by Rudy Rucker
Greg and I wrote each other frequent letters about our diverging lives, and I wrote my other college friends as well. As I mentioned before, the letter-writing formed my real apprenticeship as a writer. I was learning to write like with natural cadences and a casual vocabulary.
In 1968, Greg and I tried writing a novel together, mailing sections back and forth. I saw the projected book as a science fiction novel called The Snake People—about telepathic, wriggling beings that dart through your mind when you’re high. Greg saw the book as a wry slice-of-life description of a young guy’s experiences in the Navy. The main characters were fictional versions of Greg and me. Parts of the draft made me laugh a lot.
I learned something from our experiment. I’d found that using myself and my friends as characters in a science fiction novel appealed to me very much. Much later on I’d begin calling this technique transrealism, and I’d write, “A Transrealist Manifesto,” which appeared in the Bulletin of the Science Fiction Writers of America in 1983.
But in 1968 Greg and I didn’t push The Snake People to a conclusion. We thought we had more important things to do.
Me, I was learning math. For the first time in my life, I was taking courses that I found difficult in an interesting way: abstract algebra, real analysis, topology, and mathematical logic. And, for the first time since high school, I was attending all the class lectures and doing the homework.
Sylvia was finishing her Master’s degree in French literature. In the evenings, Sylvia and I would do homework together in our little living room. It was cozy. I liked hearing about the wild books she had to read. I remember her reading aloud to me, in French, from a medieval play about the Garden of Eden, making her voice high and thin for Eve saying, “Dit moi, Satan,” or “Tell me, Satan.”
She also read me Guillaume Apollinaire’s great surreal poem of 1912, “Zone,” with its epic opening lines, “A la fin tu es las de ce monde ancien / Bergère ô tour Eiffel le troupeau des ponts bêle ce matin / Tu en as assez de vivre dans l’antiquité grecque et romaine,” or “You’re finally sick of the ancient world / O shepherdess Eiffel tower the flock of bridges bleats this morning / You’ve had enough of living in Greek and Roman antiquity.”
The Rutgers math department was giving me some financial support as a teaching assistant, and I met twice a week with a section of calculus students to show them how to do their homework problems—they got their lectures from a professor in a big hall. Working through the problems on the board, I finally began to understand calculus myself. It made a lot more sense than I’d realized before.
I was undergoing a constant cascade of mathematical revelations. The mathematical logic course had an especially strong effect on me. Not only was mathematics a map of an unseen real world, it was also a formal system of axioms that we made deductions from. The net of logic bid fair to capture the shiny fish of truth.
I reveled in the hieroglyphic conciseness of symbolic logic, which led me to a deeper level of understanding about even such simple things as the use of zeroes, or the nature of subtraction. I was mastering a new set of mental tools, and everything was coming into focus.
Philosophically, I was beginning to see everything as a mathematical form. But emotionally, everything was love.
Sylvia and I enjoyed the Sixties—we went to the big march on the Pentagon, we had psychedelic posters on our walls, we wore buffalo hide sandals, and we read Zap Comix. I smoked pot rolled in paper flavored like strawberries or wheat straw or bananas. Sylvia bought herself a sewing-machine and started making herself brightly patterned dresses.
At the same time, the war in Vietnam was casting its bitter pall. Those who didn’t live through those times tend not to understand how strongly the males of my generation were radicalized against the United States government. It grated on me that our so-called leaders wanted to send us off to die, and that they called us cowards if we wouldn’t go. It broke my heart to see less-fortunate guys my age being slaughtered. My hair was shoulder-length by now, and occasionally strangers would scream curses at me from cars.
We were friends with a wild math grad student named Jim Carrig, from an Irish family in the Bronx. Jim and his wife, Fran, were huge Rolling Stones fans—they were always talking about the Stones and playing their records. They knew how to sign up early to get a shot at the tickets to the touring Stones shows, and in July, 1972, they took us to see the band play at a wonderful afternoon show at Madison Square Garden.
“Did y’all get off school today?” asked Mick, strutting back and forth. “We did too.”
