by Rudy Rucker
For her part, Gigi was getting a Master’s degree in mathematics at the University of Louisville. She was the very image of a Fifties hipster woman, dressed in slacks and a blouse, wearing little or no makeup, and with her flowing hair pinned into a bun or a pony-tail. She had a casual can’t-be-bothered manner of speaking, and she addressed me as if I were an adult. She was brilliant at explaining the essential parts of algebra—laying bare the simple truths buried within the fusty textbook that I’d lugged back from Germany.
Seeing my progress, Embry signed up for math tutoring too, but really he just wanted to be near Gigi. He didn’t care about the math at all. Although I thought Gigi was attractive, I was young enough that I didn’t fully see her the way that Embry did. Soon she dropped him as a student. But Hal let Embry stick around to work on his motorcycles.
Embry was exultant about the fact that one of Hal’s bikes was an Indian Blackhawk from the early 1950s. He even got Hal to let him ride it around town. So—Embry was playing Marlon Brando, and I was learning about solving polynomial equations.
The summer of 1959, my last summer before high-school, was a peaceful time for me. I still had a sense of self-confidence from my year in Germany, and the social struggles of the teenage years hadn’t really kicked in. I’d taken a lot of photos in the Black Forest—mostly of my friends but sometimes of lakes, mountains, buildings or ruins. Many of the other boys had taken photos, and we’d liked comparing and discussing our shots.
In order to get some real skill at photography, I wanted to shoot a lot more, but it was expensive getting the rolls developed. So I decided to develop my negatives and make my own prints. I didn’t take a class or anything, I just read about darkroom techniques in a library book—which isn’t actually a good way to learn such a hands-on craft.
Mom took me for repeated trips to a darkroom-equipment store downtown to amass the necessary chemicals and equipment. I liked being around this store’s staff and customers. These characters were from a completely different world, a land of shape and shade, where academic studies didn’t matter.
I converted our basement bathroom into a darkroom, with great worries about whether it was truly light-tight. Whenever I stayed in there long enough, I’d start seeing dim gleams from the corners of the black-painted window or from the cracks where the bathroom’s walls met the basement floor. I was always slapping on more tape.
I also had problems with the intricacy of the process of turning a roll of film into a pile of prints. I had to use up to six distinct baths of photochemicals, each of which came with tissue-thin folded-up instruction-sheets covered with thousands of words in Bible-font type. I couldn’t discern which of the many variables really and truly mattered.
Why were my blacks so gray? Did I really need to worry about the temperature of the developer bath? And how could I keep the damned prints from curling up? Working in a darkroom is a prolonged introduction to the willfulness and recalcitrance of the physical world.
Nevertheless I pressed on, and got a used enlarger from Hal and Gigi Taylor, practically for free. I’d vaguely imagined that an “enlarger” might be some kind of science fictional matter-control device, but it was little more than a vertical slide-projector, arranged to beam images of my negatives onto a table-top where I’d lay out good-sized sheets of photographic paper.
Now and then, I’d get a lucky hit—I remember a yellowish, low-contrast enlargement of gangly Embry sitting by my desk, looking very much like himself—and one gorgeous print of Mom in the garden, smiling over a bowl of fresh-picked cherry tomatoes, her eyes warm and happy. Pop loved this picture.
But overall, my results were spotty. It wasn’t so much that I had a primitive camera and that my darkroom technique was poor. The deeper problem was that I didn’t yet understand how to take a good picture. It would be ten or fifteen more years before I could begin reliably to see the pictures embedded in my surroundings.
And now I had to survive high school.
Curved Space
After my parents signed me up for my freshman year at Catholic Country Day school in 1959, their football coach—the formidable Coach Kleier—wrote us that, as the school was still so small, all of the boys in the high-school would be required to go out for the varsity football team. The new school didn’t even have an eleventh or twelfth grade yet, so it was the freshman and the sophomores who had to play. The summer football training sessions were to begin two weeks before the academic classes.
