The Motion of Light in Water: Sex and Science Fiction Writing in the East Village

by Samuel R. Delany

  37.61. “You’ve got a review!” Ian’s attenuated voice bubbled over the phone. “In Analog.”

  I said: “Huh?”

  “You got a review,” my old high school friend repeated. “You want me to bring it down to you? Or do you want to go out and buy a copy yourself?”

  “Now, let me see,” I said. “Who carries Analog around here? I think, last month, I saw it over on the stand beside the Astor Place subway. And I know in Sheridan Square—”

  “I’m on my way down!”

  “Wait—!” I said. “Who’s it by? What does it say?”

  “It’s by P. Schuyler Miller. And it’s in the Analog ‘Reference Library.’ He likes it—”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Hold on,” Ian said. “Let me read it to you. ‘Samuel R. Delany’s Jewels of Aptor—’”

  “Wait a minute,” I said. “You come on down.”

  Ian read it to me anyway. Then, an hour later, he brought it to me. I read that review of my first novel (from the August 1963 issue of Analog—out on the stands, of course, in late June) over and over and over again, till its phrases (“… full of fantastic bits and glimpses of bizarre beauty … a denouement that lifts the story out of itself…”) emptied of meaning, the way a word, repeated too often, will finally lose all power to signify.

  My book had been out for well over six months. But it was still my first review. It even inspired me to take out City of a Thousand Suns and work on it for a few days, before I went back to work on the growing bulk of Voyage, Orestes!

  38. There’s a game people of my generation play. “When did the sixties begin for you?” they ask. And everyone comes up with a different, personal answer. Some answers go back as far as ’56 or ’59. Others don’t occur until ’65 or even ’67.

  For me, though, the sixties began with a musical moment, in summer of ’63.1 was walking home across Fourth Street early in the afternoon. It was mid-July and hot. Someone had set a radio in a ground-floor window, and as I walked by it was playing a song I’d never heard: Martha and the Vandellas’ “Heat Wave.” What stopped me in the street, what made me turn, walk back, and listen was that the song’s introduction, which clearly signaled commercial rock, went on three times as long as the introduction to most pop songs. Then the voices started, launching into complex pop polyphony. The harmonic accompaniment had already veered wildly from the C, A-minor, F, G-7 progression that had dominated rock since its inception.

  There’d been no Beatles.

  The best of pop music was Neil Sedaka, my fellow Scienceite Bobby Darin, and a range of rhythm-and-blues.

  But for three minutes I stood transfixed to the sidewalk in the heat, hearing more real musical innovation in that early “Motown sound” record (the Gordy label) than I’d heard in the last six months of AM rock.

  Incidents always occur that suggest a change in the times. But in retrospect two things made this one seem a beginning. First, when I got home, to babble about it with enthusiasm to Marilyn, our own problems seemed to suspend themselves; she caught up the enthusiasm, and we began to search our own radio dial to find the song again—and found, instead, a number of others as interesting. At dinner that Monday night at Dick and Alice’s, I began a long argument that there really was certain American popular music you could hear on any ordinary radio, which, strictly from a musical point of view, was as interesting as any classical music being written in the country.

  As I recall, what I was saying produced incomprehension at the dinner table and, once it was understood, a fair amount of disbelieving laughter. (This, you must remember, was at a time when only a very few European films might possibly be considered art—though even that was debatable. But certainly no film ever made commercially in this country could attain to such a height. And commercial music …?) But I persisted, saying again and again, “All you have to do is turn on the radio and listen to it. That’s all. Just listen. …”

  The other reason this moment persisted in memory as a beginning to a period of change was because enough such moments followed it, in music, formal and popular, in art, on gallery walls and on comic book pages, in behavior, on the street and in private, long enough, frequently enough, and all with equal excitement, till it became undeniable that change was actually occurring.

