Desks Aren’t Just a Piece of Furniture
A Personal History
The first desk I can clearly remember is from Kindergarten. In my memory it’s gigantic; a square, white-surfaced slab that seated four, two to each side. It’s the desk where I officially learned the alphabet and how to write letters in cursive. Where I learned to count to one hundred and how to recite my old landline number. I still remember it to this day: 345–9047.
Before the first day of school I tripped in the driveway, which was still gravel back then, and split open my left thumb. It left a scar that I see every time I look at my hands when I type. I sat at the desk that day, self-conscious of my bloody thumb, and met my classmates.
I could probably tell stories about all of them. There was Robbie, who once argued (incorrectly) that Lance piloted the Black Lion instead of Keith in Voltron. There was Lee, who brought a tape recorder to Show & Tell and played “Kokomo” by The Beach Boys. There was Ricky and Jeremy, who were a duo, and preternaturally gifted at sports at such a young age. There was a kid named Josh, who tripped while carrying a box of pencils and had to get stitches on his chin. There was a girl named Krystal, who quietly told us boys to look under the desk to show us the cotton panties she was wearing that day.
We cut green construction paper on these desks and glued them together to make Christmas wreaths. We drew on them. We played games and puzzles on them. We had snack time on them. We shouted at one another across these desks and ran and danced around them. The desks were the center of our scholarly universe, and would be for years to come.
By first grade, however, we were given our own individual desks, and that wasn’t much fun. They felt like little individual prisons, but at least they had a storage space and a lid to put our school supplies inside, and god knows what else. Surely there were the standard things like paper and pencils and pens. You were someone special if you had the deluxe 64 box of Crayola crayons. I can recall plastic rulers, Elmer’s glue, textbooks, erasers, etc. Our desks contained multitudes.
I generally left my desk fairly clean over the course of the school year, but some kids — shall we say, customized the surfaces of their desktops. I wish I had pictures of the…art they made with pencil and pen, glue and glitter. We knew the end of the schoolyear had arrived when our teacher, Mrs. Marlin, gave us a can of shaving cream and told us to smother the surface with something that looked like whipped cream but smelled so exotic to me because my dad had a beard and I never saw him shave.
We let the cream sit on the desk for a few minutes and then wiped it clean with a paper towel. The effect was like magic and it never got old throughout the rest of grade school.
In second grade I had my first artistic collaboration with a girl named Jenny. I’ve never been much of an artist, but I used to make these bizarre drawings that had no basis in reality. Frankly, they kind of sucked and I still don’t draw any better. But Jenny offered to color them for me. Somehow she transformed these disfigured geometric abominations into something bright and colorful and beautiful.
I was somewhat of a class clown in those days, full of pratfalls and physical comedy. One day I tripped on the leg of my desk on the way to the board and everyone seemed to think it was hysterical. I pretended I had done it on purpose. Otherwise, I felt like a mediocrity at everything save for reading. That was my one recourse, my one advantage.
By third grade, our class discovered the encyclopedia. What a godsend. I sat at my desk in Mrs. Chaney’s class reading straight through volume after volume. The entire class became obsessed with them, whereas the other third grade class got interested in math. It seems to make perfect sense today. It was around this time that I started to do well in school. The encyclopedia unlocked something in my brain, something like a Pandora’s box, I suppose, that couldn’t ever be put back in again.
Fourth grade brought a new student to town named D’monte, who was short back then. His desk at the back of Mrs. Campbell’s class. I remember him having to sit on his books in order to see the blackboard, which only got him in trouble. Around this time I started to sit at desks closer to the front of class, not to be a so-called teacher’s pet or due to bad eyesight, but because I began to feel rather drunk on the power of learning.
We had to give our first speech ever that year. The substitute teacher gave us 3x5 index cards to make our notes. I wrote furiously at my desk because I was going to present George Washington Carver: botanist, inventor, and all-around bad ass. This meant costumes and memorization. I recall the sub criticizing my notes because I had a preponderance back then of using the word, “stuff.”
As in, “He did stuff.”
“What is stuff?” she grilled me with a knowing glance. “What kind of stuff?”
