Funny Once

by Antonya Nelson

  Ugly’s was across the street from campus. Both school and bar were located in a neighborhood that had been going to the dogs for decades. During the day, the neighborhood was still relatively benign, but at night it became a kind of battle zone. Hugh always drove home marveling at the way the streets had turned menacing, both in his lifetime and during the hours of his college course, when the sun set and the wild things came out. On the evening news, if someone had been shot in Wichita, nine out of ten times it was here.

  “You know what Papa said to me?” Hugh decided to unburden himself of his father’s words. They were ugly, and it was growing dangerous outside the door of this bar, called Ugly’s. One had to have cohorts when darkness and despair set in, when one was sowing the seeds of a hangover, when one was staring at the empty seat where one’s brother should have been sitting, where his ghost hovered in a not-so-innocent fashion, smirking from teenage 1989.

  “What?” Holly asked.

  “‘Fuck you.’”

  His sisters’ eyebrows shot up; they were shocked. “He never said that before,” Hannah said.

  “I know.”

  “Maybe he was saying it to one of his phantoms?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  And Holly began to sob and sob, her shoulders heaving monstrously, her cosmo glass knocked over, the bartender ready with the bar rag and the wagging head. Suchamutt. The men who’d perked up at the entrance of women now turned back to their drinks, relieved, perhaps, at having dodged the particular bullet of histrionics in public.

  “Sometimes, Holly,” Hannah said, “I think you use crying like a weapon.”

  “I’m sorry,” Holly sobbed, face buried in her hands.

  “It is kind of like a weapon,” Hugh agreed, thinking about it. The bartender, the patrons, everyone was keeping a timid distance from the tears, averting their eyes. “Or maybe like a secret power.”

  “Most men can’t take it,” Hannah said.

  “You don’t use it much,” he pointed out.

  “I take pills to prevent it.”

  Holly blew her nose in a bar napkin. “I should try those pills. I’m gonna be just like that pitiful lady at the home, weeping and weeping, mistaking a chair for my sister.”

  “Dead sister,” Hugh said.

  “Not dead yet,” Hannah said, bristling. “Here’s what we’ll do,” she went on. “We’ll bring Papa his stuff tomorrow. We’ll go there every day to visit.” She looked to Hugh.

  “Right,” Hugh said. Beyond that, a blank. He was tempted to ask his sisters to come visit him every day; his father at least had delirium to fall back on, and a houseful of distracting ladies. The larger change, maybe, was going to be in Hugh’s life. He would talk to himself, he predicted. Although it would appear that he was occupying the air before you, he would more likely be wandering memory and speculation, those palatial spaces too seductive to forsake, no matter the uselessness of them.

  This was the problem with drinking all day, the exhaustion and discouragement that followed just after relaxation and nostalgia.

  “I hope he never says ‘Fuck you’ to me,” Holly said.

  “Excuse me,” said a voice behind the three. He’d placed a hand on the bar beside Hannah, steadying himself, sending ghost Hamish swirling away. A portly professor with the stereotypical wardrobe: striped seersucker jacket and a plaid shirt beneath, neither of them particularly clean, and on his face very thick eyeglasses that completely obscured his eyes. He was an Ugly’s regular, and he also hosted a public access show featuring his various hobbies. Saltwater fish aquariums. Brewing beer at home. Model trains. Around his basement, the television viewer roamed. Something about the lighting on that show always made him look insane, his eyeglasses like headlight beams shining from his fat skull. It wouldn’t have been wholly surprising to see a caged animal down there, an alligator, say, or a feral child. “Can I buy you all a round of drinks?” he asked.

  “Sure,” Hannah agreed instantly. If she were single, Hugh thought, she would be pickier about who bought her drinks. Holly, meanwhile, was furiously wiping her eyes and nose with a new cocktail napkin the bartender had slipped her way.

  “I’m Sid Kivich,” the professor said.

  “I’ve seen your show,” Hugh answered as he shook Dr. Kivich’s hand. “Did you ever make wine?”

  “I did,” said the professor. “Dandelion wine. Delicious.” He confided, “The secret is letting it ferment in old Scotch barrels.”

