The Nail and the Oracle (4 page)

Okay, so now you know that, and now you know why this resident nut-case Sturgeon is saying to me, “Let’s go and camp out.”

Which—don’t ask me why, it
seemed
like a good idea at the time—is why I found myself the next night in a tent, outdoors, in the middle of a very humid spring night, with semi-nekkid Sturgeon, eating gypsy stew out of a tin can that fuckin’ exPLOded, festooning the inside of the tent wherein I slept till the mosquitoes and no-see’ms gorged on my flesh and I crawled moaning back to the house at three a.m.…

Here’s the one I was going to tell you before I got feetnoted: Ted had a surfeit of hubris. Every
good
writer has it, especially those who scuff toe in the dirt and do an aw-shucks-ma it weren’t nothin’. (John Clute, the critic, just calls it “shucksma.”) False humility is bullshit or, as Gustave Flaubert put is much more elegantly, “Modesty is a kind of groveling.”

But Ted had that scam down pat. He could act as shy as the unicorn in the garden, but inside he was festooned with bunting and firecrackers for his talent. One would have to be in a coma to be as good as he was, as often as he was, not to revel inwardly at the power. He was selfish and self-involved, even as you and I. He was also generous, great-hearted, and loyal.

Yet in all the analyses I’ve read in the previous ten volumes, no one else seems to have perceived that Ted—who was touted, by me as well as others, as knowing all there was to know about love—was a man in flames. He had loathings and animosities and an elitism that ran deep. He knew genuine anguish. But he also knew more cleverly than anyone else I’ve ever met, that it was an instant turnoff; if he wanted to get what he wanted, he had to sprinkle dream dust; and so he filtered his frustration and enmity like Sterno through a loaf of pumpernickel, distilling it into a charm that could Svengali a Mennonite into a McCormick Thresher.

From the starting blocks, Ted had been lumbered with the words “science fiction,” and unlike Bierce or Poe or Dunsany, he never got out of the ghetto. Dean Koontz and Steve King know what I’m talking about; and so does Kurt, who created Kilgore Trout, who was Sturgeon. He wanted passionately to get out of the penny-a-word gulag, and he
knew
he was better than most of those who’d miraculously accomplished the trick.

Ted had gotten into writing because he understood all the way to the gristle the truth of that Japanese aphorism:
The nail that stands too high will be hammered down
. And while I’m citing clever sources, Ted also got into the writing in resonance to Heinrich Von Kleist’s “I write only because I cannot stop.”

But he also knew it was a gig. It was a job. Masonry and pig-iron ingots and pulling the plough. Not a lifetime job for guys like Ted and me, weird ducks who’d rather play than labor. A kind of frenetic, always-working laziness. Tardy, imprecise, careless of the feelings of others, obsessed and selfish. He was, I am, it’s a fair cop. So he and I have produced enough work to shame a plethora of others, enough to fill more than a dozen big fat
Complete Sturgeons
or
Essential Ellison
s. What no one ever realizes is that it’s all the product of guilt and laziness, guilt
because
of the laziness.

We know what we
can
be, but we cannot get out of our own way. Ted was the king of that disclosure. He could not cease being Sturgeon for a moment, and he was chained to the genre that was too small for him.

(Ted once told me, and everyone I have dealt with since has told
me I’m full of shit and lying, that he
hated
the title, “A Saucer of Loneliness” that Horace Gold attached to the story before he’d even finished writing it—because UFOs were “hot” and “sexy” at that time—and that he’d originally wanted to call it just “Loneliness” and sell it to a mainstream, non-sf market. Apparently he wrote it as a straight character study, couldn’t move it—same with “Hurricane Trio” he said—and did it as Gold had suggested.)

(Had a helluva fight with the brilliant Alan Brennert over titling “Saucer” when Alan wrote his teleplay for
The Twilight Zone
on CBS in 1985 when we worked the series together.)

No matter how congenial, how outgoing, how familial, Ted knew way down in the gristle what Hunter Thompson identified as “… the dead end loneliness of a man who makes his own rules.” And it made for anguish because he was imprisoned in a literary gulag where there was—and continues to be—such an acceptance of mediocrity that it is as odious as a cultural cringe. And Ted wanted more. Always
more
.

More life, more craft, more acceptance, more love, more of a shot at Posterity. Not to be categorized, seldom to be challenged, just famous enough that even when he wasn’t at top-point efficiency everyone was so in awe of him that they were incapable of slapping him around and making him work better. That kind of adulation is death to a writer as incredibly
Only
as was Theodore Sturgeon. He hungered for better, and he deserved better, but he could not get out of his own way, and so … for years and years …

He burned, and he coveted, and he continued decanting those fiery ingots, all the while leading a life as disparate and looney as Munchausen’s. He knew love, no argument, but it was the saving transmogrification from fevers and railings against the nature of his received world. And this anecdote I want to relate—as funny as it tells now—was idiomatic of Ted’s plight.

Here’s what happened.

