A TALE OF THE LIGHTBRINGER (cont.)

After a certain interval on this planet you begin collecting case studies. Old Avrom sure is one-- the male old maid, the voluptuary of repression. Even Carol in her way makes a fine case study-- the person promoted beyond her level of competence, who though meaning well most of the time, fucks up most of the time because some quality of her being-- maybe her enthusiastic support of well-intended mediocrity-- encourages other to fall consistently below their best. After a while I began to see that Carol was not so much a dupe as someone who had overestimated herself, who thought she was strong enough to turn others' long established sharp practice to her own uses, when in fact she just become one of them-- worse, because of the patina of righteousness left over from when she had known better. Carol could go on about the most preposterous things keeping up a flawless deadpan, because it never occurred to her she was anything but right. People confuse sincerity and rightness; they're not the same at all. I learned to hate sincerity. It ruins everything by making the least effort seem enough.
I know I am a case in some people's books. What would you call it? The Intellectual Techie, the guy who looks down his nose from the cage at everybody, thinking much too much for the little he really has to do.
Luby. . . Lord God, thereis a case. The Venturesome Innocent. The Dangerous Cherub-- the guy who thrashes forward through everybodys' bailiwicks and tender spots because he has absolutely no idea that anyone is after anything but what he's after-- perfection. This is not to say he is a perfectionist-- Luby can be mighty sloppy in his precipitous moments-- rather that he is a man who believes that perfection lies not in caution or consideration, but in experimentation, in daring, in hurdling forward at the greatest possible speed. Amazingly, as long as he was fully in charge he never made a mistake. His experiments worked, even when they were not particularly reproducible. When someone interfered, though, when someone stopped the momentuum, it was easy to make Luby look like a slob, improvident and hasty. Avrom was so good at that that Luby had to get good at the equally useful skill of disguising his real program. Avrom could revise and reorder all day to his deep satisfaction and yet never touch the real matter, which Luby could then serenely take up again as though nothing had been said.
Luby's being a case study was particularly poignant for me. Part of my own caseness hung upon his. This is to say that Luby is the one person I have ever hero-worshiped in such a way as to believe that he could do, ultimately, no wrong. I guess you have to keep this in mind regarding everything I've said about him. I mean, I saw him being stupid or inattentive sometimes. In the shop he wiped his hands on his shirt and could have showered more often, was late for meetings and bad at party games, but this stuff didn't ever matter more than a few minutes. When he was on, when he was doing either the Craft of Theater or the Craft of Life, I was convinced that everything he did led to some ultimate and universal victory.
So, when accusations came against Luby that he was a pornographer, I didn't change my mind about Luby, but about pornography. Here's what happened. No one has the whole episode figured out, but I think I come close.
A semester or two after the creation of the video workshops came the famous Advanced Video Class that I took as a Special Student. God, Luby learned fast. He taught those classes like he'd grown up with a camera in his hand. On the first day of class he gave the assignment-- the inevitable assignment, if you think of it-- that we were to make our own videos. Acknowledging the hesitancy of some, the blind panic of others, Luby said we could work together if we wanted to, so long as there was a video for each member of the class.
"It'll be easier if you choose a theme," he said, "if you all work on things vaguely related. Then you can help each other without learning whole new visions. It'll be easier than traveling in nineteen opposing directions at once. It'll put a vibe in the air."
As a class we chose the theme, "sex." It put a vibe into the air all right. We decided not to tell Luby the theme until the films were finished, and then we'd make him guess from the evidence. . . not that sex on the minds of post- adolescents would come as that much of a surprise.
I was the elder of the class, and I suppose I should have offered some guidance, but it seemed like a great idea to me too. At the end of the semester there were 19 videos, some of them crude, some of them coy, one of them not about sex at all, as Miss DeLonge was born-again and instead did interviews with people recently home from the Mission Field, altering camera angles by sitting on the ground and aiming through the legs of tables and stuff, and it wasn't a bad film and Luby passed her with the comment that it was always right to test the rules. But, most of them were really about sex, and half of those were really sexy. We had a festival at Luby's house (except Miss DeLonge, who asked to be excused) where we sat through them all, and believe me, I needed to be hosed down about half way through.
