by Rudy Rucker
I went by the office, took an aptitude test, and the vice-principal, Brother Bosco, said I’d gotten a very fine score and that they’d be happy to have me.
From Country Day, I already knew I was good at taking standardized tests, but my score on this latest test set me to wondering if I were a genius. Certainly I wanted to be a genius—and never mind my indifferent grades.
I found a book about intelligence on my parents’ bookcase, and looked up “genius” in the index, which led me to the following observation: It’s not enough to get high scores on intelligence tests—geniuses are people who’ve created something significant, whether it be in science, art, literature, politics, cooking, sports, or whatever. The moral: To be a genius I’d have to do something. But I had no idea what.
In any case, it meant a lot to me that the St. X vice-principal viewed me as a desirable student to have. Right through the end of the ninth grade, I’d been a fairly mediocre student. My teachers hadn’t expected much of me, and I hadn’t had much interest in pleasing them. In a nutshell, I hated school.
But the academically rigorous environment of St. X would prove to be a stimulus, and a challenge that I’d rise to. By the time I finished at St. X, I’d have the highest grade point average in my class.
The teachers at St. X were all Xaverian brothers, with a status something like monks. They’d taken vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience, and they lived together in a dorm. They wore long black robes with rosaries dangling from the waist.
When I started at St. X it was in an old brick building on Louisville’s version of Broadway, and I recall that in 1960 we leaned out the windows to watch when Richard Nixon went by in a motorcade. He was running against Jack Kennedy for the presidency. Mike Dorris and his family were big Kennedy supporters, but my family was for Nixon. How odd this seems in retrospect, given how liberal my father later became. But at this point he was still partly in businessman mode.
As for me opposing Kennedy—maybe it was simply a result of my ongoing rivalry with Mike Dorris. Or maybe it had to do with Kennedy being Catholic, and me being in a tiny minority at a Catholic school, where I often felt like I was having that religion shoved down my throat. We started each class with a recitation of the “Hail Mary” prayer. I had to sit in and listen to the weekly religion class.
Being a Protestant hadn’t seemed to matter that much at Catholic Country Day, but the boys at St. X were a little more rough-edged. A kid named Richards referred to me as “the Jew”—which was, in his tiny mind, equivalent to being an Episcopalian. I didn’t really mind this—Richards was a funny guy, and it seemed cool to be called the Jew, not that I was sure if I’d ever met one. A less friendly pair boys wanted to “baptize” me, meaning they planned to drag me into the men’s room to soak me with water or piss. But I faced them down. I didn’t want this to end up like Louisville Country Day, with me at the bottom of the pecking order. I held my own and kept my status.
Mike Dorris and I were in a lot of the same classes, and we formed a small driving group, with Pop ferrying us into the school in the mornings. We’d get the bus back out to where Mike lived, and his mother would give me a ride the rest of the way home. Mike’s mother always gave us a glass of milk and a piece of cake at his house. She had a spinsterly face that could stop a clock, but I was fond of her.
One thing that impressed me about St. X was that we boys were allowed to smoke cigarettes at recess, which was in an asphalt courtyard behind the school. Sometimes I’d bum—or buy—a cigarette from another boy. Some of these guys were real hoods. All of us wore windbreakers with the collar turned up.
There was one flamboyantly weird student called Rocky, who was forever hanging around by the urinals staring at penises. He’d leave a book on the shelf over the urinals, and act like he’d forgotten it, and then come in to fetch it, his eyes goggling, not that there was a hell of a lot to see. Rocky was about six and a half feet tall, and seemingly a little off in the head. It was horrifying to see the way he ate a hot-dog, his eyes darting around to see who was watching. The hoods were always yelling things at Rocky, but the Brothers tolerated him.
It came as a true liberation when Mike Dorris got his driver’s license in 1961. I’d double-date with him in his mother’s powder-blue Chevy. Sometimes Debby would dig up dates for Mike, sometimes he’d find a girl on his own.
