“Polio. Polio? The only person I know with polio is Noni’s friend Frances, in Alabama.”
“Does the year 1954 ring a bell?” I asked.
“Yeah. That was the first time we spent the whole summer in Alabama. Mom and dad sure fooled us the second time, didn’t they? Hi. Welcome back from vacation, kids. Welcome to your new broken home.”
“They should have divorced long before they did. They would have made themselves and a lot of people happier.”
“No,” she said. “They just never should have left backwoods Alabama and come to the Big City. All those glittering objects. All that excitement.”
“Are we talking about the same town here?” I asked.
“Towns are as big as your capacity for wonder, as Fitzgerald said,” said Ethel.
“Okay. Back to weird. Are you sure you never had polio when you were a kid? That you haven’t been in North Carolina the last month at some weird science-place? That you weren’t causing me to hallucinate being a time-traveler?”
“Franklin,” she said. “I have never seen it, but I do believe you are drunk. Why don’t you hang up now and call me back when you are sober. I still love you but I will not tolerate a drunken brother calling me while I am trying to sleep.
“Goodbye now—”
“Wait! Wait! I want to know; are my travels through? Can I get back to my real life now?”
“How would I know?” asked Ethel. “I’m not the King Of Where-You-Go.”
“Maybe. Maybe not.”
“Go sober up now. Next time call me at work. Nights.”
She hung up.
And then I thought: what would it be like to watch everyone slow down; the clock start whirling clockwise around the dial til it turned grey like it was full of dishwater, and then suddenly be out at the spaceport they’re going to build out at the edge of town, and watch the Mars Rocket take off every Tuesday?
And: I would never know the thrill of standing, with a satchel full of comics under my arm, waiting at the end of Eve Arden’s driveway for her to get home from the studio . . .
AFTERWORD
This is the latest thing in the book (see intro.) and I’ve never written about it before.
A couple of years ago people asked if I’d be Guest of Honor at Capclave, a Washington DC convention, successor to the late lamented DisClaves. Sure I said.
“We want to publish a book,” said Michael Walsh—sound familiar?—chairman of the convention and also publisher of Old Earth Books, “An Ace-double sort, two things, one on each side, bound upside-down, back to back (what Locus calls dos-a-dos, for double-other-side). “Sure thing,” I said. “If I have an Ace-double, I want an Emsh cover on it.” “Uh . . .” said Mike. “Don’t worry.” I said.
I wrote Carol Emshwiller, dynamite writer and the widow of the late Ed Emshwiller, “Emsh.” “Got any art on you, Carol?” I asked innocently. “I want an Emsh cover on a book, two of them, in fact. Carol Emshwiller.”
Well, she allowed as how she might have some old stuff . . . Not to worry. Pat Murphy and the inestimable Eileen Gunn were coming down to go backpacking with her in Yosemite (she walks their legs off though she has twenty years on both of them.) They helped her go through her stuff. She sent a bunch.
(One of the first plans for the Capclave novelettes, as they are now called in legend, was to have one side new, and one side be the 25th Anniversary reprint of “The Ugly Chickens.” So Carol set out to draw a dodo.)
“The croquil pen won’t make the right lines, and the ink won’t flow,” she despaired.
“You’re not remembering art school, where you met Ed, right.” I said. “Croquil pens never made the right lines, and the ink never flowed.”
Anyway, the more I looked at the batch of original stuff she sent, the more I knew I wanted to write stories based on the drawings. Two were these great splotchy color things, which I knew would be backgrounds, and there was an ink drawing of a guy and a girl, and one of a horse’s head (like straight from the John Marley scene in The Godfather, only done 15 years before the book or movie.)
So I sat down and wrote what became “The Horse of a Different Color (That You Rode In On.)”—essentially the Da Vinci Code (which I’ve never read) stuff, done better, in only 5000 wds, starring the sixth Marx Bros.—Manny (who in real life died when he was 6 months old but in my world lived to be 107)—and a vaudeville horse act, and “The King of Where-I-Go.”
We’re at the first of June 2005 here. The convention’s in October, so I have to finish them by mid-September.
Martha Grenon whose house I live in, had saved five years to 1) add a sun room and 2) put a tin roof on the house. She’d been meeting with a nice lady architect all Spring, and a young contractor.
I started writing on the first of June. The wrecking crew shows up June 2. They take down the carport and fence so the backhoe with the jackhammer can get in the backyard. They tear off the old screened-in back porch and jackhammer the old porch-pad to dust. BangA-BangA-BangA. Then the guys who lean on shovels show up. And lean on shovels. An 18-wheeler moves a 32’ dumpster into what used to be the driveway but is now the dumpster-way. Then the guys who make noise come along. 5 of them plug radial saws into a single 15-amp circuit. One saw starts up, then a second. The house goes dark. I’m trying to see to write. Then all the circuits go off.
When the lights come back on I have to get up and reset all the clocks—radios, tvs, electronics, stoves. Then the saws start up and they all go off again.
I go out. They plug in the five saws and start them up. They all go off. A guy goes to the breaker box.
He’s unclear on the concept and the language. He thinks if a breaker is tripped to “off” you trip all the breakers on that side of the box to “off.” I watched him do it.
I went to the foreman. “Tell them to please only plug one saw at a time into the circuit. If they do more than one, you go to the breaker box and switch the breaker back.” Then I went inside and reset all the radios, clocks and stoves.
