by Rudy Rucker
“What is it?” he asked Sylvia.
“It’s a stop-light,” she shot back.
“No no, it’s the first thing man ever drew. What you got is the brush and the bag to keep—what they paint with, the stuff. The place to dip different colors. It’s a painting of itself.”
A big time.
And then it was back to Lynchburg. Despite my job troubles there, the town proved to be a comfortable nest where Sylvia and I would spend six years raising our kids.
In the fall of 1981, for Isabel’s seventh birthday we looked in the classified ads and found an ad for Free Puppies. The place was out in the sticks, it was a farm with lots of bare red dirt. The farmer’s dog had borne a litter of six. Five of the puppies were black and short-haired, one was orange and white with long hair.
This pup liked to lie on his back when you petted him. The farm-wife liked him best; she said she always brought him inside to play with while she watched TV. We all practiced petting him, and he eagerly rolled over to offer us his stomach. On the drive home we agreed to name our new dog Arf, with the nickname Arfie. That’s what my first real math teacher, Gigi Taylor, had called her dog in Louisville, or rather, that’s the name that her two-year-old son had given the dog. I’d always admired that name’s simplicity.
We had a big enough house that Arf spent a lot of time inside, and never mind my talk about my hay fever. There was a wide pie-slice-shaped step where the carpeted staircase turned: that was Arf’s special spot. He could sit there and hear whatever was going on upstairs or down. The children loved to spend time petting Arf, confiding with him when the world seemed against them.
“If you’re ever sitting on the ground,” observed Isabel, “Arf comes up and sticks his nose in your face to see what you’re doing. The nerve!”
Sylvia liked taking him for walks, she was proud of what a cute puppy he was, and of how everyone would comment on him. She particularly admired his high-held feathery tail—sometimes she called him “Plume.”
In the summer, Arf hung out under our front porch. This was a four-foot-high space about forty feet wide, with that bare red Virginia dirt on the ground. It was cool and shady there, and Arf could dig as much as he liked without getting scolded.
The children liked it under that porch too. Arf had made several large crater-like depressions to lie in, and Rudy would fill these pits with water from the hose so that there’d be a really good supply of mud for building walls on our driveway. Later we had a discarded mattress that made its way under the porch in real hillbilly fashion, and Isabel once tried to camp out down there with a friend—although eventually the mosquitoes drove them to the bunk-bed in Isabel’s room.
One problem with Arf being outside a lot was that he would roam all over the neighborhood, and into neighborhoods further and further beyond. He was looking for female dogs in heat. If we waited a few hours, or at most a day, he’d always come home, sometimes looking a bit exhausted and wrung-out.
We didn’t want to chain Arf or pen him up, so it was more or less impossible to keep him from roaming. Especially in the springtime, he’d sniff the air in a certain way, and you’d know he was going to make a break for it. Now and then the city dogcatcher would pick him up, and I’d have to pay to get Arf out of the kennel and maybe even go to court to pay a ticket.
For some reason I had the idea that Arf was highly intelligent. So I spent some time trying to teach him that he should always run away from the dogcatcher. Arf and I sat down together in the driveway, and I moved two little rocks around on the ground to stand for Arf and the dogcatcher.
“Dog-catcher come. Arf run away! Dog-catcher bad. Arf run away!”
Arf almost looked like he understood, but then he started sniffing at my hands to see if there was food in them.
Rudy and Isabel were attending a nice old public school called Garland-Rhodes, about three blocks from our house. They’d walk all the way—it was great to see them marching down the street, tidy and eager. If Rudy and I saw each other a block away, we’d take off our hats and wave them at each other. One problem was that Arf wanted to follow them every day. I’d try and keep him in the house, but sometimes he’d get out the back door and take off after Rudy and Isabel.
They’d die of embarrassment when, now and then, Arf would manage to get inside the school and go tearing down the halls looking for them, with his nails clicking on the floor, kids running after him, and teachers yelling. Rudy and Isabel would sit stiffly at their desks, pretending they didn’t know Arf at all.
