In a previous article (GHR, May 1999), I described Luke Spencer as an existentialist in the European tradition of Sartre, Kierkegaard, and Camus. In this companion essay, I focus on Luke Spencer as an American hipster. None of what follows is intended to negate what I wrote in the prior article. I still believe that existentialism is key to understanding Luke Spencer; he is an atheist who tries to define human nature by the choices he makes using the principle of situational ethics. But Luke Spencer is not a European intellectual; he's an American, and his existentialism is colored by uniquely American attitudes and behaviors.

While I was writing the prior article, I was concerned that the European existentialist filter I used cast Luke in a light too cerebral and intellectual. Although Luke has his cerebral moments, he is more often witty, energetic, and hip. By chance, while reading various existentialist material, I came across a quotation from Norman Mailer where he states "hip is an American existentialism." Intrigued, I turned to the source of the quote, an article entitled "The White Negro," first published in 1957.

In "The White Negro," Mailer formulates the budding hip consciousness around him as an antithesis to the "square" mentality of the 1950s. For Mailer, the hipster was born when a "menage-a-trois was completed--the bohemian and the juvenile delinquent came face-to-face with the Negro, and the hipster was a fact in American life." Mailer describes the experience of the black man in America as one of overwhelming angst: "Any Negro who wishes to live must live with danger from his first day,...no Negro can saunter down a street with any real certainty that violence will not visit him on his walk." This heightened sense of anxiety was shared--perhaps to a lesser degree--by the bohemians and delinquents who felt themselves as outsiders.

Referring to this union of outsiders as a wedding, Mailer asserts that it was "the Negro who brought the cultural dowry." This cultural dowry was specifically jazz, the music in which the African-American "gave voice to the character and quality of his existence." Jazz was "indeed a communication by art because it said, 'I feel this, and now you do too.' " Through jazz, the disenfranchised white bohemians connected with the black man's anxiety: "The hipster had absorbed the existentialist synapses of the Negro, and for practical purposes could be considered a white Negro."

Mailer begins his article by setting the stage. The horrors of World War II are still fresh in his mind: "Probably, we will never be able to determine the psychic havoc of the concentration camps and the atom bomb upon the unconscious mind of almost everyone alive in these years." He describes World War II as a "mirror to the human condition" that made one realize that "if society was so murderous," then one could not ignore the "most hideous" implications about one's own nature. Moreover, Mailer asserts, the continued threat of the atom bomb made people fearful, resulting in wide-ranging conformity and depression.

Amidst the terror and mind-numbing conformity, Mailer finds instances of "the isolated courage of isolated people." The isolated people for Mailer are the American existentialists, the hipsters who know that "if the fate of twentieth-century man is to live with death from adolescence to premature senescence, why then the only life-giving answer is to accept the terms of death, to live with death as immediate danger, to divorce oneself from society, to exist without roots, to set out on that uncharted journey into the rebellious imperatives of the self."

Although the character of Luke Spencer would not be created for another 21 years, Mailer's portrait of the hipster is a revelatory description of Luke. Luke Spencer is an outsider, a rebellious iconoclast. He has no tolerance for society's rules and expectations. Were it not for Laura's need for home and roots, Luke would live as a nomad, always on the road. Although as a young man from "Elm Street"--from the wrong side of the tracks--he longed for money, power, and respectability, Luke has since come to recognize the hollowness of that dream. In 1980, explaining his desire for money and the respectability it would bring, Luke told Laura "All my life I've wanted to escape from these rat traps." Luke succeeded. Not only did he escape the rat traps, he became the resident of the mayor's mansion. Yet 20 years later, Luke Spencer recognizes that he was just not cut out to be a respectable role model:

Luke: They make you the mayor of their town and they expect you to be law-abiding and be a role model and cut ribbons and stuff, and I'm just not cut out for that. (To Felicia, 7/15/99)

