I told Melanie the recent news at our house. It just came out. “Joe just got into Norland. Do you know about Norland?”
“The gifted school?”
Dade County Public Schools had a handful of magnet schools where kids could apply and receive specialized training in one field or another. Norland was one such school, offering an arts-based curriculum of music, dance, art, and theater to middle school kids. Joe had just been accepted into the visual arts department. My parents were so proud of him, saying he was going to be an artist someday, and buying him all sorts of supplies. I think I brought this up with Melanie to see if she would ever think of auditioning. She clearly had a few streaks of creativity.
“You can get in too if you try,” she said.
“I’m not talented.”
“If Joe is talented, you are,” Melanie said. I thought about this while we spent the afternoon playing. When I walked back in through the front door of my house, my cheeks pink, and wearing different-colored socks, I found my family seated in the same frozen arrangement I’d left them in: Joe with a book, Dad with a beer, Mom with a cigarette.
My next report card came home with recommendations for summer school attached. Joe laughed at me. Mom showed Dad my scores, and he responded with his usual tact: “You just can’t go through life being stupid, son. You’re going to turn out like Gil, next door.”
“David,” my mother cautioned him.
“Well, look: we’ve got a smart son and a stupid son. If you were smart like your brother, you’d get to go to church camp this summer. Wouldn’t you? See? So, you’re too stupid to go to church camp like the other kids. You’ve got to stay behind.” He cracked peanuts and brushed the shells onto the carpet. “How does that feel? I think you should be ashamed of yourself. But that’s just what I think.”
I turned up my collar. I was very happy to go to summer school, especially if it meant not having to go back to church camp. In fact, until now, I had never been so happy to be called stupid. I thought: He has no idea what that word means.
Where the Sidewalk Ends
The story about our shortcut to school, which I now took alone, may shed some light on my father’s disposition. It was a small path that Joe and I were permitted to take through the backyard of the Gunbar residence. Only two people lived in this house: Mrs. Gunbar, who was very old and weak and never went outside, and her son, Gilbert, or Gil, who lived in a converted garage. Gil was also very weak. He didn’t have a job. He had no place to go. He lived quietly, although he would sometimes upset my dad by turning on the lawnmower late at night, and mowing his yard with the tractor lights on. Dad didn’t think he should call the police. He just huffed and said to my brother: “Gives new meaning to ‘Tend your own garden.’ ”
In the morning, I’d see Gil fixing sprinkler heads, and picking up branches in the yard. With his wiry frame and long hair, he looked something like Mick Jagger. We were told, as kids, to avoid Gilbert Gunbar—the neighborhood drug addict—even though he was gentle enough to allow my brother and me to tear a dirt path directly through his backyard. Gil knew the street out front was dangerous. He said, “Cut through anytime.”
Joe and I could not refuse the offer, but still we were told to avoid Gil under all circumstances. We saw that he looked thin, pale, his shirt hanging from bones. My mother said, “Reminds me of someone I know.”
As a boy, Gil had gone to the regional public schools. He told me an incredible story about when he was a student at Thomas Jefferson Junior High, one of the worst schools in the area. At the time it wasn’t so bad, he said. “But you couldn’t keep your hair long!” His laughter had a kind of whooping sound, and it came with a cough.
Gil said he was some kind of a math whiz in the seventh grade. He won competitions in calculus and trigonometry. He broke records. His teachers had never seen anything like Gilbert Gunbar before, but he would not cut his hair. The new vice principal would have been forced to expel Gil from school if he did not follow the rules and get a trim. Gil refused proudly, but then he didn’t have any money. One day after school, it sounded like the happiest day in his life, he received a visit from the vice principal, who drove him to a barbershop and paid for the haircut himself. Gil laughed, retelling this. He was still moved by it. I listened as though he had not yet reached the end of his story, but he had.