Our kids joined the choir in our Episcopal church, and it turned out that one of the hymns they sang was that very song that had seemed so comical to us when we’d tried attending the U.S. Army church in Heidelberg, “There’s Just Something About That Name.” Georgia had a very sweet and musical voice, and she adapted this hymn for praising our pet at home.
“Arfie. Master. Savior. There’s just something about that name.”
Georgia went to a private girls’ school called Seven Hills School, which was a couple of blocks further away. We usually drove her there. Seven Hills had a list of novels that they recommended for the students to read and Georgia read practically every book on the list before classes began. She was determined to do well—and she enjoyed reading.
I once gave away the ending of Jane Eyre to Georgia by asking, “Did you get to the part where she finds the guy’s crazy wife in the attic?” She scolded me about this for years.
Huge numbers of daffodils came out in the springtime, particularly in the woods down at the bottom of the hill our house was on. Georgia and Isabel liked going to pick bouquets. There were some friendly kids living right next door to us, but one of them wasn’t too bright. When she saw our girls picking daffodils, she took a wagon down there, and picked every single flower in the woods, hauling them up to wither in a heap in her back yard.
The father of these girls was a Southern guy called R. G. He worked as an estimator for an electrical contractor. He was actually quite sharp, but he liked playing the redneck, if only to tease me. When we’d been living next door to him for about a month, R. G. asked me if I wanted to go to a KKK rally. It took me a few anxious days to realize he’d been kidding me.
R. G. liked mowing his lawn and trimming his hedges, but he didn’t have a hedge-trimmer. One day he convinced me to help him tidy up the top of his hedges by helping him to hold his lawnmower up in the air and lower it onto the sprouts. We were each holding two wheels, standing on either side of the hedge. After a couple of minutes, it became quite evident to me that this was a terrible idea, and we quit.
For as long as we lived there, R.G.’s wife never could learn how to spell my first name. Every year her Christmas card was addressed to “Rundy Rucker,” which delighted the kids.
Another Lynchburg Christmas story. Some carolers came by our house one year, and I called the kids to come see. They crawled to the door on all fours, barking, making faces, and peering out at the carolers as if they had no idea what was going on. The more I scolded them, the harder they barked and laughed.
Sometimes they liked to give me a taste of my own rebelliousness.
With the kids all in school, Sylvia finally had the chance to start working. Her first job in Lynchburg was the fulfillment of a longstanding fantasy of hers—being a sign painter. She’d always been good at painting sharp, clear lines, and in 1981 she found work hand-lettering billboards. “BABCOCK AUTO REPAIR” was one of her strongest works, over fifty feet long. I greatly admired the skill of the lettering. It was, like, Pop art.
She hoped to start using the airbrush and maybe even bending neon tubes, but the others in the shop wouldn’t let her share these tasks. She was the only woman working there—a matter of some comment in Lynchburg, Virginia. One of the clients, a woman realtor, actually complained to the owner about seeing Sylvia in the shop. For some reason it bothered this nitwit realtor that Sylvia was wearing jeans.
The sign-painting business took a down-turn before l
ong, but Sylvia managed to switch to a new job. Thanks to her graduate work, she was able to get a Virginia teaching credential, and she had a shot at high-school teaching. Her first teaching job was at a public school in Naruna, Virginia, a long drive out into the boonies, a place with a deep-South feel.
She taught a couple of English classes, and one day she had me come guest-teach for an hour. I was going to read a science fiction story about higher dimensions, and to introduce it, I talked a little about the concept of a two-dimensional world. I asked if anyone had ever heard of Flatland.
“That’s where you grow peanuts at,” volunteered one of the pupils in all seriousness. It was indeed true that gooberiferous zones of Virginia were the sandy flats inland from the shore.
Before long, Sylvia tired of the long drive to Naruna, and of the place’s backwater vibe. She found a better job teaching Latin and French at the private Seven Hills School in Lynchburg where Georgia was going.