  39. An autumn night on Central Park West:

  I walked uptown on the small hexagonal pavings. The trees flickered bare branches before the street lights. There wasn’t anybody sitting on the benches beside the park’s wall—it was too cold. Somewhere ahead, a man was coming forward, unsteadily. He had no overcoat. As he got nearer, he looked like a hefty Hispanic businessman in his late thirties, black hair, blue suit, white shirt unbuttoned and tie loose. One hand was in his open fly. When he saw me, he came over. I could smell drink. He stopped in front of me and shook his head, steam coming from his nose and mouth: “Please, please, man … you know where I can get a blow job?”

  I was surprised. I was also a little frightened. But his desperation was a turn-on.

  I looked around. There wasn’t anyone else in sight. “Come on,” I said.

  He said: “Huh …?”

  “Come on.”

  He followed me while I walked toward the nearest park entrance. Just behind the wall, I squatted down. He came up to me, and, it seemed, only now realized what was going on. Afterwards, when I stood up, he kept both his hands on my head. “Oh, man. Thank you,” he said, blinking at me. “Thank you, that was great … I didn’t know what I was gonna do, if I didn’t find someone to suck me off. I just didn’t think I was gonna make it.” Then he put his arms around me and hugged me tightly.

  I patted his back. “It was nice. I liked it, too.”

  He stepped back, got his clothes together, then we went out, him to continue downtown, me to walk up. But he was the only person I met that night.

  39.1. One early November evening, I told Marilyn I’d probably be out for the night and left our Sixth Street apartment to wander over to the docks. One of the people I had to do with that evening was a thin, hard, little white guy, older and shorter than I, in engineer’s boots, jeans, a garrison belt, denim jacket, and cap—at a time when not everyone wore baseball caps. He had a pockmarked, good-looking face. Slight as he was, he still had very big hands, and, though not a nail-biter, he must have recently been doing some manual work so that his hands were quite rough. The sex? After some necking, I blew him. Then he blew me. What was notable was that, though I’d had many hundreds of sexual encounters by then—a hundred of them probably in the previous six months—this was the first time I’d ever cum in somebody’s mouth.

  But he had been patient enough to do the job sensitively and with lots of extra body contact; and, for his effort, he had gotten the prize. My twenty-one-year-old response was to splash, indeed to splatter headfirst, silently and hopelessly in love. We talked a little afterwards. I think he suggested we go for a beer. We found a bar a couple of blocks up from the docks, roomy, dark, frequented mostly by truckers. It wasn’t a (particularly) gay bar—though seven or eight years later it changed hands and became one. Back then, beer came in twenty-five-cent draft glasses. After your first three, the bartender would “tap” you one—come up to you, rap his knuckles on the wooden counter, and give you your next glass free. Thereafter, every five or so, he’d tap you again.

  I’d never encountered the custom in the Village bars, with their tourist trade and their mugs rather than draft glasses. But in the Irish working men’s bars, in the truckers’ bars, and in most neighborhood locals it was commonplace—though Phil had to explain to me what was going on. He told me he was twenty-eight. (A couple of years later, he confessed that he’d lied. He’d actually been thirty-one—not that I could have cared less.) He had an easy southern drawl—was, like my father, from North Carolina. He was very sharp and had numerous quirky opinions about numerous unusual things. That evening, as we sat on the worn leather stools, I learned Phil had lots of information about where to find
sexual action, for which I was always hungry. He told me about various movie theaters and about the Soldier’s and Sailor’s Monument up on the West Side. He said he lived fairly near it.

  Finally, at his suggestion, we exchanged numbers.

  There at the bar, I wrote his down in my notebook, which I carried pretty much wherever I went. But by the time we parted and I was walking home back along Fourth Street, I’d memorized it.

  A couple of days later, I phoned him. Yeah, I should come up. I did. And in his tiny bedroom off the hall of his Upper West Side apartment, we had more sex. It was extraordinary. In the conversation around it, I learned more about him. He was a bastard, had been orphaned at about five, and had been in an orphanage in the South. But from about eight on, he’d lived largely with a foster family with whom he was still close. He had a straight roommate named Hal—who, while Phil and I were sitting naked in the living room, walked in in his suit, tie, and winter raincoat, said “Hi,” like someone who often found two naked men drinking beer in his apartment on a November afternoon, and retired into his bedroom.

