I had a test that day. After Lydia left I trudged off to class and realized that I had not studied at all. I sat down next to a friend of mine who asked me if I was prepared. When I told her I wasn’t, she told me I could just cheat off of her. She angled her test toward me. I sat there for a moment, debating, and then I just gave up. Fuck it. I put my pencil down, slid the exam away from me, and left. I might be a nobody at that school; I might be depressed, suicidal, stalking the campus at night like a goddamn madman, but at the very least I was no cheater.
Not that I was a zealot against cheating. I didn’t take the school’s solemn proclamations about the sanctity of the honor code to heart. I was engaged in all manor of depraved behavior on a regular basis, who was I to judge someone for cheating? But Lydia’s visit reminded me of who I actually was.
Leaving the test that day, in a way, began the long and convoluted road to pulling myself out of my depression. There would be more vandalism and drugs and alcohol, but pushing that test away and heading back to my dorm room for a few hours of so desperately needed sleep was the first act of many in making myself better. Of remembering the decent person at the core of myself. Of choosing to live.
And Anna gave me that.
Lydia gave me that.
I wish I could have returned the favor.
PIRATES AT THE EQUATOR
“ ‘It’s been insane,’ said an exhausted Cayton-Holland.’ ”
That was Lydia’s quote in the Denver Post. A big, bold pull quote, smack-dab in the center of the article. It was 2004. Dubya was running for his second term and the media was stoking the fears of the 2000 voting fiasco on a near-daily basis. Some intrepid reporter wrote an article about the perils of absentee voting—new twist on an old fave—and they somehow tracked down Lydia, who was studying abroad in Ecuador, apparently mired in difficulty fulfilling her civic duty.
“It’s been insane,” said an exhausted Cayton-Holland.
That was the entirety of her contribution to the article, which just about killed us. It was my family’s favorite inside joke for months after its publication. We regularly parroted her response, adding a surfer accent for effect like some sort of patriotic Jeff Spicoli.
“How’s law school going?” my mom would ask Anna.
“It’s been insane, said an exhausted Cayton-Holland!” Anna’s response.
And while that quote was merely a favorite tidbit from Lydia’s time abroad, a shorthand anecdote we could use when people asked how she was doing, there was also something reductive in our affinity for it. We knew that was merely the quote the reporter chose to use; there was an entire interview beyond that. We also knew that Lydia was no platitude-spouting imp, that she was perhaps the smartest of all three of us, capable of rallying an entire voting bloc of expats should the need arise. But it also wasn’t hard for us to view Lydia in the way she came across in the article: exasperated, flustered, overwhelmed.
There was an air of welcome-to-the-big-leagues-kid in our enjoyment of that quote. Lydia was the baby, the tagalong, the third of three. It was always easy for her to just sit back and enjoy the ride. She was gifted in many different realms—piano, breaking down Buffy the Vampire Slayer with doctorate-level precision—but practical matters often eluded her. She once drove fifty miles on a toll road without stopping, only realizing the error of her ways when the massive bill arrived at my parents’ front door. And here she was, a foreigner in a foreign land—it wasn’t hard for us to imagine her as out of her depths. As a fish-out-of-water for whom every simple turn proved harrowing. Or insane. Perhaps we found that quote so funny because subconsciously we had expected it.
Who then, was the woman that greeted us at our hotel in Quito, after we flew halfway down the world to meet her? Not the child my parents had said goodbye to at the airport, not my little sister Lee, but this actual, elegant grown woman. She was wearing a flowing dress—Does Lydia wear dresses? She wore her hair down to her ass—Had Lydia ever worn her hair that long? She had cool earrings and bracelets, a beautiful, handmade necklace—Did any of you buy Lydia those things? I don’t remember buying her those things.
She seemed transformed. And not falsely so. She was grown up all of a sudden, totally at home in her skin. For a perennially awkward skinny girl, beautiful but atypically so, with a nose like a Cubist painting, that really meant something. Lydia preferred the shadows, yet here she was at center stage, seemingly seizing the moment. She appeared before us not as the baby of the clan, but as a full-fledged member, claiming the position that was so rightfully hers.
