The play begins with Marta and Mandy, their hands and feet gathered in a massive net. They speak their lines while falling, arm over arm, to the floor. This is how the two travelers find Segismundo, bound to a chain. I open the scene with my mournful plea to the heavens: “Oh, Misery…” These are the words I recite every morning. The audience is captivated, the backstage crew is still. A giant clock moves slowly back and forth, upstage. I descend, hung by my waist. A small river runs beneath me in the cave. In the water I see my reflection—Dacyl.
In the second act I wake up in a royal bedchamber, surrounded by nurses and maids. Unknown to me, this is the day the king will test the oracle. Given the rashness I display, and my appalling lack of restraint, the king believes the oracle to be correct. I am put back to sleep, and returned to my cave. By the last scene, I have been freed from my bondage. I have led an uprising and forgiven my father. Now, the marriage. Marta is downstage-left, I am downstage-right, and the whole crew takes a bow together.
Recognition
On the Tuesday before graduation, Mr. Remis posted the results of our papers. I went to the board. There, on the bottom of the list, was my student number: 7813357; in the other column, an F.
Mr. Remis said I could talk to him after class and I said, “No thanks.” There wasn’t anything to talk about.
On graduation day, I stood with the other students in a line outside of school. I kept my head down and I held my journal clutched underneath one arm. I expected Mr. Remis to see me and pull me out of line, but as the students began to walk toward the graduation ceremony, I walked with them. Inside the theater, I sat down with the others, wearing my cap and gown.
Valerie, once the flower girl from middle school, now made the valedictorian address. John Emerson was salutatorian. Jorge graduated fourth from the top of the class, and I graduated 109th, third from the last name on the list. After seeing my performance in Life Is a Dream, Mr. Remis must have decided to change my grade.
After the ceremony, I chose to continue on at New World. I entered the college theater department and began taking classes toward my BFA. I built sets. I wrote plays, and directed them. I finished school acting onstage with my teachers and, in my own time, filled books with tiny blocks of writing.
Years later, while reflecting on my journal, I began turning the pages of one volume around, looking at the entries upside down and sideways. It was then that I first had a sharp and painful memory about a boys’ cabin in my youth. It was a terrible realization. I sat back from the page and looked at the shapes I’d made as if I had opened a familiar door, but inside of it now lived a nightmare.
I saw the ink, my own hand, words written into a macabre architectural matrix. There were panels, beams, windows. Every block of text on top of another as though built in a room of bunk beds. The fold was the ceiling of the cabin I had woken up in.
All of my time writing, I had been unconsciously rendering the confusion of waking up at church camp. To see the journals right, I had to step away from the page and discontinue reading. I needed to look, and that alone was enough. Here it is, the ceiling itself:
Detail left
Detail right
In 1994, I graduated with a BFA from New World School of the Arts. My girlfriend Lenyr helped me pack boxes full of plays that I had either read or performed. I packed the library: Aeschylus, Euripides, Goethe, Marlowe, Molière, Kleist, Beckett, Albee, Shaw, Mamet, Shepard, all of the great avant-gardists, like Brecht, Jarry, Handke, and Breton. In another box: Kant, Marx, Machiavelli, Barthes, Bakhtin, Merleau-Ponty, Hegel, Sartre, Foucault, Adorno, Deleuze, and Guattari.
Before I left Miami, I made a stop at Simcha’s apartment. He lived in a blue building on the second floor. He never locked his door. He asked, how would anyone find his shower if he locked his door? He had no furniture, not even a chair. He had no television or radio. He kept a pot of kosher rice and vegetables warm so that anyone in need of a shower or a meal could come to him and find them for free. I knocked on his door, but I heard nothing. I thought if he wasn’t home I would just leave a note on the windowsill saying goodbye, but the door opened and I saw the face of my friend. He was sad, I could see.
“Have you taken a vow of silence?”
He had nothing to say.
“I’m leaving, Simcha. I wanted to say goodbye.”
He shook his head.
