A Comedy & a Tragedy

by Travis Hugh Culley

  That night I slept on First Street, near South Pointe Park in Miami Beach. It was a short night of rest because I was now working later, busing tables. The next morning I had to have a meeting with Mr. Seidenman, one of the school counselors, about the incident in Mr. Suarez’s classroom. I complained that Mr. Suarez had been making fun of me. He’d shown me disrespect in the classroom.

  “Is that true?” Mr. Seidenman asked Mr. Suarez.

  “Yes. That is true,” he admitted flatly.

  I told the story. “He didn’t return my paper because he said he couldn’t read it. He asked me to defend a paper he thought didn’t even deserve an F. I threw the chair only to make an illustration, and I did not throw it at him.”

  Mr. Suarez’s eyes bulged. “Where did you throw it?”

  “I threw it in front of you, Mr. Suarez, only to defend my thesis.”

  “You had a thesis?”

  “Adaptation.”

  He looked away and gave a big sigh. “You nearly gave me a heart attack!”

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Suarez.”

  That afternoon, Michael woke me up in fifth-period English. Someone was saying my name. “Culley? Mr. Culley?” I looked up to see the other school counselor, Mrs. Anders, in the doorway, waiting. “Five minutes, Mr. Culley?”

  “What is she talking about?”

  “Go outside,” Michael whispered.

  “Sorry about the interruption,” Mrs. Anders said to the class.

  “That’s okay. You can have him, as far as I am concerned.” Mr. Remis got a laugh as I walked across the room, my hair hanging in my face, wearing my torn jeans and painted shoes.

  In the hallway, Mrs. Anders looked at me seriously. “I want you to know that you’re not in any trouble.”

  I held my arms together and my chin to my chest.

  “I know things are hard right now. I have to let you know that your mother called. She says you haven’t been coming home. Is that true? Are you staying somewhere else?”

  “I’m not going home.”

  “That’s all right. You don’t have to go home. If you don’t want to be home, you don’t have to go home. Your mother only wanted to know if you were safe.”

  “I’m coming to school,” I said.

  “I was a little taken by it, honestly,” Mrs. Anders said. “I have asked your teachers about your attendance, and it looks like you come to school every day.”

  Where else would I go?

  Then Mrs. Anders came close and whispered: “You have a family here now, Travis. Come to school for support. I want you to think of New World as your family.”

  On Monday morning, right at seven-thirty, I stepped into a little room on the administration floor. Mrs. Anders and Mr. Seidenman were there with the new principal, Mandy Offerley, and a psychologist, Bill Matts. Everyone was dressed for work, blouses and slacks. I arrived in torn jeans and painted shoes. Mother appeared, hair done. Father appeared, apologizing for his tardiness.

  Over the course of a three-hour meeting, Mrs. Anders made it clear that as long as I stayed in class, the school administration would have no reason to have the state of Florida investigate my parents for neglect or abuse. What they would need would be proof that I had a stable address. If these two things were accomplished, my parents would not be held in violation of the law.

  “Would that be all right for both of you?” Mrs. Anders asked.

  “Well, um, yes,” Mother stammered.

  “Sure,” Dad agreed. The room observed.

  I sat back in my chair, prepared to cover my face as my parents nearly lost their heads in shame, or perhaps in gratitude.

  To secure this commitment from my parents, Mrs. Anders had to determine how the school could be sure that I would not spend another night in my car. My mother arranged to help me look for apartments that weekend.

  “I work this weekend,” I said, looking at my feet.

  “I’ll get started on this immediately,” Mom assured us.

  “We need a date,” Mrs. Anders restated.

  “Saturday.”

  The next issue of concern was where the money would be coming from. I was impressed by the conversation because Mrs. Anders and Mr. Seidenman spoke right up about it. I saw my parents go back and forth, and then my father said: “There is the boat.”

  “The boat?” Mrs. Anders wrote in a steno pad.