“I don’t think I’m varsity material,” I told Pop. But he liked the idea of me playing football. He’d been on his college team, and he loved telling stories about it. Never mind that I weighed 115 pounds. The experience would be good for me.
I was one of our team’s two left offensive guards. The other left guard wasn’t much bigger than me. Coach Kleier would repeatedly send us in to substitute for each other, so that we could carry play suggestions to our quarterback, Tommy Veeneman, a likeable screwball who often regaled us with tales of his success with the ladies.
“I spent Saturday night under a blanket with Betty-Anne playing nookie,” Veeneman might tell us in class on a Monday morning, while our ancient teacher was out in the hall smoking a cigarette and having a cup of coffee.
“What’s nookie?” I’d ask. But Veeneman never gave a straight answer.
Although I wasn’t particularly good at blocking the opposing players, they weren’t very skilled at rushing past me, so most of the games went okay. But I do remember a time when a guy kept sacking Veeneman. He and the fullback gave me a pep-talk in the huddle. “You can do it! Rudy Rocket!” I managed to dig in and hold the tackler back for a few plays.
Coach Kleier played his role to the hilt. He was a solidly built, earthy, aggressive and blue-chinned. When discussing our play, he always said “hat” to mean “helmet.” Thus, if talking about how to tackle, he’d say, “You gotta stick your hat in there.”
We played a full season against teams fielded by other private schools, and we lost every one of our games. I especially liked the away games, where we’d drive in a caravan of cars, sometimes quite a distance, down rainy two-lane Kentucky and Indiana roads, with stops at roadside restaurants for wonderful greasy dinners, and lots of manly joking at our table.
Right before Christmas vacation, we had a sports banquet, and we all got letter sweaters. Coach Kleier made a speech in which he said there was one person here who exemplified his idea of courage: Rudy Rucker! Pop was proud and thrilled, he talked about this event for years. He said I was so small that when I stood up from my chair to get my letter, my height barely changed.
I was glad the season was over, but in the spring I had to play varsity baseball, which was even worse. You can’t hide in a pack when you’re playing baseball, the ball is unpleasantly solid, and gung-ho psychos throw it at you as if they want to kill you. Fortunately, I was so ineffectual at baseball that I hardly ever had to go out on the field during a game. Coach Kleier was satisfied if I did my part by keeping up the bench chatter and jeering at the other team’s pitcher.
I made a new friend at Catholic Country Day, a boy called Michael Dorris. Dorris’s father had died in a jeep accident in the army. Mike lived with his mother, his aunt, and his grandmother. He managed to evade his football duties with a trumped-up medical excuse about a sore leg. Coach Kleier made him a team manager.
Mike and I enjoyed talking things over and gossiping about the other boys in our class. We talked on the phone every night, giggling and confiding like a pair of girls. Being a product of Catholic parochial schools, Mike had some strange notions about sex—for instance, he thought masturbation was a sin and that you should tough it out until eventually you’d achieve release via a sexual dream. I kept mum about my own practices.
Although Mike wasn’t very good at math or science, he was great at the other subjects—English, Latin, and history. He and I were very competitive with each other. When he’d do badly on a math test he’d always say that he’d known the
material, but that he’d had a mental block.
For my part, I did poorly in our history class. One problem for me was that the history textbook seemed tainted, in that it contained a special version of history written to conform with the worldview of the Roman Catholic Church. On the title page, I could see where a couple of high-ranking ecclesiastics had signed off on the book: It read, Imprimatur and Nihil obstat—meaning, Let it be printed and Nothing to object to. Although I was already suspicious of my school books, it was weird to see censorship and mind control made so obvious.
The bigger problem was that our history teacher was a vain and ignorant man. His name was Stulz; he had short red hair. The historical era we were studying included the Protestant Reformation, and Stulz would go into vitriolic diatribes against Calvin, Luther, and all the Protestant religions. Other times he’d go on about how successful his ugly new baby was going to be—we knew the baby was ugly because he’d showed us pictures. Or he’d spend a whole period expatiating on crackpot John Birch Society theories about Red China. I hated Stulz, and did as little as possible for his class.