Lydia showed our family around her little study-abroad corner of the world over the next few days—Anna and I pining for our similar experiences in Paris and Madrid, my parents pining for the time when they didn’t have to pay for everything. We kept looking for cracks in Lydia’s veneer, but we couldn’t find them. It was legit. At every turn we were amazed by her transformation.
Over dinner one night her new friends explained that not only was Lydia the funny one of the group, she was also “the leader.” Here was a title no one had ever bestowed upon my little sister. Lydia was a seeker of the broken, a gatherer of misfits perhaps, but she did so with the sheepish uncertainty of any outsider. Leader was a stretch. Yet there she was, splitting the bill for eight student budgets; mother-henning drunk friends into cabs, barking their addresses to each different driver.
At a salsa bar one night Lydia casually related to Anna and me the story of her mugging. She was walking through a part of town known as Gringolandia, between her host family’s apartment and the university where she was taking classes. The conventional wisdom was that the area was fine to traverse by daylight, but to be avoided after dark. Of course that conventional wisdom didn’t necessarily hold up for a tiny white girl from the States. Which is how Lydia found herself being robbed at knifepoint in broad daylight, a stream of pedestrian passersby just looking the other way.
The mugger demanded she give him all her money. Lydia said of course. But she kept her wallet in the saddlebag straddling her torso, so she awkwardly began rotating the satchel from back to front so she could reach into it. Which wasn’t fast enough for her assailant. Agitated, the prick demanded she just hand over the whole bag. At which point Lydia patiently explained, in Spanish, that the bag was a recent gift and that she really loved it; if it was all the same to him, could she please just fish out the money and keep the bag? As well as the other few items in there she was fond of?
The mugger was so taken aback by the request that he quickly acquiesced. The notion of rolling a gringa for some easy money was one thing; having a conversation with a fluent expat was another. Suddenly he felt embarrassed by the whole exchange. After Lydia spoke up, he could no longer hold eye contact; he kept apologizing and calling her “senorita.” He was polite and deferential. By the time she got her wallet out Lydia felt so in charge she actually had the mugger hold her saddlebag while she removed the cash from it. She handed him the cash, he returned her bag, and they both went along their separate ways in Quito.
To hear Lydia tell it, the whole experience was really quite pleasant.
Who was this woman in my little sister’s body?
I distinctly remember thinking on that trip that she was going to be just fine. That she was finally beginning to realize her potential.
The whole family left Quito after a few days and boarded a plane bound for the Galapagos. We spent five days bouncing from island to island. We saw finches and albatross. We saw cormorants that had evolved so that they were no longer able to fly. We hugged giant tortoises, sized up frigates and boobies, both red-footed and blue. And when we weren’t doing that we were shit-talking the elderly Germans and Brits that brazenly colonized every corner of our eco-cruise.
Conservatively I would estimate that my sisters and I were eighty-five years younger than the youngest among them, and as we politely moved aside so they could waddle down one of the ship’s many narrow corridors, we silently cursed them for either ki
lling the Jews directly, or being too weak to prevent it.
We ignored our shipmates from the Continent and instead hung out with the crew, who loved us. Our age alone would have made us favorites. The fact that all three of us spoke Spanish made us virtual ship celebrities, our every move well documented.
“You swim with a sea lion today, eh?” the man slicing the meat would say to me at dinner with a wink.
“I did!”
“Eso es!” he would exclaim, delighted, piling an extra portion of roast beef onto my plate.
Lydia and I riffed constantly on that trip. We knew that “abogado” was Spanish for “lawyer,” but we didn’t know that South American attorneys also flaunt their doctorates in their job title. We learned this walking through Quito one day, when we stumbled upon a block of law offices, each one proudly flying the sign “DOCTOR ABOGADO.”
Doctor Lawyer.
Anna was about to graduate law school and begin work at my dad’s firm. We begged her to announce herself to the Colorado legal community at large as Doctor Lawyer. It would not only set her apart from the pack, we insisted, but lend her an air of worldly sophistication. She declined. Didn’t matter. Doctor Abogado was born; he became our go-to supervillain, his name only spoken as though he were a dastardly fiend.
