CurtStubbs passed away September 14, 2019. He’d been a friend to many,
and to Hilde and me for over forty years.
We didn’t see Curt as
often after he moved to Tucson in the mid-1980s, but we always tried
to have dinner with him at TusCon, the annual SF convention there.
Curt struggled with a lot of health and financial issues through most
of his life, but he seemed to have found a satisfying social niche in
poetry, both his own and acting as a docent for the Poetry Center at
the University of Arizona; he was also active in Tucson’s gay
community. And he still enjoyed reading science fiction and attending
an occasional convention. For years, he was the cook for the
traditional Dead Dog Chile served on the last day of each year’s
TusCon; there have been a lot of good bowls of chile served there
over the years, but Curt’s (sorry, you later chile chefs) was the
best.
When
he was younger, and before some of his health issues surfaced, Curt
tended to party hard. This led to some memorable anecdotes, and
Curt’s fannish nickname of Captain Coors.
This
is one of the stories from those early years:
---------
One
morning, after a particularly hard night of partying and drinking,
Curt woke up on the floor of the party apartment. He quickly realized
two things:
-
He wasn’t wearing any clothes, and,
-
Sometime during the night, while Curt was unconscious, someone had decided to paint Curt’s penis green.
And
then Curt looked at a clock, and realized a third thing:
-
He had an important job interview scheduled for that morning, and there were less than twenty minutes before it was supposed to take place.
A
moment of wild mental panic ensued: “My
penis is green! Job interview! Green penis! Job interview!”
Curt
had to make a choice. He found his scattered clothing, pulled pants
on over his engreened penis, added shirt and shoes and a quick brush
through his hair, and rushed out to make the job interview on time.
Every minute on the way, the thoughts “I
have a green penis. Someone painted my penis green. I have a green
penis,”
looped
through his head.
Curt
arrived to the interview on time, barely, still thinking “My
penis is green. I have a green penis,”
in
the back of his mind
Somehow,
he’s able to give coherent answers to the job interviewer. Things
seem to be going well. But Curt’s mind is still repeating, “I
have a green penis. I have a green penis. Oh, God-d-d-d-d-d, I have a
green penis.”
“Well,
that’s the end of the formal questions,” the interviewer finally
says. He looks Curt straight in the eye, and asks:
“Is
there anything else about yourself you’d like to tell us, Mr.
Stubbs?”
Curt
did not
get
the job.