April 1998
Pacific Northwest
Urban Writing
This Beloved Underwood
Willie Smith
I LOVE MY WIFE. I never beat her. But I'm a healthy American boy. So I am consumed with the desire to beat my wife. Especially after I come home from work. Or before going out to mow the lawn.
Instead, I beat this jaded Underwood. Every night, sit here with my beer and peanuts and pound the bejuses outta the plastic.
"You gash!" my fingers scream. "Take that!"
Whap, slam, smack-a-smacka-smacksmack!
"Don't just sit there with your teeth in your mouth - goddamnit, I'm kicking the shit outta you, you fucking slut!"
I used to have a battered Sears model. Picked her up in a pawn shop for fifty bucks. She saw me through six novels. Two of those actually readable. But she started skipping. Her escapement went wrong because of my whamming the crap out of her.
One night, while banging out a letter to an unknown poet on the other end of town, she suddenly zapped across the line, sputtering my sentence in a blue of z's and q's.
Well, I had been drinking. It wasn't an important letter. Not an important poet. Neither is this an important town. But to view my turning train of thought derailed like so much catvomit on the sofa...
I hefted her above my head and slammed her down on the desk. Her platform flew out like a rolling-pin. A cascade of ball-bearings splattered on the desk, the drawers, the floor.
"You fucking bitch!" I howled. Grabbing her. Racing upstairs.
My wife came groggily out of the bedroom, as I lunged down the hall: "I'm throwing the fucking typewriter off the balcony!"
In her nightgown, she followed. The demise was stunning: I heaved the junker into the maple, where she crashed through branches, coming to rest like a dud deep in the gloom of the blackberries.
It was midnight. Traffic on the freeway desultory.
"That was exciting," my wife yawned. "I guess you're coming to bed now?" I finished the letter with a pencil stub the next morning over instant coffee, muffin, aspirin. I went out on the porch to listen to the violent freeway. Look for bits of the typer.
Unpruned trees. Twenty-foot high, burgeoning, sucker-crazy laurel hedge. Butterfly bush run amok. Blackberries tangled to the balcony upstairs. Nothing. Not a trace. The whore had vanished, as had the sentence her final transgression annihilated.
At the time, I didn't have a job. I hadn't mowed the lawn in fifteen years. That afternoon, I visited an old girlfriend. Didn't touch her (I was too busy trying to reconstruct that lost sentence - besides, I love my wife--), and slowly, as we sipped her wine, I talked her out of an old portable I remembered she had, from her college days - up in the attic?
A Smith-Corona. She never saw it again.
I am fantastically loyal to my wife.
The Smith-Corona put up with two of my failed novels, about four hundred mediocre poems and dozens of short stories, before I clobbered her silly, the stress of all that expressed frustration freezing her keys solid. No good to me, I dumped her in the garbage. Fortunately, by then, I had a job. I was a Roto-Rooter skin diver. Lasted six months, before quitting, because I couldn't take any more shit. Five dollars an hour, no benefits, constant immersion in sewage.
Hence, the very afternoon the Smith-Corona froze, I went out and bought the Underwood. A fifty-point 1948 model. Her spacebar lagged. Her tab too stiff to flex. Platen intaglio-ed, like a bald tire brutally resurrected into snow tire. She had been mishandled before. The geek at the pawn shop assured me I was no more than her fourth owner.
I'm not proud. Just full of hate. C'mom, my litter Miss Underwood - help me get it out!
© The Raven Chronicles 1998