Luke lives life on his terms, but he is no thoughtless, capricious rebel. While the sophisticated and urbane Stefan Cassadine may consider Luke a boorish peasant, Luke is by no means a cultural slouch. He is in fact very aware of the human condition and his own place in the world. The very same horror of war and murderous society described by Mailer in 1957, is described by Luke in 1998:

Luke: Ah, the 20th Century takes quite a bashing. Sure, it's been a bloodbath from beginning to end, but what about the warm, fuzzy moments like this one? Not to mention Nagasaki.
Stefan: I didn't realize you were a student of history. Or anything else, for that matter.
Luke: Oh, yes, I'm a student of philosophy. I ponder the big questions like with God dead or on vacation or MIA or whatever, there's a big void out there to fill. Some think it's a negative thing. I think it's an opportunity. And here we are, filling the void with no God to punish us or to be pleased with us. I think we deserve a hand. (7/20/99)

In the above scene, Luke has just crashed a small party at Wyndemere hosted by Stefan and Nikolas and attended by Laura and Lulu. Although Luke's comments are heavily soaked in sarcasm, I believe he is quite serious in his views of the 20th Century and the opportunity God's absence presents. I think part of the reason for Luke's sarcasm (besides hiding his pain and anger at seeing his wife and daughter in the bosom of the enemy), is to demonstrate his disdain for authority and pretense. He does not want to be seen as a typical scholar, and yet he is clearly a man who knows his history and philosophy. Luke chafes at being thought of as conventional and relishes shocking and disturbing the people he comes across. "It's a gift," he'd say.

In his essay, Mailer continues to explain what he means by the "uncharted journey into the rebellious imperatives of the self": "Whether the life is criminal or not, the decision is to encourage the psychopath in oneself, to explore that domain of experience where security is boredom and therefore sickness, and one exists in the present, in that enormous present which is without past or future, memory or planned intention." The hipster lives in the present moment, avoiding conformity and the quiet desperation it would bring. All his life, Luke Spencer has been on such a journey into the "rebellious imperatives" of his soul.

Luke "Cop shops give me a rash" Spencer is almost always on the difficult side of the law. He's a "low life," according to Mac Scorpio. At best, he has little respect for the police; at worst, he's a criminal. Seen in the best light, his swaggering dismissal of the PCPD's competence is amusing and harmless:

Faison: Well, for one thing, you could tell me how you intend to handle the local police.
Luke: Well, that's not a problem. They have their hands full with parallel parking. (7/8/99)

Seen in the worst light, Luke is a thief, a con artist, a rapist, and a murderer. The crime he is most noted for is his rape of Laura in 1979. Believing that he would soon be killed by the mob, Luke rapes Laura, telling her "I'm not gonna die without holding you in my arms just one time." Because he believes he'll soon be dead, time is scrunched for Luke to the immediate here and now. He is living and feeling in the moment, not thinking about the future because there isn't one. All Luke knows at that moment is that he is about to die and that the woman he has for so long desired is in front of him and that he can overpower her. Until he saw Laura in the disco, Luke had no plans to rape her. But the acute awareness of his mortality and the focus on the immediate now, make Luke unable to feel anything but his drive.

This isn't to say that Luke didn't see his action as wrong. It simply didn't matter to him whether it was right or wrong. It didn't matter to him that Laura was telling him "no" repeatedly. He had no concerns that he'd be punished by God in the afterlife because he didn't believe in God or an afterlife. He had no concerns that he'd be jailed or killed for his crime, because he would be dead soon anyway. He had nothing to lose and all that mattered was the gratification of his desire. Using Mailer's terminology, Luke felt the psychopathic urge to rape and encouraged it in himself.

Let's imagine a different scenario for a moment, however. Let's imagine Laura and Luke in the same disco on the same night but without the threat of death hanging over Luke. Would he have raped Laura? Not very likely. Let's imagine another woman in the disco with Luke. Let's say Amy or Claudia or Monica had wandered into the disco on that night. Would he have raped one of them? Again, not very likely. It was his awareness of death, coupled with the presence of the woman he desired, that pushed Luke to commit the crime. He encouraged the psychopath in himself, but he's not necessarily a psychopath.

