05-04-2014, 01:24 PM
Lucius and I stood in an antique shop in downtown Eugene, transfixed by the diorama of a taxidermied cobra and mongoose locked in combat. While these days a web search turns these up by the score (are there factories around the globe churning them out?), at that time, to us, it was truly unique and way cool. The only difference between our reactions was that Lucius wanted to buy it. When I pointed out our limited finances, he called me a spoil-sport. “It’ll inspire our writing,” he argued. I was not convinced. With a sigh he relented.
The issue of money would come up often.
We were renting a furnished two-bedroom apartment. The bedrooms were upstairs. Downstairs, the cow skull lorded over the living room. What was up with that anyway? When I asked about it, Lucius gave some vague answer I don’t entirely recall. He might have said it was a long-ago gift from his mother. But considering the dark nature of his upbringing, this hardly shed light on its significance. Sometimes he would hold it and gaze into its empty sockets, perhaps seeking inspiration, or perhaps just in homage to Hamlet reflecting on the skull of Yorick. He had read, and comprehended, all of Shakespeare by the age of 10, under threat of violence from his scholar father. Not just Shakespeare, but many other classics. Even more astonishing, he had to memorize much of it. No wonder he could write with such eloquence about so many things.
Soon after we moved in, Kate and Damon gave us a call. A package had arrived in their care. It was for Lucius. I drove over and picked it up and returned to a very spirited Lucius. He opened the package quickly. It contained miscellaneous items, most of it of a musical nature. The contents really didn’t make much sense. “Come on, come on,” Lucius said with growing agitation. “It’s gotta be in here. Where is it?” Picking up two maracas, he shook them. One sounded muffled. “Hah!” He shattered it to find several plastic bags.
I couldn’t believe it. It was wrong in so many ways. “You had drugs delivered to Kate and Damon’s place?” I kept picturing the police swooping down on them, putting them in handcuffs. Lucius calmly looked me in the eye and said, “Yeah.” Then he broke out in a little ditty.
Don’t get me wrong. Lucius had tremendous respect for Kate and Damon. He put a high value on their friendship and opinions. If, in his eyes, there had been significant risk in that delivery, he wouldn’t have done it. But oh, how Lucius savored my offended sensibilities. He liked jarring people out of their comfort zones. As mentioned before, he despised the pervasive holier-than-thou attitude Americans had towards the rest of the world. I think he despised the whole American way of life. He had a wicked habit of telling people what others had said about them. When I published my first story years later, Lucius had to let me know that a certain Clarionite had not liked it at all. He was a provocateur, ever bent on stirring things up. He wanted to stress relationships and force people to question their long-held convictions. But I sensed another side to it as well: envy. When someone else had a success, he liked to take them down a peg. He could be highly competitive.
Kate and Damon held regular workshops. A smattering of science fiction writers would show up, some coming from hundreds of miles away. We would form a circle in the large living room edged by many tall bookcases. If you were to randomly pull a book from a shelf and thumb through it, you’d likely find proofreading marks. Damon was in the habit of copyediting as he read, even when reading for pleasure.
In these workshops, my stories took a beating for their characters. In hindsight, that’s not surprising. My biggest problem was a lack of life experiences. I hadn’t dealt with enough people in various circumstances to know how to build interesting characters and give them credible conflicts. While my sense-of-wonder ideas and strong plotting received praise, without compelling characters it went for naught. Lucius, by contrast, had an abundance of life experiences, which he drew upon to create compelling characters. Granted, these characters were too often misfits, miscreants and other dregs of society; but they were always deftly drawn. Where Lucius truly stood out was in creating atmosphere and setting. No one could come close to him in that regard. But Lucius had one big weakness. He couldn’t plot.
“It’s a drug-trip story,” Damon said dismissively of a Lucius story (“Black Coral”), pointing out how the long climax devolved into lots of pointless imagery. Lucius said the point-of-view character wasn’t really on drugs. “It doesn’t matter whether the protagonist is on drugs,” said Damon. “It’s of a type I call the drug-trip story. The whole climax is just a bunch of meaningless imagery.” Damon listened patiently as Lucius made an impassioned defense, then repeated, “It’s a drug-trip story.”
