Collected Prose: Autobiographical Writings, True Stories, Critical Essays, Prefaces, Collaborations With Artists, and Interviews (47 page)

Smile when the situation doesn’t call for it. Smile when you’re feeling angry, when you’re feeling miserable, when you’re feeling most crushed by the world—and see if it makes any difference.

Smile at strangers in the street. New York can be dangerous, so you must be careful. If you prefer, smile only at female strangers. (Men are beasts, and they must not be given the wrong idea.)

Nevertheless, smile as often as possible at people you don’t know. Smile at the bank teller who gives you your money, at the waitress who gives you your food, at the person sitting across from you on the IRT.

See if anyone smiles back at you.

Keep track of the number of smiles you are given each day.

Don’t be disappointed when people don’t smile back at you.

Consider each smile you receive a precious gift.

TALKING TO STRANGERS

There will be people who talk to you after you smile at them. You must be prepared with flattering comments.

Some of these people will talk to you because they feel confused or threatened or insulted by your show of friendliness. (“You got a problem, lady?”) Plunge in immediately with a disarming compliment. “No, I was just admiring your beautiful tie.” Or: “I love your dress.”

Others will talk to you because they are friendly souls, happy to respond to the human overtures that come their way. Try to keep these conversations going as long as you can. It doesn’t matter what you talk about. The important thing is to give of yourself and see to it that some form of genuine contact is made.

If you find yourself running out of things to say, bring up the subject of the weather. Cynics regard this as a banal topic, but the fact is that no subject gets people talking faster. Stop and think about it for a moment, and you’ll begin to see a metaphysical, even religious quality to this preoccupation with wind-chill factors and Central Park snowfall accumulations. Weather is the great equalizer. There is nothing anyone can do about it, and it affects us all in the same way—rich and poor, black and white, healthy and sick. The weather makes no distinctions. When it rains on me, it also rains on you. Unlike most of the problems we face, it is not a condition created by man. It comes from nature, or God, or whatever else you want to call the forces in the universe we cannot control. To discuss the weather with a stranger is to shake hands and put aside your weapons. It is a sign of goodwill, an acknowledgement of your common humanity with the person you are talking to.

With so many things driving us apart, with so much hatred and discord in the air, it is good to remember the things that bring us together. The more we insist on them in our dealings with strangers, the better morale in the city will be.

BEGGARS AND HOMELESS PEOPLE

I’m not asking you to reinvent the world. I just want you to pay attention to it, to think about the things around you more than you think about yourself. At least while you’re outside, walking down the street on your way from here to there.

Don’t ignore the miserable ones. They are everywhere, and a person can grow so accustomed to seeing them that he begins to forget they are there. Don’t forget.

I’m not asking you to give all your money to the poor. Even if you did, poverty would still exist (and have one more member among its ranks).

At the same time, it’s our responsibility as human beings not to harden our hearts. Action is necessary, no matter how small or hopeless our gestures might seem to be.

Stock up on bread and cheese. Every time you leave the house, make three or four sandwiches and put them in your pocket. Every time you see a hungry person, give him a sandwich.

Stock up on cigarettes as well. Common wisdom says that cigarettes are bad for your health, but what common wisdom neglects to say is that they also give great comfort to the people who smoke them.

Don’t just give one or two. Give away whole packs.

If you find your pockets can’t hold enough sandwiches, go to the nearest McDonald’s and buy as many meal coupons as you can afford. Give these coupons away when you’re out of cheese sandwiches. You might not like the food at McDonald’s, but most people do. Considering the alternatives, they give pretty good value for money.

These coupons will be especially helpful on cold days. Not only will the hungry person be able to fill his stomach, he’ll be able to go inside somewhere and get warm.

If you can’t think of anything to say when you give the coupon to the hungry person, talk about the weather.

CULTIVATING A SPOT

People are not the only ones neglected in New York. Things are neglected as well. I don’t just mean big things like bridges and subway tracks, I mean the small, barely noticeable things standing right in front of our eyes: patches of sidewalk, walls, park benches. Look closely at the things around you and you’ll see that nearly everything is falling apart.

Pick one spot in the city and begin to think of it as yours. It doesn’t matter where, and it doesn’t matter what. A street corner, a subway entrance, a tree in the park. Take on this place as your responsibility. Keep it clean. Beautify it. Think of it as an extension of who you are, as a part of your identity. Take as much pride in it as you would in your own home.

