BALLAD OF A PENCIL JUNKIE
AS A CHILD, I HAD two formative experiences with pencils. The first was in kindergarten, when we were learning to print our names. We were sitting in miniature chairs at low tables, and the teacher, Miss Crosby, had put a card in front of each of us with our name printed on it, and we were supposed to practice copying our name onto a sheet of paper. I clutched the thick Ticonderoga, and though I formed each letter with great care, when I was finished and sat back to behold the finished product, it was gibberish: sirroN yraM. Miss Crosby came up behind me (I didn’t like that; those were the days of bomb shelters and air-raid drills, and you never knew what might happen) and moved my right hand—the one with the pencil in it—to the far side of the sheet of paper, and when I copied my name again it came unscrambled. For years after that, to get started on the right—that is, the left—side of the paper I had to close my eyes and transport myself back to that kindergarten classroom, with the blocks and the beads and the yellow stains on the floor, and picture the door in back of me and the tall windows in front of me, and then move my hand across my body in the direction of the window farthest from the door, and place the pencil on the paper. That is how I learned to write from left to right.
The other experience took place at home, at the kitchen table. My parents had “stepped out,” as my mother said—they did this very rarely, going down to a beer joint called the Ivy Inn on Denison Avenue—and left my brother Miles in charge. I was amusing myself with pencil and paper. I liked to lick the tip of the pencil lead before applying it to the paper. I suppose I imagined that a moistened pencil point made a darker impression. This was a different kind of pencil—I had scraped it up from somewhere, possibly from my father’s workbench. There was a chronic shortage of pencils in our house. It had no eraser on top, and its mark was purplish. It was especially satisfying to lick. Miles noticed what I was doing, and said, “That’s an indelible pencil!” My hands were stained and my lips were blue. He told me to stick out my tongue: purple. “Those stains will never come off!” he said.
From Catholic school, I knew about stains—the permanent stain of original sin—and I panicked and started bawling. As I blubbered and rubbed my eyes, the tears spread the purple stain across my cheeks. I was convinced that from then on my guilt would be visible on the outside.
Ever since, my taste in pencils has run to the erasable. It was cemented when I was working for Ed Stringham, in the collating department. Ed had a light touch—his handwriting was neat and precise but faint, and that was the problem. The collated proof was sent to the printer by fax, and Ed’s markings sometimes did not transmit. Crossing lines was a cardinal sin in collating, so if you wanted to move, say, a whole paragraph on a page that was already a tangle of lines, you had to distinguish that mark somehow, and Ed was in the habit of reaching for the blue pencil. But the fax was colorblind, and, far from standing out, blue did not transmit at all. The men in the makeup department begged Ed not to use blue. He would remember for a while, but soon he would return to his old ways. He was incorrigible.