by Rudy Rucker
I’d found us a house to rent near San Jose, in a village called Los Gatos, at the base of the coastal mountains west of town. Los Gatos was like a river settlement, in a way, except the flowing river was busy Route 17, which led over the mountains to the beach town of Santa Cruz. Los Gatos was prosperous little burg, with a nice shopping street and rich yuppies in its hills. Apple’s Steve Wozniak was said to live there.
Sylvia hadn’t seen our rental house before we arrived, and initially she was disappointed. It was very large by California standards, but rundown. Another problem with our house was that, for the whole two years that we rented the place, it was continuously for sale, which meant that we had deal with an endless stream of pushy realtors wanting to show the property. I came to think of realtors as terrible people.
But, at that point, buying a house was out of the question for us. We weren’t making enough money. The houses in California cost eight times as much as in Lynchburg.
Adjusting took some time. I’d always thought of California as a lush paradise, but it was drier than I’d imagined. For the first seven years we lived there, it hardly rained at all. And you had to get into your car to do almost anything. It seemed like we were constantly driving on parched freeways, baking in the endless sun.
The people we bumped into around Los Gatos itself weren’t especially friendly. Everyone seemed to be in a hurry or stand-offish—as if they were worried I might ask them for money or strong-arm them to join a cult.
Los Gatos High School was an impressive place—it looked a lot like the Riverdale High where Archie and Veronica went, an imposing 1940s building with palm trees on the lawn and a big stone staircase. It took the kids almost a year to fit into the intricate social scene—and Georgia never really managed it, as it was her senior year of high school. Imagine emerging into the last fifteen minutes of some California teen movie and trying to make the scene. Impossible.
This said, Georgia did dig up a few bitter outcast punker friends to hang with for that last stretch of school. And the following fall, she was off for college, back East to the same Swarthmore where Sylvia and I had met. Putting Georgia on the plane in the fall of 1987 was one of those threshold moments when I can feel my life change—it was the mirror-image of that moon-silvered night when I’d first fed her a bottle of milk.
Rudy and Isabel got involved with the high-school track team—it was a cozy scene for them, with road trips to meets. And they could hang around in the track shed after school. Pretty soon Rudy had an after-school job putting together computers. And he came to like heavy metal music. He was filled with zest and gusto—as if life were spread out before him like a huge wonderful banquet, endlessly fascinating and filled with unlimited opportunities.
Isabel was learning to play the flute, and getting involved with making bead jewelry to sell to the other students. She formed a partnership with her new friend Camille and founded “Icy Jewelry.” Isabel designed and made most of the jewelry, while Camille planned their marketing campaigns. It was a preview for the future—in later years, Isabel would start her own professional jewelry business, and Camille would get a job crafting ads at Google.
The Pacific Ocean was within striking range—amazing. We made weekly family trips to the beaches in Santa Cruz—it was only a half hour’s drive over the mountains. I found the California beaches to be nicer than those of the East Coast. The water was cleaner, there weren’t so many buildings at the water’s edge, and all of the beaches, everywhere, were public, with free access. I particularly liked the wild and pristine beaches bordering the farmlands and nature preserves north of Santa Cruz.
Sylvia’s parents came over for our first California Christmas in 1986, and her father, Arpad, gave me the money to buy a used surfboard and a wetsuit from a local surf shop.
“This was Chang’s board,” said the proprietor, eyeing the battered but attractively priced board I’d selected. “He…” The guy’s voice trailed off. I never did find out what happened to Chang.
The surfboard was long, robin’s egg blue, and with the brand name Haut. I bought a fiberglass repair kit—remembering how brother Embry had used a similar kit to repair the rusted-out spots on his Model A Ford. I laid out my board in our basement and spent a week patching up the gaps in the smooth outer plastic that covered the inner core of plastic foam. And then, finally, it was time to hit the curl.
As I really had no idea at all about how to surf, I decided to have my first session at the obscure Three Mile Beach north of Santa Cruz. We went out there on New Years Day, 1987. The beach was a little hard to access, with a cliff that we had to clamber down. But we made it—Sylvia, the kids and me, also our new science fiction writer friend Marc Laidlaw and his wife Geraldine.