The most debauched night I remember in this company was when Mike brought along an allegedly hot girl named Michelle, and the four of us went to the drive-in to see a racy movie called Not Tonight Henry. The film had a historical theme, with Henry, the hapless hero, imagining women like Cleopatra or Lizzie Borden or Betsy Ross taking off their clothes—not that you could see much more that the upper regions of their breasts.
Mike was neither the smoothest of operators nor the most macho guy, but he was on fire that night. He wrapped his arms around Michelle and bent her backwards, scoring kiss after kiss. I was glad to see my awkward, horny friend having such a good time. For her part, Debby was uneasy and embarrassed, and we made numerous trips to the snack-bar.
Eventually Mike became a professional writer, just as I did, and he achieved considerable commercial success. He was best-known for his novel, A Yellow Raft in Blue Water, and for his nonfiction book, The Broken Cord.
I remember being fairly envious of Mike’s acclaim, self-centered writer that I am. At least for me, our high-school competitiveness carried over into later life. I’m sure that if we’d been seeing each other regularly, I could have gotten over that. But it’s a big country and we were travelling down different paths.
The very last time I saw Mike was around 1989, when he came to California for a book tour. At that time, he seemed distracted and unhappy, and it was hard to talk to him. He was in a shell, unresponsive. Later I’d come to understand that he was suffering from clinical depression. And in 1997, I heard the terrible news that, worn down by family troubles and his depression, he’d killed himself.
That broke my heart. As the years go by, I sometimes think of how much additional life that Mike has missed. But here and now, I’m thinking about him as I knew him in high-school, alive and happy, in the eternal sunshine of the past.
Many of the teachers at St. X were very good. I had one particular guy for chemistry and for mathematics two years in a row, a Brother Emeric. He was a sharp-witted, sleek little man, fond of geeky jokes—but proud and irritable. When the dumb kids got tired of having to learn things, one of them would ask, “Why should we have to learn this stuff, Brother Emeric? Math isn’t really good for anything.” And that would turn the Brother’s face red. He’d set off on a thirty or forty minute rant, while the dumb kids grinned and winked at each other.
I got perfect grades in Brother Emeric’s classes, and he’d joke with me now and then, but I had the feeling he didn’t like me. I think he thought I was a know-it-all because I’d once corrected him in the chemistry class. He’d said there were no chemical compounds involving the noble gases, such as helium, neon, argon and xenon. I proudly told him that I’d just read in this week’s Science News that scientists had synthesized a noble gas compound in the form of xenon tetrafluoride, or XeF4. Brother Emeric hadn’t liked this.
My physics teacher, Brother Antonio, was much more congenial, and he helped me carry out an intricate science fair experiment in which I fed radioactive food to some poor goldfish, then dissected them and measured the radiation accumulated in their skulls and livers.
In way, my favorite teacher was my English teacher, Brother DePaul. He once mentioned that he always smoked cigarettes when he was typing in his room, and to me this gave him an air of authenticity. He had us write a little essay every week, and we accumulated our works in special folders. He encouraged me and told me I was good writer, although I myself wasn’t excited about any of the things I was turning in.
Well, there was one assignment that I enjoyed—Brother DePaul told us to craft satiric fables, and, in 1963, when I was a graduating senior, I once mad
e up an anti-clerical science fiction story. Jesus comes back to Earth and encounters some nuns having a picnic. The nuns are addled by their belief in the doctrine of transubstantiation, that is, the belief that communion wafers are in some very real sense the actual flesh of Christ. So, in my short story’s climax, the nuns eat Jesus.
Somehow I’d thought Brother DePaul would appreciate my story for it’s craft. But he looked weary and sorrowful. I felt ashamed, and at the same time rebellious. I still felt that, as a construct, my story worked. But I was seeing that, if something is offensive enough, the readers ignore your artistry.
As a result of the extremely constrained range of allowable topics and modes of expression, I had a lot of trouble writing assigned essays in high school and in college. I’d always find it hard to come up with the required number of words. And sometimes I’d rebel.
