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Subject: {ASSM} Memoirs of a Life in the Future 1/7
Date: Fri, 25 Aug 2000 00:10:17 -0400
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Dinosaurian@deja-com
M/FFF+, cons, essentially true.
Memoirs of a Life in the Future.
I have read through the "Trinity Trilogy" and thought that I might put
in my own memories of science fiction conventions (and Trek cons, for a
while in there). My experience of them goes back further than his, since I
started attending cons in 1962, and further in the other direction since I
still attend a few each year - at one point I was a "circuit rider," making
everything on the east coast of the US and much of the midwest, filling in
loose weekends with club meetings in New York, New Jersey, Philadelphia,
Washington, and Baltimore.
On the other hand, the sexual side that I am willing to talk about ends
abruptly with my marriage. What I did in that way is more orthodox than
what Tom Trinity relates, but I hope also less repetitious.
My experience of conventions is also rather different than his, since I
have almost from the beginning worked on them, and got more involved as
time went on. I have been a dealer, worked on bid parties and con suites
and hospitality rooms, been at setup and teardown of art shows, planned and
been on program items, worked registration and operations and treasury,
and, especially, run film projectors and VCRs. For a while there I was the
projectionist at a lot of little Trek cons, weekend after weekend, just for
food lodging and transportation. I have also run a few conventions, but
that I don't want to remember as much.
In most cases, only first names are used here, and they are not
accurate. Some details are intentionally off; some others may not be
intentionally so. One minor incident either can't be as I recall it, or it
happened twice and I don't remember one of them. Strict chronology is
frequently violated to accommodate my train of thought.
The earliest of my days, sf cons were very different from now; or rather
in some ways they were the same but much more so. Now there is a
male-female imbalance, but in the early sixties the female population was
about 2% of the total. This had some interesting results. I am told by a
writer who was there that in the forties and fifties there were women who
came to conventions in order to sleep with as many writers as they could.
(He ended the story by asking if there still were. Sort of.) Marginally
before my time, in the year I started attending conventions, there was a
woman from California, living in New York, who got back west by writing
young single male fans and trading meals and a bus ticket to the next stop
on her route for sexual services.
The gender imbalance in fandom was reduced during the sixties, and the
usual explanation given for this is Star Trek. That was a factor, for
sure, but there was a jump in female attendance months before the show
aired.
I have always suspected that Heinlein's *Podkayne of Mars,* the first sf
novel aimed at teenage girls, was a factor. The majority opinion when it
was published, however, was that it was a bad book and an unrealistic
portrayal of teenage girls, with only women defending it.
Despite that, I think I met the first woman I went to bed with at my
first worldcon. I say I think so because neither of us had a clear memory
of a meeting but we were at the same party at least once and a photo shows
us a few feet apart at the banquet. I worked in the hospitality suite
there.
She was then maybe two months married and there with her husband. Three
months later her husband left her without an explanation or a forwarding
address. Anne, I'll call her, moved back in with her family and started
the college courses she had postponed because of her marriage and intended
children. (There were none, luckily.) The next spring she discovered that
her absent husband was a secret bisexual. She found him in 1970 in
Washington state, and served him divorce papers. She located him through a
friend in St. Louis who was better at it than her lawyer.
In any event, in the next few years I worked, took college course,
avoided being drafted, and so on. I was scheduled for my draft physical on
a Monday morning after a convention, so I stayed up as much as I could and
wore myself out to be in the worst possible shape for it -- all wasted when
they gave me a 1-Y for something I thought trivial. (The 1-Y
classification, for those who don't remember it, meant they would have to
change the requirements to draft me, so I wasn't *really* off the hook.)
I was involved with a worldcon bid, which meant going to more cons than
I would have otherwise, and I may well have run into Anne at those.
Certainly she flirted with me at the 1966 Lunacon, since she recalled it,
though I can't. Well, I wasn't feeling too good that weekend. The
worldcon that year I ran a dealer table and worked on the masquerade --
helping people on and off the stairs to the stage, and in one memorable
case lifting a woman bodily up because she could not move in her
paper-mache costume, just roll on a dolly.
That summer I got a newsletter from Anne, about the setting up of a
special interest group, not really related to science fiction but I won't
identify the group further because some might recognize it and therefore
her. She got my address from a letter I had published on the subject. In
November of that year, I stayed at a big old house in Philadelphia owned by
a couple who liked to have people there during the annual sf convention in
the town. They had, I don't know, five bedrooms and a couple of folk in
the barn, and somebody on a couch at least one night. Anne was there
sharing a bed with another woman, I was there in a room with two other men
(one on the floor) and we got talking. Actually, as people drifted off to
sleep, we did more than that. We volunteered to stay by the front door
until 1 a.m. to let people in coming back from parties. What began as
conversation slid into kissing, to serious kissing, to fondling, to
petting.