When I came home late from school that day I foolishly told my mother who I had been talking to. She grew very upset. She said Gil was a complete and utter failure in life, and that I shouldn’t waste any time talking to him. She was being hard on me about this because she didn’t want me to turn out like him. If I never set an objective, if I never developed some aim in life, if I never learned to read, she thought, I would become a hedonist and a freeloader, going from pleasure to pleasure without a moment’s caution. “What kind of life is that?”
If she had stopped for a second, stopped lecturing, I would have told her what Gil had told me about his having been a math whiz, earning high marks in calculus. She wouldn’t hear it. There were simply a hundred other things I should be doing. My mother’s ignorance had me incensed. Where was this coming from? I remembered all those other students looking up to her—as I did—receiving her master’s degree, and taking the Hippocratic Oath. I thought she had no business looking down on Gil, or on anyone, this way, but I could not find the words to challenge her authority.
At a certain point in life, Rousseau explains, a child becomes possessed of greater strength than he has wits for. As the body changes, the child becomes equipped with seemingly limitless energy, and this sort of excess forces the young mind to become blind to what it cannot do. I was now on the threshold of this kind of limitless energy, and my mother could see how I felt. I knew that the world was bigger than my little horizon, bound and guarded by the prohibitions I received from her.
Playing with other kids, I could tell: not all families lived like I lived or thought like I thought. Pieces were coming together about how distorted my environment was, and I began to be a little more curious about what other people thought. People come from different places. People must think differently.
What I could not have seen coming was that I would become equally misunderstood if I did not fall into conformity with my mother’s values. In the years ahead, she would come to misidentify my struggles just as my teachers had. She would soon come to misconstrue the energy I was developing as a young man, taking my exuberance to be anger, and my malaise to be a sign of suspicion and disloyalty.
Fortunately, even in grade school, there were teachers who felt it was their responsibility to identify and nurture students like Gilbert Gunbar—to help them harness their creative or analytic gifts. My mother couldn’t keep me from one agent of change: Mrs. Carballo, my sixth-grade music teacher.
Over the years we had come to be acquainted through art projects that she would periodically host. Now we were like pals. In the third grade, she’d directed me in a school play. In the fifth grade, I took second place in a talent contest she held. I performed a break-dancing routine that I’d choreographed in the schoolyard with three other boys. Once I asked her about her name, pronounced “Carbaiyo.” She wasn’t Hispanic, and yet it seemed she had a Hispanic name. She told me that she’d been married. Her smile was so sweet, I could have cried.
In the sixth grade, ten minutes before the end of class one day, I was making kids laugh. Using my xylophone as a mask, and the keys as long teeth, I became a motley curmudgeon and banged my mallet around at the other kids’ instruments. Mrs. Carballo took me aside. I thought I was in trouble, but she laughed. As the school bell rang and the classroom cleared, she asked if I had ever thought of applying to a gifted school. I looked down and thought of what my brother might say.
Mrs. Carballo set her hand down on the desk and said, “I think you may have certain talents that are worth exploring.”
“In music?”
“No, not in music. How about in acting or theater? You’ve got a terrifi
c personality, Travis, when you’re not in class,” she said with a smirk. “I think you’d make a very good actor.” I watched her carefully. Then she told me that my friend Bruce was auditioning for the program. I loosened up. “You know Bruce. Maybe you can take classes with him?” she suggested.
That afternoon I found my mother at home. I went right up to her and told her that I wanted to audition.
She said, “Maybe you should decide to bring up your grades first.”
“But Mrs. Carballo recommended me.”
“Who?”
“My music teacher.”
“The music teacher…” Mom said to herself.
“Does she need your permission?”
“No. She doesn’t.”
“Do I need your permission?”
“Put your bag down.”
When the application materials arrived, my mother helped me complete the forms. We went slowly line by line, and I filled in the blanks, printing the words exactly as she told me to. Norland required only three things: I needed to live in Dade County, I had to expect to graduate the sixth grade, and I had to audition with a one-minute monologue.
