Me Talk Pretty One Day (15 page)

When Amy rejected his offer, he attempted to set an example. His Christmas dinner was gone in three bites, and dessert was
skipped in favor of a brisk two-mile run. “Anyone want to join me? Amy?” He extended his age-old exercise regimen from ten
minutes to an hour and trotted in place while speaking on the telephone.

Amy kept to her fatty suit until her legs were chafed and pimpled. It was on the morning of our return flight that she finally
revealed her joke, and our father wept with relief. “Ha-ha, you really had me going. I should have known you’d never do that
to yourself. And it’s really fake? Ha-ha.”

He reflected upon the fatty suit for the next several months. “She had me fooled for a minute there, but even with a big,
fat ass she can’t disguise the fact that she’s a beautiful person, both inside and out, and that’s what really matters.” His
epiphany was short-lived, and as the photo shoot approached, he began calling me with technical questions. “Do you happen
to know if this magazine will be hiring a professional beautician? I sure as hell hope so, because her hair is getting awfully
thin. And what are they going to do about lighting? Can we trust the photographer to do a first-class job, or should we call
and see if they can’t come up with someone better?

There’s a lot I don’t tell my father when he calls asking after Amy. He wouldn’t understand that she has no interest in getting
married and was, in fact, quite happy to break up with her live-in boyfriend, whom she replaced with an imaginary boyfriend
named Ricky.

The last time she was asked out by a successful bachelor, Amy hesitated before saying, “Thanks for asking, but I’m really
not into white guys right now.”

That alone would have stopped my father’s heartbeat. “The clock is ticking,” he says. “If she waits much longer, she’ll be
alone for the rest of her life.”

This appears to suit Amy just fine.

When my father phoned asking about the photo shoot, I pretended to know nothing. I didn’t tell him that, at the scheduled
time, my sister arrived at the studio with unwashed hair and took a seat beside the dozen other New York women selected by
the magazine. She complimented them on their flattering, carefully chosen outfits and waited as they had their hair fashioned,
their eyebrows trained, and their slight imperfections masked by powder.

When it was her turn at the styling table, Amy said, “I want to look like someone has beaten the shit out of me.”

The makeup artist did a fine job. The black eyes and purple jaw were accentuated by an arrangement of scratch marks on her
forehead. Pus-yellow pools girdled her scabbed nose, and her swollen lips were fenced with mean rows of brackish stitches.

Amy adored both the new look and the new person it allowed her to be. Following the photo shoot, she wore her bruises to the
dry cleaner and the grocery store. Most people nervously looked away, but on the rare occasions someone would ask what happened,
my sister would smile as brightly as possible, saying, “I’m in love. Can you believe it? I’m finally, totally in love, and
I feel great.”

I
T WAS MY FATHER’S DREAM
that one day the people of the world would be connected to one another through a network of blocky, refrigerator-size computers,
much like those he was helping develop at IBM. He envisioned families of the future gathered around their mammoth terminals,
ordering groceries and paying their taxes from the comfort of their own homes. A person could compose music, design a doghouse,
and… something more, something even better. “A person could… he could…”

When predicting this utopia, he would eventually reach a point where words failed him. His eyes would widen and sparkle at
the thought of this indescribable something more. “I mean, my God,” he’d say, “just think about it.”

My sisters and I preferred not to. I didn’t know about them, but I was hoping the people of the world might be united by something
more interesting, like drugs or an armed struggle against the undead. Unfortunately, my father’s team won, so computers it
is. My only regret is that this had to happen during my lifetime.