According to Mailer, the hipster sees character as "perpetually ambivalent": "Men are not seen as good or bad (that they are good-and-bad is taken for granted) but rather each man is glimpsed as a collection of possibilities." In the spring of 1999, ABC Daytime ran a series of promos featuring various characters' "confessions." In "Luke's Confession," Luke tells the audience of the potential for both good and bad in himself:

Luke: I have a confession to make. I try to be a good guy, but I don't mind being a bad guy when it's necessary. Hurt my family and I can get real ugly. Some people say that's excessive; I say it's survival.

The capability to be both good and bad is something Luke has realized for a long time. In 1980, while visiting Hutch in prison, Luke had the following exchange with Hutch:

Hutch: The world is just two ways. It's either black or white. It's either good guys or bad guys.
Luke: Except us.
Hutch: Except us. Right. (April or May, 1980)

In later years, Luke would come to see that he and Hutch were not the only good guy/bad guy combos. Consider, for example, Luke's compassionate understanding of Tony Jones, after the good doctor went bad:

Luke: So you...you went a little nuts. It happens. More frequently to some of us than to others. You know why it happens? Because the whole world is screwed up, man. And every once in a while it needs a kick in the groin to set it straight. And what's a guy gonna do except light a match, grab a kid, or load a gun. (5/8/98)

Luke not only understands that people are capable of being both good and bad, he also sees life as a battle between the individual and society. And in that battle, the individual's options sometimes lie in the actions of the criminal: arson, kidnapping, loading guns--in other words, encouraging the psychopath in one's self. This doesn't mean that Luke believes that people should do whatever they want to whenever they want to regardless of the cost to others. Or rather, he'd like to believe that but finds that his impulses are checked by the need to not hurt others:

Luke: People want what they want.
Felicia: That doesn't mean you can act on it.
Luke: Well, but people do, don't they? I mean, you can dress it up anyway you want to put it, but people basically do what they want to do.
Felicia: It's still wrong.
Luke: Felicia, "right" and "wrong" are words to me that some people use to keep other people in line.
Felicia: And to keep from hurting other people.
Luke: Well, you got me there. (11/1/99)

Luke does hurt people and yet despite his awareness of the potential in him to be bad, he would not consider himself maladjusted. It is the world that's screwed up. Luke Spencer would never visit a therapist or a marriage counselor. The notion that someone other than himself would have insight into his motivation and behavior is, I imagine, entirely inconceivable for Luke. While Tony, Bobbie, Mac, Felicia, Robin, Stone, Lucy, and others have consulted Kevin Collins or Tom Hardy or Gail Baldwin, Luke has never sought therapy or counseling. The closest he's come to therapy is paying Tammy on the night they met so she'd listen and "judge" him. For Luke, a prostitute like Tammy would have better insight and understanding of people than a psychologist with years of education and training.

Since individuals are capable of being both good and bad, they take on the role of good guy or bad guy depending on the specific battle being fought. In 1997, Luke visited a Greek (or perhaps Russian or Greco-Russian) Orthodox priest to ask him to translate a document written by Stefan Cassadine. In the conversation, Luke states his beliefs regarding good and evil and how one is good or bad only within a particular battle.

Luke: Look, I won't try to con you. By no stretch of the imagination could I be considered a religious man. My life experience tends to be more existential than spiritual. But I know that you people firmly believe in this notion of, uh, good and evil.
Father: The battle between the two is unending.
Luke: Ain't it? So what I'm offering you here, Father, is an opportunity to put a good one into the battle. And you'll be standing on the side with the good guys.
Father: Of which you are one?
Luke: In this particular instance, yes. (July 1997)

In the battle with the Cassadines, Luke considers himself the good guy. And yet, he'd be the first to recognize that he was the bad guy in Laura's rape. For Luke, character is not fixed; it's always in flux. Mailer writes: "Character being thus seen as perpetually ambivalent and dynamic enters then into an absolute relativity, where there are no truths other than the isolated truths of what each observer feels at each instant of his existence." The hipster's recognition of the ambivalence of character is similar to the European existentialist concept of situational ethics where one disregards conventional morality and allows the situation at hand to determine the moral choice.

