The Motion of Light in Water: Sex and Science Fiction Writing in the East Village

by Samuel R. Delany

  Since Bob’s and my destination was Aransas Pass, with places like Galveston and Port Arthur as possible stopping points, one thing I put in the neck of my guitar case was my dog-eared paperback of Sturgeon’s E Pluribus Unicorn (the spine green, the cover by Powers). The opening movement of the book’s last story, the wonderful “A Way of Thinking,” was set on the Gulf. I was curious what it would read like when I was down there.

  The plan was to leave early the next morning.

  Around six I pushed back the covers from the bed in which Marilyn seemed so far away, stepped onto the wooden floor and walked into the bathroom. When I came out, Marilyn was sitting on the bed, pulling her bathrobe around her shoulders. She stood up and started for the kitchen. In the doorway, she stopped and looked back. “Can I fix you some breakfast?”

  “Thanks.” I smiled. “Sure.”

  I sat around while she made bacon, coffee, eggs. Then we ate together, talking about the trip, about writing, about the weather—outside the kitchen window, beyond the plants, moments of sun were already alternating with fifteen minutes now and again of gray. Finally the clock on the back of the stove said seven. “I’ll go and get Bob,” I told her.

  She nodded, a little worried, a little distant.

  I went through the front room, where the typewriter sat across from the clutter, before the airshaft window, yesterday’s page still in the roller. I picked up my guitar case, packed the night before, unlocked the door, and stepped into the hall.

  I walked down the tile flooring beside the banister with its thin spokes, turned, and knocked on Bob’s and Joanne’s door.

  There was no answer.

  Sunlight through the window at the hall’s end lay a coppery trapezoid over the gray and maroon tile floor and put a grid of thin shadows on the stairwell’s yellow wall—which dulled to gray even as I waited, when some clouds pulled across the sky.

  I put the guitar case down and knocked again.

  Forty seconds later, I heard the lock turn. Joanne opened the door a crack, holding together a housedress that doubled as a robe. Her black hair was messy. She looked very sleepy.

  “Bob ready?” I asked.

  “He ain’t awake yet,” she said.

  “Okay,” I grinned. “I’ll come back later.”

  She nodded hurriedly, then closed the door.

  I went back to my apartment.

  “What’s the matter?” Marilyn asked. She still sat with a half cup of coffee.

  “Himself doesn’t seem to be up yet.”

  “Oh.” So we sat around, talking some more, every once in a while going through the stillnesses that punctuate a parting conversation—when the parting, scheduled at one time, is now delayed longer and longer.

  Bob’s eventual arrival—grinning and yawning—around eight-thirty is much less clear in memory, and the actual leave-taking (from Marilyn, from Joanne) a blank.

  From here on, I’m going to try an experiment. Up till now, little in this account has been truly exhaustive, but just to see what happens, I’m going to try to include every memory I have of the hitchhiking trip. As experiments go, I doubt it begins very well, because the first leg of it is particularly dim. All I am really sure of is that Bob took nothing except the jeans he was wearing, the shirt and shoes he had on, and his denim jacket.

  I know we walked across town together, me carrying my guitar case. Somewhere outside the PATH train entrance on Sixth Avenue, Bob or I looked up and commented that the overcast had thickened. It was probably going to rain.

  I had a little more than fifty dollars. Bob had a little less.

  On the PATH train we rode over to Journal Square. Sometime later, we wandered out to some road, and I recall standing on an arch of highway, with Bob, under a light drizzle, looking over a grim, industrial landscape, while cars whizzed and rattled behind us. The road’s shoulder wasn’t wide enough to let them stop, even if they wanted to. Probably because of the rain, we ended up taking a bus as far as Washington.

  I sat, looking out the window, or looking down at our two denimed legs, Bob’s and mine, now touching, now half an inch apart, now touching again.

  Standing outside the Washington depot that night, looking at the sexual traffic, gay and straight, moving around us through green and red neon from a bar across the street, Bob nudged me: “We could probably make some money around here.”

  “Go ahead if you want.” I pulled the case up against my side. “I’m going in and sit down.”

