"You know you're really lost," Ben said, "when you find yourself on the Amelia Earhart Expressway."
We were on our way to the New Orleans Science Fiction and Fantasy Festival, and fortunately next to a Taco Bell we found two officers who were able to give us directions. We had a spendid repast at the Old N'awlins Cookery, although later I flipped through a tourist magazine and found we could have gone to Arnaud's.
"Aw, look, "I told Ben, "we could have eaten at Arnaud's."
"Yeah," he said, "but those damn Folger's people are always dropping in."
Anyway, I missed the gang going out for lunch Sunday, so I wandered over to the room where Pat Cadigan was supposed to be reading.The only other person who was there, well, besides Pat, was Howard Waldrop, whose book Howard Who? I had to get autographed anyway. So while we waited, I tried complimenting Pat, and probably made a fool of myself by talking about her voice when I meant her incredible ear for dialogue. After allowing a decent interval for anyone to show up (memo to the future: don't schedule Pat opposite lunch), the three of us trucked down to the coffee shop, and sat around with Walter Jon Williams & Becky Cartwright & Richard Kadrey & Pat Murphy (the other Pat) & Ellen Datlow, Cadigan's roommate for the weekend.
Pat Cadigan wanted to tell about a dream she'd just had. "It was like I was in the middle of an old-fashioned movie. There were these two men pursuing me. One was young and ingenuous, and the other was tall and dark and sophisticated...and bad for me. So I spent the whole dream bouncing back and forth between these two guys. Then Ellen's alarm went off and woke me up..."
"Maybe Ellen was having the same dream!"
"When you woke up, did you see two guys sneaking out of the room?"
"I had this dream," said Walter, "Where the Nazis were rounding up everyone in our neighborhood and sending them to Auschwitz. I kept trying to tell people what was going on, but everyone was like this sweet old lady on the block, no one believed anything was going to happen to them. So they started hitting everyone on my street, and I ran into the closet and hid behind the clothes..."
"Good idea, Walter. Nazis never think to look behind clothes."
"Yeah, well, my dad spotted me right off. So then I ran into the bathroom and got into the bathtub, pulled the fire curtain shut and lay down. Then it was like every soldier in the Germany army had to come in and take a piss in my bathroom. At first, I tried pretending I was dead. You know, dead body lying in a bathtub, not exactly out of these guys' experience. Finally, though, they rounded me up and tossed me in a cattle car. And I found myself sitting right next to the same old lady. I told her what was going to happen to us, and she said, 'Oh, no, they're only sending us to resettlement camps. Everything's going to be all right.' So I beat the shit out of her. This was the only good part of the dream, getting to beat up this old lady. And I told her, 'There will be plenty more opportunities to beat you up before they kill us.' Then a gunshot woke me up."
"What, a real gunshot?"
"Yeah, someone shooting at garbage cans or something."
"I'll tell you the dreams that always get to me," said Howard. "It's where you're with some friend of yours, who's died. And you're having a real great time, fishing or something, but you want to shake them and yell at them--'You're dead!' And then you wake up like..." Here Howard pantomimed his heart pounding fit to leap out of his chest.
"I haven't had dreams like that."
"You will," said Howard.
"I had a dream," said Pat Murphy, "where all the air raid sirens went off, and we went down into my dad's basement. Only it obviously wasn't really the basement, because there weren't any walls, it was all venetian blinds, and I could see the fireball through them."
"I grew up on an Air Force base," said Richard K., "and we used to have drills to evacuate the school in the event of a nuclear attack.They figured we'd have twenty minutes, and that was just enough time to get home so we could fry with our parents."
"I asked my parents," said Walter, "what we were going to do if the bombs came over. And my dad said we were going to go out on the front lawn, wait for the bomb to drop, and die. Well, the hell with this! So I became a junior survivalist. I went out and dug a pit in the woods to survive the fireball in--never occurred to me that the woods would burn up, too. And I learned how to make traps and catch and eat rabbits..."
"Rabbits would burn too, Walter."
"I've had lots of dreams about seeing mushroom clouds," said Richard K. "Always kind of wanted to see one, I guess."
"Tornadoes for me," I said. "I grew up on an air base in Indiana, so they had tornado drills for us instead of a-bomb drills. I have all these dreams where I'm finally getting to see a tornado. Wish-fulfillment, really. My parents live in Mobile, and during Hurricane Frederick they heard a couple pass right over the house., and I envy them even that. I could go later and look at where one cut the Safeway store right in half, touched down and walked right through the middle front to back, but it's not the same."
“Saw a waterspout once," said Richard K., "while I was boating, and it's a very unreal sort of thing. I kept thinking, okay, where are the special effects guys..."
“Dust devils," said Howard."Those things can get pretty big..."
“Yeah," said Walter, "they've had one hit Albuquerque that was three, four miles across..."
“Once in Oklahoma," said Howard, "got one that was thirty-five miles across. Inside, it's like you're in a dust storm, but from outside..."
Eventually, it was time for Howard to give his reading. I managed to snag the gang on the way and convince them that a Howard Waldrop reading is a must-see, even if Howard is sick as a dog, as he was that weekend. The audience included at least half of the writers at the con and only a handful of us mere attendees. Howard's story was one he'd been commissioned to write for a theme anthology on the Tarot; they asked Howard to write about The Fool, and he obliged with a story involving two famous literary simpletons. We felt very smug and self-congratulatory about placing the references.
Michele noted, however, that Howard did not look at all like a man who wrote such incredible stories.
“He looks like a guy who would tell you, 'Yeah. I was in the Army.'"
Originally published in ConDiablo (Westercon 49) Progress Report #3