A Comedy & a Tragedy

by Travis Hugh Culley

  This is no mystery. If you did any one thing every day, it would change you much like these books have changed me. It would have to. A new version of yourself would be born of the process you began that day. When I started keeping a journal I didn’t know what I was doing, and I never thought the practice, if I maintained it over many years, would turn me into a writer.

  Today, I am a published author, a playwright, and an occasional poet. I live in Boulder, Colorado, where I have worked as a bicycle courier and a bookseller. For the last few years, writing has been my focus. Outside of my little apartment, birds and squirrels occupy the trees near the foot of the mountain. As the day passes, and the light in my room changes, these books change too. The weathered spines absorb the light and cast little shadows that mark the time.

  When I began this journey, I thought I was an average boy who simply wanted to hold on to his innocence. I wanted to take my time growing up and learn naturally, as I needed to, and in the context of real situations. Art found me. Soon, the plays explained in class would be my new imaginative horizon. The lines were always flexible, with open inferences and intonations. Five actors doing the same monologue could give five different interpretations. This, I have learned, is part of the function of plays. The art of the theater is not to please an audience but to build a structure that can be revealed to one. It requires the actors to breathe through the lines and to express themselves in the work at hand. The theater has less to do with the production of entertainment than with the process of handling a text, and engaging the participation of other people in it. Actors learn their parts, and invent the necessary components of storytelling. The benefit and moral become first absorbed by the producers of the theater. Only then can they be shared.

  The same is true with literacy. Writing for yourself, if you develop the discipline, will expedite a learning process. By writing you encounter yourself, and understand your environment. Literacy is a comparative intelligence. It is through comparison that our words become used and drawn upon like currency.

  Left to our own devices, we will write about different things. We will use our literacy in different ways. The process is individual to each of us. Describing an event, we will describe it with different words. We speak from where we stand. This is not because some words are right and some are wrong, as I once believed. If this were the case, we would plagiarize each other constantly. By writing, we learn about ourselves. When we learn a new term and begin to expand our vocabulary, it is not by imitation. We do not imitate each other very accurately. It is wrong to think we learn each other’s words at all. In truth, we only come to exchange them with our own.

  Neither Joe nor I had been told. We were given twenty bucks to get out of the house for a while. Mom sent us out to see a film we’d seen before. I don’t know how I bought it. I sat in the theater with my brother and I didn’t look at the screen. I couldn’t watch the movie. Our mother had strapped the images to our faces like blindfolds. By watching, we were being tricked. We were being asked to keep our backs to something, to look the other way.

  I thought Mother must be keeping a secret, a lover. I wrote in my journal that she must have a boyfriend. I was right. Years later, she introduced me to the “invisible man” and confessed her reason for covering the relationship up. The problem was not that Joe and I were too young to understand but that she wasn’t yet legally divorced.

  I would avoid writing this if I could, but I have to be honest about the many levels of deception that were interfering with my view of the everyday world. I could not make easy sense of it all. There were other levels still. The reason the divorce settlement had not been finalized was that Mother was preparing an appeal. While not telling us about the man she would sneak in and out of the condominium, she was preparing to put an argument before a judge that called on supportive documents from Dr. Greenbaum saying that I was psychotic, and might need to be hospitalized.

  Her effort didn’t work, and the judge denied her appeal. While all this was going on, no one talked to me about any of it. I had not even read Dr. Greenbaum’s letter at this time. While my life was being handed around, Mom demanded I stay out of it. The divorce wasn’t my business, she said, but that was just something else my mother said. If anything was my business, this was.

  Remarkably, while going through the file cabinet, I found out that Joe had gotten there first. He had taken my childhood savings bonds and cashed them with a driver’s license he’d forged with his likeness and all of my information. He’d made the license so that if he ever got in trouble driving, I would receive the penalty. Fortunately I discovered it, and I confronted him. It was obvious. My brother had done this because no one listened to anything I said. Why should he? He could say I was lying, that I was trying to say I had not spent the money, and no one would believe me. How would I prove him wrong? Because I was illiterate, had been, he still thought he was able to take advantage of me. Even though I could now read and did write, his perception had not changed. To my brother, I was simply a confused person with no sound identity, no memory attached, and no rights worth defending. He could tape any word to my back and I would never be able to refute it.

  For safety, if not for pride, I knew I would soon have to be leaving home. It seemed better than being taken advantage of. The idea filled me with anger. I would have to leave my family because lies were now the rule. Leaving home would change the most essential thing about me, my relationship to documents. I would need to keep account of things myself, and record what other people said. I would need to acknowledge my intuition, my feelings about the people I met. I would have to be the keeper of my own archive. I would only know how the world really worked, I thought, once I could find a reliable way to look back on all this mess.

