Tragedy Plus Time

by Adam Cayton-Holland

  Or what if we had just let her be down in Colorado Springs? How much better would things have turned out for Lydia if we had left her alone after she graduated from Colorado College? Never pushed her. Never prodded. She seemed to be happy living in her college town those few years afterward; why was that not enough? She worked at a no-kill pit bull shelter. Volunteer of the year, two years in a row. Fêted at a banquet and all that. She had a boyfriend who helped run the punk club in town, the Black Sheep. My parents helped her buy a little house in a cute neighborhood down the street from the Colorado School for the Deaf and the Blind. She fostered dogs and cats and musicians and outcasts. Her friends all loved her. They seemed to orbit around her. She was this five-foot-five, late-night Guitar Hero party grande dame.

  What was so wrong with that?

  Nothing. But Lydia was a Magnificent Cayton-Holland. And we expected more.

  Our family was never one for pressure, some Waspy vultures out of J. D. Salinger sneering at their progeny’s every errant move. If you asked either one of my parents what they wanted their children to be, their answer, unequivocally, would be happy. And they would mean it. Had we sniffed at the cracks forming beneath Lydia’s surface I don’t think we would have pushed her, not even subliminally. But we didn’t know. We never negated anything she was doing, but we encouraged her in various directions, the way you would any smart young person you care about making lateral move after lateral move in their early twenties. You step in and offer guidance and advice. That’s the way of the world. Ours anyway.

  She was so good with animals, why not think about vet school? The animal shelter was a great résumé builder for such an endeavor, surely she didn’t want to make less than minimum wage with no health insurance forever, right? Colorado State University is one of the best vet schools in the west. Maybe she could go there?

  Or at the Black Sheep, why not jump into a band? Lydia was gifted at piano and guitar and drums; she was spending night after night at the punk club helping bar-back anyway, why not play a little music?

  But Lydia always had some excuse. Vet schools were inhumane. She didn’t want to have to do that much dissection. And if she became a vet, she would never be able to handle putting down any animals. It would break her. And while she was good in the privacy of her own home playing all those instruments, she’d fall apart up onstage. She wasn’t a rock star. She was a hobby musician. Nothing more.

  Excuses, excuses.

  They may have been no more than the meanderings of any twentysomething, but there was an insistence about them that was infuriating. The way Lydia seemed to tether herself to this career mediocrity. You could argue with her until you were blue in the face, there was no hurdling her reasoning. She was so stubborn.

  Which was exasperating. Lydia was brilliant, plain and simple. She was so heightened, so fiercely precise. But it was always masked by a casual aloofness. She had this nonchalant intensity about her that you could miss out on completely if you weren’t paying attention. She would let slip the most insightful comments in sly asides, half-uttered quips. The effect broke many a sad-bastard singer-songwriter into ten thousand terrible lyrics. She was special. And she knew that. She was also smart enough to see that her older sister was a civil rights attorney and her brother was this comic/writer while she was hosing dog shit off of concrete and killing drunks with kindness in a dingy punk club. So what was the problem?

  I wonder if some part of her knew that fucking up was a way for her to stand out. We all glorified and fetishized dark books and movies and TV shows. What’s more of an attention grabber than the kid who comes home for Thanksgiving strung out on drugs? And while Lydia was not there—yet—I think part of her knew that the best way to stand apart in a group of cocky navel-gazers who all fashion themselves exceptional was to be normal.

  I often wonder if I steered Lydia toward comedy when I should have just left her alone.

  I had gone down to visit her for the day in Colorado Springs. She drove me around to her favorite haunts: Shuga’s to eat, the Leechpit for records, the Black Sheep to meet the gang. She took me to the shelter where she worked and introduced me to Dozer, a massive pit bull rescued from an underground fighting ring. He was so far gone when he came in they thought they were going to have to euthanize him. He was traumatized and ferocious; he lunged at anyone who came near him. Lydia was the only one able to break through. Over months she rehabilitated him completely, and now he was this total sweetheart, this enormous shelter mascot, ready for adoption, waiting on a good home. All because of my little sister. We walked Dozer down by the creek behind the shelter, off an office park in a sketchy part of town. Lydia explained that according to the police who had briefed the shelter recently, that creek was where nearly half of all rapes in Colorado Springs took place. She delivered this tidbit upbeat, classic Lydia smart-ass. Like, wasn’t that great news! I stared at my tiny sister, aghast.

  “Jesus, Lydia.”

  “I’m fine,” she said, showing me her cat-ear self-defense key chain. “Besides, I never walk down here without Dozer. He’d destroy anyone that tried to touch me.”

  “You should move back to Denver, Lee,” I told her. “Colorado Springs fucking sucks.”

  “Believe me,” she said. “I know.”

  That encouraged me. That she was souring on the Springs. It was time to come back to Denver, to her family. It seemed so dumb to me that she was just an hour away, living this separate life from her family. She had tons of friends in Denver. She wasn’t doing anything in the Springs that she couldn’t do in Denver. Besides rehabilitating pit bulls, which are archaically banned in Denver, a subject on which Lydia could opine for hours.