Go to your spot every day at the same time. Spend an hour watching everything that happens to it, keeping track of everyone who passes by or stops or does anything there. Take notes, take photographs. Make a record of these daily observations and see if you learn anything about the people or the place or yourself.

Smile at the people who come there. Whenever possible, talk to them. If you can’t think of anything to say, begin by talking about the weather.

March 5, 1994

THE STORY OF MY TYPEWRITER

(
with Sam Messer
)

Three and a half years later, I came home to America. It was July 1974, and when I unpacked my bags that first afternoon in New York, I discovered that my little Hermes typewriter had been destroyed. The cover was smashed in, the keys were mangled and twisted out of shape, and there was no hope of ever having it repaired.

I couldn’t afford to buy a new typewriter. I rarely had much money in those days, but at that particular moment I was dead broke.

A couple of nights later, an old college friend invited me to his apartment for dinner. At some point during our conversation, I mentioned what had happened to my typewriter, and he told me that he had one in the closet that he didn’t use anymore. It had been given to him as a graduation present from junior high school in 1962. If I wanted to buy it from him, he said, he would be glad to sell it to me.

We agreed on a price of forty dollars. It was an Olympia portable, manufactured in West Germany. That country no longer exists, but since that day in 1974, every word I have written has been typed out on that machine.

*

In the beginning, I didn’t think about it much. A year went by, ten years went by, and not once did I consider it odd or even vaguely unusual to be working with a manual typewriter. The only alternative was an electric typewriter, but I didn’t like the noise those contraptions made: the constant hum of the motor, the buzzing and rattling of loose parts, the jitterbug pulse of alternating current vibrating in my fingers. I preferred the stillness of my Olympia. It was comfortable to the touch, it worked smoothly, it was dependable. And when I wasn’t pounding on the keyboard, it was silent. 

Best of all, it seemed to be indestructible. Except for changing ribbons and occasionally having to brush out the ink buildup from the keys, I was absolved of all maintenance duties. Since 1974, I have changed the roller twice, perhaps three times. I have taken it into the shop for cleaning no more than I have voted in Presidential elections. I have never had to replace any parts. The only serious trauma it has suffered occurred in 1979 when my two-year-old son snapped off the carriage return arm. But that wasn’t the typewriter’s fault. I was in despair for the rest of the day, but the next morning I carried it to a shop on Court Street and had the arm soldered back in place. There is a small scar on that spot now, but the operation was a success, and the arm has held ever since.

*

There is no point in talking about computers and word processors. Early on, I was tempted to buy one of those marvels for myself, but too many friends told me horror stories about pushing the wrong button and wiping out a day’s work—or a month’s work—and I heard one too many warnings about sudden power failures that could erase an entire manuscript in less than half a second. I have never been good with machines, and I knew that if there was a wrong button to be pushed, I would eventually push it.

So I held on to my old typewriter, and the 1980s became the 1990s. One by one, all my friends switched over to Macs and IBMs. I began to look like an enemy of progress, the last pagan holdout in a world of digital converts. My friends made fun of me for resisting the new ways. When they weren’t calling me a curmudgeon, they called me a reactionary and a stubborn old goat. I didn’t care. What was good for them wasn’t necessarily good for me, I said. Why should I change when I was perfectly happy as I was?

Until then, I hadn’t felt particularily attached to my typewriter. It was simply a tool that allowed me to do my work, but now that it had become an endangered species, one of the last surviving artifacts of twentieth-century
homo scriptorus
, I began to develop a certain affection for it. Like it or not, I realized, we had the same past. As time went on, I came to understand that we also had the same future.

Two or three years ago, sensing that the end was near, I went to Leon, my local stationer in Brooklyn, and asked him to order fifty typewriter ribbons for me. He had to call around for several days to scare up an order of that size. Some of them, he later told me, were shipped in from as far away as Kansas City.

I use these ribbons as cautiously as I can, typing on them until the ink is all but invisible on the page. When the supply is gone, I have little hope that there will be any ribbons left.

*

It was never my intention to turn my typewriter into a heroic figure. That is the work of Sam Messer, a man who stepped into my house one day and fell in love with a machine. There is no accounting for the passions of artists. The affair has lasted for several years now, and right from the beginning, I suspect that the feelings have been mutual.