Plot did not come easy for Lucius. Directionless through most of his life, he seemed to struggle with the very concept of procedure, of building something in a stepwise fashion from many pieces. He could never have been a software programmer. This does not mean his stories were simplistic. They were highly sophisticated in setting and atmosphere. In a single paragraph he might lay out the history of a village, its social-political climate, the ethnic mix of its inhabitants, their interactions, hopes and fears, how they made a living, while also introducing the main characters -- more information than in several of my stories. But there wasn’t much movement to the proceedings. It was like a high-resolution photograph, wonderfully composed and detailed, but unable to move or change. While some might argue that, as a skilled prose stylist, he needn’t bother with the armature of plot, in the minds of many it would have served him well (at a science fiction convention many years later, when Lucius introduced me to Connie Willis, she told me she was determined to teach Lucius to plot).
Sometimes I felt that if Lucius and I could somehow be merged, we’d make for a fully-formed writer destined for greatness. At other times, I imagined the result would be a deranged psychopath.
On one occasion I tried writing a story along the lines of Lucius -- light on plot, with the emphasis on setting and atmosphere. Kate and Damon were all over me. Don’t be trying to copy Lucius, they said. You have your own unique voice. Stay true to that. They seemed fearful I was being too strongly influenced by Lucius. But it was just an experiment, one of many I’ve tried; and I don’t know how one can possibly grow without attempting things outside oneself.
Life with Lucius was a messy affair. He never put anything away. Now and then I’d make the rounds, discovering spoiled foods not put back in the fridge. Mugs and glasses were everywhere, with countless cigarette butts swimming in residues of coffee and hard liquor. He had a peculiar way of reading the newspaper, tossing aside each sheet as he finished it, always in a different direction, so that in three days time one could no longer see any part of the floor. The same had been true at Clarion, where he was constantly losing things in his room, including the student manuscripts he was supposed to read and comment on, so he’d borrow my already-marked-up copies and lose them as well, leaving me without my notes for class. There was one notable exception to his misplacement of things: his guitar. He had a psychic connection to it. “Don’t step there!” he’d shout. And there it would be, under the debris.
Lucius had done a lot of drugs in his time. As a teenager, he’d gulp anything handed to him. In college, a professor was in the habit of giving him drugs, then consigning him to a room to write, curious to see what effect each had on his prose. Lucius told me of LSD’s effect: “I wrote in a circle, starting at the outer edge, working my way inward, getting ever smaller, until I reached the center.”
In Eugene, Lucius didn’t use drugs recreationally but rather as a tool. His canon was, “If you don’t work on it, you’re wasting it.” His drug of choice was marijuana. He’d smoke a joint or two, then write. I tried it a time or two, but ended up with gibberish. “It takes practice,” he told me. “You need to learn to work on it.” But I never really pursued it.
One morning, while reviewing what he’d written the night before, Lucius threw his notebook across the living room with a “Fuck!” Retrieving it, I looked at page after page of lines with the barest squiggle. “Too much weed,” he said. “Can’t read my own handwriting. Oh, well. I’ll just write it again -- and better.” I was never quite convinced that marijuana served him as a writing tool. It seemed more a rationalization for continuing its use. But there was no doubt that he could write -- and write well -- on it, as I had ample opportunities to read his remarkable prose after such sessions.
One evening Lucius went out for a walk and returned well after midnight. Drunk, in high spirits, not at all sleepy, he told me of his adventure. He’d gone to a restaurant to eat. While there, he noticed a young woman standing up near the cashier. He assumed she was a waitress, only she never did anything. After the real waitress had taken his order and then brought him his food, the woman walked over close to his table. “You interested in some action?” Staring down at his plate, a bit taken aback, Lucius mumbled, “I just want to eat my hamburger.” The woman retreated. So he ate his hamburger. When done, he went up and paid for the meal at the cashier. While putting change back in his wallet, he took a step aside and said to the woman, “How much?” Lucius laughed about it, the assembly-line nature of paying for food, then for sex.
