has the word-processor in it, I spend most of my days here. One particular “landscape” absurdity is that, though I’m constantly being assigned jobs in which I have to contact other scholars out of state, my phone is not set up to make long-distance calls!
Why you’d give a 70-thousand-dollar-a-year distinguished professor a phone that can only make local calls inside the Amherst city limits is beyond me! I volunteered to have my own put in that I would pay for completely on my own.
No, said the university.
They like it this way.
Oh, well.
Bob, of late I haven’t been the correspondent I’d have liked to be. That goes for a couple of years, now. Looking back over things, I despair of how much has never made it into my letters. You probably noticed “Charles Solomon Coup” on the dedication page of The Motion of Light in Water. I met him back in ’87; he was a six-three, 26-year-old street kid, somewhat retarded, with a couple of stints in jail for not much of anything, who hailed from Western Pennsylvania’s hills, and with whom I had a pleasant summer-long affair that year, which straggled on and off over a year more. Once Iva came home from summer camp and the main part of Mike’s and my relation subsided (by mutual consent) into occasional visits (with friendly sex, if Iva was at her mother’s), a few months later he more or less settled in with another lover, a pleasant, hyper-talkative Puerto Rican artist in his thirties named Paul. Though the last time Mike and I ended up in bed together (Mike is Charles’s street name. In fact it’s “Mike Smith,” yes, after the Heinlein hero in Stranger in a Stranger Land: Mike can’t read, but someone out on the street gave it to him when he first got to the city; so he kept it) was the first time I came down to the city, after I started up here. And of course he’s twenty-eight or nine, now. I’ve had Mike and Paul over for dinner a couple of times, and—when the two of them were kicked out of Paul’s Brooklyn flat—I put them up for a few days.
I met Charles/Mike while he was sitting on the rim of a trash can, in front of the Burger King out on Broadway, about a week after my mother’s 2nd of July stroke. After drinking a couple of cans of beer together, on the bench in the island in the middle of Broadway, over a few nights, when I’d run into him in the street after I’d come from St. Vincent’s, and buying him a couple of Chinese take-out meals, one Sunday I found him in Riverside Park, during the sweltering New York summer heat. (He was standing by the large stone newel, just inside the 79th Street entrance, and looking a little confused about where to amble on to next.) Finally I asked him how he’d take to bedding down with me. He (a nail-biter to rival John Mueller) grinned and said: “That’d be okay. It don’t bother me none. I done that before.” Later, when we got to know each other better, he told me that the reason he’d first gone along with it was because I’d mentioned I had an air conditioner. At any rate, by the next day, this six-foot-three, size-thirteen-sneakered, easygoing hillbilly who really likes to get his tits sucked (“It’s funny, but nobody ever does that enough. Men or women. I like gettin’ my tits sucked almost more’n my dick. You suck on them for me, and I’ll do anything for you, man—anything!”) had basically moved in.
At fifteen, Mike was tested at school (in which, after staying back for two years, he still couldn’t read) and diagnosed as a “slow learner” and “borderline retarded.” It precipitated a kind of a family crisis: an older sister threw a tantrum and declared she “… didn’t want no retard for a brother!” Mike went out into the woods and, rather ineffectually, tried to commit suicide. But it didn’t work—or he couldn’t do it. He slunk back home. His parents (who had five other kids) were just bewildered and not too sure what to do. But Mike’s growing estrangement from the family started about then—though once a week, he still calls his mother.
I don’t know if either one of us really found the other’s company too stimulating. When he talks, Mike’s conversation is pretty limited to the guns he would like to have owned but couldn’t afford, the crimes he would like to have committed but never had the guts to do. Once I took him to an SF party given by some fans (Computer engineer and executive secretary wife) over on West End Avenue. Mike had a perfectly fine time. Shyness is not his problem. But when it was time to go home and I went to collect him, he’d got some bespectacled law student in the kitchen corner by the icebox and, with a beer in one hand, was affably and unwittingly terrorizing the young man with his easy and endless recitation of these only just-never-quite-accomplished deeds of violence. (Mike is very large, with a kind of scraggly beard—and, because his hair is thinning, almost never takes his baseball cap off.) As I took Mike’s arm and, with a tug, told him, “Hey there, big guy! It’s time for us to go home and let these people go to sleep!” the young man blinked at me above the brown knot of his tie between the forest green tabs of his collar and said, “You have a … very interesting friend, Mr. Delany.”
But I certainly found the friendship comforting, especially while I was going through the first months with my mother. And, even after he’d officially “moved out” on the last weekend of August, from the way he’d occasionally drop by and crawl into bed with me, probably he did too—since I’m always willing to listen to him. And not a lot of people are.
Over a very rough period, he was one of the major people who got me through that very hard time. He really deserves his dedication.
You probably got a couple of stories from me about Danny McLaughlin. (Another dedicatee of the book.) But there are many, many more—Danny is currently in jail up in Ontario.
And John Mueller, who got out of jail last February, after finally getting fired for the last time from his machine shop job in New Rochelle, went on a drunken toot about three months ago that ended him up in Florida—where he was shortly picked up. Because he’d broken parole, he’s back in jail, this time in Sing-Sing. Got a letter from him only three days ago.
Nor do you know anything about Maison Bailey, a tree-service worker, with a surgically corrected harelip, who lives in Brewster, New York, and whom I’ve been seeing on and off since last April. Maison is (incidentally) the single person I’ve been most in love with in my life. Bar none. Ever. Alas, the relation is down to twice a week phone calls, now that I’m up here.
My good friend John (Del Gaizo, whom I jokingly call “Big Del Gaizo Fellow”) has been going with SF writer (my fellow Little Magazine editor and former student from the Clarion SF Writers’ Workshop) Susan Palwick, for six months now. I hope it lasts. Because the two of them are about my all-time favorite people. John, the most patient of heterosexual men, has had to hold my hand and listen for what must be days’ worth of hours now, to the intricacies of the Maison affair: John is the only one of my New York friends actually to meet Maison!
At some point, I really will have to tell you about him. But because it’s the relation that’s meant most to me since I was a kid, it’ll have to wait for a letter all its own.
Through all the last couple of years, Barbara Wise has been a wonderfully fine friend. I spent a couple of weeks with her and Howard up on the Cape last summer. (Howard is failing fast. I don’t expect him to last out the year.) But this past spring, Barbara, Big Del Gaizo Fellow, and I all acted in a production of Ionesco’s Jack, or the Submission, directed by Cynthia Belgrave, out at her basement CBA Theater on Bergen Street in Brooklyn. I played Father Jack. Barbara was Mother Jack. And John was Father Robert. (The leads—Jack and Roberta—were taken by a totally impossible and wonderfully handsome black Jamaican actor, Donald Lee Taylor, and a wonderfully talented actress, Bette Carlson.) There’s a videotape of the entire production on store at the Mugar Memorial Library at Boston. And one or two of the SF crowd (Debbie Notkin and Ellen Kushner) actually got out to see it.
Barbara’s come up to Amherst a couple of times to visit. Her stepson, Jeremy, lives in town. Barbara and I had an absurd adventure here one night, back in early December, when she