Luby was a pig in shit. He thought we were WONDERFUL. The fact that the films were boner-makers said to him we had COMMITTED TO OUR MATERIAL, that we had TAKEN EVERYTHING SERIOUSLY, that we had EXPLORED THE POSSIBILITIES OF EXPRESSION.
Luby was actually a bit of a prude on an everyday level; I really don't think it dawned on him that any of the films were actually sexual. To Luby they were either well done or they weren't. The atmosphere of freedom in Luby's class allowed some of the flicks to be, at moments, indistinguishable from porn, but the sudden embarrassed silence in the room and the witness of their own eyes revealed this to the artists, revealed their own descent into sleaze or wish fulfillment, and pulled them out of it lastingly. Some deeds you must see yourself doing before you can reject.
It surprised me to like Delilah Morris's best. I already liked her personally for reason's unrelated to art. Delilah was corn-shock blond, a cheerleader and an accomplished tease, and not only was this not the combination you expected from a film maker, but she'd given no prior indication of much else. I'd put her refusal of my assistance in her film down to fear of being overwhelmed by my talent. But she'd gotten in cahoots with the housekeeper at Phi Gamma Delta fraternity house, and had hidden cameras in the showers and in a few of the individual rooms. Of course it was not meant as a documentary, and inspired editing cut between episodes in such a way as to create a coherent narrative, but still what flickered on Luby's portable screen was a little surprising, certainly not the locker room voyeurism we expected from the steamy opening credits. There was plenty of male skin-- lots of it worth looking at, the Phi Gams being the campus peacocks-- but above all it was tender, even sort of sad. The guys had sorrows. Unexpected joys. Endearing vanities and stupidly cultivated virtues. They talked and listened to each other as though what was said mattered. They hugged, farted, giggled, poked at zits in the steamy mirrors, did pushups on the floor waiting for the toilet to flush and water to go back to the showerheads. They were brothers, even as they announced in maudlin fraternity slurs when you arrived already half drunk at their rush parties. They sang in the showers. They sat on the wooden bench at three in the morning and cried. They hunched on the sides of their beds writing poetry, jamming notebooks guiltily under beds at knocks on the door. They were beautiful in ways nobody had expected.
If the girls in Luby's living room loved it, we guys were a little uncomfortable; it revealed part of us we didn't want people to know, even each other. Whatever we felt about it, we knew it was a real film, a work of art. After it Luby didn't say much. He just stared at Delilah a long time as though she were the Sistine ceiling.
Lubachek's Film Night was the obsessive topic of conversation among us 19 and our friends for days after. We hashed everything over and over, artists talking passionately about art for the first time, juiced and sweating for the next project. It was the first time I ever thought I would really be anything but a truck driving redneck from the mountain.
Who talked to the wrong person in the wrong way I don't know, but at the end of the next week the local TV station blared that Professor John Lubachek of the State University was in county jail, charged with multiple counts of pornography involving a minor.
It's been years now, and I forget the details that seemed then branded into the flesh of the brain, but I think basically that the District Attorney was hot to get someone at the University. We were a constant irritant to the redneck contingent of the community, and each off-color fraternity graffito, each unpaid faculty parking ticket, each Sunday morning pool of vomit was regarded as an emblem of the approach of Biblical reckoning. The local newspaper shared this perspective, and well-reported felony charges against Luby piled up in defiance of the evidence, and when these were sheepishly dropped, one by one, as secretly as their initiation had been public, DA 'Big Bob' Fisher struggling furiously to the last moment, the matter no longer seemed worth mentioning, and so everybody was left with the idea that Luby continued to be in deep shit long after he was free on his own recognizance and walking the streets. The DA was thwarted by the fact that Luby had not made, bought, nor transported any of the videos. He had solicited them in a sense, but it was we who chose the subject "sex," and so Luby could be accused mostly of not keeping a firm hand on the tiller, but not after all of pornography. Nor was anyone featured in the films a minor. Incredibly, blond Delilah had even taken care for that.
