Uncle Hugh's Funk

Shafts of light shot through half-closed blinds like crepuscular rays might shoot through a cluster of clouds. An alarm was set on a bedside end table. It was still ticking time; set so that it wouldn’t go off for another four minutes and twenty seconds.

     Neil, under bed sheets and upon a mattress beside this alarm, awoke. His 11th birthday was soon and the excitement and anticipation he had often resulted in him arising earlier than usual most mornings. With a sudden movement of his hand, he loosened the screw on the window shade. The blinds opened, shelter from the sunlight disappeared: his entire room lit up resplendently. Outside, through the window, there wasn’t even a cloud in the sky above. The side of a neighboring building obstructed the view from his window with a brick wall; however, as snow blew from the rooftops around his apartment complex, the illusion that it was currently snowing was created. It had been, after all, all week.

     “SNOW!”

     Neil gleefully cheered and sprung from his bed feeling like a boy on Christmas morning. Snow aroused strange enthusiasm inside of him. After slipping into a bathrobe that hadn’t been washed in ages he bounded down the stairs and into the kitchen. Naturally, perching upon the counter, Neil peered with piercing blue eyes out through a window above the kitchen sink to catch the skyline of Boston amidst falling snow.

     “Not any snow today, kiddo.”

     The voice of his uncle, Hugh, startled him, but oddly enough it also soothed him, too. Uncle Hugh had quit a steady job not long ago and was staying at his family’s condominium while his life was “on hiatus.” Neil wasn’t sure exactly what his uncle had done for a living. All he knew was that for most of his life Uncle Hugh worked inside a cubicle, mostly because he had always complained about it. He never had a wife or children but instead had saved up for what he hoped would be a life of leisure in retirement.

     In the past, whenever Uncle Hugh was on hiatus from work he would usually take Neil away from the bustle of city life to camp out and go fly-fishing somewhere up in Maine for a few days or maybe even a week if he was lucky. Although Uncle Hugh had only been staying at Neil’s family’s condominium for a little over a month at this point, he never spoke of going fishing with Neil anymore; he only slept. He never went out looking for a job. He sat and watched T.V and rarely ate. His beard became unkempt, his clothes accumulated stains, and his body grew skinny. He had an awful stench to him. His hair, all the while, was as usual on point.

     To Neil, nothing was as sweet as Uncle Ted’s voice. In the past, whenever they went fishing, Neil would stand knee-deep in tepid waters as Uncle Hugh would merrily sit alongside him upon the bank for hours whittling away on pieces of wood, carving sculptures, or painting landscapes. All the while he would drown out the monotonous and serene babbling brook with soulful melodies from a golden tongue that lit a fire in any heart. Neil was his biggest fan. He wanted Uncle Hugh to become a Rock Star. However, Neil’s parents worried about Uncle Hugh a lot.  Neil knew that, because at night he could hear his mother's voice through the walls as she spoke with Neil’s dad in hushed tones about her brother and his “funk.”

     To raise Uncle Hugh’s spirits, Neil’s mother was constantly trying to cook his favorite meals, but much to her disappointment, Uncle Hugh would usually be full after only a few meager bites.  Almost every day she came home with what she thought to be great news, triumphantly exclaiming to Uncle Hugh that she found him a good job.  Her news was always met with the same response, an apathetic frown from Uncle Hugh. Neil’s dad was getting increasingly upset, because these were good jobs, and yet they didn’t appeal to Uncle Hugh, which annoyed Neil’s dad exponentially with each passing day.

     As was inevitable, one day, Neil’s dad confronted Uncle Hugh. The night before, the phone rang an hour or so after midnight. No one ever called at that hour so Neil knew that it couldn’t be good news.  It wasn’t. Neil’s dad ended up fetching Uncle Hugh from a police station in Brooklyn, an eight-hour round trip from Boston so when they finally got home his Dad was sleep-deprived and in an awful mood.

     “What do you want from us, Hugh? We’re doing all we can to help! You know I’d love to let you live here, but that just isn’t plausible! You quit your job, you have plenty of money to get your own place, and we have found a million jobs that you can’t ‘feel’!”

     When saying, “feel”, Neil’s dad used a sort of scornful, patronizing tone.

     “You can continue your shenanigans all you want, buckaroo, but it isn’t happening under my roof! You have got to pull your weight, or go find your own place! We are not supporting your mid-life crisis!”

