A Comedy & a Tragedy

by Travis Hugh Culley

  Copyright © 2015 by Travis Hugh Culley

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  BALLANTINE and the HOUSE colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Special thanks to New World School of the Arts, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Ox-Bow, the Wings Foundation, and the SNAP Network. Extended appreciation to John A. Ware, Mary Jane Jacob, Kelly Bristol-Bell, Richard P. Janaro, Megan Hickling, Sylvan Seidenman, Shirley Meyers, Debbie Holle, Emily Svaedra, and Mary Wolf.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Culley, Travis Hugh.

  A comedy & a tragedy: a memoir of learning how to read and write /

  Travis Hugh Culley.

  pages cm

  ISBN 978-0-345-50616-0

  eBook ISBN 978-0-8041-7755-9

  1. Culley, Travis Hugh—Childhood and youth. 2. Reading, Psychology of. 3. Writing—Psychological aspects. 4. Literacy—Psychological aspects. 5. Problem youth—United States—Biography. I. Title. II. Title: A comedy and a tragedy.

  BF456.R2C85 2015

  818'.603—dc23 2015000866

  [B]

  eBook ISBN 9780804177559

  randomhousebooks.com

  eBook design adapted from printed book design by Mary A. Wirth

  Frontispiece photograph and journal illustration courtesy of the author

  Cover design: Misa Erder

  Cover photograph: Getty Images

  v4.1

  ep

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Epigraph

  Preface

  Chapter One: Birdbrain

  Chapter Two: Why Feathers Give Me Headaches

  Chapter Three: The Pledge of Allegiance

  Chapter Four: Super-Vision

  Chapter Five: Penuél

  Chapter Six: Survival Stories

  Chapter Seven: Rebel, Rebel

  Chapter Eight: Where the Sidewalk Ends

  Chapter Nine: A Comedy

  Chapter Ten: Missing Persons

  Chapter Eleven: The Absurd Hero

  Chapter Twelve: Gang Theory

  Chapter Thirteen: Path of Sons

  Chapter Fourteen: A Tragedy

  Chapter Fifteen: The Arlequinade

  Chapter Sixteen: The Allegory of the Cave

  Chapter Seventeen: Crazy for You

  Chapter Eighteen: On Mental Health

  Chapter Nineteen: The Theater of Literacy & Illiteracy

  Chapter Twenty: Epiphany Junkie

  Chapter Twenty-One: Emancipation

  Chapter Twenty-Two: Helter-Skelter

  Chapter Twenty-Three: A Joker in Every Deck

  Chapter Twenty-Four: On Waking

  Chapter Twenty-Five: Recognition

  Epilogue

  Dedication

  By Travis Hugh Culley

  About the Author

  We cannot teach children the danger of lying to men

  Without feeling, as men,

  The greater danger of lying to children.

  —JEAN-JACQUES ROUSSEAU

  Dear Aneta,

  On September 21, 2005, I was a graduate student at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago on assignment in Finland to write about an arts festival that takes place there every year. On my way home, before flying out of Helsinki, I stepped into an English-language bookstore near the center of town. It is here we met.

  Two tiny rooms were connected by one small set of stairs. Worn volumes with colorful spines lined the walls and shelves and were, in places, stacked to the ceiling. I was reading the introduction of an out-of-print anthology of papers on the sociology of art that I’d found at the bottom of the reference section. You were scanning mass-market paperbacks in the yellow discount bin. A delicate-looking man sat near the front and gave change as customers made their selections and left. Unavoidably, I came up beside you. There was no cause for alarm. It seemed you were expecting me.

  Being polite, I thumbed through a weathered copy of The Fall by Albert Camus. I saw your fingers tapping the edge of the bin like a family of little dancers.

  “Have you seen Jane?” you asked, with a faintly English accent.

  “Jane Austen? Jane Jacobs? Jane Smiley?”

  “I’ve been looking for an English edition of Pride and Prejudice for years.”

  You weren’t English, and you were dark for a Finn. “I haven’t seen her,” I said. “But then I haven’t checked the fiction shelf.”

  “Have you read Pride?” you asked.

  “I know of her books, of course. I haven’t read them.”

  “You haven’t?”

  “I’m sure they’re wonderful.” I smiled. “But I don’t have time to read just for the pleasure of it.”

  “Don’t you enjoy reading?”

  “Yes, I do. But pleasure is not my first motivation,” I said with a laugh, trying to clarify.

  “Why do you read?”

  “Ideas, I guess. Ideas do play some part in my interest in reading.” I worried that I was sounding pretentious. “I think I am responsible to the ideas I find in books. That’s why I read them.” Then I said something about the similarity between literature and philosophy.

  “You mean like Hermes and Aphrodite?”

  “Like Mercury. Ideas are not things, right? Not in themselves. But they seem so solid sometimes, so absolutely sound, so like real things. It is the same with a work of fiction.”

  “It can be revealing?”

  “Reading will unveil illusions. And yet still, there is always some work that goes into making sure that what you read—however it seems to you—is in fact what the author meant to write. Maybe I never learned to enjoy the process the way others have. I love books. I study books. But I read them because I have to, not because I expect them to be pleasant.”

