May the Farce Be with You (from BEGINNER'S LUKE)

Sol Luckman

I was so broken down they had to tow the tow truck. I wanted to sell my imaginary life for parts. My very fictitious existence, as when battery acid has eaten away the engine, seemed too corroded to hold together a mile longer. The universe was a highway lined with signs that led to disaster. I felt like road kill. I felt like a turd in the intermediate stages of decay, hard on the outside but still soft in the middle, waiting for a semi to come along and squash me …

My first story, “From New Age to Stone Age,” had just been critiqued in Creative Writing 101. Not to put too fine a point on it, but they hated it. They said it was unrealistic, unbelievable, unfortunate. Somebody actually used the word unfortunate. They said the plot was ludicrous, the setting absurd, the characters caricatures, it would never sell, no respectable publisher would touch it with gloves and a ten-foot pole.

Mrs. McGough suggested I go back and study Raymond Carver. Penny Genet found the use of my own name for the protagonist “immature and narcissistic.” Tristan, in a boiling Irish rage, accused me of being a sexist pig and objectifying women. Reginald criticized my “self-evident, deep-seated complacency, dig, vis-à-vis late capitalist imperialism.” Tamara discovered homosexual undertones from the first paragraph on. And to my dismay, Vanessa agreed with her!

With an uncanny sense of already living posthumously, having just been gunned down by a semiotic weapon, smashed to smithereens by a literary cannon, I staggered out of Lovelace Hall in desperate need of textual healing.


An immaculate October afternoon greeted me. Fall had recently set in with a vengeance. After a summer pouring straight down, the sunlight was so incredibly slanted you had to tilt your head to see it. The shadows stretched to extraordinary lengths and the buildings appeared fantastically crisp and three-dimensional against the impossibly blue sky, while on the breeze, unmistakably, was autumn’s signature scent: a cross between ivy and sweetly decaying flowers.

“An’ de Sabbat’ be de sebent’ day,” a skinny Hole preacher resembling Sammy Davis was ranting to no one. “An’ a blue moon, ya’ll wanna know what dat means? Dey be two full moons in a mont’, dat’s a blue moon! It has to do wid Reb’lation an’ de start o’ Worl’ War Tree in de Yeah of ow Lawd Nineteen-an’-Eighty-Seben …”

I stumbled around the Hole so dazed I nearly tripped and tumbled in. I wasn’t angry—yet—just bewildered. Unanswerable questions assailed me. Had I done anything worth recording with my imaginary life? Was I delusional to believe my story was original? What was originality? Are we born original or is originality learned? The latter being the case, who’s the teacher, and doesn’t originality thus cease to be original? Or is this paradoxical “learned originality” proof of the existence of the soul whose nature is to embrace contradictions? Or is it just a question of randomness, a throw of the dice, the luck of the draw, a cosmic sneeze, neurons firing and misfiring like a string of firecrackers lit at both ends?

The criticisms of my work notwithstanding, it occurred to me I was virtually being singled out to write the story of my imaginary life. I couldn’t have cared less about changing the world, but I understood one thing: my life, being fictitious, eminently merited fictional representation. More than that: it depended on it. I, Luke Soloman, was nothing if not a literary work-in-progress.

Think about it. Your average author must labor to invent his characters, sweat them into being then struggle, as someone once said, to walk them in and out of rooms. But here I was a living, breathing, flesh-and-blood character sprung fully assembled like Athena into life’s pages—for all intents and purposes real. How could my story not ring true, not be original? And how, if I expected to continue to exist, could I not write it?

There was no reality “out there” my words could only feebly attempt to convey. My words created their reality. I was living proof. I wrote, therefore I was. My autobiography, I was beginning to comprehend, was “auto” in the strictest sense—endowed with a self-conscious and -generative intelligence. It literally wrote itself. And of course, in the same stroke, it wrote me as well.

Who did those morons think they were criticizing my story! As if the fact none of those things actually happened lessened their significance in the least. As if that Luke Soloman were just a picaresque projection of myself and my invented shenanigans in California merely preposterous episodes. Idiots! When would they learn the first principle not just of fiction but of history itself: truth is always a composition of lies?

Suddenly I remembered Billy. Billy the Enigma. During the last half hour of class as I was blasted to the slush pile and back, he’d just sat there like a wart on a witch’s nose.

Granted, he wasn’t acting any differently than usual. But it was my story! I wanted some sign of life—a weak pulse, shallow breathing, anything. If he didn’t love it I at least wanted him to hate it with the rest of them. But judging by his show of interest, you’d have thought he didn’t read English, and certainly hadn’t bothered to read my story.

