The Vicar's List
Walt Little's Soul
Wednesdays Off
You Can't Get There From Here (or, The Intersection)
Introduction to
WITH THE BENTFIN BOOMER BOYS ON LITTLE OLD NEW ALABAMA
When preparing Dangerous Visions, I predicted that Philip José Farmer's exciting and experimental "Riders of the Purple Wage" would cop the novella awards in the year of its eligibility. I was right, it did, but it didn't take any special prescience on my part. The story was so outrageously different, and so controversial, it was inevitable that it would be the most talked-about item in the book.
Now I predict that Richard Lupoff's "With the Bentfin Boomer Boys on Little Old New Alabama" will cop the major awards next year. Again I load the gun in my favor. This story will enflame and infuriate the traditionalists; it will amaze and intimidate older, longer-established writers; it will confound and awe critics; it will become the subject of fanzine articles and bull sessions and convention panels; it will cause voices to rise, adrenaline to pump, editors to howl, imitators to scramble for their copy-riters. It will raise one hell of a noise.
Friends, there has never been a thing like this one before, in or out of the field of sf.
One expects some eye-openers when assembling a wild Frankincense creation like A,DV. I got them in DV and I expected some this time. Tiptree did it, and so did Anthony, and likewise Wilhelm, Vonnegut, Nelson, Bernott and Parra. But nothing like Dick Lupoff. He takes the solid gold award for Chutzpah Above and Beyond the Limits of Gall.
"With the Bentfin Boomer Boys . . ." presents problems for foreign translators of this anthology that I see as virtually insurmountable. It defies most of the rules of storytelling that remained unbroken after Farmer's novella. It is so audacious and extravagant a story that it becomes one of the three or four really indispensable reasons for doing this book. Frankly, had no other story than this one been written for A,DV—the book would be worth reading.
And as you might expect, the story did not come to be a reality easily. Nor has its progression from first submission to final 36,000 word publication been easy. I'll tell you some of the background. I understand it has already been the subject of some discussion through the sf underground.
In 1968 I started sending out calls for submissions and Dick Lupoff queried me about this story, which he said he'd started but completion had been discouraged by not only editors, but by his own agent as well. I wrote back and said let me look at it. When it arrived, I was astounded that others had not seen in it the wonders I knew lay waiting on the unwritten pages. I wrote Dick a long letter in which I discussed what I'd like to see, and suggested he expand the concept and make it three times as long. He seemed pleased at the project and some months later I received the story in what Richard thought was a final form. There were still areas I wanted expanded—places in which entire chapters had only been hinted at. Dick and I discussed it by phone, and he was happy that the chance had been offered to do even more on the piece. We both realized that what we had on our hands was one of those rare stories that we were enjoying so much . . .we didn't want it to end. So Dick took it back and expanded again. This was the most "editing" I did with any author in this book. As those who were along for the DV ride may remember, one promise I make the contributors to these volumes is that what they write will not be altered to suit artificial regulations of what I, as editor, might deem "the needs of the audience." Every story in this book (and with only one minor editing presumption that was the case with DV as well) appears precisely as the author finally set it down, even to disparities in spelling (e.g., "color" in American, "colour" in British), which makes for derangement among Doubleday's typesetters and proofreaders.
Finally, it was done, and Dick even took a deferred payment on part of his advance. Money was running thin at that point.
I included the story, and went on to completing the editing. Then began the fireworks.
Richard sent off a carbon of "WTBBBOLONA" to his agent, the gentleman who had, with classic perceptivity, suggested he scrap the project originally. The agent flipped—a bit of a miracle, if you know the agent—and promptly suggested to one of the best editors in the paperback market, that she publish it. The editor read it . . .and a second flippage. So they offered Dick lotsa money.
