Collected Essays (80 page)

Meanwhile, people were starting to talk about cyberpunk SF and I was getting no credit, no nothing. I might as well never have written
Spacetime Donuts
or
Software
, man, I didn’t fucking even exist on the SF zines’ scopes. I was just some spaced out nut not worth reading. So I made sure to show up at the first official cyberpunk panel in Austin, Texas, you bet. The very last second before the panel, while we’re all sitting up there at a long table in front of the fans, a weaselly little guy comes up to me and addresses me in an overfamiliar manner.

“I’m Doug Smith from the Church. You might know me as Ivan Stang.”

Yes! I whipped out my Church Minister Card (Rev. Rudy Rucker, Congregation of Xiantific Mysticism), and the cheerful little weasel signed it for me: Kill “Bob” NOT ME—Authorized by Lee Ivan Stang. And then all at once everything got better, much better, and SF fans accepted me as a cyberpunk, too. (
Second miracle
.)

By way of thanks, I sent the Reverend Stang a rather unusual videotape which I had purchased by mail-order from Baker Video, a forward-looking company I’d read about in
Nugget
magazine. The Reverend sent me the official Church video in return.

Soon after this, my family and I moved to California. Though the very first letter I got here was from Stang, bubbling over with excitement over the film I’d sent him, “Rucker, You perverted weirdo…”, my slack forces were depleted, and I took sick. Effete and weary, I shivered for months with chronic fatigue. When we went to the beach we always got lost and ended up at a filthy state park with brown waves and gray sky. I was near despair, oh my brothers and sisters, but then right there, I saw it!

“Look, children, look! There in the sky! The sacred Pipe of Bob Dobbs! The Pipe, it’s there in the sky, the
Pipe of Dobbs
!”

Yes, my family saw it too, as the sky split open and the California sun entered our hearts, they saw the great gassy gray pipecloud streaming out seaward from the giant smokestacks of the Moss Landing power plant, and as I stared at the mighty Pipe of Dobbs, I knew that all would be well. My fighter slack-cells sprang into action and drove the dread Yuppie Flu from my system. (
Third miracle
.)

Thus (1) “Bob” smote me with a Dickian fear of sinister minions, then delivered me. (2) “Bob” delivered me from unknown SF obscurity into a modicum of cyberpunk fame, and (3) “Bob” cured me of chronic fatigue & the deracinated blues.

More concisely, “Bob” treated me homeopathically for (1) paranoia, (2) anomie, and (3) exhaustion.

The world is the supreme artificially alive computer program, and “Bob” is God’s own hot-key. What might I make of these three menu pop-ups? If things tie together in a comic-book, shouldn’t they tie together in this reality, this ultimate work of art? What is the meaning of “Bob” and what is his message?

“Bob”: the cocky grin spread over the addled inner derangement—his meaning is the complete lack of contact with ordinary human values.

And paranoia, anomie, exhaustion—what do they mean?

“They’re watching,” “they’re not watching,” “I’m tired.”

The first two problems produce the third. While obsessively worrying if “they” are watching (paranoia) or not watching (anomie), I get tired.

Solution: If “they” weren’t there for me, I wouldn’t get tired.

Therefore: live as a hermit. My kudzu-overgrown writing office in Lynchburg was a hermitage. I was happy there, mostly, or suicidal, mostly.

Here in California, I’m out of the cave and into the marketplace and it’s the same.

Am I a hermit yet? My greatest joy is being with my wife and children. They aren’t “they.” They are God, they are “Bob.” On Saturday mornings the children call me to see a picture of “Bob” on Peewee Herman’s televised playhouse wall.

Who cares, in the end, if “they” are watching or not watching me? “They” won’t understand either way, whether glotzing or snooting.
Understand?
Understand
what
? There isn’t anything to understand, especially not about me, especially not about “Bob.”

Therefore, an examination of the three miracles of “Bob” in my life tells me to live as a hermit—and to hang tight with my family. And this is, of course, what I wanted to do in the first place.

Slack be with you.

Note on “Bob’s Three Miracles And Me”

Written in 1989.

Appeared in
Transreal!
, WCS Books, 1991.

To understand this essay at all, you need to know that there was a semi-popular joke religion or anti-religion called the Church of the SubGenius at this time. It was a fairly hip thing, semi-profound, dadaistic, and of great interest to me. Their chief icon was “Bob” Dobbs, his first name usually written in quotes, the image of a 1950’s pipe-smoking American dad.

The co-founder of the so-called Church was Doug Smith, a.k.a. Ivan Stang, and an interview with him appears earlier in Collected Essays. In 1989 Smith/Stang asked me to write a piece for an anthology he was assembling under the title
Three-Fisted Tales of “Bob” Dobbs
. He said I could write him anything whatsoever, just so he could have the luster of my name among the assembled stars of his projected constellation. So I wrote “Bob’s Three Miracles And Me,” and Stang rejected it! Imagine my chagrin. But I published it my small-press anthology
Transreal!

With Paul Mavrides in my kitchen with a Barry Feldman painting, 2006

When I moved to California, I met the artist Paul Mavrides, creator of much of the SubGenius imagery—the Church movement was about visual art as much as it was about texts. The original image of “Bob” was found, Paul tells me, in a 1946 book of clip-art for the Bell Telephone Company of West Texas.

“Bob’s Three Miracles And Me” uses the same literary device as “Haunted by Phil Dick.” In both pieces I make an ostensibly analytical effort to find the meaning in some sequence of events that have in fact been selected or invented at random. I guess you could call it transrealist criticism.

