A Comedy & a Tragedy

by Travis Hugh Culley

  “Why would I like it?”

  She said I was coming into a period of confusion and, she thought, I might need some way to vent my unresolved feelings, my adolescence.

  “I’ve been accepted into art school, Mom.”

  “Oh, I know.”

  “Why not give me something for art school?”

  “Well,” she said, dropping her voice, “it was your dad’s idea.”

  I kept my mouth shut and decided to reject the punching bag altogether. I was no fool. Every day my parents would see that bag hanging, unmoved—a sign of their ignorance.

  That fall, for the first year in many, Joe and I left for school together. He was in the ninth grade and he was observably put off by the prospect of my tagging along behind him. The bus came early, making the turn from North Miami Avenue just as dawn was breaking. Joe stood before I did, asking, “You coming?” I grabbed my backpack, and we took our seats together. Looking out the window, I watched a light brown haze appear over the front lawns of houses I’d once pedaled past on bicycle. I could see differently, hear differently. I wondered whether or not my voices would travel with me to this new school or if some of them would be staying behind. I hadn’t even made it to my first drama class, and yet something was changing in me. As a student of Norland, I now had permission to be creative and, in the name of art, to have my feelings.

  As the bus climbed the on-ramp of the highway, other students and I looked out over the shining automobiles and sculpted concrete. The sunbeams were blinding. I turned around in my seat and found that my old friend Bruce Woolever was there, sitting quietly.

  Norland was a big school, and it had all the troubles of any other school in Dade County. We were the students who made Norland different from other schools. As students in their “Cornucopia of the Arts,” we took our academic classes with all the other kids in the morning, and in the afternoon we separated for drama, dance, art, or music.

  Mr. Wright gave us a quick introduction on the first day of class. He promised us that through hard work and study each of us could one day be working actors. Then he went on to explain his first acting lesson. He gave us a demonstration of a pantomime technique called Neutral. It meant being present without emotion or, in more elementary terms, doing nothing. Mr. Wright said that Neutral was a difficult mental exercise. It required focus and discipline, which we would need if we wanted to make it in the theater.

  I sat up in my chair, set my arms on the desk, and stepped out of myself. Neutral was no challenge for me. Once out here, beyond my frame, I felt like I was floating. I had no concentration to break. I could see all the people in class without moving my eyes. I could feel other students’ thoughts pass through me. Mr. Wright looked down the aisles for a hint of a gesture, or a look in the eye, and he found none in me. I had simply set my voices, those I held in reserve, loose into the room about me. The next week we learned the Click, another pantomime technique that helped establish the illusion of objects. At our desks, in Neutral, we spent hours reaching into the air to create the illusion of holding a cup, a telephone, a fork, a balloon. This was called acting? Was acting the make-believe holding of a balloon? It all seemed like the most impractical education to me, and yet it was exactly how I had been experiencing the classroom until now: all artifice, choreography, show. Mr. Wright then began to arrange improvisations between students. He set up two chairs on the stage and explained that we should act out characters, miming all the properties in the scene. Our class played in make-believe shopping carts, carried make-believe briefcases, and held make-believe purse snatchings.

  During the third week of classes, we were told that every student would be required to learn how to juggle. Mr. Wright said juggling made good stage business and would be an important skill to list on our résumés. To me, the spirit of juggling was like making fun of every other classroom. Nothing really mattered if you had the time to throw a few balls in the air.

  When Mr. Wright brought in a professional clown, I knew I had made the right decision coming to Norland. The clown sprang up onstage and introduced himself, juggling three balls. He invited us to grab a set of socks from a box, and to repeat after him: “One, two, three. One, two, three.” Socks flew everywhere, and the room fell apart with laughter. The juggler passed one of the colorful orbs beneath his leg and spun around, catching the others in one hand. Then he taught us the basic pattern, one ball at a time. While other kids threw their rolled socks at each other, I paid close attention. The clown paid close attention. After about ten minutes I discovered I could juggle two socks in one hand. By the end of class that day, I could juggle three in two hands and perform a number of tricks.

