NORMAN SPINRAD -- AUTOBIOGRAPHY

by Norman Spinrad

Although it presents certain technical difficulties, maybe you shouldn't write an autobiography until you are dead. 

The story of a life, even if your own, published for the benefit of readers, becomes, well, a story. And true or not, a good story requires, if not necessarily a traditional beginning, middle and end,  then at least certainly some sort of structure leading to a sense of satisfying resolution at the end of the reading experience.

But since I'm 53 years old as I write this, not exactly on the brink of retirement, I can hardly be expected to bring this story to a successful thematic closure in any of the usual manners.

Then too, while "write what you know about" may be the hoariest of literary maxims and autobiography seemingly the ideal exemplar thereof, upon a moment's uncomfortable reflection, maybe not.

Sure, you know the sequence of events better than you know anything else, but it's no easy task to negotiate the treacherous literary waters between the Scylla of the extended brag and the Charybdis of a deadly dull recitation of the complete bibliography and nothing more.

So what I've opted for here is a rather experimental form, itself perhaps a bit of autobiographical characterization, since fairly early on in my career I came to the realization that form should be chosen by the requirements of content. And this particular content certainly seems to call for something rather schizoid -- a montage of split points of view, persons, that is, in more than the usual technical sense. 

So this autobiography is divided into three clearly-labeled tracks.

"Continuity" is, as Sergeant Friday would have it, just the facts, Ma'am, written in third person as if "Norman Spinrad" were someone other than the author thereof.

"Flashbacks" are little novelistic bits and pieces designed to illumine some of the events of "Continuity" with some more intimate visions of what the character in question was thinking and feeling at the time.

"Frame" is what you are reading now -- the author and the subject, the novelist and the literary critic, speaking to you and maybe myself as directly as I can manage under the circumstances, and trying to extract some overall meaning from it all.

CONTINUITY

Norman Spinrad was born in New York City, on September 15, 1940,  the son of Morris and Ray Spinrad. Except for a brief period in  Kingston, New York, he spent his entire childhood and adolescence residing with his parents and his sister Helene in various locations in the Bronx, where he attended Public School 87, Junior High Schools 113 and 22, and the Bronx High School of Science.

In 1957, he entered the College of the City of New York, from which he graduated in 1961 with a Bachelor of Science degree as a pre-law major.

FLASHBACK

I was a subway commuter as a college student, living in the family apartment in the Bronx, hanging out in Greenwich Village on the weekends. My father, eldest son of a family of five, had never finished  high school, having left to earn family bread, and only after serving as a medical corpsman in the Navy during World War II, did he realize that medicine would have been his calling, and by then it was much too late. Like many such children of the Great Depression, he wanted  nothing more or less for his son than a secure professional career, ideally the one he wished he had been able to have.

So I was always under pressure, not just to perform academically, but to follow a path towards the bankable sciences. I  passed the stiff entrance test for the Bronx High School of Science,  graduated in 1957 at the age of 16, and, at the behest of my father, seeing as how medicine obviously actively turned me off, entered City College as an engineering major.

This lasted about a term and a half, terminated by my confrontation with the horrors of pre-electronic-calculator calculus.  Okay, said my dad, what about chemistry? You don't need so much math for that. So I became a chemistry major long enough to convince me that I had no genius for the subject and less interest in it as a life's work.

Okay, said my dad, with less enthusiasm, what about, uh,  psychology? He seemed to view the vector from medicine to hard engineering through stinky liquids into the murk of the social  sciences as a kind of intellectual slippery slope. 

What did I want to do with my life at this point?

Hey, come on, I was about 19 years old!

Although it's common enough for one's parents and guidance counselors to demand that one get serious and make a commitment, it's both cruel and naive to suppose that a 19 year old kid is  intellectually or emotionally equipped to decide what he's going to do with the rest of his life.

What did I want at this point?

I didn't really want to be in college at all. I didn't want to  be living en famille in the Bronx until I graduated. What I wanted  was la vie boheme in the Village.

FRAME

What is included here and what is left out: Unless you've lived an extraordinarily dull and uneventful life under a bell jar with your typewriter, and I haven't, you will have broken hearts, had your own broken, and engaged in any number of acts sexual and otherwise, that were politically incorrect at the time or in hindsight, illegal, or even the sort of thing your older and wiser self may now find immoral.

Then too, my life has intersected, in various degrees of  intimacy, the lives of many people of more than passing literary  interests -- Philip K. Dick, Timothy Leary, Theodore Sturgeon, Harlan  Ellison, J.G. Ballard, William Burroughs, Frank Herbert, Michael Moorcock, to name a random sample of a long, long list.

Some of these luminaries were or are real friends, others acquaintances of one degree or another, I've written about many of  them extensively in various places already, and so you must take my  word for it that it's length limitations rather than ego that limits mention of them in this compass to the effect they may have had on my  life or career.

I have been commissioned to write a short literary autobiography,  and as I interpret that commission, this is supposed to be the story of Norman Spinrad the writer, not a juicy expose of my private life, nor of the private lives of people who may have been involved with it.

