San Diego Lightfoot Sue

by Tom Reamy

  A troubling story.

  Too simple and almost sophomorically romantic for serious consideration; too powerful and demanding to be ignored. I’ve always believed that much Great Art goes unheralded, simply because it is so uncomplicated that it looks easy.

  Oscar Wilde once said, “There are only two kinds of people who are really fascinating—people who know absolutely everything and people who know absolutely nothing.” Tom was one of the former. His well of obscure information was seemingly bottomless. And his fascination with the little details of life manifested itself not only in good, long conversations late into the night, but in the stories, as well.

  Much of it came from being a keek. But even more of the minutiae of history, science, various crafts and skills, people and nature came from his peregrinations. Tom was born in Woodson, Texas, but because his father’s work demanded frequent resiting, Tom saw a lot of the country when he was young. He lived for extended periods in Kansas, in Los Angeles, in Dallas. And he filed it all away. He read voraciously. His memory was encyclopedic. And beyond the simple mimetic skills of an intelligent human being, he was able to make intellectual linkages between obscure bits of data that brought sense out of chaos when trying to unravel a tangled plot-twist.

  He was extremely good company.

  And he already had the writing skills in the fifties, when his friends were reading his stories and begging him to send them off for possible acceptance by the sf magazines. But Tom never did it. God only knows why. He wasn’t that shy a man, though he did tend to be laid-back in groups where the proportion of strangers was greater than that of people he knew.

  One would have thought that all the years as a fan, with a high profile in publishing, would have given him the ready confidence to start sending his work out to market. In the fifties and sixties his critical writings in the fan community were professional, closely-reasoned, always gentlemanly without being asskissing; but there wasn’t much fiction. Then in the early Sixties he started publishing Trumpet, a magazine so refined and of such a high caliber that he made the Hugo finalist ballot three or four times. And there, too, his writing shone.

  But it wasn’t until the Seventies that he actually began working as a professional. First in film, out here where the blue sky merchants sold him several bills of goods on the if-come, and he wrote a bunch of treatments and screenplays that kept him busy, may have made him an inadequate living, but probably won’t add much to posterity’s judgment of his talent.

  In 1975 he moved to Kansas City and established a new magazine, Nickelodeon, with Ken Keller. It was a swell magazine. But that was already a five-finger exercise for Tom—though he spent more time at it than those of us who respected his serious writing might have wished. Because on the same day in 1973 he sold his first two stories, “Twilla” and “San Diego Lightfoot Sue.” And there was nothing but the top of the mountain in sight. Tom was finally, at last, at long last, off and running. Everyone smiled. The dream was coming true. On November 4th, 1977 the dream ended with throat-gagging frustration for all of us who had watched and waited… and smiled.

  On November 4th, 1977 Tom Reamy died a writer’s death.

  At the not-nearly-enough age of forty-two, Tom Reamy had a heart attack while sitting at his typewriter doing a story for Ed Ferman’s Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction; a story Ed had been calling him about regularly; and he was only seven pages into it when the fist closed; and he was gone; and oh God it wasn’t right! It just wasn’t fair!

  Keep tough. Don’t get sentimental and let it dishonor all he did that was first-rank by praising that which he did to make a buck, to survive in the meanest town this side of Beirut. Deal with the lesser stuff quickly, get it said, and get back to the diamonds.

  Like much of the work Tom did either in or for Hollywood, “Sting!” is a snippit of an idea both trashy and time-wasting. For reader and for Tom, who might better have been working on stories intended to be stories, not treatments for low-budget potboiler films.* It is a classic example of how destructive to the artistic intellect the lure of glamourous C*I*N*E*M*A can be.

  *There exist two versions of “Sting”: the original screenplay, which appeared in 1976 in Six Science Fiction Plays, edited by Roger Elwood, and a proposed first chapter and outline for the now defunct, Elwood-edited, Laser Books. It was decided, after the Introduction was written, not to include the original screenplay version, due to its extreme length (107 printed pages in its original paperback form), in an already large story collection, nor the inferior first chapter and outline (which Harlan is referring to) since the screenplay/novel adaptation of “2076: Blue Eyes” was already being included as an example of an uncompleted work in progress.