“A monologue?” My mother laughed, playing with the word. She called the school to have the meaning of the word clarified. “Really?” she asked through the telephone. “I’ve never seen it used that way before. It’s like a speech, Travie.” She repeated back the instructions: “He needs a one-minute speech from a play. Does it have to be memorized? It does.” She said grimly, “Oh, Travie, you’re going to need to memorize a speech from a play. How about a poem?” she asked into the telephone. “Can it be a poem? Great.”
Mom went into Joe’s room and pulled out our one volume of Shel Silverstein’s poems. “Find something in here,” she told me.
Okay, I thought, it’s time I learned to read a poem.
On the book jacket was an image of the author sitting barefoot with his guitar. He had deep blazing eyes and a dark stare. Without reading, I saw that every poem inside the book coincided with the illustration nearest to it, and each illustration called for a poem. I followed the words I knew, and then I tracked them in the illustrations. There was the pile of garbage, there were the rats. Taken together, with all of the basic ideas literally depicted, I could seem to read without confusion. At least I could validate the words I knew. The illustrations gave me the clue to do what I was supposed to be doing. Now I saw the words like they were drawings, swooping and knocking around until I heard something. Soon, every page had a surprise in store. The more pages I turned, the better I was able to understand the line of associations I was to follow, and the funnier each poem became. After so many years of refusing books, I now had reason to open one.
In the book, I often had a feeling of vertigo, and sometimes I was confused about how to proceed. But I looked at the pages until I felt like I was only listening to them, hearing the drawings speak. For me, reading wasn’t a very leisurely activity. I did not sit on the couch and make faces at the book like my brother did. Time was against me. I had to have something for the audition so I threw myself in, reading out of order, speaking aloud what words I knew and guessing on the others. My mother was curious about my motivation, but she stayed out of the way. She’d never seen anything motivate me toward reading.
One of the poems was about a boy who plugged a lightbulb into the sky. One was about a woman who kept her kids in boxes. One was about a boy who turned into a television set—as though watching it was contagious.
Then there was “Sick,” a poem about a girl named Peggy Ann McKay. In the drawing, she looks up warily from her bed sheets to the lines of poetry above and across, on the next page. She says she is too sick to go to school today, but as her list of ailments gets longer, each more implausible than the next, it becomes clear that she is saying whatever she can to stay home.
“Mom, what’s this word?” I pointed.
“How do you pronounce it, Travie?”
The word was ’pendix and I couldn’t make sense of it.
“Pelvis!” Mother guessed. “Have you never seen the word pelvis before?”
How would I know otherwise? It didn’t matter to me that she was wrong. I could now read this poem, and that made it unlike any other thing in the world. I showed it to Melanie, and she said it didn’t matter that it was written for a girl. I needed to give it my all, my “everything.”
I went to work reading the poem over and over again, using pelvis in place of ’pendix every time. Instead of getting more specific about it, and looking closer, I lunged onward, doing only what I thought I knew. Something about Bruce Woolever must have worn off on me because when it came time to open my mouth and to say the words out loud, I found I had the courage. I could have sounded like a total idiot, and I probably did half the time, but I was good at being an idiot. I was convincing, and anyway I saw that making fun of myself was the surest way of doing this piece justice.
When my brother, who was suspicious of my intentions, asked me why I was trying out to go to his school, I said: “I’m already dumb, Joe. I can only get better at it.”
For the next two weeks, I repeated that long list of ailments until I remembered their order exactly and the melodies they made in my ear. Then I counted the lines on the page, and decided I could give each line a different number. With the poem in hand, I began walking through the lines until I memorized the coinciding movements. The poem was about aches and pains, and so I began associating each line with different parts of my body as well, imagining what these fictional ailments felt like. The more I kept my mind busy with gestures and antics like this, the sooner the words seemed to come.
The book open, I rehearsed when to sneeze, how to cough, and at what pitch to whine. Each moment was prepared to seem both make-believe and believable. I waited before I coughed, and I took a second to judge myself whether or not it seemed believable. I ran through the house reciting. Once I could say each line of the poem without looking down, I went to sleep, telling myself that I was letting the poem sleep. Waking up again the next day, I did not pull back my sheets. Instead, I gripped them and looked up at the ceiling.