  “Hmm,” said Hannah, interested. Or pretending interest. She flirted within the safety of marriage, her husband, Thomas, a man Hugh didn’t particularly feel like standing up for. Thomas and Hugh had not really hit it off, as brothers-in-law. Thomas was a lawyer, a runner, a man with a schedule. His hours were billable. He seemed to find Hugh pathetic. Whenever he was forced into a visit to the family house, he acted as if he might catch something there, or as if he were making a scientific inquiry, archaeological or anthropological, inspecting the lair of a curious species.

  Hugh now imagined himself returning to that very same home this evening, the way there wouldn’t be any lights lit. In his father’s usual location, in the living room, would be the crusty space where his chair had been. Beside it still sat the other easy chair, Hugh’s mother’s chair. Like his father’s, it was a ratty pleather model, its arms shredded by that dead cat Blanche. Its headrest was still stained by a henna-colored patch where his mother’s brightly colored head had rested for so many years. She had died in her chair. But she’d also lived in it—eaten there, slept there, read her fat paperbacks there. Drunk her vodka and grapefruit drink there. For that reason it had seemed proper to deliver their father to his nursing home with his chair; even now, it was holding its owner in its lap, familiar when nothing else would be. But hers, their mother’s model, Hugh was not sure what to do with. At the Salvation Army store, he and Holly had recently come across a whole section of donated recliners, rows of empty chairs as expressive as a row of human inhabitants, empty laps, indented headrests. Hugh had said, “Somebody died in every one of these.”

  “Ugh,” Holly had said, her eyes filling. “I’m sure you’re right.” They’d gone for a couple of lamps, but came home empty-handed.

  “What brings you all out on the town?” asked Dr. Kivich. Out on the town? He had wedged himself on Hamish’s stool between Hannah and a stranger, leaning his large soft chest against the bar. His eyeglass stems had dug deep ruts on either side of his face, trenches from eyes to ears. He was in his early sixties, Hugh thought, a man in between the ages of his father and himself. His basement and his hobbies suggested perennial bachelorhood, seclusion and freedom. Hugh, too, was a bachelor, yet he could not really identify with Dr. Kivich. He would never have walked up to a group of three strangers and offered to buy them drinks. In no way would he conceive of Ugly’s as “out on the town.” He wouldn’t have let a camera crew into his home, never mind standing in front of them being filmed. And why brew beer when it was so much easier to buy it? Dr. Kivich, he realized, actually made an effort. Dr. Kivich, despite his mismatched clothing and unfashionable eyewear, despite his big belly and advanced years, his bad breath and his boring conversation, was still a social animal, doing the things that bachelors were traditionally supposed to do. Hugh looked down at his own lap as if to measure his testosterone. A bar stool did not encourage good posture. Moreover, his thighs spread unattractively.

  On what could he blame his desire to go home, lie on the couch where he always lay, and watch television until he passed out? He looked up to see Holly watching him. She leaned forward and he followed suit. “You want to go home,” she said under her breath.

  “I do.”

  “Me, too.”

  “But we’re in one vehicle.”

  “The nutty professor will take her home.”

  Hannah looked up and frowned when her brother and sister rose from their stools. “We’re off,” Hugh said.

  “You’re good to drive?” Hannah squin
ted as if she were able to perform a Breathalyzer test with her nostrils, as if the results would display in her eyeballs. Dr. Kivich, meanwhile, had noticeably brightened at the possibility of having her to himself.

  Hugh shrugged; he could navigate the back roads, proceed with caution.

  “I can give you a lift,” Dr. Kivich said to Hannah. “I have an Austin-Healey.” And when Hugh popped back into the bar thirty seconds later to retrieve his car keys from Hannah, the two of them were deep in conversation about recent films. Apparently, Dr. Kivich’s newest hobby and accompanying public access programming involved reviewing movies.

  The energy that guy had, Hugh marveled, climbing dispirited and exhausted behind the wheel.

  3. Ms. Fox

  “No knitting,” said Ms. Fox, the first day of Advanced Creative Writing, Prose, swinging back over her shoulders a large load of tangled black hair. She was very small and exotic under that hair, wearing her pointy black boots, pacing in her tight black pants before her group of students. In the room of plump midwesterners she looked like another kind of being, like a wiry black ant addressing a fleet of roly-polies and ladybugs. “No snacks in Tupperware. No ringtones. No single-spacing, no font size smaller or larger than 12. And no nail biting,” she went on. Her own creepily long nails were painted different shades of pink, like an advertisement for a line of polish colors. Hugh had written poems for his first creative writing class, a year ago, using Pittsburgh Paints sample chips. Whisker, Silver Bangle, and Pearl Dream—they were sufficiently specific yet prettily imprecise enough to work well in poetry.