  Mother told the story: “In our divorce proceedings a budget was established for Travis’s education that was based on the value of our old ski boat.” I had never been told of this.

  “How much is that?”

  “Two grand.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Two thousand dollars,” Dad said, more humbly. My father seemed a completely different man to me now. He looked down at the ground when he acknowledged me and his now ex-wife. Something had changed in him. He had no power over me. He had miraculously become the least fearsome of them all.

  When all of the details had finally been settled, the adults stood up slowly from their chairs. I was the first out of the room, but Mother made an insincere show of inviting me home.

  “The house is open to you, unconditionally,” she said.

  At work, I prepared things. I told Antonio at the restaurant that I would have to do a split shift or a long lunch on Saturday, that weekend.

  “What for?”

  “I have to see an apartment.”

  “Okay,” he said, “leave at noon and then come back at five. That should give you plenty of time.”

  “On Saturday?”

  “¡Sábado!”

  As class let out on Friday, Dr. J took me aside and asked me if we could talk in his office. He was concerned about my writing.

  “My writing? Do you mean my spelling?”

  “Well, no. I can’t read it. It is illegible, and that which I can read, frankly, makes little sense. I’m worried about your literacy, Travis.”

  “My literacy?” I said, thinking he might have said something different.

  “You have to show it to me in your writing. You have to be able to put all of your thoughts and feelings down for another person to be able to see them. It is the most important thing that you can do, and the most important thing that you can probably take from New World School of the Arts.”

  “What should I do?”

  “Well, you need to work on this, Travis, before you graduate. You have a lot of ideas, big ideas. People need to be able to hear from you. You need a way to express yourself.”

  “How do I do that?”

  “You need to read.”

  “Books?”

  “Yes.”

  “But how do you get through a book?”

  “You just do—you focus on it and do nothing else, you look at every detail. Perform the words. Find some example for each of the different characters that you meet. Know what you know. Be patient. Look at the pages first like you don’t understand any of it and wait until some part of it makes sense. Build on that part, and trust.”

  “Trust what?”

  “Trust what you hear.”

  I felt like I was a ghost in the room, I didn’t know where to go.

  “Do you know where the main library is?” Dr. J asked. “Look for Hayakawa. S. I. Hayakawa, a book called Language in Thought and Action.” He wrote down the name. “His book will take you step by step.

  “You have to be able to write, Travis. Your thoughts are invaluable. Your ideas are unique, but you have to be able to express them in clear, sensible ways. You have to be able to explain yourself when it comes to your sometimes very complicated thoughts. You need to be literate so that there is no confusion about who you are, what you want, or where you are supposed to be going. If you cannot do that, you will find that other people will become more and more unable to help you.”

  “Is that what this is about?”

  “Yes,” he said. “All of us, everyone, we all want to help you, Travis. But you need to focus your energy in the right places.”

&n
bsp; Dr. J never intimidated me. He had a natural way of teaching. In our discussions, it was like he was allowing me to see over his shoulder, check his facts, and ask him questions. On a later occasion I asked him what else I should be reading, and he came to me with a personalized reading list of seventy key writers, everyone from Aristotle to Thomas Mann. Dr. J was an encyclopedia on the history of literature, film, theater, art, and music. He was also the author of a comprehensive multimedia humanities textbook called The Art of Being Human, which is in universities and colleges around the world. What makes his explanation of the humanities special is that he looks at the whole of civilization and describes each subject within its own history. There is a history of painting, a history of love, a history of technology, of death, of happiness, and so on. The book is not a rigid chronology because, as he explained to me, influence is not always chronological. Influences can be contemporary, historical, religious, or economic. “It isn’t history we are trying to make,” he says. “Art is not about breaking a record. Art gives us some way to believe the world will continue to change and have history.”