  I came home and showed off in the living room. Dad was so excited that he asked me to show him how it was done. With a yawn, he said he’d always wanted to learn to juggle.

  “Okay.” I threw him a tennis ball and he caught it. I threw him another and he caught it with the other hand. Then I dared him to catch the third ball. He looked at me cautiously. “You’ve got to stand up,” I told him. He did. “Don’t anticipate. Wait for it,” I said. Bravely, I explained every move. “Keep your shoulders relaxed. Try not to look at your hands.” Dad raised an eyebrow like I’d need to watch my tone. In the next three afternoons, my dad learned how to keep three balls in the air, juggling. We stood across from each other in the living room passing them back and forth.

  The next week, Mr. Wright revealed his grand design: the best four jugglers in class were going to be recruited into the school’s “juggling troupe.” He would spell the word troupe to make it sound like we were Italian minstrels, part of the commedia dell’arte.

  To find out who were the best jugglers, we stood by our desks. Mr. Wright handed out socks and tennis balls from the box onstage. Once everyone had three, the test began. “One, two, three!” Socks flew up. Balls bounced. Some kids ran about their chairs screaming. Some ran into each other’s way. If a student had dropped a ball he or she was expected to sit down. I stayed in my own kind of Neutral, juggling steadily. At some point, I felt like I was only waiting for the other kids to sit down. The moment I thought it, they did. Avi, Bruce, and Valerie sat down. When there were only four jugglers left, Mr. Wright introduced the new members of the juggling troupe: “Craig Reed, Adam Littman, Suzanne Young, and Travis Culley.”

  Together, we appeared to be four bright, lucky kids. Each of us took up our own role in the troupe: Craig, with the glasses, was the geek. Adam was the magician. I was the page. Suzanne was the princess. In many ways, the juggling troupe was a salvation for us. We bonded instantly, and would learn to develop our trust in each other. This saved us from the worry of cliques. I might have been the luckiest of the three because Craig, Adam, and Suzanne were some of the smartest young people I ever came to know. I admired them. I esteemed them, so I followed them outside with pins and rings and high hopes, and I tried to learn everything I could.

  As jugglers, we were given a separate rehearsal schedule that extended to the end of the year. Instead of working on scenes, or doing improvisations, we spent our time in the yard behind the drama room, coming up with stunts that anyone would find amusing at the circus.

  At home, I continued practicing. Mom even made me a special set of leopard-skin beanbags from a pillow that she’d cut up and stuffed with popcorn kernels. I told my father that juggling was all about restraint and repetition, timing and concentration. No matter how hard the trick, it must appear relaxed. This was something Craig taught me. “You can’t be in a hurry or you’ll mess up the timing.” Dad got tired of it and had me go get him a beer. He was done.

  In rehearsal, Mr. Wright developed a schematic arrangement of what we would do onstage. He would introduce us one by one, and we’d start our signature tricks. Then we’d go into more common tricks like juggling in one hand, passing under the leg, around the world. Mr. Wright carried a staff that was wrapped in ribbon and he narrated with a simple bullhorn. Finally, we would return to our individual talents
and unveil our best stunts.

  On performance days, we were excused from our classes and placed on buses with the equally exceptional girls from the dance department. On each of these field trips, the jugglers and dancers had something of a little party. There was no budget for costumes. The dancers wore black tights and assorted articles the department owned. Mr. Wright told us: “Wear something bright, you know? Something positive.”

  I asked Melanie next door what I should wear. She stood me in front of the mirror in her bedroom and had me mismatch my shoes and socks. I tried on some of her more colorful clothes. I showed up the next day wearing green pants, red suspenders, two contrasting plaid shirts, and Converse, mismatched blue and orange. Mr. Wright said I was the very essence of a clown.

