"David Gerrold - [SS] The Equally Strange Reappearance of David Gerrold" - читать интересную книгу автора (Gerrold David)

with Robert L. Pirsig. Instead of coming back, he took a tramp steamer to the east
coast of Africa, worked his way north into India, and snuck into Tibet to study with
the lamas in the shadow of the Himalayas. Then he snuck out again. He went to the
secret islands off the coast of Sri Lanka where potheaded tourists smoked their
brains out all day and fucked little brown midgets pretending to be children all night.
After that, he spent six months doing penance, not speaking a word, sweeping floors
at the Buddhist monastery on Lantau Island (east of Hong Kong), in the shadow of
the giant statue of Buddha, 256 steps up the mountain.
He went to Alaska and lumberjacked his way down the coast, drove trucks
across Canadian ice roads to places that still don’t have names, then he studied a
little bit of engineering, dabbled in photography, taught himself programming, wrote
a key piece of a “gooey” operating system at a place he called Xerox Park, bought a
Corvette, slept his way up and down the left coast, and somewhere in all that, he
even invested in Apple and Microsoft when nobody knew what either of those
companies might eventually become—what he made on those investments almost
made up for what he lost on Commodore and WordStar. He said he’d worked on
three presidential campaigns. Bobby Kennedy, John Anderson, and Ross Perot.
Later, he charted his passages through life and went drumming with Iron John. After
that, he sailed with Greenpeace and while he wouldn’t go into the details, he implied
he’d had something to do with that Japanese whaler that sank mysteriously off the
coast of Alaska. While he was recovering from his injuries, he read slush for two of
the major sf magazines, he didn’t say which ones; he said there was a lot of money
to be made in sf publishing[1], if you knew the right people. But that was before the
Internet.
[Footnote 1: Stop laughing, Gordon! That’s what he said. —DG]
Oh yeah, and here’s the part I found hard to believe. He said that he’d once
had dinner at Heinlein’s house—the round one in Bonny Doon. Then he hopped on
his hog and drove south all night to be an extra in the first Star Trek movie that was
filming its big crew scene the next day. Yes, he really was in the movie. I checked it
out later, he’s standing right behind the director’s wife—a lot thinner, no beard,
short hair, but that’s him. But the part about him having dinner with the
Heinleins—no. I couldn’t imagine Ginny Heinlein ever letting this man over her
threshold. It’s not true that she met unwelcome guests with a shotgun, but I never
doubted that she could have if she’d wanted to.
He didn’t say all that in one long speech, I’ve just compiled the parts that I
remember from the whole five days. And I might have mixed up the order, he wasn’t
specific. Most of his conversations had a disjointed quality, as if he was running
multiple tracks of thought at the same time. He once started to tell me that he might
have the adult form of ADHD[2], but he got distracted before he finished. But he
was very clear about it. He knew everything there was to know about everything he
knew—and that included the green people we were looking for.
[Footnote 2: Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder]
Apparently, sightings of green people had been recorded here in the northwest
as early as the late 1800s, but in those days, they were thought to be Indian spirits.
Some of the immigrants from the old world called them druids or nymphs or sprites.
They also showed up as elves and occasionally leprechauns. But by the thirties, they
were simply called the people of the forest. Sometime in the early fifties, or the late
fifties, or the early sixties, hard to say, Bert wasn’t clear, about the time the beats
and the bohemians and the hippies started filtering north, that’s when the idea began
that the green people were something else, like a lost tribe, or a commune, or