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Sol LuckmanWith the notable exception of Intermediate French, which I recall chiefly because the instructor was a to-die-for Parisian grad student named Emmanuelle whose haute couture hips maintained a constant motion like an Olympic slalom skier’s as she copied dizzying conjugations across the blackboard—I say, not counting French the only class I remember taking my first (and technically, only) semester in Pulpit Hill was Creative Writing 101.
Actually, that’s pure fiction. I just told a complete lie in a shameless attempt to streamline the opening of this transitional chapter that has, in all honesty, given me stress ulcers …
That’s another lie. I really just wanted to grab your attention, lure you in with a gratuitous image of exotic sexuality, seduce you into a comfortable narrative rhythm so as to take advantage of your aroused credulity. When the simple fact is I distinctly remember a third class that fall: Sociology of the Imaginary.
Taught by a twitchy little bird-faced Canadian professor named Jean-Michel Possy, Sociology of the Imaginary had fifteen students including yours truly, required no formal coursework other than a final and used a single textbook,
Extraterrestrials in Our Lives, written by the professor. Many of the students were, in fact, extraterrestrials.
We spent most of our time watching
ET,
Close Encounters,
Alien,
Cocoon and Roswell documentaries, then discussing them in detail—the idea being, according to the syllabus, “to explore humanity by examining our imaginative conception of the Other.” I kept wanting to stand up and tell everybody I
was the imagined Other, big as life right there in front of them, and they should be studying
me instead of ET. But I was a freshman and still rather shy.
To return, though, to Creative Writing 101. This was an introductory fiction workshop taught by the venerable Department Chair, who wasn’t actually a chair but a slightly senile, possibly alcoholic novelist by the name of Bertha McGough from whom I gained a sobering perspective on the art (for lack of a better word) of writing pedestrian but eminently marketable prose with a distinctly
Southern flavor concerned with the ordinary lives of ordinary characters and the ordinary human spirit’s triumph over ordinary adversity and all that Harper Lee crap.
That first afternoon we found ourselves seated around a huge round table, a literary Camelot, twenty or so of us aspiring eighteen-year-old geniuses with helium in our brains, in one of the seminar rooms in Lovelace Hall, home to the English Department. Mrs. McGough arrived fashionably late and, taking her place at the table, launched into a carefully rehearsed, impromptu lecture about how this was a
serious course, and we were all expected to turn in our manuscripts
on time, and we were to give and receive
constructive criticism, and
blah-blah-blah-blah-blah.
The class is designed for no more than twelve students and, since there are twenty of us, the non-registered students are kindly asked to look elsewhere. I’ve already pre-registered, so I’m only giving Mrs. McGough half an ear. It turns out there’s one spot left for a non-registered student that has just been snagged by one William Morocco, a.k.a. Billy, presently engaged across the table in extracting an especially recalcitrant bugger from his aquiline nose.
Billy was, in a word … ugly. I mean that literally. The boy was as ugly as your grandmother bent over reaching for the soap in the shower. I’m quite confident Billy, wherever (and for that matter, whoever) he is, would agree with me good-naturedly. We used to joke about how ugly he was, after we became friends.
You’d think I’d have been accustomed to the sight of an ugly person, having hung out for so long with Egbert and Dante and having, moreover, grown up in Lipton Hill. But Billy was in a class by himself.
Maybe it was the way he always seemed to stoop (he could stoop lying down); or the way his hands, feet and ears looked half a dozen sizes overgrown; or the albino skin mottled with raspberry freckles and the occasional juicy zit; or the shoulder-length, neon red hair that looked like a cheap theatrical wig but that really was his hair … Whatever the case, there was one thing (technically,
two things) about him that wasn’t ugly: his eyes.
Don’t panic. I have no intention of blithering on about one of my character’s eyes like some indulgent romance novelist. The eyes are the most overrated of the visible aspects of human anatomy. I myself prefer the earlobes and ankles. But I will say Billy had the most mesmerizing set of peepers I’ve ever stared into.
I can’t even remember what color they were. They could have been hot pink or lemon yellow, that’s how much I was drawn into them, mesmerized, blinded like a deer in headlights, bowled over and taken for a ride. Only much later did I finally break the spell of his eyes and realize how crazy the son-of-a-bitch was.
Long before that I came to love him as you can only love a best friend: totally, utterly, soul-to-marrow. I’d have followed him to the bottom of the ocean, the dark side of the moon, on a Himalayan expedition. And I practically did.
