Typewriter Music

The assignment was "First Memory"

I don’t remember my exact age, but I can remember clearly the clacking sound the keys made as they sprang up to slap a ribbon of ink against white unlined paper: the height of gravitas and adulthood to a young kid who’d only been allowed to work in pencil on dull wide-lined newsprint. It was Army Green with a black irregular pentagon shaped crest on the front panel that read Royal in engraved creamy-gold letters. My grandfather had died years before, but his office remained unchanged, and anytime my grandmother would babysit, I would hound her for hours so that I could sit at a huge wooden desk that had once belonged to him, and tap the time away until my parents came to collect me.

As a fairly unsentimental adult, I can’t deny the significance of sitting there surrounded by the belongings of a man I would only know by the stories my aunts and cousins told of him, and the things he’d left behind. The caramel colored art eraser and triangular ruler in his desk drawer, and the smell of onion skin carbon paper, and envelope glue, were as much a part of him as the collection of carefully displayed mugs, and beer steins, that circled the whole room on handmade shelves. For all I know his hands may never have touched the keys of that big green machine, but I always believed that they had, and that was enough for the connection to be real to the child I used to be.

I had not, yet, learned cursive in school, but I was already a better two-fingered-typist than printer. I had a tendency to forget how to shape certain letters, or reverse their direction. Someone said I had dyslexia, without much explanation of what that meant. I knew I had difficulty reading quickly, and hated to read aloud. I made lots of mistakes, but how many of those mistakes were nerves and how many because I wasn’t good at reading, I don’t think anyone knew. What I knew, is that my problems with printing disappeared sitting at that massive green machine, poking away at the clear acrylic buttons that protected parchment colored letters, what were framed with silver: some more worn than others.  I could memorize where the letters were, and never have to worry again about how to shape them with a pencil. Unfortunately for me, school wasn’t filled with big wooden desks, and heavy steal typewriters. 

The machine made a kind of music. I loved the way the carriage mechanism thumped up and down to accommodate the pressing of a shift key. By pressing, I mean, shoving it with my whole hand, it took so much strength to move that heavy rubberized roller up and down. The clack-click, clack-click, clack-click, clack-click, clacking of the keys, the fast double click of a spacebar, and then a thump-thump-clack-click, clack-click, clack-click, of the begging of a new sentence reminded me of snare, and bass drums. It made a funny hick-up sound when I pressed the backspace key to type the right letter multiple times over a wrong one, and at the end of each row a very satisfying ding-zip-thump of the carriage return ratcheting back to the beginning of the next line so that the impromptu melody could start again.

Sometimes I’d push the carriage return arm over, and over listening for the rolling dull clunk of the spacing gears change from single, to double, to triple, and back as I moved the lever with my opposite hand. Tapping the enter key on a computer, or even an electric typewriter, just doesn’t have the same gratifying sense. Then there was the ratcheting sound the roller made as you loaded a whole sheet of blank paper, and a shiny metal roller-guild sprang back into place: the sound of possibility.

It didn’t yet occur to me that this device could be used to record the thoughts and stories in my head, I just liked the sound it made, and how terribly adult I felt pretending to write terrible adult things in permanent ink.  Back then I held two contrary beliefs, that I still struggle with today. One is that everyone made up stories in their head, and the other, that it was not OK for gown-ups to make up stories in their heads. I kept my typing to the basics, the alphabet, the full names of my family members, cousins, teachers, and pets. Sometimes I would just type gibberish to see how fast I could go without locking up the keys, and sometimes I would deliberately try to tangle up as many keys as possible.  It was a dangerous game: if I tangled so many keys I had to ask for adult intervention I’d be made to stop playing with my favorite toy, and if I didn’t press my luck I’d be stuck unsatisfied, convinced I could have ensnared one more key. I wasn’t just fascinated with the letters imprinted on the page, and sometimes on the roller I had hit the key so hard, I also loved the mechanics of the heavy machine. The way one lever pressed would physically translate to a small metal arm raising out of a curved chassis to strike the page, leave its mark, and then return just as quickly to its well-ordered resting place. When I was strong enough, I would turn the whole thing over to see if I could watch the interaction of springs and levers that made the typing happen. 

My attraction wasn’t limited to my grandfather’s typewriter. My maternal grandparents had a Jet Black Underwood with black and white keys. Much more sophisticated with more buttons that I didn’t know how to use, but opportunities to play with that machine were limited. It wasn’t, in my grandmother’s opinion, an appropriate occupation for young boys, even if it did stop my non-stop fidgeting. The music I made on that machine was just noise to her easily irritated ears. At home, my parents had a Gunmetal Grey, Smith and Corona “Silent Secretary” that was anything but silent. That machine had its own pitch and music, and I was more prone to be careless when playing on it, the machine being ours, and all. The piece de résistance, lie dormant in our attic, for me to find a few years later: a Remington Portable with retractable keys. The Remington had certain quirks, the ribbon was near frayed through and no replacements were available, the carriage return would slide clear out of the machine and it tended to drop certain letters if you typed too quickly. It was temperamental. I had its own ideas about line spacing, typing speed, and what noises it should, and should not make. But then, what could you expect, it had been in The War.