However...

However, are times when such matters do impinge on what gets written, and I am trying to tell the true story to the best of my  ability, so when they do, I guess I'm going to have to try to bite the  bullet....

FLASHBACK

The Village, circa 1959, pre-Beatles, the Beat Era. Coffee houses. Craft shops. Folk music. I remember seeing a fat-faced kid  from Minnesota performing for free at a Monday amateur night at Gerdes' Folk City. Name of Bob Dylan. A hot act was the Holy Modal  Rounders, a bluegrass group which later metamorphosed into the Fugs.  One of its members was Peter Stampfel, who is now a science fiction editor at Daw Books. Another was Ed Sanders, who was to cover the  Manson Family trial in Los Angeles for the Free Press while I was writing for the same paper.

But in 1959, I never knew Sanders, and Stampfel, who I did party with upon occasion, would not remember the me of that era. They were culture heroes, and I was just another day-tripping college kid.

Another culture hero of sorts in this space-time was Bruce Britton, proprietor of the Britton Leather Shop. Bruce was a famous sandalmaker. Bruce Britton was a charismatic party animal, and the  Britton Leather Shop was a major party scene. When work was done, (and sometimes when it wasn't), it became an open house, and also a place where you found out where the other parties were.

The Britton Leather Shop became my central week-end hangout, and  Bruce became my friend, an older role-model of sorts, and later one of  the earliest patrons of my writing career.

But I didn't aspire to a writing career at that point. Truth be told, and my father not, I didn't aspire to a career at all. From his point of view, what I aspired to was quite appalling, namely to spend  all my time the way I spent my weekends -- as, well, a beatnik in Greenwich Village.

FRAME

Beatniks, even teenage wannabee beatniks living with their parents in the Bronx, did drugs. Mostly pot, which was readily available but I was introduced to consciousness-altering chemicals  with rather stronger stuff, namely peyote, and which I had experienced  before I so much as puffed on a joint.

Ah yes, we've all committed our youthful indiscretions, why even President Clinton has copped to tasting the Devil's Weed, though since he didn't inhale, he didn't enjoy it. I, however, did inhale, and therefore did get off. Often. And to my creative advantage. Nor do I regret it.

If there's one gaping void in the story of American literary history in the second half of the 20th century as currently  promulgated, it's the influence of grass and psychedelic drugs, not only on the lives of writers, but on the content of what's been written, and on the form and style too. It's hard to be critically or biographically courageous when so much creative work was done under  the influences of jailable offenses.

In the Beat Era, however, the literary culture heroes of  bohemia -- William Burroughs, Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, & Co. -- were  not only entirely up front about it, but openly advocated the chemical  enhancement of consciousness as a literary, spiritual, and cultural virtue. And wrote much stylistically mighty work under the influence to prove it.

Even a mainstream literary lion like Norman Mailer wrote a famous essay called "The White Negro" extolling the Hip world of sex, dope, and transcendence over the "Square" workaday world of the Lonely Crowd, though elsewhere he was to correctly opine that writing final draft stoned was maybe not such a terrific idea.

I raise this issue now because I would be lying shamelessly if I  denied that I was a devotee of this tradition or renounced herein my belief that on the whole a bit of grass and a more significant trip  now and again is beneficial to the creative juices. Nor could the story of the sort of writer I became make much sense in the absence of  its consideration.

For most writers of science fiction, at least prior to the New Wave of the 1960s, emerged as writers from a formative adolescence immersed in the hermetic subculture of "science fiction fandom," reading science fiction obsessive, attending science fiction conventions, writing letters and articles in science fiction fanzines. SF fans even have an acronym for it, FIAWOL -- Fandom Is A Way Of Life. 

Not my teenage planet, Monkey Boy. I didn't even know that this subculture existed until after I had published about a dozen stories and a novel. Yes, I read a lot of sf  -- Sturgeon, Bester, Dick, Bradbury, being early obsessions -- but I was just as deeply into Mailer, Kerouac, William Burroughs, and their precursor, Henry Miller.

And theirs was the subculture I wanted to grow up to live in before I even had any serious thoughts about a writing career -- the Hip world of free love, pot, psychedelics, literary and personal  transcendence -- all that which, with the addition and via the medium of rock and roll, was to call into being the Counterculture half a decade later.

FLASHBACK

This was something I could hardly admit to my parents, the guidance counselor, or even quite to myself at the time. And at least being a psych major was something I found far more congenial than my previous provisional career choices.

However two unpleasant academic satoris were to convince me that this was not to be my planet either.

I was fortunate enough to be assigned to a section in Motivational Psychology taught by Dr. Kenneth Clark, who, among other things, had written part of the brief in Brown versus Board of  Education. There were no tests. You discussed texts that had been assigned for consideration in class and you wrote three papers, and Clark marked you on that.

At the beginning of the term you were handed a list of the books and papers that would be discussed. In addition to the expected scientific treatises, there was a five-foot shelf of novels, plays, and assorted literary works. How could anyone be expected to read  through all that in a term? They couldn't. Clark believed that any college upper classman who hadn't already read most of this stuff didn't belong in a class on this level in the first place.