Marc was about ten years younger than us, a California science fiction writer with a skewed sense of humor that I enjoyed. He’d get into riffs where he’d switch from voice to voice, presenting a whole ensemble of characters. Sometimes he’d even provide voices for things like trees and waves. I loved listening to him.
Eventually Marc and I would collaborate on four SF short stories about a pair of surfers called Zep and Del. Although Marc had grown up in Laguna Beach down in SoCal, he didn’t seem to know much more about surfing than me.
I dug how crazily chaotic the waves were on the deserted beach that first time. In my thick, cushiony rubber wetsuit, my body felt warm, even cozy, although the touch of the Pacific on my hands and face was stunningly cold. I swam out and rode some tiny waves of foam on my stomach. I quickly came to understand how hard to would be to catch a glassy big wave, let alone stand up.
In the end, I never got very far with surfing, but it came to be a mental metaphor that I liked to use for my activities. Serious surfers are out there nearly every day, year after year, in all kinds of conditions, engaging with the sea—and that’s sort of what it’s like to be a pro writer.
We met Marc in the fall of 1986 through the young San Francisco SF writers Richard Kadrey and Pat Murphy, who invited Sylvia and me over to the apartment they shared.
Kadrey was at the same time sweet and menacing. He had an ever-expanding collection of tattoos on his body, each one in a different style. He wore shades and black leather. He loved talking about famous mass murderers and about hard-core erotic photographs. His novels were full of blood and gore. But yet, in person, he was one of the nicest people I’d ever met, incredibly sensitive and understanding, a fount of empathy.
Murphy was remarkable as well. She had a goofy, comedic quality, and she liked delving into tiny details about how the world works. She had a job as a staff writer for the Exploratorium science museum in San Francisco, and would craft articles about topics like lenses or pencils or ears of corn. Her SF novels were playful, liberating and radical.
I was thrilled to go to Kadrey and Murphy’s apartment. From my years of reading about the Beats and the hippies, I was perhaps a little overexcited about meeting San Francisco writers. Marc Laidlaw’s oblique way of expressing himself caused me to jump to the (fallacious) conclusion that he was high on mescaline. And writer Michael Blumlein’s recently shaved head led me to deduce (quite incorrectly) that he was a junkie with AIDS! Hardly anyone shaved their heads back then (and now that they do, Blumlein wears a long ponytail).
Blumlein is a fascinating character. I already knew his work because he’d contributed the most disgusting and politically inflammatory story that I’d ever seen, “Shed His Grace,” to an underground SF anthology, Semiotext(e) SF, which I’d helped edit. Blumlein’s story is about a man who castrates himself while watching wall-sized videos of Ronald and Nancy Reagan.
I’d quite accidentally fallen into co-editing Semiotext(e) SF with a writer called Peter Lamborn Wilson. He happened to live upstairs from my friend Eddie Marritz in New York. When I’d been visiting Eddie in 1985, I’d asked him if he knew anyone who had some pot. And Peter Lamborn Wilson came downstairs and turned us on—and then Peter was, like, “And by the way, would you help me edit
an underground science fiction anthology?” Eventually he got the writer Robert Anton Wilson to participate in the editing too.
It was a very edgy book. By the time I came to California in 1986, we’d pretty much finalized the line-up of stories for the anthology, but it didn’t actually appear till 1989—in a small-press blare of no publicity and no reviews.
So anyway, all I knew about Blumlein was that he’d written this shocking but irresistible story, which is why I was so quick to draw unwarranted conclusions from his shaved head! Blumlein seemed very mild-mannered and soulful, and prone to the psychiatric conversational style of asking endless questions. He also worked as a physician, and he knew all sorts of gnarly things. As I got to know him better, I’d realize that Blumlein’s mildness was a kind of front, and that under the surface, he seethed with the same kinds of contempt and bitterness that I myself often feel towards the powers that be.
