, you know, the Muse sits on your face. Ups the net blowage. They’re about the start a City Council election here and we were grooving off making “the net amount of on-line blowage” a like major issue.

  The wrap-up. UFOlogy. It’s heavy and worth thinking about. I don’t know if I would ever have fully gotten into SF if I hadn’t have read Ian Watson’s Miracle Visitors. Which, in turn, draws a lot of energy from C. G. Jung’s Flying Saucers, subtitle: “A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Skies.”

  Oh yeah, and why Ike had a big dick. Well, he was a real scapegrace at West Point, always in trouble. Sometimes he even reported himself if nobody else would bother. Genial. So the officer says, “Come down to my room in dress-coats for a punishment-duty-tour.” It was Ike and his room-mate, supposed to report. And the prank is that they only wear the special dress-coats and not the (expected) rest of the uniform, no not anything else, “not another stitch.” So all I’m saying is, if Ike had the (dick and) balls to do the prank he must have been pretty well-adjusted or had a humongo dong…one!

  * * *

  Note on “Access to Tools”

  Written in 1983.

  Appeared in Transreal!

  I wrote “Access to Tools” one humid, gray-sky morning in Lynchburg, Virginia, chuckling all the while. The name “Access to Tools” is lifted from the Whole Earth Catalog. I had the very unrealistic notion that this would be the first column in a continuing series for the The Bulletin of the Science Fiction Writers of America. I wasn’t actually high when I wrote it, although I think I did have a hangover. I was deliberately putting on a certain zonked style that I thought was funny—and a blow against conventional notions of good taste.

  As I mentioned in the note to the previous essay, George Zebrowski was editing the Bulletin at the time, and he’d asked me to to start a column, and this was the result. George didn’t feel he should run it. As he said in his letter to me about it, “Gadzooks!”

  The same instinct that prompted me to try and start a writing-advice column led me also to start doing TV reviews of books. After a lady named Nancy Heilman Davis interviewed me on the Lynchburg public access cable channel, I started doing a monthly TV book-review called Brain Food. Among the books that I reviewed were local poet Cornelius Eady’s Victims of the Latest Dance Craze, Charles Bukowski’s Tales of Ordinary Madness, William Burroughs’s Letters to Allen Ginsberg from Tangiers, Charles Baudelaire’s Fatal Destinies: Edgar Allan Poe, and Anselm Hollo’s Sojourner Microcosms.

  My children made fun of the way I would nervously raise my eyebrows while I was talking on TV, so one time I tried wearing shades. That didn’t work so well, so the next time I brought my daughter Isabel and our dog Arf, which helped keep me relaxed. You could see them onscreen.

  The Central Teachings of Mysticism

  This is not going to be very funny, but I hope it’s at least interesting. One reason I like to talk about mysticism is that talking weird gets me high: the air gets like thick yellow jelly, you know, and everyone’s part of the jelly-vibe jelly-space jelly-time…

  All is One. That’s the main teaching, that’s the so-called secret of life. It’s no secret, though. It’s a truism that we’ve all heard dozens of times. The secret teachings are shouted in the streets. All is One, what can I do with that? How can I use it in the home? If that’s the answer, what’s the question?

  I guess the most basic problem we all have to deal with is death. In Zen monasteries, the entering students are given koans to solve. A koan is a type of problem unsolvable to the rational mind: What was your face before you were born? This is not a stick. [Holds up a stick.] What shall I call it? Each of us on Earth has a special koan to work on, it’s the death-koan, handed out at birth: “Hi, this is the world, you’re alive now and it’s nice. After awhile you die and it all stops. What are you going to do about it?”

  The mystic escapes death by denying that he or she exists as an individual bag of meat. “I am God,” is the easiest way to put it, though this doesn’t
always go over too well. “Hi, I’m God, this is my wife, she’s God, too. These are the children, God, God, and…” What I have in mind here is that God—or the One, if you want to be more neutral-sounding—what I mean is that God is everywhere and we are all part of God. We are like eyes that God grows to look at each other with.

  The word “God” does grate. Organized religion puts a lot of people uptight (we will be passing out the plates soon) and when a lot of us hear that word (get your hands outta there, friend) our first impulse is to find a brick and throw it, or just leave or go to sleep (you’re gonna burn for this)…

  Here’s where the second central teaching comes in. All is One, fine. But: The One is Unknowable. “God”—that’s just a noise I’m making up here, a kind of pig-squeal. We don’t know God’s name, and we never will. The ultimate thing, the fundamental Reality—it’s not something the rational mind can tie up in a net of words. I can’t really tell you what I’m thinking about. In a way it’s pointless to talk about mysticism at all. “If you see God, only piss to mark the spot”—that’s a line from a poem I wrote when I was thirty. I was down in the islands, standing on a beach at night. If you see the Buddha in the road, kill him.

  So here’s two teachings: All is One, and The One is Unknowable. The third (and last) teaching is The One is Right Here. You’re totally enlightened right now, right as you are. You see God all the time; you can’t stop seeing Him. We’re all in heaven and there is no hell.

  First I claim that all of reality is one single thing, a sort of giant orgasm or something. Then I say that this One is unknowable, but right away I turn around and say that the One is perfectly easy to see, it’s everywhere. Do we have a contradiction? How can the mystics say that, on the one hand, God is unknowable, and that, on the other hand, God is everywhere?