I loved this class. It was worth the price of admission. Clark was brilliant and witty and brought out the best in his students. The class was educational, but it was also a kind of high intellectual  entertainment.

All during the term Clark complained of the conventionality of the papers students were turning in. Can't you give me something original?

I admired Clark greatly and for my final paper I determined to write something that would pay him back intellectually and knock him out of his socks in the bargain.

I had read my way through all Kerouac, Ginsberg, and through that on into Herman Hesse, Alan Watts and D.T. Suzuki, a common  intellectual vector in my Village extracurricular circles, and so I  knew quite a bit about Buddhism.

So I wrote a paper comparing Buddhism and Freudian theory as systems of psychology.

This is brilliant, fascinating, Dr. Clark told me after he had read it. I glowed.

"But I can only give you an A-."

"Huh? Why?"

He shrugged. Because I don't know enough about Buddhism to judge whether you really know what you're talking about, he admitted. 

And had not been willing make the intellectual effort to acquire the necessary background.

Another required course that I had to do a term paper for was Abnormal Psychology. I suggested to the professor that I do it on the mental states induced by consumption of peyote. He seemed quite  interested.

"But as far as I know, there's not much source material in the literature," he added dubiously.

"Don't need it," I assured him. "Not only do I have plenty of  primary experimental subjects to interview, I have first-hand experience myself."

Did he gape at me as if I was some kind of crazed dope fiend?

Nope.

That wasn't what made him refuse to consider the subject appropriate for a term paper in his course. If I could have rehashed secondary sources and studded the paper with appropriate footnotes, no problem. But original research in the form of direct reportage of the mental states in question was not academically acceptable.

CONTINUITY

In his senior year at CCNY, he took two courses in short story writing and made his first submissions to magazines. Having secured entry to Fordham University law school, he spent the summer of 1961 traveling in Mexico with friends.

FLASHBACK

By my senior year, all I really wanted was out -- out of college, out of my parents' apartment, out from under their pressures, influences, out of the Square world and into the Hip. 

But I still had it in my head that I had to get a degree to please my parents. By this time, I had changed my major so many times that the only way to graduate was to lump together what I had already taken with a few more random courses, call it a "Pre-Law Major," and bullshit it past the guidance counselors by being admitted to law school.

One course I took, in short story writing, was formative. It was taught by a writer named Irwin Stark who had sold fiction to magazines and had not lost the habit of submitting. Stark, like Clark, bitched  about the conventionality of what the students were writing, and I took another shot at taking a teacher at his word.

I wrote a story called Not With A Bang, in which a couple finds true love screwing in a bathtub full of chocolate syrup during a nuclear apocalypse, good enough to eventually sell to a low-grade  men's magazine about a decade later.

The look that Stark gave me when he handed back that week's assignment was choice.

"I can't have you read a thing like that in class," he told me in his office later.

Uh-oh.

"Why don't you submit it to Playboy?"

"Playboy...?"

"Yeah, it's a long shot, but they're the top market, and if you start at the top and work down, can take you the first offer you  get for a story and know it's the best you can do."

And he told me how to submit stories to magazines, stick them in an envelope with a self- addressed stamped return envelope and a cover letter, and drop 'em in a mailbox. If you get a check, cash it before it bounces. If you get a rejection, submit it to the next best  market.

I submitted Not With A Bang to Playboy. They didn't buy it, so I sent it elsewhere. And elsewhere. And wrote some more stories. And started submitting them.

And that's how I became a writer. Not yet a published writer, that was about three years in the future, but by the time I graduated  from CCNY, I knew what I wanted to do with my life, and how one went about doing it. You write 'em, you drop 'em in the mail, you wait.

Best advice I ever had. Best advice any would-be writer can ever get. It's ultimately all you need to know. The Big Secret is that there is no Big Secret. It drives me crazy how many wannabee writers just won't believe it.

CONTINUITY

Upon returning to New York, he decided not to attend law school but pursue a writing career instead. He rented a cheap apartment in  the East Village, secured part-time employment in a friend's leather shop, wrote a first novel which has never been published and about a dozen short stories, finally making his first sale to Analog in 1962.  The story, THE LAST OF THE ROMANY, was published in 1963.

FLASHBACK

Actually the thought of entering law school in the fall of 1961 was filling me with nauseous dread before I even graduated. By this time I knew I wanted to be a writer, but what I lacked was any notion of how to support myself while doing it, plus the courage to make such a beatnik move sure to outrage my parents. The road trip to Mexico in  a rotten old car (never buy a car from a relative!) with two college friends, Marty Mach and Bob Denberg, was part temporary escape from this dilemma, part personal vision quest, part hopeful emulation of  Huck Finn and Kerouac.

When we finally managed to coax the wretched clunker back to New York after an exhaustive education in automotive Spanish, the Greenwich Village outdoor Arts and Craft Show was in full swing. One  weekend afternoon, I took over the Britton Leather Shop's table as relief for an hour and moved $200 worth of goods, about what they had done all week.