  “You have to learn?”

  “I guess I’m a slow learner.”

  You looked up. I didn’t seem like a slow learner.

  “It’s true. For most of my time in school, I didn’t read or write at all. In middle school I was called a problem because I never followed directions. By high school I was against any and all rules whatsoever.”

  “You were illiterate?”

  “Until about seventeen.”

  “What happened?”

  I flipped through Stephen King’s Insomnia and then set it back into the space it occupied. I wasn’t sure what to say because we had only met, and people come with so many different prejudices about literacy. I said, “It may be hard to imagine, but it is fairly normal in my country for students to graduate high school without the ability to read or write.”

  “Were you dyslexic?”

  “I am, somewhat, but it’s not severe. It doesn’t keep me from reading. My challenges were social, environmental, and emotional. I grew up in inner-city schools in South Florida. Both of my parents were educated, with master’s degrees. I should have had every chance and all of the potential to read like other kids, but—” I took a breath. “There was no support. Parents got in the way. Teachers got in the way. By the fourth grade, I couldn’t trust anyone. Why would I want to learn what they had to teach me? I refused. I thought, if I agreed to their terms, I’d only agree to being lied to.”

  You cracked a smile.

  “As a kid, I thought I only had to speak my mind and would never really have to write anything down. If I didn’t need to write anything down, why bother reading? Anyway, the world doesn’t attend so carefully to the names of things, even now. We don’t call things by what they are. This can be confus
ing. Ultimately, it was in art school that I discovered the meaning of and purpose in literacy. I learned I needed to write and I needed to read in order to understand my own situation. Once I’d figured this out, I became a writer. Nothing could stop me.”

  “Were you an artist?”

  “I was in the theater. In fact, plays were an important introduction to reading for me. Surrounded by actors, each with the play in hand, I could call for help on words I did not know or could not pronounce. The others would let me fumble through a scene with them until I figured it out. Reading in collaboration this way, in a group, I developed the ability to read different kinds of parts and experiment with more sophisticated plays. When I began reading books, I found it helpful to imagine the narration coming from someone onstage.”

  “That’s creative.”

  “I came to literacy late, and it was the theater that brought me. Oh yes.” I’d forgotten. “I began a journal.” I reached into my bag for money. I paid for The Fall, and the essays on the sociology of art. Before leaving, we exchanged names. You told me you were not Finnish but Polish, here on a student visa. You were studying English philology at seminary. I took interest. I had never talked with a philologist about literature. I welcomed the conversation as we took a walk in the street outside.

  First, you asked what novelists I enjoyed. I named a few writers: Dostoyevsky, Primo Levi, Borges, and Melville. “I sometimes lack patience with novels,” I had to admit. “The moment a writer seems distracted, I become distracted. If I find something else more interesting, I can be fickle. I might put one book down and start another, but then I’m working.”

  “What do you enjoy reading?”

  “I like reading about the real and imagined world. I love all sorts of essayists, poets, playwrights, thinkers, regardless of their origins or their belief systems. I have a special appreciation for literary criticism, books about writing. I have a soft spot for phenomenology.”

  “Ideas?” you asked cautiously. “And what are ideas good for?”

  It seemed that you were serious, so I attempted some reply. “Ideas help me to reflect and to sort out chaos. A good idea can help organize all the information that is available at one time. Ideas give me a way of understanding something that, up front, may not make perfect sense, or may be too complex to see from a single point of view.” I thought I had said something profound here, but then you asked another question:

  “How do you become literate?”

  I saw you speak, but I had lost the ability to understand what you were saying. I rocked back and forth in my shoes, unsure of how to explain. I stammered, foolishly: “I’ve written one book and a couple of articles. I have a pile of journals, a handful of plays.”

  You asked the question again: “How do you become literate?” I think you expected me to have an answer; I expected you to have one. We talked for a long time. We enjoyed a beautiful day together, but we couldn’t seem to reach an agreement.

  In the time that has passed since that day, I have been collecting a more complete reply to your question. My story will describe what I could not explain adequately that day: how I learned to read, and how I came to be a writer after the prolonged illiteracy of my childhood.

  Birdbrain

  I looked out the window of my dad’s brown van, watching trees pass by. My mom and brother, Joe, were strapped in behind their seat belts, waving goodbye to the mountains in the rearview mirror. It was the spring of 1980, and we were driving from Denver, Colorado, to Miami, Florida. A truck filled with furniture and clothes drove east a few hours ahead of us.

  Feeling the van rock side to side, I caught myself staring at miles of wheat and corn, barbed-wire fences, and occasional bales of hay. Looking ahead, smelling the pine and horses, feeling the wind carry, I felt that my life was changing. Houses peered out at us and vanished. Once fascinated, I had to wonder where they went. Whole towns disappeared, never to be seen again. One moment I saw cabbages, radio towers, farms, and then empty stretches of road.

  Weeks before, Joe and I had been taken out of school to prepare for our move back east. Joe was in the third grade. I was in the first. Before our move I asked him, thinking he knew better, how things would be different in Florida. He looked around at the schoolyard where we stood:

  “Everything will be different.”