  To be precise, using the words of Saul Bellow, “Writers are not necessarily corrupted by money. They are distracted—diverted to other avenues.”

  Tom should have been writing novels and stories; fresh, hot, demanding stories that would have been his own, untouched by inhuman hands and by the studio mentality that obtains even with the fly-by-night independents for whom Tom worked… the “art by committee” philosophy that emerges from insecurity, absence of original thinking, the debased concepts attendant on let’s make a fast buck. It was a scuzzy arena for Tom to walk into, relatively unarmed. He was too gentle, too anxious to please.

  So instead of all the stories we might have had from him during that first bold flash of creative energy, 1970-1973 approximately, he wrote a plethora of film treatments, a few screenplays (a 186 page screenplay of Tom’s adaptation of Sturgeons’ MORE THAN HUMAN is still kicking around, and two of his five “adult” screenplays, The Goddaughter and The Mislaid Genie, were produced in 1972-1973), and he worked as prop manager on the sometimes X-rated, sometimes R-rated Flesh Gordon.

  He loved movies, had been a movie projectionist, and the thrill of working in films took him away, diverted him, distracted him from what surely had to have been his chosen calling… the writing of stories. And much of what we’ve been left now seems so tragically time-wasting in retrospect. Items like “Sting!” which, even had it been carried to term, even had it been filmed, would have been nothing better than another dumb giant ant story. Tom had more than that to offer the world.

  The same can be said about “Blue Eyes” and “Insects in Amber.”

  The former is another slight piece. An unfinished symphony. We cannot know how adventurous Tom would have been with this item. Again, Tom was trying to break into the big time of screenwriting. This film treatment was registered with the Writers Guild in Hollywood on October 10th, 1972. For a short-line producer named Wilbur George, Mandala Productions, whose offices were in the bedroom suburb of Monrovia, a location about as relevant to Hollywood as Secaucus, New Jersey is to Broadway.

  It’s pretty basic after-the-bomb material; a touch of the world of “A Boy and His Dog” and a touch of Amerindian hoopdedoo. The plot as outlined in the full treatment reads a lot like John Christopher’s juvenile trilogy about the Tripods (THE WHITE MOUNTAINS, THE CITY OF GOLD AND LEAD, and THE POOL OF FIRE), a little like Zardoz, a little like WAR OF THE WORLDS and a lot like THE WIZARD OF OZ, the great-grandfather of all such odyssey tales, with the most distant ancestor being, of course, Homer’s vast template.

  Like “Sting!” there isn’t much to comment on, and not much to recommend for serious readers of Reamy, save in one particular.

  The scene of the birth of the mutant child, and the slaughter of the mother, carries an emotional freighting that is genuinely arresting. Even when slanting his work for that most superficial of mediums, the B flick, Tom could not help but bring to his work an operative sensibility on the highest levels of craft, and a passion that raised the construct above the usual mud of its ilk and genre.

  As for the last of the three “stories” intended as narrative molds out of which films could be fashioned, “Insects in Amber,” well, I’m afraid the best thing about it is the title, which I wish to God Tom had saved for a story worthy of it
s imagery.

  It is, as presented here, clearly, obviously, painfully, self-consciously, a narrative version of the low-budget horror film Tom originally conceived it to be.

  Predictable, derivative and pretty thin stuff. Weak, watery blood; the kind of humour and vapor one gets when a bug is squashed. I don’t for a moment believe Ben; I find Tannie the kind of cute li’l kid I’d like to dropkick; Mom and Dad are tissue-paper cliches; and the stranded cadre of “insects” just one more example of rigidly structured, constricted thinking when it comes to a film intended to terrify. Your standard plot in which a disparate group of people are trapped in an enclosed space with a nameless thing that kills them off one by one a la Agatha Christie’s TEN LITTLE INDIANS or, more contemporaneously, the Dan O’Bannon-Ridley Scott film Alien.