Now understand something (in case I haven't mentioned it elsewhere in the introductions . . .at this final stage of the writing senility is setting in and I may repeat myself): the stories in this book are all new. None have ever appeared in any other form anywhere else. That is one of the big selling points of A,DV. You have to buy this book to read these stories. After publication of the paperback—several years from now, by contract—the rights revert to the individual writers and they can sell them anywhere they please; but for right now each author protects every other author's chance to make money from this book by the exclusivity of the product. In that way Vonnegut helps sell Ken McCullough and James Blish helps sell Joan Bernott and Bernard Wolfe helps sell Richard Lupoff. In DV, Ted Sturgeon turned down a wad of Playboy money because he understood that publication of his first story in many years within DV's pages would help hype the work of younger, unknown writers. This is a gestalt, and it is a sort of communal pull-together project. For that reason, I have been a hardnosed bastard about letting anything appear in print before publication of the books.
Dick respected the concept and called me, advising me he could clean up if I'd let the paperback house do the story in an even more expanded form as a novel. But he said he was grateful for my faith in the novella and would abide by my decision. I was sorrowful at keeping Dick from the deal, but suggested that an appearance in A,DV would only heighten interest in a novel of "Boomer Boys" at twice or three times its length here, after publication of A,DV. He said okay, and told his agent, who told the editor.
Then started the calls from the editor.
I puffed up with pride, of course. Others now thought we had something extraordinarily sensational. But I had to remain firm.
Finally, the paperback house said they'd wait and re-examine the project after publication of A,DV.
Which would have been swell, except it took an extra year to get this book in print, and during that time Dick was beset constantly by extravagant offers that would have cut the story from A,DV. To his credit, though he needed the money and had not seen another penny from me, he refused. (But he bitched mightily, privately and publicly, which I can't put him down for so doing, though it made me feel more and more like a shit. However, having expunged all guilt from my nature—no mean trick for a nice Jewish boy automatically entitled to two thousand years retroactive kvetching by a nice Jewish upbringing and a nice Jewish mother, hello Serita, how are things in Miami Beach?—I learned to live with it. All I had to do to make it supportable was remembering those first few ms. pages I'd seen.)
Further, as a mark of his honorableness, some months ago—before publication of A,DV—the contract ran out and the rights reverted automatically to Richard. Had he so desired, he could have kept the advance money and sold the story to whomever he pleased, and I wouldn't have been able to make a peep. And wouldn't have been able to bring myself to peep, for after all, I'd taken so long to get it into print.
But Lupoff is a good guy, a fine writer, and here is the story, as originally intended.
I now implore all of you who find it as smashing a piece of work as the agent, the editor and I did, to write your local paperback publisher, demanding "Boomer Boys" be expanded and published as a full novel. It's the least we can do to repay Lupoff for having written it, and for having stood by his fellow writers at his own expense.
And for more Lupoff, a talent getting increasingly important every year, let me recommend Sacred Locomotive Flies (Beagle Books, 1971); One Million Centuries (Lancer, 1967), a 352 page giant of a novel; Edgar Rice Burroughs: Master of Adventure (Canaveral, 1965/Ace, revised edition, 1968); and, as co-editor with Don Thompson, All in Color
for a Dime (Arlington House, 1970), a marvelous collection of nostalgic articles and essays on comic books of the 1940's. Additionally, for those of you too impatient for more Lupoffiction to wait for "Boomer Boys" as a full novel, press your local paperback publisher to buy and publish a wild and whacky manuscript titled Thintwhistle on the Moon that was originally bought by Dell for paperback publication (but was cancelled when Dell inexplicably cut back its sf program and let go one of the most imaginative editors who's ever worked in our field).
Dick Lupoff—whose fame has gone to his head only in that he now insists his stories be published under the name "Richard" Lupoff—now lives in Berkeley with his wife, Patricia, and their three children, and when he isn't sf-ing, writes rock criticism for such diverse markets as Organ, Changes, Earth Magazine and (as this is written) next month begins a regular rock column for Ramparts. (In the dreary month of February, 1972, we are advised, Mr. Lupoff will have had a study of the sf field published in the last of those magazines just noted. Look it up.)