  On Saturday, my mother picked me up from the restaurant, as agreed, and drove me over the MacArthur Causeway. At that time, this was where you could find the cheapest rent anywhere in Miami, and for good reason. South Beach appeared to be a ghost town whose sun-beaten streets were host to poor families and stray dogs.

  For two hours we rode around on the sunset side of the peninsula looking at rooms and apartments that had been advertised in the classifieds section of The Miami Herald, and in every one I saw, my mother found fault. This apartment was too close to the highway. That was too much rent. This one had no carpet. They were all excuses.

  “We have to find the right one, don’t we?” she said.

  “No. We have to find any one that you can afford given the terms of your divorce.”

  When she spoke with landlords, she spoke in us language—“We would like to find a place for him to live”—and she drove me from parking meter to parking meter, jerking the car forward and back to keep from getting too emotional about what was going on. I saw her trembling with the quarters and the car keys. With each apartment we saw together, she seemed more fragile. “Home,” she kept saying, as though it was a quality.

  Then we saw an SRO, a single room, listed for $210 a month. It was a beige efficiency with a sink that jutted out of the wall. The floor was carpeted in a dark brown acrylic that seemed right for old offices. The room came furnished, and all of the utilities were included. There was a bed, a card table, a chair, a beige dresser, a bedside table, a small refrigerator, and a window. There was one light in the middle of the room, and it was either on or off. “This looks like a prison cell,” my mother said, and I spoke up to sign the lease.

  In front of the landlord, my mother begged me to reconsider, and I said, “No. I am living here.”

  “Well, tell me why. What do you like about the room?”

  “It has a door,” I said. “It’s close to school, and it is cheap, so there won’t be any reason that you can back out later. Are those reasons that you can accept?”

  Mother wrote a check. I signed the lease, and the landlord, without a single word, handed me the key.

  “Are you happy now?” Mother asked, bitterly.

  “Take me back to work.”

  A Joker in Every Deck

  The first weeks in my apartment were intolerable. I would have rather been in my car some nights. It was lonesome. I left the light on, sat up in the twin bed, and wrote in my journal until I fell asleep. I had no radio, no television, and no telephone. I listened to the passing traffic and a neighbor’s air conditioner. Often, I would take my voices for a walk, find someplace to sit, and write a few of their words into my journal. I had many names for my journal now, my log, my house, my cohort, my secretary, my calendar. Some objects are called on for many things, and like people, they earn many names.

  On Alton Road, I stole a construction pylon with an orange light and set it in the middle of my room, blinking. When I tried to sleep, I would sometimes not remember where I was. I missed my mother and my brother, no matter how much agony they’d caused me. I missed the sound of their voices, even when they were yelling. All I could do was write to console myself, to manage the silence. I needed my journal because without it, voices would fill all the available spaces in my mind and come rushing out in tears.

  When I wrote, I always heard something. A voice was needed to guide my pen. Listening, I could begin to write incessantly, like Gene-John did, with a stream of words coming to my mind constantly. I wrote to myself to be my own company. I wrote to myself to give myself tasks, to tell myself to think differently. I wrote until there was no more room, not a single speck of white on the folio. If I could use every inch of a page, then I was surely an excellent writer.

  I turned to my journal for many purposes that year. To remind me of where my focus ought to go, even if only to tell myself what I should be doing, I entered it into my journal. Embarrassing and gratuitous thoughts were entered without hesitation. Once in writing, they no longer burdened me.

  I had written my way through the shoelace journal and two composition notebooks by the spring of my junior year. Some of the pages were so overwritten that they were barely coherent. I began looking for a new journal when I started running out of space in the last. This would be my fourth volume, exempting only the first attempt, and it would mark the fact that I had now been writing every day for the past eighteen months. I was through with composition notebooks, and with them I was through with lined sheets. Now my mind could rest only on clean sheets of blank paper in a good spine. I wanted a cover, a hardback, not just a collection of papers. I looked through a bunch of sketchbooks at an art supply store on Biscayne Boulevard. Most of them were black, but on the middle shelf, there were a few white canvas hardbacks. When I first got a glimpse of them, I snatched one up and held it to my chest. Behind the plastic cover there was a little piece of cardboard that advertised how I should use this book. “Paint me!” it exclaimed. I imagined it saying “Tickle me!” and knew that I would never want to touch it with paint.