     “I’ll be out of here soon” Uncle Hugh responded, sullenly, “I just want to be happy, is all, and I’m afraid that wasting away most of my life in a cubicle isn’t making me happy.”

     “Don’t we all” Neil’s mother murmured sympathetically with a tender hug.

     Neil’s father simply shook his head and looked through the window above the kitchen sink and out to the skyline of Boston with emerald pools flashing haughtily in angry eyes.

     “Dad, don’t you work in a cubicle?”

     Neil’s question broke the tense silence, followed by a thunderous laugh from Uncle Hugh.

     “No, he works in an office, it’s very different.”

     Uncle Hugh smiled at Neil and crossed his legs as he sat calmly in his seat.

     “Go to your room. This is grown up talk” Neil’s Dad was not at all amused.

 

* * * * *

 

     Neil’s mother was the principal of the high school, and Neil would soon be one of her students, in many ways, he was one already. Her colleagues, his teachers, told him that she was nice. He hoped that they said the same for him. Neil never broke the rules. He knew that she would somehow find out if he did, one way or the other, and he also knew that he would get punished for it, so from an early age he decided that he was going to be a good kid.

                 He had good grades, spoke politely, and always used the best manners. He wore his khakis proudly above his waist with a belt, tucked his shirt in and buttoned it up, had a clean-cut look, and sported a pair of high profile, thick-brimmed glasses. He was no punk and he knew that if he wanted options down the line -- so that he didn’t end up trapped in a career of cubicle desk-jobs like Uncle Hugh -- then he would have to continue the hard work to keep his grades up and become a boss-man just like his father. Keeping his grades up was never a problem, and surprisingly, neither were bullies. Nothing was in Neil’s way.

 

* * * * *

 

     Shortly after Neil’s eleventh birthday happened Uncle Hugh ended up going on a trip to India. He had been planning the journey all along, just waiting for Neil’s big day: his plan was to train with monks in the secluded mountains high up and far away, learning the art of meditation; he sought internal happiness, eternally, despite whatever sort of cubicle job he ended up taking. He was gone for around 7 or 8 months. When he did come back, he seemed about the same… except for the fact that his head was shaved and he was wearing extravagant robes on his body, wooden beads around his arms and had a lot of intricate tattoos.  Most impressive was the fact that he now spoke fluent Tibetan. The fact was, he wasn’t much like himself at all, really, but he said that he had “found himself” more than ever before. He planned only on spending a week or two with Neil and his parents before going back to India where he said that he would live there permanently. Neil was heartbroken -- he loved his uncle – Uncle Hugh brought joy to his life whereas all that his dad provided him was lessons on how to always be absorbed in work on his phone: constantly e-mailing his associates, void of genuine joy.

     After Uncle Hugh had sufficiently caught up on his jetlag, Neil found him meditating out on the porch like some sort of Jedi knight.

      “What’s up with India, Uncle?”

      “You’re a smart kid, Neil. You’ll get it one day. I had been merely meandering through the middle passage, but now I am on the path to enlightenment. And I have never felt more alive. This is why India is where I belong. I am suffering here, in this industrial world, whereas I find peace in the spiritual world.”

     Uncle Hugh’s voice seemed etched with experience, patient, and sure. More than anything, Uncle Hugh seemed a whole lot happier, but to his parents he was just a whole lot crazier.

     “What’s the middle passage, Mom?”

     Neil asked his mother that night at dinner. Uncle Hugh wasn’t around; he was practicing mindfulness at a vegan restaurant a block away.

     Neil’s dad intervened with a grumbling diatribe, “The dude has dived into the deep end, Neil, I wouldn’t concern yourself with him. They won’t teach you about that sort of stuff in school, and for a reason; it’s bogus.”

     Neil’s mouth gaped – he didn’t want to hear that – but his father was too fixated on collecting all the green beans from his plate in between grunts to provide any sort of eye contact that might suggest he was kidding.

    “Mom?” Neil looked to her.

    She shrugged; she nodded - diverting her eyes - and then sank her teeth into a blood soaked hunk of lamb.

 

     Uncle Hugh rarely spoke much anymore. Instead he would spend his time in deep mediation or he would go outside for long spans of time. Whenever Neil had questions, his responses were either ambiguous or intensely thought provoking and insightful. Neil learned that each tattoo of his would carry with it an ancient story and a deep moral, while another might simply be a sacred God that he revered. Neil felt as though he could ask or tell Uncle Hugh anything and his response would shed a positive light with spiritual words of wisdom. To Neil, he was not crazy: he was wise. The day before he left, he gave him a bracelet. It was composed of wooden beads and split by a single turquoise bead in the middle.