And then they played “Midnight Rambler” and Mick whipped the stage with his belt—a trick that Jim and I took to emulating at home.
The Carrigs threw great Halloween parties. They lived in an apartment on the second floor of a house, and Jim would stand at the head of the stairs like a bouncer, checking up on his guests’ attire.
“Get the fuck outta here!” he’d yell if anyone showed up without a costume. “Go on, we don’t wanna see you!”
I remember coming to Jim’s 1969 Halloween party as a Non-Fascist Pig. That is, I bought some actual pig ears at a store called Fabulous Meat City, punched holes in them, threaded a piece of string through them, and tied them onto my head. I lettered, “Fuck Nixon,” onto my T-shirt. I pinned on a five-pointed Lunchmeat Award of Excellence star that I’d cut from a slice of Lebanon bologna. And I carried a pig-trotter in my pocket to hold out if anyone wanted to shake hands with me.
When Sylvia and I went to see the left-wing movie Joe in the summer of 1970, the movie theater played “The Star Spangled Banner” before the film, and there was nearly a fight when a guy two rows ahead of us wouldn’t stand up. Turned out the guy was a Viet vet himself.
“That’s why I went to fight,” the vet told the older man harassing him. “To keep this a free country. I don’t have to stand up for no goddamn song.”
I was very nearly drafted that summer myself, undergoing a physical that classified me 1A—meaning prime choice cannon fodder. I’d thought that my missing spleen would earn me a medical exemption, but no dice. I still remember the medical officer who told me the bad news. Sidney W. Tiesenga. He seemed to have a chip on his shoulder. Maybe he’d been drafted himself.
I bought some time by faking an asthma attack—and then they switched to a lottery system for the draft, and I happened to get a comfortably low-priority number. I wasn’t going to Vietnam after all. I was going to keep on learning math, being a newlywed, and having fun.
The tidal wave of underground comix inspired me to get some Rapidograph pens and to start drawing comics on my own. I developed a wacky, left-wing strip called Wheelie Willie that occasionally appeared in the Rutgers campus newspaper, the Targum, during the years 1970 and 1971. I felt uneasy about my ability to draw arms and legs, so my character Wheelie Willie had a snake-like body that ended in a bicycle wheel.
As I was paranoid about being busted for the politics and the drug humor of Wheelie Willie, I published it under a pseudonym, Rubber v. B. Tire. None of the people at the paper knew my real name. Some of the students must have liked the strip, as a fraternity once went so far as to have a Wheelie Willie party. But, anonymous as I was, I only found out about that party after it happened.
My fellow math grad student Dave Hungerford had a lively sense of humor, and was very plugged into the burgeoning hippie culture. He was the one who turned me on to underground comix—he showed me how to find them in what he termed “the commie bookstore,” an independent shop run by an old leftie couple straight from the 1930s.
Dave was a skinny guy with an odd way of talking, and he looked more like a TV repairman than like a hippie. He liked using words in odd ways, for instance he always said “Rug-ters” instead of “Rutgers,” and “pregg-a-nit” instead of “pregnant.” His father had been a housepainter, and he liked to talk about color combinations he’d like to try in his apartment.
“Wal, I think I’ll paint these living room walls taupe, wit
h the faintest touch of red in it. And then I’ll use a pale vegetable green on the moldings.”
He was the first of us to turn thirty, and threw a big party at his apartment. None of us could believe that one of our number was turning thirty. It was like sighting the icy walls of the Antarctic continent.
Mild-mannered though he seemed, Dave was a troublemaker. When he arrived for our grad student orientation session at the start of the first year, he told me that he’d demonstrated against all three of the current presidential candidates: Humphrey, Nixon, and Wallace. And he’d been arrested in the Chicago convention riots. He was always going off to marches and demonstrations. Once, in 1968, he even roped Sylvia and me into making a trip to give support to the AWOL soldiers in the brig at Fort Dix. The soldiers gave us the finger.