  Phil said, “See how I’ve got him trained?”

  Phil was deeply into sado-masochism and was a little worried that he drank too much.

  A while ago, he explained, sitting back down in the brown overstuffed chair and using a can opener with a green wooden handle to pry off the top of another beer bottle, between thighs that looked so very smooth, with hands that looked so very rough, he’d brought home some guy for an S& M session he’d picked up in the park. They’d both been drunk. As part of the scene, the man had bound and gagged Phil, naked, in the bathroom, to the toilet pipes. Then—not part of the scene at all—he’d decided to rob Phil.

  Hal happened to be home, reading in his room. Phil managed to make enough noise so that Hal figured maybe something was wrong.

  Though Hal was a junior stockbroker down in the Wall Street area, he was a stolid bear of a guy—with impressive shoulders and a curly blond beard (not that common, back then, among stockbrokers). He’d wandered out into the hall and pushed open the bathroom door. I don’t know how familiar Hal was with Phil’s S& M shenanigans, but from Phil’s squirming, Hal realized something was amiss. “Don’t you think it’s time for you to leave?” Hal said to the man.

  Who put down the pilfered objects and did.

  Then Hal unbound Phil.

  Phil was a bit worried about sex getting him into this kind of trouble.

  My own experience of S& M had been minimal. I’d had one two-week S& M “affair” (if you could call it that) with an NYU English instructor (also met at the docks), which had left me pretty confused and unclear about why various things went on—though my view at the time was that I was hugely sophisticated about all such matters. After all, I’d at least done it—in a world where most people could hardly imagine it.

  I said something like, “Oh, yeah. I’ve tried that. But it’s nothing I’m very interested in.” I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s what brought Phil’s and my sex to an end for which I’m still sorry today. The truth was, I’d have happily beat Phil within an inch of his life and called him every kind of humiliating name conceivable as often as he wanted if we could have gone on sleeping together—but I was young and (he knew by now) married, which probably made me a less likely prospect.

  Anyway, we never slept together after that.

  Before I left, Phil showed me a journal he kept of his sexual encounters.

  Its thousands of pages were stored in thick black or green spring binders on the shelf above his bed. From each day’s activity, he made handwritten notes. Then, a couple of times each week, or possibly each month, he typed them up in fuller versions which would go into the binders. He let me browse through the earlier volumes.

  Though some of the entries were only notes, many were beautifully written, dense with detail and observation that far outweighed mere prurience. This was before the days of Straight to Hell and First Hand; before Stonewall and Gay Liberation. Neither D. H. Lawrence, the Marquis de Sade, nor Henry Miller was then published in the United States. (But I’d read the Olympia Press edition of The 120 Days of Sodom and Black Spring Barbara had brought me back from Europe years before.) I was reading, I knew, an astonishing document on gay sexual patterns in New York.

  That first afternoon, Phil wouldn’t let me see the most recent volume in which he’d described our own dockside encounter.

  I went home.

  After a while, when I didn’t hear from him again, I called once more. Rather lamely, I suggested he might like to go to the Metropolitan Museum with me. Yeah, he said, that sounded good. We’re talking here about a twenty-one-year-old kid who was crazy-sick with lust after this guy—and absolutely unsure of how to express it.

  We met on the wide gray steps of the Met that Friday, and went in to wander the museum for an hour.

  It was a nice afternoon.

  I don’t know whether Phil picked up on my quivering, tongue-tied ephebic rut—it was probably hard to miss. As we were leaving, though, he said, well, he had to go see some friends now—and abandoned me, in front of the museum, in the darkening afternoon. I went home and was probably rather uncommunicative with Marilyn that evening. I didn’t see Phil again for another three or four months.

  But I had memorized his phone number.

  At home I turned back to my writing.