I stopped in my tracks only to discover I was standing at the entrance to my dorm. Maybe I’m just naturally curious. There are worse fates, like being naturally boring. I knew it was no use trying to get Billy off my mind, so I turned and headed back to Upper Campus. I was determined to find out what—if anything—was going on inside that Raggedy Andy head of his.


I found him sitting in his usual spot on the Hole steps munching a Mr. Goodbar, dressed in Gucci loafers with no socks, stonewashed Guess jeans and his usual Harris tweed jacket, listening to Sammy Davis: “Right up de road when I was a boy der lived dis gypsy woman dat played de fiddle. A lespian. Oncet my deddy tried de pull de devil out’n her. De foulest filt you eveh heahd spilt out her mout. She screamed, ‘I been waitin’ on dem sons o’ bitches so long my bladdah’s swoll up an’ hangin’ plum’ out!’”

I recall coming close enough to get a good look at Billy without being observed and thinking his face could have been frescoed during an epileptic seizure. Goddamn he was ugly. That was before he stared up at me with those crazy eyes, those pinwheeling, fortune-teller eyes I always resisted believing but always ended up believing anyway.

I opened my mouth to speak … but had forgotten what I’d planned to say. Embarrassed, I plopped down awkwardly beside him. Billy broke the silence. “I suppose you’re here to talk about your story,” he commented neutrally.

Could he read my thoughts? Was I such an open book?

“As a matter of fact,” I said, pulling myself together, “that’s precisely why I’m here. I know it’s not your style to offer criticism—”

“No?”

I studied his face for clues. He was wearing a perfectly ambiguous expression like the Mona Lisa’s.

“An’ in de end what I learnt,” bellowed Sammy, “was dat bahbecue needs love!”

“No,” I said. “It’s not. You never say a word in class.”

“That doesn’t mean it’s not my ‘style to offer criticism,’ now does it? It just means nobody ever asks my opinion.”

“Fair enough. So what is your opinion?”

“You really want to know?”

“I asked, didn’t I?”

I was beginning to get a little hot under the collar playing these petty semantic games. I braced myself for the worst.

“Bahbecue needs love, I tells you! You college boys don’t know nuttin’ ’bout love. You gotta love youh bahbecue like youh woman!”

“All right,” said Billy. “I liked it.”

“You did?”

“Of course I did.”

“Why? I mean—what did you like about it?”

“Well, for starters, it was funny. I don’t mean it was without its share of freshman (pardon the pun) infelicities, or that comedy should be the sole objective of art. But it struck me as something new, a satire of a satire of certain incongruities in contemporary American culture delivered in a voice that was an intriguing amalgam of Huck Finn and Hunter Thompson. Shall I continue?”

“Please.”

“I mean it broke the mold, Luke. I think we can both agree as a matter of principle genre fiction sucks—”

“Definitely.”

“—and that the South in particular is up to its eyeballs in an antiquated realism of the most deadly dull kind. I mean if I read one more molasses-sweetened, coming-of-age tale featuring Piggly Wiggly, Wonder Bread, apple pie, Chevrolet, collard greens, bluegrass, old-time religion—”

“I beseeches you! Tuhn away fro’ de lust dat invites puhdition!”

“—a backer-chewin’ uncle who puts WD-40 on his arthritic joints and a heartwarming moral, I’ll hurl chunks. I don’t care if all that stuff is quote-unquote ‘real.’ Grass growing is real, but you don’t write novels about it.”

“You’ve got a point.”

“Of course I do. Did you ever consider why writers these days are said to ‘emerge’ from the South? Do they emerge from other parts of the country? Why do writers emerge from the South, Luke?”

“I’d rudah stay heah an’ be poah as travel de worl’ an’ be filty rich widout Jesus Chris’ as my Lawd an’ Savioh!”

“You tell me.”

“I have no idea. It’s not worth dwelling on. The bottom line is—I liked your story. Is this guy bugging you?”

“Sammy?”

“Yes.”

“He’s driving me crazy.”

“Me, too.”

Billy made a sudden twitching motion with his face strangely reminiscent of Samantha in I Dream of Jeannie.

“But what about everybody else, Billy? They detested my story, they despised it. You could see the fear and loathing in their eyes.”

“To hell with everybody else.”

“But what about Mrs. McGough? She’s a respected author. She’s published a dozen novels.”

“Ever read one?”

“No.”

“Don’t bother.”

“But what about Penny Genet? That bit about being immature and narcissistic because I used my own name?”