Bingo! I had a part-time job. Bruce Britton, and later, his partner and successor at the leather shop, Ken Martin, supported my writing ambition, and more or less let me make my own hours. And my own wage, since what they were paying me was a commission on sales.

I found a foul little apartment in the East Village that I could rent for $36 a month. meaning, what with food, and utilities, I could survive on about $120 a month, and in a good week I could make $40 at  the leathershop working 20 hours.

I could survive, more or less, as a would-be writer.

FRAME

My naivete was total. I knew no other writers, I hadn't published a thing, and my brilliant notion was that I would support  myself writing short stories while working on my first novel. I wrote an unpublishable novel, which, years later, I was to some extent to cannibalize in the writing of BUG JACK BARRON. I wrote stories and  sent them off to magazines, mostly science fiction magazines.

When I finished the novel, I knew nothing better to do with it than pay my $35 to have it "evaluated for the market" by the Scott Meredith Literary Agency, who advertised this service in various  magazines. They rejected it, as they did 99% of such fee submissions, as I was soon to learn in another incarnation, but the "agent" who wrote the rejection letter over Scott Meredith's signature met me in secret, praised my talent, and wised me up to the SMLA fee-reading scam, strongly suggesting that I not waste my money on it again.

Nor had I sold anything. And the final turn of the screw was that Analog had been sitting on "The Last of the Romany" for an unconscionable six months.

What I didn't know was that the reason for the delay was that John W. Campbell, Jr., the legendary editor thereof, had discovered the lion's share of the major science fiction writers of the lastquarter century or so by the tedious and time-consuming process of reading his entire slushpile himself.

Needless to say, when his acceptance letter arrived in the mail  all was forgiven.

CONTINUITY

He sold several more short stories during the next year or so, on the strength of which he secured a professional agent, the Scott Meredith Literary Agency.

FRAME

I had been dead broke before I sold a novelette to Campbell for the princely sum of $450, so broke that I had taken a job as a Welfare Investigator in Bedford-Stuyvesant for a month to keep me going. 

When I made my third magazine sale, I wrote a letter to Scott Meredith, the only agent I knew, and was accepted as a client on a professional basis.

Meanwhile, an ulcer I had developed under the pressure of adolescent angst and no doubt exacerbated by eating all that cheap hot stuff in Mexico landed me in a hospital for an operation. The operation was successful, but the patient should have died. They screwed up bad and infected me with something called toxic hepatitis, supposedly universally fatal. I ran a fever of about 106o for days.  I lost about 25 pounds. I survived. Still running a fever and looking like death warmed over but not by much, I took a cab directly to the Draft Board and got myself re- classified 4-F so it wouldn't be a total loss.

FLASHBACK

A prolonged ultra-high fever, aside from usually being fatal,  makes a 1000 mike acid trip seem like a warm glass of 3.2 beer. I was not only hallucinating, I had ... Powers.

Laboring under the hallucinatory delusion that I was being tortured for secret rocket fuel information by spies, I had the hysterical strength to snap the bandages tying me to my deathbed, yank out the IVs, and hold off a squad of interns while I used another Power on the bedside telephone.

It was the wee hours of the morning. The hospital staff must've thought I was raving into a dead phone, understandable considering what they were hearing on my end.

Somehow I had fixated on the name of what turned out to be a real Air Force general. I got an outside line. I got a long distance operator. I made a collect long distance call to said general at the  Pentagon. He had long since gone home to bed. I did ... a thing. I ordered the Pentagon switchboard to patch me through to his home phone, validating it with a blather of letters and numbers that was my Top Secret command override code. They did it. A bleary general's voice came on the line.

I start babbling about spies, rocket fuels, send a rescue squad  to --

"Huh--? What the--?"

At which point, the interns jumped me from behind and hung up the phone on the sucker.

By the next morning, my fever had broken.

And the hospital had some tall explaining to do when the Pentagon traced the call back.

FRAME

Que pasa? I've contemplated that question ever since, my best take on being the story CARCINOMA ANGELES, a literary breakthrough for me which I wrote about three years later, and which, long after that, seems to have been picked up by a doctor in Texas as a treatment for  cancer.

As on an acid trip, only more so, I think the fever warped me into a metaphorical reality in which the disease ravaging my body was transmogrified into a paranoid image-system overlayed on actual real-world events. By giving that story the ending I wanted, by actually waking up the general, I somehow was able to triumph over the  infection for which the whole thing was metaphor.

Unless you've got a better explanation.

The facts are that I survived a fatal disease, that this experience, whatever it was, later was the impetus for the story that was the real take-off point for the writer that I was to become, and I  don't think I was the same person afterward.

CONTINUITY

SMLA made no sales for him during the six months, and he was economically constrained to seek full-time employment.

He answered an ad in the New York Times offering an entry level position as an editor. When he took the test for the job at the employment agency, he realized that the prospective employer was his own literary agent, Scott Meredith. Armed with this knowledge, he did very well on the test and was tentatively offered the position by the employment agency.

