“What kind of food?”
“Whatever: snacks, canned food, pasta—whatever your dad likes to eat.” The whole time I couldn’t help but sense that there was something planned about his behavior. He was still moving about in his head like he was going through a checklist, packing essentials into a pillowcase.
A Tragedy
There is always a way to do something wrong. It’s often good to explore this. I might have told my parents what had happened at camp. I didn’t. I might have learned to spell a certain word incorrectly and for many years not caught it. What is the difference between “staring” and “starring”? Likewise, I might learn to see something incorrectly. I might look back at my childhood home, later in my life, and not recognize it. All this is possible. People err in every aspect. Other people in our environment can effectively expand this principle. Think about it: if one person can misunderstand society, there must be hundreds of ways to misunderstand a person.
What I’ve learned is that literacy is a reflection of a need to document experience. We develop writing to keep record of changes that are happening around us. Writing is real. It is a form of calibration. We follow logic, likeness, and step forward, carefully, from one understanding to a new understanding. Restraint and imagination are both necessary to the process because it always requires some investigation to be sure of making a comparison.
In the process of reading, there is an exchange that takes place between our projected fears and the forms that take shape to perception. A reader has to be ready for anything. While language may be generative, literacy is reductive. That is why one must be prepared for a reading that haunts them.
Imagine that something terrible happens. A child is taken away, the mind looks on the scene with surprise, sees the absence as a disaster. The absence is terrifying. So our eyes become trained to notice small changes—to better watch over our children as they sleep. Our eyes become trained to recognize the faces of our own so that they can be called by their names when they rise. Reading involves recognition and fear. We rest our eyes a moment and look back, careful not to see too deeply or too shallowly.
Literacy always has an object. The difference between literacy and illiteracy is then a matter of how a person handles words, reading them or writing them down. The literate respect pages, and use them, gathering together the important propositions they make. The literate will tire a chapter out and wear it down to obviousness. When confused, the literate will acknowledge their confusion and trace their way back to where that confusion began.
I never did figure out my father, and I feel like he left the house without having really met me. The story of my broken family, clumsily written, began on page two of my journal in black.
On the third and fourth pages I wrote about school, my brother, movies I’d seen. I needed to do some catching up. In colors, I began to write about other people that I had an aversion toward. I explored my feelings. Doing so helped me take my mind off of heavier subjects. Sometimes, I tried to describe what was happening in school or in my imagination. Sometimes, I wrote down words I heard around me: quotes from the sky, or the classroom, or the cafeteria. I changed the color of the ink and started a new line. I could sense that there was some kind of magic involved in documenting someone’s exact choice of words—even my own. I recalled my father’s words. He’d lived up to them exactly.
When I came home from school, I left my punching bag alone. For one morning, maybe two, there was nothing to keep hidden. Joe and I looked at each other eye to eye. Dad was not there anymore to reinstate the privilege of the firstborn. And, given all my “therapy,” my brother had become less willing to pester me. He’d seen me hit the punching bag so hard that it flew off its rings and crashed to the limestone. I had done this three times before. Now, I sat at the dining room table, looking at the house from new perspectives, feeling long streams of fresh air pass through the screens and blinds.
Joe was wearing designer jeans now, and driving a sports car that Dad had bought him for his birthday. It was a vintage Camaro with rust under the fenders, and a small spoiler under the back window. It had racing grips, but no radio. Mom had put the house on the market. We would soon sell the property, the boat, and we’d sell my punching bag for a few dollars at a garage sale.
After a lean Thanksgiving, Mom came home from her part-time job and found a large white box on the kitchen table. It was a mystery. The box had been addressed to my brother, Joe, but there was no return address. By the red stamp in the corner Mom could see that it had been shipped from Washington. “Seattle, Washington,” she said. “B.J. must have sent this. It must be some kind of gift.” The white box sat on our table for a week. Then it moved to a chair. When the pine tree went up by the window, the white box was waiting.
Broken with curiosity, Joe opened the box a week before the holiday. Inside, without wrapping, Joe found a used Kenwood radio. It looked like it had been pulled out of someone else’s dashboard. There was no card or note attached, no instructions. The mystery was only growing, and it seemed to make fools of all of us.
After Christmas Day came and went, the radio still waited. The cardboard box was folded in the kitchen with the trash.
Then, two days later, Mother received a call from B.J.’s wife to see if we had learned anything of her brother’s whereabouts. He’d been missing for more than twenty-four hours. Mother tried to hide her worry. “B.J. may have a girlfriend,” she offered. “Perhaps he doesn’t want to be found.” She said anything she could think to say, and the mystery only grew.
When my dad came to the house to visit, he took Joe to get the radio installed—but it didn’t work. The technician gave the dead crab back to my brother, and Dad bought him a lesser radio. Now, everyone had questions for B.J., but no one between Miami and Seattle knew where he was. Mother said he’d fallen off of a cliff.