“Uhh...” I needed to dig deeper, I realized, and produce concrete evidence and facts. I needed to be more specific.
It was a valuable lesson, one that I’ve never forgotten.
In fifth grade, our teacher went on sick leave not long after the parent/teacher conference at the beginning of the year. In her place we had a substitute, Ms. Locke, who replaced her for the entire year. Our desks were constantly shuffling. One week they’d be in a vast circle around the room; the next they’d be in rows.
Everyone loved Ms. Locke. Most substitute teachers didn’t receive much in the way of respect since the children knew they’d be there only for a day or two. She’s the first teacher I had who actively promoted literature on its own merits. We had a classroom book club. Ms. Locke affixed a poster to the wall with everyone’s name on it. For every book we read, we’d receive a golden star sticker next to our name. Let the games begin.
By the end of the year, my stickers had surpassed the length of the poster by more than a foot. I wish I’d kept a list of everything I read that year. Probably a lot of R.L. Stine, Hardy Boys, and Nancy Drew. I’m quite certain I fit “A Wrinkle in Time” in there somewhere too. After recess, Ms. Locke would spend half an hour reading “The Hobbit” out loud to us. It was glorious.
Fifth grade is also when I got my first taste of writing stories of my own. There was a school competition that year among all the schools in my district. I had an idea for a story, but it needed to be typed. After my sister moved out, we turned her old bedroom into a “computer room.” Our first computer was an Apple IIe. Raise your hand if you remember what that looked like. This was the late 80s/early 90s, near the end of the 5.25-inch floppy disk drive era.
My father decided to buy it because he could see, even back then, that computers would be a big part of the future. Or would be intimately tied to my future, at any rate. I think he envisioned me becoming a programmer of some kind. But at the age of eleven, I didn’t have much in the way of typing skills, so I enlisted the help of my mom to transcribe my story into a digital form. We didn’t have a proper desk at this point; merely a table with foldable metal legs.
Today I can no longer recall the genesis of the story. It seemed to come to me fully formed, a kind of mental Fabergé egg. There was a lot of anti-drug propaganda in my school. There were D.A.R.E. posters and school assemblies and “Just say no” role plays. It was inescapable. To that end, I penned a story about a guy who gets caught up with a drug dealer, appropriately named Booze Cruz. Like most fiction, it was the villain that made the story. I turned it in to my teacher and then forgot about it. Another boy, Robin, felt sure he would be the winner.
He was the new kid in town, brilliant but troubled. Rap culture had entered our sheltered suburban lives almost by osmosis. Not long before we were debating whether M.C. Hammer or Phil Collins deserved a Grammy. Vanilla Ice came and went. But the East Coast / West Coast feud was brewing and it felt imperative to choose sides.
We became experts in flashing gang symbols, whether Bloods or Crips or Gangster Disciples, and learned how to draw that funny-shaped S on our desks. It’s completely absurd in retrospect. We were eleven-year-olds pretending to be gang members. Most of us were white and didn’t know any better. This is the same year I dressed up as Dick Tracy for Halloween.
At some point I received word that in fact I had won the short story competition. I swelled with pride. I kept the original copy and it still exists today, hidden somewhere in my parent’s house.
The next year found us in Mr. Bohnenstiel’s class. The desks were arranged in regimental rows, but constantly covered in №2 pencil graffiti. Rather than the jointed lids of previous years, these desks had a cavernous slot facing the seat. It was the final year we’d each have a desk of our own. From then on out, it would be a series of musical chairs as we jumped from classroom to classroom.
A few things stand out from this final year of elementary school. It is the last time I did indisputably well in math. I also won Mr. B’s Brain Strain — a high pressure quiz game — which could be considered one of my finest academic achievements. That year I was also caught by my classmate Ryan reading the definition for “sex” in the dictionary. I’ve always been an insatiable reader.
Academic desks became a nuisance for me by the time I was a teenager and entering junior high. Not only were we forbidden to draw on their surface, but they lacked the premium storage of previous years. Arts and crafts were generally a thing of the past. These desks were designed exclusively for books and papers. They were also designed for right-handed people, as it turns out. For a lefty like me, that meant no use of the arm rest and less usable space.
