[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
Salk or Babe Ruth or Hemingway--or Nixon or Jack the Ripper or Hitler.
And this morning they lowered him into darkness, and wonderful words were read
over him by Rabbi Ashkenazi, Monsignor McCalla, Dr. Ehlen, Carl Sagan and me.
Mine were the best.
Naturally: I knew him best. And as Jimmy so often told interviewers, with that
abundance of humble largesse that so endeared him to
People magazine, The Paris Review and
The National Enquirer, Larry Bedloe is a good solid writer; he s got a nice
little talent working there.
That popped up in my thoughts as I stood there watching them crank down the
gunmetal-blue anodized aluminum casket. Right across from me, on the other
side of the black, plush velvet, upholstered ropes, was a chubby little woman
in basic black and pearls.
Her face was all puffy from crying. She was clutching the Literary Guild boxed
set of his
Radimore trilogy. Chances of her getting it autographed were very slim.
Kerch, as everyone but his ex-wife Leslie and I called him, was already on his
Page 72
ABC Amber Palm Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abcpalm.html
way to stardom when I met him. We were both just turning twenty--I scampered
ahead only six months older--which meant that for half of each year he could
refer to me as old man and I
could admonish him to speak with respect to his elders--and we had both been
science fiction fans.
Every ingroup coterie had its mystiques, its craziness. Masons have secret
handshakes; jazz musicians run a special patois incomprehensible to squares;
only in the motion picture industry can you get a laugh when you tell the one
about the Polish starlet...
who fucked the writer;
antiquarian bookdealers share arcane rituals of buy&sell that bind them in
terms of verso, recto, foxing, gutters and true firsts.
The deranged traditions of science fiction fandom are overwhelmingly
attractive, particularly to those few boys and girls who are the outcasts of
their high school classes because of wonky thought processes, a flair for the
bizarre, and physical appearance that denies them the treasures of sorority
membership or a position on the football team. For the pimply, the short, the
weird and intelligent... for those to whom sex is frightening and to whom come
odd dreams in the middle of study hall, the camaraderie of fandom is a
gleaming, beckoning Erewhon; an extended family of other wimps, twinks, flakes
and oddballs.
We had never met, though we d corresponded heavily for several years. The
nexus of our incipient friendship was the. maelstrom of fannish
publishing-- fanzines. Mimeographed amateur magazines of comment about the
writers and the works in the genre, and a smattering of dreary fan fiction.
His fanzine was titled, with becoming modesty, The World s Greatest
SF Famine Including Venus;
mine was called
Visitations.
But it was at the tenth annual World Science Fiction Convention (neologized as
ChiCon 11), in Chicago, 1952, that we actually met.
I was walking through the lobby of the Hotel Morrison. Being short on funds, I
had arranged to stay in a two-room suite with half a dozen other fans from
different parts of the country; and I was looking for the one in whose name
the rooms were registered, so I could get the key and dump my suitcase.
The lobby was jammed with a horde of fans checking in, renewing acquaintances,
screaming across through the potted plants for directions, rolling in dollies
with cartons of used books for the huckster room, making arrangements for
cheeseburger dinners that night.
And in the midst of that cyclical flow of sweaty aficionados who had driven or
flown of hitchhiked or crawled in from Minneapolis and Kansas City and
Cleveland, Jake Repnich tracked me down.
I felt a hand grab the back of my shirt as I tried to elbow through a knot of
kids divvying up suitcases for the trek to the elevators (thereby saving the
bellboy s tip), and I
reeled backward as the tension was applied. Then someone clubbed me a shot in
the kidney.
I pitched forward, but couldn t fall down because the back of my shirt was
still wrapped in a fist. So my feet went out from under me and I dropped to my
knees. I tried to look around behind me; I was in such exquisite pain that my
[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]