The Defenestration of Bob T. Hash III Read online

  Contents

  Title Page

  Epigraph

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2 - First Steps!

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4 - Asking for Directions—“nel mezzo del cammino”

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6 - Introductions: How Do You Do?

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8 - Asking For and Telling the Time: —It’s half past a quarter to twelve

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10 - Vocabulary for Beginners

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12 - Buying a Newspaper

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14 - At the Dry Cleaners: Taking Things in Your Stride!

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16 - Repairs and Rectifications

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18 - Imperatives

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20 - “Brand Loyalty”—An Advertisement for the Institute!

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22 - Summer Courses Abroad—Another Advertisement!

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24 - Aloud vs. Loudly

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26 - Delivering a Sales Pitch!

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28 - A Curious Encounter…

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30 - Habits and Habituation, Past and Present

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32 - Canard du Jour…Écoutez et Répétez!

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34 - Phone Exercise

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36 - Customs and Mores: “Think Globally, Act Locally”

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38 - Social Conversations: Some Useful Small Talk

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40 - Gondola Skit: “Come in, Number Cinque!”—a chance to practice your Italian!

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42 - An Invitation to Dinner

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44 - Comprehension Test

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46 - “Anything to Declare?”: a role play at customs and excise

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48 - Guess Who I Saw…?

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50 - Say “Ah”—A Visit to the Doctor

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52 - American English vs. British English

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54 - Comparatives and Superlatives

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56 - The Usual Suspects: the past progressive

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58 - Palindromes

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60 - Idiomatic Expressions and Phrasal Verbs

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62 - Lodging a Complaint

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 64 - “Could Have Done”/“Was Going to Do”

  Chapter 65

  Chapter 66 - Tendering a Resignation: “I can’t go on. I must go on.”

  Chapter 67

  Chapter 68 - The Good Samaritan: A Skit

  Chapter 69

  Chapter 70 - A Dictation: Ordering a Coffin

  Chapter 71

  Chapter 72 - Take Me to Your Leader: A Role Play

  Chapter 73

  Chapter 74 - “Un Piccolo Incidente al Crematorio…”: (Another chance to practice your Italian!)

  Chapter 75

  Chapter 76 - Hobbies and Pastimes

  Chapter 77

  Chapter 78 - Courtesies and Polite Requests

  Chapter 79

  Chapter 80 - Active vs. Passive: (proficiency-level students only)

  Chapter 81

  Chapter 82 - Brush Up On: Places to Wave From

  Chapter 83

  Chapter 84 - Advanced Certificate: further possible ways by which you might have infiltrated the picture book world of the course book

  About the Author

  Copyright

  “There is in the world no rock or tower of such a height that it cannot be scaled by any man (provided he lack not feet).”

  From The Great Didactic (1649) by J. A. COMENIUS, author of Orbis Sensualium Pictus (1658) and The Gate of Tongues Unlocked (tr. 1659)

  1

  The only place where anything fun ever seems to happen in the Acme language course book Forward with English! is in the section known as Everyday Accidents and Domestic Mishaps. To illustrate what an everyday accident or domestic mishap might consist of, various familiar and generally very careful picture book characters volunteer themselves as the unwitting victims of a moment’s dapper imprudence. We wince at the sight of a chin getting scratched by a razor in a bathroom mirror, we gasp at fingers straying too near the burner of a kitchen stove, we chuckle at the picture of a fedora hat (Br. Eng.: “trilby”) getting whisked off into a neighbor’s hedge by a freak gust of wind; while the sight of a parrot suddenly turning into a man and falling off its perch will give many reason for pause. I think what makes those cheeky pastel-and-ink cartoons in the mishap section so interesting is that for a brief, tantalizing moment they offer the only clue that there might exist another dimension outside the world of scheduled routines and codified speech bubbles that reign elsewhere in Forward with English! Of course, by the Repairs and Rectifications section that follows, the regular world of clockwork expectations is securely back in place, if not quite quickly enough to have stopped us catching a glimpse of that other somewhat whacked-out dimension beyond. We are left now pondering a parallel world of heady misadventures and fabulous picaresques; a world where, time standing still—unchecked, benignly—events might one day run amok.

  Actually, that last little inconvenience—the parrot turning into a man and falling from its perch—hasn’t quite made it into the picture book yet (which is not to say that it won’t appear in the forthcoming edition of the course, due out next fall). But otherwise, it was those vignettes of chin, fingers, and hat that flashed through my mind when, on the morning of Bob T. Hash III’s madcap elopement, I found myself crashing toward the parquet tiles on his living room floor, parrot stand in tow.

