by Rudy Rucker
I didn’t see the point of these tests for the first few years, and I didn’t do very well. I’d stop halfway through, wander off to sharpen my pencils, or, even worse, skip a question but forget to leave that answer-row blank, thus ending up with most of my answers in the wrong-numbered slots.
When I finally did manage to successfully complete one of the annual batteries of tests, the principal called in my parents and me to demand why my grades were so poor, when clearly I had the ability to do better.
“It’s because you’re not teaching us anything interesting,” I wanted to say.
Niles loved science fiction every bit as much as I did. We read all the SF books in the Louisville Public Library, and we even bought some SF paperbacks at the Woolworth Five and Ten Cent Store. We were excited about Sputnik, and we felt it was our duty to help the US to catch up with the USSR.
So we two started building half-assed rockets. We didn’t even waste our breath trying to talk our parents into buying us good stuff like powdered magnesium, potassium perchlorate, or steel rocket tubes. Instead we used recipes we’d invented or that we’d heard at school.
For our first rocket, we harvested the little red heads from about ten packs of matches, and stuffed them into a pointed plastic tube that had once held a flower. The fuel flared up wonderfully, spewing a fierce beam of flame. But instead of taking off, the plastic tube simply melted.
Niles and I usually had a small stash of firecrackers that we’d brought home from family vacations through the South, or that we’d buy from friends. To fuel our second rocket, Niles and I emptied out the powder from a whole pack of firecrackers, unrolling the layers of newspaper dense with wonderfully alien Chinese characters. We funneled the powder into a hollow rocket-shape we’d molded from Reynolds wrap, and lit it off with one of the firecracker fuses. The tin rocket raced around the ground in a widening spiral, spraying Nile’s leg with sparks.
This was too big a waste of firecrackers, so we switched to a more efficient technique for launching things. Niles figured out that we could get a rocket-like effect from a single firecracker by making a mortar from two tin cans, each can with a single lid removed. One can was a little smaller than the other, so you could nest them together, enclosing a small space. For our launches, we’d set the larger can on the ground with its open end facing up, drop in a lit firecracker, and quickly set in the smaller can with its open end facing down. Whoosh, the little can would fly thirty feet high.
As a variation on mere rocketry, we dug a shovelful of gravel from our driveway, soaked the rocks in gasoline, lit them, and tossed the shovelful high into the air, loving the movie-disaster look of the flaming pebbles. This was good, so we did it a few dozen times in a row.
Alarmed by our pyromania, Mom bought me a safe rocket, a red plastic Alpha-One, which was powered by something like baking soda and vinegar—although the instructions called these the fuel and the oxidizer.
The Alpha-One was quite well designed, and we enjoyed many successful flights, often a hundred feet high. The thing was in fact still working twenty years later, when I unearthed it from a box of boyhood mementos and started launching flights with my own children and a chemistry professor friend.
In some ways my mother was a hypochondriac. She definitely set too much store in doctors. Since I’d sometimes get red-eyed when I was around freshly mowed lawns or plants with a lot of pollen, she took me to an allergist in downtown Louisville.
The doctor’s office was in the Starks building, the closest approximation of a skyscraper that Louisville had. The Starks building had a news stand in the lobby, marble halls and a bank of elevators. It was the first elevator I’d ever been in.
The doctor pricked my back, my arms, and my legs with trays of pins that had various serums on them. The idea was to see which spots got red. When we were done, the doctor announced that I was allergic to cuttlefish and to black walnuts—neither of which were likely to show up on Mom’s menus. But, yes, I had hay fever as well, with goldenrod and ragweed being a particular problem. Goldenrod was, at that time, the Kentucky state flower.
The doctor prescribed some powerful antihistamine pills that made me feel sleepy and dead inside. For a couple of months, Mom forced a pill into me with my orange juice every morning, but finally I was allowed to stop.
