Glass (Small Press Distribution (All Titles)) by Sam Savage Read Free Book Online

it. Not many places still sell typewriter ribbons these days, I discovered; none of the stores in my part of town had a match for my machine, so on the advice of a clerk in one of them I took a bus, two buses in fact, across the river to a district I had never been to before, where there were a lot of low buildings I took to be warehouses, through a part of town entirely inhabited by black people, so that staring out through the rain-blurred windows I thought I was in another country, and then I walked several blocks in the still-drizzling rain to a store the man had said specializes in typewriters. I wondered if he had made a mistake, because when I finally reached the address, I found a little shop that, except for a nineteen-fiftyish looking poster in the display window of a young woman in a pleated skirt and pearl necklace seated at a typewriter, looked from the outside more like an old-fashioned corner grocery than anything else. Beneath the poster a large gray cat was asleep on what appeared to be a folded sweatshirt. I pushed through the door and then just stood there a moment waiting for the man sitting behind the counter to look up from his magazine—an elderly, rather pudgy man, swaddled in a thick sweater. He must have had a shirt on under the sweater with large knobby things in the pockets, as he seemed all lumps and bulges, or else had a terrible disease. When he finally raised his eyes I noticed how tired he looked. He did not have a match for my ribbon, he said after looking at it. The best he could do, he said, was sell me one for a different brand of machine but with the same width as mine, width being all that really matters. I had only to unwind the new ribbon from the spools it came on and rewind it on the spools from my machine, he said. It was not a store, actually, or not a store mainly—mainly it was a typewriter repair shop. A dozen or so machines that people had probably dropped off there to be fixed were lined up on metal shelves against the wall behind the counter, a manila tag at the end of a piece of twisted wire dangling from each. While the man was in back looking for a match for my ribbon, I leaned across the counter, craning, but most of the tags were too high or were facing the wrong way for me to make out the names. I was interested in the names because I don’t know anyone who still has a typewriter—has one, that is, in the sense of using it to type on, as opposed to having it lying around in a garage or basement, which I imagine a great many people still do—and I felt a kinship. I was able to read the names on only two of the tags. One was attached to a huge pale-green IBM electric of the sort that toward the end one saw just about everywhere—just about everywhere in offices, that is, not usually in people’s houses—not ever in people’s houses, in my experience. I was struck by just how huge it was. While I might be able to lift it off the ground just barely, I would not be able to carry it up a flight of stairs if I lived on an upper floor. I do live on an upper floor, and what I mean to say is, if I lived on an upper floor and I were the owner of such a huge typewriter I would never manage to get it up there, in which case I would want to swap it for something smaller, probably. That would not be terribly difficult, I imagine, IBM typewriters being among the very best, being considered among the very best, I should say, since I don’t want to suggest that I have had personal experience with them. I suppose I could always just hire somebody strong to carry it up the stairs, if it came to that, though of course it would mean doing the same thing again every time it needed repairs, though being an IBM Selectric that would not happen often, if ever, though on the other hand it obviously does happen occasionally or why was the typewriter here? It was, according to the tag, the property of someone named Henry Poole. When I say I have not had personal experience with this model