4/7/13
I had recently completed my online TEFL certification and had been hired to teach English as a second language to non-English speakers. My first student was a young Chinese girl, 5 years old according to my dossier, living just around the block from me.
As I approach her house, I observe that it is a perfect box-shape, like some sort of modular home, riveted together with massive copper plates. It resembles a treasure chest or deep-sea diving helmet.
Standing at the door, the mother greets me warmly and welcomes me inside. Playing in the foyer are a small girl (maybe 3 years old, still clueless), a slightly older boy (9 and obnoxious), and an older girl, 11, who turns out is actually my student. Shit, my lesson isn't age-appropriate...I'll have to improvise.
I go to turn on the sink in the kitchen, and it violently rumbles while coughing out dust. I notice the kitchen island is covered in a plastic tarp, which itself is covered in sawdust. The floor in the kitchen hasn't been laid yet: I am standing on bare plywood. Forget about the bathroom, it's filled to eye-level with central air-conditioning units and aluminum siding, and the sink isn't even connected to anything. The central stairway in the house is only half-installed, and the grandmother is standing at the 2nd-floor landing, placidly observing us from up above. How'd she get up there?
Before I can fancy a guess, the mother shoves a steaming palate of colors in my face, and stepping back I realize it's food. Chinese food. The mother cordially insists I dine with the family before commencing my English lesson with her child. She made General Tso's Chicken, and it looks delicious.
Sitting around the dinner table, I watch the youngest child slap her dinner plate with both hands---broccoli rockets across the room like fireworks. This gives me an idea: the shelves behind me are lined with plastic models of vegetables...toys, in fact. I will teach my student the vegetables' names in English, using these "realia" (in teacher-speak) to spur the lesson and make it interesting! I excitedly shovel the plastic vegetables off the shelves into my open knapsack: Carrots, Celery, Tomatoes ('why not?'), Eggplant, Potatoes...everything goes in the bag.
Suddenly I notice that Sam is sitting next to me; I proudly tell her my plan, and she approves.
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Dan, Alex, and I are in a theater watching a shitty disney/dreamworks/pixar movie, replete with nauseating confetti candy-coated scenery and special effects. It's the new Johnny Depp movie.
Bored to tears, Dan and Alex produce from somewhere these neon-colored paint-pens (Hot Pink and Screamin' Orange) and start tagging up their seats. Actually, they are tagging up everything, leaking globs of fluorescent paint onto any surface in the theater. In the bathroom, where we stop to take a piss before bouncing, Dan scrawls a massive splat of Hot Pink on the tiled wall next to the sink. it looks haphazard and amorphous, as if someone literally launched a handfull of paint at the wall.
We give less of a shit and head for the bathroom's exit when the matron of the theater---an old and grisly woman with her hair in a beehive, personifying "expired"---barges in and orders us to clean up our graffiti. She specifically points to the big pink mess on the wall, and actually doesn't stop pointing at it until we acknowledge its existence. The three of us just awkwardly glance at one another, not really wanting to clean it up and telepathically weighing our options, looking for an escape. Tensions are high as two bouncers of considerable heft float in to give the manager's threats some muscle.
Realizing there is only one sensible option left to us, I sigh, grab some paper towels, and begin to scrub off the paint as Dan and Alex watch me uncomfortably. However, I'm not so much cleaning as I am polishing...the paint is not coming off the wall. Rather it seems to be changing color, a metallic white with a navy blue border. Actually, the more vigorously I scrub the more the splat assumes a resemblance of...words? Gradually, where there once was a nondescript tumor of paint on the wall, there now appears to be a bona fide graffiti tag, in ornate block-style lettering, with a shadow effect, spelling out the name of the movie we just walked out of!
