The Walls of Air
The Walls of Air
A lot of writers were scared of Lester Del Rey.
Del Rey Books was named, by the way, after his wife, the remarkable Judy-Lynn Del Rey, but Lester was the chief editor; he was the one I dealt with. He was about 4’10”, looked about a hundred years old (he was in his mid-sixties when I met him, 78 when he died in 1993), and had huge, crystal-blue eyes behind enormously thick coke-bottle lenses and long fingernails stained with nicotine. He gave the impression of a slightly demented wizard who had started to transform himself into a goat and then got distracted half-way.
I was terrified of him.
He was bar none the best story-doctor I’ve ever encountered. He could spot where a narrative was weak and immediately come up with a fix. The years I worked with him were the equivalent of a writing-class for which I got paid. I’d type my manuscript (being very careful to put up carbons the night before – a whole stack of little black-and-white paper sandwiches, ready for work the following day: that’s two sheets of paper with a piece of carbon-paper in between, for those of you who don’t remember what an actual typewriter was), and send it off to my agent, who would send it on to Lester (after she presumably had it photocopied, something that wasn’t all that easy to do in those days even if I’d had the money). It would come back in a thick brown envelope and it would be about a week before I’d have the nerve to open it, because Lester could be VERY caustic. His handwriting was tiny (about the size of 7-point type) and very neat, and I’d hyperventilate with stress for awhile and then re-write.
(By the way, I loved Lester).
I’d send the corrections back and then would get galley-proofs: the typeset story printed out as long, snake-like strips which would later be cut up to fit the actual pages. A galley page was about 2 ½ feet long, with a narrow line of typeset in the middle. That always made publication feel very close.
By this time I’d moved off the back porch and a block and a half down Seventh Street to the upper floor of an old 1920s craftsman bungalow, set in a big yard about three blocks from the railroad tracks that divided the University area of Riverside from downtown. At night I’d hear the trains go by. From the window of my workroom I could see them, when I’d be working during the day. I was still training in karate several nights a week. I could tell the house had been built in the 1920s because when I’d drive back from the dojo I could see, on the chimney which faced down 7th Street, an old-style anti-clockwise swastika built into the brickwork, as they used to do for good luck.
At this point also I got my first Pekinese, a little red-brown bitch (I use the term advisedly) whom I named Whiskey. The kitchen of the apartment was a narrow little galley with a door at one end, and I’d let her out onto the platform outside and she’d hop down the flight of wooden stairs, to wildly bark to protect the trash from the trash-trucks. When I’d bathe her (in the kitchen sink – I’d hold her by head and tail and run her back and forth under the faucet. This was before flea medications), I’d towel-dry her, and then she’d run frenziedly around and around the apartment, shaking herself wildly UNTIL I LEFT THE ROOM. Then she’d go lie down. When I came back in, she’d leap to her feet and run frenziedly around the apartment shaking herself again.
The woman next door had four dogs – a big mongrel named appropriately “Lug” and three chihuahuas – and her yard was separated from ours by a chain-link fence. Since THE way of establishing dominance for a dog is to poop on another dog’s territory, Whiskey would back herself up against the fence-wires and poop ON THEIR YARD while Lug and his ankle-biter minions stared in amazement: “How did she DO that?” Not the sharpest daggers in the armory.
Whiskey, by the way, was living proof that the legend of dogs being able to sense ghosts is not true in all cases. And at the time, I must have been totally psychically insensetive as well (although that seems to have changed, which is a story for much further down the line). A couple of years after I left that apartment, I learned that only a few years previously there had been a double shotgun-murder in my bedroom. So either I and Whiskey both were completely insensetive, or the doomed lovers had left no unfinished business behind them on the earth…
Which brings me (briefly) to the Haunted House on Seventh Street.
All the students who lived off-campus knew about the Haunted House on Seventh Street. It was a neighborhood of old houses that rented rooms to students, so a number of people I talked to had either lived in the place, or talked to people who had, and there was something DEFINITELY weird going on there. On the other hand, this WAS the 70s, and though the marijuana being smoked then was considerably milder (I am told – I gave the stuff up around 1980) than the hybridized weed common today, it was also cheaper then and some people smoked an AWFUL lot of it.
In any case, I never knew exactly which house it was, but I made inquiries before moving into both of the Seventh Street houses I occupied to make darned sure I didn’t stumble onto the place by mistake.
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