In later years, when I was working as a mathematician, people often made a point of telling me that they’d hated all of their math teachers. For whatever reason, I had that feeling about all of my history teachers. Perhaps I really did have poor teachers, or perhaps it was because my history classes were about battles, kings and politicians—all of which are topics that bore me. Only in my thirties did I learn that history can be about things that matter to me, such as mathematical ideas, literary movements, philosophical concepts, or styles of art.
In any case, Mike Dorris loathed Stulz too, so that wasn’t a problem between us. Now and then we’d argue about religion—the infallibility of the Pope was an issue—but generally we were more interested in talking about our schoolwork, about literature, and about our dreams of eventually getting to know some girls.
On the girl front, Mom had enrolled me in a weekly dancing class held at the Louisville Country Club—they called it the Cotillion. A certain spritely spinster had been running the Cotillion for a zillion years. To get me up to speed, she gave me a simple lesson on the box-step in her living-room. She felt light as a feather, like a nimble wraith.
On Cotillion night—I think it was every two weeks—we’d all put on our best clothes—which meant coats and ties for the boys, and shiny colored dresses for the girls. The girls would line up along one wall of the Country Club ballroom, the boys along the other, and a guy would play the piano: waltzes, foxtrots, now and then a jitterbug, and once per evening, the Mexican Hat Dance.
It was up to us boys to walk across the floor and ask girls to dance. There was no way out of this—the Cotillion employed athletic young men to strong-arm us into acting civilized. One of these enforcers actually worked as the Algebra teacher at Catholic Country Day. He was a pretty good guy, handsome and with a burr cut. He taught me a trick for factoring quadratic polynomials that stood me in good stead for the rest of my career.
Back to the Cotillion, given that I had to ask some girl, it was better to go across the floor earlier, as then I’d have a chance of finding one whom I might like. Not that the initial choice was all that important, as we’d swap partners with the nearest couple every few of dances or so. If you were alert, you might maneuver to be near a couple you wanted to swap with.
I often ended up dancing with this one particular girl named Debby. She was cute and perky. She often wore a bracelet made of exotic kinds of seeds and nuts, and this formed a reliable conversation topic.
“What’s that one?”
“A yamayama bean.”
Conspiring with one of her girlfriends, Debby invited another boy and me over to her house for a cook-out in the spring of 1960. As it happened, the house she lived in was none other than the former home of my boyhood friend Haystack Lampton, the place where I’d squirted grease into the black life raft. But the place was much more fixed-up now. Debby’s mother was quite the decorator. She was the well-off daughter of a big Louisville jeweler—where her patrician husband now worked.
Oddly enough, Debby’s mother arranged to have a photographer from the Louisville Courier Journal at our cookout, and our picture appeared in the society pages a few days later. I recently found the clipping among my mother’s papers in my basement. I look eager and innocent, attired in madras Bermuda shorts, a short-sleeved button-down oxford cloth shirt, white wool Adler socks, and Bass Weejuns loafers. A lamb led into battle.
More parties followed. Finally at one of them, Debby and I started kissing. We were lying on the lawn out of sight behind a bush. It was early summer, with thunderstorms in the distance, the air still and charged. Kissing Debby was even more pleasant than I’d expected.
I ended up dating her until the end of my junior year in high school—over two years. An ongoing issue with Debby was that she idolized Doris Day and the virginity-first characters whom Doris played in her movies. Maybe she’d learned caution from the fact that her older sister had ended up pregnant and in a shotgun marriage with a stable-hand. Debby’s family never talked about the strayed sister—I heard about her from my brother.
