[Back to memoir excerpts. Somehow the Sixties feel very close today!]

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, I was at Rutgers Univeristy learning math. For the first time in my life, I was taking courses that I found difficult in an interesting way: abstract algebra, real analysis, topology, and mathematical logic. And, for the first time since high school, I was attending all the class lectures and doing the homework.

[Boyhood suitcase of magic tricks.]

My wife, Sylvia, was finishing her Master’s degree in French literature. I liked hearing about the wild books she had to read, like medieval plays featuring Eve and Satan, or the poems of Apollinaire. In the evenings, she and I would do homework together in our little living room. It was cozy.

The Rutgers math department was giving me some financial support as a teaching assistant, and I met twice a week with a section of calculus students to show them how to do their homework problems—they got their lectures from a professor in a big hall. Working through the problems on the board, I finally began to understand calculus myself. It made a lot more sense than I’d realized before.

I was undergoing a constant cascade of mathematical revelation, even coming to understand such simple things as why we need zeroes, or why “borrowing” works when you’re doing subtraction. I was learning a new language, and everything was coming into focus.

The mathematical logic course was a particular revelation for me. I liked the notion of mathematics being a formal system of axioms that we made deductions from. And I reveled in the hieroglyphic conciseness of symbolic logic. From the academic point of view, I was beginning to see everything as a mathematical pattern. But in my personal life, everything was love.

Sylvia and I were enjoying the Sixties—we went to the big march on the Pentagon, we had psychedelic posters on our walls, we wore buffalo hide sandals, and we read Zap Comix. I smoked pot rolled in paper flavored like strawberries or wheat straw or bananas. Sylvia bought herself a sewing-machine and started making herself cool dresses.

At the same time, the war in Vietnam was casting a bitter pall. Those who didn’t live through those times tend not to understand how strongly the males of my generation were radicalized against the United States government. Our rulers wanted to send us off to die, and they called us cowards if we wouldn’t go. It broke my heart to see less-fortunate guys my age being slaughtered. My hair was shoulder-length by now, and occasionally strangers would scream at me from cars.

We were friends with a wild math grad student named Jim Carrig, from an Irish family in the Bronx. Jim and his wife, Fran, were huge Rolling Stones fans—they were always talking about the Stones and playing their records. They’d sign up early to get a shot at the tickets to the touring Stones shows. Thanks to them we saw the Stones play a wonderful afternoon show at Madison Square Garden.

“Did y’all get off school today?” asked Mick, strutting back and forth. “We did too.” And then they played “Midnight Rambler” and he whipped the stage with his belt—a trick we took to emulating at parties.

The Carrigs threw great Halloween parties. They lived an apartment on the second floor of a house, and Jim would stand at the head of the stairs like a bouncer, checking up on his guests’ attire. “Get the f*ck outta here!” he’d yell if anyone showed up without a costume. “Go on, we don’t wanna see you!”

I came to one party as a Non-Fascist Pig. That is, I bought some actual pig ears at the supermarket, punched holes in them, threaded a piece of string through them, and tied them onto my head. I lettered, “F*ck Nixon,” onto my T-shirt. I pinned on a five-pointed Lunchmeat Award of Excellence star that I’d cut from a slice of Lebanon bologna. And I carried a pig-trotter in my pocket to hold out if anyone wanted to shake hands with me.

When Sylvia and I went to see the left-wing movie Joe, the movie theater played the Star Spangled Banner before the film, and there was nearly a fight when a guy two rows ahead of us wouldn’t stand up. Turned out the guy was a Viet vet himself. “That’s why I went to fight,” the vet told the older man harassing him. “To keep this a free country. I don’t have to stand up for no goddamn song.”

I was very nearly drafted, undergoing a physical that classified me 1A. I’d thought that my missing spleen would earn me a medical exemption, but no dice. I still remember the medical officer who told me the bad news. Sidney W… oh, never mind his full name. He seemed to have a chip on his shoulder. Maybe he’d been drafted himself.

I bought some time by faking an asthma attack—and then they switched to a lottery number system for the draft, and I happened to get a comfortably low number. I wasn’t going to Vietnam after all. I was going to keep on learning math, being a newlywed, and having fun.

The tidal wave of underground comix inspired me to get some Rapidograph pens and to start drawing comics on my own. I developed a wacky, left-wing strip called Wheelie Willie that occasionally appeared in the Rutgers campus newspaper, the Targum.

I felt uneasy about my ability to draw arms and legs, so my character Wheelie Willie had a snake-like body that ended in a bicycle wheel. Some of the students must have liked the strip, as a fraternity once went so far as to have a Wheelie Willie party, not that I attended it.

Another close friend was my fellow math grad student Dave H. He was a skinny guy with an odd way of talking—he almost seemed like an old man. He always said “Rug-ters” instead of “Rutgers,” and “pregg-a-nit” instead of “pregnant.”

When Dave arrived for our grad student orientation session, he told me that he’d demonstrated against all three of the current presidential candidates: Humphrey, Nixon, and Wallace. And he’d been arrested in the Chicago convention riots. He was always going off to marches and demonstrations. Once he even roped Sylvia and me into making a trip to give support to the AWOL soldiers in the brig at Fort Dix. The soldiers gave us the finger.

