“Fritz” is Fritz Leiber.

I had phoned Fritz this morning and told him I would be there at two. At about two thirty I got to Geary.

Fritz lives in the Tenderloin, about eight blocks from here. He’s terribly old and fragile, and it takes a while to see how tall this bent man used to be. He seemed delighted to see me and eager for the chance to sit and talk.

His place is tiny and packed with memorabilia. There was a venerable stack of National Geographics, the inevitable set of the OED, a stuffed Fahfrd and Gray Mouser, an oil portrait of his late wife, and many other things. I couldn’t look at much for fear of being rude.

He sat me in an armchair and offered me some coffee, but I really didn’t want any.  We talked for over an hour. He told me about visiting Sutro Tower with a friend, being let in to ride its elevator and look out at the view by an engineer there who was a science fiction fan. He talked about the problems he was having with his eyes, (His manuscripts now are all written in very large longhand) Fafhrd and Gray Mouser, the fog horns that used to sound from Alcatraz. Fritz speaks slowly, with long pauses, either because he has lost his voice or because he has lost his train of thought. When I left, he took down my phone number.       

He needed a typist.

I can still see Fritz leaning forward in his chair after I’d read out loud to him a fight scene he’d written in longhand. When I finished he would chuckle, slow and deep as a tolling bell, and rub his hands. The oil portrait of his wife, a beautiful, sharp-faced woman, canted her eyes sideways at us.

Another painting, this one of his famous father in armor as the Ghost in Hamlet, gazed soulfully over our heads. Father and son resembled each other so closely it could have been Fritz Leiber Jr.

Somewhere in that cluttered apartment were letters from Robert Howard and H.P. Lovecraft.

Photo by Alan Light via Wikimedia Commons

I swear I am not deliberately posting a cluster of diary entries about deaths. This is just the order of the entries.

Tim and I drove to Berkeley to eat before I dropped him off at work. We stopped first at Comic Relief on University, which had a new issue of Love and Rockets. As we were leaving, we noticed a copy of Dori Seda’s Lonely Nights mounted in a plastic frame, and a rose beside it with the words, “In memory of Dori Seda.”

We turned around and went back in.

Unfortunately, the woman we are friends with had gone into the back to work on taxes and was replaced at the desk by a young man we didn’t know who wasn’t very forthcoming. “Oh Dori Seda died,” he said.   

“How?”

“I don’t know. Complications. She was in a car crash.”

We walked out, shocked. Just a couple of months before, we’d met Dori Seda at a party Comic Relief had held. She was a tall artiste with a mane of frizzy brown hair, a round bunny face and a space between her front teeth. It’s a cliché to say of a well-known person “I felt as if I knew her,” but I did. Her work was always so funny and ribald, and it felt familiar.

No, Dori Seda did not die from a car crash. She died, far too young, from a bad bout with the flu, her lungs undermined by the silicosis she’d contracted when she worked in ceramics. Seda’s art was so good that, a few years after she died, I talked with someone for several minutes at a Bay Area party while wondering how I knew the man. I had seen that face, and I was sure he must be an old friend.

In fact, we’d never met. He looked familiar because, as a friend of Dori Seda’s, he’d appeared frequently in her comics.

I loved the humor and realism of her art, which was so unlike many female cartoonists at that time. Women underground cartoonists too often depicted being a woman as being grotesquely self-hating — which I suspect is how many male publishers of underground cartoons imagined us. Seda was good-looking, and she drew herself that way — along with all that went with being an attractive woman in a circle of male artists and cartoonists who had come of age in the sixties and seventies.

One of my favorites of her panels was a door-frame view of an angry guy she’s just brushed off. He’s holding a six-pack in one hand and raising his middle finger in the other, just before she closes the door on him. The caption reads “Pissed cuz he didn’t get laid.”

Which I’m afraid summed up so many men in the ’80s when you were young, female, and cute.