Outside, Lucius negotiated the asking price of $15. “How ‘bout instead I just get us a room and buy us a case of beer?” The woman accepted. So they’d made a party of it lasting several hours. “She was nice,” he said. “It was a nice experience. She liked me.” And he was probably telling the truth. He hit it off implausibly well with so many women. Once, when I paid Kate and Damon a visit by myself, Damon interrogated me. “What is it about Lucius that women find so irresistible?” Kate stood nearby, grinning at Damon, amused by his curiosity. It was a very good question, because Lucius wasn’t much to look at. He had the grizzled, weatherbeaten face of a pirate, and he’d pretty much destroyed his nose with coke. As for his body, it was a sack of potatoes. I did my best to answer. Lucius had traveled extensively and was full of anecdotes, which he told extremely well, especially with his deep voice. There was an intimacy to the way he conversed, like you were the most important person in the world. He could be wildly funny and was always impulsive, alive in the moment. Life around Lucius was full of surprises. And women really liked that.
Lucius’ little adventure disturbed me, but not on any moral grounds. It was a financial concern. What I haven’t mentioned up to now is that Lucius had borrowed a considerable sum from me (later I was to learn he’d borrowed from a good many friends and relatives). So I had a vested interest in his spending. He could be so impulsive. On our cross-country trip, he’d buy turquoise at roadside stands in the desert. During our Vegas debacle, as we walked through a casino surrounded by flashing neon and clanging bells, he said he felt the luck and needed to do some serious gambling (thankfully our host talked him out of it). Up in Eugene, he would pay for psychic readings, and he’d go to bars and restaurants; and while I can’t fault him for wanting to know the future or needing to socialize and have a night life, that was money we could ill afford to spend.
Then there was the betting. Lucius was known to bet on sporting events. He was a big boxing fan. We both were. The first fight between Sugar Ray Leonard and Roberto Duran took place in June of 1980, shortly before Clarion. If I recall correctly, Lucius bet on Duran in that fight and made some money. The rematch took place on November 25, 1980, early into our Eugene sojourn. Lucius truly despised Leonard, viewed him as an American fabrication, a polished product of capitalism. He was surrounded by fat cats who had groomed him to appeal to a wide audience, and Lucius hated him with a passion. Duran, on the other hand, had grown up in poverty, swam in shark-infested waters as a boy to make a living. He stood for the underprivileged, the impoverished, the disenfranchised, the Third World. Duran was Lucius’ kind of guy. Though Lucius never said anything, I strongly suspect he bet big on that fight, which ended in the 8th with Duran’s infamous, “No mas.”
Lording over all the above craziness was Lucius’ continuing obsession with Lady X. He remained tormented, on a roller coaster of emotions. He kept coming up with outrageous schemes for destabilizing Lady X’s marriage or otherwise provoking her into leaving her husband. I was a good listener, seldom judgmental, and for better or worse I became his sounding board. One scheme involved writing lots of letters to Lady X but not sending them from Eugene. Instead, he would give the letters to cohorts in other locations around the country or even the world, and they would then mail the letters to Lady X. This was sure to drive her crazy. She’d be puzzling all the time about where he was and wouldn’t be able to put him out of mind. For another scenario (worked out in great detail), he would hire a high-class prostitute to take one of the husband’s college classes and slowly seduce him into an affair, and afterwards make a big scene with the husband and Lady X, presenting photos as proof. Crazy crazy stuff.
Lucius didn’t just write to Lady X; he also phoned her regularly. These calls were long in distance and duration. One day I received a nasty call from the phone company demanding an immediate installment payment, as they’d detected a suspicious spike. I was shocked at the size of our bill. Lucius agreed to pay it.
All too soon we had our own “No mas” moment. Just a couple of months into Eugene, Lucius told me he couldn’t live this far away from Lady X, he needed to move back closer to her, the better to keep pressure on her. He left behind most of his belongings, including his guitar and that big cow skull. A few weeks later he wanted me to ship him his guitar. That was easier said than done. Time and again UPS rejected the package. Desperate for his guitar, Lucius told me to do whatever to get it to him. UPS finally accepted it after I lied about the contents and declined insurance.
As for the cow skull, it stayed with me for many years, perhaps decades, slowly losing teeth as I moved from place to place, until finally, sadly, I tossed it.