June. July. Now the new stud walls are up for the room; now they’re going to put the new tin roof on. The decking plywood is too thin. This calls for a complete roof tear-off and rebuild. Another 18-wheeler brings an extra 25’ dumpster in. August. All the roof decking’s off, just builder’s paper up there. Big wowza thunderstorm comes up at midnight. Rain starts coming in the new room, and around the living-room door etc. etc. Call contractor, he gets here 3 a.m., goes up and puts 30’ x 40’ blue tarp over the whole house by himself in a wind and electrical storm . . . and ties it down. Damage fixed next three days. Saw Saw Saw Hammer Hammer Hammer.
Meanwhile I am pulling the two stories out of my guts. I don’t know which end is up. I have to walk the dog six times a day as there are no fences. People are ringing the doorbell every ten minutes needing to measure something . . . September. To save time, I try bringing some true stuff that happened to me and my sister when we were young into “tKoWIGo”. By page 10 I was out of the truth and had to make EVERYTHING up. I didn’t save any time at all. I finish “HDC(TYRIO)” and the first twenty pages of “tKoWIGo’’ and send them off Express Mail September 24th. I send the rest off a day later.
I can no longer separate the writing of the two stories from the conditions under which they were written.
About October 1, I get a message from Walsh. “Uh—Mike Nelson (the guy who’s doing the production work) has just been handed one of those notes by his apt. owners—be out by the 20th or have 140,000 dollars for us—we’re going condo! Crisp new bills preferred.” Mike wants to tough it out. I call him. “Find a new place to live,” I say. “There’s life AFTER the convention.”
The original plan: Capclave novelettes are printed; I sign them all when I get there; everybody who comes to Capclave gets one at the door.
That doesn’t ha
ppen of course,through nobody’s fault. I go and have a great CapClave anyway (an ex-girlfriend of my ex-housemate even shows up, wanting his address, to get in touch with people—nobody’s seen her for Thirty Years!) I come home to find Martha and the dog have been attacked by a pit-bull down the block when some moron kid left a door and a gate open. They have both been shaven and stitched in the oddest places . . .
By’n’by the Capclave novelettes are published (both had been up as e-stories on Ellen Datlow’s SciFiction late in the 2005 year—just before it died.) in April 2006 and mailed to all the con attendees. They’re just beautiful and I’m real glad nothing happened to Carol between October and April and she got to see her copies safe and sound. Thanks, Carol!
Like I said, I can’t separate the writing of them from their worth. Something must be okay. “The King of Where-I-Go” is in two YBSFs and I just lost a Hugo with it last night. “Horse of a Different Color (That You Rode In On)” is in this year’s Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror.
The Worldcon gave me a very nice Hugo Nominee Certificate (or, as I refer to it, another “Ticket To Palookaville”) I have a closet full of them.
I wasn’t there when I lost the Hugo, but all my friends were.
Howard Waldrop titles available from Small Beer Press
HORSE OF A DIFFERENT COLOR: STORIES
Hardcover and ebook edition, 2013
10 new stories.
“What’s most rewarding in Mr. Waldrop’s best work is how he both shocks and entertains the reader. He likes to take the familiar — old films, fairy tales, Gilbert & Sullivan operettas — then give it an out-of-left-field twist. At least half the 10 tales in his new collection are prime eccentric Waldrop . . . as he mashes genres, kinks and knots timelines, alchemizing history into alternate history. In “The Wolf-man of Alcatraz,” the B prison movie rubs fur with the Wolf-man; “Kindermarchen” takes the tale of Hansel and Gretel and transforms it into a haunting fable of the Holocaust; and “The King of Where-I-Go” is a moving riff on time travel, the polio epidemic and sibling love.
“Among the most successful stories is “The Horse of a Different Color (That You Rode In On),” an improbable confluence of vaudeville (two of the main characters perform in a horse suit) and the Arthurian Grail legend that manages to name-check Señor Wences, Thomas Pynchon, “King Kong” and more as Mr. Waldrop tells of the Ham Nag — “the best goddamned horse-suit act there ever was.” It’s certainly the best horse-suit-act story I’ve ever read.”—New York Times
HOWARD WHO?
First paperback and ebook editions.
13 stories.
Introduction by George R. R. Martin (A Song of Ice and Fire): “If this is your first taste of Howard, I envy you. Bet you can’t read just one.”
“Back in print after so many years, Howard Who? remains a terrific collection of short stories. There is nobody else alive writing stories as magnificently strange, deliriously inventive, and utterly wonderful as Howard Waldrop.”—Metrobeat
THER WORLDS, BETTER LIVES
Selected Long Fiction, 1989 - 2003
April 2014: First ebook edition.
Paperbacks available from Old Earth Books.
“In 2007, Old Earth Books, an independent press located in Baltimore, brought out Things Will Never Be the Same: A Howard Waldrop Reader, a comprehensive volume that features selected short fiction from 1980-2005 by the Nebula Award-winning and often anthologized writer. This is a book that belongs on the shelf of anyone interested in science-fictional and fantastic short fiction at its best. Old Earth has now followed that earlier and welcome volume with an equally fine companion, Other Worlds, Better Lives, which features longer stories written between 1989 and 2003, and it displays Waldrop’s mastery of the novella form.”
—Pamela Sargent, Sci Fi Weekly
Our books are available everywhere and we hope you will consider picking them up from independent booksellers.
Our ebooks are also available everywhere books are sold and can be found DRM-free on our indie press ebooksite:
www.weightlessbooks.com
Of course there is much more to be found here:
www.smallbeerpress.com
Things Will Never Be the Same Page 40
