Tragedy Plus Time

by Adam Cayton-Holland

  Our portion of the neighborhood had been spared. The tornado hadn’t made it that far west. But it had touched down in east Park Hill, knocking down enormous old trees into several houses, collapsing power and telephone lines. City workers moved in quickly to address gas leaks.

  When the phone lines were back up we touched base with my dad and let him know we were alive. That mom had gotten us home safe. She had saved us. We checked on friends and neighbors and for the most part everything was all right. Some damage to property here and there, but no fatalities, just a scare.

  All that hype for nothing.

  That night my dad told us how during the worst part of the storm everyone in his office building got on the roof and watched the tornado touch down in Park Hill. He said looking out across Capitol Hill, then City Park, you could actually see the funnel cloud form and drop from the sky. He explained how it would touch the earth, then immediately recoil, almost timidly, before working its confidence back up, pouncing again. He told us how frightened he was, how helpless he felt as he stood on the roof and watched a tornado terrorize his neighborhood, where his wife and son and daughter were, and with whom he couldn’t communicate. He was overcome with emotion. He hugged us and kept us close to him all night. I wondered if my father suspected something like that might happen all along. Like we did.

  “We were hoping it came closer!” I blurted out.

  “Why would you want that?” he demanded.

  “I don’t know,” I stammered, suddenly aware of how spoiled it was to pine for a disaster. “Just to, like, see it better. Right, Lee?”

  She wisely kept her mouth shut. I was flailing.

  “Well that’s ridiculous,” my dad said. “You should be grateful nothing bad happened.”

  He was right. We were lucky. Still, when I think about that period of our lives it’s easy to remember Lydia like that: desperate for something else, something dark and familiar, a mesmerized child staring through the back windshield into the chaos of a howling storm.

  SIGNATURE BITS

  We weren’t raised religious; eighties sitcoms became our doctrine. The Huxtables on the staircase lip-syncing to “Night Time Is the Right Time?” A character actually named Boner Stabone? Carlton doing the Carlton Dance? This was our gospel. Here were all the answers, here were moments of sheer joy, of unthinking, in-the-moment Zen. We couldn’t get enough. We devoured it wholesale, reenacted it, riffed off of it. Right there in the basement, on that patch of carpet that would eventually become so worn it would need to be replaced, we developed our sense of humor.

  We ran bits.

  Especially Lydia and me. Because while Anna was off pursuing figure skating at early morning and afternoon practices, we were down in that basement letting the TV colonize the far-flung recesses of our brains. Lydia continued her studies when Anna got home; the two often binged Star Trek together deep into the night. But at that point I would take my leave. Space was for nerds. Comedy was all I needed.

  One Friday evening, as was often the case, Lydia and I found ourselves parked in front of the TV devouring ABC’s TGIF slate. Thank Goodness It’s Funny. We’d gotten to Full House, the crown jewel of the block, and we were watching like jack-o-lanterns as Michelle Tanner was learning to play the recorder. She was trying to plow her way through “Bah Bah Black Sheep” but every time she got to a certain point in the song, the recorder would play a flat note. She just couldn’t get past it. No matter what she did differently, same flat note, every damn time. So Uncle Joey gave it a try. Same result. He looked in the recorder and realized there was an obstruction. So he blew into it as hard as he could, and a wad of bubble gum shot out and hit Michelle directly between the eyes.

  THWAP.

  Lydia exploded. It hit her just right. She laughed so hard she couldn’t breathe. Then suddenly she let out this deep, troubling wheeze, a shocking sound that made us both laugh even harder. It sounded like Robert Carradine’s laugh in Revenge of the Nerds. It was disturbing, like a sickly clap at the end of a coughing jag. We shared one of those tears-streaming-down-your-face, I’m-gonna-pee, I’m-gonna-pee types of laughs.

  “What the hell was that, Lee?!” I asked her.

  “I have no idea!” she said. “I didn’t mean to do it!”

  “Can you do it again?!”

  “Maybe!”

