A Comedy & a Tragedy by Travis Hugh Culley

Author:Travis Hugh Culley
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2015-07-14T04:00:00+00:00

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.”

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