Home (from BEGINNER'S LUKE)

Posted on Feb 19th, 2008 by

Sol

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HOME (from Beginner's Luke)

Sol Luckman

Like a homing pigeon, I was instinctively returning to a previous incarnation, intuitively going back to a part of me that had been skipped, though precisely which version I was headed for I couldn’t have told you just then. I was zeroing in on a clearer vision of myself before I became me, seeking some historical grounding, something at least resembling a past, even a partial one, even if technically it had to be reconstructed from a future perspective.

But why eighteen? you’re probably asking yourself. Then again, maybe you’re not. That’s okay. Never mind you should be asking yourself that question. It’s the only logical question given such illogical circumstances.

It would have been easier—and far more coherent from a narrative, not to mention biological, point of view—to forge boldly ahead, tick off the appointed stages one by one through midlife crisis to forced retirement to doddering senility to death without dignity. But what character with any sense of aesthetics desires a cradle-to-grave account of himself? That’s so passé, so nineteenth-century.

Then there was the rather depressing fact that, despite starting out at thirtysomething, I didn’t really feel like a man. It was a rotten time to try to be a man in America. Until Blue came along I’d never even spent time around a man. Hell, I’d never even seen one. Where were all the men in this once great land? I longed for a rite of passage to teach me what it meant to be a man.

Easier said than done. The thought of initiation scared me more than dentists. I pictured shivering naked in dark caves, eating raw meat and insects, stumbling deliriously across miles of scorching desert, hanging from my pierced chest for days on end. “Perhaps it doesn’t have to be so painful,” I mused between drags on a damp Pall Mall while thumbing for a ride in a light mist of rain outside Grosse Tete, Louisiana.

One item was nonnegotiable: I refused to go all the way back. I became paralyzed at the suggestion of returning to childhood. Childhood is either absurdly superficial or profoundly shitty. There’s no in-between. Anyone who reminisces about their happy childhood is delusional.

Ditto for adolescence. All the king’s horses and all the king’s men couldn’t have dragged me back to that martyrdom of zits, braces, cafeteria lunches, pep rallies, school plays, yearbook photos, SATs, curfews, chaperones, hickeys, blue balls, premature ejaculations, wet dreams, inopportune boners, melodramatic poems, and suicidal tendencies.

So I settled on eighteen, that magically suspended instant just after high school when responsibility has yet to encroach on your felicity, and my imagination took care of the rest.

Which explains, more or less, how I found myself riding shotgun in a silver Fiero on Interstate 40 hurtling across the Cumberland Plateau up into the Appalachian Mountains, Duran Duran playing at ear-crushing decibels over the radio.

The driver, a creature with cadaverous skin and a funereal mullet, wore black eyeliner and lipstick, blue jeans, white tennis shoes, a gray sport jacket and matching ribbon tie, the whole ensemble set off by a collection of tacky rings, bracelets and necklaces. From my recent future perspective, he seemed a living caricature of himself. “Killer music!” he shouted over the chorus to “Rio,” passing me a small vial of white powder.

I realized I wasn’t alone in having turned back the clock thirteen years: everybody and everything had reverted to circa 1986. Inside the vial, in addition to the powder, was a tiny silver spoon. I snorted two tiny heaping spoonfuls—one in each nostril. Soon I agreed wholeheartedly: the music was killer. We crossed the precipitous state line into North Carolina at a hundred and ten miles an hour.

I’d never been to North Carolina, not that I could recall. Which wasn’t saying much. We turned off the AC and rolled down the windows to enjoy the invigorating mountain air. The music pounded in our ears and our skin soaked up the wind as the Great Smokies engulfed us, fold after fold of fleshy hemlock ridges towering all around like vegetable mammoths, softening in the velvety distance, the deep gorges opening and falling directly below, sublimely verdant gashes.

I was back on the old High Seas headed for yet another installment of the Adventure, another chapter of my imaginary life set this time in a place I thought of as home. Home. The mountains were like a mother with arms open wide, welcoming home her prodigal son.

Home. The word circled comfortably in my mouth like bubble gum, swished around sweetly soft and satisfying. Home. Try saying it aloud to yourself. Home. Isn’t it like taking a bite of something lovely? If only we could eat words.

It was good to be young again, and free, and on the road, and airborne, and skimming the waves, and submarining, and returning to my roots all at once: a spaghetti tangle of confused directions and associations and locomotions. But I didn’t care that I made no sense. For the time being I relinquished myself to existence pure and simple, thinking absolutely nothing—as if my mind were merely an echo chamber for the music, as if it contained only ether or at most a vaguely pleasant odor as of roses preserved between the pages of a book, their significance long forgotten. The tongue of the road gobbled me up and I allowed myself to sink like a tasty mouthful all the way to the bottom of a marvelous, rejuvenating vacuity. Later, it would occur to me it’s the emptiness we mistakenly call Innocence.

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

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Who would you be if you could be anyone? go anywhere? do anything? Well, you can! Luke Soloman will show you how.

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 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, recently 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.”

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