I lied my way into the type business. I was twenty-six, lubricating constantly, completely tangled up in the theater, acting, writing, learning a life. I was broke. There was an ad: Proofreaders. Typesetters. Experienced Only. Top shop, good money. Well, you put "shop" and "money" in the same paragraph and you were destined to see my pert, destitute young butt come up for an application. I'm a natural for proofreading: a Virgo, a reader, a writer, a perfectionist, a person who memorizes poems in order to eat them. But I had to lie: this was a whole trade. They gave me a test. There was an odd kind of ruler that said PICAS on it, and I thought that was a kind of coffee or tea. They gave me some odd paper and called it film, and told me to read it for spelling and "specs." Someone came in and asked me if I had checked the density, and I said: "Oh yes, I certainly have, and it's fine! The density is lovely, it's perfectly lovely!"
It was where I learned about sex, about the inevitable sexuality of competence. I was, in a certain sense, a virgin until I set type. Type is all about shapes and spaces, about tending to the shape and grace of people's words and numbers, a meditation on the synonymous nature of shape and meaning -- like sex. Letters are like dancers, like actors; they work in ensemble to create meaning, standing in different forms, different orders, moving against infinite chaotic tropes, millions of years of groaning and hieroglyphs, towards orderly, sinuous language. Type. The sexiness, the devastating beauty, of letters. People would order their type the way they'd order an escort. Think of it: paying for words, the way you want them; what's said is what you want said, exactly the way you want it; the way you want to see it. Order flimsy or lacy or slouchy; demand whisper-light or dominating bold. Describe the curves you want to see, the shapes you want suggested. Choose the words; if they don't move you, change them on a dime; you pay for them, you get what you want: "TNT" meant Tight/Not Touching; "T/T" meant Tight and Touching; "Stet" next to type meant Leave Me Alone.
I can barely zip a zipper and yet I became the systems manager for this major computer and typesetting system dedicated to the printed word. There in the obsessive/compulsive laboratory of the typeshop, I wasn't the only person bothered by the way two numeral 1's sit so far apart, or the final "V" and "A" in the word VULVA have that devastating, endless, oblique vaginal corridor separating them. Kerning, it's called. Certain pairs of letters need to be mated better, closed up; they seem too far away from each other; their isolation from each other makes a word seem wrong, neglected. I was the queen of this kabalistic kingdom, where symbols were everything. I learned what density was: it was the crispness, the thickness of the type, the color of the print, its level of darkness, its integrity. I went from night proofreader to day proofreader to typesetter to night typesetter to night foreman to systems manager in the obnoxious, dizzying sweep of a single year's time. Although I had no mechanical ability, I was so in love with the printed word that I forced the system to work: faith-healed it when it failed me, changed its hard-disk drive with my bare hands in the middle of the night like a thoracic surgeon massaging a heart on Christmas Eve. My competence itself was a powerful pheromone and I always got what I wanted at the type shop. And sometimes, what I wanted was lucky enough to get me.
It was a beautiful community. Everyone just ended up there. No one studied to be a typesetter or a proofreader. It was an accident, a shipwreck, a catastrophic professional Gilligan's Island, a lucrative coincidence. You had to be smart to do it, and it paid top dollar; good artisans made $25/hr in a $4.00 minimum wage world. As a result, it attracted all kinds of drunk dreamers, transient studs on motorcycles, revenants, actors, loose women, fast risers: Jim Morrison's ex-wife; Duayne, the cocaine-addicted mathematics genius; Roxanne, the one with the habit who French-kissed all the women just to say hello; Jay, who answered our ad for a typesetter and came to his interview naked from the waist up (hired instantly and thereafter became an only occasional pants-wearer ); Henry, a foul-mouthed jazz pianist with a heart transplant; Famm, the deaf gay poet who read lips and kept hoping for a ménage with me and the elevator repair man; the owner's son, hanging around, mumbling, and groping you when you walked past; and Gwendolyn, a typesetter who threw up all the time for no reason and got pregnant by the man responsible for the computer system that synchronizes traffic lights on all the New York City avenues.
Once you were in the type business it was hard to get out; it had a gravity; it held you. Anything could happen and you would not be fazed; you could walk into the darkroom and interrupt someone cutting cocaine or giving head on the Typositor plate, then answer the phone with complete equanimity and aplomb. I could do anything with type, anything. A client asked me to set an advertisement in type in a certain face going from the smallest possible point size up in 1/4-step increments, line by line, to create two different shapes: Galveston, Texas and a naked woman. I worked odd hours, any hours, all night, all day and night. A lonely, crazy man couldn't remember the name of a typeface, called me at two in the morning and made me figure out which one he meant by describing the lower-case r, the peculiar shape and bevel of the curved piece which hung off the vertical line "like the paw of a begging dog; like a penis right after orgasm." (It was Perpetua. Natch.)
Lucien. Lucien was a typesetter on my shift. He was about my age, he had a son about my age, and he was constantly high. I don't know what drugs he worked with, but he was smooth as butter and he smiled all the time, a profound, genuine smile. I was the foreman on the shift; it was graveyard, twelve to eight; it was all night radio and cigarettes, a combination of high pressure and darkness and silence.