  After wandering around a little more, though, we stayed there on the benches, drowsing against one another’s shoulders, pretty much all night. Toward sunrise, I got into a conversation with some guy who said he’d give us a ride out to the highway. He wore glasses, a rumpled gray suit, and he accompanied the ride with a lecture on how hard it was for two guys to hitch together. Few people would chance taking a pair of men. We’d do better to split up.

  It made sense.

  I’d taken a roadmap from a basket on the counter at the bus station. (Bob said he didn’t need one. “You just keep south till you’re about to hit Florida. Then you turn right and go west.”)

  But now we mapped out a general route, down the east coast and across to Texas. Twenty minutes later, out on the sunny morning highway, Bob said: “Okay, I’m gonna go up about a hundred yards. You stick your thumb out here. We’ll see what happens.” He sprinted up the road, now and again putting out his hand when a car passed.

  He’d only gotten about thirty yards on when a green Chrysler pulled over in front of him. Its roadside door swung open.

  Bob grinned back at me, gave me a thumbs up, ran on and ducked in. The door closed. The Chrysler pulled out into the traffic … and was gone.

  I was alone on the road, some hundreds of miles away from my home and of thousand more from anywhere I wanted to go.

  I turned to the road, took a deep breath, and stuck out my thumb.

  All my narrative instincts tell me that, if the ride I got about six minutes later were my third, or my fifth, the tale would flow much smoother. But that would violate the nature of the experiment I’m attempting here. And, however awkwardly it fits into the tale, it really was the first ride I got, once Bob left.

  It was a very long six minutes later (I was ready for it to be an hour or two …), when an old blue truck with canvas roped down over the sides of its van pulled up ahead of me. The cab door swung out. I ran up the shoulder, pushed my guitar case in, then pulled myself up. A hand gripped my arm to steady me—“There you go. Close the door. Where’re you headin’?”

  “South,” I said. “Texas, finally. But I’ll go as far as you’re driving.”

  In his late twenties or early thirties, wearing a blue short-sleeved checked shirt pretty much open over a bald chest, the driver was kind of serious-looking. “I’m goin’ pretty far. Let’s see how it goes.”

  I closed the door. As he started up, the smile he gave me took a moment to come out, then left very fast. He looked back out the windshield and hauled on the wheel. “You got enough room there?”

  “Yeah. Thanks.”

  We began to bounce on down the road, my guitar case shaking against my shin.

  After three minutes talking about routes, roads, and rides, though, he switched gears on the truck and the conversation in the same ten seconds, veering off into an obscene account of how horny he was and had been on the trip, with much groping of his crotch.

  Probably because he looked so sober, or maybe just because I wasn’t expecting it, it took me another minute to realize this was a come-on. The odd thing was that I thought the guy was pretty attractive, and in any other situation would have been happy to have sex with him. Bob had alerted me that sex was rampant on the road. But I hadn’t been ready for it to intrude on my first ride. Also, I’d only gotten maybe two hours’ sleep in the Washington bus depot. But the guy was coming on pretty strong. “Man, I tell you, I like my pussy. I got an ol’ lady waitin’ for me in Tennessee and we’re as good as married. But I�
�ll be up front with you—” He hefted his crotch again—“I sure like to get my dick sucked, too. You like gettin’ sucked off?”

  “I don’t know.” For some reason I decided to say: “I never did anything like that.”

  “I used to have one ol’ cocksucker,” he went on, “worked with a goddamned circus—used to travel all up and down the east coast. Didn’t have no teeth—but that just made it better. Know what I mean? And, I’ll tell you, that man sucked dick like he wanted you to come back. I come back, too. We was real good friends, actually. I followed that goddamned circus around for three years.” He looked over. “Christ, I gotta take myself a wicked piss.” As he pulled the truck over, he released the clutch and moved his worn boot to stamp the break pedal; we both jogged forward, then back. “What about you?”

  “Um,” I said. “No.”

  “See you in a second.” He opened the door on his side, dropped down to walk around the front of the cab to my side, where, presumably, he took his leak. He stayed there a good two and a half minutes. The three times I glanced down into the right hand mirror, he was looking directly up at me, while he stood there, fingering himself, waiting for me.

