Puce, Petunia, Poppy, Peppermint, Periwinkle . . .
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I've known several blind people in my life. The first was Elmer, who ran the news and candy and cigar stand in the post office in Corsicana, Texas, where my grand-parents lived. When I was in town, Granddaddy and I would walk a few blocks to the post office every day to get the mail, and we'd always stop and talk to Elmer. Elmer would put his hand on my head to see how much I'd grown (usually a lot; I finally topped out at six-foot-six). I spent many pleasant afternoons there, sitting and reading the comics and SF magazines. The only things I have ever stolen in my life were SF paperbacks, but I never shoplifted from Elmer. Not even the SF monkey on my back could have driven me that low . . . and besides, I was far from sure Elmer wouldn't hear me slipping the book into my jeans. He was
that
good.
Corsicana was my refuge from the miseries of the Gulf Coast when I was growing up. I spent large parts of my summers there, and my family did the four-hour driveâone way; that's nothing in Texasâat least one weekend a month, usually
two. It was paradise for a small boy. There was a park with a dozen weird, zany, one-of-a-kind pieces of play equipment made entirely of rusty iron and splintery wood that must have been designed by a mad child-hating engineer. Just looking at them would make a personal injury attorney drool like a Pavlov dog. Any one of them could pinch off a finger in a second. I
loved
playing on those things. Last time I was back it was all gone, replaced by soft, harmless plastic stuff. Ralph Nader had come to Corsicana . . . and
ruined
it. I swear, this generation is a bunch of fraidy-cats.
But the best thing by far about Corsicana was Granddaddy's store. It was a five-and-ten, part of the chain called Duke & Ayres, which you've probably not heard of unless you're from Texas. It was like Woolworth's, only smaller and cheaper. It was long and narrow with a high tin ceiling and only two aisles between the wooden counters. The female sales force would stand behind the counters and wait on you.
There were newfangled fluorescent fixtures hanging from the ceiling, which you had to turn on individually. I used to sit on Granddaddy's shoulders and pull the strings as he took me down one aisle and up the other. After five minutes of flickering, we had light. When I got big enough I ran down the aisles every morning at seven, jumping up to pull them. In the summer there were ceiling fans to turn on, too.
Upstairs wasn't used, and it would have been a good setting for a Stephen King story. It was a series of rooms connected in no logical way that had at one time been professional offices. Probably back in the oil boom, the twenties. Corsicana had been bigger then. Now the second floor was used for storage, and in a five-and-ten that meant you could find anything up there.
Anything
. There were old dental chairs with blood still drying on the spit sinks. There were heaps of old magazines and newspapers, metal greeting card racks, piles of postcards and glass and a glass cutting table, old clothes from the turn of the century, acres of cobwebs. It all smelled of spiders and mouse turds, must, mold, mildew, and dry rot. There were dust bunnies the size of Bengal tigers. There was no lighting, and we deemed it “no fair” to bring a flashlight. In short, a paradise for children.
Most of all, there were the mannequins. Some were full-sized, bald, and naked (and sexless, of course; no nipples on the breasts in those days). A few had clothes. They
all
moved there in the darkness when you turned your back. If that wasn't good enough, there were the body parts. Boxes overflowing with severed arms, legs, heads, and torsos. You could put them together, you could take them apart, violently. You can forget your FAO Schwartz and your kindergarten storytime. That attic was the place to come up with stories, and me and my friends came up with ones that would curl Dr. Frankenstein's toes.