Lucien. He was always a tiny bit late. Late people are always late by the same amount; with L it was about six minutes. He would slide in, mumble something smiling, then start to get set up for the evening. It was a big process. L was a speed typist with excellent accuracy, who could only work when he had eight things going on at once. He had a miniature television and a walkman; he would turn on the TV, hook up his headphones and pop in an Aretha Franklin tape. He'd call a woman on the phone and crank up his monitor, moving one earphone away from his ear to accommodate the telephone receiver. He'd start setting type. Aretha, Gunsmoke, a woman's voice, the type specs, the text, the movement of his fingers on the keyboard, his eyes on the line, and me. I always had his eye. I was always one of his pieces of eight.
He mumbled, I remember that. He was inaudible, and he spoke in a slangy, sexy, encoded way, but you always knew what he meant. I went home one morning and was awakened by his voice, murmuring into my machine: Hi, beautiful . . . number three burnt down . . . smokin' . . . I repeat: number three burnt down . . . smokin' . . .
I knew that meant that terminal three had had a short in a wire and wasn't functioning, but it said something else to me as well. It said: God baby, Oh god every day you walk in here, I think: if I don't have this woman soon then heaven won't be good enough for me when I die . . .
See, we worked with our hands, that was the problem: our competence abided in our hands. Hands are prehensile genitalia. Hands are sex objects made visible; be-ringed, quotidian, functional, external, wildly suggestive. This was a man with flying fingers. This was a man who could do eight things at once. Ninety words a minute. Music and talk and text and type. This was a man who could do me.
We worked together one Sunday. On weekends, the dingy type shop was like a hotel. Sunlight came in the windows differently. The phone was silent, like we were in an ICU. The mood was odd, italicized, in the absence of the jangles and serifs of weekly commerce. I couldn't hear a word he said all morning. Church day, double overtime. There was a huge project due, and it was just him and me. We worked silently, and I remember feeling terror, and that full feeling, dangerous, like having had too much to drink. Hours passed, two or three. I took a canful of film into the darkroom. The darkroom was gorgeous, curtained in black. There was a certain kind of light in there, red light, light like in the windows of whores in Amsterdam, a kind that wouldn't expose film, a kind that exposed other things; a dark, dreamlike, arousing light: half water, half sloe. The galley processor was a huge machine, almost like a booth, a confessional; film placed like a sin on the dark side, washed through a judgement of lye into legibility, emerging lucid, readable, fluent on the other side, in the light. I turned on the monster, placed the film on the shelf, pulled it out a little way, lifted the lid of the developer, pulled the film a bit further; all things I knew how to do in the dark, had known, would always know. The developer caught the film and pulled it on its own, and it flowed like silk, hissing under the tips of my fingers. I shut the lid, turned, moved the black curtain; and he was there, waiting.
Proofreaders. Typesetters. Experienced Only. Top shop, good money. Well, you put "shop" and "money" in the same paragraph and you were destined to see my pert, destitute young butt come up for an application. I'm a natural for proofreading: a Virgo, a reader, a writer, a perfectionist, a person who memorizes poems in order to eat them. But I had to lie: this was a whole trade. They gave me a test. There was an odd kind of ruler that said PICAS on it, and I thought that was a kind of coffee or tea. They gave me some odd paper and called it film, and told me to read it for spelling and "specs." Someone came in and asked me if I had checked the density, and I said: "Oh yes, I certainly have, and it's fine! The density is lovely, it's perfectly lovely!"
Choose the words; if they don't move you, change them on a dime; you pay for them, you get what you want: "TNT" meant Tight/Not Touching; "T/T" meant Tight and Touching; "Stet" next to type meant Leave Me Alone.
Gilligan's Island, a lucrative coincidence. You had to be smart to do it, and it paid top dollar; good artisans made $25/hr in a $4.00 minimum wage world. As a result, it attracted all kinds of drunk dreamers, transient studs on motorcycles, revenants, actors, loose women, fast risers: Jim Morrison's ex-wife; Duayne, the cocaine-addicted mathematics genius; Roxanne, the one with the habit who French-kissed all the women just to say hello; Jay, who answered our ad for a typesetter and came to his interview naked from the waist up (hired instantly and thereafter became an only occasional pants-wearer ); Henry, a foul-mouthed jazz pianist with a heart transplant; Famm, the deaf gay poet who read lips and kept hoping for a ménage with me and the elevator repair man; the owner's son, hanging around, mumbling, and groping you when you walked past; and Gwendolyn, a typesetter who threw up all the time for no reason and got pregnant by the man responsible for the computer system that synchronizes traffic lights on all the New York City avenues.
foreman on the shift; it was graveyard, twelve to eight; it was all night radio and cigarettes, a combination of high pressure and darkness and silence.
ICU. The mood was odd, italicized, in the absence of the jangles and serifs of weekly commerce. I couldn't hear a word he said all morning. Church day, double overtime. There was a huge project due, and it was just him and me. We worked silently, and I remember feeling terror, and that full feeling, dangerous, like having had too much to drink. Hours passed, two or three. I took a canful of film into the darkroom. The darkroom was gorgeous, curtained in black. There was a certain kind of light in there, red light, light like in the windows of whores in Amsterdam, a kind that wouldn't expose film, a kind that exposed other things; a dark, dreamlike, arousing light: half water, half sloe. The galley processor was a huge machine, almost like a booth, a confessional; film placed like a sin on the dark side, washed through a judgement of lye into legibility, emerging lucid, readable, fluent on the other side, in the light. I turned on the monster, placed the film on the shelf, pulled it out a little way, lifted the lid of the developer, pulled the film a bit further; all things I knew how to do in the dark, had known, would always know. The developer caught the film and pulled it on its own, and it flowed like silk, hissing under the tips of my fingers. I shut the lid, turned, moved the black curtain; and he was there, waiting.