Kate and Damon were sympathetic to my plight. They thought it was harsh. There I was, having quit a promising job to move across country with Lucius, only to be abandoned after just two months. Now I was stuck paying full rent and other expenses. I managed to last another few months, but with funds running low I needed to find work. Oregon was not good hunting grounds for a software programmer, so I made trips down to Silicon Valley for job interviews. Eventually I landed a job, and that was the end of Shangrila.
The issue of money would come up often.
We were renting a furnished two-bedroom apartment. The bedrooms were upstairs. Downstairs, the cow skull lorded over the living room. What was up with that anyway? When I asked about it, Lucius gave some vague answer I don’t entirely recall. He might have said it was a long-ago gift from his mother. But considering the dark nature of his upbringing, this hardly shed light on its significance. Sometimes he would hold it and gaze into its empty sockets, perhaps seeking inspiration, or perhaps just in homage to Hamlet reflecting on the skull of Yorick. He had read, and comprehended, all of Shakespeare by the age of 10, under threat of violence from his scholar father. Not just Shakespeare, but many other classics. Even more astonishing, he had to memorize much of it. No wonder he could write with such eloquence about so many things.
Soon after we moved in, Kate and Damon gave us a call. A package had arrived in their care. It was for Lucius. I drove over and picked it up and returned to a very spirited Lucius. He opened the package quickly. It contained miscellaneous items, most of it of a musical nature. The contents really didn’t make much sense. “Come on, come on,” Lucius said with growing agitation. “It’s gotta be in here. Where is it?” Picking up two maracas, he shook them. One sounded muffled. “Hah!” He shattered it to find several plastic bags.
I couldn’t believe it. It was wrong in so many ways. “You had drugs delivered to Kate and Damon’s place?” I kept picturing the police swooping down on them, putting them in handcuffs. Lucius calmly looked me in the eye and said, “Yeah.” Then he broke out in a little ditty.
Don’t get me wrong. Lucius had tremendous respect for Kate and Damon. He put a high value on their friendship and opinions. If, in his eyes, there had been significant risk in that delivery, he wouldn’t have done it. But oh, how Lucius savored my offended sensibilities. He liked jarring people out of their comfort zones. As mentioned before, he despised the pervasive holier-than-thou attitude Americans had towards the rest of the world. I think he despised the whole American way of life. He had a wicked habit of telling people what others had said about them. When I published my first story years later, Lucius had to let me know that a certain Clarionite had not liked it at all. He was a provocateur, ever bent on stirring things up. He wanted to stress relationships and force people to question their long-held convictions. But I sensed another side to it as well: envy. When someone else had a success, he liked to take them down a peg. He could be highly competitive.
Kate and Damon held regular workshops. A smattering of science fiction writers would show up, some coming from hundreds of miles away. We would form a circle in the large living room edged by many tall bookcases. If you were to randomly pull a book from a shelf and thumb through it, you’d likely find proofreading marks. Damon was in the habit of copyediting as he read, even when reading for pleasure.
In these workshops, my stories took a beating for their characters. In hindsight, that’s not surprising. My biggest problem was a lack of life experiences. I hadn’t dealt with enough people in various circumstances to know how to build interesting characters and give them credible conflicts. While my sense-of-wonder ideas and strong plotting received praise, without compelling characters it went for naught. Lucius, by contrast, had an abundance of life experiences, which he drew upon to create compelling characters. Granted, these characters were too often misfits, miscreants and other dregs of society; but they were always deftly drawn. Where Lucius truly stood out was in creating atmosphere and setting. No one could come close to him in that regard. But Lucius had one big weakness. He couldn’t plot.
“It’s a drug-trip story,” Damon said dismissively of a Lucius story (“Black Coral”), pointing out how the long climax devolved into lots of pointless imagery. Lucius said the point-of-view character wasn’t really on drugs. “It doesn’t matter whether the protagonist is on drugs,” said Damon. “It’s of a type I call the drug-trip story. The whole climax is just a bunch of meaningless imagery.” Damon listened patiently as Lucius made an impassioned defense, then repeated, “It’s a drug-trip story.”