FLASHBACK

As I client, I had never even met Scott Meredith. When I showed  up in the office as a job applicant, he was non-plussed. Many writers who later became clients had worked for him, and many people who had worked for him later became clients, but Scott had never hired one of his own writers through the employment agency cattle-call and didn't want to do it.

"What do you mean, you won't hire me?" I demanded. "The only reason I need this damn job in the first place is that you haven't sold a thing for me in six months!"

Having never confronted this argument either, Scott relented.  Voila, the 24 year old kid whose own stuff wasn't selling had a job anonymously representing a list of something like a hundred  established writers, some of them, like Philip K. Dick, Philip Jose, Frank Herbert, John Brunner, and Jack Vance, among others, literary idols of mine at the time, and people who were later to become my friends.

FRAME

The pro desk at SMLA was an excruciating experience. Scott Meredith was a genius at squeezing work out of his peons by force of  paranoid pressure, and after a full day's work writing letters under his name to authors, sometimes typing them over and over again until he was satisfied, you had to read manuscripts on your own time at home. It was like being back in school. It was nearly impossible to get anything of my own written. And there I was, agenting stories and  novels anonymously for the very writers whose illustrious company I  longed to join myself!

On the other hand, it was a crash-course in the realities of publishing from the inside out, and the bottom up. By the time I was  25 I had more publishing street smarts than venerable greats twice my age, and before I was 30, found myself playing the strange role of career advisor, father-figure even, to my own literary idols, like Theodore Sturgeon and Philip K. Dick.

CONTINUITY

While working at SMLA in various capacities in 1964-66, he continued to write stories, some of which sold, and completed THE  SOLARIANS, his first published novel, which appeared in 1966.

FRAME

I have always been a lousy typist, and in the end, I simply couldn't keep up with the workload on an SMLA pro desk. Scott fired  me. He then rehired me for a part-time job supervising the fee- reading operation, where piece-work editors wrote letters of criticism on submissions from amateurs for a fee.

Somewhat morally ambiguous maybe, but I had time and energy to write my own stuff again. Stories sold, including one to Playboy, "Deathwatch." I wrote a space opera, THE SOLARIANS, which SMLA sold to Paperback Library for $1250.

After I left the Meredith Agency for good, I never held another job, and for better or worse, sometimes much worse, have survived on  my writing ever since.

And though I seriously suspect that years later Scott Meredith was responsible for the non- publication of THE CHILDREN OF HAMELIN, about which later, I doubt whether I would be saying that now, if it wasn't for the education I got in his rough school of hard publishing knocks.

CONTINUITY

In 1966, he decided to move to San Francisco. He gave up his East Village apartment and his by- then part-time work at the Meredith agency, bought a $300 Rambler, loaded his worldly goods in it, and set out for California.

FRAME

Bruce Britton and his wife Marilyn had moved to San Francisco in the train of their psychotherapy guru, a story that was to be an  inspiration for a part of THE CHILDREN OF HAMELIN, a curtain coming down on part of my life, but also friends in a state where I otherwise  knew.

And California, San Francisco in particular, for me, like so many others, was the mythical Golden West towards which Young Men were supposed to go, the land with no winter, North Beach, the Sunset end of the Road, the object of a thousand and one vision quests, the Future itself, somehow, the glorious leap into the Great Unknown. 

Appropriately enough, Frank Herbert and about 300 mg of mescaline sent me on my way.

FLASHBACK

Walking west through the Village night on 4th Street, peaking on mescaline after reading the final installment of the magazine serialization of DUNE, a powerful meditation on space-time,  precognition, and destiny soon to launch a hundred thousand trips, I  had a flash-forward of my own.

I would be a famous science fiction writer, I would publish many stories and novels, and many of the people who were my literary idols, inspirations, and role-models, and former clients, people I had never met, would come to accept me as their equal, as their ally, as their allies, as their friend.

And my life's mission, would be to take this commercial science fiction genre and turn it into something else somehow, write works that transcended its commercial parameters, works that could aspire to  the literary company of Burroughs and Mailer and Kerouac, that would help to open a new Way....

This is what you're here for. This is why you passed through the fever's fire and didn't die in that hospital bed. This is what you  must do. You must go West to meet your future.

The mescaline talking? An overdose of 25-year-old ego? A stoned  out ego-tripping wish- fulfillment fantasy?

Call it what you will.

Everything I saw in that timeless Einsteinian moment would come to pass.

CONTINUITY

On the way to San Francisco, he attended the Milford Science Fiction Writers' Conference in Milford Pennsylvania, to which he had been invited by the organizer, Damon Knight.

FLASHBACK

Damon Knight had invited me on the basis of "The Equalizer," a story I published in Analog. The only other science fiction writers I  had met before had been Terry Carr and Barry Maltzberg, fellow SMLA wage-slaves, and suddenly there I was in Damon's huge crumbling Victorian manse for 10 days of workshopping and socializing with a couple dozen of them, a few who I had actually agented anonymously, though considering what had habitually come down, I wasn't about to mention that.