  After a few attempts, she found that she could, and we burst out laughing anew, just as hard as the first time. We were both so delighted that tiny Lydia could ever produce such a sound that we pursued it full tilt. With a little more practice Lydia was able to do it three times in a row, and with a little more tinkering, she was able to make the noise while saying the word “Hi,” much to our insane delight. We fashioned this new bat-shit skill into a character and ran with it. She became a lonely foreign exchange student, Margo, a young girl oh so eager to please, but who, alas, only knew two American words, “Hi” and “Bye.” Poor Margo, all she ever wanted, all she so desperately longed for in this strange, foreign land was to fit in, to be accepted. But damn if that cursed sound didn’t scare away all her peers!

  “Hey Margo,” I would start. “Some of us kids were going to go ride bikes. You want to come?”

  Her eyes would widen, she would smile deliriously and began quivering with excitement, like a Sarah McLachlan kennel dog finally shown a moment of attention.

  “Hi!” she would belch, a TB patient escaped from the sanatorium.

  “Um, excuse me?” I would continue, face contorting into a disgusted sneer.

  Beside herself, she would belch out another series of disturbing yelps, frantically waving hello the whole time, desperately imploring this new friend not to leave.

  “HI! HI! HI!”

  I would feign disgust, totally weirded out.

  “Uh . . . like, never mind, Margo,” I would say. “What is wrong with you?”

  Then Margo, tragic Margo, would go back to her sad little corner of the world alone; she would tuck her knees into her chest and let out one more defeated, disconcerting, bark.

  “Bye . . .”

  And then, poor Margo would die. And we would roll around on the carpet in hysterics.

  What can I say? We were very alt.

  Soon Lydia discovered that she could speak backwards. Fluently. The trick was that she had to be able to spell the words she was saying. If she could picture the letters in her head, she could flip them, read them, and then spit them back out instantaneously. That’s just how her brain worked. That fast. Lydia could read the world backwards as easily as she could forwards. Both versions made sense to her. We didn’t know why. We hypothesized it was from when she was a toddler and shoved a magnetized, travel-sized checker so far up her nose that my parents didn’t discover it for two days, when the stink could no longer be ignored. But we didn’t question it all that much. All we knew was that it was an amazing parlor trick we could use. So of course we gave the skill-set to Margo, adding more and more nuance to our beloved character like SNL scribes desperately trying to get Lorne to make the sketch into a movie. Eventually, Margo would belch her strange hello, then, once rejected, she would mutter to herself inconsolably in her backwards language, sounding like some wretched, Eastern European wench.

  We performed the act in front of my parents. Though initially alarmed, they quickly lost their minds laughing. They wiped the tears streaming from their eyes. Who were these weird fucking children?

  We were always running new bits, playing new characters. Like this pair of hick siblings ever threatening to tell on one another for whatever backwoods atrocity they’d committed that day.

  You don’t gimme your Mountain Dew I’ma tell Daddy how you tied all them kids to them trees!

  You do that I’ll tell Daddy you mutilated them squirrels!

  Tree-tied kids way worse than mutilated squirrels!

  Sometimes in carpool one of us would start sounding off about the bad lunch meat we’d tucked into that day at school, feigning queasy and begging whatever poor bast
ard had driving duty that afternoon not to swerve so much. The bit would quickly escalate from groans to full-on retching. This, naturally, would trigger the queasiness of the other, who had also horsed down said dubious deli meat, until eventually both of us were holding our stomachs and fake-puking from the backseat as loudly as we could. Whoever was driving would yell at us to stop but we’d stick to it with such conviction that eventually they would succumb to our routine, transitioning from yelling at us for being annoying to yelling at us to stop so they didn’t lose control of the wheel from laughter. Either that or the bit would just tank completely. We were about 50/50. But we didn’t care. We were making each other laugh, and that was all that mattered to us. It became how we related; every conversation between Lydia and I would quickly veer off into absurdity. We felt comfortable there, safe from looming danger. It seemed more fun to laugh at the world then to cry about it.