Plot did not come easy for Lucius. Directionless through most of his life, he seemed to struggle with the very concept of procedure, of building something in a stepwise fashion from many pieces. He could never have been a software programmer. This does not mean his stories were simplistic. They were highly sophisticated in setting and atmosphere. In a single paragraph he might lay out the history of a village, its social-political climate, the ethnic mix of its inhabitants, their interactions, hopes and fears, how they made a living, while also introducing the main characters -- more information than in several of my stories. But there wasn’t much movement to the proceedings. It was like a high-resolution photograph, wonderfully composed and detailed, but unable to move or change. While some might argue that, as a skilled prose stylist, he needn’t bother with the armature of plot, in the minds of many it would have served him well (at a science fiction convention many years later, when Lucius introduced me to Connie Willis, she told me she was determined to teach Lucius to plot).
Sometimes I felt that if Lucius and I could somehow be merged, we’d make for a fully-formed writer destined for greatness. At other times, I imagined the result would be a deranged psychopath.
On one occasion I tried writing a story along the lines of Lucius -- light on plot, with the emphasis on setting and atmosphere. Kate and Damon were all over me. Don’t be trying to copy Lucius, they said. You have your own unique voice. Stay true to that. They seemed fearful I was being too strongly influenced by Lucius. But it was just an experiment, one of many I’ve tried; and I don’t know how one can possibly grow without attempting things outside oneself.
Life with Lucius was a messy affair. He never put anything away. Now and then I’d make the rounds, discovering spoiled foods not put back in the fridge. Mugs and glasses were everywhere, with countless cigarette butts swimming in residues of coffee and hard liquor. He had a peculiar way of reading the newspaper, tossing aside each sheet as he finished it, always in a different direction, so that in three days time one could no longer see any part of the floor. The same had been true at Clarion, where he was constantly losing things in his room, including the student manuscripts he was supposed to read and comment on, so he’d borrow my already-marked-up copies and lose them as well, leaving me without my notes for class. There was one notable exception to his misplacement of things: his guitar. He had a psychic connection to it. “Don’t step there!” he’d shout. And there it would be, under the debris.
Lucius had done a lot of drugs in his time. As a teenager, he’d gulp anything handed to him. In college, a professor was in the habit of giving him drugs, then consigning him to a room to write, curious to see what effect each had on his prose. Lucius told me of LSD’s effect: “I wrote in a circle, starting at the outer edge, working my way inward, getting ever smaller, until I reached the center.”
In Eugene, Lucius didn’t use drugs recreationally but rather as a tool. His canon was, “If you don’t work on it, you’re wasting it.” His drug of choice was marijuana. He’d smoke a joint or two, then write. I tried it a time or two, but ended up with gibberish. “It takes practice,” he told me. “You need to learn to work on it.” But I never really pursued it.
One morning, while reviewing what he’d written the night before, Lucius threw his notebook across the living room with a “Fuck!” Retrieving it, I looked at page after page of lines with the barest squiggle. “Too much weed,” he said. “Can’t read my own handwriting. Oh, well. I’ll just write it again -- and better.” I was never quite convinced that marijuana served him as a writing tool. It seemed more a rationalization for continuing its use. But there was no doubt that he could write -- and write well -- on it, as I had ample opportunities to read his remarkable prose after such sessions.
One evening Lucius went out for a walk and returned well after midnight. Drunk, in high spirits, not at all sleepy, he told me of his adventure. He’d gone to a restaurant to eat. While there, he noticed a young woman standing up near the cashier. He assumed she was a waitress, only she never did anything. After the real waitress had taken his order and then brought him his food, the woman walked over close to his table. “You interested in some action?” Staring down at his plate, a bit taken aback, Lucius mumbled, “I just want to eat my hamburger.” The woman retreated. So he ate his hamburger. When done, he went up and paid for the meal at the cashier. While putting change back in his wallet, he took a step aside and said to the woman, “How much?” Lucius laughed about it, the assembly-line nature of paying for food, then for sex.
Outside, Lucius negotiated the asking price of $15. “How ‘bout instead I just get us a room and buy us a case of beer?” The woman accepted. So they’d made a party of it lasting several hours. “She was nice,” he said. “It was a nice experience. She liked me.” And he was probably telling the truth. He hit it off implausibly well with so many women. Once, when I paid Kate and Damon a visit by myself, Damon interrogated me. “What is it about Lucius that women find so irresistible?” Kate stood nearby, grinning at Damon, amused by his curiosity. It was a very good question, because Lucius wasn’t much to look at. He had the grizzled, weatherbeaten face of a pirate, and he’d pretty much destroyed his nose with coke. As for his body, it was a sack of potatoes. I did my best to answer. Lucius had traveled extensively and was full of anecdotes, which he told extremely well, especially with his deep voice. There was an intimacy to the way he conversed, like you were the most important person in the world. He could be wildly funny and was always impulsive, alive in the moment. Life around Lucius was full of surprises. And women really liked that.