Let it be said that some of the Xaverian brothers who taught at St. X were very tough customers. At the end of one class period I once saw the raw-boned Brother Cassian beckon an obnoxious student back into the room—and drop him to the floor with a punch to the jaw.
But it was more typical of the Brothers to consign a malefactor to Jug, that is, to an hour of detention at the end of the school day. While in detention you invariably had to write an essay titled, “Why I Am in Jug.” In 1962, in the fall of my senior year, I got in trouble for writing an obscene stream-of-consciousness piece for my Jug essay. I’d imagined the Brother presiding over detention would toss my paper out without reading it—so for once I felt free to write something that interested me. But the guy read it, and I had to go see the vice-principal Brother Bosco in his office.
“You’re not a mule, Rudy. I can reason with you, can I not?”
“Yes.” I knew what he was hinting at. The man was a master of the veiled threat. If you really acted up, Brother Bosco would take you out to the gym and paddle you. A boy had told me about it at lunch one day. He carries that paddle hid under his robe. You can hear it bangin’ on his goddamn leg.
“Because I would rather not have to treat a good student like a mule,” continued Brother Bosco.
“You can reason with me,” I assured him, suddenly on the point of tears. “I understand. I’ll act better.”
One of the odder things at St. X was that we seniors had to attend monthly sex lectures by the demented Father Panck.
“I tell the mothers in my parish to be on the lookout for contraceptives in their sons’ rooms,” Father Panck once told us, pacing before five hundred boys like a colonel addressing his troops. “And I’ve heard that some of you fellows are too smart for that. Oh, I know all the tricks. Yes, there was one boy who kept his prophylactics taped to the inside of his car’s rear hubcap. I said Mass at his funeral last February. For, one snowy night, he was out there in the street, with a tire iron in his hand, and his pants around his ankles, and…”
We all enjoyed imagining the scene—visualizing the dark-haired girl in the back seat, with her wool skirt hiked up, and her panties glowing like magnolia petals. Some of the less articulate boys might lose control of themselves and begin hooting during Father Panck’s talks. Bony Brother Cassian would wade into the crowd and slug them.
In the summers, Niles and I would mow lawns all around our neighborhood, which had become a dense patchwork of suburban homes. We’d hoard our money all summer, saving up for a massive blow-out at the Kentucky state fair on the outskirts of Louisville.
The great attraction at the state fair was, of course, the midway, with the huge, clanking rides: the Ferris wheel, the Tilt-A-Whirl, the Wild M rollercoaster, the Round-Up, the bumper cars and so on. There was tasty junk to eat, carnie games to gamble on, side-shows, and mechanical peep-show machines with flip-books from the 1940s.
The louche Kentucky fairground crowd fascinated me—the soldiers from Fort Knox, the teenage hoods in pink shirts and black suits, the drunks and the hillbillies, the fat men and their skanky women with permed peroxide hair, people in polio braces, and the furtive, angular carnies running the booths and rides. I remember a guy who was sporadically reading a science fiction paperback while controlling the Ferris wheel—when things got busy, he’d tuck the book into the hip pocket of his jeans. I dreamed of someday writing an SF novel that hipster carnies might buy.
I’d bragged to Niles about my trip to the Brussels World’s Fair, and we set our hearts on visiting such a fair together. And so, when we were sixteen, we took the train all the way from Louisville to the west coast to visit Seattle’s 1962 World’s Fair.
It was a wonderful trip, rich in incident. We changed trains in Chicago, and proceeded through marvelously Wild West places like Missoula, Montana, with a huge painted sign for Bluff Tap Liquors. Niles jokingly proposed that we hop off the train and bluff our way to the tap. I met an unaccompanied girl on the train and sat with her for a few hours in the scenic observation dome, shyly talking about—the mathematics of group theory, which was the most interesting thing I’d learned at school that year.
