A Comedy & a Tragedy

by Travis Hugh Culley

  “Birdbrain.”

  “Yes, Butt?”

  “Don’t call me that!”

  To me, it didn’t matter that he could read books. In my mind, he was just getting fat behind those stubby, gray paperbacks. I mean, books were for lazy people, obviously, and people who didn’t have better things to do. I wanted to do things. I loved sports, and action movies. I was not afraid of danger. I had messy hair that formed little wings over my ears, and a dusting of freckles on my cheeks. I was the kid who would always take a dare.

  Joe said he liked this about me. In some way, he liked that about the authors he read. They were fearless, they did things. Still, I could not get past the idea of having someone else’s words stuck in my head where I couldn’t reach them, or change them, or determine what other words they might lead to. He said that was the dumbest thing he’d ever heard.

  Once, Joe dared me to read. He brought me to the horror novels on his bookshelf. I grabbed one and flipped the pages. I grabbed another. “What’s the difference? They’re all the same. Every page is just like every other!”

  We separated in disagreement.

  On my own, when I tried to read, I found myself instantly exhausted, easily distracted, and constantly unsure of what I was supposed to be doing. Each word looked like a broken collection of figures that had once been orderly and carefully arranged—like coats that had once been hung up in a closet. When I looked down, the coats were in disarray. All of the letters had fallen out of the words and into a heap at the bottom of the page. Words were only a way of seeing the alphabet in ruins. How could I fit my whole life, beginning, middle, and end, through such a misshapen form as this?

  If I opened a book, I didn’t see sentences, only parts of phrases, and assorted sounds; ropes, balls, trees. But with every word and line jammed up beside every other, who knew how this noise was all supposed to sound? When I read a name, even in one line of a story, I lost track of what they were doing in the next line—or on the next page. I followed clues in just about every direction but then found myself deafened, and staring. Reading didn’t get me anywhere, and it did not fulfill my need for stories.

  The idea that reading opened the mind seemed totally backward to me; the opposite was more likely. Written words seemed to have the effect of framing the mind, narrowing options. They were only one step away from mind control—as I saw it—or brainwashing. Words were limits, boundaries. How could they lead to everything?

  In Mrs. Wyndham’s class I kept my concerns to myself. I feared speaking up because I thought I might crack and then try to say whatever there was room to say. Why are there only so many letters in the alphabet, not fewer? Not more? Why do some words have only one letter? What is the real story of the alphabet? Why does f follow e, and n follow m, and u lead to w, as it clearly does? I thought, I can’t speak up about this. I’d only be told to stand outside and face the wall.

  The next year, Bruce and I would no longer share the same classroom. Mrs. Pickard, my new teacher, found me to be a joyful and optimistic boy. In January, on the Stanford Achievement Tests for grade schools, I received above-average scores: 66 percent in listening, 94 percent in math computation. I was below average, earning only 48 percent, in reading comprehension. There was still every hope of my being able to learn how to read.

  Why Feathers Give Me Headaches

  Teachers say that literacy starts in the family. If that’s true, then I came from two families. There was the family that thought itself highly educated, fully functional, and yet this was the same family that thought it wasn’t up to them to teach me how to read. Unlike other children, I have no memory of my father or mother reading books. I don’t recall being read stories. I don’t have favorite characters or myths that I identified with at an early age. Seldom did anyone write to me, or expect to receive my thoughts in writing. It didn’t bother anyone that I couldn’t read.

  There was, in our family, some importance given to documents. To my parents, written words were considered weightier than mere spoken expressions. Writing was reserved for serious business like school assignments, legal judgments, tickets, a license to practice, a schedule of classes. Promises, degrees, laws, these required keeping track of. Stories were hardly necessary. They were more like distractions from the events we screened on television.