•
So all the non-registered students are obliged to leave, Billy casually flips the bugger over his shoulder, and the first lesson gets underway. As an ice-breaker Mrs. McGough asked us to go around the table and introduce ourselves. I recall counting only eleven students, including myself, four of whom, in addition to Billy, played at least a minor role in my brief tenure as an undergrad in Pulpit Hill:
Penny Genet. Related through an obscure genealogy to the French playwright, Penny Genet (for some reason nobody ever called her just “Penny”) could talk a mean Shakespeare and was the most naturally talented writer among us. She had a plump, pretty exterior, especially on the rare occasions when she permitted herself to smile, but underneath was a heart harder than marble and liquid nitrogen sluicing through her veins.
“I like eating better than sex because no one is sharing it with me,” she once told the class proudly. Gifted with a razor-sharp wit and microscopic critical eye, Penny Genet was more outwardly pleasant than inwardly kind. While remaining cordial toward one another, she and I both realized, privately, we disagreed about everything.
Tamara Love. A wan, hypersensitive girl who wore ankle-length, earth-tone, hemp dresses with no shoes or stockings (even in winter) and wrote tear-jerking stories about endangered wildlife. Plainly sweet and sweetly plain, Tamara didn’t look like other coeds with her bushy Slavic eyebrows and knotty body. There was something rather beautiful in her ugliness, and something else altogether unattractive in her beauty. She had a strange habit of giving her fellow classmates deep-tissue massages with the pointed end of a yam.
Once, at a party, finding herself alone with me on someone’s porch, she confided that in high school she’d had three abortions and two STDs. That was shortly before she fell to waxing eloquent about how nice my ass was (she’d enticed me to the floor and started in with the yam) and how I was so good-looking (she was stoned) and how we should definitely get together and have sex or something.
I think I hurt her feelings when I politely declined to accompany her back to her room. I never could figure out whether Tamara was stupid or just confused. She went on to become editor of Queue (which Billy and I referred to as Cul, from the French), the student literary magazine.
Reginald Washington. A skinny, animated guy from the Fourth Dimension (so we surmised) who was the spitting image of Spike Lee in Do the Right Thing. Reginald liked to discourse at great length and in tremendous detail on the Bible as science fiction. His stories never had characters—at least none any of us could identify—though he did produce one interesting piece of work: “The Undiscovered Country,” a sketch for a story (presumably with characters) about the discovery, in 1986, of a seventh continent the size of Australia located just a few miles east of the Florida Keys. The somewhat obvious theme being the hubris of science exposed by the mystery of the unknown universe.
It was impossible to tell whether Reginald was on drugs or Foucault. He’d get wound up and suddenly take off like a UFO into some extraordinarily abstruse topic completely off the subject, something like: “What I fail to understand is the contradictory textual situation because of the fact that the narrator is but isn’t, you dig, and also that whole antihero thing, and I was reminded again of the sociolibinal nature of narrative, which translates into a kind of triviality belying a tremendous though hidden and oft-denied importance, like the Crazy Glue cementing this world together whose center just can’t seem to hold otherwise, to paraphrase Shelley and Yeats and, yes, Achebe, a brother, dig, and I felt a vast existential loneliness inherent in the seemingly glib dialogue and compelling descriptions of the wasteland that society has become which came across as pure poetry, lyrical even, dig, and that reminded me of something Nietzsche once said—”
Then there was Tristan. Tristan Dykes. The funny thing was—she really was a dike. “Queer as a tennis helmet,” Billy used to say. Tristan had the droopy hound-dog face of certain Irish women, sported cropped flaming red hair to match her molten Gaelic temperament and was a damned good writer—if you liked stories about arson, gang rape and child molestation.
She wrote like a serial killer. She’d grown up as an army brat in Fayetteville, North Carolina, which she referred to with smoldering odium as “Fayettenam.” I’ll never forget the first sentence of the first story she submitted: “The only serious fire I ever set, aside from a few minor dumpster and trashcan fires, was when I doused my parents’ doublewide with gasoline, threw a lit match on it and walked away without looking back.” Fact or fiction? The shared suspicion was it was unembellished fact, but we never found out for sure.
Tristan carried a chip on her shoulder the size of the Rosetta Stone. She hated men in general, me in particular. She took especial umbrage at my satirical sketch of the feminist writer (cleverly named Kristen Sykes) who, after losing her memory in a near-fatal lesbian sexual accident, hears her own story (which she has absolutely no memory of writing) being read at a workshop by a male colleague and proceeds to attack his “typically myopic, bigoted, phallogocentric point of view.”
Last but not least, there was Billy. Besides being eye-popping ugly, Billy was the official Resident Enigma of the University of North Carolina at Pulpit Hill. A kind of collegiate Gatsby for the 80s, the guy was nobody and everybody, either full of shit or full of gold depending on the source.