And while I don't want to keep you from the "Boomer Boys" any longer than absolutely necessary, here is some Lupoff self-statement.
"Born Brooklyn, 21 Feb. 1935.
"First fuck, some nameless whore after a basketball game when I was 17; believe it or not she was a pleasant person whom I remember vividly (doesn't everybody?) and with affection, and will probably put in a story someday. ('Used again,' she'd remark if she knew about that, but smiling.)
"Patricia and I have been together long enough to have three children (Kenneth, Katherine, Thomas), with whom we share our house with an old spaniel, a nutty afghan and a healing-cat. It's also been long enough to go through a lot of changes, but even so it's just the beginning.
"I attended an all-male, military, Christian boarding school through high school. As a result I am passionately devoted to co-educational, civilian, secular day schooling. After barely surviving the horrors of secondary education I went to college, majoring in journalism. This is a total shuck: I enjoyed college and benefited from some of my courses, most particularly symbolic logic and other philosophy courses, but as for writing, as many people have said before me, it can't be taught. You learn by doing if your desire is sufficient, and if you have the requisite innate talent; and if you don't then no amount of drill in the five W's will make you a writer.
"Let's see, is there anything else I can tell you? Oh, I served two calm years in the army after college, then twelve (!) in the computer business before opting for full starvation in 1970.
"I love, like or admire: Patricia the Dancer, good writing, honesty, women, intelligence, children, cats, Mendocino, vegetables, dogs, cities, Alice Smith, freedom, men, dumb horror movies, acid, blues, living.
"I hate: slavery.
"Oh, let's see, I started writing science fiction short stories about 1950 and received rejection slips from Boucher & McComas, Horace Gold, Fred Pohl, and Planet Stories (the last not even signed). Some years later I backed into the ranks of sf professionalism by snaring the job of editing half-a-dozen posthumous volumes of Edgar Rice Burroughs, then writing a book about Burroughs.
"Meanwhile I'd cried a lot about my inability to sell short stories, and James Blish suggested that I try a novel instead. I thought this idea absolute lunacy, but it stuck in my brain. I wrote no fiction during the Burroughs thing: mostly just read and read and read all the conceivably relevant stuff I could find that had been published prior to 1920. Out of that experience I've promised Tom Disch that I will someday produce an essay 'How I Read 400 Bad Books in One Year.'
"But when I re-emerged into the modern era I followed Blish's advice and wrote a novel along very conservative, traditional lines, quite Burroughsian in structure. It was rejected by the best-known paperback science fiction editor of the time. Because its hero was black. (Or Negro, as we used to say in those quaint, long-ago days.) Fortunately there were other editors around, and Larry Shaw, one of the long-time unsung sf editors, bought it. It was called One Million Centuries.
"Somewhere along the way I learned a little about writing saleable short stories. Chester Anderson quotes William Tenn as giving this formula for the short story: One thing happens. So I've written shorts in which: four people in a bar play the juke box . . .a man sits in his kitchen waiting for his wife to come downstairs . . .a man wakes up in the night and goes to the bathroom. The last of those is my favorite. Twelve pages of piss. Sam Moskowitz will have a fit!
" 'With the Bentfin Boomer Boys on Little Old New Alabama' was planned as a second novel, but no editor I could find would touch it. Even my agent Henry Morrison, normally a most kind-hearted and accommodating man, declined to try to sell it. So it lay dormant, three chapters written and the remainder outlined, for a full year until Harlan put out the call for manuscripts for Again, Dangerous Visions.
"I think this story was the best thing I'd written up to that point, but there's so damned much to learn, so far to go . . .I hope that some day I'll be a good writer. Or at least a writer. I'm working on a novel now called Up! It's about a fellow who finds himself in the basement of a tall building and goes upstairs."
