Indelible text / Clear-headed revels

Today: Carrie Frye, writer and book editor at Black Cardigan Edit; and Rax King, the author of essay collections Tacky: Love Letters to the Worst Culture We Have to Offer and the forthcoming Sloppy.

Issue No. 126

Carriage Return
Carrie Frye

Sober Night Out
Rax King

Carriage Return

by Carrie Frye

When I was ten my mom enrolled me in a typing class offered in a summer “camp” program being offered by the city. This was in the early ’80s. I’m sure there must have been a baby computer programming class on offer somewhere in the building, but we were learning on typewriters. There were twenty or so black typewriters in the room—the equivalent of a stable where the horses are stolid and wide-chested and tired of giving tourist rides (that horse has a bum knee, this horse has a j-key that jams). 

The teacher was a no-nonsense guy, piped in from the local high school, and as a kid you got the sense that if he had been saddling us up, or teaching us how to use a bandsaw, or how to do quadratic equations, his manner would have been exactly the same: “Sit in that chair. Now. OK, you’re going to sit in that same chair every morning for the next month, instead of loafing around, eating cereal and watching Price Is Right, like you want to.”

These were old typewriters, each key with its own long metal stem, and the first class was spent putting strips of masking tape over each letter and number so we couldn’t sneak peeks. This was tedious, sticky work—the typewriter a shark with endless rows of teeth to attend to. 

There were drills. Practices. Tons of them. As time went on, maybe during the second or third week, whenever people were speaking, I began mentally turning whatever they were saying into typing, my mind firing how my fingers would have to move to put it down, with the words then appearing over their heads like typewritten letters struck onto a page. It was both a terrible compulsion (sometimes I really did want it to stop)—and a new way of apprehending the world. Of being forced to pay attention in some newly adult way. At a performance of Deathtrap, sitting next to my parents in the audience, the actors’ lines appeared in the space over the stage as quick as I could type them: 

Actor: What I should do is, beat the fat bastard over the head…

Me: Index-finger-down B-stroke. Pinky A-stroke. Ring finger S-stroke. Index-finger-up T-stroke. A-stroke. Index-finger-up R-stroke. Middle-finger D-stroke.