A Comedy & a Tragedy

by Travis Hugh Culley

  About ten minutes into my release, the engine blew and I coasted the car into a gas station on Seventh Avenue. While it was being looked at by mechanics, I could do little more than sit on my trunk, write in my journal, and watch the traffic heading to and from my old neighborhood.

  I named the car. Its name was Puke:

  Here I am hottest day of the year sitting on the trunk of Puke with my radio next to me. My car and I are off to the side of 7th avenue. The car didn’t make it three miles before it overheated. Writing or trying to write the thoughts that are popping into my head. Like the fact that I might forget this day, or from here on it’s either a rags to riches story or just rags.

  I planned to sleep in my car, but tonight I felt I needed someplace to stay. There were friends with whom I had collateral. I could call in a few favors. I flipped a coin, calling heads and tails for my two surest options. Marc won the toss, so from a pay phone I called him, the Dodo from Alice in Wonderland. He and I had become better friends in Kansas.

  He told me that he could help me out later but he had plans to go dancing that night with a small group of our classmates. He was going to a nightclub in Fort Lauderdale, an all-ages show. “You can come if you want to,” he said. By nightfall, after the car had been fixed, I parked on the street outside of the nightclub. I walked in and found a room full of kids in psychedelic T-shirts, jeans, and sandals, spinning and dancing. The black lights made the clothes and eyes of all the dancers seem brighter. My head spun. The music was pulsating, but I wouldn’t budge. I walked slowly through the group, feeling estranged. I hadn’t come to have fun, but now I felt like I was going to fall off the face of this earth.

  The next morning I woke up on Marc’s floor. As soon as the sun rose, I got up and left the house. It gave me a real awkward feeling to depend on other people this way. I drove downtown for a greasy breakfast, all my clothes rolled up into one bag.

  Over my lunch break at work, I sat down in the stockroom and called my father from the office telephone. I don’t know why I called, except that I thought I could earn his sympathy. It was a lost effort. I asked him if he would consider giving me the child support money that he was supposed to be giving my mother. I needed to raise money for a security deposit on an apartment. I needed someplace to live, I said, raising my voice.

  “You have someplace to live.”

  “Dad, I can’t live there anymore.”

  “That’s why you called? No ‘Hi, Dad, how are you?’ ”

  “Dad, it’s important. She told me to get out.”

  “Your mother tells me you’re not doing well.”

  He wasn’t listening. “She wants to hospitalize me. Did she tell you that?”

  “No.”

  “She’s lying to you too, Dad. She lies to everyone!”

  “How much money do you need?”

  “Three hundred and fifty dollars a month.”

  “What would you do with that?”

  “Three hundred dollars would cover rent, fifty dollars for groceries. That’s all I need, Dad. I have a job! I’m making money!”

  “Sorry, son. Call someone else.”

  The office door opened, and I found my boss, Julio, standing there with big eyes. He said I couldn’t “do that here.” The whole conversation could be heard through a vent on the sales floor.

  “Sorry, I really won’t do it again.”

  “No. You can’t. I’m serious.”

  “You mean I’m fired?” Our talk had gotten too heated.

  “Yep. That’s what I mean.”

  “Julio, you can’t do this to me. I really need a job now.”

  He gave me this look like he’d been there before; he knew how I was feeling. “One week,” he said.

  I took a pill and went back out on the floor.

  I’d parked on a pier behind the Hard Rock Cafe, a strip of broken asphalt that extended out into Biscayne Bay. The pier doubled as a port for small private boats that came in and out of the harbor. It was not an official parking lot, so I didn’t think I was breaking any laws.

  After work that night, after getting fired, I climbed into my car and shut the door. I turned on the engine, and then I turned it off again. Having no place to go, I climbed into the backseat, collected my clothes into a ball, and used them as a pillow. I went to sleep that night on the pier, listening to the water gently licking the seawall.

  Overnight, the sky had become a sheet of coal, and water came down in thick globules, pebble-sized raindrops that pelted the bay and splashed the windows of my car. Storm winds and seawater came in from the Atlantic, hurling spray. Pools of water wafted back and forth over the roof and hood of the car.

  I rolled down the window and stretched my fingers out into the rain. I rinsed my eyes and shook out my hair. The storm was not in me. At home, I imagined that my room was empty, my breakfast free. I wasn’t running away, I’d been told to leave. I turned to my journal and tried to think of what I could write about this. Could I describe my anguish? My confusion? My disappointment? Could I explain my mother’s hypocrisy? I looked down at the blue lines on the pages and followed the movement of dripping water from the windows behind me. Nothing came. I had nothing to say. Voiceless, with a clear mind, I climbed into the front seat of the car and started the engine. I wiped down the inside of the windshield with a handkerchief, turned on the wipers, and drove carefully back to school.

  When I got to class, I wore the rain on my face. I came into first period thirty minutes late and was met with jealous glares. Mr. Suarez said nothing and dismissed class early. “Your Government papers are due tomorrow,” he said. “If you haven’t begun yours yet, it will be obvious. So, do your best. This paper will go to twenty percent of your cumulative score. Think of it as one fifth of the year’s work. Comprende? Any questions? Get out of here.” The others rose from their seats. “Get lost!”