WITH THE BENTFIN BOOMER BOYS ON LITTLE OLD NEW ALABAMA
Richard A. Lupoff
1. Last Night in Letohatchie
Well he didn't like it the hot dust blowing, crusting and it made him have to blink a lot standing still a gentleman doesn't move under the circs but you can blink yes by the end of the whole thing it's like sleeping too long the dust tears get caked up and make a gritty crusty blob at the corner of your eye where the nictitating eyelid would push it clear if you were a frog (too late—you're not). He knew that afterward he would have a chance rub the two places one at a time it would hurt (pull scratch) but only for a moment and the dustcrust blob would come out, get it between the last joint pad of thumb and forefinger of each hand it would roll into a nifty sphere so what?
Mean, what do you do with a perfect sphere (two in fact) 1/32-inch in diameter composition gritty dry outside (no sweat left) moist inside (tears yes) made out of 70% red cruddy N'Alabamian dust blown into your eye at parade by the hot wind 30% white man's tears (yeah) (saline content) listening to a would you believe it commencement address oh no!
How about that speech! Brilliant! Original! How about we gotta sacrifice to win brave surn manhood to protect pure white pussies from the nigras (ever see one who didn't slobber clutch after a white c*nt?) carry the war to the enemy put the nigra back in his place make N'Haiti pay for atrocities and
and
and grit in your eye. Sheeh!
So who ever said commencement was supposed to be fun anyhow tradition is what it is. & N'Alabama is strong for tradition good surn tradition all the way from O'Earthtime days before the furgem Jewrabs conquered the world when O'Alabama was an independent damn O'Earth nation bajeez with independent damn allies: O'Miss O'Jaja O'Boerepublic the nigra knew his place then you bet basaintgeorge.
Well he stood there attention he was a good gyrene raring to get into space into war and fight the good fight for god and planet and little baby heads of shiny golden curls (that would grow up to be a piece you follow? a piece) who ever said he needed—who ever said anybody needed—a commencement speech to tell him to blast the damned uppities out of black space back to their stinking N'Haiti till the papadocs learned their place again . . .
. . .some bigbellied senator from furgem Talladega or someplace? Sheeh! What if it was the furgem governor himself what could he say about the war that everybody didn't know already anyhow? That we better win it or there'd be buck nigras walking free on N'Alabama's sacred soil and before you know it some cunning black nigra kid's playing pop-o with some innocent golden-haired little N'Alabama baby and you know what happens then! Minority groups at the polls! Two party elections and furgem minority groups trading off damn votes for concessions the same thing that happened on O'Earth before the furgem Jewrabs pushed everybody else out and left the colony worlds to shift for themselves. Who needs speeches
?
So after it became overwith he went with Gordon Lester Wallace III and Freddie. School out, all the eager boy graduates had their diplomae and a handshake from Senator Belly from Talladega (he knuckled his eyes between mitting them) and off to barracks for fresh undustied uniforms and awayaway it's over but he was gone already by then with Gordon Lester Wallace III and Freddie to Letohatchie for a time.
Down the red rut road to Letohatchie by whining two-wheel gyrocar and Gordon Lester Wallace III and Freddie said to him—How about it sarge?—and turned waiting for an answer.
He didn't.
Gordon Lester Wallace III and Freddie grunted and looked ahead no use bugging him that was obvious. What if he was just tired. Or grumpy. But if Gordon Lester Wallace III and Freddie had done something wrong that got him mad, ah, that was another matter and better let sleeping sleepers sleep. He knuckled his right eye it hurt (pull scratch, yes) and his left (yes) and rolled two gummy spheres 1/32-inch in diameter between the last joint pad of thumb and forefinger of each hand and threw them away dustodust they rolled whined down the red road.
Parked in a dirty alley in downtown Letohatchie (don't knock it if you've never tasted Letohatchie fried mudhen) and set a clever device on the gyrocar to set off an electric current and hold any burglar there till they got back Gordon Lester Wallace III and Freddie and he would find the bastard there maybe with a few hours of writhing first and see what they would see to do with him. Humane? Keep your nose clean and it won't get tweaked, that's what! Whose rights are you worried about, the victim or the thief, answer yes or no.
Again, Dangerous Visions Page 94