The hipster is an existentialist philosopher at heart. But you don't need to discuss philosophy with a hipster to identify one. Hipsters look and sound different from most people. They wear sunglasses at night. They don't wear button-down shirts and three-piece suits. They move like cats. They speak a different lingo. Mailer describes the hipster's language--heavily influenced by jazz and black dialect--as an "artful language" intended to act as a wall between the hip and square worlds. When Luke first arrived in Port Charles he frequently used hip terminology that was extremely rare in the soap opera world. For example, Luke would call people "man" or "baby," refer to money as "bread," and implore people to "dig" this or "lay" that on him. In recent years, Luke's language has become more personal. While 20 years ago he used a language common to the hipster to differentiate himself from conventional Port Charles society, nowadays Luke invents his own metaphors. Consider, for example, the following passage where he addresses Alexis alternatively as "Pollyanna" and "Princess," refers to her as "the big bad bogeyman," refers to Helena as the "wicked stepmother," names Mikos "King Herod," and calls Stefan the "Prince of Punishment":

Luke: Look, Pollyanna. The wicked stepmother knows that you're King Herod's bastard daughter. The Prince of Punishment is next in line for the information. Once he finds out you're not only his betrayer you're also his rival that means you the big bad bogeyman, Princess, and the dark won't be safe until you're eliminated from it. (12/26/97)

It is difficult to imagine that Mailer wrote about the hipsters without having the "Beat Generation" at least partially in mind. In 1957, the same year that Mailer wrote "The White Negro," Jack Kerouac's On the Road, written in 1951, was finally, after several rejections, published. The same year saw the obscenity trial for Allen Ginsberg's poem, "Howl," first recited in San Francisco in 1955 and published in 1956 by City Lights bookstore. The Beat writers were making their voices heard in America and they were finding sympathetic ears. The Beats were not part of the established literary order. Most critics disdained their work, although some recognized the revolutionary language, meter, and subject matter used by the Beats. True to Mailer's description of "The White Negro," the Beats were enamored of and heavily influenced by jazz, specifically the bebop of Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, and Thelonious Monk. Sitting in New York's famous jazz clubs--Minton's Playhouse, The Spotlight Club, The Three Deuces--they would yell "Go, go, go" and "Blow, man, blow" and soak up the feel of jazz. Kerouac would try to emulate the sound of bebop in his writing and he termed his style "spontaneous prose," or "bop prosody."

On the Road is an autobiographical fiction (or fictionalized autobiography) describing Kerouac's careening journeys across America with his friend Neal Cassady (named Dean Moriarty in the book). Cassady was a rootless, manic, energetic, charismatic, fast-talking con-man with a voracious sexual appetite. His mother had died while Cassady was quite young, and he had been raised--mostly ignored--by his alcoholic, perennially unemployed father. By the time Kerouac (Sal Paradise in the book) met Cassady at age 20, Cassady had stolen more than 500 cars and had spent time in reform school and jails. Substitute "Spencer" for "Cassady" and you'd have an excellent description of Luke Spencer--with the exception of the 500 stolen cars. (Luke has stolen several forms of transportation, but he probably hasn't hit 500 cars yet.)

