by Rudy Rucker
Which college to attend? This was a sticky wicket. Each college application required the student to write a brief essay, and I committed the error of writing what I considered to be the truth: (a) life is essentially meaningless because we’re all going die; (b) whatever career I picked made no real difference, so even being a truck-driver might be okay; and (c) I planned to spend my years living as authentically and ecstatically as possible.
I was too pigheaded to change my essays even when my parents suggested that I should. I imagined that the wise academic administrators would share my disdain for the status quo! Fat chance.
My first-choice school was Harvard. I remember going downtown to the office of a local Harvard alum, a stockbroker and a college football fan. He could hardly believe what he was hearing from me. “These existentialists you’re going on about, that Sartre fellow, how old is he? Has he ever met a payroll?”
My second-choice college, Swarthmore, an elite private school near Philadelphia, was on the point of rejecting me as well. My father phoned up the admissions office with something like tears in his voice. “My son has a National Merit Scholarship. I thought—I thought that meant he could go to pretty much any school he liked.”
I was furious and embarrassed at the old man’s meddling. But it worked.
In the summer of 1963, I started refusing to go to church. Given that my father was an Episcopal minister by now, this caused some family arguments—although eventually my weary parents just dropped the subject.
In many ways, Pop was proud of me, but in other ways I was getting to be a pain in the ass. There’s a reason why you send your kids away from home and off to college.
Niles and I were getting drunk as often as we could, and endlessly bull-shitting about the meaning of life. Before I’d quit going to church, I’d sometime officiated as an acolyte, so I knew where the communion wine was stored. Every now and then I’d go and steal a bottle of that. But by now Niles was pretty good at buying bottles in liquor stores.
I didn’t have a steady girlfriend, and I fell in with a younger girl named Susan. I met her at a party at some Kentucky mansion where she got my attention by stealing my glasses off my face. She was impressed by my literary aspirations—I gave her a copy of the Chevalier Pegasus with my stream-of-consciousness story about riding the bus home from school.
Susan’s father was an overweight psychiatrist who strongly disapproved of me. Having read my Chevalier story, he told his daughter, “Rudy will be unhappy for his whole life.”
But he didn’t understand that when an author complains in his writing, he might actually be happy and having a good time. I was already coming to learn that whining on paper always puts me in a better mood.
This said, I was indeed anxious about my unknown future and sad to see my childhood years coming to a close.
In September, 1963, the same month that I was to go to Swarthmore, Pop took a job as the rector of a church in Alexandria, Virginia, a suburb of Washington DC. He’d been working as an assistant at St. Francis, but now he wanted a congregation of his own. He and Mom called the movers and put our house up for sale.
I was headed for a liberal, intellectual, co-ed college, and Niles was going to Columbia University in New York City—everything was working out just as we’d wanted it to. But we felt like condemned men. Our familiar lives were disappearing.
“Instead of saying goodbye, we should hit each other in the face with pies,” I suggested to Niles.
“Great idea. Genius.”
So I bought two frozen cream pies and let them thaw out overnight in our kitchen, and the morning before my parents and I were to drive off towards Northern Virginia, I met Niles at the strip of grass where his back yard met mine.
The pies looked flat and cold and dreary. We didn’t bother shoving them at each other. We just said goodbye.
Sad to say, Niles and I hardly ever saw each other again. With both of us at college and my family no longer in Louisville, we were on diverging paths. With the best of will, it was rare that we managed to reunite. I’ve come to realize this often happens. The winds of life toss us about like tiny specks. No blame.
My Louisville years were over.
Spring Blossoms
On the morning in September, 1963, when my parents dropped me off for college in the little village of Swarthmore, Pennsylvania, Pop bought me a copy of Edwin Abbott’s Flatland in the corner drugstore—the same book that Niles had been talking about the year before. Pop was into Flatland as a metaphor for personal salvation, rather than as tool for visualizing the fourth dimension. He saw A Square’s trip out of the plane as a metaphor for a human being’s contact with the higher reality of God.