  39.2. Near midnight on November 21, 1963, I finally took the one thousand fifty-sixth page of Voyage, Orestes! from the typewriter. In the concluding six-page epilogue, the young black hero (working as a cashier in a barbecued chicken store—where, for three weeks at the beginning of the autumn, my musician friend Dave had gotten me a job) and the white, folksong-playing heroine wandered down the empty November beach at Coney Island, longing for something that would change the world; and the book was complete.

  I’d promised to deliver the entire manuscript as soon as it was done to Bobs (at Bobbs-Merrill). The next day, I called her to see if I could bring it up. Sure. Why didn’t I aim for two or thereabout. She’d be back from lunch. At a little after one, I set off, carrying the entire thousand-plus pages under my arm, against my notebook, over to the Astor Place subway station in front of the Cooper Union. I went through the turnstile and stood, waiting for the subway, beside the news kiosk, its sides and counter slick and heavy with new red paint, rows of girlie and muscle magazines racked along its back, the science fiction and astrology digests stuck up behind rusted wire holders. I heard the black radio at the counter’s corner say (my attention came around with the words): “… is dead, it’s now been confirmed. Governor Connolly is in serious condition at the Dallas General. …” Then the train came.

  I rode uptown, wondering at the fragmentary newscast. Who was it that could possibly be dead? And Governor Connolly? I tried to remember which state he was from. But Dallas, certainly, was in Texas. …

  There was no receptionist at the desk of the Bobbs-Merrill offices, and I had been in the offices proper enough times by then to feel it was okay just to go back to Lorn’s desk and give him my manuscript to pass on to Bobs. When I walked through the archway, I saw people were walking all around the office, talking excitedly, and looking like anything but the staff of an efficient New York publisher. One middle-twentyish woman in a gray-and-white knitted suit turned to me and simply said:

  “… want to know is President Kennedy still alive?” as though she were finishing a question that she’d begun to someone else. “That’s, of course, what everybody wants to know!”

  Though I hadn’t heard the name on the newscast, all the pieces suddenly came together. “He’s dead,” I said. “It’s been confirmed. I heard it on the radio at a newsstand when I was in the subway, coming up here.”

  The young woman turned around. “He’s dead!” she called out. “President Kennedy is dead!”

  The news bubbled through the chaos. And seconds later Lorn stepped up and, a moment later, Bobs. They said hello, took the manuscript—they would g
et back to me as soon as they could. But I must understand, of course, that today.…

  39.3. The year was almost up. And the first of the year meant another birthday—my twenty-second—was only three months off. With very little pause I took out the manuscript of City of a Thousand Suns and began to work on it once more. The new chapters came as easily as the opening one—and, I fancy, with as much energy. The handwritten draft was finished on the last day of February; at once I began giving it its two obligatory passes through the typewriter. The first took me well into March: that’s when I added the postscript that has accompanied it ever since. The second, once again, lapsed over into April by a couple of weeks.

  39.4. Nor did the sense of voice desert me. A few days later, I called Bernie at his office. How was he coming with The Ballad of Beta-27 Well, he’d put the first half-dozen pages through the typewriter again, but really, he’d had no time to do anything else. Nor was he sure when he could.

  What about if I took it back?

  Fine, he said. Come up and get it.

  I did. He gave me my original and the few pages he’d rewritten. Reading them on the subway downtown, I decided that I could more or less ignore what he’d done and work from my own version. Over the next two months I finished it and retyped it. I even held off submitting City of a Thousand Suns for a while. Ace published double books. Occasionally both books were by the same author. Perhaps they would put this small novel on the back of City of a Thousand Suns. A chance call from Don about something else entirely, however (another fan letter had arrived about the just-issued Towers of Toron; did I want to come pick it up?), made me decide to turn it in anyway.

  Then The Ballad of Beta-2 was finished.

  Apparently Don liked City of a Thousand Suns a lot; at least he was far more enthusiastic than he’d been over the trilogy’s first two books. “It rounds the whole thing off very nicely. For a while there, I wasn’t sure if you were going to be able to do it. I think we’ll give this one a volume all its own,” he told me.