  As a group, we performed all over Miami. Some weeks we’d perform every other day, leaving school and returning before the last bell of the afternoon. I wasn’t keeping up academically, but my performance schedule was the perfect excuse: I had juggling to do. With this, I received special treatment. I became a wiseass in the morning and a juggler in the afternoon. I seemed to brighten when my name was called. If I didn’t have an answer, I would now say from the back of the room the first thing that came to mind, even if it was ridiculous.

  On our way to performances, I sat next to Suzanne. She thought I was silly to stay in costume all day.

  I defended my decision: “What’s the difference? We perform all the time. Anyway, the world can be a shallow place.”

  Missing Persons

  Every year my family was due to make a number of visits to see the grandparents in Daytona, “to shake the apples from the tree,” Dad said. But this was Christmas Eve 1985, and Joe and I were being cautioned. Upon our arrival, Mom said, we would be meeting our uncle B.J., her brother, Bernard Joseph Fox.

  “You have a brother?”

  She laughed. “Well yes, Trav.”

  “Since when?”

  “ ‘Since when?’ You actually met B.J. when you were a toddler, but you were probably too young to remember it.”

  “I’m twelve, Mom.”

  “That’s why I’m telling you now, so you can prepare yourself, because today you are going to meet your uncle, and his family.”

  “Who are they?”

  “Well, they live in Seattle. They have a five-year-old boy named Ryan. What do you want to know?”

  “Who is Ryan?”

  “He is…your cousin,” she deduced. That was all. About his wife, her name was Joelle. Mom tried to describe her brother. He was tall, good-looking, charismatic, she said. I could sense her wondering how little she could say. She had virtually raised him from the time she was four years old, she said, and it shocked me. She’d fed him, changed him, and escorted him to school every day for “a quadrillion years.” She’d begun working with him in Grandfather’s bike shop when she was ten.

  “Why haven’t you ever told me about your brother before?”

  “I don’t know, Trav. You never asked.”

  “What are we going to give him?” my brother asked. “It’s Christmas.”

  “Don’t worry, I have ornaments for everyone already wrapped. We’re going to be decorating Grandma’s tree.”

  When we finally met our uncle, Joe and I stared up in amazement. He wore a white shirt, partly covered in coffee. The girl at the restaurant had spilled the pot onto his shoulder. B.J. had smiled and decided to wear the coffee stain home because he didn’t have another clean shirt. And yet, he seemed to have everything. I met his wife and son. There was a sense of exhaustion and completion in him. He had nothing left but the joy he felt meeting us, and introducing Ryan to all the little objects in his mother’s kitchen.

  I looked at my mother, puzzled. Why had she kept him secret? She sighed and said nothing. After dinner, Ryan sat on B.J.’s knee, a little shy. Mom asked about the boy, and his ability to read. Joelle told us, “Ryan reads very well. He reads to us all the time.” When the time came to open our ornaments and to decorate the tree, I opened two boxes with my name on them. In one box there was a juggler in a blue-and-white costume and a blue-and-white hat. In the other box was a set of masks, adjoining—the symbol of the theater—Comedy and Tragedy. Under the tree were matching black jackets from my dad, which Joe and I put on and wore about like mobsters.

  On the drive home, the juggler in my lap, Mom said that B.J. had another family before this one, a wife, divorced now, and a child who had been put up for adoption. Who was this boy, where was he now? Mother kept silent. But then she never told us about the weddings, either one, or the births of our two cousins. The way my mother seemed to obliterate her brother, reducing him to single traits, made me nervous. My voices kept silent; they kept listening. Mother wasn’t telling the whole story.

  I had to acknowledge what I knew. My mother had thought she could keep her brother secret until our meeting became inevitable. It seemed she thought Joe and I would go on like nothing had ever happened, as if we were not quick enough to notice how removed we were from the other members of our family. I could see how carefully she’d withheld her brother’s name. Prior to this, every day that she let a curse word slip, every day that she snickered at my choice of clothes, she’d never said a single word about my uncle—or had she?