Somewhere in the back of my mind is a dim memory of standing in some line holding a perforated card. I remember the cheap,
slightly clinical feeling it gave me, and recall thinking that the computer would never advance much further than this. Call
me naive, but I seem to have underestimated the universal desire to sit in a hard plastic chair and stare at a screen until
your eyes cross. My father saw it coming, but this was a future that took me completely by surprise. There were no computers
in my high school, and the first two times I attempted college, people were still counting on their fingers and removing their
shoes when the numbers got above ten. I wasn’t really aware of computers until the mid-1980s. For some reason, I seemed to
know quite a few graphic designers whose homes and offices pleasantly stank of Spray Mount. Their floors were always collaged
with stray bits of paper, and trapped flies waved for help from the gummy killing fields of their tabletops. I had always
counted on these friends to loan me the adhesive of my choice, but then, seemingly overnight, their Scotch tape and rubber
cement were gone, replaced with odorless computers and spongy mouse pads. They had nothing left that I wanted to borrow, and
so I dropped them and fell in with a group of typesetters who ultimately betrayed me as well.

Thanks to my complete lack of office skills, I found it fairly easy to avoid direct contact with the new technology. The indirect
contact was disturbing enough. I was still living in Chicago when I began to receive creepy Christmas newsletters designed
to look like tabloids and annual reports. Word processors made writing fun. They did not, however, make reading fun, a point
made painfully evident by such publications as The Herald Family Tribune and Wassup with the Wexlers!

Friends who had previously expressed no interest in torture began sending letters composed to resemble Chinese take-out menus
and the Dead Sea Scrolls. Everybody had a font, and I was told that I should get one, too. The authors of these letters shared
an enthusiasm with the sort of people who now arrived at dinner parties hoisting expensive new video cameras and suggesting
that, after dessert, we all sit down and replay the evening on TV. We, the regular people of the world, now had access to
the means of production, but still I failed to see what all the fuss was about. A dopey letter is still a dopey letter, no
matter how you dress it up; and there’s a reason regular people don’t appear on TV: we’re boring.

By the early 1990’s I was living in New York and working for a housecleaning company. My job taught me that regardless of
their purported virtues, computers are a pain in the ass to keep clean. The pebbled surface is a magnet for grease and dirt,
and you can pretty much forget about reaming out the gaps in the keyboard. More than once I accidentally pushed a button and
recoiled in terror as the blank screen came to life with exotic tropical fish or swarms of flying toasters. Equally distressing
was the way people used the slanted roofs of their terminals to display framed photographs and great populations of plush
and plastic creatures, which would fall behind the desk the moment I began cleaning the screen. There was never any place
to plug in the vacuum, as every outlet was occupied by some member of the computer family. Cords ran wild, and everyone seemed
to own one of those ominous foot-long power strips with the blinking red light that sends the message
YOU MUST LEAVE US ALONE
. I was more than happy to comply, and the complaints came rolling in.

Due to my general aversion to machines and a few pronounced episodes of screaming, I was labeled a technophobe, a term that
ranks fairly low on my scale of fightin’ words. The word phobic has its place when properly used, but lately it’s been declawed
by the pompous insistence that most animosity is based upon fear rather than loathing. No credit is given for distinguishing
between these two very different emotions. I fear snakes. I hate computers. My hatred is entrenched, and I nourish it daily.
I’m comfortable with it, and no community outreach program will change my mind.

I hate computers for getting their own section in the New York Times and for lengthening commercials with the mention of a
Web site address. Who really wants to find out more about Procter & Gamble? Just buy the toothpaste or laundry detergent,
and get on with it. I hate them for creating the word org and I hate them for e-mail, which isn’t real mail but a variation
of the pointless notes people used to pass in class. I hate computers for replacing the card catalog in the New York Public
Library and I hate the way they’ve invaded the movies. I’m not talking about their contribution to the world of special effects.
I have nothing against a well-defined mutant or full-scale alien invasion — that’s good technology. I’m talking about their
actual presence in any given movie. They’ve become like horses in a western — they may not be the main focus, but everybody
seems to have one. Each tiresome new thriller includes a scene in which the hero, trapped by some version of the enemy, runs
for his desk in a desperate race against time. Music swells and droplets of sweat rain down onto the keyboard as he sits at
his laptop, frantically pawing for answers. It might be different if he were flagging down a passing car or trying to phone
for help, but typing, in and of itself, is not an inherently dramatic activity.