  I went upstairs and stepped into the offices of the theater department. Dr. J was there, and we got to talking. I was exasperated. My four monologues had been washed out because of the medications I was on and the headaches I was having.

  “This is only the beginning, Trav.”

  “Of what?”

  Dr. J said, “I know how it feels, and yet, you have to believe me—I have a few years on you now. This is the beginning.”

  I broke down in his office, exhausted. Dr. J closed the door and sat across from me, behind a desk. He told me that another teacher, David Kwiat, had talked of taking me out for lunch, his treat.

  “Really?”

  Like Ellen Davis, David Kwiat was a voice coach. No matter what we had to say, he wanted all the students to open their mouths and be heard. In class, it seemed his only word was clarity. “Clarity is purpose,” he said, “in the theater.”

  David Kwiat was also a writer, a poet, Dr. J told me. “You should talk to him about your writing.” I could barely keep my eyes open.

  Then Dr. J went on to say that I should check in with Jane Weiner because she had begun exploring a program for restaurants to underwrite students’ lunches. If the plan worked out, I would have a different restaurant hosting me five days a week for a meal.

  “You will get through this, but you have to accept that you are only at the very beginning of this process.”

  “Is there anyplace I can lie down until third period?” I asked him.

  Dr. J walked me down to the teachers’ lobby. The steps I took behind him were cautious. He filled a cup with water and opened a door adjacent to the lobby, marked LIBRARY. Most of the space inside had been taken up by a single table and four chairs. The walls had been built out with shelves. As the building was new, the library had not yet been completed. Nothing was organized or alphabetized. On the shelves were piles of plays, biographies, histories, and an assortment of theater criticism—some of which had been written by Dr. J. I closed the door, threw my book bag under the table, and crawled beneath. Bending my knees around and through the legs of the plastic chairs, I found a way of lying on my s
ide, my journal and a handful of plays stacked under my head as a pillow.

  Helter-Skelter

  That afternoon, I called Jorge from the store and asked him if he could help me write a research paper.

  “Now?”

  “It’s due tomorrow.”

  “Okay. I’ll help you—but only if you don’t mind if I practice piano while you work.” I arrived so tired that my eyes were beginning to fail. I was standing back on my heels. I couldn’t blink. Jorge let me in and made me a cup of coffee. I reeked, he said, and let me take a shower. Then I sat down in front of his computer, my eyes barely open.

  “Okay, how many pages does the paper have to be?”

  “Five pages.”

  “Easy.”

  “It’s due in seven hours.”

  “Don’t worry about it.”

  “Why not?”

  “It won’t help you.” Jorge set up a new file for my paper and began by forming the header with page numbers. “Who is the paper for?”

  “Mr. Suarez, Government.”

  “Type your last name here.”

  I pecked out the letters of my last name.

  “What’s your paper on?”

  “Anarchy.”

  “Do you have a title?”

  “No.”

  “Okay.” He handed me the mouse. “What is anarchy?”

  I typed: Anarchy is.

  “Yes. Go further.”

  I typed: Anarchy is an idea like communism or capitalism. It is the only political philosophy that claims to be the best and only enduring form of government for all people. Under capitalism money is the total force of politics. In communism people are the source of all the power and therefore are the most important resource. It is the people who make the world go round, the people who work and create value—

  “The proletariat,” Jorge interrupted me.

  “The what?”

  “That’s the name they used for the working class.”

  “Right, the working class, exactly.”

  I typed: In anarchy, money is an abstraction because an anarchist believes that people are united by another principle.

  “What is that principle?”

  Nature, I typed.

  “What is nature?”

  Anarchy.

  Throughout the night, Jorge counseled me: “Who has written on this subject before?”

  “It doesn’t matter. Anarchy doesn’t need to cite its sources or pay for another person’s intellectual property.”

  “How about Emma Goldman or Rosa Luxemburg? What did they say about anarchy?”

  “I haven’t read them.”

  “You should have read them. You have to try to separate their writing from your writing, and your writing from their writing.”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “That’s what a research paper is, Travis. There are rules about how to do this.”

  “Rules about how I write a paper on anarchy?”

  “There are no rules to anarchy, but there are rules to writing.”

  “What are you saying? I have to write on anarchy for someone who—”

  “Does not know anything about anarchy! What can anarchy be compared to?”

  “People think anarchy is chaos, but that’s wrong. Look at all the wars we’ve had. Look at Iraq. Governments fight, and fail; that is chaos. By what rule do we have to go to war?”

  “That’s good. Start there.”

  I turned to the computer screen, looked at the keys, and froze. “What did I just say?”

  “Governments are wrong because governments fail—”

  We did this until about three in the morning. At one point, Jorge tried to explain distance. He used the terms objective and subjective, what happened and what happened to me.

  “So, even an anarchist needs to operate within the rules of society? But an anarchist means to transform society.”

