Heylookitsa Bob

My mom asked me the other day how I decided to teach ESL. I told her it was because of a fat guy in a hot tub and a dead rat.

Two summers ago, in 2010, I was working at The Yellowstone Club, a ski resort for wealthy people located a half hour northwest of Big Sky, Montana. I was a janitor. That August, my boss Ivonne told me that I was the new pool boy for an outdoor pool house. This pool house's main pool, being located in the middle of the Montana Wilderness, served as a giant chlorine filled mouse, fly, hornet, and any-animal-smaller-than-a-Fiat trap for the Gallatin mountains.

So every afternoon, I got to take a net on a stick and pull out dead things from a swimming pool. After that, I would go clean condoms and mice out of the hot tub filter. It was during cleaning the hot tub that I met an old fat Korean man smoking a cigarette named Robert.

There were signs posted around the pool saying that you weren't supposed to be able to smoke in the hot tub; this was a goofy rule. The Yellowstone club was a getaway for millionaires and the only real muscle around the staff was the custodial staff and facilities services. Did they really expect a bunch of janitors and electricians to tell a millionaire or their spouse not to smoke in a hot tub? That would be silly. In a sense, this meant the signs were for the children of millionaires and the staff or for health conscious millionaires to point at when they want to yell at a different millionaire for smoking.

Robert was not a millionaire to be messed with. The old man, still not a grey hair on his plugs, sat in a hot tub in the way that only a man who cared about nothing and yet also knew he was going to live a very long life could. He wore a gold chain around his neck and kept his silver Rolex on top of a leather wallet on top of his nautilus towel. He looked old school money, and he was Asian. Asian old men in movies, so as in life, look one of two ways: wan and breakable, or corpulent and charmingly sociopathic.

Robert was the latter.

I, being Asian looking, was a subject of interest to Robert. He asked me with a heavy azn-ish accent where I was from. Now, When an Asian person with an Asian sounding accent asks another Asian without an accent where they are from, they don't mean, "are you an adopted Korean who was brought up on Clint Eastwood and Mtv in a Semitic family?"

What they mean is, "You look like me. Why is this, and Which Asian country are you from?"

Growing up in the mid-west, most people I interacted with for my two decades on earth at this point had been of Irish, Polish, Anglo-Saxon, Italian, Norwegian, or German descent and looked not at all like me. As with Robert, when a W.A.S.P. asks you "Where are you from?" they too are not looking for you to answer with "Billings, Montana." What they are asking is, "Why do you look different from me?"
To answer Robert, when he asked me, "Where are you from?" I answered, "From Billings, Montana." I was a very stupid twenty-something. Robert sat glaring at me for a while, a very uncomfortable while, and then he burst into laughter. We talked as I pulled a dead rat from the hot tub's filter chamber. Turns out he was actually the father of a millionaire and was a part time plumber and thought Montana was a stupid place. Too cold, too many bugs and the trees were dull. Fair enough.

He also told me that I should look into visiting Korea and when I told him I couldn't afford it, he told me about EPIK the placement association for Korean Public Schools. This was the first time I'd heard that Korea was a place that people went to teach English.

That night I would go look up EPIK. All because Robert the Plumber, father of a Millionaire, told me I should.