My father had a friend in Seattle called Mr. Heath, and we stayed with him for a few days, and then in a student hostel downtown. Mr. Heath was a kind man and a good host, but Niles of course made fun him, referring to him as The Magnificent Heath. Niles was both self-deprecating and radically deflationary of any pomp that he observed. The Magnificent Heath had an eager-beaver son called Jeffrey, and Niles found the boy deeply uncool. Niles developed this alarming comedy routine that he’d deliver in a wheedling hillbilly accent.
“I’m sorry about little Jeffrey, Mr. Heath. We didn’t really mean to butcher him up that-a-way. But it’d be a sin to waste that meat. We’ve got Jeffrey a-roastin’ on a spit out back. It’s the fittin’ way to say goodbye, like how we do it in Kentucky…”
Niles would be, like, mumbling this to me while we were riding in the back of the Magnificent Heath’s car. I was relieved when we made it into the student hostel in the city.
A high point of the world’s fair trip came when Niles and I managed to get into a burlesque show. You were supposed to be twenty-one to see the show, but we’d doctored our driver’s licenses.
Perhaps to look more official, the Kentucky licenses at that time were made with white print on black paper. There was a certain car magazine which printed numerical specifications in just the same size, and in that same white on black font. Niles and I had replaced the final numerals of our birth years with zeroes, making ourselves five or six years older. The carnie running the show waved us in.
It was thrilling to be inside with the seedy crowd of gawkers. A comedian came out and told jokes involving complex double-entendres that I barely understood—like interchanging “C’est si bon,” and “Shave zee bone.” From time to time he’d break off and wheeze asthmatically into the microphone, saying, “Hear the roar of the crowd?”
A heavy-set woman called Baby Dumpling appeared, wearing spangled shorts and pasted-on nipple-covers with dangling gold tassels. By rhythmically hunching her shoulders, she was able to set the tassels to twirling—in opposite directions. “Ah, the breeze from the mountains,” she cooed.
For the final act, an aging woman slunk about the stage with ostrich feather fans—you were supposed to imagine that, behind the fans, she was naked, but it was hard to be sure. She was intensely sucking in her stomach so as not to look fat, which brought her ribs into horsey prominence. Be that as it may, we were ecstatic to have seen burlesque.
There weren’t actually that many carnival-type rides at the World’s Fair. But I did manage to win a two-foot-tall chrome Space Needle cigarette lighter by tossing a penny over a railing onto a polished sheet of painted plywood. Miraculously my penny came to rest entirely within one of the dots painted on the sheet, and not just within any old dot, man, I hit the single grand-prize-winning red dot. I proudly brought the lighter home for my mother to display in our living-room. In a few weeks it migrated to my dresser, and then to the basement.
The world’s fair exhibit that impressed Niles and m
e the most had to do with Einstein’s Theories of Relativity. We’d heard of the Special and General Theories in our science fiction books, but we had little understanding of what they said.
One part of the exhibit was about the notion of spacetime as a unified four-dimensional continuum—which is a central concept for the Special Theory of Relativity. To illustrate this, they’d made an enormous sculptural model of the Moon’s path around the Earth, including the time element by depicting both of the celestial bodies as trails in space. The Moon’s worldline was like a helical vine twining around the vertical worldline of planet Earth.
I looked at it and—bam—I got the picture. That is, if I were to move a plane from the floor to the ceiling, I’d see the moon-line’s cross-section as a dot circling the stationary dot of the Earth-line’s cross-section.
Kicking things up a level, you could stack up the successive states of our full three-dimensional universe to create a four-dimensional spacetime block universe—and you could animate it by moving a cross-sectional Now from the Past towards the Future! You could model time as the fourth dimension.
The General Relativity display consisted of a large curved funnel that was rotating inside a railing. It was a model of the solar system. The funnel’s downward curve towards the center represented the curvature of space, a curvature which was induced by the mass of the sun. We could toss balls into the turning funnel to see how the centrifugal force from the spinning balanced off against the central pull.
Fun to play with, yes, and here came another insight. If gravity amounted to a stretching of our space, what direction did our space get stretched in? The fourth dimension! But, wait, if time was going to be the fourth dimension, then I’d probably want to bend space into the direction of the fifth dimension, or…?
