A Comedy & a Tragedy

by Travis Hugh Culley

  “What have you been doing?”

  “Only what I’m supposed to be doing, Mom.”

  “You’re supposed to be home by dinner time.”

  As my mother and brother were bunkered in, strapped to their chairs, I felt like I was coming and going from Plato’s cave. This was the point when the others turned, heard about the shadows, the colors, and thought the man insane.

  At home, I was constantly being questioned. Why did I do this or that? My answers were suspect of irrationality. Joe was always looking for something to tell Mom, and she was always looking for reasonable and unreasonable “behaviors.” According to her, if I ever did anything without sufficient reason I was “acting out,” exhibiting some neurosis, or worse.

  I had to be careful of what I thought in the house. Any thought was punished. Metaphors had always come easy to me, but now, if I chose a metaphor, my mother became suspicious of slippage. She wouldn’t find any sense in a comparison I made but seemed to be evaluating my wellness on the basis of that comparison. In the background, she seemed to be taking note of the fact that I compared my mind to a school of fish or that I described coming home as though being locked in a cave.

  Metaphors themselves were signs, in her mind, of some misidentification of things. She dropped a beat and stepped out of the action to analyze my meaning.

  “A school of fish?”

  “Fishbowl,” I replied, automatically.

  Mother seemed to attend to me closely but coldly. She saw me turning my clothes inside out, painting my shoes, and making drawings of space people who were being burned by acid. She never asked me about any of it. She was now an objective observer, only monitoring. I didn’t know what she found so interesting.

  Because we’d be moving soon, I went through my box of comic books, reading each one to the very last page. My favorite hero was Daredevil, the blind attorney from Hell’s Kitchen. I used to think I was something like him, blind though I could see. I opened up the earliest volume and read it for myself. Then I continued, reading all of the thin graphic novels in sequence. When I was done with these, I looked back at the box and the character of Matt Murdock, and I felt some compassion for him. It was a shock to think about how many other characters tried to take advantage of his inability to see.

  Mother announced a meeting, the first and the last of its kind. Joe and I were called away from our chores. Once we’d gathered, sitting on the living room floor, Mom began. She said that we would soon be entering the “Dark Years.”

  She listed the changes that had recently taken place. I had been jumped at school, Joe had been arrested for shoplifting, Dad had beaten me up and moved out. B.J. had committed suicide. But there was good news. Mom had quit smoking and had gotten a new job. I had been accepted into New World School of the Arts, and Joe was soon to graduate from North Miami Senior High School. A lot was happening, but “Dark Years”? Her title seemed melodramatic. Besides, placing a title on a play that had not yet unfolded seemed somehow intentionally confusing. Was she developing some psychological shorthand for denial? I turned away, unsure of my role.

  “We are going to make it,” she insisted, “if we can only get through these Dark Years.” Then she said she’d be taking back her maiden name. She would no longer be a Culley. She would be a Fox, Paula Jeanette Fox. At that point my brother erupted, feeling that he was losing his mother. “You’re not going to do that—you’re not allowed to! You are a Culley! You are Paula Fox Culley!” He was usually the restrained one, but now he was inconsolable. “You will be a Culley for the rest of your life!” He didn’t look to me for support. When it came to this, I was on her side.

  Joe grew small and round-eyed. I thought that, for a person who had read so many books, he’d have more flexibility when it came to changing a name. After all, Fox wasn’t her real maiden name either. She had been a Fuchs originally. The Fuchs family came from Germany, and Fuchs was changed to Fox when she went to grade school. I understood by this that names did not have to be attached to any origin. Fuchs could be changed. Fox didn’t really mean fox. There was no substance to these ideas, nothing real in them at all.

  In the coming week, we left the house a complete mess. No one fought anymore. Nothing was gained by arguing. Mother slept in until ten in the morning, and when she woke up she was another person. She seemed to have set down all of her prior assumptions as though they’d been written out on a little notepad and torn from the glue. She was starting over, she said, in every way possible.