Damon's motto was "No Chiefs, no Indians." This was a professional workshop and everyone invited was by definition a professional, hence an equal, whether they were Damon, Gordon Dickson, James Blish, Judith Merril, or one of the selected new guys like me.

What's more, I was indeed accepted as an equal colleague on a certain level, and the sense of awed isolation I felt when I first stepped into the house's big kitchen and met all these people who were names on book jackets lasted maybe an hour and a half.

You can say a lot of critical things about the community of science fiction writers, and down through the years I certainly have, but it really is a community that not only tends to protect and  nurture its own but actually welcomes newcomers into the fold. Like all gatherings of writers, the sf community engages in bragging, backbiting, vicious gossip, and cruel games, but nowhere else in my experience are established writers so genuinely openhearted to the new kids on the block.

CONTINUITY

He became fast friends with Harlan Ellison, who was at Milford, and was strongly attracted to Dona Sadock, who was there with Ellison, and with whom he was to live many years later.

FLASHBACK

Harlan arrived in Milford in a flash of Hollywood street punk ectoplasm with the tiny elfin Dona in tow. It was just one of those weird chemical things. He hadn't been in Damon's kitchen for twenty minutes before we were talking as if we were already old buddies picking up a conversation that had been going on for years.

Harlan at that time was about 30, dressing and bullshitting like the Hollywood star writer. Dona was this tiny little 20 year old groupie, or so it seemed until she opened her mouth and out came this preternaturally powerful voice redolent of 50 year old sophistication and speaking for someone who seemed about a thousand years older than that.

Instant fascination. Unrequited love that would go on for years. 

The beginning of the two longest friendships of my life.

CONTINUITY

Instead of driving directly to San Francisco after Milford, he passed through Los Angeles and looked up Ellison, who put him up at his house for a week or so, persuaded him to try Los Angeles instead, and found him an affordable studio apartment.

FRAME

I hadn't intended to stay more than a few days in Los Angeles.  I took a random exit on the Hollywood Freeway and called Harlan, the only person I knew in LA. He invited me to crash in his little house up in Beverly Glen. Before I quite knew what was happening, he was persuading me to give LA a try, and finding me an apartment. All in a week.

It couldn't have been a week after that when he asked to borrow $2000, about half my net worth, this from a guy who was knocking down a thousand a week on contract to Paramount. Just for ten days, he assured me. How could I say no to a guy who had been so generous to me? 

Thus began a weird pecuniary relationship that went on for years.  Harlan would borrow large sums from me for a week or two, pay them back, borrow the bread again a week later. The same few grand got recycled over and over. No matter how much money he made, Harlan had the creative need to ride the edge of insolvency. No matter how much he borrowed, he always paid it back.

CONTINUITY

He stayed in Los Angeles for about six months, where he wrote, among other stories, the now- much-reprinted "Carcinoma Angels", the very first story purchased for Harlan Ellison's landmark anthology DANGEROUS VISIONS. A previous attempt at a story for DANGEROUS VISIONS turned into an outline for the novel THE MEN IN THE JUNGLE.  Doubleday gave him a contract and a modest advance, and he moved to San Francisco to write it.

FRAME

Why did I leave Los Angeles after six months?

Why did I stay that long?

The Summer of Love, the Counterculture, might be two years in the future on a mass level, but the tension between the Hip and the Square from which it was to emerge was a very real identity crisis for a young writer from Bohemia.

I had made one life-long friend in Los Angeles, I had made the stylistic breakthrough of "Carcinoma Angels" there, and the attempt to write THE MEN IN THE JUNGLE, my take on Vietnam and professional revolutionaries, as a novelette for DANGEROUS VISIONS had led to my first hardcover contract, so I can't say the atmosphere wasn't creative, but there didn't seem to be any there there. No street  life. No scene like the Village.

San Francisco, on the other hand, the chosen object of my odyssey  in the first place, was still mythical country, Kerouac's North Beach, the Village West, the California capital of Hip. Harlan's and Los Angeles' distant disdain for the misty metropolis to the contrary, I  had to at least check it out myself, now didn't I?

FLASHBACK

When I hit San Francisco, the first place I went was to Bruce Britton's apartment, since I knew no one else in town. Bruce being  Bruce, and as luck would have it, he and his wife were going to what would be one of the historic parties of the decade that very night. 

Yes, I spent my first night in San Francisco at Ken Kesey's very first Acid Test blowout in the Seaman's hall, an event often considered the birth of the Counterculture. Thousands of stoned  people, loud music, acid in the punch, general frenzy, the whole tie- dyed ball of wax. 

What a homecoming to the Hipster community!

And yet....

FRAME

Fabulous North Beach proved to be an expensive bummer. The Beat Scene having turned it into a primo tourist attraction, the authorities in their infinite wisdom figured all they had to do to make it perfect was to get rid of the dirty beatniks who had made it famous in the first place.

The result was a depressing mixture of high rent apartments, plastic coffee houses and topless bars, and a Hip scene that had followed the low rents elsewhere.

Namely to the Haight.