“So we meet again, Doctor Abogado” Lydia would vamp. “Did you really think you could brazenly keep filing slip-and-fall after slip-and-fall and the court would simply fail to take notice?”
“Tell me, Doctor Abogado,” I’d yes-and. “Did you actually listen to your Continuing Legal Education Seminar tapes, or DID YOU JUST SAY YOU LISTENED TO THEM?!”
One afternoon, Eddie, the ship’s point man, pulled my sisters and me aside, all business. He explained to us that the ship had a long and storied tradition for when the vessel actually crosses over the equator. While the guests are out on the deck enjoying their afternoon cocktails, some of the crew dress as pirates and run around pretending the ship is under siege. Eddie explained that normally such a privilege was the exclusive domain of the most senior crew members, but because they liked us three so much, they were hoping we would take the reins.
Eddie, I thought, this is a terrible tradition. A cheese-dick sketch for a bunch of septuagenarians who normally reserve laughter as a means of shaking crumbs from their folds? No thank you.
“We’ll do it!” Anna said.
“Really?” Eddie asked, delighted.
“Absolutely!” Lydia chimed in. “We would be so honored.”
Eddie beamed, then ran to tell the others.
“We’re not really going to do this, right?” I protested.
Anna gave me the type of look that only a family member can muster, a look that says not only are you going to cease your line of questioning immediately, you’re going to back the fuck up and proceed in the opposite direction entirely, regaling all who you encounter with the story of how foolish you once were. I turned to Lydia for reinforcement. She stared back at me with the exact same look.
“Quit being such a baby,” she said.
Treachery on the high seas. Lydia was my go-to comedy collaborator. Not only did we share a sense of humor, but also a sense of mortification. And self-respect. We were never the drama geeks hyperventilating at their own hilarity as one of their bits plays out in front of the food court. We were the cynical assholes watching those neckbeards and mocking them. Yet here we were staring down the barrel of a total comedy fucking disaster and Lydia’s only response was to start an improv troupe. All we needed was a fat guy in a sweater.
An hour later we were sitting in a cabin off the main deck preparing for the show. A crew member helped us don wigs and eye patches and ill-fitting pirate garb. Eddie handed us a page-long script he had printed out. It called for three pirates and a Poseidon. As if on cue, my father, the original Doctor Abogado, bounded into the room wearing a tight-fitting gold tunic, the fanciest of sausages. He had a long, white wig on and he clasped a plastic trident in his hand. He was smiling like a special needs student.
“I’m Poseidon!” my father loudly announced, unable to contain his joy.
Our improv troupe was complete.
My mother, for her part, wisely sat out the performance, opting to drink chardonnay and write postcards in her cabin instead, dignity intact.
As we neared the equator, we peered through a window toward the unsuspecting European lizard-people, warming their massive carcasses with goblets of gin. They had no idea they were about to be bitch-slapped by a four-man, dinner-theater flash mob. Then Lydia spoke up, inspired.
“We should just swear as much as possible.”
“Swear?” my dad asked her. “Why?”
“Because fuck it. We’re pirates. Pirates swear.”
The logic tracked.
“WE’RE CROSSING THE FUCKING EQUATOR!!!” I bellowed, belting out of the cabin, plastic swords flailing. “AARGH!!!”
“YOU HEAR THAT, SHIT-BAGS?!” Lydia screamed. “WE’RE CROSSING THE EQUATOR!”
“WHICH MEANS YOU BETTER FUCKING PAY ATTENTION!!!” Anna joined. “AARGH!!!”
As the script called for, we each grabbed a stunned spectator and dragged them to the front of the deck, where we forced them to get on their knees. The crowd was rapt.
“Ladies and gentleman!” Lydia yelled. “All hail King Poseidon!”
The audience applauded and my father emerged like a resplendent, silver-haired drag-queen: Too Wong Jew.
“Who dares cross the equator without consulting me first?” he demanded of the assembled mass. “I am Poseidon! I must be satisfied!”
He was owning it.
“AARGH!” Anna gargled, herding an old English man she had plucked from the crowd toward my dad. “FUCKING TAKE THIS ONE!”