  Summers we took our road show to City Park, the crown jewel of the city. It was a mere three blocks from our house growing up. Any iconic shot of Denver you’ve seen, it’s taken from there: the lake, the boathouse, the downtown skyline, then the foothills rolling up into the mountains. Postcard City Park. And once we were old enough to cross busy Colorado Boulevard on our own, it was all ours.

  My mother was a volunteer docent at the Denver Zoo, right in the center of the park. She worked in the primate house. She often helped raise rejected apes and monkeys until they were healthy and old enough to reintroduce back into their enclosures. But they’d still pine for their caretakers. So my sisters and I would walk the zoo hand-in-hand with our mother in her beige vest with the green name tag and visit all her little friends. Katie the capuchin who made kissy-lips at my mom; Bungee the spider monkey who’d loved my mom and would come running toward her screaming, fully erect. We would laugh so hard people must have thought us simple.

  They named Katie’s baby after my little sister: Lydia the capuchin.

  Eventually my mom began working in the nursery, and sometimes, if the nice vet techs were working, we’d get to help feed whatever baby animal was currently housed there. You never knew what you were going to get. An artic fox baby. An African wild dog. America’s polar bear baby sweethearts Klondike and Snow. We got to meet them all.

  It felt like we were celebs, in on this secret that the general public never got to see: a busy world of carts darting every direction and animals pacing in the backs of their enclosures. We’d make our way through the nurseries’ offices, then the enormous kitchen, down the narrow corridor with the off-exhibit crates and cages and then into the main nursery, the one with the display window out to the public. Passing zoo-goers would watch jealously through the glass as an army of baby mongooses crawled all over us or a golden lion tamarin baby nursed a bottle in our arms. The envy on the faces of the schoolchildren passing beneath us was palpable.

  Why do those kids get to do that and we don’t? Why are they so lucky?

  Because we were born into it. We live here. This park, this zoo, this is all ours. This is our home.

  And isn’t it amazing?

  We were also members of the Natural History Museum, which sat next to the zoo. Entire days were swallowed there. Days of the Hall of Life and the sloths in the tar pits and the mineral caves and the plastic saber-toothed tiger that roared when you put a coin in its mouth. But our favorite were the animal dioramas. Floor after floor of them, from all over the world: Africa, South America, Australia, the Antarctic. We knew each continent backwards and forwards.

  And we knew about the gnomes.

  One of the original muralists painted them there as his calling card: tiny little gnomes that he would hide somewhere in his landscapes. If you didn’t know to look for them they were nearly impossible to find. They were perfectly camouflaged in the background. But they were there just the same, as a reward for those who knew to seek them, tiny little treasures to hunt for across multiple floors of taxidermy. A museum employee told us about them and over the years we found every last one. And nothing delighted us more than pointing them out to unsuspecting visitors. We’d stand in front of a diorama and wait for a new group of visitors to approach, then launch into our favorite bit, a clumsy shill.

  “Say, what are you looking at?” Lydia would ask me, loudly, the audience plant to my carnie shuckster.

  “You don’t see it?!” I’d respond, incredulous. “There’s a gnome hidden in the painting here!”

  “There is?!” she’d reply, flabbergasted. “Where? I don’t see it.”

  Then I’d loudly explain to her exactly where it was located.

  “See that big tree, the one next to the rock? Look on the right side of it, one, two, three branches up. Beneath that branch, in the background, crouched in the river, there’s a gnome!”

  “Oh my god I see it! That is so cool!”

  “Right?”

  Inevitably people would want in, and after our ruse we were perfectly positioned to bask in the admiration of strangers. They were always so tickled and delighted once they finally found them. As were we. The bit had worked. Two-fold. Not only had we shown them the secret of the museum, but in doing so, we had made ourselves special. Like we were somehow different, with an enhanced understanding of the world. Our world. The zoo, the museum, City Park, Park Hill, Denver. It made us feel bigger than ourselves, like we were connected to some greater plane, one where the treasures of the world were at our fingertips. We wanted everyone to realize that there was mystery and wonder right there in our backyard if they only knew to look for it. There was so much more beneath the surface.

