DO NOT READ THIS BOOK

I don’t think I was supposed to read “The Mad Man.” Someone told me that Samuel R. Delany was a major sci-fi philosopher and writer so I bought a second-hand copy of this one of his works by mail. Once I spend money on a book (I think it cost a $1), I read it. The beginning, a “proem” about a huge obscene roc/griffin monster, was wild and impressive. The rest was a little hard for nice ladies to relate to. I’m not recommending this book.

Luckily some parts of my life have not been nice. In the nineties I lived in a decrepit apartment in Portland. There were three of us in the building who were or had been ministers. Me; a divorced guy with teenaged kids who lived in a basement studio; and up on the top back corner a black guy, not unlike Andre Braugher. Bald. Intelligent. His apartment had a hole in the ceiling/roof big enough for a vampire to fly out of at night. He told me about it (I tried to be friends with him) and I tried to get a city inspector to take a look, but the occupant wouldn’t open up. This third minister had a special ministry for people with AIDS. I still have his card in my Rolodex, but I doubt he still exists. A sweet little old white lady would come to drive him to church on Sundays. He didn’t have a car. He was civil but not friendly.

When he left, the manager of the apartments was outraged at the horrendous mess -- not the hole in the ceiling, but the stinking trash bags of beer cans and takeout boxes stacked to the ceiling that crammed the kitchen and in the front room a huge avalanche of AIDS materials: books, curriculums, handouts. On top of the four-foot-high heap was an upside-down emerald green velvet Victorian settee -- a beautiful thing. Probably a gift from a little old lady. The manager raved, “This guy had to be insane! What does this mean? How could he do this?”

I said, “He was one helluva mad man.” Double meaning.

The trashed apartments in this book are not just a mess. They are also full of excretions of every male human kind. From the description I would say I saw (and smelled) two places like that in my career as an animal control officer. One was a house inhabited by more than sixty chihuahua mixes and one old lady. There was a three inch layer of dog shit on top of everything, which included a lot of boxes of Salvation Army clothing. In the end they bulldozed the house and burned it. The other was a house where a young woman who had nine Great Danes had to let them go in and out the window because the door was blocked by a layer of shit six inches thick. The guy who contracted to remove it took out four pickup loads. I’m saying this book is supposed to be fantasy, but maybe not.

People just underestimate how easy it is, once such things get out of hand, to get used to it. But that’s not quite what this book is about: it’s about street people, abandoned, repellent, rejected, and yet somehow able to form bonds among each other. But there’s more to it than that and probably someone will tell me about it.

The MAIN thing I get is a kind of riff that might be only my own: the preoccupation of high-flown literary academics with the down and out. We three ministers in the apartment building, who hardly knew each other, were of the same type: liberal by principle, academic by preparation for the ministry, and do-gooders as justification. There’s a kind of symbiosis between the theories and the realities. It’s almost like crime fiction, except that for that one needs a head for plot, some narrative skills, and so on. A theological education is more like philosophy. Why people do stuff, what will redeem them. Any of the three of us could have been the main narrator of this fat novel, who is dedicated to investigating the work and death of an older philosopher, but is captured by his low life. None of us would have gone to these lengths. I THINK. (I'm prevented by gender.) It was the dawn of the AIDS danger, but the guys in this book were more in danger of dying of e. coli or hypothermia from being soaked with various substances.

The great advantage of buying a used book is that someone already made notes that are often very helpful. (The disadvantage of a used book is that this one smelled like pee and I had to spray it with “Pet Stain and Odor Remover” to tolerate it at all.) An educated guy with a ballpoint pen had drawn a line alongside the notable paragraphs. He wrote neat remarks like: “NB: not only rel to rev -- to norema’s revelation & mirror -- strat -- also a new angle on waste -- def where ‘chaos’ etc. comes in now.” The reference escapes me. I did catch another one about Heraclitus though. And I rather liked a quote on in the inside of the back cover: “Why If You Must be a Savage You Should Be a Noble One.” (It might be a title.)

I’m not sure these guys quite qualify as noble savages. Neither have I figured out the meaning of the Old Poet, who was a female in a wheelchair living at Big Sur -- a friend, scholar, and preserver of manuscripts by the philosopher/poet we never quite know much about. The Old Poet is white. (Race winds in and out. Delany is black.) She seems to be a person of privilege and status in the old-fashioned academic world, whereas the narrator is one of the great mass of people who have done all the work for their Ph.D. except their thesis.

Delany himself says explicitly that the book is not about homelessness or it would be far harsher. (There are no winter scenes.) He says, “It is quite sobering to think that the Great American Novel to come will have to be so little to do with the “American Dream” but will have to be far nearer a contemporary Les Miserables.” This was 1994. Was “Les Miz” on Broadway then? The book ends with a serious (seroconversion) medical warning about AIDS, dated 1987, originally printed in “The Lancet.”

Is it better or worse that now the misery books are on an electronic device that will serve up photos, video interviews, relevant music (what is the relevant music for AIDS?), movie clips, and maybe a link to “thebody.com?” The male liberal intellectuals are still endlessly curious and intent on slumming. There probably really are street guys out there who are a cross between Paul Bunyan and Peter Lorre, as envisioned by Grace Metalious. If they can get access to the meds they need by now.

Somehow, the most realistic and convincing figure is that taurine gargoyle crouched, reeking, glinting of metal, scaled and feathered, tufted and spiked, too obscene for me to describe exactly here. Oddly familiar to some of us. Pogo, who knew his swamp creatures, would recognize it.