An exalted start, but it’s not like the guys in my dorm were budding philosophers. We used to have huge water fights that raged from floor to floor, people ambushing each other with waste-baskets filled from the faucet. There was one feisty little character who, when cornered, would put his hands up like fins and say, “Careful. I know karate.”
In reality, none of us Swarthmore students was particularly tough—far from it. Even if we liked being wild and silly, everyone was smart. It was a real change from high school—as if I’d traveled to a different planet.
A lot of the students were New Yorkers, and nearly everyone was a big talker. We’d stand in the hallway of my dorm, discussing everything. Like—one of the older boys in the dorm got a chain letter saying that if he sent a dollar to the top person on this particular letter’s list of ten people, removed that top name from the list, added his own name to the bottom, and then copied the new letter to ten people, within a few months he’d receive a fortune.
With relish we dissected the proposal. A upper classman, a political science major, pointed out that you’d do just as well to write the new letter without sending anyone a dollar at all and that, while you were at it, you’d do better to send the letter with your name on the list to twenty people instead of ten. I observed that ten to the tenth power was ten billion, and that ten billion was considerably larger than Earth’s current population, so it was in fact impossible for our chain letter to parasitize enough victims for us to get returns.
“So we’ll put our names close to the top,” suggested the Poli-Sci major.
But nobody wanted to bother writing out the letters.
My roommate was Kenneth Turan—tall, friendly, thick-lipped, and wearing heavy black-framed glasses. He came from a tough part of Brooklyn and sometimes he acted like an old man.
“Push that desk over there, Rudy. I’m sorry I can’t help you, I’ve got a bad back.”
We got in the habit of having long talks in the dark after we went to bed. We were both such provincials—each in our own way—that we were fascinated by each other’s strange accents and curious cultures. Kenny had an insatiable appetite for facts about the Southern high-school scene, and in return, he’d tell me about his gritty life in Brooklyn.
“Some of these guys have no mind, Rudy. With the mouth you got, you wouldn’t last two days.”
Kenny had seen a zillion obscure movies in the theaters of New York, and he was a master at recounting their plots. One of his full-blown performances could take half an hour, and I’d feel like I was seeing the film unfold on the ceiling of our room. Sometimes, I’d later learn, Kenny’s version might actually be better than the film itself. For years I wanted to see a murder movie called Peeping Tom that he’d told me about—and when, forty-five years, later I finally managed to rent it, the experience wasn’t nearly as great as hearing Kenny tell it. It’s no wonder that he ended up being a lead film-critic for the Los Angeles Times and for National Public Radio.
Through Kenny, I met an interesting pair of guys called Barry Feldman and Roger Shatzkin. They were both on the wrestling team, each of them only a little over five feet tall, and they shared a tiny room, squeezed into a bunk bed. They’d known each other in high school on Long Island, which meant that meeting them was like walking in on a couple having a
long conversation. Or like meeting two of the Marx brothers.
Roger was somewhat buttoned-down and organized, but with a sneaking love for chaos. He seemed to know every blues or old-timey music record ever made, and he played the harmonica and the guitar. Barry was wild and messy, a natural-born artist, who’d say odd things like, “My name should be Stillborn—to show that, every second of every day, I’m still being born.” Or, “Schmuck in Yiddish means your dick, but in German it means jewelry, so your dick is your ornament.”
Barry was already an accomplished painter—I once spent an hour watching him busy with a pencil and paper, drawing a bush and capturing every snaky curve of the branches. When he was at work, his lively, sarcastic features would settle into an angelic calm.
Even more nourishing than the male bull-sessions were the conversations with women. They were everywhere—in my classes, in the dining-hall, on the grassy lawns, in the library. Utopia.
One sophomore girl knew my big brother, and she let me hang around with her a bit. She was into lettering words onto big sheets of poster board, coloring in the words to create something like a multidimensional poem—or maybe like a gossip magazine. I was happy when she added my name to her poster, labeling it: “Department Of Missing Persons.”