  Where it came to literacy itself, there was really no illiterate option. This is why, early on, I was not called by that name either. Mom believed there was always a name for a thing—you only had to know where to look. In her mind, the world had already been figured out and that’s why we had books. She didn’t expect me to take an interest in reading them. I was too easily distracted for academic pursuits. I couldn’t concentrate very well, she told me, and so my standards were set low. As long as I could tell whose name was on the label of a Christmas present, she was not alarmed.

  Dad was also pretty frank. He said I shouldn’t be so dumb all the time, but then I couldn’t take him very seriously. He also said I had a birdchest, and he called me a number of other things that didn’t make sense. Anyway, these names, spoken in a humorless flourish, were only to be taken as endearments. Calling me names was a way of calling me his, without having to pat me on the back or touch me. I think in every picture of my early childhood, I am wearing my clothes wrong because he’d dress me in a haphazard way. My pants were pulled up too high, my hat was pulled down over my ears. This was because my father always had this fear of touching me. If he’d show me any affection, it was only to grant me my independence.

  My father understood that literacy was important, but not on the same level as money or reputation. For him, literacy was only a symbol, like getting a politically sensitive joke. By now I should have gotten the joke. I didn’t.

  For both parents, literacy was only an ambiguous notion. It meant something like having the ability to maintain equal leverage in a conversation, to follow logic, or to use a map to get to some place I’d never been. They could not have imagined how illiteracy could be an average or ordinary part of life. Having not thought through either question at much length, they might have agreed that literacy was natural, and that becoming literate was an inevitable development. They might have thought that someday illiteracy could be eliminated completely, even while they sat and watched television. Literacy was like regular life to them, theirs by sovereignty. They didn’t know what to do with me.

  Aside from my brother’s collection, there were few books in our house. Dad kept a handful of popular novels by the toilet. For this reason, I don’t know if he read them. These included works by Tom Clancy, John Grisham, James Clavell, and Gary Jennings, the author of one mammoth work of historical fiction: Aztec. It took all of my strength to carry this book in one hand. The cover of the hardback, illustrated with blocks of heavy sandstone, made it look even bigger. I thought of my father like he was Montezuma. I imagined him on the throne, this brick in hand: the symbol of his kingdom.

  When news about the presidential election was on we kept our talk to a minimum. Ronald Reagan smiled at us in our living room, his hair lacquered like bowling lanes. Dad viewed the set from his corduroy La-Z-Boy, the footrest up. Mom wore a nightgown, and smoked a cigarette from her matching recliner. Joe sat on the tweed sofa, a novel on his knee. I lay on my elbows, my back to everyone, my nose a few inches from the static buzzing screen. I blurred my eyes, and lost the crisp images to a grid of micropixels. This was our family tableau, the posture we took when there was nothing left to do.

  “Sit back, Travie.”

  “I can see fine, Mom.”

  “It’s bad for your eyes, Travie.”

  “It’s exercising my eyes, Mom.”

  “Travis,” Father said, sternly.

  I crawled back six inches and continued staring. In a few minutes, I got up and filled my glass with water. While resuming my place on the floor, I took those few inches back. There, the set engulfed me like the windshield of a spaceship. I wasn’t watching a movie anymore, or hearing the soun
dtrack; I was seeing light fluctuate in rhythms, unique, random intensities shifting independently in bars of red, blue, and green, like the light show in Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

  “Travie?”

  “What?”

  “Sit back.”

  “I did.”

  “Son, I can’t see through your head.”

  By eight-thirty or nine o’clock, no one had anything left to say. Dad lumbered off in his boxer shorts, leaving my mom with a glass of Southern Comfort and the remote control.

  I slept in the back bedroom, all the way down the hall on the left. I had a green carpet and wallpaper that consisted of the faces of animals in some far-off wilderness. The bear, the ram, the zebra; their eyes floated out in the middle of the room, heads detached from their bodies. I drifted off to sleep as though lying among them and allowed all the things I had learned that day to return to their simpler and separate natures.