“So what do you do with Proust? What do you do with Miller? We’re talking thousands of pages of your own name. Penny Genet’s good but she makes a short story long. And she’s an only child for life, Luke. She’s just threatened by your talent.”

“Then what about Tristan and those sadistic comments about my alleged sexism? What about my ‘complacency’ and ‘obvious’ homosexuality?”

“I wouldn’t worry about Fistin’, if I were you. She’s not worth the spit to shine her. And everybody knows Reginald’s from another galaxy. And Tamara, well, she suffers from severe mental cramps. Forget them, Luke. They’re just jealous. Here you are drawing freehand while they’re still making copies of copies. They’re tracing—and they’ll always be tracing.”

“I hadn’t thought about it like that.”

“Don’t sweat the small stuff. Don’t even sweat the big stuff. You can’t let them get to you. You can’t let anyone or anything get to you. If you’re truly serious about baring your soul, you’ve got to prepare a face for all the assholes you’re going to meet.”

“Like J. Alfred Prufrock?”

“Like Eleanor Rigby.”

“Speaking of putting on a persona, I have some experience in that area. I’ve never been a fan of realism. Facts always seem solid when you first look at them, but then they start leaking around the edges. If I’m a realist at all, I’m what you might call an ‘allegorical realist.’ I try to get at the inner reality as opposed to the outer fantasy … Hell, I don’t know what I’m talking about.”

“I think you do.”

“This may come as a surprise, Billy, but that story I wrote was true. It was an exact retelling of an event or series of events from my past. I mean my imagined past. Of course, it wasn’t really my past. After all, the Luke of ‘From New Age to Stone Age’ is thirtysomething in 1999, whereas I’m still in my teens in 1986. So in a sense, it was a story about my future. I was attempting a theoretical or speculative rendition of a possible episode that never actually transpired, yet which was nonetheless faithfully rendered.”

I’m not sure what it was about Billy, what subtle vibe I picked up on in him, but it was as if some hidden force was leading me to confess myself. “I’m not who you think I am, Billy. I’m not who anybody thinks I am. Can you keep a secret?”

“Certainly.”

“Swear to God?”

“Swear to God.”

“I’m not real. Nobody else knows this. You’re the first person I’ve ever told.”


I hadn’t planned on coming out of the closet—at least not right then and there on the steps of the Hole. But I was glad I did. It seemed a tremendous weight had just slipped off my shoulders.

Still, I worried what Billy might say or do. He’d finished his Mr. Goodbar and was lighting a Dunhill with a platinum Zippo. The thought crossed my mind he might reject or even expose me. In an instant my relief turned to fear.

Billy exhaled sideways and turned to me with a question. “How old do you think I am?”

“What’s that got to do with anything?”

“Just answer.”

“I don’t know. It’s hard to tell. You don’t seem to have an age.”

“Guess.”

“Nineteen?”

“Older.”

“Twenty?”

“Older.”

“Twenty-five?”

“Not even close.”

“Thirty-five?”

“Chronologically, I’m a hundred and fifty years old. Well, I’ll turn one-fifty in December.”

“Come on. Be serious.”

“I’m being serious.”

“You mean to tell me you’re a hundred and fifty years old?”

“No. A hundred and forty-nine. Stop acting so incredulous. You think you’re the only one going around making it all up? How do you think I got rid of Sammy?”

It was true. For minutes now, ever since Billy’s face had twitched, the Hole had been as silent as Humbert Library on a Saturday night. I looked everywhere, but the preacher was nowhere to be found.

“You mean you’re like me? You’re not real?”

“If that’s the way you want to put it. I prefer to think of myself as having a different ontological status.”

“How many of us are there?”

“Thousands. But we’re hard to smoke out. We’ve gotten so good at blending in.”

The faces of practically everyone I’d ever known blipped in photo stills through my reeling consciousness. I thought of Normal Norm the retired shoe salesman, Alexis and Jack and the Folarians, Blue and Goddamnit, old Mother Teresa, Merita, Egbert and Dante … What if one of my friends (or for that matter, enemies) were merely a figment of his or her own imagination?

“So were you ‘smoking me out’ just then?”

“No. You smoked yourself out.” He extinguished his cigarette, lit another, then offered me one.

“No thanks.”

“Suit yourself.”

“How much do you smoke?”

“Depends on who I am. Sometimes a lot, sometimes never. You mean you’ve never smoked?”

“Once. But I was somebody else.”


We were quiet a while. Billy smoked and let me digest our conversation. It was a lot to swallow all at once. I had so many questions I hardly knew where to start. “Why did you decide,” I began finally, “to come to Pulpit Hill when you could be anywhere doing anything?”

