Sitcom - David McGimpsey

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of the Apes?’ It’ll just turn out everybody’s all dressed nice, showing off how our spouses taught us not to say ‘nothink.’ Spruced from long apprenticeships in the malls and cubicles since we left sweet Hoodlum High, we know how to deny the neighbourhood. Good guys all, we’ll hear, all shy and quiet, nerds and geeks who forgive the only school in the state to be closed due to ‘benzene poisoning.’ We’ll transform poor to cute-poor – cartoon-Brooklyn poor or Rydell High poor. Will there be awards? I’d like to see that. Can I put my name up for Most Improved Sense of Persecution? Naturally, the award for Most Exactly Where We All Thought They’d Be has to go to Charlie G., who smashed his Chevette into a pole. Would I see that guy – you know, the guy I once punched in the stomach for five delinquent dollars – get up, fight the piercing feedback of the microphone, accept his lame prize as Nicest Guy, and weep for ‘the best times of our lives’? I’m sure Nicey’s all set up: probably doing lines off a whore’s thigh while the whore’s tax attorneys look on. I will be at the reunion. I will dance to T’Pau and I will do impressions of old teachers ’til they pry me off the bar. But there will come a time when it gets dark. The lights against the wall will hypnotize. In frosted mirrors behind the Pernod I will see couples dancing and realize, for me, partying’s no different than waiting for a late flight out of Newark: despite the sequined dress of yearned-for Sasha-May, despite the welcoming handshakes, I opt for the vampire who lives behind the wall; he has leather chairs and a rifle range, a pet tiger he likes to call Earl, a desk into which to carve the words It’s over. Alone, I’ll smell the factories again and retrace the steps to the shops of my youth, where they sold candy made out of petroleum and just one brand of soft, gleaming white bread. I’ll see shiny elbows on my sport coat and, just like that, all attendees will seem like fat rich kids on ponies. They never ask if the pony’s back is sore, they only say, ‘I wanna lollipop!’ Wouldn’t it be great if the nicest girl, and I mean the most legendary Jesus-Loves-Me queen, showed up all divorced and brandy-weary? And if we excused ourselves to some long-lost stoner’s enclosure made for bra-strap fiddling, and we’d satirize everything, including Sasha-May, including my own dreams of a one-off and, looking in her green eyes I’d say, ‘We better get back,’ just as the band returned to play ‘Footloose.’ ‘I thought that was more of an encore,’ I’d say, tucking my shirt into my belt, and sensing our shared booby-prize despair, she’d take my hand and gently remind: ‘Koo-Koo, the nice thing about crawling into the woodwork is staying there.’

      Dinklihood

      What is there to do but solder wires

      and listen again to Pink Diggly Diggly? What is there to do but admit I’m tired and move to the west side of East Smelly? Should you find the ghost of Natalie Wood would you recommend my earthly boner? Should I lose all to a European bid will you not call me the Prince of Posers? One’s value is not just social pride, which I should always try to remember when seated by a laminated sign that explains the Heimlich Manoeuvre. Drink up, Pasquale, I have an abscess; drink up, Dingus, I have scalped your tickets.

      Architeuthis

      ‘A good student will always learn to laugh

      at old professors,’ Dr. Miracle

      wrote on my paper about Dorian Gray. I had no idea I’d ever be on the other side of his maxim and I regret making fun of how he’d say, ‘Now, let’s dive into the wild that is Wilde.’ I wouldn’t have taken that shady job teaching writing at the local college if I didn’t have innate confidence my VCR could tape afternoon soap operas. Coming home to refrigerator pudding and envelopes I’d slip into the trash, I loved the way soapers slammed gin tumblers and how monologues weren’t botched with impertinent interruptions. ‘Jeremy, I’m leaving you,’ Lainie would say, and Jeremy would look on like a fat seal as she finished her I’m so sorry sentence. I marked papers the way Dr. Miracle did: with flinty, sarcastic remarks in red pen. The first class I ever taught was on Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler. I paced the room, punchy, and my real teaching ‘career’ started when, frustrated with my hedging, one kid asked, ‘Don’t you think Hedda’s a total bitch?’ I did not roar out of graduate school and wait in the halls of the MLA; I gave up on finding that teaching job – much like Emilio Estevez gave up on making hit motion pictures, or the way Ray Parker Jr. gave up on dominating the Billboard Top Ten – and I doddered sessional to sessional. Once, when I still believed in stepping stones, I had to teach an Intro to Lit class, absurdly early in the morning to kids who wanted to be dental hygienists. They would just look at me and sneer, ‘With teeth like that, what could you teach us?’ I never talked to the guy I shared my office with – he was worried I’d light up one of the cigars that sat on the corner of my desk. Once, a student came to see me while I was working on a jigsaw puzzle of Aquaman – she never mentioned it, but through our talk, you could tell it was on her mind. Dr. Miracle would have been appalled, even if he spent much of his spare time studying legends of the giant squid while decanting his favourite spirits. ‘Architeuthis,’ he would say, ‘is no myth. One hardy restaurant on Canal Street tried to cook a three-foot-wide suction cup.’ When I told him I was writing poetry he set for me this simple exercise: ‘Write four rhyming couplets, if you can, about four different squid (save architeuthis). You may have to go to the library. The couplets should say something factual about the natural state of the squid, that most misunderstood of species.’ Loligo forbesi is what we like to batter, Found in most seas of Atlantic waters. The opalescent squid’s white as a ghost Found mostly off the California coast. Loligo vulgaris depends on weather: It shrinks and grows with the temperature. The Caribbean Reef squid lives beneath all light Its large side fins are as large as kites. ‘Nonsense!’ he wrote. ‘But good amateur verse!’ In one of the soaps I watch, Ryland, the wastrel son of Thomas Pressleton, swims free from a town car, run off into the ocean by Houghton Canning, who was to marry Ryland’s true love, Amy Summerland. Ryland fights his way to the suburban wedding ceremony. Dripping wet, he screams, ‘Amy! Amy!’ Now, I find it hard to return phone calls and I brush off requests from a lawyer. My students often come to talk to me, sensing I’m a washed-up outsider and I might have something to say besides ‘I can only judge you by your work.’ I don’t. I’m one bad day away from fuck off. I have my own problems being loved; what could I tell General Gabler’s daughter? How can I sink without sounding like I was the saga’s tough cap’n, like Leontes assuring, ‘Let us be clear’d of being tyrannous’ before sending Hermione to her unkind death? Weekends, I’m entranced by a Richard Simmons infomercial where the greased-up star sidles up to desperate fatties who have lost hundreds of pounds with his help. He’ll ask things like ‘What was Evelyn like on the inside?’ and he’ll hold her thinned hands while she speaks of herself in the third person. ‘Evelyn was lonely, near dead inside.’ He’s like Mother Theresa for the fat, the St. Jude of the morbidly obese. I knew two-minute meals and twelve-hour shames; oh, how could I tell Dr. Miracle my hero was no strange squid or Oscar Wilde but a five-hundred-pound oaf in a half-hour ad? I lived just above a late-night gyro stand in an apartment with mice and a neighbour who just loved to play the opening licks to ‘Over the Hills and Far Away.’ I saw the end of life: the Ventolin, the monitoring of high-blood-pressure pills, the little TV in the semi-private room. Students say they never watch what’s on, not even the buoying love of Ryland, shaking off a lily pad in the aisle. I did not think of how it would work out, never took the time to remind how their students would learn to laugh at them.

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