As I was sometimes wheezy when my attacks of hay fever would hit, the doctor also gave me an asthma inhaler, which was something I enjoyed a lot more. The inhaler was an intricate plastic device, a so-called nebulizer with a rubber squeeze bulb. It looked very scientific, and I liked using it, not that I actually had asthma very often. Whenever I’d go to spend the night with a friend, I’d bring along the asthma inhaler, and my mother would explain it to the other parents, and I’d feel important.
My most severe asthma attack occurred one cold Sunday afternoon when I was playing in the front yard. I wanted to get into the house, and I realized that my parents had locked me out. Or maybe it was just that I couldn’t get the balky front door to open. My parents were nowhere to be seen—perhaps they were lying together on their bed, resting and cuddling.
Of course I had to be a brat about the door, pounding on it and screaming that I was having an asthma attack. When I saw the unhappy, worn expression on my father’s face as he came to the door, I somehow dialed up the intensity of my wheezing to the point where I really did seem to be in a serious state.
They drove me to the hospital and I got a shot of cortisone, which immediately cleared my chest. Perhaps a glass of cold water in my face would have done the same. But Rudy’s dramatic asthma attack became enshrined in the family mythology, and my condition was now viewed as a serious problem.
In 1957 and 1958, when I was eleven, I became increasingly unhappy with my life at Louisville Country Day. The endless snobbery and bullying was getting me down. What with puberty about to kick in, I was in a shaky emotional state.
Something that just about put me over the edge was a scary TV drama that I happened to watch alone one evening in the basement. In the show, a second-rate pianist had cut off a dead pianist’s hands, and was planning to somehow wear them so as to perform better. But the hands got loose and started crawling across the floor. I totally freaked out, ran upstairs screaming, and I couldn’t stop thinking about those disembodied hands for days.
I’d be riding on my bicycle and imagine the hands flying along right behind me, about to choke me. As chance would have it, the wonderfully crazy daily comic strip Dick Tracy was just then running an adventure about a killer who imagines a pair of disembodied hands following him. So maybe the hands were real?
One night at bedtime, I told my mother about my fear of floating, crawling hands, and she was very soothing. Feeling safe, I went on and explained about the pecking order in my class at Louisville Country Day. I had it quite well mapped out. Only two other boys were below me, I was third from the bottom. I don’t think Mom had ever realized before quite how bad it was for me at Country Day, and she decided that something had to change.
Combining her desire to get me out of Country Day and her worry about my asthma, Mom came up with the idea of sending me for a full year to a boarding school in the Black Forest of Germany. For me this would be the eighth grade.
Going to Germany wasn’t as far-fetched an idea as it sounds, as my grandmother and two of my uncles lived there, and they were eager to get to know me. So the plan was set into motion. The German school year ran from spring to spring, and so, in 1958, just before my twelfth birthday, I went to Germany for a year.
Niles didn’t like the idea of his best friend leaving town. He sang a sarcastic ditty, making his voice reedy and dumb. “We go to Germanyyyyy—to see the King!”
As it happened, I enjoyed my time in Germany very much. The language came easily to me. My classmates were friendly. I liked the little intrigues with the girls in my co-ed classes, in fact I had my first girlfriend, not that we actually talked to each other more than once or twice.
Her n
ame was Renate Schwarzwälder, and her father and brother were watchmakers. Renate had long, braided blonde pigtails. Eventually, our flirting increased to the point where she plucked one of her extremely long hairs and dropped it near my desk—glancing back a few moments later to observe me picking it up. But that was about as far as it went.
Something I loved about the Black Forest was the vast network of informal trails. Back in Louisville, it seemed like all the open fields were fenced in, but here you could stroll through pastures, along tiny streams, and under the tall pines of the woods. It was natural to wander about, and nobody cared.
Sometimes the other boys and I would collect pine cones and have a war, hurling them at each other. Other times we’d gorge on blueberries, or build secret forts.
Away from my horrible life at Louisville Country Day—and away from my role as the goony baby of the family—I realized that I wasn’t weak or dull. I was a kid like any other kid, and I had the ability to cope with life on my own. I fought a bit with the German boys at first, but quickly I won my way in. There wasn’t an unbreachable wall of snobbery like at Louisville Country Day.