Suddenly everyone is aware that Dan has painted this beautiful typographical specimen with a magnificent 3D effect, and I am just stunned. I drop my handful of paper towels and back away from the wall, towards the exit, which is now unobstructed. "This is beautiful," I declare to the theater manager, who is only more infuriated. "I can't erase this." Alex and Dan cautiously sidle toward the exit with me. I take one last look around the bathroom, at the fresco of pink and orange smeared all over the stalls---works of art also waiting to be uncovered---and walk out with my friends.
The woman screams, "SOMEONE has to clean this up!! Who is going to do it?!" Alex, Dan, and I break into a sprint across the theater's hallway and towards the parking lot, hysterical with glee, and I call back to our challenger, "I don't know! Why don't YOU do it!... HAHAHA!" as we slide down the handrails to freedom.
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(Actual) lyrics to the Frank Zappa Song, "Watermelon in Easter Hay":
"This is the CENTRAL SCRUTINIZER. Joe has just worked himself into an imaginary frenzy during the fade-out of his imaginary song. He begins to feel depressed now. He knows the end is near. He has realized at last that imaginary guitar notes and imaginary vocals exist only in the mind of the imaginer. And ultimately, who gives a fuck anyway?! Excuse me. Who gives a fuck anyway? So he goes back to his ugly little room and quietly dreams his last imaginary guitar solo."
Sometime in the future, I re-enter the movie theater and take my seat near the back row, watching Frank Zappa perform live. A deep purple glow illuminates the theater. At intermission, he invites a member of the audience to assist him in the next song, and I am fortunate enough to be selected. I walk down to the the stage and take a seat at a table across from Frank Zappa---a table on which he lays an elaborate sampler pad, furnished with not only buttons but switches, dials, cables, and antenna you can flick to produce buzzing and whirring noises.
The audience settles in, and Frank triggers a low synth back drop, against which he and I begin toying around with the pad and creating a medley of fleeting beats we continually evolve. We scrap one sound for another, our four hands and all twenty fingers weaving across the sampler, him untwisting what I just twisted, me hammering out patterns, him rattling, me scraping...for a few minutes it's just noise. But then...
But then I press these three drum-pad buttons, followed by two antenna that create "swish" noises, and Frank fiddles with a dial to fix the levels...and this is the sound that ultimately suits the mood. Resembling the opening to Animal Collective's "Cobwebs," it is minimalist, a little dark, and driving. Frank Zappa and I release the sampler from our clutches and relax back into our chairs as the groove loops onward and the stage guitarist licks a nasty solo for minutes.
After the song fades, before the crowd even realizes it's over, Frank exhales for the first time since the song started and remains dazed for another moment. "Wow," he breathes, staring into space, "that was amazing." I am beside myself with delight as I give Frank Zappa a hearty high-five in celebration of our impromptu opus. I shout "Yeah!" and take a victory lap back up to the nosebleed section to sit among my friends.
Back in my seat, I am searching through my backpack, and dig up a large bundle of fireworks that I was not aware I had. Some commotion is reverberating through the audience, and as I glance towards the stage it appears that Frank Zappa has accidentally set a stage curtain on fire. Many people are confused or concerned, wondering whether the fire is part of his performance, as Frank is just standing downstage shrugging his shoulders nonchalantly.
I look back down into my bag and pull out the fireworks.
Back at the stage, the fire has combusted up into the scaffolding above the stage, spreading rapidly, while Frank Zappa doesn't do much besides fumble on the floor of the stage. People are rioting and looking for an escape before the flames overtake the theater, and pandemonium reigns. Scrambling out of my seat, I light the fuse of my handful of firecrackers and chuck them down the aisle towards the stage, and as I turn the corner towards the exit door I can hear their POPOPOPOPOP over the tumult of rushing, panicked crowds and an all-consuming flame.
Someone grabs my sleeve as I dash out of the theater---I recognize him as a friend of a friend, whom I consider a complete asshole---as if his intent is not to use my speed to help his escape, but rather only to slow me down. I shove the guy away and brush past a family as I clear the glass doors of the burning theater.