To confirm that Debby and I were going steady, in 1960, at the end of my freshman year of high-school, I presented her with my von Bitter signet ring, and with my Catholic Country Day football letter sweater. The latter was a bulky item, I brought it to her house stuffed inside a brown paper shopping bag. She wasn’t very thrilled about the sweater. A Louisville Country Day letter would have been another story—but Catholic Country Day…eccch.
Debby left the sweater in its brown paper bag on her house’s back porch. “Oh!” exclaimed her mother, finding it, and immediately understanding what it was. “This is a sweater! I thought it was the garbage.”
Every few weeks, Pop would drive Debby and me on a date. We’d sit in the back seat together, as if he were a cab driver, and he’d ferry us into town to see a Doris Day movie. Of course Pop insisted on talking to us. He thought Debby’s mother was cute; apparently the mother had sat on Pop’s lap at some party in the inconceivably distant past.
Debby always called Pop, “Sir,” which just slayed him.
The summer of 1960 was my brother Embry’s last few months at home before going off to Kenyon College in Ohio. To be further from my parents’ scrutiny, he’d moved his dwelling into the basement of our house. He had shelves of hot-rod magazines, copies of Dig magazine, a set of bongo drums, and dozens of back issues of Evergreen Review. Niles and I began spending time in Embry’s lair, even when he was there.
Niles thought the hot-rod magazines were absurd. “Look at this ramshackle jalopy,” he said, dismissively tapping the picture of a championship dragster. “What a piece of crap.”
“That car goes a hundred and sixty miles an hour,” Embry testily responded.
“Sure,” jeered Niles. “Off a cliff.”
In the fall of 1960, Pop took it into his head to become ordained as an Episcopal minister. He was forty-six. Over the previous few years, he’d covered the required course work by independent study, and had passed the required academic, theological and psychological exams. And now he became ordained, first as a deacon, and soon thereafter as a priest. We in the family could hardly believe he’d gone through with this.
My mother in particular wasn’t thrilled by this turn of events. “I would never have married a minister,” she remarked.
I never did understand precisely why Pop became a priest. He didn’t talk a lot about religion to me. Certainly he was committed to being kind to people, to doing good, to helping the less fortunate—not only because it was the right thing to do, but also because it made him feel good about himself.
Another factor was that Pop enjoyed being a leader, a person who stands out from the crowd. With his businesses and his inventions, he’d always been looking for a life-changing big score. Becoming a priest was a definitive move for breaking loose from the herd.
But there was more to it
than Pop’s personal needs. When he was standing before a congregation, he’d acquire a numinous glow, as if filled with divine power. He plugged into a higher force and—whatever his personal flaws—he made a positive difference in many people’s lives.
This said, my mother, brother and I did tire of hearing how wonderful Father Embry was. Later in Pop’s career, when I was around thirty, he started giving his parishioners buttons that read, “Embry Says I’m Perfect”—and they loved it. I was often in a resentful frame of mind in my midlife years, and those buttons got my goat. I didn’t feel like Pop was regularly telling me that I was perfect. But, in all fairness, often he did. No matter what, he generally tended to treat me with acceptance and love.
Another of Pop’s saving graces was that he never took himself too seriously. Once when he was interviewed on a Louisville TV show called Pastor’s Round Table, they asked him why he became a minister so late in life. With a straight face he answered, “Well, I couldn’t make a go of anything else, so I thought I’d give this a whirl.”
In reality, Pop held on to his Champion Wood dimension manufacturing business even after he became a priest, although now he delegated much of the management work to his employees, his partners—and eventually to my brother Embry. The company prospered, and Pop was fairly well-off during my high-school and college years.
After my freshman year at Catholic Country Day, I switched to an all-male Roman Catholic school called St. X, for St. Francis Xavier, and I was there from 1960 through 1963. Why another Catholic school? Well, my friend Michael Dorris was switching there, and he convinced me it was a good idea. And, according to an article in the Louisville Courier Journal, St. X was supposed to be have the best science classes in Louisville. The feeling in my family was that I was going to be a scientist. And the tuition at St. X wasn’t very high.