It was raining on the day of my audition. My mother drove me to Norland Middle School, asking whether or not I had chosen the right shirt. It was a concert T-shirt for the Kinks. “It’s the right shirt,” I told her.
She shook her head. “I don’t think you’re right on this one.”
“It’s the piece I’m doing.”
“What about it?”
“It’s a comedy, Mom.”
Coming into the auditorium, I saw my friend Bruce. He was center stage, and mid-performance. He leapt about, reciting lines to the left and to the right. Like me, he was doing a girl’s monologue, but his was about Tinker Bell dying. The monologue itself had a reputation of being overdone but, as with “Sick,” guys would never attempt it. Bruce skidded through the piece like he was peeling out in a drag race. He was showing off his long hair. I lowered my head and tried to keep from laughing out loud.
When he was done, I was almost crying. Bruce stood waiting for further instructions. “I’m finished!” He broke character. “So, how did I do? Like, did you like it? Pretty good, right? I practiced really hard on it. I had my sisters’ help even.” Mr. Wright, the drama teacher, asked Bruce to sit, waving him down. I thought Bruce would do as he was asked, lowering his head and taking the stairs, but he took the gesture literally and proceeded to walk off the edge of the stage. Mr. Wright leapt to his feet to stop him. It was a joke, of course! Bruce did not fall.
When my turn came, I requested two chairs. There were heavy stipulations against the use of chairs. I could use two only if my piece required both, and mine did. Before I stepped up onto the stage, I explained that I needed them to create the illusion of a bed. I showed Mr. Wright my sheets and pillow stuffed into a paper bag, and he waved to the stagehand: “Two chairs.”
It was the only story I knew. I walked into the stage lights and found that I couldn�
�t see until I turned my back to the house. I found my shadow scattered now in several directions around me. I sat down, stared into the lights, and put my feet up on the plastic seat of the other chair. I spread a sheet over my toes, and began: “ ‘Sick,’ by Shel Silverstein.” The performance went exactly as planned. The words came easily, one line followed the next, and I convinced everyone present how much I hated school.
A Comedy
For my birthday the summer after sixth grade, my father presented me with an oversized present. He apologized that he couldn’t wrap it and told me to close my eyes instead. This was sort of a big surprise. “No peeking.”
“I won’t peek, Dad.”
He wasn’t convinced. He needed a blindfold, so he grabbed a T-shirt that had been used some weeks ago to wash the boat. It had the logo of the college where he’d earned his master’s degree in marketing, the University of Alabama. With this soap-stained jersey, he tried to wrap my face up so that he knew I couldn’t see. I went with it. What else could I do? But the shirt wouldn’t suffice, and so Dad went to the bathroom for a towel. When he got tired of messing with blindfolds, he put me in a headlock under his right arm and led me out the back door. He walked me around the table and chairs on the porch, and then said, “Okay, Travie; open your eyes. Happy Birthday!”
There hung a one-hundred-pound white canvas heavyweight punching bag. I was a 112-pound kid. The bag was suspended from a chain but not from the last link. My father set the height of the bag, hooking the chain six or seven links in. He did not cut off the remainder. I nudged the canvas, reading the logo as it spun: EVERLAST. “Is this for me?” I had never asked for a punching bag.
“Here are the gloves!” Each carried the same logo on the wrist. Dad waited until I put the matching gloves on and took a swipe at the bag. He even took a picture. “What do you think?”
He was handing me an edifice of my ignorance. In the moment, I was amused by his presentation, the whole headlock and dirty T-shirt masquerade, but this was my illiteracy he was wielding before me, and he was putting a happy face on it. The gloves were like platypus feet. On my hands, I felt like they were made of sand. I shook them off and left them on Dad’s rusted weight-lifting bench. That afternoon, I asked my mother why I had been given a punching bag. She said it had been given to me as a kind of, she hesitated, therapy. She thought I’d like it.
A Comedy & a Tragedy Page 6
