Letters from Amherst. Samuel R. Delany
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May 22, 1990
• • •
21 Cowles Lane
Amherst MA 01002
May 22, 1990
Dear Bob,
Received yours of March 1 / May 17th, and responded pretty much by rereading everything you’ve sent—back to October 25th, 1989. Though it’s entirely my fault, there are a few holes in the story I’d like to catch up on. First off: How is Cynthia?
You told me about the beginnings of her knee problem—then, your own hip problem (understandably!) superseded it in your account. Nevertheless, while I have a sense of how you’re doing (and it doesn’t sound fun!), I’m still concerned whether both or just one of you is currently severely limited in getting around!
We’re a handful of days beyond the end of classes. I spent the afternoon writing letters (one form letter, actually, but with a personalized first paragraph) to all the graduate students who’d received Teaching Assistantships, telling them which faculty member each would be working with (if any), and what courses each would be teaching.
I did the personalizing, however, so I might as well have been writing out 12 letters.
I also told our reigning disaster case, a 30-ish young man from Hungary (Rajmund), that the department had decided not to support him this year. Because he’s from an eastern bloc country, essentially this means he’ll have to drop out of graduate school here. He’s been known to have quite a temper—but he likes me, so I’m afraid that, rather than get angry, he just kind of fell apart. The sad thing is, it’s not his marks that are the problem—though they are not spectacular. He simply has an appalling attitude toward things intellectual and work in general, which the department has no way to deal with. Fundamentally, he can’t conceive that there might be anything worth knowing that he doesn’t already know. Thus, when a term or phrase (e.g., “lexia,” “contradictory relationship,” “irony against both sides”) comes up in the professor’s lecture that he’s not always/already familiar with, instead of going to the professor and asking for some further explanation, he simply dismisses it as academic nonsense not worth bothering about. Then, when the students in his discussion group ask him for explanations of the same terms, he raises his eyes to heaven and declares, “Don’t ask me. You’ll have to ask Professor Moebius. I have no idea what it means.”
A chairman’s job is not (always) a happy one. But, as my friend John Del Gaizo (who is subletting my apartment back in the city) keeps reminding me, what they pay you for is the unpleasant parts of your job: failing kids and telling good-hearted disasters that they have to go home.
At this point, though, I must tell you about a pleasant young fellow of 36 whom I’ve known for most of a year and who has been living with me, here and in the city, for the past two months. His name is Dennis Rickett. For six years he’s been homeless and living on the New York streets. His stomping grounds for the past couple of years have been 72nd Street, where he had a blanket full of books he sold from during the day.
One winter’s day, when I was down from Amherst for a few days, I went past, when he was squatting at the corner of his book display—a very dirty guy in an even dirtier jump suit, fiddling with a fairly large radio.
A maroon paperback of Norman Podhoretz’s Making It lay on the ground, and I picked it up. It was priced at two dollars. I decided I wanted to read it, and went digging under my winter coat at my pocket.
But I’d left my wallet at home.
I laughed and told the guy what had happened. Under his woolen cap, pulled low over a few year’s growth of gray-shot hair, he smiled over a mouth full of almost no teeth at all within his scraggly, once-red beard and waved a big gray-black hand at me with bitten nails: “Take it. You can bring me the money the next time you come by …
So I did.
(“Hey, you really brought it back,” he said, with a faintly bemused smile on the slightly warmer Wednesday morning, two days later. “I didn’t think you would.”)
Which is how I first began talking with Dennis. He was a quiet, good natured, very simple guy. His old man had been an alcoholic truck driver, occasionally in jail, but very close with Dennis. They’d worked together, all through Dennis’s adolescence and early twenties. Dennis loved him a lot. One night Dennis was out at a bar. His father, drunk and on foot, went looking for him—was hit by a truck and killed. Dennis’s family—none too bright Irish/German working class, from Brooklyn—kept ribbing Dennis about his father’s death being Dennis’s fault. Dennis started to drink heavily, while carrying on an affair with (in his words) “a fat, nymphomaniac girlfriend,” which ended, after two years, with girlfriend gone, Dennis and his family permanently estranged, and Dennis (then age thirty) living on the streets.
With his shopping cart full of books and belongings, he’d been at his present location for about a year—going across Central Park at night to sleep in the doorway of a Madison Avenue art dealer’s, then coming back in the morning (stopping in the park’s public restroom—when it was open—for minimal washing, to masturbate, and take a dump) to the West Side to sell his books, look out for cars, do little side-walk sweeping up jobs for the store owners around.
For the first three months I knew him, it was the most passing of acquaintances. Then, I began going down to look for him in his doorway and to hang out with him for the odd hour. Sometimes, standing around on the street, we’d have a coffee. Sometimes we’d have a beer. In the course of that time, Dennis got rid of the shopping cart, and began to travel with a backpack—which he wore almost constantly and which must have weighed a good fifty, if not sixty-five, pounds. Oddly, it was Dennis who first brought up the possibility of sex—with a passing quip between beers, back in mid January:
“I got it pretty good out here,” he told me one day. “All I really need is a lover.” Which he presented as kind of a joke, since he was dirty enough—no, the word I want is filthy—enough to preclude most people’s sexual interest in him.
A couple of days later, when we were again talking on a rather blustery winter’s day, he shoved his hands deep into his jumpsuit pockets, grinned at me, then looked wistfully off down the street. “You know, I ain’t been to bed with a women in six years. You hear women talk about guys who just want to keep them for their bodies, an’ they don’t like it. Well, I wouldn’t mind it if some guy wanted to keep me just for my body. Me, I think it’d be kinda pretty cool.”
Both comments stay with me because I didn’t respond to either one—at least right away. But a day later, when I went down, I asked Dennis if he was serious what he’d said yesterday. He said,
“Maybe, I don’t know,” which is what Dennis says to a lot of things—today, I know that that’s generally his code for “yes”; but at the time I didn’t.
We talked about our mutual sexual preferences—what we did and didn’t like to do in bed with other men. We both agreed they sounded pretty complementary. I said that if he was serious, maybe we should try spending a little time together. Yes, I found him attractive, underneath (and, hell, just a bit because of) the dirt. Dennis’s response was, “Yeah, maybe we should. We seem to get along pretty good.”
I was back and forth from Amherst a couple more times before I put a proposition to him:
“Look,” I told him one morning. “I’m going to get a motel room for a couple of days. We can go there, spend some time, and see how things work out.”
“You wanna do that?” he asked.
“Yes,” I said. “I do.”
“Okay.”
And the next time I came down, as soon as I got off the bus, I went to the Skyline Motel on 10th Avenue and 49th Street, rented a room for the weekend, and came back to seventy second street that afternoon with the pair of rectangular plastic “keys” (perforations at one end, like single ended dominos), and showed them to him. “I’ve got a room. You want to keep yours?