The man shuffled toward him, blinking and uncertain.
“You!” King Poseidon continued, angrily, absolutely stealing the fourth-grade spring play. “You’ve been flushing toilet paper down the toilets when the signs blatantly say to dispose of all paper products in the trash can!”
“WHAT THE SHIT, MAN?!” I screamed.
“YOU KNOW IT’S A DELICATE SEPTIC TANK!” Lydia echoed. “ARE YOU STUPID OR JUST AN ASSHOLE?”
“For your punishment, you must do the mating dance of the blue-footed booby!” my father ordered.
Relieved that this was the extent of his punishment, the timid Brit shuffled in place, doing his best imitation of a ritual we had all seen so many times over the last few days. The crowd roared with approval. The crew handed him a fancy pink drink, and the Brit promptly disappeared below deck like a mole who’d been above surface far too long.
It went on like this for what felt like forever, though I can’t be sure. Time has a way of eluding you at the equator. The three of us would round up fat Europeans and swear at them, my father, King Poseidon, would dole out punishments, the bar would reward everyone with silly drinks.
Finally, we reached the end of the script.
“Ladies and gentleman,” Lydia said. “A round of applause for King Poseidon!”
My father bowed humbly, holding on to his wig like an ace, lest the whole cover be blown. Then he regally made his way back to the cabin.
“And remember,” Lydia cautioned, beginning to lose her voice from all the pirating. “REDUCE!”
“REUSE!” Anna followed.
“FUCKING RECYCLE!” I screamed.
We exited. Hysteria reigned. We’d crushed.
Back in the small cabin off the deck, we caught our breath and removed our costumes and makeup. Eddie promptly joined us and positively shrieked with glee. He said it was hands down the best equator crossing they’d ever had. He thanked us profusely and gave us each a king-sized Nestlé Crunch bar, a rare commodity so far out at sea. Then he left us alone to come down from our performer’s high. We tucked into our candy bars with ravenous appetites, three pirates and a King Poseidon, feasting together on their hard-earned bounty. Then Lydia spoke up.
“It’s been ins
ane said an exhausted Cayton-Holland.”
We all laughed. Lydia smiled. The joke was no longer on her.
JESUS IN A TORTILLA
I was at a bar waiting for a friend when I struck up a conversation with the man seated next to me, the way two heterosexual males never do. I had graduated from college and was back in Denver, trying to figure out my next move. The year was 2004. The bar was the Red Room. The man was Ben Roy. I’m surprised there’s no commemorative plaque.
Here Asshole A met Asshole B and together they went on to create extended cable glory.
Ben had tattoos covering seemingly every inch of available skin and was scribbling away in a small notebook.
“Are you a writer?” I asked him.
“No,” he said, definitively. “I’m a comic.”
Never mind the fact that he had been doing stand-up comedy a paltry six months at the time. In Ben’s mind, he was a comic. That was good enough for him.
“Are you a writer?” he asked me.
“Yeah,” I said, trying to sound cool. “I write for Westword.”
Never mind the fact that by that point I had had one essay and three upcoming event blurbs published in my hometown alt-weekly. Never mind that I was substitute teaching to actually pay the bills while struggling to get pieces into the paper. In my mind, I was a writer. That was good enough for me.
Two young Skywalkers. The delusion was strong in these ones.
Ben and I chatted more as we waited for our respective friends. I peppered him with questions about stand-up comedy, fascinated. I had never met an actual stand-up. Up until that point I didn’t think that they walked among us. I thought they only existed in blazers in front of brick walls, anointed on high by the Late Night gods. I didn’t think it was something you could just do. I was never one of those guys who fixated on stand-up as a kid. Colorado cable packages didn’t even offer Comedy Central until late into my teenage years. And what little I did know of comedy, I found lame. Dudes with mullets bitching about airplanes. Uncle Joey on Star Search. But here was this punk rock dude talking about stand-up with an intensity I found mesmerizing. You could tell he lived and breathed it. For him stand-up was as valid as any art form out there, if not more so. Because there was nowhere to hide, as Ben explained. It’s just you and a microphone. And what’s a purer form of expression than that?
Tragedy Plus Time Page 5