Author’s Note | The Supersonic Phallus

The idea for The Supersonic Phallus came from the slenderest volume among the thousands in my father’s library, a pamphlet entitled The White Sands Incident, by Daniel W. Fry. This is Fry’s highly readable, self-published, first-person 1954 account of his July 4, 1949 (or 1950) abduction by an alien spacecraft at the White Sands Proving Ground in New Mexico. Its pilot, an unseen but talkative creature named Alan, flew Fry to New York City before dropping him off back in New Mexico infused with a new spiritual awareness of the interconnectedness of things.

Dad undoubtedly bought his copy at Fry’s July 29, 1954 lecture in Grand Junction, Colorado, advertised as

For the Most Amazing Experience Of Your Lifetime Hear & See Daniel W. Fry. . . The Man Who Rode In A Flying Saucer And Conversed With A Man From Outer Space! (Admission 75 cents)

(Grand Junction Daily Sentinel, July 29, 1954, p. 4).

The newspaper’s account the next day—168 Hear Account of Trip on Flying Saucer—was unsigned but unmistakably Dad’s:

The lecture by Mr. Fry closely followed the pattern of his paper-bound, 67-page book. Both saucer representations are sweetened with bits of accepted scientific fact, cooled with references to the mythical lost continents of Atlantis and Lemuria, and stirred with a sound spiritual message—“love thy neighbor.”

Twenty-one copies of the book were sold at $1.50 a copy. . . Mr. Fry’s gross for the evening—$157.50.

(Grand Junction Daily Sentinel, July 30, 1954, p. 3)

The White Sands Incident fed my sense that the hometown I nostalgically revisit in The Supersonic Phallus was a hotbed of UFO activity (UAP, if you insist), a sense only heightened by hearing eyewitness accounts later. Mine started out a much wilder narrative: aliens living unobtrusively amongst us, mysteriously taking over humans with a focus on the experience of being targeted with telepathy, fleets of flying saucers. But that would have made it a more conventional sci-fi story, one we’ve all read before, and meanwhile a gay theme kept bubbling up: A book will be born. I stood up from writing every day very surprised indeed.

At the time of Fry’s lecture, Dad was a reporter for the Grand Junction Daily Sentinel. He always said he had Dalton Trumbo’s old job there. He later became Executive Editor. Of course I was fascinated by the newspaper’s premises—the newsroom, the pressroom, all of it. My mother taught her Cub Scouts how to fold newsprint into hats like the pressmen’s, back when I was too young to be a Cub Scout. Life seemed paradisiacal until the moment, during a pressmen’s strike, when Dad’s friend and boss, the Daily Sentinel’s owner and publisher Preston Walker (son of former U.S. Senator Walter Walker) convened a staff meeting and demanded that everybody take a personal loyalty oath to him.

Dad, father of four young children, stood up and said, “I quit.”

“The best decision I ever made,” he called it. Time magazine soon hired him; later he was a founding editor of USA*1, a sumptuous if short-lived monthly (funded by Chicago Tribune/Patterson family money), where his colleagues included Robert Massie, Lewis Lapham and Dick Armstrong, and then he joined Fortune magazine.

Around the time we left Grand Junction Pres Walker left his wife for the copy boy Dad had hired; they enjoyed a successful relationship for years, until Walker’s death on a rafting trip.

In my book Ernie Wacker is the Uranium King. The real-life Uranium King was Charlie Steen. Everybody in Grand Junction knew him and his wife. My parents’ friendship with them was impaired by Mother’s outrage at the conditions Mrs. Steen accepted for her children, living in a tarpaper shack in the middle of nowhere with sometimes nothing to eat but sugar water. Mother used to take groceries out to them, but remained indignant. Of course, Steen soon made his strike, pulled $150 million out of his Mi Vida uranium mine and the sugar-water phase was history.

Steen was a larger-than-life character who enjoyed his money. He built a mansion in Moab, Utah, where he’d invite the entire town to his annual party. My favorite story is how he made sure his family could watch I Love Lucy when local TV reception was virtually nonexistent, loading up wife and kids in the plane every Monday at 9:00 o’clock and circling Moab till the show was over.

A character suggested by Steen actually made a prior appearance in my fiction, in A Family Romance, as Charlie Scone (chapter 47, pp. 252-256) in an episode derived from Dad’s final contact with him. One day in the late 1960s—Steen by that time had built a glorious modern mansion in Nevada—he phoned Dad at Fortune. He said he was calling at the behest of Howard Hughes—the richest man in the world—to solicit Dad’s help in either stopping American underground nuclear testing or at least moving the tests away from Hughes’ vicinity. Hughes then lived atop a high-rise property he owned in Las Vegas, the Desert Inn, and disliked the way it shook and swayed every time an atom bomb exploded at the Nevada Test Site. Dad was charmed that Steen or Hughes might have thought he had any sway over such matters, but of course he had none. Hughes soon moved on to Central America.

Sam’s World War II experiences in The Supersonic Phallus are based on Dad’s, and Dean’s on those of his brother, my uncle Donald F. Meyers, who told me of them (and wrote them up in a harrowing private memoir, Remembrances). Some of the technical aspects of newspapering in those days came from Dad, including the fact that a newspaper subscribing to the Associated Press could request expansion of any brief story that came over its teletype. Dad asked for such an expansion when he saw a squib about Rosa Parks’ arrest in 1955; the A.P.’s fuller story in response helped make the Montgomery bus boycott national news (Dad always allowed that others, too, might have made the same request).

The P-51 Mustang’s landing at Cortez, Colorado I took from the amazing true story of the alien who landed there one night in 1959.

Dean’s yellow Oldsmobile convertible is based on my great-aunt Opal’s, though it was looking rather antique by the time I came to know it. Ernie Wacker’s custom Cadillac station wagon was inspired both by the one that passed my family’s Plymouth station wagon on an early Interstate in the late 1950s—unforgettable thrill, back when being overtaken was a minutes-long event on an empty highway—and by the vehicle my cousin Ed Heltemes drove into Manhattan when he arrived to be inaugurated as president of the Veteran Motor Car Club of America in the early 1980s. His exquisite vintage Packards safely back in their Colorado Springs warehouse, he arrived on Riverside Drive in his daily driver: an enormous mid-1970s Cadillac transformed into a pickup truck by its original, money-no-object owner. I enjoyed driving around the Upper West Side with Ed looking for a parking garage willing to stable the beast, my blasé fellow New Yorkers—their attention forcibly wrenched to Ed’s behemoth—giving us open-mouthed doubletakes.

My early memories of Grand Junction include the Fisk Tire store sign of a giant, blanket-swaddled toddler with one arm through a tire, the other holding out a candle: “Time to Re-Tire,” and of course the Model T on the rocks in the middle of the Colorado River beneath the bridge. A shout-out to the sweet mare Smokey I rode on annual visits to Estes Park. Pedants occasionally point out that when I was born my family lived on Mesa Avenue, that only later did we move to the little farm on Orchard Mesa that I remember so vividly—shout-out to our donkey Clementine!—but I prefer to remember it otherwise.

The Supersonic Phallus was a lot of fun to write. As for myself, though I’ve not yet seen anything like a UFO, I’m not automatically dismissive of those who say they have.

Readers who enjoy The Supersonic Phallus might also like my story set against the early 1950s Lavender Scare, Another’s Fool, to be found in My Mad Russian: Three Tales.