  To start, I would need to establish a separate space to act as an intermediary between two worlds: the world as it was and the world as I saw it. By leaving a few observations in a notepad of some kind, I thought I could make my pen a tool that could continually test and measure my adjustment to “reality.” I knew that if I didn’t develop the literacy needed to write my story, to tell the truth about what happened, someone else could step in and alter it. I had to find a way of knowing who was lying and who was not lying. Only by writing would I see for myself who spoke the truth. My literacy would be a test, in this sense, to see whose words held true. I envisioned having a book that stayed with me, a constant companion. This would be a journal built on some of the basic conventions of the first. It would not be random, but it would be coded and organized by different-colored inks. Inasmuch as I could plan it, this book would serve many purposes and have multiple, parallel functions. It would keep a record of my thoughts and experiences, documenting important events and the many ideas they led to.

  My journal begins on the morning of November 22, 1989. That day, as per our new routine, Mom drove me to the gas station on Route 441 at the corner of Ives Dairy Road. At this anonymous bus stop, I caught the I-95 Express downtown.

  “Have a good day, Travie,” Mom said through the window. These little goodbyes were rehearsals for the real goodbye we would soon face. I was not a boy any longer. I had knowledge from someplace she could never understand. I still wore my mismatched sneakers and painted-over pants. I wore my hair long, and over my face. I wore a concert shirt, Jimi Hendrix or Jerry Garcia, and always I tried to hide what I was feeling. Even though I did not do drugs, I let people think what they liked.

  My mom thought, as all moms do, that dressing the way I did meant that I wanted to be seen by everyone, that I wanted to be the center of attention. She was wrong: I did not wear my hair long to be cool. I didn’t wear my jeans tight to be sexy. Since Norland, she’d stopped buying me clothes I would actually wear. She bought me slacks and penny loafers, things that were ridiculous. This was why the jeans I wore eventually developed holes. Now in my junior year, I was still dressing like the juggler from the seventh grade—and in the same digs.

  This morning like every morni
ng, Mom pulled into the street and I paced in the darkness behind her like a number sign, dressed like a game of tic-tac-toe. When my bus came and the doors opened, I boarded, showing my monthly pass to the driver. I sat next to the same elderly woman as always and opened a book of sonnets. By the time we saw the margins of downtown, I’d closed my book and pulled the cord to signal for the first stop. I couldn’t sit a moment longer. I held my bag by its straps, scurried out the door, and ran the rest of the way to school. I jumped over sewer grates and curbs. I ran alongside the bus and then turned down Second Street, dodging pedestrians. After the first block I felt better, by the second I felt great, and by the time I got to school, eight blocks later, I was ready for anything and early for school.

  In Mr. Padgett’s class I sat among friends, passing notes with Rita and Chris, from Norland. Today Chris was drawing surreal, amoeba-like cartoon figures, painted like candy canes. Together, we ignored Mr. Padgett. It wasn’t that we didn’t care about class. On principle, we didn’t care about excelling in Geometry.

  In Biology, I felt like I was changing my skin. It was the formaldehyde. I spent the hour making a list of all the intruding ideas I had that hour and discarded them.

  An hour later I went to the church for American History. On a page, I started drawing a disembodied eyeball with one hand holding it in the air, the arm dissolving into the cosmos. Whatever I saw today seemed to stick together and come apart. I remembered my journal from Thomas Jefferson. After the move, I had lost track of it. Now, I felt the itch to write again. I listened and waited with my pen. Voices pointed to objects in the room that were like ciphers, revealing more information behind them as though from behind a seal that I could almost lift the edge of. I needed a book to write in. I scratched my page, unwilling to let this stream of thoughts get past me.

  Then it came to me: make one. I reached into my backpack and gathered together all of my paper. I was unlacing my right shoe when Mrs. Clarke politely asked, “Mr. Culley, can you explain to the rest of class what you’re doing?”

  “Me?”

  “Yes, Mr. Culley? If you please…”

  “I’m writing in my journal, Mrs. Clarke.”

  Kids were chuckling. Mrs. Clarke smiled with them. “Thank you for being honest, Mr. Culley. Pardon me for asking, but why do you feel the need to take off your shoes?”

  “The binding.”

  “Come again?”

  “For the binding.”

  “And have you read the assignment?”

  After class, I crossed in the middle of the street, one painted canvas high-top scuffling along loosely behind me. During break I cut the other shoestring in half and tied my high-tops with half laces.

  In Mrs. Ledesma’s French class, I wrote: I can’t handle today. I’ve got to get out of here. The ink from my black felt pen was too thick for my hand. The letters struggled to identify each other. I felt that I was training myself to face certain still unknown realities, and to cope with still unmet emotions. Each entry was then another experiment in reaching the heart of a current predicament. I didn’t know what they would eventually lead to, so fragments were as welcome to me as questions. I wanted to see for myself how, among all of the world’s reflections, I truly appeared.

  The next day, on Thanksgiving, Joe and I sat with our dad in a tacky seafood restaurant eating mussels and shrimp. He had a new mustache. “How are you guys doing in school?” he asked, chewing.

  Joe had graduated from high school, with honors, and was thinking about college. He wanted to stay in the area.

  “Travie?”

  “Next week, I’ll be auditioning for a play.”

  “Really?” Dad took interest, wiping his hands. “What’s it called?” He was waiting for something rich.

  “The Suicide,” I told them, and they both laughed. “No one dies in the play. It’s a farce, you guys.” They laughed louder.