     “This bracelet was handmade by monks, Neil. I’m not sure if I’ll see you again for quite some time, and so this is something to remember me by. Whenever you need to calm down, try and meditate, and when meditating, wear this bracelet. If you rub the blue stone upon it, you will fill your chakra’s with its energy.”

     Neil was crying profusely. Uncle Hugh wrapped him in his arms and sang him a song he always sang, “What A Wonderful World” by Neil Armstrong.

     And then he got in a big yellow taxi and was on his way to the path to enlightenment.

 

    That year, Neil made high honors. He was satisfied, but he didn’t feel that happy. He certainly wasn’t happy in school. It was stressful.  The following year, when he was twelve, he found himself meditating more and more in order to cope with the heavy workload. His parents laughed and scoffed at him whenever he meditated. They thought it was ridiculous; Uncle Hugh had been a bad influence.  In fact, they feared that he might be a little bit too much like his uncle.

     So they got him a counselor from school named Caryn Lyttle.

     She asked Neil a lot of questions, fired off in rapid succession, expecting big answers from him. She always wielded a notebook and pen, ready to jot down notes and analyze his psyche. He never got any relief from his stress from these meetings, they actually heightened his stress, and so he stopped seeing her. Truth is, he didn’t need her. He had no feelings to discuss; he wanted to feel more: that’s why he meditated.

     Mediation was not the way, or so his parents thought.

     To them, Uncle Hugh was regressing in India; he was living in a shack way up in the mountains with a school full of monks living a ridiculous existence.

     Neil didn’t see it that way. He pictured himself with Uncle Hugh, singing songs, fishing fish, and hiking trails. Meditation was boring, though; so it wasn’t worth fighting over it. He locked the bracelet away with the hopes of living a life with his uncle.

 

* * * * *

 

     Stress kept on taking control of Neil’s life, and so one day he asked his parents about medication. Seeing as meditation was not the way, he thought medication might be. They didn’t hesitate; they immediately got him a prescription for anti-anxiety pills to help him stop feeling crazy.

     Every morning he took a dose, and every afternoon, too. Eventually, he was feeling no stress, in a steady routine of popping pills he was beginning to not feel anything at all. In his fourteenth year, when high school finally came around, his mom was the principal at a different school, and so Neil got into the business of being a troublemaker. It was indeed a business; Neil made money selling his anti-anxiety pills to underclassmen and used their money to buy better, stronger painkillers. He was on a path of distancing himself from his true source of pain: himself, and the person he was becoming.

     Along this path, his grades began to suffer; he was now maintaining B’s rather than making high honors.  He didn’t care about becoming a boss-man anymore; life was all about making money, happiness was overrated. He didn’t think the painkillers would become addictive. But they did. Eventually, Neil got busted.

     When he was asked who gave him the painkillers, he said that Uncle Hugh had left them behind around 6 years ago before he left for India and he had just found them the other day.  The school bought the story, but his parents didn’t; they knew Uncle Hugh was strongly against using any sort of drug and would never have accepted painkillers even if he had gotten surgery. That just wasn’t like him; he was all-natural, all the time.

     They didn’t want to believe that Neil was a drug addict, though, and so they went into denial and blamed it on Uncle Hugh. They even managed to convince themselves that it all made perfect sense: the reason why he was acting so eccentrically was because he was depressed and abusing drugs.

     At the time, Neil was ecstatic to get the blame lifted off his shoulders and shifted onto his uncle who lived on the other side of the globe.

     From then on, he regretted it.

     A week later, as his favorite Beatles song played in ear buds, “Instant Karma’s gonna get you, gonna knock you right on the head…”, Neil’s jam was interrupted by some news: Uncle Hugh’s funk brought him back to Boston. Unfortunately: his parents would not let him over to the house.

     Because of the fact that the drugs that Neil had found and abused were obviously also the source of Uncle Hugh’s madness, the whole family was concerned about him, and staged an intervention.

                 After Uncle Hugh’s intervention, they took him to rehab, and had him tested for drugs. He was clean, but his path to enlightenment would forever take him in a new direction that led him to never come back to America again.

     Neil wasn’t sure if he forgave him.       

     His family certainly didn’t.