Another girl I hung around with was a big fan of Bob Dylan—who was new to me—and I got hold of his first record. Loner poetry songs, wow! And Dylan was only the same age as Embry! Incredible. Our generation was taking over.
Every night after supper, there’d be a bunch of people on the front porch of the main campus building, some playing guitars and singing, others pitching pennies, still others playing the schoolyard game of “stretch” with table knives lifted from the dining hall. It was like I was finally having a happy childhood. All that I really needed now was a good girlfriend.
I found her on March 21, 1964, the day before my eighteenth birthday. Sylvia. I happened to sit down next to her on a charter bus taking students from Swarthmore to the Washington DC area for spring break—Sylvia had a friend there, and I was going to see my parents, now in Alexandria, just south of DC.
Sylvia was beautiful, sophisticated and intelligent. I liked her smile and her laugh. We talked about Andy Warhol and Pop Art, about electric eels, and about the game of pretending your finger is a scythe reaching out the bus window to mow the landscape. Sylvia seemed to understand and appreciate me more than anyone I’d ever met in my life.
When I got back to Swarthmore after the spring break, it took me a few days to find her, as I’d gotten her last name wrong. Also she was two years ahead of me at school, so I couldn’t find her in the freshman facebook. But then she appeared before me at the condiments table in the dining hall: shy yet confident, tall and eager, curvy-hipped, all smiles.
For our first date we went to all three concerts of the annual Swarthmore Folk Festival together. They had a great lineup of groups: Delta bluesmen, Chicago rockers, New York folkies, and even the fledgling Jefferson Airplane, complete with the first light show that any of us had ever seen—a loop of the cartoon Alice in Wonderland falling endlessly downward, overlaid by the soon-to-be-standard projection of dyed oil globs pulsing in a shallow glass dish.
Swarthmore had a strict curfew for the female students, and if you brought your date back to her dorm late, you had to wait outside with her until eventually the night watchman would show up on his rounds to let her in—and to report her for a demerit.
But the waiting was fun. Sylvia and I sat amid great spreading patches of blooming daffodils on the campus lawn, canopied by the elms and a damp, gently glowing spring sky. We liked to kiss. Not only was Sylvia the smartest woman I’d ever met, she was the best kisser. From the start, we felt just right for each other. A perfect fit, all the way down to the molecular level.
The summer after freshman year, I did some construction work in the developments sprouting up around my parents’ new house in northern Virginia—and earned enough money to fly to Geneva, Switzerland, where Sylvia’s family lived, and where she spent her summers.
I ended up working this same job several summers in a row, each time to earn money to visit Sylvia. Sometimes my job was running a tamper—an object about the size of an outboard motor-boat engine, with a broad, flat, metal foot on the bottom. After a new basement had been bulldozed out and tidied up with shovels, I’d guide the tamper over the dirt floor for an hour or two, flattening it.
Other times I’d drive a little tanker truck that dribbled water onto the development site’s dirt roads, to keep the dust from blowing around and sticking to the fresh-painted houses. And then there were days when I’d just move from spot to spot around the construction site, doing whatever the foremen told me—cutting up metal rebar rods, collecting trash, or stacking lumber.
The interesting thing about the job was the juicy cross-section of blue-collar life that I met. I got to hang out with black men, some older than me, and some my own age. They had great accents, and a different way of seeing the world. Another guy with a memorable accent was a skinny old white hillbilly carpenter called Roller. Roller was always to be found with his partner, a taciturn man who was in some sense Roller’s keeper or interpreter. Roller himself was like a high priest of weirdness, to be consulted only with caution. I treasured the pearls that fell from his lips.