Life as a lefty has always felt like a series of slights and insults.
I’ve always hated scissors since the best ones have always been made for right-handed folks. Writing from left to right meant I’d always have a stain of ink, lead, or marker on the bottom part of my hand. Spiral notebooks too would leave marks in the same place. Most hockey sticks and baseball gloves and golf clubs were made for the other 90% of the population. Learning as a lefty meant teaching myself how to do everything in reverse.
While the desks at school were increasingly becoming a major source of disappointment, the situation at home had improved. We upgraded computers from the Apple IIe to the Macintosh II series. The floppy drive got smaller. There was this newfangled graphical user interface and a funny thing called a mouse. I moved into my parent’s old bedroom, where they had installed this enormous L-shaped desk. It was made of faux-wood and I loved it. It had cabinets and drawers and a place where I could have my own personal phone line installed.
Computer games up to that point in time were objectively horrible. I preferred my NES, then the Genesis, from Mario to Sonic, Mega Man to NHLPA ‘93. But suddenly I was able to play Doom and Warcraft 2 on System 7 and it was marvelous, like entirely new worlds of possibility had opened up. Having my own phone line allowed me to do direct dial-up connections via TCP/IP so that I could play Warcraft 2 matches with friends living across town.
Then, one day we started receiving these floppy disks in the mail and bundled with magazines, advertising something called America Online. Maybe you’ve heard of it. That was my gateway. I retain a certain nostalgia for these beeps and klaxons as the phone line connected.
With America Online, that sound soon became synonymous with the World Wide Web. I don’t remember anyone calling it the Internet back then. It was labyrinthian a place of chat rooms, interminable load times, and the login sound of, “You’ve got mail!” I recently read that that guy today drives an Uber, which must mean something significant, I’m sure.
By the time I began high school, we gave in and bought a PC. It seemed like a good reason at the time. Circa 1997, just before the release of the iMac, it’s hard to believe Apple was on its deathbed. It was much harder to find software and there were many more games available for PC, and that was a major selling point to a kid at the age of fifteen.
The less said about the desks in high school the better. They were utterly forgettable things, consigned to anonymity. Since junior high it had become common for people to fall asleep in class. Like that kid who drools on the desk in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. School desks had devolved over the years from a childhood treasure chest to a pre-tablet graffiti board to an ergonomic nightmare.
I spent most of high school bored and waiting to go to college. I played music in band and studied Spanish and German. When I wasn’t playing Final Fantasy 7, I was probably watching a VHS tape of Braveheart or My Blue Heaven. I wanted to be a professional cyclist and got my first job at a pizzeria in order to buy a Cannondale R300. The color faded from red to yellow. I felt like a social chameleon, able to fit in everywhere and yet be invisible at the same time.
I went away to college up north near Chicago. The only major difference between classrooms was when I (occasionally) attended large lecture hall seminars. It was more like a sparsely attended concert than a class. The desks were a joke, and I can barely remember using them, aside from making awful doodles.
The desk in my dorm room was a monolithic, rectangular dresser with just enough space for a CRT monitor. This was just before the flat screen LCD revolution took flight. It was ugly and impractical, but I used the hell out of that desk those first two years. The desk doubled as a dresser, housing both my computer (then a Compaq tower), jeans, and underwear in the same place. The desk was something to use and abuse, something to take for granted.
I tried my hand at a screenplay as a freshman, conjuring up a pretentious meta-fictional story that was inspired by too many late night viewings of Fight Club. I downloaded a lot of music too, since college was the first time I had access to high speed internet.
The following year I got a job writing a column for the Northern Star, my campus newspaper. Did I mention I went to school to study journalism? This column was not your standard bit of reporting. Highly under the influence at the time, of Hunter S. Thompson, I wrote a mixed bag of highly subjective “man out on the town” type of pieces, libtard nostalgia for the Clinton years (the Iraq War was about to get underway), rancorous hatred for the Detroit Red Wings, and the time I carried around a so-called “War Hammer” around campus for the night.