  They were also, basically, gray.

  Ms. Fox seemed on the defensive already, and she hadn’t even discovered what to defend against. Her workshop was filled with people Hugh was coming to recognize as regulars, recidivists; he could have told her a few things to beware. Three of the women had been in his poetry class and waved happily when they saw him. He was one of two men in the room, also not an uncommon situation for these classes offered at happy hour.

  Ms. Fox was a new instructor this year, and not what the group was accustomed to. For instance, she had started calling roll at five twenty-seven p.m., sighing heavily when someone came sheepishly through the door ten minutes later, tiptoeing, as only a heavy person can, to an empty seat at the table and snuggling quietly into it. Ms. Fox hadn’t exactly said so, but the impression she gave was that she was not in Wichita by choice. If anything, it seemed as if she’d been abducted from some big city on one coast or the other, brought here under duress, and marched at gunpoint across the campus into continuing ed. Here, she found her students, all of them adults returning to school after the hours they’d spent at work, and most of them late. “Motivated,” Hugh would have labeled him and his classmates. But perhaps also a little calcified, as learners, a little more willing than your average undergraduate to express mild scorn concerning wild artistic notions imported from the same place that Ms. Fox had originated; they were not afraid of projecting a tolerant dismissal of their instructors’ assertions, the same patient reaction they had to their teenage children’s wacky phases, knowing that eventually those children would grow up and get over it, whatever it was.

  Hugh had not taken Introductory Creative Writing, Prose, but neither had anyone else in the group. Ms. Fox had sighed upon discovering this, muttering about prerequisites and permission-of-instructor forms, taking down the name of the registrar who’d blithely signed them up. The U was flexible, Hugh might have been able to explain to her, and that was one of its virtues. Prerequisites were for nitwits.

  “Why does this building smell like a hamster cage?” she asked, in the middle of calling roll. The class as a group sniffed the air.

  “I don’t smell hamsters,” said one student.

  “It’s a little like the zoo maybe,” said another, helpfully.

  Hugh didn’t say so but thought it was probably because of the homeless man who lived in the building. He showed up in the evenings, while the doors were still unlocked to let out the students of the last classes, yet after the official staff had left the grounds. There’d been budget cuts recently, so that the janitors only cleaned once a week instead of every night. As a result, the homeless man usually had the place to himself, a series of bathrooms and classrooms and vending machines, even a telephone, a few couches, and some magazines, if he was interested. He hugged the wall when he entered, skulking by with his head lowered, the only real giveaway his plastic bags instead of a backpack. Otherwise, he could have been a student, scruffy, sullen, pensive. Hugh had only taken notice after a few semesters. He was always one for a good scam; he never pulled them but he enjoyed conceiving them, and witnessing this one. If he hadn’t been afraid of spooking the guy, he’d have asked his name and brought him a sandwich on class nights. In lieu of this, Hugh had planted a jar of peanut butter and a loaf of bread behind the third-floor couch last semester.

  Ms. Fox had moved on to other issues concerning her new job. “Is it really named Hiney, this place?”

  “Hiney,” the group agreed, nodding. The Hiney Building, for Ed Hiney, the man whose statue greeted you at the door, extending its bronze hand into which somebody was always placing unlikely items, condoms or a cigarette.

  “Unbelievable.” She continued down her list of students, calling names and having those names amended (“Call me Babs,” said Barbara Kilcox; “I go by Nettie,” said Antoinette Myers). Again, Ms. Fox ran her hands under her hair and lifted it from her shoulders, heaving it over. If it annoyed her as much as she made it seem it did, why wouldn’t she simply cut it off?