  I had just about decided that maybe things would go better if I responded (there weren’t too many more excuses I could make after being caught looking—three times), when suddenly he was back around on his side, and up into the cab. He yanked the door closed, turned the ignition, and pulled out onto the highway again. When I glanced at him, I saw that his jeans fly was open, as if he’d forgotten to zip it up. But after about two minutes, he just put his hand inside. “Man, this thing and me have had some good times together. I could use some good times now—what is it, seven-thirty? I don’t know, but I always get horny in the goddamn morning. I can go all goddamn night and not think about it, but come the morning, and there it is, just standin’ up and rarin’ to go.” Boldly, he pulled his cock out of his pants, looked at it, then at me. “What about you?”

  There wasn’t much to it. It had real tight foreskin—and he was no more of a nail-biter than Bob was.

  “I don’t know,” I said and tried to look uncomfortable. “I don’t think so.”

  “Well, I sure could use a little fun.” For a moment, he even looked sheepish. “And there ain’t enough to it where it would hurt you none.”

  When I didn’t say anything, he said in a harsher tone: “You know, if you don’t wanna do nothin’, I can set you down on the road right here and you can go get yourself another ride. It don’t make no never-mind to me. Is that what you want?”

  I was tired; and I wasn’t sure what I wanted. “No. …”

  “Okay,” he said. He drove on another minute. “You can touch it, if you want. Go on. It ain’t gonna hurt you.”

  So I did. It was small and hard under my hand. We drove like that for another couple of minutes. Finally he said: “Look, I’m a little tired now. I’m gonna pull over …” which he started to do—“and go in the back of the truck and take me a rest.” On the shoulder, once more, he put on the brakes. “You can come back there with me, if you want.” In his serious inflection, it didn’t sound like an invitation so much as a warning.

  We jogged, stopping, again; again he opened the door on his side, swung his legs around, and jumped down—with his little prick still jutting out of his pants, from the way it looked.

  I sat in the cab ten, twenty, thirty seconds; maybe I was just being silly. Since I did find him sexy, why was I putting him and me through all this? Still, I felt like I was being bullied into something I thought I’d said I didn’t want to do—even though … well, I did want to. Finally I got out my side, leaving my guitar case leaning against the seat, and walked around to the back of the truck. Through the canvas flaps—one was pulled a little to the side—I could see where he’d spread a blanket on the ribbed van floor. He was lying on it, on his back, his pants open, massaging himself.

  Morning traffic was going by fairly regularly.

  I climbed in. “You know,” I actually said, “I’ve never done this before,” because I was exhausted and because I didn’t want him to think I was just a cocksucker and because it was the first time I was wholly on my own, outside New York City, in a sexual situation that for all my experience was, finally, new enough to make me retreat behind the language barrier composed of this banal lie millions of millions of women and men have spoken in such situations—to put some gap between this and all that had just been so much of my life.

  “Huh?” He lifted his head and glanced at me. “Oh. Yeah.” He put his head back on the blanket.

  The sex, as they say, was brief and impersonal. I didn’t come. He did. Yet the reality of it somehow brought me back to myself a bit. At one point, in his excitement, he’d reached down and grabbed my head. And I’d enjoyed it. This coyness I was affecting was, I realized, silly. When it was over, I even chuckled. “Well, that wasn’t so bad.”

  “Yeah,” he said again.

  We both lay on the blanket now. I was hoping he might stay there and let us sleep for an hour or so.

  But in less than a minute, he sat up suddenly. “Okey doke. Let’s get goin’. Time to get back on the road.”

  I followed him over the tailgate, jumped down, went to the cab, and climbed back in.

  As we drove on, he said: “I’m gonna do you a favor, boy. You ain’t never gonna get to Texas if you follow the route you was talkin’ about. I done hitchhiked all over these States, and you can’t get no rides on that road—part of that road you were going on ain’t even been built yet!” (So that was what the dotted section Bob and I had wondered at, back at the bus terminal, had meant.) “Besides, it don’t go direct. You turn off here up ahead about fifteen miles, onto—” he gave the number of another interstate—“and that’ll take you right on down through Mississippi and into Louisiana; then you go straight on and into Corpus.” Aransas Pass was just a few more miles outside Corpus Christi. “And you’ll be there.” He shook his head. “I don’t know where the hell you thought you was goin’, but if you’re goin’ to Texas, you better go like I said. If you do, you’ll be there in half the time. Goin’ the way you was, you liable to be on the road a couple of goddamn weeks!”