In the fall of my second year at Randolph Macon—this would be 1981, soon after we got Arf—I found out that I was fired for real, but for no explicitly stated reason. I never was quite sure what the specific problem was. I never missed a class, most of the students liked me, I was publishing some papers—but admittedly, I never really did want to grade homework.
This time around, time the math chairman didn’t try to fire me face to face. He had the Dean write me a letter while he was on a trip to Randolph-Macon’s sister school in England. I was resentful, downcast, and anxious about the future. I couldn’t face trying to find another teaching job just then, so I decided to put more energy into my writing. Maybe, just maybe, I could break through to commercial success.
I wanted to write the best possible books I could, and I knew that, given the kind of person that I am, these were not going to be in the conventional bestseller mode. But I was hoping that I could hit it big with my own style of avant-garde SF.
By now I’d also come to understand that I didn’t really have the option of writing in a more conventional mode. My sense was that if I were to try to water down my style and write something that felt weak to me, then, first of all, it wouldn’t be fun to do, and secondly, it wouldn’t be very readable. What gives bestsellers their zing is that their authors are going all out, and they believe in what they’re doing.
I’d been confirmed in this belief the summer before, when I’d been invited to a workshop at the Naropa Institute for Further Studies in Boulder, Colorado. I got to meet William Burroughs there, and to attend one of his talks. Somebody asked William Burroughs why he didn’t just write a bestseller to make some money. He said that something like the following, which appears in one of his printed interviews.
“It’s not possible. People may think they can sit down and write a bestseller, but you can’t do it. A bestseller is written up to the level of a man’s ability. You can’t write down to the reading public.”
Far from starting a bestseller in 1981, I began working on The Sex Sphere, a transreal SF novel loosely based on our experiences in Europe, starring a married couple with three children. The “trans” part is that they’re menaced by giant ass from the fourth dimension, an alien being named Babs. While I was at it, I included detailed instructions about how build a contraband atomic bomb.
I’m not sure I’d have the gall to write a book like that anymore. I think it was in part a reaction to the namby-pamby environment of R-MWC.
With regards to Babs, I might blandly insist that, as I’m interested in the fourth dimension, I wanted to echo the Flatland theme of a sphere that lifts a lower-dimensional being into higher space. And I could say that I thought of Babs as embodying the archetypal notion of a love goddess. But it’s also true that I was looking to shock people. It was kind of a punk, underground comix thing.
But at the same time, The Sex Sphere was an attempt to depict the give and take of a loving marriage. To this end, I wrote half the chapters are from the husband’s point of view, and half from the wife’s. Sylvia liked the book a lot.
When I finished The Sex Sphere early in 1982, Susan Allison at Ace agreed to publish it. I still have a wonderful letter from her about this book in my files, with one sentence in particular that warms my heart.
“You’ve created a marriage here that for all its looniness is rounded and wonderful, and you may not even be aware how rare it is for a writer to be able to do that at all—to say nothing of doing it with one hand while playing the most unlikely arpeggios with the other.”
Every four years, the R-MWC faculty were dragooned into presenting a winter talent show to entertain the students. As fate would have it, a show was coming up just a few months after I found out I was losing my job. Some other terminated faculty and I decided to perform as a punk band, which I named The Dead Pigs.
My reason for the name was, first of all, that it sounded punk, what with “Dead” in it. And, as I mentioned earlier, I’ve always had a warm feeling towards pigs. Being in this band, I got more pig-like all the time.
We practiced all through that fall and winter of 1981, and into the start of 1982. I was the singer, even though I can’t really sing—but I can’t play any instruments either. It was exciting to be playing the part of a punk rocker, to be screaming my resentments into a microphone. And I liked rehearsing with the others. Other than my ninth-grade year of football, I’d never been on any kind of team. It was refreshing to be part of a group. I also liked that making music was so visceral and non-digital.
Our performance at the faculty show in February, 1982, was in the band’s estimation, a triumph. We played punked-out versions of “Louie, Louie” and “Duke of Earl,” complete with a roasted pig’s head onstage, and a guy running a chain-saw. I wore shades and tight leather pants. The students screamed like we were the Beatles, and the authorities were shocked. They rang down the curtain on us before we were done.