In Neal Cassady/Dean Moriarty then, we have a precursor to Luke Spencer. I think the similarity is quite deep, given the striking similarities in background and disposition. Luke and Dean also share an uncommon pattern of speech. Listen to the manic verbal drive as Dean talks to his girlfriend Camille:

"It is now (looking at his watch) exactly one-fourteen. I shall be back at exactly three-fourteen, for our hour of reverie together, real sweet reverie, darling, and then, as you know, as I told you and as we agreed, I have to go and see the one-legged lawyer about those papers--in the middle of the night, strange as it seems and as I tho-ro-ly explained.... So now, in this exact minute I must dress, put on my pants, go back to life, that is to outside life, streets and what not, as we agreed, it is now one-fifteen and time's running, running--"

Compare Dean's speech pattern to Luke's:

Luke: This is exactly what you wanted, Sweetheart, all fashions and factions and facets of your family gathered around one table, stuffing down one enormous meal. Some might have thought that was a naive fantasy, others an invitation to manslaughter, but not me. I'm easy, I--I like to cooperate. So, here we all are.... Well, here's to us--the perfect postnuked, radioactive, but fully blended family.(7/20/98)

Luke Spencer is more sarcastic than Dean Moriarty, but the two share the same, revved-up, headlong, run-on cadence of speech.

Neal Cassady loved cars and had an extraordinary ability to handle them. (His second claim-to-fame, next to being the protagonist of so much of Kerouac's writing, is his stint as the driver of the bus "Furthur" for Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters.) In On the Road, Kerouac describes Dean (Neal) working in a parking lot: "The most fantastic parking-lot attendant in the world, he can back a car forty miles an hour into a tight squeeze and stop at the wall, jump out, race among fenders, leap into another car, circle it fifty miles an hour in a narrow space, back swiftly into a tight spot, hump, snap the car with the emergency so that you see it bounce as he flies out; then...leap into a newly arrived car before the owner's half out, leap literally under him as he steps out, starts the car with the door flapping, and roar off to the next available spot, arc, pop in, brake, out, run." While I don't recall seeing Luke Spencer parking cars, I'd imagine him leaping into cars and roaring just like Dean Moriarty. Indeed, we saw Luke last October leap to the seat over the closed door of his beloved convertible once-pink-now-red-for-the-new-millennium Cadillac. In that episode (10/28/99), Luke and Roy had taken Faison (knocked unconscious, in the trunk) to Lookout Point, where they tossed the villain off the cliff. As I watched Luke Spencer in his Cadillac, bonding anew with his old pal Roy DiLucca, I thought of Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty.

While Dean Moriarty (and Sal Paradise) loved Jazz, Luke "I play blues--nothing but blues" Spencer loves blues. Jazz and blues are distinct, but share a common heritage; they are both rooted in the African-American experience. I believe Luke Spencer loves blues because he identifies with the plaintive sound and lyrics of the blues--the sound of worry, loneliness, and estrangement. Luke isn't one to openly share his feelings, but I imagine even a hep cat like Luke likes company with his misery. At least some of the time. And Luke Spencer is no stranger to misery.

Because life doesn't fit Luke like a glove--"more like a dry cleaner's bag," as he told Tammy--he is forever restless and agitated. He feels suffocated by the middle-class conventional values of Port Charles society. Although he once longed to be part of that world, Luke knows he'll always be an outsider. He knows that you can take Luke out of Elm Street, but you can't take Elm Street out of Luke. He knows that he'll forever be on the wrong side of the tracks, never fitting in. And with God "dead or on vacation or MIA or whatever," he'll have to make up the rules as he goes along.

Notes

1) "The White Negro" was first published in Dissent magazine in 1957. Mailer included it in his anthology of essays Advertisements for Myself in 1959. The same article was most recently included in Mailer's The Time of Our Time, a comprehensive retrospective of Mailer's work.

2) On the Road is Jack Kerouac's most famous novel. In fact, it is the most famous work of the Beat Generation. Kerouac was prolific, writing several novels, essays, and poetry. A good introduction would be The Portable Jack Kerouac, edited by Ann Charters.

3) For general reading about the Beats and hipsters, I'd highly recommend The Rolling Stone Book of the Beats, edited by Holly George-Warren. Another excellent book is Steven Watson's The Birth of the Beat Generation.

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