Samuel R. Delany - The Mad Man

Samuel R. Delany

ISBN 1-56333 193-4

TO

David Demchuk;

and once again

for Sam and Leonard.

The Mad Man is a work of fictionand fairly imaginative fiction at that. Nocharacter, major or minor, is intended to represent any actual person, livingor dead. (Correspondences are not only coincidental but preposterous.) Nor areany of its scenes laid anywhere representing actual establishments orinstitutions. Certain parks, commercial sites, churches, and city landmarks,mentioned as locations of minor offor on-stage actions, do exist (or have existed).But those mentions are only to lend verisimilitude to what the reader isexpected to take wholly as a pornotopic fantasy: a set of people, incidents,places, and relations among them that never happened and could not happen forany number of surely self-evident reasons.

But a second disclaimer is needed in sucha work as this: The Mad Man is not a book about safe sex. Rather it isspecifically a book about various sexual acts whose status as vectors of HIV contagionwe have no hard-edged knowledge of because the monitored studies that wouldgive statistical portraits of the relation between such acts and Seroconversion(from HIVto HIV+) have not been done. Reprinted as an appendix is the lastlarge-scale such study to be made widely and publicly available, back in 1987,in the British journal, The Lancet. The fact that this study dates fromas far back as it does, and the fact that anyone and everyone concerned withAIDS and AIDS education cannot today cite a dozen such studies, far moreup-to-date, using both women and men, covering a far wider range of specificsexual activities, is appalling, horrifying, and ultimately criminalgiven the350 thousand-odd cases of the dis-ease in this country and its continuing andgrowing devastation.

But the broad statistical studies withcareful monitoring have not been done. And the few small ones which have aregiven little or no attentionwhile vast amounts of hearsay are collected,tabu-lated, and presented as knowledge and fact.

A third disclaimer: The Mad Man isnot a book about the homeless of New Yorkor, indeed, of the country. No bookcould be which all-but-omits all scenes of winter and does not deal withindeed,focus onthe criminally inadequate attempts by the municipality to feed,clothe, and shelter these men, women, and children. Such a novel would have tobe substantially darker than this onewhich, I suspect, will be found quitedark enough. Indeed, it is sobering to think that the Great American Novel tocome will have so little to do with the famous American Dream but will haveto be far nearer a contemporary Les Mise rables.

SRD

B lack,raddled, roped with veins, it rose like a charred tallboy from snarled bronze.Below, the texture and color of overripe avocados, testicles hung like rocks.It sagged in the envelope of flesh that held it to the belly, almost as high asthe navels gnarled pit. A black cock on a hulking white man? A dogs dick on ahumongous buck? Only, beyond seven feet, it wasnt a man, though yellow hairtuft-ed the crevice beneath its thick and blocky arm. The head turned polishedcopper horns above the barrel chest, penny-colored nip-plessilver-dollarsizedghosted in wiry brass. The tongue slathered up to lave bright mucus fromthe taurine pad enveloping the nostrils, muzzle tusked nearer boar than bull.It breathed cold steam in winter-thin dawnlight. Its gut was heavy as some gonebeer-hounds, though muscle-ridged. The boulder of its fist opened, nailsgnawed back on fingers heavy as ax hafts and engrimed at nutty knuckles, at thecrowns rock-rough rims. Its other hands brass claws gleamed along scapularcurves, green with verdigris, where, like demonic plumbing, each erupted frombeneath cracked and thickened cuticle. Clawed fingers rose to scratch thescrotum, paused on the columnar sex, brushing the thickened under-conduittwice, thrice, and twice again. Above its ever-wet tuft, crisp and curling, thethick cuff thrust out, like a dogs, a slow inch of meat.

One creviced, callused, and engrimed footwas, anyway, human.

Where it stood, ice had formed under therocs claw, that, scaled in green was its other foot, on a leg feathered,ashen, ebon, and mis-shapen as a condors. Needles of moisture had frozen, glitteringover the park paths asphalt and on the rocks beside. Neither birds nor bats,but stretched on spines like an insects or a fishs, letting low, mottled sunthrough filigrees of veins in the leather, its wings stopped their sway, toquiverthirteen feet high.

It turned.

Hanging from the small of its back,covering the crevice between beast-broad buttocks, creased at the jointure,brown at the base but become, lower, thin as a cobra and armored with green,its tail hung to within an inch of the gray paving. The triple barb twitchedtwice left, once right, twice left, once right, beside its human heels soiledpilaster. Now the tail jerked aside, to let honking gases, then drop itscrumbling turd, black, grassand bone-rich, steaming on the frostwhile beforeits belly, urine arched, heavy, sudden, gold, to spill and splat, angrily onthe macadam. Unconcerned with where it slopped, first it reached back to maulits still-delivering sphincter, then to raise the thick man hand, swung inadvertentlythrough its stream, to its mouth, to enjoy its salts, the stench on itsfingers, gnaw at the wrecked nails with taurine teeth, blinking with goat-sliteyes (black crevices rising over corner-clotted crimson), while its waterscrawled under the iron rail at the paths edge, overflowed the cement, anddripped, boiling, bubbling, onto the Hudsons glass-green rush.

I do not have AIDS. I am surprised that Idont. I have had sex with men weekly, sometimes dailywithout condomssince myteens, though true, its been overwhelmingly ... no, more accurately itsbeensince 1980all oral, not anal. My adventures with homosexualitystarted in the early-middle seventies, in the mens room of the terminal on theisland side of the Staten Island Ferry: a guy at least thirty years older thanI, clearly scared to death someone might walk in, pulled his small,uncircumcised dick out of my mouth the moment he came, stuffed himself back inhis fly, leaving semen tracks on his sharkskin pants, grunted a perfunctory ...yeah, thanks, fingered through his red hair, and pushed out the door as abored policeman walked in. All right. He banged his club on the rusted bluejamb and blinked at me, a very tired man. You get out of here, too.

Because my father bucked what I oncethought the entire New York City Board of Education, when I excelled inelementary school, I was allowed to skip a couple of grades.

His family, my father intoned in thedrear office (wed just heard the psychological traumas and debilitatingmiseries and maladjustments befalling the child wrenched untimely from his peergroup), will take care of his socialization. You take care of his education.But I just hope you understand the miseries and maladjustments from spendingyears among lots of people stupider than you are. Actually, it was just theStaten Island branch. A more civilized boroughManhattan, or evenBrooklynprobably would not have allowed it; not in the sixties.