SpongeBob--Down On the Boulevard
I was in LA last weekend and staying off of Hollywood Boulevard within hailing distance of Musso and Frank's and only a short drive to Fairfax and the Farmer's Market--two of my favorite venues in all of these United States. Georgene was shopping or just taking a short vacation from me and I was reading the stars on the sidewalk. I was a block east of Grauman's when I saw SpongeBob SquarePants angling for tourists and trying to distance himself from Wonder Woman and a Batman with a foam chest that was duking it out with gravity and losing.
I looked in through the wire mesh covered hole and saw a hint of an iris, a pale cheek.
I said, "Weird job, huh?"
"Yeah. And I don't do it for my own amusement." I handed him a dollar bill and he took it in his three fingered and soiled gloved hand. It went somewhere into the costume.
SpongeBob said, "And what do you do to pay the rent?"
"I'm a high school English teacher."
"Now," he said, "Is it time--or does that come later--when I say to you, 'Weird job, huh?'"
"Yes, now would be the time."
"Weird job, huh?"
"Man," I said, "You don't know the half of it. They know more about you than they know about Shakespeare. They've spent hundreds of hours watching you sell hamburgers underwater. They tell me you were their friend, a confidante, a babysitter."
"You're going to have to give me another dollar if we are going that way." I did.
He said, "You know that this is just a costume, right? That I am not really a sponge and that I didn't do anything to your students, that I am broke and obviously pretty lazy and not exactly proud. You know that I'm doing this because whatever else I have tried didn't work out. Why else would I be standing here talking to you, wearing this suit, if I weren't desperate and embarrassed?" Sponge Bob Square Pants seemed to wrinkle a bit, to fold in the middle as if he were threatening to become Wonder Bread Bob Sandwich Slice.
He said, "I don't know what I'd do if my high school English teacher saw through this foam and saw me. Man... I don't even want to think about that shit."
"Why not? He might be proud."
"It was a she," he said.
"Proud," I said, “maybe because you haven't just sat in carrels and read books--but you've become part of the story, part of the fantasy--an alternate reality where household tools have relationships with breathing creatures and sell fast food to starfish and squid. You live in the sea, and like the poet said about that, 'Two worlds. One planet.'"
"Okay. That will be one dollar please."
I gave it to him and we both watched the Hollywood Boulevard ebb and flow, the groovy and the doomed, the blinged and the Nebraskans, the clutchers of maps to celebrity mausoleums, the 47 varieties of hustlers, hodaddies, harlequins and apprentice zombies. They were fitting their feet into Marilyn's footprints at Grauman's and eating pizza by the slice and reading the huge billboards and waiting for the stars. Above us there were the gigantic elephants on stele above the door to the Kodak Theatre. There were bums and the soon to be, targets and bowmen, liars and prophets.
So there I was with SpongeBob SquarePants and we were talking about misplaced allegiances, T.V. narcosis, failure and escape, rue and hope.
I said, "Good Luck," and he wished me the same.
