WAKE UP THE KING

Wake Up The King

Phil, the 57 year Vietnam veteran, has found a bed in the Paradise on Brookside. It is a shelter for the homeless run by the Catholic Charities. Even homeless, he still looks kingly, with his double color wavy hair parted in the middle and brushy eye brows almost knitted together. He has lost his shape of the teeth. Not the teeth, but the shape of them. All the teeth are ground down to leave only chiseled points and broken. They look like wolf teeth, if anyone imagines what the teeth of the wolf would be. His thin lips are protruding at the world as if regarding the daylight with disapproval. He has long and hawked nose, deep set eyes. When he looks at you, he narrows his eyes, parts his legs real wide, and raises his eye brows up and down at the same time, right, then left, right, then left. His eyes hide below his eye brows and leave a very serious impression that he is giving you his kingly regard. He speaks with a slur sometimes. Not that he stutters. He is chewing tobacco most of the time and he smiles a big chewing smile, and his chewing sometimes makes his speech less fluent and precise. He is fondly given the name “Ghetto King Phil”, to which he enjoys very much and behaves more and more in that effect. He starts to wear robe. It is not the dragon robe for the Heavenly Son of the lost Chinese Royals, nor the robe for the Kings of England or France of remote past. It is a bath robe. But it is apricot yellow, which is the royal yellow reserved for the Emperor in China before 1900. He wears his hair long over the ears, and styles his hair a bluish grey with streaks of yellow which blend strikingly with the rest of the head. He wears big rings on his fingers, big stones and diamonds inherited from his Highness mom. He is however, a king in the reform, and in the “retreat”. He is off drug for a successful three months, although his tobacco chewing habit is more established than before. Ghetto King Phil is very attentive to the world affairs and works till small hours in the morning, listening to the most democratic or less republican talk shows to stay on top of the international affairs. He has some leisure activities: watching video while eating popcorn in the TV room till lights off is one of them. He plays bass guitar too, very professionally, and attends AA meetings on many of the weekday nights. He collects many useful items such as boots and jeans, women sweaters and slippers, and generously gives them away. He rules his bed and the cases under his bed and his closet in a very sovereign, yet chaotic manner. He just let things pile up and then transfer them to the table and start to sort them out, and put them in small piles and sit for long moments pondering how and why he has so much things to rule. For all the things he has had, he one day discovers that he does not have an alarm clock. He never needs one because the shelter overseer keeps the most punctual time for the sake of the running of the place. 6.30am, the lights will be turned on, and by 10.30pm, after 3 warning off-on, off-on, and off-ons, the lights are off and within two minutes, snoring at a very large scale is heard all over the world and King Phil is drowned in his talk shows. However he has got a job and he has to wake up and get up early, no late than 6.30. Think of it, the King has to work. That kindly disgrace of the proletarian ethics.
It should not be a problem if he wakes up by 6.30 am, when the lights are turned on. But the King can’t, just as everyone else does, wake up, by the noise those lights generate. He stays in his sleep longer than the lights and if left on himself, he would never wake up until 1 pm in the afternoon. He has issued an order that he be waken up by 6.30 to the most alert resident of the Paradise, Miss Altera. She did not, however, think it necessary to carry out the decreed, since by 6.30, she assumes that the King is awake. So the King explains to her that he can’t be waken by lights. He must be awaken by her. To this order, Miss Alerta ignores. A Ghetto King has no real authority to demand her service. Ghetto King got himself an alarm clock and sat it at 6.am, to give him a 30 minutes allowance to become awaken.
For two mornings, his alarm set off as it is set and off it goes, off and off and on and on and on till about 80 measures, each measure lasts two seconds. It sounds as dou- dou- and douddoudou, doudoudou. with each measure its temper goes faster and more urgent and more demanding. It does not sound as loud as the fire alarm, nor as loud as the siren. But when the Hall is still cozy under graying darkness, the alarm sounds exactly like an alarm. It is jarring , demanding, unquieting, and alarming. It seems going on and on, and any moment it’s supposed to stop, it does not. It is supposed to alarm the King up to his sense and he will turn it off, but he is not being disturbed at all. It is a bizarre situation only to be encountered in Paradise at Brookside. For one thing, the good residents are holding their breathe under the daily conditioning of self discipline. On the other hands, out of the daily exhaustion of roaming homeless, foodless, jobless, or of being fully engaged in job-hunting, house-hunting, and food-collecting, net-working, emotional taxing, no one is yet, after a full 3 minutes of being alarmed, having any initiatives to interfere.
