Afterword to “Not Responsible! Park and Lock It!” (1981)
While at grad school at the University of Kansas, I made friends with another student named Tim Roth (no relation to the actor). Tim was an aspiring writer whose oddball sensibilities were similar to my own, and we hit it off very well. We took workshops together, one of which was taught by James Gunn, my mentor. One week Gunn brought a Visiting Famous SF Writer to teach the class, and the VFSFW assigned us the task of writing a story in 24 hours, to be critiqued a day later. Mine was a non-sf story called “Home” that became my first published story, appearing in the Cottonwood Review in 1975. Tim’s was a deconstruction of heroic fantasy, about the kind of young village boy who is often the hero of fantasy tales, who is called upon to face a brutal villain in single combat over the honor of the heroine and his home town. Think Frodo. Think Eragon. Think Luke Skywalker. We all know how this story ends: in the climax, the hero, despite the odds against him, defeats the evil warrior and wins the girl.
Except in Tim’s story, the brutal warrior beats the snot out of the hero, who has no real combat skills or physical strength, pisses on his prostrate body, leaves him half-dead, and rapes the girl. It’s a shocking ending to a story that we think cannot end that way. I thought it was a daring challenge to the assumptions of genre fiction—especially in 1974.
In class the next day, the VFSFW proceeded to savage Tim’s story. He spent at least twenty minutes ripping the opening pages apart. He read sentences aloud in a funny voice. He mocked the characters’ names. He capered and waved the manuscript in the air and laughed aloud. The rest of us students sat there cowering and silent. Tim was brutalized. Somewhere in the middle of this rant I realized that the VFSFW had not read past the first three pages, and therefore thought that it was just another clichéd wish fulfillment fantasy.
After that workshop—this is the absolute truth—Tim decided he wasn’t any good as a writer, gave it up, dropped out of school, and joined the army. He washed out of basic training, came back to Lawrence, found Jesus and ended up living in a communal home with other born again Christians. I lost track of him.
Tim had written a different story that I had always admired, “Going Mobile” (cut one, side two, Who’s Next), the story of a boy growing up in a family living in a moving automobile, in a world where everyone lived in automobiles, traveling on an endless highway, never stopping. The situation was absurd, but Tim treated it matter-of-factly, with a tone of wistful nostalgia veiling social critique. In a Kafkaesque way it was a deadly accurate portrayal of what it was like to come of age in a middle-class American family in the 1950s and 60s.
I couldn’t forget this story, and I regretted that Tim had never published it. Some years later, after I had sold my first stories, I went by the house where he was living with the other Christians. He came out to talk with me. He had cut off all his long hair. I told Tim that, if he was willing to give me the manuscript of “Going Mobile” I would like to rewrite it and we could try to sell it as a collaboration. He told me that he had decided that his writing was a painful reminder of an earlier life that he was trying to get past, and that he had burned all his manuscripts. I was appalled. I asked him if he would let me use the idea in a story of my own, and he said yes.
So I wrote “Not Responsible! Park and Lock It!” It’s not the same story that Tim wrote, but it owes its existence to him.
The title comes from a record by the Firesign Theater, Don’t Crush that Dwarf, Hand Me the Pliers.
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