CONTINUITY

In San Francisco, Spinrad lived on a street close by Buena Vista  park, bordering on the Haight- Ashbury. There he wrote both THE MEN IN THE JUNGLE and afterward AGENT OF CHAOS in the space of less than a year. 

FRAME

The bohemian communities of Greenwich Village and North Beach had had economic bases in the arts, the crafts, the tourist industry, but Haight-Ashbury in 1966, the year before the Summer of Love, had no such legitimate economic base at all. People like me, actually making a living in an artistic endeavor, were rare, people with straight nine-to-fivers even rarer.

The unfortunate result being that the economy of the hippie community there (so named by Time in 1967) could only be based on the drug trade. At street level, indigent connections collected money for nickel bags of grass or crystal meth or individual tabs of LSD from high school kids or day-trippers, and scored ounces or lids from the  lowest true dealers, their cut amounting to $10 or so or a nickel for their own stash. The low-level dealers bought from wholesalers in  maybe kilo quantities, and so on up the food-chain, which in those days did not extend to Drug Lords, narcoterrorists, or the Maf.

Not my planet either, not what ON THE ROAD had advertised as the hip scene in San Francisco at all, though there seemed to be no other.  In the process of cleaning up North Beach, the powers that be had created Dope City in the Haight.

Call it street smarts, or call it luck, I found myself a nice little garden apartment on a hill just above this scene, where I could  write THE MEN IN THE JUNGLE and later AGENT OF CHAOS during the day, and boogie in the Haight at night and weekends.

No doubt some of the nastiness in THE MEN IN THE JUNGLE owed as  much to the environment of the Haight as to the Viet Nam war which was  beginning at the time. For sure, the three-sided conflict between Establishment, Revolution, and Forces of Chaos in AGENT OF CHAOS owed even more to my identity crisis at the time.

I was a hipster, right, a Beat, a bohemian, these were my people, weren't they? Weren't they? The Square world sucked, didn't it, official reality was boring and oppressive for sure, and hey, it was the Establishment itself that created the Haight by driving the Beats out of North Beach. Surely I didn't want to be part of that.

But I saw things in the Haight....

I saw people smoking coffee grounds because they had nothing  better. I saw people smoking match-heads to get off on the sulfur fumes. I saw needle-freaks shooting up with hot water just  for "the  Surge." A guy said to me, "I'd eat shit if I thought it'd get me high," and he wasn't joking.

And there were people who regarded me as a Square because I wouldn't get involved in dealing.

I spent a long time looking for a third way. So did the country. And maybe we're all searching for it still.

CONTINUITY

A certain deterioration of the cultural milieu in the Haight persuaded Spinrad to return to Los Angeles.

FLASHBACK

One day two girls from Texas I knew pleaded with me to come over to their apartment and rescue them from a couple of dealers for whom their kid brother was a connection, and who were refusing to  leave.

I put on my White Knight suit and drove over.

Given the level of paranoia in the Haight, ejecting them was easier than it might seem. All I had to do was glower at them enigmatically until they started giving me paranoid looks.

"Whattsa matter, you guys think I'm a narc or something?" I snarled defensively.

"Oh, no, man, nothing like --"

"Yeah, I think you do! Whatsa matter, I look like a cop to you?"

"Oh, no, man --"

"You think I'm a fuckin' narc, don't you?"

Sinister these schmucks were, but they were schmucks, and after about a half an hour of this, they slithered out the door. But not before telling a story that they found highly amusing.

They were big-time acid dealers, or so they claimed. Peace, Love, Higher Consciousness in hundred tab lots.

"An' two out of every hundred hits are cyanide, some people are in for a really heavy trip, haw! haw! haw!"

I left the Haight for LA the next week.

FRAME

I spent about a month living in Harlan Ellison's large new house with Harlan and one of my main literary heroes, Theodore Sturgeon.  Both Sturgeon and I were chasing unsuccessfully after Dona Sadock, who had arrived in LA, and it got kind of weird.

I was still trying to digest the results of what I had seen in the Haight. The Counterculture hadn't even been born yet, but I was already thinking 20 years ahead to what would emerge out the other side, Ted and Harlan were both working on tv scripts, and I was thinking about what immortality would mean as an item of commerce too, BUG JACK BARRON was somehow coming together in my mind....

CONTINUITY

Spinrad drove to New York, where he secured a contract from Doubleday to write BUG JACK BARRON, and then to Cleveland, where he attended his first science fiction convention.

FRAME

The elusive Dona had fled from Sturgeon and myself back to New York, and I did another transcontinental run, in pursuit of her and a book contract from Doubleday. Didn't catch her, but I did cadge the contract for BUG JACK BARRON, at a rather wet lunch with Larry Ashmead, who had been my editor on THE MEN IN THE IN JUNGLE, then about to be published.

Ashmead grandly assured me that there were no taboos, that I was free to follow my literary star in writing this novel of immortality, television, and American Presidential politics.

FLASHBACK

Harlan was also in New York, on his way to be Guest of Honor at the World Science Fiction Convention in Cleveland. "You gotta go to the Worldcon," he told me.

"Worldcon? What's that?"

"Two thousand fans of writers like us, half of them women. Need I say more?"