Granddaddy sold just about everything in that store, and at the cheapest prices in town. A large part of his customer base was the Negro population, who literally lived
on the other side of the tracks, so I knew a lot more black people than your typical Texas white boy of that day and age. And every year he outsold the much larger local Woolworth's and Newberry's. He sold more eyeglasses than the optometrist, Dr. Jungermann. There was a candy counter with fifty kinds of tooth poison heaped up in big vertical glass cases. I was allowed to sample anything I wanted, and later helped scoop it out for sale by the pennyworth. There was a long toy counter. I spent most of my time on the floor back there, the salesladies stepping over me as I performed the critical, vital, exacting job of product testing, making sure each item was truly play-worthy. Nasty work, but somebody's got to do it. I was also in charge of quality control. See, if something was broken in shipping Granddaddy noted the fact, informed the manufacturer so he wouldn't have to pay for it . . . and then gave it to me or my sisters. Broken? Big deal. It was going to be trashed by us playing
hard
with it soon enough anyway, so who cared if it started off slightly chipped? Christmas morning at Granddaddy's could rival the displays at Neiman's in Dallas, that's how much broken stuff we got.
None of this except the part about Elmer has anything to do with the story that follows, but I just couldn't turn this book in without mentioning Corsicana.
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I could be mistaken, but I think Tom Disch may have used the following story, “The Persistence of Vision,” as a case in point of Labor Day Group machinations or whatever to win a Hugo Award. If so, it worked. And if so, so be it. I am more proud of this story than of anything I have written before or since. Yet, as I have heard some authors say before, I don't feel entirely responsible for it. I can pinpoint the source: a newspaper story about a generation of children growing up blind and deaf because their mothers contracted rubella while pregnant. A tremendous bump in the population of deaf-mutes was on its way, much like the Baby Boom, and there simply weren't enough people around who could cope with their special needs. I don't know what became of themâI suspect that most of them managed to do a lot in spite of their handicaps, because the human animal is an almost infinitely adaptable thingâbut their plight inspired this story. Then it more or less wrote itself, and by the end I was crying, and I didn't know why. Frankly, I had no idea where it came from, but I'd like to do it again, every night.
I have had more response to this story, both in letters and in person, than to anything else I ever wrote. It's one of those things of which people say, “It changed my life.” I can't tell you how great that makes me feel. It was written during the time of the growth of the disability rights movement, before there were parking places and special rest room stalls for the handicapped. Many, but by no means all, of the people who thanked me for writing it were disabled. It seems to touch people deeply.
I hope it touches you.
THE PERSISTENCE OF VISION
IT WAS THE year of the fourth non-depression. I had recently joined the ranks of the unemployed. The President had told me that I had nothing to fear but fear itself. I took him at his word, for once, and set out to backpack to California.
I was not the only one. The world's economy had been writhing like a snake on a hot griddle for the last twenty years, since the early seventies. We were in a boom-and-bust cycle that seemed to have no end. It had wiped out the sense of security the nation had so painfully won in the golden years after the thirties. People were accustomed to the fact that they could be rich one year and on the breadlines the next. I was on the breadlines in '81, and again in '88. This time I decided to use my freedom from the time clock to see the world. I had ideas of stowing away to Japan. I was forty-seven years old and might not get another chance to be irresponsible.
This was in late summer of the year. Sticking out my thumb along the interstate, I could easily forget that there were food riots back in Chicago. I slept at night on top of my bedroll and saw stars and listened to crickets.
I must have walked most of the way from Chicago to Des Moines. My feet toughened up after a few days of awful blisters. The rides were scarce, partly competition from other hitchhikers and partly the times we were living in. The locals were none too anxious to give rides to city people, who they had heard were mostly a bunch of hunger-crazed potential mass murderers. I got roughed up once and told never to return to Sheffield, Illinois.
But I gradually learned the knack of living on the road. I had started with a small supply of canned goods from the welfare and by the time they ran out, I had found that it was possible to work for a meal at many of the farmhouses along the way.
Some of it was hard work, some of it was only a token from people with a deeply ingrained sense that nothing should come for free. A few meals were gratis, at the family table, with grandchildren sitting around while grandpa or grandma told oft-repeated tales of what it had been like in the Big One back in '29, when people had not been afraid to help a fellow out when he was down on his luck. I found that the older the person, the more likely I was to get a sympathetic ear. One of the many tricks you learn. And most older people will give you anything if you'll only sit and listen to them. I got very good at it.