I hate computers for any number of reasons, but I despise them most for what they’ve done to my friend the typewriter. In
a democratic country you’d think there would be room for both of them, but computers won’t rest until I’m making my ribbons
from torn shirts and brewing Wite-Out in my bathtub. Their goal is to place the IBM Selectric II beside the feather quill
and chisel in the museum of antiquated writing implements. They’re power hungry, and someone needs to stop them.

When told I’m like the guy still pining for his eight-track tapes, I say, “You have eight-tracks? Where?” In reality I know
nothing about them, yet I feel it’s important to express some solidarity with others who have had the rug pulled out from
beneath them. I don’t care if it can count words or rearrange paragraphs at the push of a button, I don’t want a computer.
Unlike the faint scurry raised by fingers against a plastic computer keyboard, the smack and clatter of a typewriter suggests
that you’re actually building something. At the end of a miserable day, instead of grieving my virtual nothing, I can always
look at my loaded wastepaper basket and tell myself that if I failed, at least I took a few trees down with me.

When forced to leave my house for an extended period of time, I take my typewriter with me, and together we endure the wretchedness
of passing through the X-ray scanner. The laptops roll merrily down the belt, while I’m instructed to stand aside and open
my bag. To me it seems like a normal enough thing to be carrying, but the typewriter’s declining popularity arouses suspicion
and I wind up eliciting the sort of reaction one might expect when traveling with a cannon.

“It’s a typewriter,” I say. “You use it to write angry letters to airport authorities.”

The keys are then slapped and pounded, and I’m forced to explain that if you want the words to appear, you first have to plug
it in and insert a sheet of paper.

The goons shake their heads and tell me I really should be using a computer. That’s their job, to stand around in an ill-fitting
uniform and tell you how you should lead your life. I’m told the exact same thing later in the evening when the bellhop knocks
on my hotel door. The people whose televisions I can hear have complained about my typing, and he has come to make me stop.
To hear him talk, you’d think I’d been playing the kettledrum. In the great scheme of things, the typewriter is not nearly
as loud as he makes it out to be, but there’s no use arguing with him. “You know,” he says, “you really should be using a
computer.”

You have to wonder where you’ve gone wrong when twice a day you’re offered writing advice from men in funny hats. The harder
I’m pressured to use a computer, the harder I resist. One by one, all of my friends have deserted me and fled to the dark
side. “How can I write you if you don’t have an e-mail address?” they ask. They talk of their B-trees and Disk Doctors and
then have the nerve to complain when I discuss bowel obstructions at the dinner table.

Who needs them? I think. I figured I’d always have my family and was devastated when my sister Amy brought home a candy-colored
laptop. “I only use it for e-mail,” she said. Coming from her, these words made me physically ill. “It’s fun,” she said. “People
send you things. Look at this.” She pushed a button, and there, on the screen, was a naked man lying facedown on a carpet.
His hair was graying and his hands were cuffed behind his doughy back. A woman entered the room. You couldn’t see her face,
just her legs and feet, which were big and mean-looking, forced into sharp-toed shoes with high, pencil-thin heels. The man
on the carpet shifted position, and when his testicles came into view, the woman reacted as if she had seen an old balding
mouse, one that she had been trying to kill for a long time. She stomped on the man’s testicles with the toes of her shoes
and then she turned around and stomped on them with the heels. She kicked them mercilessly and, just when I thought she’d
finished, she got her second wind and started all over again.

I’d never realized that a computer could act so much like a TV set. No one had ever told me that the picture could be so clear,
that the cries of pain could be heard so distinctly. This, I thought, was what my father had been envisioning all those years
ago when words had failed him, not necessarily this scene, but something equally capable of provoking such wonder.

“Again?” Amy pushed a button and, our faces bathed in the glow of the screen, we watched the future a second time.