Lucius’ little adventure disturbed me, but not on any moral grounds. It was a financial concern. What I haven’t mentioned up to now is that Lucius had borrowed a considerable sum from me (later I was to learn he’d borrowed from a good many friends and relatives). So I had a vested interest in his spending. He could be so impulsive. On our cross-country trip, he’d buy turquoise at roadside stands in the desert. During our Vegas debacle, as we walked through a casino surrounded by flashing neon and clanging bells, he said he felt the luck and needed to do some serious gambling (thankfully our host talked him out of it). Up in Eugene, he would pay for psychic readings, and he’d go to bars and restaurants; and while I can’t fault him for wanting to know the future or needing to socialize and have a night life, that was money we could ill afford to spend.
Then there was the betting. Lucius was known to bet on sporting events. He was a big boxing fan. We both were. The first fight between Sugar Ray Leonard and Roberto Duran took place in June of 1980, shortly before Clarion. If I recall correctly, Lucius bet on Duran in that fight and made some money. The rematch took place on November 25, 1980, early into our Eugene sojourn. Lucius truly despised Leonard, viewed him as an American fabrication, a polished product of capitalism. He was surrounded by fat cats who had groomed him to appeal to a wide audience, and Lucius hated him with a passion. Duran, on the other hand, had grown up in poverty, swam in shark-infested waters as a boy to make a living. He stood for the underprivileged, the impoverished, the disenfranchised, the Third World. Duran was Lucius’ kind of guy. Though Lucius never said anything, I strongly suspect he bet big on that fight, which ended in the 8th with Duran’s infamous, “No mas.”
Lording over all the above craziness was Lucius’ continuing obsession with Lady X. He remained tormented, on a roller coaster of emotions. He kept coming up with outrageous schemes for destabilizing Lady X’s marriage or otherwise provoking her into leaving her husband. I was a good listener, seldom judgmental, and for better or worse I became his sounding board. One scheme involved writing lots of letters to Lady X but not sending them from Eugene. Instead, he would give the letters to cohorts in other locations around the country or even the world, and they would then mail the letters to Lady X. This was sure to drive her crazy. She’d be puzzling all the time about where he was and wouldn’t be able to put him out of mind. For another scenario (worked out in great detail), he would hire a high-class prostitute to take one of the husband’s college classes and slowly seduce him into an affair, and afterwards make a big scene with the husband and Lady X, presenting photos as proof. Crazy crazy stuff.
Lucius didn’t just write to Lady X; he also phoned her regularly. These calls were long in distance and duration. One day I received a nasty call from the phone company demanding an immediate installment payment, as they’d detected a suspicious spike. I was shocked at the size of our bill. Lucius agreed to pay it.
All too soon we had our own “No mas” moment. Just a couple of months into Eugene, Lucius told me he couldn’t live this far away from Lady X, he needed to move back closer to her, the better to keep pressure on her. He left behind most of his belongings, including his guitar and that big cow skull. A few weeks later he wanted me to ship him his guitar. That was easier said than done. Time and again UPS rejected the package. Desperate for his guitar, Lucius told me to do whatever to get it to him. UPS finally accepted it after I lied about the contents and declined insurance.
As for the cow skull, it stayed with me for many years, perhaps decades, slowly losing teeth as I moved from place to place, until finally, sadly, I tossed it.
Kate and Damon were sympathetic to my plight. They thought it was harsh. There I was, having quit a promising job to move across country with Lucius, only to be abandoned after just two months. Now I was stuck paying full rent and other expenses. I managed to last another few months, but with funds running low I needed to find work. Oregon was not good hunting grounds for a software programmer, so I made trips down to Silicon Valley for job interviews. Eventually I landed a job, and that was the end of Shangrila.