In this matter, however, I have to say I gave my friend the worst trouble. My video involved shots of my niece and nephew-- two year old twins-- cavorting in their birthday suits, a parody of sexuality broad enough that the Grand Jury, clucking and tisking over the waste of academic hours, nevertheless found it harmless.
The coup de grace was that the Phi Gams were not eager to press charges--whatever those charges might have been. Rather they wanted copies of the video, which Delilah was busy for a long time providing.
I didn't see Luby much during the forty days of his tribulations, when charges piled up publicly and then were whittled away to nothing in silence. We collided a couple of times by accident, but each encounter seemed painful to him, as though he were embarrassed to be visible. He wouldn't talk about the things which were happening to him. He asked what movies you had seen lately. He told you how that haircut suit you. It made me mad. I didn't want my friends hiding themselves like that, especially not Luby whom I'd come to think of as my best friend. I phoned. I went to his house, pounding and calling until his neighbors looked out their windows. I suspect he was inside with the lights off. This still hurts me when I think about it. I know he wasn't himself then, but even so, to be shut out along with everyone else didn't seem fair. I was his friend. I know he loved me. That should have counted for something.
Wassermann too made himself scarce. Here was mess by the bucket load, and if there was anything Avrom hated, it was mess.
When it was "over" Luby did come forth to teach a few classes, but he was formal and distant, as if further intimacy between himself and his students would lead to further suffering. I put "over" in quotation marks because though Luby was free of the law, he was not free of Avrom Wassermann. Wassermann went before Academic Policies citing the extraordinary circumstances of Dr. Lubachek's recent history, and asserting that, though blameless in the eyes of the law, he could no longer teach with authority, could no longer be considered a proper role model for youth in the eyes of this particular community. It was a matter of perception, Wassermann said, even if the facts pointed in some other direction. Perhaps Professor Lubachek was guilty of nothing but bad judgment, yet the university served a community, and the community had doubts that mere innocence was not going to erase.
I wanted to kill him, of course, but I had to admit there was truth in what he said. Kids were dropping Luby's classes. Most of them had been strong-armed by their parents, but that didn't change the statistics. Majors asked for new advisors. There were righteous phone calls and angry letters to the student paper. Plus, Avrom had said a strange thing in his speech to Academic Policies. He said, "Dr. Lubachek will in time find this to have been a blessing. Whether he recognizes it or not, State has been for him a detour." I wondered if he really believed that crap.
Luby turned into a machine in front of class, repeating what the book said, if asked a question that could not be answered with a fact, saying "I'll look it up." He had disappeared within the DA's accusations. I couldn't have brought him out of it, even if he'd given me the chance. He'd finally gotten what most of us get a decade or so earlier: a vision of evil. Not that the anonymous tattle-tale or the DA or even Wassermann were themselves evil, but that the combined power of their self-protective mediocrity create an evil itself so anonymous and mediocre that it cannot be fought, not even definitely located. I knew that Luby was gone. He'd lost the will to be who he had been.
Luby resigned at the end of the semester, officially "to pursue independent projects." Avrom announced in a closed faculty meeting that it would not be appropriate for any member of the department to give him a recommendation, as it might appear to be supporting a nature which had not managed to linger above reproach. Luby's replacement checked in for the second summer semester. This replacement lasted one year. The one after, three. The one after, three semesters. The present one is in her second disappointing year and skating on thin ice, Wassermann-wise. For all that came to pass, Luby still holds the departmental endurance record.

We each think our own milieu is so important that people disappear when they leave it. Certainly some at State thought they had put a full stop to John Lubachek's story, that thereafter he was wandering alleys somewhere contemplating the errors that cast him out of paradise. Maybe in fact he did that for a while. I don't know. I've already told everything I saw directly. Luby didn't answer the letters I sent to his old address. When they began coming back with "Forwarding Order Expired" I finally gave up. I might have asked Carol if she knew where he was, but I didn't want to give anyone in the department the satisfaction. Yvain pulled the photographs of his productions from his office wall and thumbtacked them to hers. She never actually claimed credit for them, but after I left there was no one who would call her to account if she did.