  I went to school the last week of class and found myself walking around downtown dreaming about how I could change my life. I imagined that I could make a few simple decisions, and thereby never have to go home again. Then, on campus, I saw a purple flyer, a call for auditions that had been posted for a student production of Alice in Wonderland. I thought briefly and wrote my name on the list. If I got a part in the play it would mean a few weeks of rehearsal and one weekend of performances.

  The next day I stood before the director, Sean Cutler, a senior from New World’s first graduating class. I was ready to leap into a Shakespearean sonnet, but everyone was talking and walking about. Sean kept his hands in his pockets while people stepped, ducked, and reached behind him. The table was covered with lists, open scripts, pencils, and props. There was a key, a clock, a candle, a cookie, a teacup, a bottle, and a deck of cards, all of the pieces necessary to tell the tale. The stage manager was yelling, in whispers, at the assistant director, and the assistant director was clicking something at the stage manager, and the assistant stage manager was complaining to the director, who calmly sat back and smiled. Ashley and Kristin, two girls from my class, were having a kind of pantomimed argument in the middle of all this, exchanging non sequiturs. Ashley started singing “La, la, la, la, la,” and Kristin began stamping her feet and clapping as though she were a puppet.

  “Who’s next?” the director asked.

  I was standing in the light. “I am.” I smiled, looking out.

  “And who are you?”

  “My name is Travis.”

  “What will you be doing, Travis?”

  “A poem by—”

  “A poem?” I was interrupted. The director started flipping through the papers on the table. “Can you read any poem?” He was just being cute, but then he handed me a sheet of paper. “Why don’t you try to read this poem?”

  “I’ve never seen it before.”

  “That’s okay.” Then in a clownish voice, he added: “We’ve never heard it before!” The room laughed.

  I lifted the paper up before my eyes and the laughter quieted. I began: “ ‘Jabberwocky’ by Lewis Carroll.” A beam of light fell on the stanzas, and I read each of the words off the page as though I’d written them. I found the lines, a rhythm, a voice. I felt clues to the right emphasis as I came upon turns in the next stanzas. Albeit absurd, the poem arranged itself—if I played with it—into a crisp sequence of sentences. The words spoke themselves. Each came out clearly. When my minute was over, and the poem was done, I stood back with the other cast members, now quite perplexed, reflecting. Then, like stamping the back of a check, the director thanked me in a big voice and told me to look at the call-board in the coming days.

  I left the stage tingling and went outside to walk off my nerves and to let my mind adjust. How did I do that? I wondered. I didn’t even know the words! Somewhat confused, and partly delighted, I spent the next hour in the courtyard kicking a footbag with my buddy Jorge from the music department.

  We got to talking about how the world changes quickly, like all the time. “Change takes place before anyone gets to talking about it,” he said.

  “You mean change lends itself to people?”

  “I guess,” he said, and kicked.

  “I know what you mean,” I assured him. “You mean that people only get to talking about changes when they’ve already taken place, when it’s safe to talk about them! Then, words come easily.”

  Jorge laughed and passed to
me. He didn’t know what he meant anymore. By the end of our sophomore year we’d developed an amicable friendship. He was a sincere guy, and a talented musician. I found him interesting because English and Spanish were identical in his mind. He saw them both for their values. All the while, he knew Chopin, Liszt, Rachmaninoff. His brain was like an endless stream of information. Jorge denied it. He said that he’d only begun playing piano six months before his audition at New World. I could relate. But when he sat down at the piano, he was a perpetual source of new examples. Jorge was an excellent student, and he encouraged me to do my best in school—to see the importance of the training. “Man, look around you. All of this is going to disappear faster than you know.” He was frank with me because he knew: New World was all I had.

  Seeing my name on the cast list of Alice in Wonderland, I went to the office of the theater department to pick up my script. Sean welcomed me and sat me down. If I took the part he was offering, the whole play would rest on my shoulders. If I was ready to accept, I would be cast as Lewis Carroll, the author, and I would narrate the entire story of Alice start to finish, introducing each of the acting scenes. If I did not want the challenge, or could not commit completely to doing it, he would cast me in a lesser part, maybe as the Dodo.