What we were doing in a Greyhound bus station, damned if I can remember. But there we were, about five of us—I think Bill Dignin was one of the group, and I seem to recall Gordy Dickson, as well. But Ted and I and the rest of these guys were going somewhere
chimerical, the sort of venue my Susan likes to refer to as Little Wiggly-On-Mire. And there we sat at a table waiting for our bus, chowing down on grilled cheese and tomato sandwiches, or whatever, and one of the guys nudged Ted and did a “Psst,” and indicated a guy at the counter, who was (so help me) reading the Pyramid paperback reissue of Ted’s terrific novel,
The Dreaming Jewels
(under the re-title
The Synthetic Man
). And it just tickled Ted, and he came all a-twinkle, and whispered to us, “Watch this, you’ll love it.”

And Ted got up, sidled over to the dude, slid onto the stool next to him and, loud enough for us to hear, cozened the guy with the remark, “Watchu readin’?” and the dude absently flashed the cover, said it was something like a fantasy novel, and Ted said archly, “How can you waste your time reading such crap?”

And we waited for the guy to defend his taste in reading matter to this impertinent buttinski. We held our breaths waiting for the guy to correct this stranger with lofty praise for what a great writer this Theodore Sturgeon was.

The guy looked down at the book for a scant …

Shrugged, and said, “Y’know, you’re right,” and he flipped it casually across the intervening abyss into the cavernous maw of a huge mound-shaped gray trash container. Then he paid his coffee tab, slid off the stool, and moto-vated out of the Greyhound station.

We knew better than to laugh.

Ted came back; and he had the look of ninth inning strike three. None of us mentioned it again.

It seemed funny at the time. Not so funny when I write about it.

Here’s a funny one. I don’t have this authenticated, that is to say, I (thankfully) have no photos, but I sort of always knew that Ted had an inclination toward, well, not wearing clothes.
Your
doctor would call it nudity. Now, as I say, I don’t know if Ted was a card-carrying
nudist
at any time in his life, but around here he started walking around
sans raiment
. I could not have that. Not just because we had studio people and other writers and girl friends and the one or two people who made up my “staff”
also in situ
, but mostly because
bare, Ted was not any more divine an apparition than are each of you reading this. He had blue shanks, scrawny old guy legs, muscular but ropey; he wasn’t inordinately hairy, but what there was … well … it was
disturbing;
a little pot belly that pooched out,
also
mildly distressing; I will not speak of his naughty bits. But there they were, wagglin’ in the breeze. I am, I know, a middle-class disappointment to Ted’s ghost, that I am thus so hidebound, but I simply could not have it. Particularly, especially, notably after The Incidents:

Primus: he decided to make
Paella
for me and a select group of dinner party favorites. So we got him this big
olla
, and amassed for him the noxious ingestibles (did I mention, I not only
hate
this olio, would rather have someone hot-glue my tongue to a passing rhino than to partake of
Paella
), and off into the kitchen went the naked Sturgeon. A day he took. A whole day. No one went near the kitchen. I sent
out
for my coffee. And here’s what is the Incident aspect of it: as he mish’d that mosh, he used his hands, alternately digging into the heating morass and then occasionally
scratching his ass
. I am not, I swear on the graves of my Mom and Dad, not making this up. I have no idea if others in the house saw it, but I did, and I got to tell you, had I not loathed
Paella
out of the starting-gate, that tableau from The Great Black Plague would have put me off it at least till the return of the Devonian.

(Another footnote within an anecdote inside a reminiscence: Ted was impeccable. Clean. This was a clean old man I’m talkin’ here. Not obsessive about it, not some pathological nut washing his hands every seven minutes, but
clean
. So don’t get the idea that the horror! the horror! of The
Paella
Incident stemmed from Sturgeon uncleanliness, it was just straightforward here-is-a-dude-slopping-his-claws-in-our-dinner-and-then-maybe-skinning-a-squirrel-who’s-to-know.)

Secundus: he liked being helpful; little chores; nice short house-guest strokes that won one’s loyalty and affection. Did I mention, Ted used charm the way Joan of Arc used Divine Inspiration. He could sell sandboxes to Arabs. Charm d’boids outta the trees. Devilish weaponry. So: little aids and assists. Such as answering the doorbell every now and then. Which was all good, all fine, except most of the time he forgot he was
bareass nekkid!
Capped as Incident on
the afternoon, as god—even though I’m an atheist—is my witness, he answered the door and the Avon cosmetics lady in her Ann Taylor suit and stylish pumps gave a strangled scream, dropped her attaché sample case, her ordering pad, her gloves (I think), and flailed away down the street like a howler monkey.

Tertius: after the cops left, I laid down the law. No more Incidents. Put the fuck some
clothes
on, Ted! I don’t care if it’s SCUBA gear, mukluks and a fur parka, a suit of body armor, but you
will
henceforth go forth
avec
apparel!

So he started wearing a tiny fire-engine red Speedo.

I cannot begin to convey how disturbing
that
was, mostly because the li’l pot belly overhung that
sexe-cache
the way the demon Chernabog overhung the valley in Disney’s
Fantasia
.

Avon has never sent a rep to my house since that day, decades ago. Also, Pizza Hut will not deliver. Go figure.