  When the film didn’t go, Tom obviously tried to salvage the work already expended by rewriting it as a short story. I cannot lie to you; unlike most of the other work in this fine collection, I find “Insects in Amber” an embarrassment.

  Tom wasn’t a science fiction writer, no matter how inconvenient that pragmatic reality may be for the loons and categorizers who need ready labels as a substitute for fresh thought. Even so, many of us who work in styles of our own creation have dabbled in the genre; and I think it’s an unarguable truth that the work done clearly in the science fiction idiom is our least effective. For the Nivens, the Dicksons, the Heinleins and Clarkes, who feel comfortable with the rigors of pure science fiction, it is a boundaryless (and boundless) terrain on which they can run amok. But for fantasists like Tom and me, it was always a nightmare of restrictions, rules, accepted templates, fannish expectations and very much like asking us to swim the 1500 meter freestyle with anvils chained to our ankles and catchers’ mitts on our paws.

  It is tragically inevitable that when this book gets reviewed it will, by all odds, wind up with the other “sci-fi” titles when, in fact, it is no more science fiction than the latest Stephen King or William Kotzwinkle novel. And even when a reviewer has the simple sense to realize it ain’t sf, some mention of that will surface in the review: “This book should reach much farther than the usual science fiction crowd…” the review will say, and thereby damn it simply by the use of those words.

  And that’s a shame. Tom’s work should be known to a much broader range of readers: those who respect writers who deal with the human condition; those who need no faster-than-light rationales for improbable behavior; those who do not shy away from the darker side of the spirit. In short, those who respect fine writing above tinkertoy problems.

  If the notes struck by the preceding little song rankle the True Believers for whom the sun rises and sets on the phrase (but not necessarily the actuality) “science fiction,” well, I shrug and smile bravely. They should not be surprised; it’s a song I’ve sung before. And that’s the name of that tune.

  I’m still here to sing the song, but Tom isn’t. Though it was a refrain I’ve heard from him, in gentler tones, on any number of occasions. And if the True Believers find it awkward, gauche and ill-placed for such words to appear here, I offer as testament to the validity of the assertion, the story titled “Dinosaurs” in this volume.

  Railing against the restrictions, Tom’s natural bent when he conceived a story was not toward the accepted and acceptable science fiction ideas, but toward the dark fantasies of urban and rural life—“Under the Hollywood Sign,” “Twilla,” “The Detweiler Boy.”

  As far as I can tell, “Dinosaurs” is the only fully-formed, actually science fiction story Tom ever wrote. Like so many of us tarred with the wrong brush, Tom was frequently referred to as a “sci-fi guy” by the illiterati, even though he was obviously a fantasist. Just because some of his stories appeared in sf magazines. Which is like saying if you happen to rent a room in a cheap hotel that caters to pimps and whores, you must be either a pimp or a whore.

  His interests and expertise never were in the areas of scientific extrapolation (though he had a wonderful grasp of the physical and biological sciences) or gadgetry. He cared about prying up the flat rocks in the human spirit and cataloguing with an unerring eye the slithery oogies that wriggled out to walk the streets. And so this story seems the assumption of an uncomfortable persona for Tom. Bluebabies and breathers and dreamers and whispering stones… all the la-de-dah of the prototypical sf whiplash are here, and frankly they whiz past me without getting in the wind very much.

  But like all of us who were fans once, who have been gulled momentarily by the dreams we had as children, who have taken our unsuccessful flings at writing what others write better… Tom did his and it’s here for your comparison with other works that he wrote out of necessity, rather than curiosity or a misguided sense of noblesse oblige.

  In the event my heavy hand becomes too oppressive in trying to deal with the stories in this book as attempts at Art—whether successful or otherwise—free of the misty-eyed, lachrymose, dishonest approbation slathered on the frequently-substandard literary legacies of writers termed “giants” by self-aggrandizing “critics” (that seem to proliferate in the world of science fiction every time a kindergarten class graduates to long pants and Norforms), know this:

  Just because my friend has died, does not mean my brain or my critical faculties have turned to suet. Art is Art, and Friendship is Friendship; and respect for the latter means unswerving allegiance to the former. Even so, writing this candidly about Tom, for the eyes of strangers and friends and Tom’s relatives, is a tightrope walk. He was a very private man, and he would often allude to places he’d been, experiences he’d had, things he knew first-hand… but they were always only glancing references. He kept his own counsel and kept stages of his life separate from one another, and from the people he knew on those stages. It is not my place to talk about any of that. Tom would not approve.