Haunted by Phil Dick

My head was in a very bad place in the spring of ‘82. I often think of life as being like surfing. Ups and downs, manic-depression, all you can really do is ride it out. Hang ten. On the board. Sometimes you fall off, the board hits you in the head, sharp coral comes up, etc. I’d just been fired from my last teaching job, my wife and I were fighting, I was singing in a psycho-punk band called the Dead Pigs.

Phil Dick died around then, and I started thinking about him a lot. In May ‘82 I started working on a post-WWIII book called
Twinks
. Every day, starting out, I’d pray to Phil Dick and ask him for guidance—to some extent I was trying to twink him. “Twink” is an SF word I made up; to “twink” someone means to simulate them internally, to let their spirit take possession of you. The idea is based on my notion that Soul = Software.

Let me explain this concept a bit. Using a computer analogy, we can compare the body to hardware, and the mind to software. The personality, memories, etc., can all, in principle, be coded up to give the individual person’s software soul. A powerful enough hardware system can boot and run any given software. Given enough information about another person, you can twink them.

In fall of ‘82 I got a contract for a nonfiction book called
The Fourth Dimension
, and
Twinks
was set aside. I still thought about Phil Dick a lot. Sometimes, me walking stoned around some tree-lined Lynchburg neighborhood, he would feel very close. I heard I’d been nominated for the first Philip K. Dick award (for my novel
Software
) and I felt I had a good chance of getting it. I begged Phil, or my internal simulation of him, to make sure I would get it. I’d done five SF paperbacks at this point, and was getting zero recognition. I really needed a break.

Later that winter—like in January ‘83—Sylvia and I and a friend named Henry Vaughan went out to a party at a girl’s house in the country. We didn’t know too many of the people—they were sort of rednecks, where those days in the South a redneck was person with long hair and a scraggly beard. It was mellow, plenty of weed, loud music, and everyone getting off.

At some point I glanced across the room and in walked Phil Dick. He didn’t say he was Phil Dick, but he looked to be wearing his circa-1974 body…hair still dark, beard…hell, I don’t know what Phil Dick “really” looks/looked like, but I knew
this was the guy
.

At first I just grinned over at him slyly—like Aphid-Jerry eyeing “carrier people” in
A Scanner Darkly
. Then, finally, I introduced myself and drank beer and whisky in the kitchen with him for awhile. Of course I was too hip to confront him with my knowledge of his true identity.

The man’s cover was that he was in the garbage business. “The Garbage King of Campbell County.” He said he had a fleet of trucks, and that he’d furnished his entire house with cast-off items gleaned from the trash-flow.

I steered the conversation around to science fiction, mentioning my novel
Software
.

“What’s it about?”

“It’s about robots on the moon. In a way they’re black people. The guy who invented them—he’s my father—is dying and the robots build him a fake robot body and get his software out of his brain.”

“Go on.”

“They run the software on a computer, but the computer is big and has to be kept at four degrees Kelvin. It follow him around in a Mr. Frostee truck. There’s a big brain-eating scene, too.”

“Sounds all right!”

At the first Phil Dick award ceremony. (Photo by S. Rucker.)

Maybe that was Phil Dick, maybe not. In any case, I got the award, and it did help my career. The award ceremony was a good party, too. First Tom Disch talked, and then Ray Faraday Nelson talked, synchronistically basing his remarks on some stories he’d happened to tell me walking over from dinner—and then I stood on the bar and read a speech which I’d prepared in advance. The speech went like this:

I’d like to just say a few words about immortality. I have a theory about how artistic immortality works. When you’re reading a well-written book, and totally into it, then you are, for those few moments, actually identical with the person who wrote the book. It’s my feeling that artistic immortality means that the artist is, however briefly, reborn over and over again. We could express this idea in terms of computers. If you can somehow write down most of your program, then some other person can put this program onto his or her brain and become a simulation of you.

If I say that Phil Dick is not really dead, then this is what I mean: He was such a powerful writer that his works exercise a sort of hypnotic force. Many of us have been Phil Dick for brief flashes, and these flashes will continue as long as there are readers.

Let’s push the idea a little harder—that’s what SF is all about, after all—pushing ideas out into new territory. Even if there were no more readers, then the Phil Dick persona would still exist. Actually, each of our personalities is immortal, as a sort of permanent possibility of information-processing.

Another push now. Just as each of Phil’s works is a coding of his personality, we might go on to say that sometimes various authors are, as people, examples of the same higher-level archetype. I’d like to think that, on some level, Phil and I are just different instances of the same Platonic form—call it the gonzo-philosopher-SF-writer form, if you like.

One last thought. Up till now I’ve talked about immortality in very abstract terms. Yet the essence of good SF is the transmutation of abstract ideas into funky fact. If it is at all possible for a spirit to return from the dead, I would imagine that Phil would be the one to do it. Let’s keep our eyes open tonight, he may show up.

So hi, Phil, wherever you are, and thanks for everything. Let’s party.

Over the next couple of years in Lynchburg, I saw the Garbage King of Campbell County a couple more times at parties. One time we were in a house, a house like a house I often dream about, with a front and a back staircase, and the King and I were on a landing, him and his good-looking wife, and he says, “What was that writer guy you talked about? Philip Jay Dick?” Only then he gave me a sly wink. I was stoned enough at the time to think that the “Jay” was a psychic reference to the fact that the first Dick book I ever owned was
Time Out of Joint
.