  We saw the remake of 3:10 to Yuma and when it was done, neither one of us wanted to stop hanging out. We missed each other. I had a gig that night in Castle Rock, a cluster of McMansions halfway between Denver and Colorado Springs, so I invited Lydia to join. She got someone to cover her shift at the Black Sheep and we caravanned north on I-25 to the gig. She had seen me perform several times—indeed, she had organized shows for me and my friends at the Black Sheep—but it had been awhile. And I had gotten a lot better. I was headlining showcase shows now. I was semi in-demand.

  The show that night took place in a strip mall coffee shop where a Pier 1 Imports appeared to have projectile vomited all over the walls. They served no booze and there was no stage, just a mic stand on the floor. The setting was far from ideal but the room was packed. There was an audience there for the taking. Unfortunately, none of the comics seemed up to the task. I watched as the openers got up and meekly performed to tepid indifference. But I’d be damned if that was going to be my fate that evening. My little sister was in the house. I was Adam Cayton-Holland, of Squire fame. Of Los Comicos Super Hilariosos! Apathy was my fucking gasoline. These golf course polyps didn’t know what was about to hit them. I took the stage and howled into that microphone. I refused to take meh for an answer. I went into the crowd and interviewed people, desperately wrangling. And it worked because that type of hacky shit always works. The audience just needed some livening up, some pander-monium. Once I had them listening, I transitioned into the good stuff, the polished bits that I used at Comedy Works. I knew to err on the side of clean so I kept it mostly PG, PG-13. They loved it. I had learned to read an audience by now and I was giving them what they wanted. I grew more confidant. I was goofy and loose. At the cash register there was an order-up bell next to the tip jar. I grabbed it in the middle of my set and began dinging it loudly after each punch line. I was in command. At the end of my set, I got a standing ovation. Thirty suburbanites moved to their feet. A couple of the bigger swinging dicks tipped me crisp twenties.

  Lydia couldn’t believe it. She sat with me on the outdoor patio after the show and we sipped free coffee and broke down my performance. She was like an anthropologist, she wanted to know everything: which parts were planned, what was off the top of my head, what material was newer, what was older. She asked me how
I had come up with certain bits, offered up tags that I had not thought of. In that exact moment I watched Lydia pivot from indie rock to stand-up; I witnessed her metamorphosis into an alt-comedy fangirl right on that patio. She knew about Los Comicos and everything that I was doing, but I don’t think she had fully put together that it was actually good, that my friends and I were performing some fine dick jokes up there in Denver, creating art equally of note—if not more—than the music she was consuming on a nightly basis. That night, I showed her. And she wanted in. Just like the newspaper had predicted. Comedy became her new punk rock.

  She asked me if she moved back to Denver, could she maybe help out with shows. Work the door, sell drinks, run tech, whatever.

  I often wonder what life would be like if I had said no.

  THE GRAWLIX

  “You’re saying ‘literally’ too much,” Lydia pointed out.

  “No I’m not,” I protested.

  “You are. I counted. You said it four times last night. Four. In a ten-minute set. That’s way too much.”

  “Did I really say it four times?”

  “Literally. You say it a lot in general.”

  “I think you’re right.”

  She was right. Her comedy instincts were dead-on. Lydia made everything I wrote better. Never huge overhauls, but a small suggestion here, a tweak there; she helped me get right to the essence of the joke and avoid all the fluff. She became a second set of eyes and ears. A secret writing partner. These were the type of intimate conversations a comic should allow only with another comic. But this was Lydia, my whip-smart little sister, my earliest collaborator. I let her in.

  “What did you think of the e-mail exchange bit,” I asked, “with the American Museum of Natural History in New York?”

  “So fucking good. That crushed.”

  “It did do pretty well.”

  “But it needs one more back-and-forth. It was killing. The crowd wasn’t ready for it to be over yet. One more short exchange between you and the museum, and the audience will lose their minds.”

  “But there isn’t one more exchange. That was an actual back-and-forth. That’s where the e-mails ended.”

  “So? No one in the audience knows that. Just make one up.”

  We were getting along famously, connecting in ways we hadn’t since we were children. Our newfound proximity and a shared loved of comedy brought us closer together than ever before. Lydia worked the door at my shows. She sat in the booth and figured out lighting cues, played the videos. She lent a hand at the bar, she helped make flyers. And I needed her help. There was plenty of work to be done.

  We had reemerged on the Denver comedy scene as a trio: Ben Roy, Andrew Orvedahl, and myself. It immediately felt right; Andrew and Ben were the two most talented comics I had ever met. We christened ourselves the Grawlix. “Grawlix” is the word one uses to refer to an omitted swear word in a comic strip, like this: *$!#@! The name was perfect, obscure, and pretentious, just like us.

  We wanted to grow our audience, to attract the attention of the comedy world at large, so we decided to make a web series. Through the Denver comedy scene, we had gotten to know the Nix Brothers, Evan and Adam, two hive-minded brothers who were so in tune creatively everyone thought they were twins. They agreed to work with us, and thus was born the Grawlix web series Behind the Scenes of Denver’s the World’s Best Comedy Show.