  I accepted the part of the author and agreed to memorize every word of the script. Sean handed me the play. I started cramming as soon as I could, excited about the prospect of really acting. While reading the script, I found it hard to stay in one place. I read some of the opening poem, then I stood and sat down on the other side of the room, laying the book on my desk. There, I read a few more lines. If I sat anywhere too long, I needed to change my perspective. I held the pages up. I pressed them against the wall. I laid them on the floor and spoke the lines to our cat, Princess, under the bed.

  Alice! a childish story take,

  And with a gentle hand,

  Lay it where Childhood’s dreams are twined

  In Memory’s mystic band,

  Like pilgrim’s wither’d wreath of flowers

  Pluck’d in a far-off land.

  More than a dictionary, to get a full sense of the work, I needed the original text. At the library, on a sale rack, I grabbed the Penguin edition of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and I began comparing the book to the play. They were different. I read them both through. Most of the lines of the play were the same, or very nearly like the book, but whole sections had been cut. There was no Tweedledee or Tweedledum, no Mock Turtle, no Lobster Quadrille. I did begin to take some pleasure in this process of finding the story behind the story. When I came upon new characters, I wrote their names down on a separate piece of paper. As names gathered in my hand, I began to hear them in my head. A voice was assigned to each. This wasn’t crazy, this was how I came to learn to read.

  When I grew weary, which did not take long, I rubbed my eyes and returned to the idea that I was only reading a comic book. Imagining the letters dancing made the process easier. Instead of accepting at face value the words I knew, I imagined that I did not know them. Now they came fresh to mind, as though necessary. I saw each word as though it were spoken from a stage, and still I expected to misunderstand the central message. Was this notion of meaning only there to provoke? Half-uttered expressions stood up between the pages in my hand. I stopped and covered my eyes—hearing all the possibilities.

  At the first rehearsal for Alice, Sean had us all sit around a table. “So that you know, not everything in this play makes sense,” he said. He eyed us. “We are going to have to learn how to make sense of that which, by the nature of the work, is not going to make sense. This is an absurdist masterpiece, and a classic piece of literature, because it presents an image of the imagination that is so true, and so honest, that it has stood the test of time. Other writers cannot seem to do this better. People, like ourselves, keep coming back to the original because it is delightful, and because it helps us understand so many of the conundrums of youth. This is why we are adapting the play for the theater.

  “Who knows anything? What is big, what is small? Who is worth listening to, the Caterpillar or the Mad Hatter? The Red Queen or the Cheshire Cat? What is time? And, different from time, what is the hurry that the White Rabbit is in? All these simple questions will appear to Alice to have their own contradictory answers. This is the magic that we will conjure here. Big will seem small, small will look big, the beginning will be very much like the end, and, in a sense, nothing will happen here. Our objective will be as follows: to have as much fun as possible between opening night and the time we strike the set.”

  The cast looked back and forth at each other cheerfully. “Shall we begin the reading?” Sean asked, deferring, with a look, to me.

  Rehearsals took place in the black box theater between four and six, every evening. Ashley, our Alice, flew through every scene. Marc Ostrick was given the part of the Dodo. Jay Krajewski was our Cheshire Cat. The cast had chemistry, and Sean was very good about encouraging us to collaborate. I announced each scene, describing who would come in and out. The cast waited for me as I continued plodding, sometimes, through the lines. Sean often corrected me on the pronunciations of words but I was never asked to speed up, or hurry along. Only if I was patient would the right words come.

  By the dress rehearsal, the cast needed no direction. I would set up the scene and Ashley would leap into the next outrageous dilemma in Wonderland. An artist constructed an elaborate tunnel, a five-foot hole through which the audience was expected to enter the theater. I appeared on opening night with a candle and introduced the cast carefully, telling the story of young Alice.