  A CAREER IN THE ARTS

  The public schools in my neighborhood were shit so I had to go Graland Country Day School, a neo-Fascist lacrosse factory in the form of a K–9, a place so pretentious it actually existed in a neighborhood called Hilltop. At Graland the progeny of emotionally distant businessmen and their manic-depressive trophy wives gathered on a daily basis to perfect their pronunciation of the word “faggot” while sowing the seeds of future opiate addictions.

  One fall—fifth, maybe sixth grade—flag football became popular at recess. But rather than a gang of kids picking sides and hurling the ole synthetic rubber around, teams were formed. Soon contracts were negotiated, actual documents were drawn up on college-ruled paper and signed. Promises were made and fulfilled: a donut in the morning once a week to play for a certain squad, a soda pop every day at lunch for a speedy receiver to jump franchises. Flag football became a business. Once money began changing hands the administration shut down the league. That was Graland: a place where children didn’t want to be football players, they wanted to be owners.

  I grew up on the wrong side of Sixth Avenue from Graland Country Day School. Though my neighborhood of Park Hill was decidedly upper middle class, at least on the south side, it was treated as the lefty ghetto to their Country Club right. I was never out-and-out bullied because I was good at sports—my flag football contract was a king-sized Twix on Fridays—but I was different there, an outsider, a quiet weirdo from the wrong neighborhood. Until one fateful morning in the ninth grade.

  On Fridays every student in the upper school—grades seven through nine—was required to attend a weekly assembly. And at the end of every assembly, a different ninth-grade student was made to deliver a two-minute speech on the subject of their choosing. The administration figured it would behoove the FBLA Hitler Youth to get some public speaking under their belts. Ninth graders lived in perpetual fear of their turn at the podium. Every week we would watch some poor bastard sheepishly make their way to the front of the room and try to climb inside of themselves over the course of two painful minutes. They’d stare directly into the ground or sweat profusely; they would pause awkwardly and stutter, choking out disconnected thoughts about riding horses or skiing. The ninth-grade speeches were so unilaterally terrifying that they were off-limits from standard ridicule. What was the point? We all had to do them. There was no separating one speech from the other; they were all n
ightmares, another humiliating ordeal in a long string of humiliating ordeals that, cobbled together, somehow constituted an Ivy League admissions package.

  But for me, those ninth-grade speeches were an opportunity, two golden minutes when the entire upper school had to pay attention to me. I didn’t intend to let it go to waste.

  Dave Letterman was my own personal Jesus at the time. I had negotiated my bedtime to after the Top Ten List, which allowed me to watch Dave’s opening monologue, whatever bat-shit opening sketch the writer’s room had concocted that evening, then the Top Ten List. The Top Tens were my favorite—so dry, so precise, so joyously and deliberately odd. So when it came time for me to speak in front of the upper school, I decided this was my opportunity to write my own.

  Graland underwent a massive renovation that year, a seemingly endless construction job that left an enormous hole in the middle of school. They walled off the crater so we wouldn’t topple into it, but it still loomed there mysteriously, noisy and dusty, like a meteor crash site in the middle of our otherwise pristine campus.

  So I wrote a Top Ten about it.

  I took to the podium, all thirteen years, four feet eleven inches of me, and cleared my throat.

  “It’s time for tonight’s Top Ten!”

  Tonight! It was 8:00 a.m.! The irreverence! The entire audience immediately perked up.

  “Top Ten Things the School Plans to Do with That Giant Hole in the Middle of Campus.”

  I removed a note card from my pocket on which I had written my Top Ten and proceeded to tick them off, one after another. And it fucking destroyed. Crushed. Showtime at the Apollo, the little rich, white asshole version. People couldn’t believe what was happening. It was unlike anything they had seen all school year. This was not some painful experience to be omitted from our collective memory. This was noteworthy! This was funny. I savored every second. I ad-libbed and shook my head in delighted disappointment at the joke, just like Dave. I watched the waves of laughter roll over the audience, waited for them to subside, and then hit them with the next joke. It was the single most electric moment of my childhood up until that point.