  In its career as parrot stand so far, the T-shaped branch of local elm wood (anchored vertically in a pail of cement, and to which cage, perch, mirror, and so forth were affixed) had, without ever toppling, survived numerous unintended knocks with caster-propelled items of interior furniture, been leaned on by umpteen tipsy houseguests, withstood a score of disoriented somnambulists, and brushed off sundry blitzkriegs of indoor Frisbee. Till that morning, however, its ability to support the weight of a fully grown adult human being attempting to balance himself on the extremity of one of its prongs had yet to be put to the test. When, mentally, I ran events backward and in slow-motion replay, I watched in fascinated horror as the parrot stand restored itself to the vertical, dragging in its wake an almost biblical multitude of birdseed that appeared to spring off the carpet—like a tiny tornado passing over a field of golden ripe wheat in The Wizard of Oz—to funnel itself, unspilled, back into the little seed trough. I watched an assortment of primary-colored plastic amusements from Astor’s, the pet shop, hop, skip, and jump into the air and clip themselves trimly to the bars of the cage, which, itself having become detached on impact, had thrice cartwheeled across the living room floor.

  For a few dazed moments, among a freshly laid bedlam of birdseed, I lay there flat on my back, staring at the ceiling in amazement. A halo of cartoon stars spinning round my head and a watery bird whistle twittering inside it, I found myself wondering how the picture book artist might try to depict my own misadventure for some future edition of Forward with English!, thereby admitting it too to that select pantheon of mishaps. In the “before” picture, for example, you could have a
n African gray parrot, sensibly perched at the living room window, with nothing, barring a wink, to suggest an impending disaster. Beside it, in the “after” vignette, you could then have a man in a suit—necktie floating into the air like in an astronaut’s weightlessness experiment, businessman’s glasses dancing off the bridge of his nose, staring at us with that look of mild astonishment, as if someone had just played a practical joke on the departmental manager by announcing an unexpected downturn in the quarterly sales figures while he was practicing on the office trampoline during lunch break.

  So, mishaps occur. And yet, with a little more care, how easily disaster might often be averted: shaving more slowly, keeping one’s eyes peeled for banana skins under a window—in my case, repairing to a more reliably solid piece of furniture the next time I’m about to switch from the psittacine form to the so-called Homo sapiens. The only other time this happened I also ended up stranded on the parquet floor of the Hashes’ front living room. The main difference being that then, on my first metamorphosis, it was night, and the house was sound asleep. Another difference was that (purely by chance, having not the faintest inkling of the little miracle that was about to occur) I had happened to be stationed on a magazine rack—that is, one of several “low altitude” secondary perches positioned around the house for me to fly to. Under my newly acquired bulk on that occasion, the news rack simply toppled over onto its side—rather than crashing to its doom like the parrot stand was to do on my second transformation. One minute there I was, a parrot minding my own business, quietly perched on the magazine rack; the next, out of the blue, I was a fully grown man, platypussing about on the floor amid an assortment of back issues of the Belmont Gazette and the Grammarian’s Quarterly!

  My state of human-hood on that maiden transformation was to last just a couple of hours or so—long enough, nevertheless, to take a nocturnal spin in the family convertible, top down for the stars and the soft warm air of night. More to the point, it was long enough to give me a taste for the life lived by humans, as opposed to the life I had led as a parrot. Till that fateful night I’d been content with my lot. Of course, I’d heard lots of good things about being a human, don’t get me wrong, many good things, but I had yet to be convinced. Did humans wink at little round mirrors, or ting little bells as often as I did? How often did the average human get the chance to imitate an interlocutor’s question word for word in a loud, screechy parrot voice—to the delight of lady company especially? In short, why take the car when you can run up and down the little multicolored ladder? Of course, it might seem a little sweeping, a little bit reductive, to equate being human with driving an automobile, when you consider that even in our own picture book town of Belmont there are many other things besides driving a car that its inhabitants can do to show that they’re human, and therefore many other ways I myself might have made use of my humanoid hours. But, let’s face it, there were good reasons for my going for a spin in the car that night.

  One reason was that my sudden, serendipitous possession of a cat burglar’s arms and legs was perhaps a window of opportunity to do things not normally open to one in possession of mere talons and wings. While a variety of human gadgetry was already within my parrot’s range (light switches, microwaves, I’d long ago mastered), a whole gamut of more sophisticated large-scale machines had till that moment been beyond my control. To coordinate at the same time, for example, not just a steering wheel but a gearshift and a set of pedals (not to mention a mirror or two) clearly requires the ability and reach of a full set of humanoid limbs. A second and perhaps even better reason was the avoidance of any potential alarm my newly acquired human form might give to an insomniac Hash, if one of them were struck by a midnight pang of hunger and came downstairs in their slippers to fetch a bowl of Froot Loops. All in all, it seemed a good idea to spend whatever man-hours I was going to get off the premises and away from the house.

  I took to driving like a duck takes to water—no need for lessons! I just turned the key in the ignition—and with it the irrepressible dashboard audiocassette of Forward with English!: “Taking a Trip in the Car.” I pulled out of the Hashes’ white picket fence estate with all the graceful carbon-friendly tact of a milk cart. I drove through sleeping suburb till I reached Duck Pond, where suburb turned into field, with the volume down low.

  Picturing myself as a very tall parrot in monocle and cravat on the turnpike for neighboring Bellville, I admired moonlumined farmlands—fields of grain, a collection of cows, the odd In Cold Blood–ish barn.

  Roadside signs and instructions were as helpful as the most limpid of phrase books from the Acme collection: pass through flashing amber with caution—cry-wolf-ish spring-loaded antlers—snowflake.