“I could ask you the same question.”

“But I asked you first.”

“Hell, I don’t know. The girls. The music. The drugs. Boredom. A little nostalgia mixed in. I was here about seventy years ago. I roomed for a semester with Thomas Wolfe.”

“No kidding? The famous writer?”

“The same.”

“What was he like?”

“Drank like an immigrant and snored like one, too. But he had beautiful hands. What about you? What are you doing here?”

“I never went to college. Not that I can remember. And then I got this big scholarship. It just seemed like what I was supposed to do.”

“How old are you?”

“You mean in terms of actual time spent living?”

“Yes.”

“Young.”

“How young?”

“Very. Less than one.”

“Jesus, you’re a baby! Terrific!”

“Why terrific?”

“Everything must look brand-new. It must seem like a great time to be alive. A brave new world and all that.”

“It does. For the most part.”

“This, too, shall pass.”

“Maybe. Maybe not.”

“Oh, it will. Believe me. I started out just like you. My imaginary life would have no boring episodes, no reruns, no yawns. I wanted to experience despair as well as joy, failure as well as success, fear and hope, pain and pleasure. So I set out to learn what it truly means to be human.”

“And?”

“I did. It only took a few years. And then one day when I’d traveled everywhere, done everything and met everyone, life started to play like a broken record.”

“I’ll never let that happen. I’ll kill myself first.”

“My words exactly! I was an idealist, a dreamer like you. I had to be either alive or dead, not marinating in some purgatorial in-between. I was crazy to connect, insane to electrify and be electrified. But even under the best of circumstances, life grows old.”

Crushing his cigarette under the heel of his loafer, he stood and extended his hand. I shook it. He felt real. “Come on, Luke, lighten up. You’d think this was reality. I’ll get off my soapbox now and give your newborn ears a rest. I’m sure you’ve got more interesting things to do than sit here listening to the Voice of Experience.”

“Nice talking to you.”

“Nice talking to you, too.” Suddenly, as if drawing a revolver, he produced a notebooklike paperback from inside his jacket and handed it to me. “I brought this figuring you’d swing by. You’ll enjoy it.”

“What is it?” I asked, merely glancing at the cover.

“A comic.”

“A comic?”

“The Dark Knight Returns. A modern classic.”

“Billy, I appreciate the gesture, but—”

“No buts. Remember what Twain said: never let school get in the way of your education. Just read it. You’ll understand.” He lit one last Dunhill for the road. “See you in class?”

“If I ever go back.”

“You will. What else have you got to do?” He grinned and started walking, then paused thoughtfully. “By the way, if you’re free Halloween night, I’m having a little get-together at my house. Six-sixty-six Mephisto Street.”

“Cool address.”

“Thanks. I made it up.”

“The address?”

“No, stupid. The house.”

As he smoked his way nonchalantly across the Hole, I examined the comic’s cover more closely. It featured a silhouette of an extremely muscular and sinister-looking Batman soaring through the air against an eerie backdrop of night sky and jagged lightning.

“May the Force be with you, Luke!”

I glanced up to find Billy, Dunhill in mouth, giving me a mock salute outside the Student Co-op. It occurred to me then, something I’d been vaguely aware of during our conversation, indeed ever since I’d met him that first day of class back in August, that he had an altogether bizarre accent: a mélange of Southern, Irish, Creole and Kiwi, with a little Spanish or Portuguese thrown in. Conscious of this, I was no longer sure of his words. Had he shouted “May the Force” or “May the Farce be with you”?

Copyright (c) 2008 by Sol Luckman. All Rights Reserved.


BEGINNER'S LUKE is the first novel in a series of six madcap adventures that, collectively, make up the imaginary life of this lovably irreverent modern-day Walter Mitty. Luke's signature obsessions with self, sex, satire and slapdash highlight a serious, and life-changing, point: consciousness creates. The point is there is a point to living in the imagination–for only through it can we reinvent our ourselves and our world.

A respected New York publisher, whose authors feature a National Book Award finalist in addition to dozens of prestigious award winners, offered the author a contract (subsequently declined in favor of an experiment in self-publishing) for the BEGINNER'S LUKE Series, which made it out of a yearly slush pile of nearly 8,000 manuscripts. One early reader confided, ”I've had quite a journey ever since you shared BEGINNER'S LUKE with me. I'm more careful, these days, when someone gives me a book. I haven't been the same since reading it, as if I contracted the disease of restlessness and have spent months reconsidering every facet of my life. Your novel changed me forever and I blame you for it.”