Some said he was the estranged (possibly bastard) son of wealthy East Coast aristocrats, the Browns or the Rockefellers or even the Kennedys. And he did vaguely resemble—with that mop of red hair, blueblood nose and equine teeth—Bobby Kennedy as a young man. Others said he was related to Lily Tomlin, that he was descended from George Orwell, that he was Lyle Lovett’s half brother, that he was the son of Ed Sullivan or Jack Palance or even, according to a vocal minority, Buddy Holly.
Whether with plotting purpose or out of unconcerned innocence, Billy added to the intrigue by maintaining a serene, detached silence that had the effect of stirring up more rumors. That he was a heroin smuggler. That he was a KGB spy. That there were secret caves on the coast of Brittany where he’d hosted month-long orgies. All that was known with certainty about him was he was loaded—enough to drive a mint condition orange Ferrari Spider and own (not rent) the sumptuous three-story antebellum manor he resided in on a cul-de-sac off Mephisto Street.
Billy’s silence extended into the classroom, where unless I missed it during one of my daydreams, he never uttered a syllable beyond that first meeting when we all introduced ourselves … That’s not true either. I’m full of lies today! He did speak one afternoon in class when, ordered by Mrs. McGough (who was at her wit’s end) to produce at least the idea for a story, he looked directly at me as if staring into my heart of hearts and outlined the following scenario:
A writer in his early thirties kept sending off his stories to various magazines, contests, agents and editors—without success. The writer became more and more depressed, and at times even a little suicidal, facing all that rejection. But one day he had a brilliant idea: he decided to transform himself and go back to college. But not just any college. He applied to the University of Iowa and enrolled as a freshman in its famous writing program. Of course, he told everybody he was just eighteen, which made his professors (among them John Irving) think he was some kind of prodigy because he wrote so well for his age. So they used their influence to get him a lucrative publishing contract and, presto, despite his actually mediocre talent, he was hailed as the next Tom Robbins.
But other than this singular outburst, Billy’s lips remained tightly sealed. To the best of my knowledge he never even turned in a writing assignment. Yet he never skipped class, was always the first to arrive and last to leave. He even took notes occasionally, scribbling with a Waterman pen in a leather-bound, gold-leafed notebook he carried in the inside pocket of his Harris tweed jacket.
Mrs. McGough eventually stopped making his blatant lack of participation an issue—though she later flunked him. Little by little Billy passed from being one of us aspiring geniuses, to a curious if not altogether engaged onlooker, and finally to nothing more than a specter that haunted our classroom, a friendly apparition more figmentary than real, a regular Boo Radley gone away to college and enrolled in Creative Writing 101.
•
After introductions Mrs. McGough handed out copies of the syllabus and discussed its particulars, then went on to pose general questions about the nature and purpose of fiction.
“What is a story?” she began, surveying the room over the top of her horn-rimmed bifocals, which she always wore on the tip of her nose when not chewing an earpiece in a polished writerly gesture. “Tell me, what is a story?” An embarrassed silence ensued. No one had an answer.
To this day I’m not sure I’m any closer to answering Mrs. McGough’s question. I’m tempted to say either everything is a story, or nothing is. Maybe it’s simply a matter of semantics. Maybe there’s really no difference between story and non-story. After all, the Word was made Flesh. And certainly Flesh is made Word every day. Take my imaginary life. I used to be a real person, but now I’m just words.
Or am I?
Rule #1: Always believe everything you read, however absurd or implausible it may strike you, because you just never know.
Believe this:
That first class possessed an undeniable fatality. Aside from providing the context for my initial encounter with Billy (an event that was to have immense personal and, to a certain degree, metaphysical and even historical implications), that first class was where I fell madly, desperately, head-over-heels in lust with Vanessa Hope.
Sweet Vanessa! Nymphomaniacal muse! In Life, as in Art, one typically falls for at least one femme fatale. I still get a hard-on when I think about her.
