All Write, Already!

"Jesus! Were you born in a barn?!" I shouted.

"Yes," said Jesus.

There was a pregnant silence, the utter stupidity of this moment hanging in the air. This had been the strangest day of my life, by a wide margin.

I'm almost certain it started yesterday, in the creative writing course I had enrolled in to fill out my class schedule. I needed an elective, and I had always enjoyed this kind of class in high school. Creative writing was inevitably a bullshit class that I could half-ass my way through if the going got tough in my other classes, and still usually count on an A.

Instead of the usual unreconstructed hippie or touchy-feely future grandmother in a long drab skirt that you'd expect to be teaching freshman creative writing at a community college in northeast Oregon, our instructor was an upper-middle-aged man named Mr. Carville, who projected a cipherous competence and not much else. He wore a plain white button-down shirt and a plain red tie. He was totally nondescript, in fact, except for the eyepatch.

He even made a fairly standard choice for the obligatory getting-to-know-the-class exercise: the dinner party. You know the drill. You're throwing a dinner party, and you can invite any 10, or 12, or however many people, and it can be anyone, living or dead, so go nuts. A particularly gung-ho teacher might make you decide which guests are seated next to each other. Then you talk about your selections with the rest of the class.

Mr. Carville was anything but gung-ho. He only made us come up with 6 names, and didn't make us do the seating chart. Some bright-eyed idiot in the first row even asked if we should make a seating chart, and he told her no. Could it be that I had stumbled upon the classroom of the one creative writing teacher in the world who was hip to the pro forma nature of creative writing classes, and had decided to tread water along with his students as an alternative to the serial heartbreak of taking his job seriously?

Okay. Six names. Jesus and Einstein. That's a given. Four to go. What sort of person do I want the instructor to think I am? How much do I want to stand out from the rest of the class? I want to be thoughtful, but not a philosophizer. Not eccentric, but not boring. A realist, but not a jerk. Practical. Not too smart. Live and let live. Normal.

Ben Franklin for the thoughtful normality. Duke Ellington for culture. No, wait. Cause then someone might say "oh, you're a jazz fan?" and then I'd have to think of something to say about fucking jazz. Elvis? No, no, and more no. John Lennon. Then my masterstroke: Amy Tan. A little more obscure than the others, but that's just as well. If someone realizes that she wrote The Joy Luck Club, I might come off kind of gay. I'll just say she's a novelist who plays in a rock band with Stephen King. More importantly, she's a triple token -- woman, minority, and still living. Booyah. And Mark Twain for flavor.

I had my list. If I'd known what was going to happen, I'd have picked a much different one. At the time, it seemed like just a throwaway excersize. I don't remember a thing about the class discussion afterwards. I also don't remember anyone ever telling me that Culver County Community College was built on an ancient Indian burial ground.

The next morning -- this morning -- I woke up to the sound of guitar music. Fuck, did I leave the radio on all night? I thought to myself. As I drifted awake, I realized that the music didn't sound like an actual song. It sounded more like someone practicing on guitar. Some chords and messing around, then a snippet of a song, then more messing around. Then I realized it was an acoustic guitar. Then I realized it was coming from my living room.

I sat up, bleary-eyed and confused. How did an acoustic guitar get in my living room, along with someone to be playing it? Did I let someone crash at my place last night and not remember? My alarm clock said 6:27. When my head clears up, I thought, it had better have a damn good explanation for this.

I plodded sleepily into the living room. There was John Lennon strumming away on guitar. Sitting next to him was a children's picture Bible Jesus, long-faced and doe-eyed, with a flowing brown beard. They were talking music. Mark Twain and Einstein were on the couch talking philosophy. Ben Franklin was plugging and unplugging my desk lamp. Amy Tan was sitting mutely on the edge of my loveseat, rocking gently back and forth. She looked like she was in shock.

No shit.

To be continued