  Heading home, I asked Joe if he thought Dad should know about our uncle.

  “They’re divorced, Trav. Why should he know?” I turned down the radio in his car, reminding him that B.J. had sent him one first. Joe remembered the white box. “You’re right. I’m not sure if he knows.” We drove. Joe never said I was right about anything.

  “I don’t think B.J. killed himself.” I let the missile fly.

  “What are you saying?”

  “Well, think about it. Dad had no sensitivity about suicide when I mentioned the name of my play, neither did you. Either he doesn’t know, or there was no suicide. Which do you think is more likely?” Joe was trying to pay attention to the road.

  “You and I, we are not grieving a suicide, are we?”

  Joe hit the brakes hard at the light. He had questions: “Presuming you’re right, and B.J. did not commit suicide, who killed him then? How did he die?”

  “It was an accident, probably. Mom wants to wrong him for it. She came up with the suicide—to scare us.”

  “From what, drugs? She wouldn’t do that,” Joe said, but then he thought again.

  “Parents lie to kids, Joe. It’s easy: Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy, the Easter Bunny.”

  “This is not the Easter Bunny. You’re saying she lied to us about B.J. to scare us?” My brother couldn’t grasp it. “Why should I believe you?”

  “Would you believe her?”

  “That is not enough! It doesn’t mean that B.J. didn’t kill himself!” He was pulling his head out of a paradox.

  “Joseph”—this was his new nickname—“suicide is something a detective has to prove.” Then I reasoned it out: “In a suicide, a detective goes to the scene of the crime and picks up every bit of evidence to rule out the possibility of it being an accident, or—”

  “What?”

  “Or motivated.”

  Silence.

  “A suicide is intentional, premeditated.” A voice came to the rescue with all the right words. “Think, Joe. If there was no note, and no sign of an intended death, then why would anyone—without evidence—jump to the conclusion that he killed himself? How does that clear the matter up?”

  “You tell me.”

  “It only clears the matter up if it’s a lie.” Joe had no reply. “She wants to guard us from turning out anything like him.”

  He listened, keeping his eyes on the wheel. “Why would she do that?”

  “I’ll ask.”

  We pulled into the condo and parked by the hydrant. Mom was alone, sitting in her chair with a glass of wine.

  “How is your father?”

  “Nice, Mom.” I stood there, ignoring the question. Then I asked, “What really happened to Uncle B.J.?” I knew it was rude, but I was angry.

  She looked at me, grimly. “Why?”

  “Does he know?”

  “What do you mean, ‘Does he know?’ ”

  “Does Dad know that B.J. committed suicide?”

  She stared.

  “Was it a suicide?”

  “Well, yes,” she burst out. “Your uncle, with his own hand, killed himself using dangerous, illegal drugs. Don’t you call that a suicide?”

  “Wasn’t he on medication?”

  “Yes. I think he was on medication.”

  “Do you think he took that with the intention to kill himself too, Mom?”

  “Travis, suicide is a clinical term. It means causing harm to oneself.” I listened. “B.J. caused his own death with drugs that he knew were dangerous. That is, clinically speaking, a suicide. What else do we need to go over?” She kept going around, trying to say the same thing. Then she shifted. “Are you thinking about hurting yourself?” She sipped from her glass, peeking down, ready to draw her ace.

  This was, of course, what she spent much of her time doing at work: following up on desperate calls, counseling people in distress, catching them at the moment of breaking. She thought herself a master at handling these sorts of problems.

  “No, Mom, being suicidal is a psychological state. It means having the intent to die, an interest in dying. I don’
t want to die. I want to know.”

  She sat forward and put down her glass. “Okay, I’m done. If you’re not at risk of hurting yourself then I don’t know why we’re talking about this. Happy Thanksgiving.”

  The next night, she hid in her bedroom, curled up on the right side of the waterbed, staring blankly into the glow of some news channel. Needing confirmation, I went into her room. I left the door cracked and I turned off the TV set. Mother sat up and howled. Our fight raged.

  She ordered me to turn on the TV, and I ordered her to tell me the truth. She threatened to have me committed, and I threatened to run away. She said she would call the police and have me hauled away for disruption. I said I’d have her hauled away for—

  “For what?”

  “For breaking your oath.”

  “What oath?”

  After the long weekend, as I walked down the hall at New World, my classmates started to congratulate me. One after another, art and music students were saying “Good job” and “Congratulations.” Both Liz and I were among the students to be cast in The Suicide.

  Liz was offered the lead female part, acting across from Jay, our once Cheshire Cat. I was cast as the butcher, Pugachev. I had only three lines, all comedic. I walked onstage with a five o’clock shadow that I applied myself and a bloody apron. In the glow of the theater lights, Liz, in a white wig, knew every beat. When she needed a cue there was another actor ready with it. The script we’d rehearsed so many times seemed to completely disappear between the actors. This incredible instructive illusion, this force of coordination, was magical because at the end of the night it led me back to myself. Liz and I took off our makeup in the same mirror, setting ourselves aside from the illusions of our characters.