In some ways these writers were more serious than our Lynchburg friends had been. I quickly found that I couldn’t run my mouth in quite the same self-aggrandizing way I’d used in Virginia. If I’d start sounding too puffed up, they’d just glance at each other and laugh. I was in a more sophisticated community now, and I had to adapt.
Our children particularly liked Marc Laidlaw—he was as close to them in age as to the ages of Sylvia and me. Marc and Geraldine had cool little statues of the elephant god Ganesh all around their apartment, and they had a pet python who was about eight feet long. Marc fed the python a white mouse now and then, and when telling us about this, he’d act out the mouse’s reactions.
Geraldine was an irrepressible loudmouth—when I’d call Marc on the phone, she’d stand near him, interrupting him, even though she couldn’t hear what I said. She made a little money telling fortunes with Tarot cards at an occult supplies shop in the Haight Ashbury.
To gear up for “Probability Pipeline,” the first of our four collaborative surfing science fiction stories, Marc and I began studying surfing magazines. There was a phrase in one of the ads that Marc particularly liked: “Life on the edge measures seekers, performers, and adventurists.” Marc and I deemed this line to be worthy of enshrining as the key text of a new literary movement that we called Freestyle.
“There it is, Rude Dude,” Marc once wrote me. “The Freestyle Antifesto. No need to break down the metaphors—an adventurist knows what the Ocean really is. No need to feature matte-black mirrorshades or other emblems of our freestyle culture—hey, dude, we know who we are. No need to either glorify or castrate technology. Nature is the Ultimate. We’re skimming the cell-sea, cresting the waves that leap out over the black abyss.”
I came up with an even shorter summary of our principles: “Write like yourself, only more so.” For about ten minutes Marc and I convinced Richard, Pat and Michael that they were Freestylists too, not that any of them ever took our idea very seriously. The problem with Freestyle, as a movement, was that it really had no prescriptive program. We were all diverging along our own worldlines.
As soon as we moved to California, Sylvia lined up a job teaching French at a public two-year community college, which looked to be a much better career than teaching in high-schools. But it was only a part-time position, as they only had the one introductory French course. So she started to think about teaching community college courses on English as a Second Language (ESL). The catch was that, in order to be certified to teach ESL, she’d have to take two years’ worth of courses in linguistics—which seemed like a big hurdle.
A year after we moved to California, in July, 1987, Sylvia’s mother died unexpectedly, a terrible shock. Sylvia flew over to Switzerland for the funeral, and I stayed home with the kids. Sylvia was brokenhearted. Partly to take her mind off her grief, she went ahead and started taking courses at San Jose State, picking up the linguistics courses that she needed for certification to teach ESL. Each of us was retooling as fast as possible.
Meanwhile the realtors’ efforts bore fruit, and we were evicted from that first rental house. We had very little time to find a new rental, and we ended up in a small beige tract home on a busy street, a road so busy that wrecked vehicles regularly careened into our front yard.
It was an impossible situation. I felt like a plastic bag blowing around in the cheap-ass San Jose maelstrom. But a year later, we found our third rental, this time on a leafy hillside street in Los Gatos, just a block from where we’d rented at the start. The new home was a pleasant house with a large deck overlooking the flatlands of Silicon Valley, twinkling with lights at night.
A surprising individual appeared in our social circle when we moved to San Jose—Dennis Poague, a.k.a. Sta-Hi, my personal Neal Cassady. Dennis was living in a rooming house and working as a cab driver. He was down and out, friendless, maybe a little strung out on speed, and happy to have us in town. By now he thought of us as family.
It was fun to have Dennis come over, up to a point, although he was always one for pushing your hospitality too far, yammering on and on about something until you’d relent and say yes. He’d acquired an ancient old milk-delivery truck that he’d spray-painted in silver, and he got us to let him park it our back yard. It barely ran; it was more like a storage locker for him. The back was stuffed with various treasured bits of junk—parts of motorcycles, broken electric guitars, boxes of old skin magazines, industrial laboratory equipment, mounds of Goodwill clothes—whatever.