  We moved into a neighborhood house with an acre yard that sat back from the shoulder of a busy two-lane street in North Miami. The house was spacious and open. The walls were paneled with stained wood. The hall creaked and moaned. There was a porch at the front of the house and an enclosed swimming pool in the back. The screens whistled differently in the warm wind. The windows were glass venetian-style shutters, thin plates that we opened and closed with little metal dials. Each window was covered by an awning, and so the house was always dark within, even when we had every light on. Dad thought we had no room to complain. With a pool and a backyard like ours, he was sure Joe and I had everything we should need.

  Dad warned us that we would soon be going to a bigger school, and that we’d need to prepare ourselves. First of all, Miami was nothing like the suburbs of Denver. Here, we’d be taking classes with people from all over the world. We’d have to learn to talk with different kinds of people, and even deal with the sense of being a minority in some of our classrooms, although this, he suggested, wasn’t really true and would in time wear off. Passing tests and turning in assignments should be easy. The problem would be the jealousy of other boys, he said. At school, kids would envy us because we were luckier than they. He had this phrase: most likely to succeed.

  Here began two very different journeys in education. My brother would become an honors student, earning high marks and graduating easily. I would be called a discipline problem. My path would be beset with many obstacles, and I would remain illiterate until high school.

  When our mother brought us in to register for classes, it was March, only nine weeks from the end of the school year. She parked the Pinto on the street and led us into Biscayne Gardens Elementary through a side door. Together, we found ourselves in a desolate hall that seemed to have no end and, for the moment, only one boy standing halfway down the expanse of classrooms, facing the wall. Mom walked up to the boy and asked him where the principal’s office was. The boy spun but did not answer. Instead, he held his breath, blowing his cheeks out like a blowfish, and pointed farther up the hall.

  “Why are you holding your breath?” I asked him. He was my age.

  “I’m in trouble,” he said, inflating.

  “What for?”

  “Talking in class,” he peeped, his shoulders high.

  I looked to my mom: You can’t talk in these classrooms? But then he laughed and I laughed and we were friends. This was Bruce Melvin Woolever, Jr. As luck would have it, I would be placed in his first-grade class. He and I would follow each other, hopscotch, through the next ten years, depending on each other at some of the hardest turns.

  Bruce and I were nothing alike. He came from a busy home with three younger sisters. His father was Italian, his mother Guatemalan. He was mixed, he said, in quotes. At home they spoke Spanish and English interchangeably, and were probably more literate in each language than I was in my own. Bruce didn’t feel superior about this. The world was big enough for all kinds of people. His perspective was admirable. He said that everyone had something to laugh about. Even those people who don’t want to laugh at all or find any joke funny ever—even they have something to laugh about. He laughed himself silly saying this.

  Unlike me, Bruce had little shame getting attention. Unlike my brother, he was gentle and motivated by sympathy. Bruce was never hurtful. He did not see stereotypes or respond to clichés. To him, things were funny in themselves. I could give some turn to a phrase and he would take it straight: “My brother is going to get it someday, I swear.”

  “Get it? Get what? Oh! I get it—I got it!” Then he’d fake like I’d hit him and stagger back. He always cheered me up. Over lu
nch, he’d try to trade food. Once, he stuck a finger in my cornbread and asked if I wanted to eat it.

  “That’s gross!”

  “Aren’t you touchy?” He chortled, his mouth full of my cornbread.

  I let it go. I needed Bruce’s friendship more than he needed mine. I was the younger brother of Joe Culley, a bully, twice my size, who had taken up the art of condescension. Compared to Bruce’s, my brother’s sense of humor consisted only of potshots and double crossings, inspired by Spy vs Spy. Joe defended himself. He wasn’t being cruel; he was only exhibiting his knack for competition. Joe loved competition because it established unarguable authority—but then there he was, my older brother, parading his authority through the house. Joe brought home perfect report cards, 4.0 averages. He gloated about being superior to me in every aspect, even over the two inches he maintained above me as Mom marked our heights up on the pantry door. There it was: Black spy—wins again!

  Joe was also the senior book lover in the family. I think that by nine he’d read more books than both of our parents combined. He wasn’t dumb, but mean. He enjoyed mysteries, fantasies, especially the sci-fi and horror genres. As a boy, he’d read the Hardy Boys and Agatha Christie. Now he was reading Stephen King and Ian Fleming. It seemed he didn’t read these books for any virtuous reason, but only to deepen his twisted mind—to see what he could get away with. He wanted facts, science, information he could use or take advantage of. I didn’t want to be anything like him. I think it bruised his ego.

  At home, Joe let it be known that I was the gullible one, the dummy. He called me know-nothing, nitwit, dork. He called me Birdbrain so often that I eventually flew into a fit, and the name stuck. Joe earned his nickname when he pinned me to the ground in the backyard and sat on my head like King Kong. He was trying to impress a friend from the football league who was standing right there, speechless. Mom and Dad couldn’t hear me calling for help. I started yelling, “You’re a butt! Nothing but a fat butt!” Afterward, every time he called me one name I called him the other.