Version 1.0 dtd 040300 Disciples Gardner Dozois 1 was roaming the post-midnight halls of a science fiction convention hotel not long ago, trying to find a party still functional, when I heard great waves of laughter filtering through a locked door. I knocked and was informed that I had stumbled on the "bad joke" party; to gain admission you had to tell a joke bad enough to elicit universal groans. 1 did dredge one out of childhood memories, and entered to find-of course-Gardner Dozois, the party's perpetrator, surrounded by dozens of adoring science fiction fans. The party turned out to be one of the most entertaining times I've ever had, because although the rest of us did tell a joke now and then, it was mainly The Gardner Dozois Show, tale after hilarious tale emerging from the shaggy heap enthroned in the corner. Gardner is a natural-born storyteller, with great gifts of gesture, accent, timing. He can hypnotize a crowd in .seconds and keep them laughing for hours. But the aforementioned Buchwald Paradox is very much at work here: Gardner's writing is anything but jolly: his work is predominantly concerned with the dark face of life, with tragedy and pathos. His writing is a unique brand of gritty naturalism, done with terrible accuracy but also compassion and grace. As witness this tale of Nicky the Horse. Nicky the Horse was a thin, weasely-looking man with long, dirty black hair that hung down either side of his face in greasy ropes, like inkmarks against the pallor of his skin. He was clean-shaven and hollow-cheeked, and had a thin but rubbery lower lip upon which his small yellowed teeth were forever biting, seizing the lip suddenly and worrying it, like a terrier seizing a rat. He wore a grimy purple sweater under a torn tan jacket enough sizes too small to look like something an organ grinder's monkey might wear, one pocket torn nearly off and both elbows worn through. Thrift-store jeans and a ratty pair of sneakers he'd once found in a garbage can behind the YMCA completed his wardrobe. No underwear. A crucifix gleamed around his neck, stainless steel coated to look like silver. Track marks, fading now, ran down both his arms, across his stomach, down his thighs, but he'd been off the junk for months; he was down to an occasional Red Devil, supplemented by the nightly quart of cheap chianti he consumed as he lay in the dark on his bare mattress at the Lord house, a third-floor loft in a converted industrial warehouse squeezed between a package store and a Rite-Aid. He had just scavenged some two-day-old doughnuts from a pile of boxes behind a doughnut store on Broad Street, and bought a paper container of coffee from a Greek delicatessen where the counterman (another aging hippie, faded flower tattos still visible under the bristly black hair on his arms) usually knocked a nickel or two off the price for old times' sake. Now he was sitting on the white marble steps of an old brownstone row house, eating his breakfast. His breath steamed in the chill morning air. Even sitting still, he was in constant motion: his fingers drumming, his feet shuffling, his eyes flicking nervously back and forth as one thing or another-a car, some windblown trash, pigeons taking to the air-arrested and briefly held his attention; at such times his shoulders would momentarily hunch, as if he expected something to leap out at him. Across the street, a work crew was renovating another old brownstone, swarming over the building's partially stripped skeleton like carrion beetles; sometimes a cloud of plaster powder and brick dust would puff from the building's broken doorway, like foul air from a dying mouth. Winos and pimps and whores congregated on the corner, outside a flophouse hotel, their voices coming to Nicky thin and shrill over the rumbling and farting of traffic. Occasionally a group of med students would go by, or a girl with a dog. or a couple of Society Hill faggots in designer jeans and expensive turtlenecks, and Nicky would call out "Jesus loves you, man," usually to no more response than a nervous sideways glance. One faggot smirked knowingly at him, and a collegiate-jock type got a laugh out of his buddies by shouting back "You bet your ass he does, honey." A small, intense-looking woman with short-cropped hair gave him the finger. Another diesel dyke, Nicky thought resignedly. "Jesus loves you, man," he called after her, but she didn't look back. When his butt began to feel as if it had turned to stone, he got up from the cold stoop and started walking again, pausing only long enough to put a flyer for the Lordhouse on a lamppost, next to a sticker that said EAT THE RICH. He walked on, past a disco, a gay bookstore, a go-go bar, a boarded-up storefront with a sign that read LIVE NUDE MODELS, a pizza stand, slanting south and east now, through a trash-littered concrete park full of sleeping derelicts and arrogantly strutting pigeons-stopping now and then to panhandle and pass out