  Now she went around the circle, asking everyone to briefly (“briefly,” she emphasized) say who they were and why they were here. The other man in the class was younger than the usual demographic for continuing ed, and had hair almost as long as Ms. Fox’s. He had his hands in it as well, flipping it, as she had, over his shoulders. The rest were women, the assortment Hugh had grown comfortable with, wives and office professionals, dabblers, hobbyists, brainy high school girls, mostly kind, and for the most part very pleased to find Hugh in their midst. You did not have to do much to be the favorite man in a classroom of continuing ed women.

  And among the college creative writing faculty Hugh was known as “Good Hugh.” There was a “Bad Hugh” whom Hugh had met at a poetry reading several months earlier. The faculty had tried to banish Bad Hugh from their classes, but the threat of litigation and a timid dean had prevailed.

  “Hugh Panik?” Ms. Fox asked, eyebrows raised in what looked like dread. She didn’t pronounce the H in his name, yet she also did not pronounce his last name correctly. You Paneek. Sometimes the teachers knew only to beware a middle-aged Hugh. There’d been confusion concerning the Hughs until both had shown up at the end-of-­semester poetry reading in May. Bad Hugh was a retired professor from the college. He wasn’t quite old enough to have retired in the usual way. He’d been forced out by a series of strokes that had left him somewhat diminished and odd. Half of him appeared to have been short-circuited, fried like a faulty machine: one eye blinked like a Christmas tree light, and he held his left arm with his right while dragging his left leg behind him. The poetry he’d read that evening had been populated with biblical characters, and, like a child, Bad Hugh had seemed titillated by naughty words and bodily functions. He could hardly make it through “Flatulent Jesus” without bursting into guffaws. When the other students read, he blurted out random reactions, immediately slapping both hands over his mouth. “I’m a bad boy,” he murmured repeatedly. “Bad Hugh.”

  “I’m not Bad Hugh,” Hugh assured Ms. Fox at break. For the last forty-five minutes she had been casting stern glances in his direction.

  “‘Bad Hugh’?” she said.

  “There’s another Hugh,” Hugh explained, understanding now that she hadn’t been warned by her colleagues in creative writing. This meant several things. One was that the other instructors didn’t like her. Another was that her stern glance had to do with so-cal
led Good Hugh himself rather than an instance of mistaken identity. And, very unfortunately, he was only complicating matters by trying to explain Bad Hugh. Maybe now Hugh was going to become Ms. Fox’s own private Bad—and banned—Hugh.

  A woman in class at just that moment stepped in to save him. Not on purpose. But nevertheless.

  “Excuse me,” she said. “I’ve locked my keys in my car.” She wasn’t a regular. She was new, more or less Hugh’s age, and looking very frazzled.

  “Class isn’t over,” Ms. Fox said, lifting the wrist that sported a watch the size of an alarm clock.

  “But my dog is in the car.”

  “And . . . ?”

  “It’s very stressful, having to think about my dog in the car, locked in, I mean. I wanted to get it taken care of so that I could relax and pay attention.” She would cry, Hugh saw; life with his sister Holly had taught him the signs, the reddening nose and cheeks, the fluttering eyelashes, the little storm just on the verge of breaking.

  “I’ll help,” Hugh said. They left Ms. Fox giving them both her fierce eyebrows.

  “Her thought balloon says, ‘Humph!’” Hugh told the woman as they trotted down the echoing steps of the Hiney Building.

  “Do you think it’s cruel to leave a dog in the car?”

  “Not necessarily.” She was pretty, although Hugh hadn’t really noticed her during class. He’d been preoccupied with how he’d rectify what he’d thought was a mistaken identity situation. He himself wasn’t particularly bothered by Bad Hugh. At the poetry reading last spring, Bad Hugh had applauded with genuine enthusiasm, wiping his eyes when Hugh had read his piece about his mother’s death, heckling—“Oh, hot mama, hot mama!”—in a very charitable and mostly sympathetic manner.

  “Some people think it’s cruel,” she was saying. “Sometimes they give me grief. Isn’t it so weird how total strangers will walk up and tell you what they think? I really do not appreciate that.” Her dog had his nose at the back window, which had been left open an inch. The evening was less mild than the one two nights ago; a breeze tossed around the parking lot trash. On a night like this, it would have seemed sinister to convey a man to a nursing home in the back of a pickup truck. It would have looked like hazing, or Halloween. The clouds were hurrying overhead, the sky yellow-tinged, a situation that could lead to tornado.