ELECTRIC TYPEWRITER

John Tustin

 

I began to write poetry during the brief age

Of the electric typewriter.

 

I always had a pressed-in callus

On the side of the middle finger of my left hand

Due to not holding a pencil or pen properly

Ever since I could remember

And around the age of eighteen

I was writing so much that my hand

Could not keep up

With my mind.

Notebook after notebook filled with the tiny words.

 

I sat down one night

At the dining room table with my mother’s electric typer

And I taught myself to type,

Writing poem after poem,

Hour upon hour

Until the sun woke up

And implored me to do something else

Until night fell again.

 

Being self-taught,

I type improperly to this day

Just as I could never correctly hold a pen.

Unteachable me.

 

I taught myself to write, too.

It came from nowhere.

 

It came from nowhere, those nascent rhymy poems

Like bubblegum pop without the hook.

Layer upon layer on endless pages,

The spigot turned on at fourteen and it took a woman

With the soul of a jackal to turn it off twelve years later.

For a decade, at least.

 

Then eighteen years old,

Failing at every turn

As I balanced a girlfriend who didn’t want to be my girlfriend

And friends who were less than friendly

When my back was turned

I typed it all out on fabulous naked pages

Slowly scrawled to hatchmarks of blackness.

 

In time she was gone.

Slowly, I withdrew from most of them.

They did not complain.

I reminisced about the times I misconstrued

So heartily

And I wrote.

I wrote.

 

I moved into my own place and I spent day after day working the grind,

Night after night drinking,

Not drinking,

Talking to myself or silent,

But always with the typewriter buzzing on my lap

As I hunched and punched the keys with abrupt and harried fingers,

Letting all of that poison seep out of my head

And through my hands

Onto sleeping pages come to life.

 

The poems are gone now, all of them, but I remember snippets.

I remember titles:

A Drunken Rant of a Letter

Poem Full of Women

I’m a Bachelor

Manic Depression

Gypsy

Anna….

“Anna

Anna Banana

That’s what I call her

With embarrassed laughter

Voice trailing after

Neck like a swan

Eyes like the dawn

Lips so discreet

Must taste so sweet

If only they were offered up to me

Naked as a sacrifice…”

All the words jumbled

Tumbling out of me

In the heat and the beer-scotch haze

And the solitude

Of an inhibited youth.

 

Type it.

Tear it out.

Retype it.

Retype it again.

Add. Subtract. Like it was important to anyone

But me.

I was insane.

 

I wrote more than I read and then I wrote

As much as I read

And then I read so much

I needed to find the time to write.

All the while Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen,

Tom Waits

On the Walkman

And the clack clack clack of the keyboard

So like a train chugging to the next anonymous city.

Clack clack clack clack clack.

I hit the keys hard.

They were rifleshots.

 

Steinbeck and Salinger

Merged into Ginsberg

And Whitman and then

The Nirvana of Bukowski!

I read Love is a Dog From Hell in one day

And it helped create 500 poems of lust and travail.

I was opening my heart, I was letting my veins flow

Bloody

Along the pages

In a room alone, waiting for a phone to ring.

The phone would squat on the wall in silence.

All the time,

Clack clack clack clack

As the phone laughed in

The squalor of so many empty rooms

That sat silent

Except for the mocking laughter

And the

Clack clack clack clack.

 

A long-haired madman with the beard of Rasputin

And the face of a delicate child.

I churned out the pages,

Put them in a stack next to me on the sofa.

 

The snap of the paper being plucked from the cradle,

The snick snick snick of an empty piece being rolled up

Like a bullet in an empty chamber.

Bang bang bang!

I wrote them and then I read them over and over.

When I was not working I was reading.

When I was not reading I was reaching out

To the air.

My words, my poems, they were my friends.

And Anne Sexton was my friend, John Fante was my friend,

Hemingway was my friend.

Bukowski and cummings were my friends.

I drank with them and wrote with them

As I awaited life to change.

 

The sun would set, the moon would rise,

The heat would release from the asphalt and then

I would type all the shit I scribbled down while working,

Elaborating the plaintive cries

Of a man who was a boy,

Wanting only to be wanted.

Night after night sweating naked with that typewriter my only friend:

Brother my brother.

Churning the pages,

Piling them up.

Being me.

 

I almost killed myself that summer

But then I found love for a little while

And when combined with the words in my head –

I had everything.

 

For a little while,

At least.

 

She is gone now,

But the words keep arriving,

Sometimes at the oddest times.

 

I welcome the words.

 

“Clack clack clack clack”

Is what I still hear in my head

When I sit in the dark

All alone

With my headphones on

And expel my peculiar poison

Now

On a page

That is not really

A page;

Expelled from a heart

That is otherwise

Not worth a damn.

The keyboard makes this little expeditious typing sound

But in my head –

Clack clack clack clack clack.