My German relatives were excited to see me. Grandma in particular was as much fun as ever. For a lark she taught me to knit, not that I got very far with that. And she showed me an art book that would mold my taste forever, Das Bruegel Buch. It was filled with the paintings of Peter Bruegel the Elder. I really liked these pictures a lot. Some of them, like The Triumph of Death, resembled science fiction scenarios, others, like Netherlandish Proverbs, were filled with delightfully arcane symbolism, subtly suggesting the world around me was itself a clever puzzle filled with deeper meanings.
I’d arrived in Germany in March, 1958, and that summer when I was on break from the boarding school, my Uncle Conrad drove me, his wife, and two of his children to Belgium in his VW bug to visit the Brussels World’s Fair. Back in those days, world’s fairs loomed large in the public mind, or at least in my mind.
The Brussels fair was known for its huge, sculptural Atomium—a three-hundred-foot tall construction in the shape of a cube resting on one corner, with a sixty-foot-wide chrome sphere at each corner plus one more sphere in the cube’s center, and with chrome tunnels connecting the spheres to each other. It amazed me to see a pristine mathematical object that big.
Something else at the fair that amazed me was a short black and white experimental film in one of the pavilions. The film showed a woman, perhaps a movie star, repeatedly puckering up and blowing kisses at the camera. I could hardly believe how sexy she was.
The Black Forest school I attended, the Zinzendorf Gymnasium, was run by members of a minimalist Protestant sect, the “Herrnhüter Brüdergeminde.” They called each other Brother and Sister.
We boarders were grouped by age. Initially I was with the Sparrows, a group of boys slightly younger than me. We were under the watch of Sister Schütze, a short, strict lady who confiscated my Time magazine for having a photo of a movie star in a negligee, and my Boy’s Life for having some pages of color comics inside it. Sister Schütze was high-strung, brittle and prone to screaming fits that we boys would weather in anxious, stone-faced silence. Half the time I didn’t understand what she was talking about. There was one boy whom Sister Schütze would always pick on when we took our weekly shower. Dieter Gorlacher. Sometimes she had him come into her room in the evening—the rest of us were glad it wasn’t us.
Soon I was allowed to move up to be with the Foxes, a group of older boys. That was more fun—although our counselor, Brother Resas, made a point of slapping me very hard in the face on one of my first evenings under his tutelage.
“Do you understand why?” he asked intensely.
“Yes, yes,” I said. Sure I understood why. He wanted me to be afraid of him. After this little ordeal, the other boys in the Foxes’ communal dorm room greeted me in a friendly fashion. I was one of them now.
The food wasn’t much to my liking—the worst of all was a cabbage soup we’d get on alternate Saturdays. It looked and smelled as if it had been made by boiling water in a garbage can. I had the nerve to complain to one of the counselors about the food, and at the next meal, the house overseer announced, “We have a gourmet among us, Rudy Rucker. As our food isn’t good enough for him, he’ll eat bread and water for a day.” It was a classic European boarding school experience.
But all in all, I was feeling cheerful and energetic. We boys carried little wallets with stamps in them, and we traded them on the playground—I’d collected stamps back in Louisville, but it had never been so dynamic and social. And I had a little Voigtländer camera that my grandmother had given me; I was having fun taking pictures.
During the week-long fall break at the Zinzendorf Gymnasium, most of the boarding kids went home to visit their families, but I was one of the kids who stayed over during that particular vacation. Two of the counselors took us stay-on kids for a huge group hike, sleeping at youth hostels. The counselors would cook stew for dinner, and we’d wait in line for our servings, playing the part of wild savages, singing a song with the chorus, “Umba umba!”
The food was delicious in the woodsy air. Each of us would only get one portion—we never really got enough. I thought about food a lot that year. In the Foxes group, I was allowed to keep the copies of Life magazine that my mother sent me, and it was with deep longing that I’d study pictures of things like hot-dogs, hamburgers, and chocolate bars.