“Looks like where the madwoman shits,” Roller exclaimed one day, upon stepping into a room where some drunken housepainters had left a welter of empty cans. Another time, finding a room completely filled with stacks of wood trim, the sage observed, “T’ain’t enough room to fuck a cat.” Pondering his partner’s scheme of getting construction work on the new US military bases going up in Vietnam, Roller remarked, “The pay is good, but the snipers are plentiful.”
Sylvia’s parents, Arpad and Pauline, were Hungarian émigrés. Arpad was a high-ranking diplomat, and Pauline, who’d been an office worker in Washington, was now a slightly reluctant homemaker. I think she missed her job. They lived in a classy high-rise apartment in Geneva, with balconies and yellow awnings on three sides. Soon after the war, Arpad had defected while at a conference in Paris, and Pauline had snuck Sylvia, her brother, and a nanny across the Austrian border, paying the local guides with jewelry.
Pauline always said the nanny had been more trouble than the children. As soon as they hit Vienna, the nanny took off for Monte Carlo with a plan for winning at roulette—and when that didn’t work out, she tried her luck in Hollywood. Meanwhile Sylvia and her family had found their way to Paris.
I’d rarely been around such worldly, charming people. Sylvia’s mother was a chatterbox, never at a loss for words, and her father was an inveterate punster—for instance when the maid left a basket of fruit in my room, Arpad told me, “This can be the rudiments of your eating.”
Embry, who was still in the army near the East German border, showed up at Sylvia’s in a tiny little clown car, a subcompact Fiat. Embry and I followed Sylvia’s family Mercedes up to the mountain resort of Zermatt for a week’s stay. Embry was surprised to see me walking around the village with Sylvia holding hands. He’d had lots of women friends by now, but maybe he hadn’t yet been in love.
Over the next few years, I went to Zermatt with Sylvia’s family several times. The place blew my mind. For one thing, I began to realize that, with luck, I might keep on seeing Sylvia forever. And for another—I’d never been around high mountains. Spending a day on the mountain trails with Sylvia was an exact objective correlative for what I wanted to do with my life: climbing towards the peaks, exploring wild terrain, marveling over the wondrous flowers—all this with a sweet-voiced woman at my side.
Of course some days I’d want to push my hiking farther than the others did, and I’d head out alone, scrambling up impossibly steep meadows that would top out at—still more impossibly steep meadows.
I’d remember these climbs in graduate school, when I’d study transfinite set theory, with its notions of higher infinities piled above lower infinities.
And when I’d write my SF novel about infinity, White Light, Zermatt’s Alps would be very much in my mind. But all that came much later.
When I started college in 1963 I’d been planning to major in philosophy or in literature, even though Pop kept urging me to study something more technical. “You can read all those books on your own,” he insisted. “Read everything, sure, but learn science too. Be a Renaissance man!”
Although my natural bent was to disagree with Pop, after a couple of semesters, I decided he was right. I wasn’t getting much out of the philosophy and literature courses that I was taking. When I asked my philosophy professor about the meaning of life, he deluged me with double-talk. And the English lit professor wanted us to plow through stuff like Pamela or Vanity Fair.
I found these English books so dull and square that I turned to reading their summaries in our library’s treasured resource: Masterplots, a twelve volume set with the plot stories of the world’s finest literature. Before long, I found it too enervating even to read the plot outlines of the assigned books. But by then it had became a running joke among the other introductory literature students always to check out the Masterplots volumes under the name Rudy Rucker.
At least in science you didn’t have to read a whole lot of crap. I had a vague notion of majoring in physics and inventing an antigravity machine, but physics turned out not to be my strong suit either. After a grueling semester of Mechanics and Wave Motion—in which I tried unsuccessfully to make a hologram with a laser—I was off the physics track for good.
And so I majored in math. I had some difficulties with my initial calculus course, some basic issues in understanding what we were even talking about. But then I got a fellow student named Arnie Yanoff to help me. He explained the mysterious “chain rule” to me, talking about the infinitesimal quantities dx, dy and dz in a relaxed, cozy tone, as if we were discussing the doings of some little gnomes that lived beneath his floor.