The shelter is dark and silent, but by no means quiet. Compared to the night tranquility thickened by different levels of intensity of snoring, the big communal living room for all the residents are heavy with disturbance. From the four corners of the building, agitation is felt, beds squeezing, bodies flipping, and then a baby’s cry is heard. It is from the two months old baby Matthew. He is the only one who is not going to hold his breathe. He is disturbed and he protests from his crib behind the closed doors of the individual dorms for the families with kids.
Two male residents raise themselves up while the alarm was in full blast. They are not, however, paying any attention. They rise from their bed to go to the rest room before rushing outdoors for their first drag of the day. The overseer of the shelter is a new recruit of one day experience. He does not know quite what to do. He just graciously waits and waits hoping any minute the alarm would wake up the King and be turned off. He seems to be thinking of whether intervention is necessary When he does nothing to interfere, other residents are not making moves, behaving like English, just wait and wait, gentlemen walk, they never run. Eventually, Navaho, one of the residents throws her blanket away and sits up on her upper bunk bed. She waits and waits, thinking any minute the King might wake up and turn that damned clock off. But nothing happens except the annoying alarm , steadily and urgently sounds its alarm. Hope is higher and higher with each measure of alarm piecing the surprised unrest. “That damned thing must be made in Japan. “ Navaho thinks. “Made in China” would have stopped at 40 measures and only the Japanese doing a hard job to keep their competitiveness longer
After another 10 measure of alarms, Ghetto King’s snore rise above the alarm. It sounds fuller and fuller, more glorious and thundering, more intimidating and unchecked by any human decency and gracious tolerance. This is too much. The alarm is becoming a crime of public offense that unnecessarily disturbs the residents. Navaho could not hold herself up any more, she looks up and down, trys to get hold of her stuffed animals. She has placed them too far to reach, so she has to pick up her pillows and throws it at the Ghetto King. But it produces no effect. At this moment, Sam, the Ethiopian prince, in a position of prime minister on a chess board, is eventually aroused into erecting himself out of his bed and put his big palm on the throat of the King and chocks the King into gasping and therefore into opening his eyes and mouth at the same time.
This trick works and the Ghetto King jerks himself into the fear of a murder or in the good consciousness of pacifying the deeply disturbed sleeping public, putting his guitar bass plugging fingers over the Damned made-in-Japan and grubbing or another 5 second to find where the off switch is. At this moment, the whole house woke up and suddenly there was a deadly silence without any sound, either from the alarm, or from the residents. The Ghetto King is resurrected from his bed and he stands on his bare feet. As if in wakefulness, he slips his feet into a pair of kitty head slippers and flips and flops to the man’s room, the slipper mows and mows like kitty while he walks in them.
The next night, or rather the following morning of the next night, the same thing happen again. The Ghetto King’s impotence of hearing is widely publicized now and he got 4 stuffed monkeys thrown at him and two more landed on the neighboring bed where German Scholar sleeps. James, President of the Man’s room, goes right up to the King’s bed, ready to straggle him up into standing up. Before he is able to enclose his hands on the King, the house overseer Mr. B.B stops him and goes ahead himself to place the alarm clock close at the King’s ear. To his despair, the King’s ears are plugged and being blasted by the radio that is broadcasting the morning news. Under such heavy volume of noise, the King is still snoring. Mr. B.B. shakes the King into wakefulness and makes the declaration of attention that the alarm clock not to be used to awake everyone else but its owner, and the King be responsible for his own alarm management. By then, the whole house is wild awake. The lights are on and the residents are on their beds watching the King being dragged out of his double layer comforter of feather by one dignified female resident who threatens to kill the King if he keeps turning an deaf ear to the noise the alarm clock make. Novaro demands that the King returns the stuffed animals she throws at him. Ghetto King good humouredly throws them back at her as if she is the wide receiver from the 49ers. She reckons him to come over and asks him why he needs an alarm clock, since he doesn’t need to get up before the lights of the house turned on .”The King does not wake up by himself, nor by the alarm clock. but alarm clock is the only way to get me up by waking someone else to wake me up.” he explains without any embarrassment.