Character Sketches

I need to post something here, but I don’t really have anything substantial just now.  So what I am going to do is post some character sketches for a story I’m writing.

Ulysses Juvenal Schumacher - Known to his friends as ‘Juvie’.  He was an astounding athlete growing up and was simultaneously drafted by the Green Bay Packers, New York Yankees, Boston Celtics, Montreal Canadiens, and NASA.  But for all his athletic prowess, Ulysses is really a shy poet who has filled dozens of marble notebooks with verse to make the gods weep.  He spends most of his free time alone, sheepishly reading his books.  You see, Ulysses is an unmatched genius and multi-disciplinary savant.  He runs faster than Bobby Fischer and plays chess better than Carl Lewis.  He paints like a rock star and he invented egg rolls.  He graduated from the University of Pennsylvania with a J.D., Ed.D., and a Ph.D. in polymathematics in just three years.  He listens to music so underground, you’ve never heard of it, and he is physically incapable of hearing popular music of any kind due to a tragic, character-defining disease.  His favorite musical act is the definemecore band, Schopenhauer’s Curse, a group so fucking underground that he made them up.  They sound like a command from God to kill yourself.  Congress has scheduled hearings.

Dulcinea Cooper - Dulcinea was the girl next door – literally – to Ulysses.  He was smitten from the day she moved in when she was twelve.  Ulysses was twenty-three, but that’s not fucked up and creepy because this is literature and Ulysses is both very sensitive and an extraordinary character...like you run into all the time.  Dulcinea is incredibly beautiful, but in a way that only people who read this book would get.  As big box stores have begun moving into Ulysses’s hometown, it has becomes his life’s mission to help to try and preserve the town’s landmarks – particularly Dulcinea’s favorite places.  This is either a tragic waste, or the most noble use, of Ulysses’s talents.  This will be left up to the reader. 

Joey Persico - Joey is Ulysses best friend.  He’s extremely normal and ordinary.  His favorite band is Led Zeppelin and he works at some kind of a factory.  His friendship with Ulysses shows how Ulysses can connect with regular people, even though he is so much more awesome than them.  Joey is always playing with a really old yo-yo that his grandfather gave him shortly before he died because I can’t be bothered to develop his character; so this will have to suffice.

Mr. LaFleur - Ulysses’s high school English teacher.  He was the only teacher who saw that Ulysses was more than a lunkhead athlete.  (His other teachers were huge morons who didn’t realize that his good grades meant he was intelligent.)  Ulysses has maintained a friendship with Mr. LaFleur since high school and the two often drink copious amounts of whiskey and visit the graves of dead writers.  LaFleur is also one of the few people who understands Ulysses’s love for Dulcinea as he himself fucks a lot of high school students – but only over the age of sixteen – but it’s cool and all because of something about the ancient Greeks and the eroticism of teaching.  It’s all artsy fartsy, highly intelligent and cultured shit, and not at all a rationalization.  Mr. LaFleur and Ulysses are composing America’s first Epic Poem based on the constant beatings they receive from the uncultured fathers of sixteen year old girls they try to pick up after they get smashed on whiskey.  Ulysses and Mr. LaFleur once accidentally killed a foreign diplomat with a faulty washing machine.  They sold the body to a secret medical school for people who belong to the organization that secretly runs the world.  This is Ulysses's one regret, and may prove his undoing.

Bob Bob Bobby Bob - Was the high school bully where Ulysses grew up and bullied the fuck out of him (even though he is this amazing athlete who could have kicked Bob’s ass...but he’s all sensitive and shit, so he gets beat up).  Bob is now Ulysses’s boss somehow...even though Ulysses works for a non-profit he started...and continues to bully Ulysses as an adult.  Bob represents death.