Typewriter

This is something I'm working on, possibly for grad school applications. It's got promise. The narrator is unbelievably irritating, so I'm sorry. 

We fancied ourselves uniquely unsuited for squalor. Even together in the Gleesons’ half-empty loft, sharing a queen-sized bed with covers that smelled like someone had died in them we chuckled high-mindedly at the way that they considered bologna a worthy sandwich meat, we disdained the white bread that they made their toast with and laughed at the way they considered Sunny Delight a fruit juice. We had nothing but our terror and our scorn.

            Gavin was fourteen, gangly even though he hadn’t hit six feet. I was sixteen, still reaching the deep and unbroken defiance of mid-adolescence. I was thick, soft, I ate too much and knew it, daydreamed too much to turn out well. Neither of us had reached periscope sight of talking to an honest-to-god female that wasn’t forty-five and chain smoking in the middle of the Tennessee valley.

            The Gleesons lived outside a town called Barstow, if a town of three hundred people with a post office and a gas station even has an outside. Reggie Gleeson, our uncle, was a man so thin we called him Waluigi when he wasn’t around, after the Mario Brothers character. Unromantically, his wife Dana, the lady that replaced our mother’s sister after her sudden and cancerous demise, was similarly deathlike. In the evenings they would hunch like the skeletons of folding rulers around a coffee table that appeared to have been stolen from an abandoned Goodwill and watch shows I had thought belonged only to souls so tragically infirm they could not change the channel themselves: late-night pap like Wheel of Fortune, Jeopardy and 60 Minutes.

            Dana worked the desk at the Post Office, a job that provided security without adequate compensation. Reggie welded casings for air conditioners in a factory ironically without air conditioning. This fact was the main topic of dinner every night until I nearly lost my mind and was told that I would take dinner in my room. Gavin, in solidarity, took his dinner in the loft as well, despite the chill of the Ozark winter.

            Grief is for those with the luxury to change their surroundings in order to alleviate that indulgent whim. We had no time to be luxurious or indulgent.

            We found the typewriter in the woods shortly after my seventeenth birthday. It was alarmingly teal and slightly rusted but the keys worked fine. We didn’t know how much ink was left in the ribbon but when we found that there was enough to hammer out obscenities we gleefully did so onto water-stained paper for a few minutes. We were a strange sight, my brother and I, hunched over a derelict piece of obsolete technology in the middle of the bald woods in early December, chuckling cloudily to each other in the brittle air as we took turns hammering vulgarities like pagan prayers into the paper.

            “We should write something,” Gavin said. “We can be famous.”

            The idea smashed into our little world like a torch into a well. I lit upon the idea; I, the ungrateful reprobate who spent more time devising ways to trick our blankly idyllic legal relatives into believing we’d done our homework than actually doing the homework, and Gavin, the sweet, quiet, trusting boy that followed my every move and mimicked me, sometimes to the phrase.  I seized on it.

            “We can write a movie.”

            “Why not a novel?” Gavin asked. I hesitated.

            “Nobody makes money with novels.” I said after a moment. My teeth chattered and I clenched them. “Poe died alone. Melville killed himself, I think.”

            “Who’s Melville?”

            “Herman Melville. He wrote Gulliver’s Travels.”

            “Oh.” Gavin ran his slender fingers along the edge of the blue typewriter. “Do movie writers make money?”

            “Tons.” I picked up the typewriter. It was heavy, and the cold metal burned through the sleeve of my jacket. “They’re riding around Beverly Hills in Ferraris and having sex with supermodels all day.”

            “How do you know?”

            I didn’t. “You remember Louis? His grandpa was one.”

            “Lou Vargas? He was a liar.”

            “Yeah, but he was telling the truth about this. His grandpa wrote,” I couldn’t think of whatever film Alex had said, so I picked one that seemed to be a hit, “forty year old virgin and made like twenty million dollars.”

            Gavin hadn’t seen that. Neither had I, just posters at the Walmart in Jackson we went to every couple weeks for things we couldn’t get at the corner market.

            “When I’m rich,” Gavin said, “I want to live in Colorado.”

           

            The most important part of writing a movie, I had heard, was the planning stage. We put the typewriter on a milk crate that lurked in the corner of the loft, and I stole some paper from the printer that Dana kept in the kitchen for recipes. We had a title, too. The Savants we called it, and we typed those golden sacred words at the top of the page very carefully. I didn’t know how to put page numbers on the script, so we just said that we would hire someone to properly format the mess when we’re done. Geniuses can’t be expected to keep up with everything, you know.

            When we went to the store for small things, Gavin and I observed everything that happened. When a family came through town, travel-haggard and caustically brutal with one another, we smirked at each other and wrote down their descriptions in a little moleskine notebook I’d purchased the last time we went into Jackson.