I wanted to get us some more gigs, but, as per usual with punk bands, the group fell apart. We played a few parties and one more concert at R-MWC, and that was all. It felt like driving a car off a cliff at a hundred miles an hour. For several days, I was obsessively replaying the final concert in my mind.
My fifteen minutes of rockstar fame had come and gone. I went back to teaching my calculus classes, knowing I’d be out on the street in a couple of months.
One of my best friends at Randolph Macon was Mike Gambone, an economics professor my age and an admirer of Thorsten Veblen’s Theory of the Leisure Class. It irked him to run conventional economics courses at RMW-C.
“I feel like I’m teaching my students Bible stories,” he’d say. “Or Soviet propaganda.”
I was always running into Mike around the campus, and he played the bass saxophone in the Dead Pigs. Mike had lived all over, but he sometimes called himself a Texan—although he was a Texan more like the guys in Z Z Top or like Lighting Hopkins than like George W. Bush.
Mike was a fellow traveler, another secret agent from the world of ideas. He’d often come party with Sylvia and me on the weekends, and sometimes I’d go over to his house. Sometimes we go back and forth, from house to house, getting higher and higher.
I remember him telling me about attending a tent revival meeting, and there being a dissolute guy in the middle of the tent, draped around the pole, and crying out, “Lord oh Lord, I’ve been a mizzuble sinner!”
Mike had a knack for acquiring white elephants at bargain rates—pool tables, pianos, factory tools, furniture—eventually he rented a warehouse by the river just to store his booty. He owned a maximum-sized white Cadillac convertible, and near the end of the year, he drove me and another guy east through Richmond, Virginia—where we paid respects to Edgar Allen Poe’s house—and onward to Williamsburg, where we saw an epic concert by the mighty punk band, the Clash. For this expedition I wore my Dead Pigs outfit—leather pants, leather coat and shades. Sylvia stayed in Lynchburg with her brother, Henry, who was visiting us right then.
“Nice knowing you,” said Henry, watching me
get into the cackling Gambone’s pimpmobile.
At times Mike was married, at other times not—he’d gone through maybe five wives, and he always seemed to be on the prowl. He had an easy, charming manner that was enhanced by his smooth accent. According to what he told me, he had a very high success rate.
One spring day in 1982, near the very end of my teaching stint, Mike and I found our way down to the James River and climbed up high into two poplar trees immediately adjacent to each other. The river was running high, and was pocked with whirlpools. The branches were bedecked with the tender greens of spring leaves. We hung out there for quite some time, chatting and imagining we were on another planet.
Mike and I talked about science a lot. He knew a lot about technical things and was an inveterate tinkerer, with myriads of offbeat army surplus devices in his basement, such as a powerful gyroscope in a greenish box that you plugged into the wall. This thing was designed to be used for navigational purposes on a bomber plane. I was fascinated by it, and Mike generously gave it to me. Eventually this super-gyro turned up in my 1983 short story, “Inertia,” featuring a pair of mad scientists called Fletcher and Harry. Fletcher was loosely modeled on Mike, and Harry was a blend of me and that memorably weird Rutgers math professor, Harry Gonshor.
So, fine, I was unemployed now, and this was my chance to be a freelance writer. For lack of a better plan, we decided to stay on in Lynchburg. Stubbornly staying on would be, in a small way, a thumb in the eye of those who wanted me to disappear. And it seemed practical to stay, given that our mortgage payments weren’t very high, and given that Sylvia had her job teaching high-school.
In the spring of 1982, as if descending from Olympus, no less a figure than my boyhood hero, Robert Sheckley, arrived to bless my writing endeavors. Along with Philip K. Dick, Sheckley is one of the original transreal SF writers. For me, Sheckley’s stories were a model for how to write SF that is funny, hip, sad and exciting—all without seeming to try very hard. And later, when I started trying to write SF on my own, his style served as a beacon and a guide.