I had a pen, and held it up. Soon we had a large sketchbook. He wrote down the reason for his vow. I wrote down that his heart should be lifted. Simcha had become my teacher. I wrote down what I’d learned.
What will you do? he wrote.
Theater, I hope. Maybe I’ll be a writer someday.
He smiled.
For the rest of the afternoon, we sat in his living room writing down our conversation on large sheets of paper, setting the papers out on the floor around us. By the time we came to Good luck and be safe, the floor had been covered. I left him to gather up the notes of our uncommon friendship.
In Chicago, I did a fair amount of wandering. I appeared an introverted writer trying to tap into the city’s theater and performance art scenes. It wasn’t quite what I’d hoped. I remember looking at the city with fresh eyes, astonished by how much could happen in one place and time. To me, the city was a single cohesive work of art, a great coordinated dance. I had to experience it at very slow speeds initially because I found this effect so profound. I used to walk about with pennies, and set them heads-up at the very ends of sidewalks, between the cracks in stairs, on streetlights and curbs. Often I had no one to talk to and no one to see, and so I opened myself to being a public citizen who saw people of all kinds. I found that I enjoyed going to cemeteries for solitude. The feeling of walking among all the etched statuary was no different from that of walking down Michigan Avenue. In the same way, I was reading all of the signs available.
The Winter Garden on the ninth floor of the Chicago Public Library was a sanctuary for me. There, I would spend my afternoons if I didn’t have to work at the bookstore in Evanston. Soon, I requested all of my Tuesdays off because those were the free days at the museum of the Art Institute of Chicago. I would divide up these days into three parts. I would spend the morning at the museum while it was quiet, then I would have lunch at a nearby deli and write an entry in my journal. After lunch, I would pack up and spend the afternoon on the top floor of the library with the play that I was writing. I read plays, studied ancient Roman history, and, eventually, I discovered the zip code demographics guidebook for Illinois. Like I said, I’m fickle. After a few months studying this, I began reading about Chicago. I had found my own Mount Olympus, from which the whole world seemed to easily come into view.
Between the library and the museum, I wrote a number of plays, some of which are very long and most of which are impossible to produce. I founded a theater company, which folded after two productions. In 1996, I organized a bike art show for the Critical Mass bicycle ride and from there on found myself among the riders. I wrote a memoir, The Immortal Class: Bike Messengers and the Cult of Human Power, about my rookie year as a bicycle courier in Chicago. After the book’s release, I settled for a part-time job at a bookstore and a part-time job as a messenger. Everywhere I went I kept a journal with me. When I had a minute, I took notes on life. I began to write in clean, easy, balanced lines. As my life slowed down, I decided to go back to school.
I continued writing poetry and reading philosophy. I expanded my journal volume by volume as I worked in various art-related jobs. Delivering my application to the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, I wasn’t sure what I would uncover, but in my first year, I began confronting the memories that were waiting for me in my journal, carefully preserved, waiting for a safe time—and a safe place—to be accepted and understood.
On February 15, 2003, after protesting the rush to war in Iraq, I made a call to my old mentor, Dr. J. He answered and said he was going to bring me to Miami, expenses paid, to be acknowledged as alumnus of the year and recognized
for my “exceptional achievement” at an annual gala performance that pulled together a sampling of current work being done across all disciplines.
On the night of the gala, I wore my best shoes. I met with students and toured backstage, meeting the school’s next graduating class. Students ushered the audience to their seats. I walked down the aisle to the second row and found a seat next to Dr. J and David Kwiat. It was reserved for me. I sat next to my mentor, program in hand, my journal in my lap. The night began with a song. If I closed my eyes, I could hear Liz Brownlee. More curtains were pulled back, opening to a series of vignettes, sketches, operettas, and musical theater scenes. Andy Noble had directed Six Characters in Search of an Author by Luigi Pirandello. Dr. J nodded to me as the piece came to a close and applause filled the theater. It was intermission, and that was my cue to head backstage. I stepped into the little hall that led behind the wings, reminded of past productions, gala nights, and my own graduation, all of which had taken place on these very boards.