I began working for local companies, usually for a percentage of the door. There had been no competition at State, the Drama Department being the only game on campus. But the little companies downtown were at each others' throats in an understated sort of way, scrapping over the few dollars of the tiny proportion of the county population which haunted their basement and converted shoe store theaters, scrambling for any advantage, any distinction. I guess I was an advantage and a distinction. It surprised me to not only to be making more money than I had at the university, but also to need to grow in my craft. To that end I moved to New York and worked a couple of seasons, not liking it much, never intending to stay, but catching up on as much new tech as I would need for a career in the mountains.
There I ran into Luby again. He hadn't evaporated or withered away in a junior college somewhere after all. He had become the hottest director off-Broadway, staying Off by choice and by refusing reputedly weekly offers to graduate to the not-so-great-anymore White Way. So far as I was concerned his life-- like a good play-- had skipped the transitions and gone from just plausible catastrophe to just plausible triumph.
I went to a couple of his shows-- to all of them, in fact, several nights each, trying to hit them at beginning, middle, and end of their runs to see what discoveries he had made in process. He was the sort of director who stayed with the show, changing things all the way up to closing night. This irritated producers, but the best actors loved it, and when they went to get their awards they always thanked John Lubachek. He was different. Looked different even, sleek and sure. When I saw him like that I recognized that his habitual expression at State had been Confusion. Here he was the Man.
He'd started directing his own works. Luby's becoming a playwright was inevitable, I guess, given his obsession with the living process of a play. I even went to work for him once, on an original called Night Flight in which the audience figures out eventually that the mordantly humorous characters in fluttering costumes are really migrating birds, but also human souls waiting for rebirth. It made more sense watching it than it does talking about it, and with it Luby won his first Tony. I wish to God I had been on State campus that week, to see what people said about Luby's Tony, whether they forgave him and praised him as their own, ignored it, or shook their heads sadly at the thus-manifest wickedness of Gotham.
All through the run I wasn't sure he recognized me. We worked together pretty close, as I was lighting designer and lighting had become an important part of his theatrical armament. I refrained through all my months in New York from mentioning that in this I taught him everything he knows. But on Tony Awards night, there he was onstage, looking cooler and saner than he ever had at State, giving my name as someone who had taught him everything he knew about lighting a stage. Not only that, but I had stuck with him "in a time almost too bad to remember." Thus I knew he remembered me, and State, and Avrom's patent leather shoes, and Delilah Morris, and our nights in the bar trying to pick up The Muse by the pure longing of our souls. It was courageous of him to hire me and have that remembrance in his face night after night-- though, after all, I was the best. Anyway, it was my paramount moment, him in the light like that mentioning my name. I could go home after that, and I did.
I brought with me all the theater publications and newspaper clippings I could carry which mentioned Luby's Tony and otherwise sensational post-State career. I carried them to the theater and dropped them on tables in the lobby where the drama students hang out. I wanted them to know. There were still some at State who knew or thought they knew the whole story, when what they knew was just what the idiot local paper told them. The truth would gall the right people.
I went back to the theater the next day on business, and saw that the clippings and magazines were all gone. I knew who had done it, and why. I was meeting with him anyway over a show he wanted to hire me to light, so I asked Avrom what he thought of John Lubachek's career.
"Oh, I don't know that much about it," he said, scrupulously avoiding a glance at the trash can where one could see languishing all the proof of Luby's glory. "But I suspect what always happens in these cases."
"What?" I said. "What always happens?"
"That he hasn't mentioned State. That he hasn't mentioned-- us--- once. There is a sort of ingratitude which haunts-- such people. I never have understood it."
He opened the middle drawer of his desk, removed the departmental checkbook and slapped it down enticingly in the space between us. "Two hundred up front, as usual? The rest from the door?" He wasn't looking at me, so I didn't bother answering. "You were here. You know how discouraging it can be." He opened the checkbook and wrote my name boldly at last on the payee line. "You know what he owes me. Us. It wouldn't have happened had we not pushed him from the nest."
I said, "Five hundred, half, up front." Avrom looked at me over his glasses. He smiled his little half-smile, the almost-endearing one, the grin between rogues. There were moments, when it didn't matter so much to him, when he would acknowledge that he'd gone too far. He wrote down exactly what I said.