Distracted by politics, Dave was an indifferent student, given to napping in the comfortable leather chairs of the Rutgers library. He spent a lot of time worrying about the pigs—that is, the FBI, CIA, Secret Service, Republican party operatives, and ordinary police. He thought they might come after him for his radical politics, which wasn’t out of the question in those times.
A poster on a wall in Dave’s apartment warned, “The Ears Have Walls.” At one point he wanted to keep an escape suitcase in the apartment where Sylvia and I lived, a little get-away case with clothes, some money, and—a gun.
“No way are you bringing a gun into our apartment,” Sylvia told him.
In honor of the Beatles 1969 Abbey Road album, Sylvia and I had gotten a nice KLH stereo. And now Dave Hungerford got me to start listening to Frank Zappa, who came to be my favorite musician for many years. I’d listen endlessly to Zappa on my record player, sometimes using earphones. Sylvia and I went up to the Fillmore East in New York to see Zappa in person few times as well, sometimes with Dave Hungerford along.
Over time, I developed an ability to hear entire Zappa songs in my head, note for note, as if in real time—that is, it would take me just as much time to play a song mentally as it would have taken to hear it on the radio. Remembering an entire song wasn’t actually that hard, now that I was continually honing my mind’s sharpness by studying insanely complex mathematical proofs.
One special night in 1969, I was home alone, listening to the song, “The Nancy and Mary Music” from Zappa’s epochal disk, Chunga’s Revenge. During the song’s rhythmic chanting sequence that bounces between the left and right speaker channels, I had a peak moment of inspiration. I took up my cartoon-drawing pencil and my art-gum eraser and began sketching pictures of the Flatland hero A Square.
I’d always related to A Square, partly because my high-school math teacher Brother Emeric used to call me R Squared, and partly because A Square was a visionary who tried to teach his fellows about a higher dimension. I drew A Square with a nice cartoony eyeball-in-profile, and I drew his wife as a wiggly line segment ending with a similar kind of eye.
Beginning to illustrate the adventures of Flatland, I thought of further adventures that A Square might have—this was something I’d been meaning to do for several years. And I began writing a simple text to accompany the pictures. Over the next five years, this project of mine would grow into a set of lecture notes, and eventually into my first published book: Geometry, Relativity and the Fourth Dimension, 1977.
Sylvia and I also hung out with Eddie Marritz. I’d gone to Swarthmore with Eddie’s big brother Don, who was in Vietnam now. Don had enlisted in an intelligence branch of the Army, hoping to get a comfortable deal like my brother Embry, but they had him riding in helicopters to debrief covert operatives who’d been sent into Laos. He doesn’t like to talk about it. Don still argues that, on his return from Nam, our grateful government should have given him a lifetime free pass to major league baseball games.
So far as I know, Don was the only one of my classmates who actually ended up in Nam, which was a sad paradox, as he was the gentlest of us all. Fortunately he survived, got a law degree, and became a heroic public defender, capable of making a federal case of a seemingly mundane tenant-landlord dispute. Back in college, Don and I loved doing word puzzles together, and to this day we exchange excited emails whenever there’s a cryptic crossword in the Sunday Times magazine.
Sylvia and I got to know Don’s younger brother Eddie in September, 1968, when he showed up for his freshman year at Rutgers. When I first saw Eddie on campus, he was wearing a pair of Don’s old sunglasses. It was like a weird flashback to my own freshman year. I was struck by a realization that carried the force of a blow: my four college years were truly over.
I was practically in tears over how old I was getting—this at the age of twenty-two! There was no going back, I was married now. It occurred to me that I might as well take the next step down the road: having a baby with Sylvia. With a strange mixture of joy and sorrow I laid out these thoughts to her. She liked the idea of having a baby. She said she’d always wanted to have a family, but she hadn’t known I’d be ready this soon. So now that was in the cards. But not quite yet. Maybe in a few months.
Eddie was a lovable kid, and we took him under our wing as if he were a younger brother. It turned out that Eddie always knew where to get pot. Later on, in 1971, he and his roommate had a whole Wheaties box full of the stuff, with a thin layer of oat flakes on the top to disguise their stash.
