Back to school.
College starts again. A shoe box dorm room filled with students trying to get ready for school; it lets linger a dull, musky light from the plexi window. New back pack and tennis shoes; bloodshot, hangover eyes; swampy faces. Let's go to the student store to buy sweatshirts and crappy, drooled upon used books; beer bottle openers that bear the school mascot; a shot glass to match; a teddy bear wearing a hat and tee-shirt; a bag of trail mix! For them, the money flows and the money goes, but the squeaky pipe is always filled to the brim. Say. Let's all take a swig.
Goddamn. No classes on my roster. Since I already have a BA, I think I have forgotten to enroll in my courses. Time to crash the desired courses listed on schedule. Plan: Dress up like a leprechaun and win the lucky gold. Bake homemade meat loaf with which to bribe. Create meat loaf sculptures with which to impress. Wear glasses. Hide in the supplies closet. Lock enrolled student in supplies closet. Wear fake mustache and claim mistaken identity. Wear fat suit and claim discrimination. Fall and break arm due to spilt paint. Create a split personality which will induce professor to think: outsider artist discovery and exploitation.
Wells and wells of stairs lead me to the tired old basement of the art building. Mobs of haggard art students scramble around while sweating and panting. Bare wood posts hold the ceiling up, the doors are fresh off the tree, bleacher-like structures splinter occupants; it appears that the lumberjacks have arrived.
Stoop down to look at a crack in the concrete floor gloss. Rainbow hair and sidesplitting laughter pass through the corridor. Eyes move up to engage in a panoramic scope of the surroundings. A ticket-taker allows students in to closet filled with black berets and poetry journals. Here, they can learn about rhythm and speak about the old days of verse. Hold on to that notebook, I command. Guard it with your life, or else I will grill it on my barbecue. Who's laughing now?
No sunlight shows itself down here, but only the sunlight in the gleam of my smiling teeth which contemplate what to chew on for lunch.
Look out! Hipster hips, sensitive painters, power-suit critics, gaunt art historians, frazzled grad students. Don't step on that goddamn dog, lest you wish your ankles to be clobbered and feasted upon by their jaws.
Where the fuck is the class, whose my teacher, where are my feet? Non-motion in motion, right here, breezed past by the presence of hundreds with their backpacks, grimaces and sandals with socks. A hideous disguise, I say.
I walk to the room that pulls me closest. A clunky shack of a room walled with old bricks and wood posts. The Art of Acting. Here, oozing and overflowing with people. I trip and inadvertently bodyslam the floor crashers. Scramble back to wooden post. Pretend I no longer exist.
A familiar voice rings in the mind cave. The thin, bohemian-looking teacher in his late twenties had taught a ceramics class that I had taken the first time around. Always a wave of great music in class: Pavement, PJ Harvey, John Coltrane, etc. Acting is quite a change for him. Ceramics was quite a change for me.
Scanning the room for known faces. Sam, a drama/directing major who speaks fluently in Shakespearean with a side of dramatic pauses. Usually only communicates in this manner. Hast... thou seen this... wonderrrful... production? My goodness, no.
I'm back. On the force, in the zone, in the class. First performance is an aspiring performance artist holding a flag and speaking in tongues. Second: a naked girl holding a balloon and screaming while crouching under a huge hot dog bun made of styrofoam. Third: a chanteuse singing about how her boyfriend constantly drinks forties of Colt 45. After her song, she opens one and pours it all over herself. Fourth: I chew on a stick while reciting passages of A Season in Hell. That's right old chummy-chum. I currently have no control over what I am doing and I am not sure whether I like it or not.