It was fun. Because my picture was next to my byline, I got noticed at parties all over town. It was my brief flirtation with something akin to fame. It generally consisted of someone coming up to me while I was double-fisting beers and saying, “Dude, I read your latest article in the Star! It was great!”
That changed after I moved into a house with other eight other people my junior year. For the first time I had a desk I could call my own. Small, black, and minimal in design, I liked it because it had wheels. There was a keyboard tray that slid in and out. I bought a big black office chair that also had wheels. It swiveled, and chairs that swivel are unequivocally the best kind of chairs.
During this year I started my first long-term writing project. I called it The Book of Isms. I used spiral top-bound memo pads to write quippy inside jokes and observations. They were at turns honest and vulgar, stupid and insightful. They were kind of like Twitter several years before it even existed. I ended up filling five memo pads, front-to-back with my post-adolescent gobbledygook.
I returned home to St. Louis the following year to finish my degree closer to home. I had switched majors from journalism to English because I decided journalism was too narrow and limiting a field.
I didn’t want to just report facts and figures. I wanted to experiment and to explore the nooks and crannies of literature.
There’s that cliché about the human condition. I wanted to write fiction to feel alive. I told my friend Mark, today a successful Chicago-based playwright, that I had switched majors and he said, with somewhat of a lament, “It happens to the best of us.”
Back home with my folks, we dismantled the old desk and upgraded to a modern, streamlined desk. It also had wheels, but wheels don’t roll so well on carpet. It was similar in style to my personal desk at college, but bigger and with two rows of shelves to store things like a printer.
I then got a job at FedEx and bought a PowerBook. It came with an iPod too, which was fantastic. These things don’t matter — they’re just tools — though I had decided to return to Apple for good. But having made the switch to a laptop meant my days of needing a desk were numbered.
I started to write my first novel. I wrote a hundred or so pages of first person garbage. It made the pretentiousness of my freshman year screenplay sound Oscar worthy. I took creative writing classes at school and gradually improved, thanks for the advice of professors like Geoff Schmidt and Valerie Vogrin.
As an experiment, Geoff asked me to rewrite the first chapter from a different POV. Why not? I wrote it, he read it, and gave his verdict. “This is much better,” he said. I took that as a sign and ran with it.
At FedEx, I generally worked from 4 p.m. to midnight. I’d get home around 12:30 or so, eat dinner, crack open a bottle of vodka, and get to work. Typically, I’d sit at that desk and write until four or five in the morning, sleep until noon, go to work, rinse, repeat.
By 2006, that routine was uprooted. I had maybe six chapters of the book finished. My parents decided to sell the house of my birth. Rather than immediately move into a new place, we all moved in with my sister. It figured to be a crowded arrangement.
Upstairs there was my sister and her daughter. Eventually her boyfriend moved in, and he had two teenage sons. My parents moved into the bedroom in the basement. I moved into the basement as well, but I didn’t have a room of my own. Instead, we had a section of the room cordoned off with bookshelves and that’s where my dog and I hung out.
For the first time since kindergarten, I didn’t have a desk. But that had ceased to be a problem. I had that laptop. I wrote constantly. I wrote in bed mostly, but would take the computer out on the deck by the swimming pool or a table on the patio. I’d write on the couch or on the floor, it didn’t matter. Just me and the dog. A desk became just…stuff. Furniture, something that was only as useful as you made it.
Then, on an otherwise unremarkable evening near the start of spring, after endless setbacks, doubts, personal dramas, and four hundred pages of prose, I sat cross-legged in bed and typed two of the most satisfying words in the English language: “The End.”
Meanwhile, our new house was being built. We moved in there the summer of 2008. I wanted a desk again. I’d recently read Stephen King’s memoir, “On Writing,” and he wrote about having this huge slab of a desk. It made me jealous. My dad learned that one of his colleagues had this massive rolltop desk for sale. I bought it and then came the monumental task of transporting that to the basement of the new house. That sumbitch was heavy, even divided into two parts.
That’s where I sat at night doing revisions to the book. It was my own personal office. There was a space for everything. I had the book printed and made line edits with a red pen. Then I went through it again.