  But just to make certain I hadn’t gone over the line in places where my own high-verbal tendencies deprived me of a sense of balance in the critical analyses, I called several of Tom’s friends mentioned herein; and I read them all that has preceded this paragraph. They assured me I’d been cool. In fact, Richard Delap laughed and said Tom would have adored my comments about “Insects in Amber.” Richard said, “Tom hated that story. He was amazed when Ed Ferman bought it… and he could never understand what Ed saw in it. It brought in some food money and Tom was pleased Ferman had picked it up, but he despised the story.”

  Wheeew!

  He also apprised me of an error earlier in this essay: the first two stories Tom sold, for which he received checks on the same day—from Damon Knight and Harry Harrison—were not “Twilla” and “San Diego Lightfoot Sue.” They were “Beyond the Cleft” (first sale only because he opened Harrison’s envelope first) and “Under the Hollywood Sign.”

  Sometimes, having Delap around is better than having a self-correcting typewriter.

  But as a result of having been (as the est-holes put it) validated in my comments about Tom and his work, I can race toward a conclusion with comments about the four remaining stories that comprise this collection, three of which are among the best, thereby allowing me to ride out with upbeat thoughts.

  “The Sweetwater Factor,” I think you’ll find, is a puckish, lightly intellectual variation on the O. Henry “sting in the tail” story. A one-punch entertainment, neither particularly well-developed nor particularly deep… simply amusing. Which is no doubt just what Tom intended. He was accomplished at relaxing, and this kind of story, done by others, always amused him; I take it as a given that he should attempt to return the favor.

  It reads as if Tom didn’t really have an idea where the story was going when he envisioned the man sitting on the bench and the giant nose coming after him. It’s a story that just grew, like Topsy. We all do it from time to time, in almost exactly the way a good jazz musician does it: just jamming. Crank it up and let it wail. It’s a technique more widely used by fantasists than is generally acknowledged: free-forming it, letting the wild
surmise take you where it chooses.

  Bold assumptions drawn from insufficient evidence, you say? Putting yourself in Reamy’s mind a bit too arrogantly, aren’t you, you say? Second guessing, Monday morning quarterbacking, you say?

  As a student of fantastic literature, as a man who has worn out five separate editions of Strunk & White’s ELEMENTS OF STYLE, as a serious literary critic steeped in the wisdom of two thousand years of classical literature, as a creative intellect whose credentials for worthiness include that I am looked on with disfavor by such lousy critics as Baird Searles, Paul Walker and Lester del Rey, I assure you I’m absolutely correct in this bit of auctorial detectivework, and offer as interior evidence to support my supposition Tom’s introduction of the “personifications of abstractions” in the persons of History and Mother Nature in this story.

  And besides, Tom told me that’s how he wrote it.

  For me, the best story in the book is one of the shortest. Don’t ask me why. These things have no logic to them. “The Detweiler Boy” is probably the strongest story in the book; “Under the Hollywood Sign” is probably the best written; “San Diego Lightfoot Sue” is probably the most emotional; and each of them is, seriously considered, better than my favorite.

  Nonetheless, I adore “The Mistress of Windraven.” Adore, do you hear!

  Sensational. Just a real, no fooling, knocks-me-out, card-carrying, righteous lollapalooza! It is a ring-tailed doozy of a variation on the old “Miniver Cheevy” kind of s/he who hates her/his life and runs off into a painting. You’ve read or seen it done a million times. (Rod Serling misappropriated the idea at least twice, if I recall correctly. )

  I remember a version of the idea, uh, how good’s my memory, in an early issue of Fantastic magazine, back around 1953: “Room with a View” by Esther Carlson, if memory serves, which it probably doesn’t, but I’m getting old, so be kind.