David Gerrold - [SS] The Equally Strange Reappearance of David Gerrold

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The Equally Strange Reappearance of David Gerrold

by David Gerrold

When last we heard from Mr. Gerrold (as printed in the Jan. 2007 issue), Mr. G.

was very vague about his whereabouts, perhaps with good reason. Many people

were concerned, especially those of us who were hoping to get passes to the

premiere of the film adaptation of The Martian Child. Fortunately, our worries

have been allayed by this missive:

* * * *

Dear Gordon,

I got home late last night to find a stack of frantic e-mails from you and a

dozen other people. When I finally recharged my cell phone, there were thirty voice

messages and at least that number of text messages.

I’m very, very sorry, Gordon. I apologize profusely for worrying you and

everybody else. I don’t know how I’ll ever make amends, but I’ll do my best. The

only thing I can think to say is that I must have been in a very weird state of mind

when I wrote that ... well, whatever it was I wrote. Maybe I should excuse it by

saying that when I wrote it I was off my meds, except I’m not on any meds. Well,

maybe I should be. Something like Lithium or Prozac or one of those mood-altering

substances that would let me walk around with a glassy detached expression of

unfocused contentment. Whatever.

So here’s what happened.

Nothing.

We went out searching for the legendary green people of the northwest and

we found nothing at all. Well, not quite nothing. But mostly nothing.

I told you about my friends Dennis and Jay (not their real names) who put me

in touch with some other people, who finally put me in touch with some people

willing to go back and take a look at the area with me. Professional greenie-chasers, I

guess you could call them. Like those folks who go out looking for Sasquatch and

D. B. Cooper’s lost loot. So, that’s how I found myself headed back south in a

rented van with three guys I’d just met, and about whom I was already having my

usual paranoid doubts. The driver barely said a word the whole trip, he had a beard,

and he wore sunglasses and a knit beanie, and one of those silly utility kilts you see

grown men with beards wearing at sf conventions, so the only thing I can really say

about him is that he had exceptionally unattractive hairy legs. Other than that,

underneath all that, he could have been anyone, even the legendary Emmett Grogan.

The other two—well, that’s another short novel.

I’ll call them Bert and Ernie, not their real names—but still a pretty good

indicator of their personalities. Bert is large and bear-shaped, and almost as hairy. (I

guess nobody in the northwest does “manscaping.” That must be a Bravo channel

phenomenon.) He’s fueled mostly by beer and he’s appropriately keg-shaped; at

first glance you might think this guy is all fat—I made that mistake, but there’s a lot

of muscle under that bulk. He’s also very hirsute (I’ve always wanted to use that

word in a story). His long hair is starting to show gray, and it’s parted in the middle;

not a good look for him, but I doubt he cares. His beard reaches mid-chest; it’s also

going gray. In personality, he has an H. L. Mencken sensibility, but without the

anti-Semitism. He’s an equal opportunity cynic; not bitter, just skeptical of

everything, even with proof. Why he believes in the green people of the northwest

enough to go on a snipe hunt like this remains an unanswered question, but his

determination kept us going for the full five days.

Ernie, on the other hand, is tall and lanky. He didn’t look like he had enough

meat on his bones to be a decent meal for the buzzards that might end up picking at

our corpses; but he remained indefatigable and he carried a backpack nearly half his

weight, filled with some of the most remarkable surprises. Ernie is also a wealth of

astonishingly esoteric facts, the end result of all those days spent surfing the web.

Ask him about porn sometime. He has the evidence to prove that several of those

anatomical impossibilities we speculated upon in adolescence aren’t really

impossible after all. He gave me the URLs where I can see the actual photographs.

(I’ll send those later in a separate e-mail, after I check them out myself. The one

about the ladies with multiple breasts sounds promising. My guess is that it’s all

done with Photoshop, but who knows anymore?)

Bert and Ernie are a very odd pair. Where Bert is skeptical, Ernie is

enthusiastic—overabundantly so; often to the point where if I were a less patient

man, I might have been tempted to inflict bodily harm on him. Nobody is that happy

all the time. You want to talk about chemical imbalances...? Start with Ernie. On the

other hand, I have to admit, I wish I could bring that kind of unfailing, unflappable

enthusiasm to life.

Ernie is also an incorrigible punster. I tried not to incorrige him, but he’s a

self-starter; more evidence that the shortest distance between two puns is a straight

line. Obviously, at some point, he’d been seduced by the dork side of the farce.

And in case I hadn’t mentioned, Ernie is as black as the space of Hades. And that

should give you some idea of what Bert and I had to put up with for the better part

of a week. (Someday soon I’m going to lock Ernie into a room with Spider

Robinson and Esther Friesner and see which one of them survives. That is, if the

universe doesn’t implode first. Not with a bang, but a whimper of whipped gods.)

We drove down through Oregon, down into California, to that place I told

you about near the Lassen National Forest. I won’t be more specific about the

location, although it doesn’t really matter anymore. You’ll see why shortly. We

drove the better part of the day and finally arrived in mid-afternoon. Coming in from

the north, we didn’t see any signs identifying this area as a private hunting club, but I

recognized the barbed wire fences; there was nothing like them anywhere else in the

area. Driving slowly south, we also found the place where I’d cut the green boy

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