"Gardner Dozois - Disciples" - читать интересную книгу автора (Dozois Gardner)

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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

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