  I wasn’t sure what to say. The way I’d been headed was one I’d picked out with Bob on the map—which Bob had claimed was one he’d hitched before. But as I looked at the map folded back in my lap, what this guy said seemed to make sense, too. … But even before I was sure what I’d best do, he pulled to a stop, pointed down a turnoff where I could see another highway, and shooed me out of his cab. “Now take the right road, and you’ll get there!”

  Then his truck rattled and grumbled away in the morning haze, his canvas back flaps shaking and swinging. I stood with my guitar case in one hand, my map in the other, and a lot on my mind.

  What about Bob, on the other road?

  But maybe, I figured, till I got to Aransas Pass, it was pointless to worry. Another thing I decided (I squatted on the shoulder now, to stick my map, along with my notebook, back inside my case), was that if this was the sexual landscape I’d entered, and encounters were going to happen that frequently, no matter how tired I was I’d better shrug off this new-found virginity I’d been developing. (Maybe he hadn’t been doing me a favor so much as getting rid of a kid who was going to be coy about putting out. I knew he had a couple of hundred miles to go along my original route; and he wouldn’t have been that bad to travel with. …) I walked a few feet down the feed-on ramp, and held out my thumb.

  The ride pattern for cross-country hitchhiking has always been pretty much the same: three, five, seven rides of three, five, twelve miles before you catch a good one of forty, sixty, ninety miles. Sometimes you even get two good ones in a row—then you start all over.

  There were no other sexual propositions till seven rides and three hundred miles later: it was another Chrysler, and as I ran up to the open door, for a moment I wondered if I’d find Bob inside. But this one was dark blue. I
t was driven by a thin balding guy in his late thirties with glasses, who wore pale blue slacks and an open collar that flapped around his neck. He said he was a salesman, but whatever he sold (boats? houses? private airplanes?) was too big to fit in his car. About ten minutes along into the trip he started in on the anecdotes about his own hitchhiking days: “… I was back up in the sleeper, see—we were somewhere in South Carolina and it was about nine o’clock at night, an’ I was just beat—but the next thing I knew he’d stopped for some other hitchhiker. Well, we weren’t moving at all. So I looked out the sleeper curtain, and I’m damned if that truckdriver hadn’t picked up this nigger kid and had his pants down around his knees and was suckin’ on his dick—a piece of meat on that nigger, too! Well, I’m watchin’ from the sleeper, and don’t you know it’s gettin’ me all hot and horny? So—” he glanced over at me. “You look like you could have some colored blood in you, too, huh?”

  I nodded. “I’m Negro.”

  “Oh. Well, you know, I didn’t mean anything by callin’ him a nigger. Negro. This Negro boy. Well, anyway, there he is, suckin’ this Negro kid off in the front seat, and there I am, peekin’ out of the sleeper curtain, pullin’ on my own peter somethin’ fierce—waitin’ for him to finish with the colored boy. Didn’t come—’cause I wanted that cocksucker to get to work on me.” He rubbed his crotch, laughed, and looked at me. “Know what I mean? And he does, too. Well, I tell you, I like my pussy. But ever since that night, I’ll be honest with you—” again he rubbed between his legs—“I sure like to get my …”

  But I fell asleep amidst his ramblings.

  A couple of times, while I drowsed in the humming car and afternoon clouds as tan as saltwater taffy stretched across the windshield between streaks of gold, he reached around the guitar case between us, and I felt him grope me.

  That was all.

  And I was too tired to respond.

  For many years a strangely vivid memory would return to me: in some medium sized city, I was coming down wide steps into an ancient lobby, holding the iron rail. The whole hall—perhaps it was a YMCA—was painted an enameled turquoise. There was maroon linoleum on the floor. From where I stood on the steps, I could see the wooden pigeonholes for mail behind the registration desk. On the counter were a black telephone and a tarnished call bell, of the sort whose top button you hit with your palm. Across the tiled foyer, the elevator stood at the first floor with only a gate over the door. Inside, I knew (for I had already ridden in it up to my room), it had a large rheostat and hand lever. A black man in dark green, threadbare livery was both bellboy and operator. At the doorway, the light spilled out on the night street (I remembered it from when I came in) through two narrow stained glass windows.