My hand got to know her breasts quite well, then went under the elastic
of her panties, and I had brought her to orgasm twice with my fingers when
she said in a hoarse voice some words that sounded wonderful to me: "I want
very much to have you in me, you know that, don't you?"
But we didn't. Besides the fact that someone might knock at the door at
any moment, there was no place in that house that was not occupied. Not
even the room we were in, since the other couch had a fellow on it who had
passed out and not gone up to the bed (or half-bed) waiting for him. But I
did start corresponding with her, and the letters got in their way almost
as intense as our actions that night on the couch. But it wasn't enough,
and in the latter part of December I called up Lys Turoff, who I knew ran
around with Anne, and asked for Anne's phone number. (That name is the
right one. That sweet woman was dead of a heart attack before she was 25,
months after the birth of her first child, and can't be harmed by being
remembered, even here.)
I talked to Anne and we set up a meeting for the weekend of New Year's
Eve. I made a reservation at the Hotel New Yorker, which has been
refurbished twice since, I believe, and is still shabbier than it was that
weekend -- and about ten times as expensive. I arrived on Friday morning
and waited in the lobby for Anne. She came at noon in what was probably a
new dress and was definitely a fresh hairdo.
I checked in and we went to the room to talk for a while before setting
out anywhere. Anne was surprised and a little overwhelmed that I had
registered us as Mr. and Mrs., though it seemed to me to be an obvious
thing to do, in avoiding any problems in having her come and go over the
weekend. We talked for hours, and eventually got into some physical
activity.
I do not know if Anne had not considered the possibility that we might
continue with what we had done on that couch in Philadelphia, and go beyond
it to completion (or as she put it "to consummate the relationship"), but
she had not brought any sort of contraceptive. Nor had I, so we restricted
ourselves to petting that afternoon. She seemed to have no hesitation
about doing anything, but had just not considered preparing for it. We
walked around later in the afternoon, had dinner and went to a movie, and
around midnight I took her home and met her parents.
I was up on Saturday morning and bought condoms for the first time in my
life. Anne met me at noon again and in the afternoon we tried to use them.
She was concerned about her hairdo, so she tried getting on top, but
complained that while I was certainly big enough, she really couldn't feel
much of me through the latex, and it didn't feel right. In the evening we
went to another restaurant, where I drank champagne for the first time and
compared it unfavorably to the flower wines my father made.
About a year before the Washington sf club had gone through an inventory
of its library and prominent among the names of borrowers was that of a man
who had apparently taken the books with him when he moved to New York
nearly ten years before. We were going to a New Year's Eve party at his
apartment that night, and I planned to look over his shelves for the
missing titles. Anne did not have much to do with him, but was a friend of
his second wife, who left him a few years later. None of the books were
there. Another New Yorker reported buying some from him right after he
moved up -- he wondered about the club stamp.
On Sunday morning Anne met me at ten AM and we went to a drugstore where
I gave her money to buy some contraceptive jelly. And in the afternoon,
not long before I checked out and returned home on a train, I wrapped her
head completely in toilet paper to protect the hairdo, and we had sex to
completion.
As we did I think each of the next six weekends, until Balticon where we
broke up.
My breakup with Anne I will keep to the next part, since it was really
directly connected to it. But I stayed on good terms with her and indeed
saw more of her in the time I lived in New York than during our affair. I
last saw her a couple of years ago.
Anne, both before and after the episode with me, had a Jewish lawyer
named Robert, from a rather well-off family, anxious to marry her. But she
was never interested.
It is odd to think that she never did marry again. Certainly I have
seen less likely women do so. I am rather sure that she was involved with
at least two other men after me, and a third one claimed to have slept with
her but I don't believe him.
Why doubt it? I'll tell you. Because he told me when he said it
happened.
It was a not infrequent thing for some of us in NYC fandom to go in
groups to movies or concerts. That particular night there was a Peter,
Paul and Mary concert out at Shea Stadium, and I was the one who bought the
tickets in advance by mail. Around six that night Anne called to tell me
that she wasn't feeling well and wouldn't be there. She had been buying
her own ticket but had also called her boyfriend of the time to tell him.
He couldn't find anyone on short notice but offered to pay me for her
ticket. I told him she had promised to take care of it. He did try
briefly to sell it at a discount outside, but the cops were arresting
scalpers and he got nervous. The concert was at eight, and I was home by
midnight or so. I called Anne (still living with her parents) to see if
her stomach was better, and talked to her then.
If the man who claimed to have screwed her was telling the truth, he
would have had to (since he was from out of town) pick her up at six, have
dinner somewhere, take her to a hotel, and get her back before midnight. I
don't believe that she would be moved around that fast. She did pay me for
the ticket, by the way.
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