002: Chapter 2
It had all been a whirl, how he ended up getting the job. A nice young woman behind the counter had explained that it was a good thing he had come in that day, because it was her last, and that the Werewolf family were very nice people (yes, that was their actual surname). She’d been working there for two years and would have been heartbroken if they hadn’t found anyone to replace her. Things worked in a bit of an antiquated manner at Werewolf Diskdrive, she explained, and pointed to a dusty behemoth of an instruction manual in the corner which she said had all the schematics (and presumably instructions) for fixing the old floppy or zip drives that would occasionally come in. Eric Elbogen couldn’t help thinking of it as some kind of weird Dungeon Master’s Guide for circuits.
Most of the time, she said, people would come in because they were lonely, asking if the shop could repair a thirty-year-old Swatch watch or if they could source tiny replacement bulbs for a Lite-Brite. They would talk nostalgically for 30 or 40 minutes about these objects and how important they were, how much they couldn’t imagine their lives without them. Half the time, the keepsakes weren’t even broken. And while the shop had a strict policy to never charge a customer unless actual repairs were done, the patrons would still leave tips in an old jar on the counter.
Again, it all happened so quickly, and before he knew it, the nice young woman was tossing him the keys and wishing him luck. There hadn’t been any talk of wages or hours, just a brief synopsis about how she and her boyfriend were moving to Omaha, Nebraska to be closer to their families. And then she was gone. The jingly bells attached to the front door stopped jangling and he thought of the word ‘poof’ while simultaneously conjuring the image of the Road Runner, a fast-moving bird character from a cartoon he used to watch when he was a kid. There would always be a wisp of smoke left from where the Road Runner started its sprint, to indicate the velocity with which it had accelerated.
A slow dose of panic began to creep in, now that he had actually achieved the thing he had wanted to achieve. He feared that he had made a big mistake, and quickly considered just locking up the shop and never looking back. What mostly prevented him from doing that was the thought that he would need to decide where to mail the keys once he did. Would he look for an address for a member of the Werewolf family or just mail it to the shop itself? He gazed around at the various knickknacks that lined the shelves of the store and reminded himself that, at this point, he didn’t have much of choice if he wanted to be able to pay his bills for the next few months.
Amid his bout of indecision, the door to the shop opened. An older woman with a small, panting dog in her arm walked in with a smile. “Hello,” she said, “do you sell typewriters? I’ve been looking everywhere in the city and can’t seem to find anyone who does.” He thought of all the time he spent sitting behind a merchandise table when he was still making music. Of how often he’d have to try and figure out how to sell a t-shirt or record for one of the other bands on the bill who was on stage but hadn’t left a price list or instructions for what sizes they had in stock. They both glanced to a shelf near the side of the room that had a beautiful pearl black Rocket typewriter sitting on it. “You know what, miss,” he said … “I believe we do!” They walked over to examine the goods while she explained her predicament. Apparently, the woman felt an incredible amount of guilt about not being into the tablet sized hand-computer her granddaughter had given her for her birthday, but she really preferred the touch of real keys while she was writing her correspondence. He told her he understood completely and added how nice it was to not have to stare at a screen or hear the faint electro-buzz of a lithium battery. A handwritten tag attached to the Rocket read that it had been recently serviced, worked great and was on sale for only $5. It seemed they were both in luck, so they smiled at each other in acknowledgement.
This isn’t so bad, Eric Elbogen thought as he placed the typewriter into its custom carrying case and opened the cash register to give the woman change for her hundred-dollar bill. She thanked him for his help, told the dog to say goodbye to the nice man and walked out leaving him again in silence. Just beneath the register was a simple shop ledger with old-style, carbon-blue triplicate transfer paper, as well as four №3 pencils and a small green analog sharpener. He opened the ledger and made note of the sale. It felt strange and foreign to use a writing instrument instead of tapping carefully on a small glass screen, but he liked the nostalgia it triggered.
Now that this first hurdle was out of the way, he felt different. It wasn’t exactly pride. Maybe a distant cousin. But he did feel good in a way he wasn’t used to, appreciating the complicated sequence of events that led him to this very simple moment of transaction he’d just had. Helping someone cross a very specific, tangible need off of their to-do list was quite different than summoning musical notes and rhyming words from the ether and converting them into a nebulous casserole that either would or would not resonate with other people in the world, let alone surpassing the barriers that kept them from learning about its existence at all. The woman needed a typewriter so he sold her one. It was beautiful.
Once the thought has passed, he began to survey the rest of the drawers and shelves to find what else could pique his interest. There wasn’t much he could see but he reached back behind where the ledger lived and found one of those crude handheld monochrome LCD games that Mattel made in the late 1970s and early 1980s. He had had one of the Missile Attack games when he was a kid, and remembered a friend who owned the Football one, but he had never seen this one, a vector-based racing game that had a picture of a wacky werewolf in a race-car driver getup. He failed to see what the werewolf had to do with the game, but assumed it was some kind of marketing tactic that made more sense in the early 80s. And even though it was clearly meant to be some kind of Formula racing, he couldn’t help but picture a dracula, a frankenstein and a mummy laughing wildly as they battled the werewolf in a round of bumper cars.
“Doodle-lee-doo,” the game chimed as he slid the power switch to the on position. He played for a few minutes, its crudeness refreshing, but he couldn’t quite understand why it would musically chime a death knell (with a melody reminiscent of Butterfield’s Lullaby) every time he would lose a race. He assumed the game’s creator was suggesting that a lack of a win was analogous to death, which was a bit morbid even for him. Still, he felt taunted by the melody and tried a few more times to beat the game by winning a race. This proved to be unsuccessful and after several attempts he put the game down on the counter and looked over at the big instructional manual with the schematics. He realized he better start studying up.