Eventually this madness became too much for Eddie, and he dropped out of Rutgers, moved in with a woman named Hana in New York City, studied film at Hunter College, and became a successful cinematographer. Eddie and Hana have lived in that same New York apartment for going on forty years now, raising two children along the way. Ah, rent control.
Our friend Roger Shatzkin, a classmate from Swarthmore, was studying English literature at Rutgers while Sylvia and I were there. Roger had an erudite demeanor, and a precise, cautious manner of speech. Back in college, we’d bonded during a series of conversations in which we’d shared every scrap of information that we’d learned about sex during our extensive researches—into books. Roger was the only guy I ever met who’d actually read Richard von Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopathia Sexualis. His dentist father had a hell of a home library.
Seeing more of Roger at Rutgers I got to know him quite well. We’d talk things over, trying to figure out what was going on around us. The endless war, the collapse of our government’s legitimacy, the demonstrations, the riots and the drugs.
“I’ve been thinking that studying for my classes is a meaningless social hangup,” Roger remarked one day. “It’s playing the Man’s game—being a plastic person, a tool, a cog. And then I started thinking of ways to push that argument—like paying rent is a meaningless hangup too, so, okay, I should be sleeping on your couch. But how far does it go? Like—what about breathing? Is it a meaningless social hangup to play the breathing game?”
Impoverished students that we were, Sylvia and I spent any number of evenings playing Scrabble with Eddie, Roger, and David Hungerford, usually listening to music, often smoking pot, and occasionally watching late night television, perhaps with the sound turned off and a record playing. I learned that essentially any track of music will wittily illuminate and comment upon any segment of video at all. We’re quick to see connections.
Now and then I’d even watch TV with the sound on and once, in 1968, I somehow reached the point of drafting a heartfelt letter to the talk-show host Johnny Carson about the concepts of infinity and the fourth dimension, both of which I felt he’d mentioned (albeit indirectly) on his show.
“When Johnny reads this letter, he’s gonna think it’s from a real nut,” I told Sylvia proudly.
“And he’ll be right,” she said.
In 1968, I took a class on mathematical logic, taught by an interesting but difficult character called Erik Ellentuck. He had a medical condition that made his limbs skeletally thin, and he walked and wrote on the blackboard with considerable difficulty. He sometimes claimed that his condition had resulted from a motorcycle accident, although, in retrospect, I thi
nk it’s more likely that he suffered from anorexia. But that didn’t occur to me at the time.
Whatever his problems, Ellentuck was an engaging man with a brilliant mind. But he was a little lazy about teaching. Once he gave our class an extremely difficult assignment that we didn’t know how to begin. Rather than explaining how we should proceed, he proposed that we form teams of two students each and help each other. And then, for the grading, he’d simply talk to one student from each team to inquire what we’d done.
I ended up paired with a young rabbi named Arthur. Arthur had little understanding of the course material, and no time or inclination to work on our homework, so whatever small progress we made was due to me. But Ellentuck respected Arthur for being a rabbi, so when it was time to grade our joint work, it was Arthur whom he called into his office. We ended up with a fairly low grade.
I had the impression that Ellentuck supposed that I been leeching off Arthur, rather than the other way around. So I visited his office as well, and talked that over with him. We found that we liked discussing math together.
Not too long after this, Ellentuck invited Sylvia, me and another student for a meal at his house. He was married to a Japanese woman whose father was a well-known neo-impressionist artist in Japan. The meal was good, and we got to drink a lot of hot sake from wooden cups. Sylvia was disturbed by the fact that, throughout the dinner, Ellentuck kept a loaded pistol sitting on the table beside his plate. Not that he was actively threatening us—surely the gun was only there to impress us. You had to feel a little sorry for this weird emaciated man.
I was learning that, if I was going to be a mathematician, I needed to recalibrate any preconceived notions I had about not being friends with extremely weird or socially inept people. Of all the outré subcultures that I eventually became involved with, mathematicians take the crown for being strange—and never mind about hippies, science fiction writers, punk rockers, computer programmers, or Berkeley cyberfreaks.