I read the David Foster Wallace book “Infinite Jest” during this time. It took me a month to read. Then, the morning after I finished, I went on the web to discover he had hanged himself the night before. Bad tidings…
I briefly tried my hand at the publishing game in spring of 2009. I agonized for weeks over crafting the perfect query letter. It’s profoundly difficult to condense and summarize a book you spent years on into a few paragraphs. Every word must be perfect, the concept has to sizzle and pop. I’ve never thought of myself as a good salesman, though. Still, I crossed my fingers and sent off query letters to around ten literary agents.
I wasn’t successful. Some agents responded right away. Others responded a couple weeks later. It was an apocalyptic period. Thousands of people were losing their jobs, getting laid off. People were angry and afraid. I had become unemployed myself, counting down the days before I’d move to Prague to teach English as a foreign language.
The literary marketplace seemed suspended in time. A lot of folks were transitioning to a full-time digital life. The first iPhone had come out the year before. People were starting to buy e-books at an unprecedented rate. I read articles about “the death of the paperback.” Scary times indeed.
My first month in Prague was spent out in the boondocks, far from the lively city center. I lived in a pre-fabricated panelák outfitted with Soviet era furniture. My room had a cheap wooden desk that I used more as a shelf. Instead, I had fully transitioned to using a bed as my de facto office.
This pattern continued when I moved into the cadastral district of Vinohrady. The truth is, I had become used to getting by without a desk. The laptop had become the tool of my liberation.
I didn’t write much in Prague for a few reasons. For one, I was quite busy teaching. My hours were spread out throughout the day. And when I wasn’t teaching, I was socializing. I met new people every day. The expatriate community there is very active and there were always gatherings at the beer garden or a pub, visits to the park to play Frisbee, cultural visits to museums and castles, promenades along the Vltava River.
After receiving my first round of rejections for the book, I abandoned fiction for a while. I’d spent years cultivating a story from thin air. Of course, that’s one of the great illusions of fiction. People always asked me, “Is your novel about you?” No, of course it isn’t. But there are always tiny elements that creep inside and find their way to all the nooks and crannies of the story. They’re like little Easter Eggs for the people who know you best. Living in Prague was a way to see life from a different angle, to learn and grow, to add new emotions and experiences to my existence.
There I became truly independent for the first time in my life. I found work that I enjoyed. Even if it didn’t pay much, the results were always rewarding. There too I fell in love with a feisty and intelligent girl from France. So what if I wasn’t writing as much? So what if I didn’t have a desk?
When we moved to France at the end of 2010, we didn’t have much in the way of furniture. We had a mattress and some IKEA tables, a TV stand, and a futon. We didn’t buy a desk. A few years later we upgraded apartments and filled our lives with other things and furniture, but still we didn’t get a desk. We didn’t need one, but sometimes I wish we had one. As this essay can attest, sometimes I feel nostalgic for them.
I’m not sure where we’d put a desk though. We don’t have a spare room to turn into an office. We’re on-the-go professionals with a living room, kitchen, bedroom, and a bathroom. So I still write sitting at the edge of the bed, or at the park, or on the couch, or wherever I can find the space and time to think and breathe and spend a few hours to create. The recent fad is to have treadmill desks, which I find a bit much. But I’ve always liked to stand and pace when I’m in the groove.
Sometimes in the morning, if I don’t have a lesson, I will go into the kitchen and get the electric tea kettle going. I’ll put my computer on the ironing board, prop up the bottom of the keyboard at a 35 degree angle, infuse a tea, play some Prince, and dance around the kitchen in my socks. Then I’ll clack away at the keyboard for a while. It’s sounds absurd, but I’ve never been concerned with appearances, only with what works.
I’ve used a lot of words (too many?) to tell a series of small stories about the desks I’ve had in my life. I think a lot of people can relate to the relationships we each have with our desks, even if you’ve never stopped to think about it.
I’ve never worked in an office, but I imagine a desk would be my own personal sanctuary. So no, desks aren’t just furniture; they’re a space for our things and our thoughts and our memories. A desk can have personality and a desk can be cramped and awful, but I for one, have always appreciated them.