I had failed to connect up with Dona once more, so he didn't. 

I pictured a thousand literary groupies of the sort one might in one's dreams encounter in a Village coffee house avid for intellectual discourse and fornication with science fiction writers.

Instead, I had my first encounter with the subculture of science fiction fandom -- dominantly male, adolescent, overweight, and literarily jejeune to say the least. An unsettling experience for  writers who come to science fiction from elsewhere for strictly  literary reasons. J.G. Ballard didn't write for a year after his first and last convention. When I encountered Keith Laumer after his first convention, he was in a state of gibbering shock.

Not my planet either, but being the venue of much publishing wheeling and dealing, as well as places to meet your friends and colleagues, sf conventions, I was to find, are rather seductive to  science fiction writers, bad for the head, but hard to avoid.

CONTINUITY

Upon returning to Los Angeles, Spinrad rented an apartment in  Laurel Canyon, where, in 1967- 8, he wrote BUG JACK BARRON, as well as short stories, journalism, and two scripts for Star Trek, one of which was produced as "The Doomsday Machine."

FRAME

Los Angeles seemed a lot more like home the second time around, or rather Laurel Canyon did, wild overgrown hills five minutes off the Sunset Strip, inhabited by wild overgrown people, and I've never lived anywhere else in LA ever since.

Harlan introduced me to Jared Rutter, editor of Knight magazine, and I wrote a piece about science fiction fandom for him which led to a monthly column chronicling the times as we passed through them, collected in 1970 in FRAGMENTS OF AMERICA.

This was to be published by something called Now Library Press, another line of a large porn publisher, who at this time was doing the Essex House line of literary porn novels under the aegis of Brian  Kirby. The writers who wrote the novels -- and there were some formidable ones like Theodore Sturgeon, Philip Jose Farmer, David  Meltzer, Michael Perkins - -got $1500. I got $300 to read them and write six pages afterwards justifying their redeeming social significance.

Thanks to another Harlan Ellison connection, I wrote a piece for Cinema magazine, and thanks to a favorable mention of his pilot for the show therein, I was invited to write a Star Trek by Gene  Roddenberry, and then a second. 

Thanks to all of the above, I managed to survive economically for  the eight months or so it took me to write BUG JACK BARRON on the  first half of a $1500 advance from Doubleday.

This was, in retrospect, the apogee of the countercultural  revolution, when everything seemed possible, when the world was being made anew, when even Time could do a naively positive cover story on the Summer of Love.

I was writing commentary on it all every month. I had been invited to write Star Trek. My first hardcover had come out. I was riding as high as the times.

So I took Ashmead at his word, sat down with my copy of  UNDERSTANDING MEDIA, a lid or two of grass, and the blithe assumption that science fiction could also be made anew, that is, that all the commercial, political, stylistic, and linguistic strictures no longer applied, and I let the muse, the evolutionary imperative of the time take me where it would.

Where it took me was into a highly political tale of love, sex, immortality, suicide, drugs, idealism lost and ultimately regained, informed by a sexual explicitness the science fiction genre had never  seen before, though, in 1990s retrospect, relentlessly heterosexual, and almost naively free of anything that would today be called "perverse."

The style that seemed to move through me in a great Kerouacian gush was curiously similar in spirit to that of Norman Mailer's WHY ARE WE IN VIET NAM?, Brian Aldiss's BAREFOOT IN THE HEAD, and even Robert A. Heinlein's THE MOON IS A HARSH MISTRESS, all of which had to have been written at roughly the same time, and none of which could have influenced any of the others. None of the four of us had written anything like that sort of thing before, and none of us really ever did again.

It may sound arch in 1993 to suggest that the spirit of the times must have been speaking through us. But not in Psychedelic Sixty-Seven.

CONTINUITY

Doubleday rejected the finished manuscript of BUG JACK BARRON.  Spinrad spent the next year or so trying to sell it to major hardcover houses without success.

FLASHBACK

1968-1969, on the other hand, were, as I called them in the title of one of my Knight pieces, "Year of Lightning, Year of Dread."

Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy were assassinated, Russian tanks crushed the Prague Spring, Richard Nixon emerged as President after Lyndon Johnson was driven from office, and Doubleday bounced BUG JACK BARRON.

Not to suggest that these were events of similar magnitude, but the nature of the clashing forces were the same in the microcosm as in the macrocosm.

"Take out all the sex, drugs, and politics, and we'll publish the book," Doubleday told me.

"All that would be left would be a novelette," I pointed out. 

Multiply this by ten million such incidents, small and large, and  you have the transformation of the cultural awakening of 1967 into the  cultural war of 1968-72. Hip versus Square. Counterculture versus  Power Structure. Revolution versus Establishment. Sex, Drugs, and  Rock and Roll versus the Judeo-Christian Tradition. Me versus You.  Us versus Them.

BUG JACK BARRON bounced around New York from publisher to  publisher, rejection to rejection. The mainstream publishers rejected  it because it was too much like science fiction. And I resisted the easy out of publishing it as a genre book.

Go to Next Page