By the morning of New Year’s Day 1988, our worries seemed to have settled. The cat sat up on the counter where Dad would leave his keys and coins. Mom made a cup of coffee and began reading the Sunday Miami Herald. There, on the front page, was a story about a young arts conservatory designed for high school kids in public school. The story caught my mother’s attention.
The school had opened the previous September and was now putting out a call for auditions to fill its second generation of students from tenth to twelfth grade. I was astonished by the pictures. Mother read the name from the headline: “New World School of the Arts.”
“I want to do that,” I said, looking over her shoulder.
“You’ve tried that, haven’t you?”
“Different school, Mom.”
She tried to level with me. “Don’t you think your chances of getting in will be affected by the fact that you were kicked out of your previous gifted program?”
“Students will be accepted on their auditions,” I said, paraphrasing.
“If they accept you.”
“It’s really not up to them,” I reasoned. “It’s up to me.”
My mother looked down sharply. In a few weeks, we began filling out the application forms for New World School of the Arts. Like before, Mother told me what to write. I carefully penned the words into their spaces after having each one approved, making sure they were all spelled right. When each of the questions had been answered, my mother went through a list of requirements, circling the last word on her list: “Transcripts.”
Mom relaxed. She could go by Norland after work and pick them up from the office. This sounded easy enough, but then I remembered her theory of self-sabotage, and I took it out of her hands. “School is over at two-thirty. I don’t think there is going to be anyone in the office if you go by after work.”
“I can leave early.”
“Can you get there by two-thirty in the afternoon?”
“No, that’s unreasonable.”
“Then you can’t get this done.”
“It is an office. They’ve got to keep office hours, don’t they?”
; “No they don’t.”
“I’ll call them.”
“They won’t listen to you.” She started to say something. “I won’t listen to you.”
She blinked.
The next morning, I left the kitchen with a note from my mother permitting me to leave school midday. I thought I was prepared, but I hadn’t eaten. I’d spent the morning hungry, nervous about my next move. Then, after the second hour, I walked out of the rear doors of the school building and crossed the catwalk over the highway. No one saw me. On the other side, I walked along an access road beside a row of small homes and emerged beside a bus stop on Seventh Avenue. It was a quiet day. The driver let me aboard. I got off the bus a few blocks from Norland Middle School and walked the rest of the way. Classes were in session. I stepped into the administration hall and talked to a woman in the office. She gave me a sealed envelope. There was no fee. I turned, and I began my journey home.
Getting off the bus on 152nd Street, I checked the time on my wristwatch. School was almost out. At the entrance to the catwalk I saw a squad car with two police officers seated inside. They looked at me with disinterest, and I walked on toward my bike, which was locked to a fence on the other side of the expressway. I walked the length of the catwalk, hearing the school bell ring across the yard. Then I heard the crack of steel doors opening around the building and the voices of students coming out of classrooms and hallways. I saw kids running across the yard and toward the catwalk, pushing to get in. I leapt out of the way as they set a path for the other side.
There was Desi, from homeroom, also heading to the catwalk. “Hey, Travis, are you coming?”
“What’s going on?”
“A rumble.”
What he didn’t have a chance to say was that this display of violence happened every year. The rules were explicit: If anyone got in the way of the rumble, they’d get jumped. I had not been in class, so I had not heard. I followed Desi, walking my bike at first. We were at the rear of a long line of kids, eager to see what was going on ahead. We had been hooked by our own desire to watch the action unfold. We heard hollers and whistles on the other side of the catwalk. The street alongside the highway was flooded with kids. People filled the road from one side to the other. The police stayed behind while the others walked en masse toward Seventh Avenue. Excited, I mounted my bike and shifted to the lowest gear, pedaling gently alongside the others. Up ahead I saw the gang, walking in a line at the front of the crowd.
“I wouldn’t do that,” Desi suggested, but I was too curious.
I appeared on a sparkling new Schwinn ten-speed that had been built by my grandfather. I thought I was looking at a break in my struggles. Obliviously, I was slowly coasting ahead between the crowd and the highway when someone grabbed my saddle. I wobbled, trying not to crash. I stood and pedaled faster, trying to get away. But that’s when the others saw me and started to converge. Five people were pushing me on my bicycle, running alongside me. Others joined. One grabbed my handlebars, and another grabbed my backpack. I swung a fist, but I hit shoulders. I squeezed my brake levers, but I couldn’t stop. They ran me into a mailbox that stood atop a single piece of wrought iron. I flew over the handlebars, over the mailbox, and landed on the dry lawn of some stranger’s yard, where I was met on all sides by maroon jumpsuits. They descended on me with punches and kicks.
I curled up into a ball. I was stomped on. I was punched from all sides. Another foot came down, and I took it in the arm. My knees were bent, and my hands were moving fast, catching one fist after another. I saw a small silver blade appear. It came down and forward. I grabbed it. The hand pulled away, cutting my palm. I made a fist of my left hand. I swung, and I kicked and punched until there was no one left to hit. The boys cleared after they saw blood. Then, where I thought another blow would come, I found the sky, and I spun over, hitting the mud.