I remember when the Berlin Wall fell, and suddenly we realized that the dreaded Soviet empire had collapsed. The Soviets were nothing more than a bunch of people, not all that well organized, and not nearly so powerful as we’d feared.

The same thing happened to the right wing of American politics last night. They’re a paper tiger, an artificial threat that’s been propped up too long by the media. Their reign is over.

“Free at last, free at last, thank God Almighty, we are free at last!”

Suddenly African-Americans look a little different—all along they’ve been feeling and thinking the same things as the rest of us, and never mind what anyone thought before. It’s their country too. Our hearts are opening. We’re one weave.

And soon we can get to work fixing things up!

Hallelujah.

Tuesday is the big election day we’ve been waiting for. It’s finally our chance to be heard!

Help the Democrats take over the Presidency, the Senate and the House! Let’s get our country working again. Let’s heal the damages of the last eight years.

And don’t assume the Democrats can win without you. Remember 2000 and 2004? A close election can be stolen. If we’re going to win, we have to win by a landslide.

We can have a free country again—if we want it.

Vote Democratic on Tuesday.

First a couple of links. I recently met a San Jose photographer called Gary Parker, who does some interesting work, including portraits of people with their pets and photos of little people.

Gary has a show of his photos at the Bear Coffee shop on Santa Cruz Avenue, in Los Gatos, with an opening last night, and some of his friends came by, including a master pumpkin-carver.

My guru-like friend Ralph Abraham has been working on his website, posting some thoughts about chaos and the stock market crash, and making all of his past articles available, including an intriguing paper called “Mathematics and the Psychedelic Revolution,” which exposes some of the hidden history of Silicon Valley. Far from being a herd of nerds, a very large number of computer graphics pioneers were ecstatic stoners.

And now for another excerpt from my memoir-in-progress, Nested Scrolls.

When I started Swarthmore College in 1963, I’d been planning to major in philosophy or in literature, even though Pop kept urging me to study something more technical. “You can read all those books on your own,” he insisted. “Read those books, of course, but learn some science too. Be a Renaissance man!”

Although my natural bent was to disagree with Pop, after a couple of semesters, I decided he was right. I wasn’t getting much out of the philosophy and literature courses that I was taking. I asked my philosophy professor about the meaning of life, and he deluged me with double-talk. And the English lit professor wanted us to read unbearable stuff like Pamela or Vanity Fair. I found these books so dull that, try as I might, I couldn’t even read their summaries in our library’s treasured resource: Masterplots, a twelve volume set with the plot stories of the world’s finest literature.

Before long, I found it too much trouble to even read the summaries in Masterplots, but by then it had became a running joke among the other introductory literature students always to check out the Masterplots volumes under the name Rudy Rucker.

At least in science you didn’t have to read a whole lot of crap. I had a vague notion of majoring in physics and inventing an antigravity machine, but physics turned out not be my strong suit either. After a grueling semester of Mechanics and Wave Motion—in which I tried unsuccessfully to make a hologram with a laser—I was off the physics track for good.

And so I majored in math. I had some difficulties with my initial calculus course, some basic issues in understanding what we were even talking about. But then I got a fellow student named Arnie to help me. He explained the mysterious “chain rule” to me, talked about the infinitesimal quantities dx, dy and dz in a relaxed, cozy tone, as if were discussing the doings of some little gnomes that lived beneath is floor. From then on, math came more easily for me. I liked that there were so amazingly few brute facts to memorize. Given that everything followed logically from a few basic assumptions, there wasn’t all that much you had to learn.

What else did I learn? A little bit about modern art. And I took a German literature class where we read Kafka’s Metamorphosis in the original German, which allowed me to understand that Kafka had meant for his stories to be in some sense funny. But other than that, most of what I learned was from the other students.

I liked talking to my friends, socializing with the girls, walking around the grassy campus, and exploring the nearby Crum woods. I was in with the in-crowd of our class, and I reveled in that. In grade school and high school I’d been more of an outsider.

With my steady stream of C grades being mailed home semester after semester, Pop sensed how little work I was doing. “It’s like you’re sitting at a lavish banquet table, Rudy. And all you’re doing is eating a sandwich that you brought in your pocket.”

Concerned as he was, Pop even paid me a surprise visit one day—appearing in my dorm room in the fall of my senior year. It ended up being the best day together that we ever had. He was accepting and non-judgmental. We walked around the campus talking about the meaning of life. I even took him down to the Crum woods and showed him the impressively high train trestle that crossed the creek.

We boys liked to walk out to the middle of the trestle—it had two tracks so that, in principle, even if a train came by, you could go to the other side, and if, by some horrible fluke, two trains came at once, you could lie down flat and hold the ties, not that anyone I knew had ever executed this drastic maneuver, although we talked about it a lot, worrying that the train might have a dangling chain that hung to within millimeters of the ties.

Pop was being such a sport on our big day together that he even walked onto the trestle with me. For those few hours, it was like we were fellow college boys. He really didn’t care much about proprieties or appearances. He just wanted me to be okay. He didn’t want me to fall off the edge.