I’d met her briefly a few days earlier at the reception for the incoming Skidmore scholars at the Skidmore Terrarium. A posh event, I’d never felt more like the wide-eyed, slack-jawed, clueless hick I’d chosen to be, surrounded by such stunning Old Money opulence—the shiny brass doorknobs, gleaming crystal chandeliers, period furniture, Turkish rugs, oriental vases and gilt-framed oil paintings; the waiters in black tie serving artisanal hors-d’oeuvres and expensive champagne; the stuffy trustees making the rounds getting to know the new scholars; the scholars themselves, sixty or so, an up-and-coming jet set of Americans, Canadians, Brits and Aussies from Andover, Hotchkiss and Wycombe Abbey destined for executive positions with such philanthropic and spiritually uplifting corporations as JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs, trying their prep school best to appear suave, witty, urbane and wise beyond their years; and presiding over it all the vast oil portrait of Richard Smedley Skidmore VI, rubber baron, patron of the arts but mostly the sciences whose seven-figure endowment was royally financing not only our educations but the artisanal hors-d’oeuvres and expensive champagne to boot. (The fact every scholar present was underage was casually and, I say with certainty, safely ignored.) Yes, there he was: good old Uncle Skidmark himself.
And there she was—Vanessa, sweet Vanessa, conversing in fluent French with one of the trustees, delicately sipping her champagne with impeccable grace. To look at her, to listen to her, you’d have thought she was untouchable, inviolable, a creature not of this world, a fair-skinned Norse goddess who, unlike her swarthy and promiscuous Greek counterparts, would never deign to be caressed by mortal hands.
Not that she was haughty; to the contrary, her conversation flowed with animation and sincerity. I noticed she had big gums, and the effect was anything but negative, and I returned to my dorm room later that evening still thinking about her, drunkenly aroused and mildly troubled in a sexual way. Imagine my surprise when she waltzed in the door twenty-five minutes late for Mrs. McGough’s Creative Writing 101.
“I’m Vanessa Hope. Sorry I’m late. I had trouble finding the building.”
“Have a seat,” said Mrs. McGough. “Tell us, Vanessa, where are you from? You don’t sound like a Southerner.”
“Boston,” she replied, squeezing into the vacant seat beside Billy, the bastard.
I’d never been to Boston, but the way Vanessa said it, the way the word dripped out of her mouth like fresh maple syrup oozing from a tap, filled me with an intense desire to go there. Immediately.
From that instant, for the duration of the class, I completely forgot about Billy. I forgot he even existed. I forgot I existed. I became an impassioned spirit drifting limpidly, languidly through the streets of an imaginary Boston, lost in Vanessa’s petulant breasts and slender neck, the chiseled line of her jaw, her sparkling emerald eyes that kept boring hot little holes in me.
•
The sounds of notebooks closing, chairs scooting back and people standing up rudely interrupted my reverie. Class was over. I’d managed to fantasize away the second half of my first lesson.
As we filed out of the room, I tapped Billy on the shoulder. “What’s the assignment?” I whispered.
He looked at me knowingly with his lucid mad eyes and said simply, matter-of-factly, “I haven’t the vaguest idea.” Then, turning to watch Vanessa sashay down the hall: “She’ll go far on that ass.”
I reread the syllabus later for the assignment: a one-thousand-word free association sentence without punctuation or capitalization to be written spontaneously in one sitting. We were also supposed to begin a writer’s notebook like F. Scott Fitzgerald’s to be filled with story ideas, character sketches, dialogue, descriptions, jokes, poems, recyclable tidbits, et cetera.
Meanwhile, I followed my classmates out of Lovelace Hall into a sizzling August afternoon. There wasn’t a hint of fall yet in the flatlands; the bright sunlight was still as hot as a crematorium. I watched furtively, longingly, as Vanessa disappeared around the corner in the opposite direction I was headed.
Parting is especially sweet sorrow when it’s unilateral. I felt empty walking back across campus to my dorm. As I made my way past the Hole, the university’s social epicenter and forum for a variety of lunatics, I overheard a street preacher reading from his King James Bible, voice raised, as if to a circus tent full of revival-goers.
“And the word of the LORD came unto me, saying, Son of man, prophesy against the prophets of Israel that prophesy, and say thou unto them that prophesy out of their own hearts, Hear ye the word of the LORD; Thus saith the Lord GOD; Woe unto the foolish prophets, that follow their own spirit, and have seen nothing! O Israel, thy prophets are like the foxes in the deserts. Ye have not gone up into the gaps, neither made up the hedge for the house of Israel to stand in the battle in the day of the LORD. They have seen vanity and lying divination, saying, The LORD saith
it; albeit I have not spoken? Therefore thus saith the Lord GOD; Because ye have spoken vanity, and seen lies, therefore, behold, I
am against you, saith the Lord GOD.”
When I looked back I saw Billy, heinously ugly Billy in his Harris tweed jacket, sitting alone on the steps munching a bag of Ruffles, attentively accompanying the preacher’s sermon.
Copyright (c) 2009 by Sol Luckman. All Rights Reserved.
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February 2010 
Sol
Access: Public
