Letters from Amherst. Samuel R. Delany
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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 and I had gone dancing at a local Amherst nightspot, the Pink Cadillac. It ended up with Barbara running a red light in town, getting arrested, and spending a night in jail in Belchertown—while I and another friend, Mackie, ran all over Amherst, trying to keep all this from Jeremy and the rest of the family, who consider Barbara just a bit wild anyway.
Chip Delany and Barbara Wise as Father Jack and Mother Jack in Eugène Ionesco’s Jack, or The Submission, upstairs in the changing area of Cynthia Belgrave’s CBA Theater, April 1988.
I spent the six weeks from Christmas till the start of classes (Feb. 1st) down in New York with Iva. We had great fun.
She’s happily ensconced at the Bronx High School of Science and doing well. All Christmas Eve I found myself wondering about and thinking of you. It seems on so many other Christmas Eves I’ve somehow been able to find the time to sit down and write you. And three weeks later, on Iva’s birthday, I found myself getting all ready to write you yet again, as I’ve done so many years now. But this year, for the first time, Iva decided she didn’t want to have a party. So, instead of the burst of cleaning in the morning, with the rest of the day free while the kids entertained each other, she and I spent the whole day together. And another letter didn’t get written—though she and I had a wonderful time.
Toward the end of January, down from Canada and on her way to Montego Bay, Judith Merril stopped off to stay with Iva and me for three very nice days. It was quite wonderful to have a house guest. For one thing, if just for those three days, it got me into regular cooking—we had beef stew the night of Judy’s arrival, and I made real breakfasts in the morning. Indeed, on the evening of the second night, Judy said, “Chip, what is the fanciest thing you can do with breakfast eggs?”
Working at the dining room table on the manuscript for the English edition of Motion of Light in Water, I looked up and frowned. “I don’t know. You can sheer them, I suppose. Then there’s eggs Florentine, poached over fresh spinach—that’s nice. And of course you can always fall back on Benedict. Why do you ask?”
“Because tomorrow’s my birthday,” Judy said. “And I’m only going to be here for breakfast. And I’d like some birthday eggs.”
“You shouldn’t have told him that!” Ending a telephone conversation in the corner, Iva laughed. She stood up from the maroon chair. “Now he’ll be off to Zabar’s for all sorts of stuff—and knowing how he cooks, he would have started this morning if you let him, so that there’d be things fresh baked for tomorrow!”
“I know how he cooks, too,” Judy said. “That’s why I waited till ten o’clock at night to tell him. So he couldn’t take too much trouble. Really, eggs will do.”
But of course I dashed out (without letting Judy know) and managed to sneak some champagne back into the house. And since