  We screened the first episodes at our live show, and the response was overwhelming—it was an immediate hit. Everyone seemed to respond to our on-screen dipshit trio, and we settled nicely into our roles as the smart-ass (moi), the lovable moron (Andrew), and the emotionally unstable maniac (Ben). We began uploading the episodes to Funny or Die, and in no time a Hollywood producer reached out to us about developing a script. We consulted with our reps, who informed us we didn’t need some producer, we just needed to write a script ourselves and they could help us sell it.

  So we did. I had been tinkering with a script that drew on my experiences as a substitute teacher in Denver public schools called Those Who Can’t. I liked the high school setting but something was missing. I suggested we transfer our Grawlix characters into academia, and suddenly the ideas couldn’t come to us fast enough. Andrew would be the moron gym teacher, blissfully unaware of his lack of athletic prowess. Ben would be a history teacher with a Howard Zinn bent—truth is the real punk rock. I would be the pretentious Spanish teacher, a guy who so desperately wants to be cool and who teaches the Queen’s Castilian Spanish to primarily Mexican-American students. A world was born. Our reps loved it. More to the point, they told us they could sell it.

  In the meantime, we just kept doing our Denver thing, playing to sold-out audiences every month. We were becoming C-list local celebrities, like newscasters and used-car barons, except with actual personalities.

  I had always wanted to make it in comedy from my hometown of Denver, but deep down I knew that was naïve. Now for the first time I started to actually believe that maybe I could do it. And I wanted nothing more. Why did I have to live somewhere I didn’t want to live? Just to fit in to what was viewed as the comedy norm? I was proud of Denver, the little city that could. I was spending my twenties being involved in the arts scene in my hometown, pouring every ounce of myself into being someone from there, of there, like Neal Cassady but with dick jokes. And now my friends who were artists and musicians and comics were really starting to come into their own, myself included. So why did I have to leave all of that to fit some sort of coastal bias of what success means? There are great music scenes all over the country, I reasoned, why couldn’t that be true of comedy? Bands come from everywhere. Why can’t comics?

  I was where I wanted to be.

  And I loved having Lydia home. We ate lunch together three, four times a week. And I talked to her every single day on the phone. There was no one else in the world that was true with. Not Katie, the lovely girl I was beginning to date. Not my parents. Only Lydia. Not a day went by that I didn’t talk to her. If that’s not the definition of a best friend, I don’t know what is.

  My entire family was enjoying having her home.

  My mother had leapt boldly into the dog show world, an insane Best in Show vortex that was the source of constant amusement. Lydia would often accompany her to competitions in small, forgotten cities along the Front Range. The agility dogs were their favorite. They would sit in the stands and watch the little guys tear ass around the course and laugh and laugh. Lydia began working at my dad’s and Anna’s law office, helping out with whatever was needed. Anna and my dad were considering passing on a case about a young black college student getting the shit beat out of him in a routine traffic stop. At first look there didn’t seem to be enough evidence. Lydia did the intake and couldn’t believe they hadn’t taken it on. She pressed them until they acquiesced. It became the largest individual settlement in the history of Denver up until that point. Their client has become an anti-police-brutality activist in his own right. He tours around the country talking about what he went through to this day. Lydia was making her mark at the firm. She also ushered my dad through a tech revolution, updating his entire operating system to Macs, and teaching him Instant Messenger on his office network. I found their first effort folded in a drawer in Lydia’s desk.

  caytonholland (Lydia): hello

  jholland (my dad): Hi

  jholland: what up with that

  jholland: can you have two or three people on same time, dad

  caytonholland: what?

  jholland: Can anna also talk with us at the same time, three at a time? How do you do that?

  caytonholland: yes but she’s not here right now

  jholland: she’s not that far away, repeat, how do that

  caytonholland: I’m not telling; this is a dangerous tool in the wrong hands. Someone named Lucinda called about the Smith case. Do you know who that is?

  jholland: I am waiting your last reply, you are falling behind, that is cruel, are you warm?

&n
bsp; caytonholland: am I warm?

  jholland: repeat, you warm?

  caytonholland: yes, I’m warm. Who’s Lucinda?

  jholland: hi Lydia!

  caytonholland: hi

  jholland: hi

  caytonholland: please answer my question about Lucinda

  jholland: what do you want?

  caytonholland: grrrr

  jholland: hi Anna!

  caytonholland: I’m Lydia.

  jholland: your chat room name is wrong

  caytonholland: forget it, I’ll talk to you later

  jholland: I miss you, why later?

  jholland: hi Lydia!

  jholland: hi!

  My dad was boldly leaping into the twenty-first century, his daughters by his side. One as a partner, one a paralegal. Ostensibly. It was temporary. Some income while Lydia got her bearings in Denver.

  We had family dinners together often, in the backyard of the house we grew up in. Anna would bring her fiancé Sam, my dad would barbecue, and we would sit and talk and drink wine and soak up the last moments of daylight. Those dinners felt like one of those good dramedies that comes along every few years, the one the networks so desperately hope take hold. They always revolve around a family unit coming to terms with adulthood, the delicate shift of children relating to their parents as grown-ups, relating to their siblings as peers. Done well those shows really sing.