Remembering Bob Wilson

In 1989 I had this loser "musician" friend whose claim to fame involved writing interesting people and being fortunate enough to have some of them write back. He had quite a collection; PKD's son Christopher, members of Killing Joke, Gary Newman. Trippy fringe people. One of those he "collected" was Bob Wilson, and after many a bong hit my loser "musician" friend decided that the esoteric order to which we both belonged should "produce a tour" which would raise money for said order, and maybe pay some of loser "musician" friend's back rent.

As the only one with a car, I got to pick Bob up from the airport. As the only one with a house, I got to put Bob up for a week. My "commitment" to the "tour" was tested after going out for beers with Bob and the "sponsoring order" that evening by breaking the uncomfortable silence that descended once the cheque appeared. I was the only one with a job, so this is how the rest of the tour went.

Loser musician friend's "producer" efforts extended to booking one small venue and putting up a dozen photocopied posters up in a few bookstores and head shops. After two days of stepping over many an esoteric-order-stoner-loser friend on my living room floor, with Bob as the centre of the universe, Bob did a knock-em-dead presentation at the fifth-full/four-fifths empty venue. The "tour" had lost money from the get go. Bob had initially booked a week off to do signings and presentations, but his flight schedule forced him into a 10 day stay. For which it was instantly obvious he would receive no compensation (and he was out of luck on the plane ticket, too).

I tried to pick up the slack by arranging book signings and media time; but the Reaganista climate of the day was not particularly conducive to a pun-cracking Joyce scholar with a penchant for invoking LSD experiences, alien conspiracies and sex cults. The war was over, the good guys lost. Aside from the University radio station, nobody wanted to interview him – and even then, we were stood up by both engineer and interviewer, so I filled in as both. I'd never run a sound board before so I'm not even convinced we were broadcasting.

Evenings were spent with salons at which Bob shone with wit and stories; he enjoyed these tremendously and wine flowed to an insane degree. Days were spent with him mostly bored out of his skull: he soon realized he was on an island, with day-trips to Vancouver or Seattle being out of anyone's budget. We drove around, lunched, read to each other. He made me a Discordian Pope and bestowed upon me a Haitian Vodou lineage to pass the time more than anything else. We talked literature, philosophy, magic, and the role of pornography. We played chess and rented slasher movies.

The universe conspired to arrange for Dr. Christopher Hyatt to be in town, briefly. Bob and Chris were old friends and partners in crime in orbit around Falcon Press, and Chris's visit re-energized Bob. Their repartee was brilliant, inspired, multi-faceted and sparkling genius. For those brief moments we could all believe again that we were inventing the future; an intellectual utopia of sex and ecstasy and smart drugs and cybernetics dominated by green libertarian transhuman poets, the bastard love-children of William Burroughs and Stephen Hawking.

For those of us born in the 60's, we didn't get a Woodstock. Kerouac was 20 years dead and we had missed the Bus. Personal computers were our Bus. Mondo 2000 was our Howl. Bob Wilson saw the ghost in this machine, saw the Hermetic current snaking caduceae through the networks; the BBSs and FidoNet and the WELL.

Eventually the 10 day, one-event tour came to an end, and Bob returned wincing to my shockless, rusted Jeep and I drove him to the airport. Throughout he was a gentleman, taking in stride that his work reached out to kids and stoners and weirdos who couldn't promote a tour or pay him for his time. He made it clear he appreciated me stepping in and doing my limited best to pick up the peices of my friends' well-intentioned stoner-loserdom.

Maybe a year later I was chatting with Howard Rheingold on the Brainstorms community, and he brought up Bob. I didn't mention the tour fiasco, as I was embarrassed by its failure and generally appalled at the way he had been treated. But of course so many of those ventures failed back then, with even Falcon itself having to rise from its own ashes every now and again. In the media generation that invented famous-for-being-famous, we all lost an enormous opportunity in not giving Bob's work the kind of attention it deserved - not just as psychadelic prankster, but as a student of human nature who provided both a vision and a roadmap to an integral, compassionate future.

Robert Anton Wilson 1932 - 2007