One of the greatest nights I had with Dennis was early in 1987, when the newly launched Beastie Boys gave a concert at a small auditorium in San Jose. I’d been reading about the Beasties, so I’d gone ahead and bought three tickets, treating Dennis and my fellow professor Jon Pearce. Sylvia wasn’t interested in seeing this particular show, so it was a boys’ night out. Dennis showed up his Goodwill finest—he had a giant gold lamé jockey’s cap, a leopard print shirt and mauve bell-bottoms. Jon was bemused, but game for the action.
“These guys are—geeks!” Jon happily exclaimed after the Beasties delivered their first song. In other words, they were one with us.
It was one of those rare concerts that was unimaginably better than anything I could have expected in advance. A gift from the gods. I played the songs in my head for months. The Beastie’s rap-based technique of sampling snippets from other music seemed like a nice match for the dawning computer age’s jumpy modes of thought.
A big upside of being in the Bay area was that we could see great music as often as we wanted to. My favorite punk band, the Ramones, passed through San Jose every year, always playing at the same rudimentary night club, One Step Beyond, a box amid warehouses. Sylvia and I took Georgia there soon after we arrived, and a couple of years later we took Rudy Jr. These were very small shows, like dances at a private high-school. The Ramones weren’t all that famous yet.
A couple of years later I took all three kids to see the Ramones at the outdoor Greek Theater in Berkeley. Isabel was young enough that she didn’t want to venture into the mosh pit, so she was sitting by me. The lights went down, a fog of dry ice smoke washed across the stage, and two red spotlights silhouetted a pair of figures standing on amps and holding guitars. It was Dee Dee and Johnny Ramone, with Joey center stage.
“Isabel!” I exclaimed happily. “Remember this. This is rock and roll.”
Joey was an unlikely figure to be a rock star—pale as an alien grub worm, spindly and awkward when he’d menace the crowd with his microphone stand. He had a wonderfully emotive voice—that was always the juicy core of a Ramones song. Joey had feelings, he cared. He wasn’t at all like the stereotype of a harshly screaming punk rocker. In concert, I always felt like Joey was talking directly to me, but maybe everyone else thought that too.
I liked the way that the Ramones played straight-on classic rock and roll—and managed to make it new. They amped it up, they made it faster and tighter, they wrote goofy lyrics, and middle-of-the-road people didn’t like them. I think of my science fiction as having similar qualities. That is, I write tales with classic
SF themes like higher dimensions and aliens, I push my effects to new levels of weirdness, my characters are suffering and realistic humans—and I’m not all that popular among typical SF fans.
The very last time we saw the Ramones was in 1995, with a large crowd at a battered old theater hall on Market Street in San Francisco. It was their last tour. Rudy Jr. got thrown out of the concert during the first song for stage diving. The Ramones had something like an immense Presidential seal on the curtain behind them, edited to be a symbol for the Ramones.
The song that sticks with me from that last concert was their rendition of Bob Dylan’s “My Back Pages,” with the refrain “Ah but I was so much older then, I’m younger than that now.” Being the Ramones, they turned Dylan’s folkie, meditative music into a hysterical buzz-saw of guitars played faster than seemed humanly possible. As always, Joey’s tuneful, insolent, jaded voice gave the song heart and—above all—made it new. Pretty soon after this, all of the Ramones would be dead.
In addition to the San Francisco SF writers, Sylvia and I found a nice set of friends among the faculty at San Jose State in 1986. Two of them were fellow mathematical logicians who’d also reinvented themselves as computer scientists—Michael Beeson and Jon Pearce. They both said they’d taken a lot of psychedelics in the sixties.
“Computers are the LSD of the 1980s,” Michael remarked soon after I arrived. I could see what he meant. These machines were becoming an all-consuming society-wide obsession, and in the process they were changing our self-images and our perceptions of how the world worked.
Michael had a mathematician’s trait of being rigorously logical, which gave conversations with him an odd feel. Sometimes I’d derail one his deductions with a completely random remark, which he’d then ponder and decide how to handle. He might shove my interruption out of his way and continue as before, or burst into laughter and request amplification, or start an entirely new line of logical investigation.