  Presently, some ten miles short of Bellville, no doubt due to the meagre parrot proportions of my last meal being insufficient to supply my new, inflated humanoid energy needs, I began to feel rather peckish. So, when I saw the neon sign of an anonymous but conveniently located roadside diner, I decided to pull into its neat little car lot divested at that hour of patrons.

  I strolled inside that diner like a John Wayne plonked on the moon; and I asked the nice waitress for a fish burger please. I leaned on the long zinc counter with tall toadstool stools and the waitress (presumably having recognized the trademark Bob T. Hash III Plymouth Fury as it swung into her empty car lot and jumped to conclusions)—when I asked her if she would mind putting it in a takeout receptacle—said not to worry, Mr. Hash, you get a takeout box whether you stay inside the diner or eat it out in your car with the roof down open to the stars and the soft warm air of night. It was not until some time later, to my own great shock and amazement, that her mistake made a great deal more sense.

  Back in the car, under the stars, the burger turned out to be woefully short on the sesame front and, to be frank, was a great disappointment (see Lodging a Complaint, Forward with English!). I’m not eating at that place again, thank you very much. On the other hand, by sticking the drinks straw into the roof of the little carton, I was able to produce a crude sort of sailboat—which at least made up for not getting some wee free toy such as a hand-painted dragon-slaying medieval knight in armor or a bleeping limbo martian with irreplaceable batteries in the first place. Against the now setting moon, pendulous and yellow over a cornfield, sailed my little Medusa like a pedaling E.T., bobbing at the end of an outstretched wing (or, should I say, arm), its passengers doomed. Right then, as I was watching this, I got a funny sensation. It was a sixth sense, a kind of inner gas gauge, warning me that my trial stint as human was already nearing its end—and that it was perhaps now a very good idea to get myself, and Bob T. Hash III’s Plymouth Fury, back to Belmont before this event actually happened.

  The green grass joys of neighboring Bellville, where I’ve heard there’s a mall, have to wait for another occasion. A wise twit-awoo perching in a tree watched me turn the car round in the burger lot—swiveling its head the way owls do to stare at my taillights—back toward the way I had come from. From the east the dark ink of the sky was already starting to drain and already I could make out the fond shadowed silhouette of Belmont. By the time Bob’s alarm clock went off at a quarter to seven (unseen birds atwitter with song), the car had been returned undamaged to the pea-stone drive and I, once more an African gray parrot and picture book mascot, had been returned to my living room perch as if nothing had happened.

  There is an order of things that happen to us (and I would obviously include my own species-flip in this category) that strike us as so monumental, so life altering—events that so change our outlook not simply on the correct use of the present perfect, say, or the pros and cons of bilabial fricatives, but on the very purpose of life itself, and we know that from that moment on our lives will never be the same. I knew then that, for me, from that day onward, trotting up and down little colored plastic ladders would never again hold quite the same appeal as it had done thitherto. Add to that the prosaic truth belying an impression of a supposedly
adventurous, multithemed lifestyle, which might be gleaned from a cursory flick through the picture book where you can see me in a variety of vignetted locations. There I am, sitting on top of a filing cabinet in the office; there I am, blending into the exotic fruit wallpaper in the coffee shop (if rather monochromatically—I am not, repeat not, a macaw); and there I am again, perched on the shoulder of a peg-legged, patch-eyed pirate poised over a doubloon-filled chest exhumed on a coconut beach, a schooner anchored in the glistening bay behind me. But the truth is, I’m afraid, that 99 percent of the time I might as well have been glued to my living room perch by the talons.

  That miraculous species-flip and run in the car, then, had brought home with sudden poignancy the limitations of a life spent sitting on perches and also, given the felicitous possibilities of creative composition, put into stark relief the absurdity of plucking mimicked fragments from a store of prefabricated phrases in the fashion of parrots. That flip transformation, so entirely unexpected, had offered, in tandem with the mishap page, a foretaste of another world—not just of the burger-munching rally driver, but the whole wild glittering tragedy of humanoid existence itself. From that moment on, up there on my perch, I began to daydream of leading a double, Jekyll-and-Hyde-type existence: mascot parrot by day, the thrills and spills of a tormented Hamlet by night. Having dipped my toes into the realm of the human, I could hardly now restrict myself to the same tired party tricks as before—like a sad Phil Silvers in his nursing home watching reruns of Sergeant Bilko.

  By the way, for anyone unfamiliar with Forward with English! (seventh edition), this is probably a good moment to introduce the Family Hash en famille, as seen, in loco, on the lawn in front of their house—please look at page 2 of the companion picture book as you’re reading this sentence. There, against the backdrop of the veranda, in his weekend cardigan, stands business tycoon and eponymous paterfamilias Mr. Bob T. Hash III. That charming creature beside him in a shin-length A-line pleated cotton skirt and sensible blouse is Matilda, his wife. Around them are gathered the picture book daughters Betsy, with hockey stick, and pigtailed Jane, leaning on her bicycle, and picture book son, rascal Bobby, freckled like the little boy on the cover of Mad.