The Improviser
I took a job working for a young hustler with a stereo and auto accessories store. I’ve worked for this guy before in my dreams, going back at least ten years, I would say. He’s based on someone I’ve known, but I’m not sure who. I think it’s Brian Sugar, the guy at J.Crew who hired me to code the 3D downhill snowboarding game in 1998. But I don’t remember much about Brian’s look or personality. So it’s odd that he might keep recurring in my dreams. And peculiar how I think it’s Brian without remembering Brian clearly. But maybe not peculiar for the sleeping mind, which often remembers better than I do.
He has me come in for the late shift, staying there for a couple of hours after the place closes, serving what purpose I don’t know. I close the place around 10 and go home. I come back the next evening for another shift, and the boss wants each of us employees to improvise some rock music on the parking lot. He’s a go-getter entrepreneur, open to emerging practices I myself might not see the value of.
I’m pretty shy, being the new guy, and I’m not sure my voice is up to it, but I say, “Okay, I’ll try it.”
My assignment is to lampoon one of the other employees, a guy without much personality.
And I’m amazing. I sing out in a high register, a pretty good rock voice, and find I can keep going higher in my range. And my rhymes are amazing. I’ve never rhymed more quickly or wittily in my life. I began to wake up during the last part of the song, and I was conscious of the material I was creating, and remembered it for a while after waking. And, I mean, it was good. I was coming up with clever rhymes almost infallibly. Couplets mainly. I’ll see if I can do it again.
So they’ve asked me to do it again
To make this boy here feel like a man.
To make him capable of romance
With all the nothing he’s got in his pants.
It can’t be done! An impossible task!
It can’t be done! Unreasonable ask!
Look ladies, here’s the Romeo I mean.
Look close! For there’s little to be seen!
Just forget about it Michael
Get back on your tricycle
Leave the women to us men
You should never try wooing again
Just go home Michael and masturbate
Learn this fact of life: you shall never date!
And so on.
I swear, I was spinning out good stuff, better than this, almost without a delay or do-over. It’s of course a hearkening back to that week or so in fifth or six grade when the kids were asking me, “Do me now! Do Jack now! Do Mr. Pollinger!” I had gotten on a roll of improvising little stanzas of caricature. It was rap before the world knew rap. Every single time, I thought, with a cold stomach, “I’m bound to fail this time.” But I always got through—four lines about some funny or flattering little trait of the person in questions, where the fourth line rhymed with the second, and my audience was again impressed. A high-wire act I was proud of but hatet every single time as took the first step.