To my right was Jeff Quinn, the set designer. Farther back, at the old light board, were Dan Palmer and Larry Miller. These were the guys who taught me how to build stages in college. Jeff gave me a congratulatory nod, which also meant “Get up there.” Then the spotlight came on and found the three top representatives of New World School of the Arts onstage. There was Dr. Pellosi, the president of Miami Dade; Ellery Brown, the principal of New World’s high school; and Patrice Bailey, now dean of the theater department.
Mrs. Brown began: “Every year, when the time comes for the Rising Stars, we are confronted with some essential questions, like: Why do we do this? What is the purpose of this school? And what, every year, do we hope to accomplish? The selection of the alumnus of the year goes a long way toward answering that question. Travis, could you come out here, please?”
Patrice gave me the nod, and I stepped out onto the stage. A microphone was placed in my hand.
Dear Aneta,
On December 16, 2003, my grandmother gave me the full story: Right after my parents separated, she thought it was time to bring her son, B.J., and my mother together. She thought, this way, they could help each other at this point in their lives. Both families were in trouble, ours already divided. Days before my uncle’s disappearance, my grandmother secretly mailed B.J. a ticket to fly from Seattle to Miami International Airport. On the twenty-sixth, the day after Christmas, he was scheduled to land. This was why he had sent the mysterious radio weeks earlier. There had been no note in the box, but for a very good reason. He had intended to install my brother’s radio himself. Besides, my mother’s gift was to be their reunion, and he did not want to spoil the surprise.
When B.J. went missing, my grandmother held her tongue. Initially, she didn’t know why he had not made his flight. She only knew he hadn’t. I asked her about the possibility of suicide, and she flatly denied it.
“Joelle called just before the holiday,” she remembered, “asking if she should increase his medication.” Grandma had been a nurse all her life, but she wasn’t familiar with this new generation of mood stabilizers. Grandma told Uncle B.J.’s wife that it would probably be okay, but was unable to imagine what would happen next.
“The ticket was in his glove box,” she supposed, “the night B.J. left his family.”
When his body turned up, she buried the story about his visit, and the ticket she’d sent him. Her surprise had backfired horribly, and none of the details mattered now. I think she couldn’t bring herself to explain the scope of the tragedy.
In some way, this was all happy news to me. I’d learned that my uncle had been on his way to help us pick up our lives right in the heart of my mother’s “Dark Years.”
In the time that it has taken to answer your question, I have read Pride and Prejudice. I want you to know that I troubled over these characters a great deal, and their choices. I loved the writing, the acerbic British humor. I read over the correspondences many times. While I was expecting the story of Pride and Prejudice to be a diversion, and a comedy, I never imagined that it would lead to a relationship of letter writing.
When we left that little bookstore and went walking through the city, you told me that you wanted to introduce me to a friend of yours. You led me around the monument to Alexander, and pointed up the marble stairs of the Helsinki Cathedral. The sky was clear. We could hear the boats creaking and knocking together in the harbor. I followed you. I stood with you outside of this astonishing temple, admiring the friezes, pillars, and domes. Then, reaching for the door, you found that it was locked. You read the sign, translating from Finnish: “Closed for Renovations.” You looked at me with so much to explain.
I remember you saying before you returned to your classes that literature could be thought of as a modern form of scripture. The stories we create are revealing, enlightening, and redeeming. “Literature fills our lives with art, poetry, ethics, and morality,” you said. I could not disagree, but only add that you might approach the problem of literacy more simply—even with a blank page and a pen. Objects teach. Look into things. They will tell you what to do with them. If you look closely, they will tell you who you are.
For Aneta Szklanko
By Travis Hugh Culley
The Immortal Class
A Comedy & A Tragedy
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
TRAVIS HUGH CULLEY is the author of The Immortal Class: Bike Messengers and the Cult of Human Power. In 2003 he was named Theater Alumnus of the Year by New World School of the Arts. In 2006 Culley completed his MFA in writing at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and he was a recipient of the Ox-Bow Fellowship in Saugatuck, Michigan.
www.TravisHughCulley.com
A Comedy & a Tragedy Page 19
