Johnny America

 

Ringo Par­quet, Tu­ba Instructor

by

Illustration of a goat with tubas on either side.

A lo­cal uni­ver­si­ty was cre­at­ing a pool of ap­pli­cants for the po­si­tion of ad­junct in­struc­tor of In­tro­duc­tion to Tu­ba, and as he hap­pened to be in the mar­ket for a job, Ringo Par­quet de­cid­ed to hop on in. All in all, the biggest thing he had work­ing against him was that he didn’t know how to play the tuba.

Ringo, how­ev­er, did not nec­es­sar­i­ly con­sid­er that a deal­break­er. “Af­ter all,” he re­mind­ed him­self, “those who can’t do, teach.” And in­deed, it was hard to imag­ine any­thing Ringo Par­quet could not do more than play­ing the tu­ba, be­cause when I say he didn’t know how to play the tu­ba, I mean he re­al­ly had no idea what­so­ev­er how to play the tu­ba. In fact, he wasn’t even sure he’d ever seen a tu­ba in per­son— or, he sup­posed he should say, “in tuba.”

On top of that, Ringo fig­ured it stood to rea­son that if the stu­dents he was ap­ply­ing to teach were en­rolling in In­tro­duc­tion to Tu­ba, they, too, didn’t know a damn thing about play­ing the tu­ba, mean­ing he could tell them what­ev­er he want­ed, and they’d have no ba­sis for judg­ing whether or not he was full of shit. For in­stance, he could tell them: “First, fill the tu­ba with peanut but­ter, and then pour in the jam.” On sec­ond thought, that prob­a­bly wouldn’t go over too well, es­pe­cial­ly con­sid­er­ing the price of peanut but­ter these days. Luck­i­ly, Ringo was pret­ty con­fi­dent he wasn’t go­ing to get hired see­ing as the on­ly qual­i­fi­ca­tion he could think to list on his re­sume was “flu­ent in English.” 

Well, maybe the hir­ing com­mit­tee as­sumed he’d ac­ci­den­tal­ly omit­ted “played tu­ba,” or maybe there sim­ply weren’t enough ex­pe­ri­enced tu­ba play­ers in the area look­ing to get in­to the ad­junct in­struct­ing busi­ness for them to split hairs, but one way or an­oth­er, Ringo end­ed up get­ting the job. 

“Con­grat­u­la­tions,” said the chair of the hir­ing com­mit­tee when he phoned Ringo with the news.

“Thanks,” replied Ringo.

Then he got straight down to the busi­ness of draw­ing up some class plans. 

The first class was a breeze, as Ringo quick­ly re­al­ized he could eas­i­ly kill off the en­tire fifty-min­utes by read­ing through the syl­labus and con­duct­ing an ice break­er. The spe­cif­ic ice break­er he cre­at­ed for the pur­pose in­volved toss­ing a large beach ball around the class­room on which var­i­ous ques­tions of a per­son­al na­ture had been writ­ten and re­quir­ing each stu­dent, when they caught it, to an­swer the ques­tion near­est their left thumb. Ques­tions on the ball in­clud­ed: “If you were strand­ed on a desert is­land for sev­er­al weeks and could on­ly have one thing, would you rather have a pair of sneak­ers, a tube of sun­screen, or a goat?”; “If you picked the goat, would you fuck it?”; and, “If you fucked it, would you still slaugh­ter it and eat its meat if that’s what it took to survive?”

As for what Ringo had planned for the sec­ond class, suf­fice it to say that if it hadn’t been for that over­ly sen­si­tive goat in the third row who re­port­ed him to the ad­min­is­tra­tion for ask­ing in­ap­pro­pri­ate ice break­er ques­tions, we might have got­ten the chance to find out.

Filed under Fiction on September 13th, 2024

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