A crowd approached. I lifted myself to one knee. Students gathered around me, but I didn’t care who any of them were anymore. I walked through the crowd, forgetting every face that I saw, promising to never see these people again, not Desi, not anyone. I lifted my bicycle from the wrought-iron mailbox and looked backward toward home. With a wheel bent, I walked. People made way. I saw the assistant principal, but he did not come to my aid. There were teachers who had seen what happened but hadn’t helped. The police, still sitting in their car, asked me if I wanted to fill out a statement. I had no answer, and walked past blankly.
There was no way to hide it. I saw the gravity of my situation, and I spoke frankly with my mother about it. We’d come to a dangerous place. After bandaging my hand, and putting ice packs on my head, she tried to think about the future: New World School of the Arts.
“Are you going to do the same piece for your audition?” she asked.
“No, Mom. I’m not getting in with a kids’ poem.”
“What will you do?”
“Something new, something better,” I said.
“Okay. You’re the boss,” she said gently.
“I’m the boss? Okay, Mom, take me to the bookstore.”
At the mall, I found a book of monologues for young actors, and I began flipping through it on the way home. This was the second real book I had ever opened with the intention of reading. It was a thin black paperback with a generic cover and a thin yellow stripe. Inside, each page had a different speech from a play, one serious, the next humorous. Each speech told a story. Not having to think about who the speaker was made the book easier to trust somehow. On one page there was a story about a woman surviving an assault, and on another page there was a story about a mother going to confession. There was one story about a kid who liked to go to the movies all the time. There were no connections between these pieces. None of the characters would ever meet. My arms bruised, my hand wrapped in gauze, I turned the pages, interested to know what character and what part of what play would introduce themselves next.
I was standing in the hall, having just swept it, when my mother’s voice took me by the ankles and traveled all the way up my neck. Her scream seemed to be coming from every room. I heard the entire chorus of my mother’s voice echoing off of the wooden paneling and the broom in my hand.
B.J. had been found in the backseat of a car in Seattle. He’d been dead for eight weeks, nine, and was difficult to identify. The coroner had requested his dental records to verify his name. He had been missing from December 26, 1987, until March 2, 1988. My grandmother told my mom that B.J. had taken a toxic overdose of drugs: alcohol, cocaine, opium, and two different mood stabilizers. The body was received in the coroner’s office the day before Grandmother’s birthday, March 3. When the news arrived she thought the true story, the full story, wasn’t even worth telling. My mother, knowing only what she heard, took the information she received and ran.
“Oh my God, he’s finally done it!” She was sure her brother had been depressed, and now she was certain that he, in despair, had given himself a lethal dose. “An orgy of drugs,” she cried. She kept saying “every pill in the book,” like I’d never come to know better. I didn’t read books.
After the emotions settled, Mom forbade Joe and me from ever speaking of her brother again. It was too hard for her, she said. Joe and I sat in the front seat of his Camaro, rolled down the windows, and turned the radio up.
The date of B.J.’s death was recorded as “1-?-88.”
The Arlequinade
The fool has a long history. I am certainly not the first. With the fall of the Roman theater, so fell the fool, or the clown, who was until then well adored. The church continued on long past the fall of Rome, its ceremonies preserving some of the theatrical conventions of the older theater. Through religion the theater survived. Though more somber and more serious, the church began to perform the story of the Passion of Christ using theatrical methods that had been developed previously and handed on. Over centuries, these methods became more complex, and more lifelike. Horses drew carriages on which, like floats in a parade, the stages of the
Passion were reenacted. These stages roamed the countryside in the Middle Ages, bringing the story to communities that had no access to books and little ability to read them. The Passion plays took the shape of a traveling procession. Like a carefully formed sentence, all of the stages in sequence were drawn out for the people to see.
In the early Italian Renaissance, the theater reemerged by way of companies of traveling actors. Again, clowns fell out of carriages, and the fool was returned to the cities of Italy. Ushering in the Passion play came these Renaissance clowns. To be a clown, or to be made a fool, was no different than to be made a fool of. It meant being someone without legitimacy—someone whose word did not carry weight or convey reliable information. If clowns were paid, it was partly out of pity for their nomadic lives and minimal possessions.
The conventions of the theater were very basic. There were no electric lights or microphones. Actors had to earn their audiences’ attention, calling out their lines and moving in stylized ways, to claim the space of the action. They did not rehearse plays as such or use scripts. Over three hundred years they produced theater, and yet only a handful of scenarios, or arguments, remain. These were used as outlines for their performances, which would begin to take place in piazzas all around the Mediterranean.
Every performer was in some way a clown. Masks were worn to individuate their characters and to create an attractive sense of the bizarre. If the action fell apart, each performer had a collection of gags and jokes to draw upon at any time—to earn the attention of his onlookers. Most of the actors were illiterate, and they performed to an illiterate crowd. If anyone in the audience was reading a book, a clown would be likely to pull it out of that person’s hand and try to read it upside down as though saying, “Who’s the fool now?”
A Comedy & a Tragedy Page 10