leaflets, drifting on again. He'd been up to Reading Terminal early that morning, hoping to catch the shoppers who came in from the suburbs on commuter trains, but the Hairy Krishnaites had been there already, out in force in front of the station, and he didn't like to compete with other panhandlers, particularly fucking groups of them with fucking bongos. The Krishnaites made him nervous anyway-with their razor-shaved pates and their air of panting, puppyish eagerness, they always reminded him of ROTC second lieutenants, fresh out of basic training. Once, in front of the Bellevue-Stratford, he'd seen a fight between a Krishnaite and a Moonie, the two of them arguing louder and louder, toe to toe, until suddenly they were beating each other over the head with thick packets of devotional literature, the leaflets swirling loose around them like flocks of startled birds. He'd had to grin at that one, but some of the panhandling groups were mean, particularly the political groups, particularly the niggers. They'd kick your ass up between your shoulder blades if they caught you poaching on their turf; they'd have your balls for garters. No. you scored better if you worked alone. Always alone. He ended up on South Street, down toward the Two Street end, taking up a position between the Laundromat and the plant store. It was much too early for the trendy people to be out, the "artists," the night people, but they weren't such hot prospects anyway. It was Saturday, and that meant there were tourists out, in spite of the early hour, in spite of the fact that it had been threatening to snow all day; it was cold. yes, but not as cold as it had been the rest of the week, the sun was peeking sporadically out from behind banks of dirty gray clouds, and maybe this would be the only halfway decent day left before winter really set in. No, they were here all right, the tourists, strolling up and down through this hick Greenwich Village, peering into the quaint little stores, the boutiques, the head shops full of tourist-trap junk, the artsy bookstores, staring at the resident freaks as though they were on display at the zoo, relishing the occasional dangerous whiff of illicit smoke in the air, the loud blare of music that they wouldn't have tolerated for a moment at home. Of course, he wasn't the only one feeding on this rich stream of marks: there was a juggler outside of the steak- sandwich shop in the next block, a small jazz band-a xylophone, a bass, and an electric piano-in front of the Communist coffeehouse across the street, and, next to the upholsterer's, a fat man in a fur-lined parka who was tonelessly chanting "incense sticks check it out one dollar incense sticks check it out one dollar" without break or intonation. Such competition Nicky could deal with; in fact, he was contemptuous of it. "Do you have your house in order?" he said in a conversational but carrying voice, starting his own spiel, pushing leaflets at a businessman who ignored him, at a strolling young married couple who smiled but shook their heads, at a middle-aged housewife in clogs and a polka-dot kerchief, who took a flyer reflexively and then, a few paces away, stopped to peek at it surreptitiously. "Did you know the Lord is coming, man? The Lord is coming. Spare some change for the Lord's work?" This last remark shot at the housewife, who looked uneasily around and then suddenly thrust a quarter at him. She hurried away, clutching her Lordhouse flyer to her chest as if it were a baby the gypsies were after. Panhandling was an art, man, an art-and so, of course, of course, was the more important task of spreading the Lord's word. That was what really counted. Of course. Nevertheless, he brought more fucking change into the Lordhouse than any of the other converts who were out pounding the pavement every day, fucking-A, you better believe it. He'd always been a good panhandler, even before he'd seen the light, and what did it was making maximum use of your time. Knowing who to ask and who not to waste time on was the secret. College students, professional people, and young white male businessmen made the best marks-later, when the businessmen had aged into senior executives, the chances of their coming across went way down. Touristy types were good, straight suburbanites in the twenty-five-to-fifty age bracket, particularly a man out strolling with his wife. A man walking by himself was much more likely to give you something than a man walking in company with another man-faggots were sometimes an exception here. Conversely, women in pairs-especially prosperous hausfraus, although groups of teenage girls were pretty good too-were much more likely to give you change than were women walking by themselves; the housewife of a moment before had been an exception, but she had all the earmarks of someone who was just religious enough to feel guilty about not being more so. Brisk woman-executive types almost never ...
Januszek66