A Ronald Reagan Story: “Where’s the Rest of Me”

I have made my story “Where’s the Rest of Me?” available on this site, and there are ePub and PDF files of it to download for anyone who prefers reading that way.

The story was first published in my collection Blood: Stories (Black Lawrence Press, 2016) and was reprinted in Wilde Stories 2017: The Year’s Best Gay Fiction edited by Steve Berman. In his Locus review of Blood, Paul DiFilippo wrote of the story: “Simply put, this is a long counterfactual account of the life of Ronald Reagan, pulp writer for Astounding and other zines, and, afterwards, home-spun messiah. With incredible verisimilitude and just the right amount of period details, Cheney delivers a story whose parallels with Reagan’s ‘real’ life are numerous and apt, and whose alternate-reality byways are organic and irreproachable. Nor is this a mere thoughtless and easy satirical slander on the man. Instead, Cheney inhabits Reagan’s psyche with sympathy and charity.”

“Where’s the Rest of Me?” was the end result of a few years of researching Ronald Reagan when I was planning to write an academic book called The Reagan Imaginary, about Reagan’s effect on 1980s action movies. That project never quite came together, and I stashed a couple of boxes of books about Reagan, conservative politics, and the 1980s in my attic. But the research haunted me, and ultimately it came out in this story, which draws not only on Reagan but also on L. Ron Hubbard. (It was after reading Lawrence Wright’s book Going Clear that the story came into my mind.)

Though the story is an alternate history, I tried to stick as close to actual reality as possible, so things like F. Orlin Tremaine’s approach to editing and John W. Campbell’s opinions are based on details from Mike Ashley’s histories of science fiction magazines and The John W. Campbell Letters. (Campbell’s views on homosexuality come directly from a letter he wrote to Isaac Asimov.) I was also trying to imagine a life for the artist known to science fiction readers only as “Alejandro”, but whose Wikipedia entry is as Alexander Cañedo. His cover paintings for Astounding in September 1947, October 1949, and July 1954 have long fascinated me because they are all of heroic, naked men in poses rather different from what we might expect from genre magazines of the time.

The title of the story comes from Reagan’s first autobiography, a famous line from his movie King’s Row. The titles of the sections are all films he acted in.

Ronald Reagan remains a fascinating figure for me, though I consider him to have been one of our most horrendously awful presidents and a blight on American history. (As a gay man who came of age during the AIDS crisis, I will never forget his failures of leadership then.) In many ways we continue to live in the world Reagan created — Donald Trump is no break from Reagan, but a vulgar continuation of Reagan’s dreams. This story allowed me to imagine a different Reagan and a different world.