The rides began to pick up west of Des Moines, then got bad again as I neared the refugee camps bordering the China Strip. This was only five years after the disaster, remember, when the Omaha nuclear reactor melted down and a hot mass of uranium and plutonium began eating its way into the earth, headed for China, spreading a band of radioactivity six hundred kilometers downwind. Most of Kansas City, Missouri, was still living in plywood and sheet-metal shantytowns till the city was rendered habitable again.
The refugees were a tragic group. The initial solidarity people show after a great disaster had long since faded into the lethargy and disillusionment of the displaced person. Many of them would be in and out of hospitals for the rest of their lives. To make it worse, the local people hated them, feared them, would not associate with them. They were modern pariahs, unclean. Their children were shunned. Each camp had only a number to identify it, but the local populace called them all Geigertowns.
I made a long detour to Little Rock to avoid crossing the Strip, though it was safe now as long as you didn't linger. I was issued a pariah's badge by the National Guardâa dosimeterâand wandered from one Geigertown to the next. The people were pitifully friendly once I made the first move, and I always slept indoors. The food was free at the community messes.
Once at Little Rock, I found that the aversion to picking up strangersâwho might be tainted with “radiation disease”âdropped off, and I quickly moved across Arkansas, Oklahoma, and Texas. I worked a little here and there, but many of the rides were long. What I saw of Texas was through a car window.
I was a little tired of that by the time I reached New Mexico. I decided to do some more walking. By then I was less interested in California than in the trip itself.
I left the roads and went cross-country where there were no fences to stop me. I found that it wasn't easy, even in New Mexico, to get far from signs of civilization.
Taos was the center, back in the '60's, of cultural experiments in alternative living. Many communes and cooperatives were set up in the surrounding hills during that time. Most of them fell apart in a few months or years, but a few survived. In later years, any group with a new theory of living and a yen to try it out seemed to gravitate to that part of New Mexico. As a result, the land was dotted with ramshackle windmills, solar heating panels, geodesic domes, group marriages, nudists, philosophers, theoreticians, messiahs, hermits, and more than a few just plain nuts.
Taos was great. I could drop into most of the communes and stay for a day or a week, eating organic rice and beans and drinking goat's milk. When I got tired of one, a few hours' walk in any direction would bring me to another. There, I might be offered a night of prayer and chanting or a ritualistic orgy. Some of the groups had spotless barns with automatic milkers for the herds of cows. Others didn't even have latrines; they just squatted. In some, the members dressed like nuns, or Quakers in early Pennsylvania. Elsewhere, they went nude and shaved all their body hair and painted themselves purple. There were all-male and all-female groups. I was urged to stay at most of the former; at the latter, the responses ranged from a bed for the night and good conversation to being met at a barbed-wire fence with a shotgun.
I tried not to make judgments. These people were doing something important, all of them. They were testing ways whereby people didn't have to live in Chicago. That was a wonder to me. I had thought Chicago was inevitable, like diarrhea.
This is not to say they were all successful. Some made Chicago look like Shangri-La. There was one group who seemed to feel that getting back to nature consisted of sleeping in pigshit and eating food a buzzard wouldn't touch. Many were obviously doomed. They would leave behind a group of empty hovels and the memory of cholera.
So the place wasn't paradise, not by a long way. But there were successes. One or two had been there since '63 or '64 and were raising their third generation. I was disappointed to see that most of these were the ones that departed least from established norms of behavior, though some of the differences could be startling. I suppose the most radical experiments are the least likely to bear fruit.
I stayed through the winter. No one was surprised to see me a second time. It seems that many people came to Taos and shopped around. I seldom stayed more than three weeks at any one place, and always pulled my weight. I made many friends and picked up skills that would serve me if I stayed off the roads. I toyed with the idea of staying at one of them forever. When I couldn't make up my mind, I was advised that there was no hurry. I could go to California and return. They seemed sure I would.