  We returned home late at night to find Gil mowing the front yard. Dad and Joe made jokes about how stoned he must be, and then my mother said those words again, but only barely, under her breath: “Reminds me of someone…”

  I hung the masks up on my wall.

  After winter break, classes were in session, and I went back to school with lots of energy. I don’t know where it came from, but I didn’t want to go home. I wanted to pretend that I didn’t live at home. In Mr. Wright’s class, I could. There was no difference between real and make-believe in an acting class, and no telling where I could go in a simple two-minute improvisation.

  I began channeling voices, turning them into characters onstage. Ideas flooded my mind, and soon I had Adam and Valerie laughing. Acting was about being unreal, unlike life, and I found myself getting seated at the center of the action.

  I came home with a smile on my face, a blush at times. I had a witty comeback for why I had not done my household chores. I had been trained to improvise, to leap into discussions unprepared, mocking my teachers and my audience, every one.

  One weekend, I found myself at home with my dad. It happened to be Easter. I’d been given a basket of candies. Now Dad called me out of my room. He didn’t like getting up. His hair was out of control. He had sideburns and curls and a smudge of facial hair that had not quite grown into a mustache. “Have you finished packing yet?” he asked.

  “Packing for what?”

  “You’re going to Daytona to see your grandparents.”

  “Again?”

  “Tomorrow.”

  “Then shut up, Dad. There’s plenty of time.” I said this like C’mon. It’s no big deal! But he responded in one move. My father stood from his chair, grabbed my left arm, twisted it behind my back, and pushed me to the living room carpet. He said that I had been “trying him lately.” He slapped me and punched me in the back, keeping a grip on my wrist like I was under arrest.

  “Dad!” I shouted, and he dropped me. I tumbled through his feet, rolled to my heels, and ran to my room.

  For a few minutes I waited behind my bedroom door. Then I heard his heavy footsteps approaching. I was prepared to run, either at him or around. He didn’t knock. When he got to my door, he threw it open and started flicking the lights on and off. “I want you to understand something,” he said. “If you keep this up, son, you won’t be my son anymore.” Then he left. I heard nothing but traffic.

  He’d done this before, never to my brother, but to me. He thought he could get away with it, I guess. Maybe he thought he could do this to me anytime. What would I do about it? If I challenged him, or threatened him, he could hurt me more seriously and no one would know what had really happened here on this day.


  I went over to my desk and found paper. With a pen I began to write down exactly what happened. I hurried, recording his exact words as best I could. Then I heard my father in the hall again, his footsteps quickly coming. I crumpled the paper and stuffed it under my knee. I held the pen tight when he came into the room. He stood there a moment and sighed. There was a commercial break. Dad sat down on the bed next to me and tried to say he was sorry, but he couldn’t get all the words out right. I sat at the edge of my bed waiting for him to go, my face throbbing, my fists tense.

  The Absurd Hero

  It is no secret that there is a relationship between children’s performance in school and the hardships they are being expected to live at home. Given the terror of feeling that I might soon lose my father and mother, my name even, I had no more aptitude for literacy. I was too confused about who I was. My father never mentioned a divorce, so I thought I might be sent away, cast off—preemptively. This question rendered every sentence I would think beyond this one fragmentary. I was uncertain now of the worth of knowing something. In whose name would I know it? All that I did know and could point to was in a letter that I kept, and shared with nobody.

  In whichever classsroom I sat, I watched the clocks. They disturbed me. The whole building had its clocks wired together so that it was always the exact same time in every classroom. I discovered this while walking the halls on my own, peeking into other classes. It made me curious, even suspicious. Time was not so orderly. Time went forward and back. Hours could be lost in a second, never to be recovered again. Hours could disappear entirely. What a silly illusion to think that the whole world might be set on the same dial like a flower that never blossomed. What a pointless exercise. As the day passed, I went from class to class with the bells, walking apace with these clicking wheels.