  At the end of the show, Ashley joked: “It’s not easy, losing your innocence every night.”

  Crazy for You

  My confidence reading, held in secret, now led me to reflect more carefully on the changes that were taking place at home. Mom was keeping track of things a little differently. She muttered that the divorce had not gone as planned while she organized our lives into a little filing cabinet.

  Soon we were moving, and our lives were in disarray. Our pictures were packed into a cedar chest. Joe’s books were packed away into boxes. I packed my juggler and removed my masks from the wall. These reminded me of when I met Uncle B.J., the moment I first knew that I didn’t know anything. I packed my spare high-tops into their old shoe boxes. In one of them, I found a crumpled sheet of paper, my first attempt at writing; Easter Sunday, of all ironies. I smoothed the edges of the paper out on my desk. Then I drew the old can of Barbasol from my desk drawer and I set it on top. For a moment, I sat with these two precious objects juxtaposed. Then, when I heard Joe coming down the hall, lumbering like Dad did, I crumpled the letter up again and threw the can into a box.

  When I got home from work one night, Mom told me that Gil had phoned her and said obscene things in a prank call. I couldn’t believe her, but she insisted. “How did you know it was him?” I asked.

  “How do you know it wasn’t him?”

  I didn’t believe a word she said anymore.

  On the Fourth of July, we didn’t celebrate. We had no barbecue, no fireworks, no races. Instead, we moved into a small three-bedroom condominium in a complex called Walden Pond on the very northern boundary of Dade County, and we moved all of our secrets in. In the hallway, Mom hung up the school photos of Joe and me. There were no family pictures except one: a stiff family portrait taken in 1974. I was a one-year-old with a tuft of hair and big round cheeks. The portrait was so old, and in it I was so young, that I could hardly recognize myself.

  Our new home was a squat flat in a building that had eight identical units. There was no backyard. We lived in a corner unit, and our kitchen sat near the bank of a rectangular lake. Mom enjoyed the fact that she could look out of our kitchen window and see the water. It didn’t matter to her, the shape. Even if the lake had been dug out by tractors, she found the water soothing. She didn’t miss the exotic trees or the gentle wind through the schefflera leaves. She wa
s happy to watch the light off the water while she was unloading the dishwasher.

  Mother chose this spot for a number of reasons. It was the right price, and it was as far north as we could go without legally leaving Dade County. She worked in Fort Lauderdale, and so the farther north we moved, the closer we’d be to her work. She chose County Line Road because if we had moved outside Dade County, even by one street, I could no longer take classes at New World. She didn’t want to risk my place, she assured me, but then I could see that she was giving me a thin line to walk.

  Joe was given the corner room, overlooking the parking lot. He didn’t complain. I was appointed a small square room with one narrow window and a door. It had a gaudy hutch that had served as a liquor cabinet for the previous tenants. The hutch had a counter, glass shelving, and mirrors on all sides. I used the shelves to keep my extra cassette tapes and comic books. I left my crumpled letter from Easter Sunday out in the open where anyone could see it. The letter, whose paper was now soft like silk, had to be carefully peeled open to be read, and no one did. I was also given a matching set of dressers, one large and one small, and a waterbed that I never got used to. Sometimes I would rather have slept on the floor, but there wasn’t room. I turned, feeling the plastic mattress against my cheek, desperately wanting to fall into Neutral.

  That year, at the school’s first TGIF reception, I met a girl, a new senior in the musical theater department. She was a devastating beauty with dreams of being in Broadway musicals. I was a wild child with an eye for the impossible. We’d gathered on the mezzanine level of the main building, an architectural wonder built in the modern style. The party was held on a wide triangular porch that jutted out into a cloudless sky. There was no sign of where we had come from, nothing to orient us, and so we found each other as though without the slightest interference. Her name was Liz. She told me while dancing, but the music blared so loudly, I couldn’t even hear myself asking. I met Liz with a series of pantomimed expressions. I was RAFFISH or TRAVIS depending on how close we stood together.