  The Pledge of Allegiance

  By the time I began the third grade, Joe and I rode our bikes to school. He had a black Huffy mountain bike with fat tires and straight handlebars. I had a bright red Schwinn Sting-Ray with a glittering gold banana seat. It had coaster brakes, full chrome fenders, chopper handlebars, tassels, and grips that had a groove for each of my fingers. Even on this little bike, I could stand up, pull the bars back and forth, and always outpace my brother.

  Backpacks strapped snug to our shoulders, chains around our seats, we cut a little off-road path through our neighbor’s backyard and then took a set path through the parking lot of a Baptist church on the corner of 142nd Street. Nine blocks down Garden Drive we made a left and coasted another three blocks. There were other ways we could have gone, other routes we could have taken, but Joe never explored them. He was in charge, and that meant he was only prepared to do as he’d been told.

  After the last stop sign, we appeared just east of the playground and pedaled up onto the sidewalk through an opening in the fence. There, Joe and I locked our bicycles behind the cafeteria. Older kids from the safety patrol stood around the intersections wearing orange belts and badges. Children lined up outside the doors, waiting for the bell. Cars and vans and school buses pulled up and drove away again. We separated without talking. His friends were his friends, and we were not friends. In the courtyard, Joe pretended I didn’t exist. He wasn’t going to be nice to me unless he had to be. He stood with the others in his class, his head high. I joined my friends Bruce, Vance, and Rodrigo under a knotted oak tree. There, before class, we turned up our shirtsleeves like hooligans, exchanged insults, spread rumors, and cracked our knuckles thoughtlessly.

  At a quarter after seven, the bell rang across the schoolyard. Then the doors opened and, in hundreds, children rushed inside. My friends walked slowly, in no hurry to be talked down to. At half past the hour, the second bell rang and all the classroom doors were swiftly shut by their teachers. The room went still, except for me—my knee bouncing. I was eager to run back outside. I disliked the building and the small rooms; beige walls, smudged murals, old desk chairs. There were no lockers in the hallways, only classroom doors decorated with construction paper and crayon. The whole cafeteria, the stage and auditorium, were below an expanse of the I-95 expressway. When we ate lunch, our tables grumbled from the passing traffic. The windows were barred and darkened. The plastic knobs on the faucets were worn faceless. Walking down the hall, I felt like I was in some sort of engine built for the purpose of organizing memories.

  I wore a striped shirt and tucked my hair behind my ears. Like every other kid in third grade, I brought my lunch in a box and sat down at a gray metal desk. I was given an assigned seat, one aisle from tall fiberglass windows. As the speakers crackled, Mrs. Helene stood before the classroom facing the American flag. The class stood for “The Star-Spangled Banner,” which we sang beneath our breath in all variety of sighs, moans, and satires: “José can you? Sí…” Then we gave a woeful recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance, closing in unison with “and justice for all.” The word justice came unthinkingly out of our mouths like old bottles in new pop machines.

  Each day unfolded in a routine way. We began with our social studies books. The second hour we moved on to our math books. Mrs. Helene led us, adding and subtracting numbers on the chalkboard. At the start of the third hour, she asked us to pass up our “vocabulary exercises.” I froze. What exercises? We weren’t exercising. Then the whole room of students did a familiar dance in their chairs, turning and reaching into their backpacks. I copied their movements, rifling through one of the two empty folders in my bag. As my neighbors began to pass up their vocabulary words, I lowered my head and handed up nothing. The next day the same thing happened, and with no consequence.

  I learned to pull a blank sheet of paper from my folder and wait. When my neighbor’s homework was being passed up, I included the blank, adding it to the bottom of the pile. Then, as though performing a card trick, I would pass the stack forward, leaving the last page—the decoy—spinning on my desk. To anyone in the front of the classroom, it would seem I had turned something in. I became so accustomed to this shuffling technique that I began to grow concerned. If I did turn in homework, any homework, Mrs. Helene would only come to expect more from me.