  “True.”

  “But doesn’t that also mean transforming grammar and language, because aren’t grammar and language part of the system of rules?”

  “Even the most radical thought”—Jorge was translating something in his head—“abides by the rules of common sense. Same goes with music.”

  “Music has rules?”

  “Yes. Laws of acoustics, melody, harmonics. Think about rock ’n’ roll. What’s your favorite song?”

  “Helter Skelter,” I said. “The Beatles.”

  “Okay. Well, like any other song, it has a chord structure—actually a really simple one—and it is only because it lives up to this structure that the song is ‘Helter Skelter.’ If it doesn’t live up to the structure, it becomes another song. That’s a rule.” He sat at the piano. “How does it go?” He set his fingers on the keys.

  “When I get to the bottom—”

  “Yes, yes. I think the song’s in G.” Then he sang: “When I get to the bottom I go back to the top of the slide…”

  I fell asleep on the sofa listening to Jorge play me a lullaby.

  When Mr. Suarez received my paper the next day he raised his bushy eyebrows, a look of surprise on his face. I slept through the rest of class. After school, I went in to work wearing the same clothes I’d been wearing the day before. Julio opened the door slowly, unsure if he should even allow me inside. I told him to be honest. If he didn’t want me to come in, he could tell me what to do instead. Then my boss said something wise: “In life, I try to look at the bad things like they’re good things. Don’t worry about getting fired. Get a better job instead.”

  “Where?”

  He told me that he had a friend at the Brazilian restaurant in the same shopping complex, and that if I talked to him I might get hired.

  “Who do I talk to?”

  “Antonio.”

  After my shift, I walked straight over to the restaurant and introduced myself to Antonio. He handed me an application and a pen. I got nervous. He said, “I’m only hiring a busboy.” He said he probably wasn’t even going to read what I wrote down. “We just need to have the information someplace.” I completed the form as quickly as I could and handed it back.

  That night I slept on the pier, then on the beach, then in the grove. I was on Tobacco Road, taking little pills from a jar. That week I made the acquaintance of other homeless people, people who’d been living outside for years. One of them, Bo Spider, seemed to understand my situation implicitly. “Some people come in with too much knowledge, spinning ten swords and promising disaster,” he said. “No one can tame them, or tell them what is real. The trick is to become an orb and a wand at the same time, an individual.” He had careful visualizations of these glowing orbs. He handed one to me like it was a magic bean in a fairy tale.

  The next week Mr. Suarez started class with a discussion of our research papers. He began handing them back, from the highest grade to the lowest grade, and when he got to the bottom of the pile I was still empty-handed.

  “What happened to my research paper, Mr. Suarez?”

  “I don’t have your research paper, Mr. Culley.”

  “Where is it?”

  “It didn’t receive an F, Travis. It got no grade at all.” The class laughed at me.

  “What didn’t you understand?” I asked him, offended.

  “I think I understood okay. The problem was your paper. It didn’t say anything.”

  “You can think what you like. In fact, that’s exactly my point, and exactly what my paper said. In anarchy you can do and think what you like.”

  “What did your paper say? I’m sure the rest of class would be interested to know,” Mr. Suarez challenged me. “What is anarchy, Mr. Culley?”

  “Anarchy is not a political system in the way that we have been discussing political systems.”

  “No? And why not?”

  “Because it has no rules. It is what all political systems are fighting against: unruly, lawless, nature.”

  “And what is nature?”

  “Selfishness, and adaptation. Survival. Man-made laws ar
e only disciplinary conventions; markers and tactics. They are not necessary to the order of civilization, only to capitalism.”

  “So, nothing is better than something?”

  “Nothing is better than something that fails.”

  He seemed to appreciate this, but the class was stunned. Mr. Suarez sat on the edge of his desk. “So, what does no system look like, because when I tried to read your paper, there was no…Forget it—there was no sense there.”

  “It doesn’t look like this,” I said, gesturing about at the classroom and his stack of papers.

  “What does it look like then?”

  “It’s more obvious, immediate. The truth doesn’t hide.”

  “How does society function?”

  “People work together when they need help. If a bridge needs to be built, all of the people lend a hand. We identify dangers. We teach other people what they need to know. Community is what you call it when people help each other—when they cannot do something alone.”

  “How? How do we accomplish this adaptation?” He was pushing.

  “Well, I’m adapting. You’re adapting.”

  “But how? How are we doing this? Give me one example.”

  “An example?” I saw through Mr. Suarez. “Well? How do you adapt?” I asked him. I felt like I’d been strapped to my chair and surrounded by a room of fools.

  “An example! One!”

  I stood up and threw my desk into the air. Now Mr. Suarez had something to adapt to. The chair and desk, all chrome and plastic connected by a hinge, squeaked and spun mid-flight, attempting something of a pirouette. Mr. Suarez raised his arms to the windows and leapt like a goalie. The desk crashed to the ground and bounced in three directions.

  “Leave!” He shouted over the commotion. “Go now!”

  I grabbed my tote bag and left.