It began raining a lot towards the end of that fall-break hike, and the puddles had yellow dust in them. I wondered if it was fallout from the atmospheric atomic bomb and hydrogen bomb tests that the U. S. and other countries had been conducting. It even occurred to me that World War III might have happened while we were off in the primeval pines, and that I’d return to find everything gone. That would be sad and horrible—but in a way it would be cool. It would mean that ordinary life had turned into science fiction.
For some reason, the biggest holiday of the year for the people running the school was the First of Advent. This was the one day when good food was served in our dorm, starting with white-bread rolls and salami for breakfast. In preparation for the First of Advent, each of us boarders had to make a little work of art to be displayed in our common rooms. The most popular projects to make were stellated polyhedra—I myself made a humble tetrahedral pyramid with a narrow point glued to each face, but the older boys made exceedingly intricate models, networks of a hundred or more squares, triangles, pentagons and so on, with specially folded paper points growing out from each of the polygons. I felt an intense longing to understand how the more complicated patterns worked.
At Christmas, my mother came for a visit with Grandma and me at Gradma’s apartment, bringing a number of the plastic airplane model-kits I liked, also an algebra textbook. I’d been very concerned that I was missing out on my first year of algebra—back home, they started algebra in the eighth grade, and I’d been looking forward to it for several years, even though I didn’t exactly know what algebra was.
After Christmas, it was back to the Black Forest for a few more months. Spring came early, and we went on lots of hikes. I became pals with a boy called Joachin. We’d walk faster than the other hikers so we could get out in front and find a nice little glen where we could sprawl by a stream and relax—looking at the waterbugs, building a little dam, maybe playing a game of cards. All the boys my age were into a pinochle-like game called skat.
Joachin liked reminiscing about his life back home—about eating fresh, white rolls with jam and all the milk you wanted. Basically, he was homesick. I realized that, for my part, I’d begun enjoying life on my own. I liked being in this pack of boys, a kid among kids, the equal of the others.
I became quite fluent in German over the year—the down-side was that my English acquired a German accent. So when I got back to Louisville in the spring of 1959, the snobs and bullies at Louisville Country Day had another reason to pick on me.
Returning to my family was of cour
se comfortable, but it was constraining as well. The four of us had certain set roles, and I wasn’t that happy with playing the youngest kid anymore. I hadn’t missed the tensions between my parents and between my brother and me.
Another problematic thing was that Niles and my schoolmates had started going out with girls—and even kissing them. They were miles beyond my shy flirtation with Renate Schwarzwälder. While I’d been tramping around the Black Forest, my friends had segued into puberty. I was way behind the curve.
I told my parents that I absolutely couldn’t stand Louisville Country Day for another year. I wanted to go to a co-ed public school like Niles. But they were dead set against the Louisville public schools—perhaps for reasons of social status, or perhaps because they thought the schools to be bad.
Given my talent at taking aptitude tests, a large private school called Atherton was willing to let me attend, but only if I skipped the ninth grade—their lowest grade being the tenth. But I refused to do that. And then somehow my parents hit upon the idiotic idea that I should try a brand new private boys’ school that was opening in the fall: Catholic Country Day School. And we weren’t even Catholic.
Because the American students had started algebra while I was in Germany, I got some tutoring that summer to make up for what I’d missed. My algebra mentor was a charming, sophisticated woman named Gigi. She was married to Hal Taylor, a new assistant minister at our church, St. Francis in the Fields.
Hal and Gigi were a breath of fresh air for our community. They were both arty, with lots of their paintings in their house, and a whole table covered with soft little clay sculptures made by them and their Bohemian out-of-town guests—mostly grotesque images of heads.
Hal had prematurely gray hair, a flat-top haircut and two motorcycles. When he preached, he talked about Kierkegaard and existentialism, which greatly interested Pop. Pop had an itchy fascination with these new philosophies. On the one hand, it seemed as if the ideas might be bogus, on the other hand, Pop didn’t want to miss out on the latest developments in theology. He was becoming more interested in religion all the time.