  The part I hated most was the chanting. Mrs. Helene would call out the first word from a vocabulary list, and the classroom would respond by spelling out each word.

  “Walk,” she began.

  “W, A, L, K.”

  Together, the cacophony of disconnected sounds made my temples whirl. Mrs. Helene asked us all to speak up. “You can be as loud as you want to be,” she said with a wink. She wanted us to be heard all the way down the hall, breaking these words into pieces. I pretended to spell out the words, making up sounds as I went along. I tried to listen, but I found that I couldn’t chant while I listened, so I chose to ignore the words themselves and say, under my breath, anything I felt like saying.

  When Mrs. Helene gave us the next word, voices came up around me again:

  “House.”

  “H, O, U, S, E.”

  “House. Very good, now purse.”

  “P, U, R, S, E.”

  “Purse. Very good, now road.”

  “R, O, A, D.”

  “Road. Very good, now bridge.”

  As the chanting continued, I found the empty volume of consonants disorienting. I didn’t know what I was hearing. I lowered my head, and spent the hour hiding behind other students, who themselves were hiding behind students, all of us hiding from Mrs. Helene.

  “Train.”

  “T, R, A, I, N.”

  One morning Mrs. Helene stepped away from the front of the class and walked down the aisle, looking over each student’s shoulder. Soon she was at my side.

  “Travis, what page are we on?”

  “Am I on the wrong page?”

  “You haven’t been paying attention,” she said, announcing my confusion to everyone.

  “I’ve been trying, Mrs. Helene. I promise.”

  “How can you say that? You’re not reading with the rest of class. Are you?”

  “I must have lost track.”

  “Thirty pages ago!”

  I started flipping forward, but then Mrs. Helene reached between the pages of my workbook. Her rings and bracelets scared my hands away. She turned to page 52 and smoothed the sheets down.

  I tried to imagine some connection between the workbook and the vocabulary exercises she was always asking of us. She shook her head. “You’re not trying. That’s why you’re on the wrong page.” It must have seemed like I was coming out of a spell. “Does your mother know that you haven’t been doing your homework?”

  I said nothing.

  “Do you know what you are supposed to be doing in your workbook?”

  I looked back with only the image of a blank piece of paper in my eye.

  “I’m going to have to call your mother. Is that okay?”

  “You won’t find her,” I said, impetuous
ly.

  “Oh? And why is that?”

  “She isn’t home.”

  “No? Where is she?”

  “She gets home late.” This was the truth. My mother was taking night classes.

  “What about your father? Does he get home late too?”

  “No, but he doesn’t answer the telephone.”

  “I’ll find your parents.” I looked down at page 52 until she walked away.

  As usual, I rode home with my brother that day. We didn’t talk, and I didn’t tell him what Mrs. Helene had told me. When my mom and dad came home, I didn’t tell them either. I thought I shouldn’t tell anyone what happened. If I could intercept the message from Mrs. Helene, no one would have to know about my trouble in school. The event would go unnoticed. Mrs. Helene would have to believe that I was telling the truth. My parents were unavailable. What else could she believe? I imagined how the whole event could fit inside of this single secret and disappear without a trace of wrongdoing. My parents would never suspect. I would only have to answer the phone and be diligent about checking the mailbox.

  How long was third grade anyway? Given the heat in Miami, I imagined one day must seem so like the next that the sameness of days would sometimes melt into one sweltering blur, allowing for small changes like this to disappear into the background as though they’d never occurred.

  Still, I would check. I had to know for myself. After school, every day for about a week, I screened the answering machine and checked the mailbox, grateful that I wasn’t in trouble yet. Then, after a Boy Scout meeting, I found a thick envelope in the mailbox addressed to “The parents of Travis Culley.” A few printed letters on the return address confirmed my fear. This had been sent from “Dade County Public Schools,” the seal of authority. I shook it. The envelope was full, the lip bulging.