Collected Essays (76 page)

If I speak of him as non-malignant, it is because he does not overtly preach violence and hatred. Wrong-headed as his ideas are, Jerry Falwell doesn’t have death-squads to wipe out his detractors. He doesn’t funnel money to the lunatics who go around murdering abortionists. Demonstrators at his church are not beaten, and people who make fun of Jerry are not hounded out of Lynchburg. After Reagan’s landslide re-election, a number of my fellow left-wing friends in other cities expressed a fear that “now Jerry Falwell is going to run the country.” “He’s already supposed to run Lynchburg.” I told them, “And people here can say whatever they want to.”

I tested this out in April, 1984, as the following story will demonstrate.

At that time, the head of Jerry’s Moral Majority organization was a man named Cal Thomas. (Cal has since stepped down to become a full-time syndicated columnist.) As it happened, Cal Thomas lived about a block from me. I was going through a difficult period in my life just then—I was jobless and broke, I’d just finished writing my tenth book and felt resentful about my lack of recognition, I was smoking pot and drinking too much. The fact that successful, right-wing Cal lived nearby was starting to rankle—not that he knew me.

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.”