  I wanted my book to reflect me, naturally and sincerely. I knew that if I bothered painting it, I would be worried about keeping the painting. I decided to keep the cover white so that it would absorb every trace of the world that I was thumbing through. I thought the cover might end up stained, torn, and thereby reveal the truth of the book in my hand, the unadorned, authoritative personal archive.

  I drove to the beach with my new book in the passenger seat, and when I got home, I brought it up to my room and set it on my bedside table like it was glowing.

  I made a final entry in my old composition notebook and set it on a makeshift bookshelf next to my bed. This journal had become my sole companion since I left home. I had kept it with me everywhere I went. The open pages of my journal became something like a surrogate ceiling, which I would glare into before nodding off in the evening, wherever I happened to be.

  Around the middle of November, I walked down Lincoln Road after all the bars and nightclubs had closed. When I got to Euclid Avenue, I saw a way that I could shimmy up a pipe in the alley. I climbed hand over hand seven stories to the roof of the concert hall that was home to the New World Symphony. A stream of drunks and partygoers were milling about for taxis below. I sat down on the ledge of the building, my ankles hanging off of the side, my journal and a pen awaiting inspiration to my right.

  The sky was sparkling like a fine fabric with tiny mirrors woven into a divine pattern, now gently vanishing. The next day had begun to appear through this heavenly weave-work in tones of peach, pink, and blue. The lights from floating windows, streets, and the beams of passing cars, which had seemed all night to imitate the Milky Way, now resolved themselves into a vast array of buildings and roads that looked false to me, like they had been meticulously painted by the maker of some elaborate model. Each detail, meaningless in itself, was only sign
ificant as part of a larger structure.

  I had been contemplating suicide—a suicide, not mine. I opened my book and tried to write something of a suicide letter for B.J. to see if there was any chance that I’d been wrong. Nothing came. My difficulty began with the fact that I still had trouble spelling the word: suicide. Besides this, I wasn’t quite sure yet how I should feel about it. Its meaning understood—why was the word misused and overused? Who benefited from threats? I wondered. Probably no one. But who benefited from the suicides of other people, or from erroneous claims?

  My mother, as I had suspected, was like the character in my play who had invented a suicide to accomplish another goal. She’d treated B.J.’s death like he wasn’t her brother, like his death was only some warning for us about the dangers of excess pride or pleasure, some opportunity to say “I told you so.”

  To use words this way, I understood, involved a trespass of her brother’s heart. To have endowed him with an intention, whether to ward me away from drugs or to set me on a regime of prescriptions, broke the Hippocratic Oath and disabled the last line of trust between us. Had he really wanted to kill himself, there would have been some corresponding sign, some impression that the result, his death, could verify. He would have expressed himself—before and after. But he’d made no threat, and he wrote nothing down. The radio he’d sent to my brother came without a letter or a picture or a set of instructions. If he had been feeling suicidal, even remotely, why would he not have sent that package with some reflection of himself, some clue that said: “Restore me”?

  B.J. wasn’t thinking about suicide. He was not on a ledge such as this one I sat on. He had a family he came home to every night. People were counting on him. I knew, given the most remote chance of suicide, my uncle would have written something.

  Seeing this, I was no longer confused. My mother had her reasons for coming up with the story. In view of everything, in view of my whole confusing life and all of my unexpected obstacles, I had this: a pen with which to describe them. What Dr. Greenbaum had observed when he wrote about my “tenuous hold upon reality” may have been my mother’s influence on me. His letter may have been a symptom of her messy excuse for a working family. I decided that night I would have to stop taking the antidepressants.