Steve Katz - Kissssss - A Miscellany

Joe's big hands spelled trouble at the keyboard. The pads of his fingers were colossal, so that even if he struck the keys perpendicularly, with only the blunt point of each finger, he would register three, or even four letters at once. Even with the point of his jumbo pinky he would hit at least two. Nelly believed Joe could improve with practice if he learned to hold his hands as she showed him, poised above the keyboard, fingers striking lightly straight down. If this practice became habit his skills might increase, in proportion to his increasing understanding. Joe was big, but he wasn't stupid. He easily grasped the nuances of Microsoft Word, at least, conceptually. Other programs, like PowerPoint, or the Adobe family, would not be a problem; at least, conceptually. Nonetheless, his big hands spelled yertwqreoiuptiyubnvck;ljterw at the keyboard.

Nelly invested a lot of time and work to teach him. She could sympathize. She liked him. He was big, he was white, he was clumsy. He was brilliant, in his way. He was a third trimester abortion that had failed, thank God; and when he was old enough to understand that — six foot one at the age of eleven — he ran away from his mom, who was relieved finally to be quit of him.

Joe Gargantus' father was a sailor, one of those merchant seamen who spent as little time on shore as possible, because he had no attachments there, and wanted none, and had little respect for the gang of landlubbers that chose to rattle in place on the big island. He preferred life at sea, where there was less to separate you from oblivion, and you could feel your foundations move while you played Omaha and Crib with your mates below deck. He was also a pederast and a pedophile on land, so his son, Joe, was a big mistake, the result of a tedious moment on shore with a woman who took a shine to him while they were waiting in a movie line near Times Square. He was alone, and she was alone. The movie was Giant , on a big screen. It starred James Dean. They sat together in the balcony. They got close, then closer. The rest is history — or call it Joe, which is what she calls each of her kids, her dog, her houseplants, and her current boyfriend. It's convenient when all is Joe. Joe's father never knew about him, though he might have enjoyed Joe's company when he was a six-year-old, before he really started to grow.

Of course, Nelly Mishbooker didn't know any of this about Joe Gargantus. If she had it might have pushed her sympathies even further, and who knows what she would have done then for him; whereas now she gave him some special attention, trying to get him to orient his big hands correctly over the keyboard, and she never let him give in to his frustration and would stay with him a little longer, past the ninety minutes of the class, but this was nothing she wouldn't have done for any of her students with special problems.

In fact, Joe didn't know this about himself, and the idea that he might have had a father somewhere hardly ever crossed his mind. When once he saw a picture of James Dean in a Sunday magazine story, he felt a slight perturbation, and made a mental note that he might rent those movies some time; but that he might connect this actor with his own conception, or think that James Dean might be his father? Unlikely.

Melinda, his mom, didn't know the whole story either. At the time of Joe's conception his father was watching the movie over her shoulder while she listened from his lap. She saw the light stream widen out of the projector window. She sucked at names. A sailor. Joe. Maybe he said Gargantus. What the hell?

Nelly Mishbooker was raised in a sharecropper's shack in South Carolina. Her father was a white boy who took advantage of her mother almost daily for a whole summer as she walked home in the evening from Fiona Mishbooker's estate, where she did housecleaning and gardening. The white boy was Mrs. Mishbooker's son, Beeper, who became a state senator, then lieutenant governor, then ran for the U.S. Senate and almost won. He was the force behind the drive to change the colors of all the roadsigns in the state and, by God, they were changed. Of course, he denied his paternity; so although Nelly knew her father was a Mishbooker, it did her little good. She took the name for her own in later life just because it seemed the spiteful thing to do. Perhaps these circumstances made for a special mysterious bond between herself and Joe, that semi-orphanhood that they tacitly could recognize in each other. Nelly's stepfather, Cyrus Ophilus Mackenzie, persecuted her because she was so fair-skinned. “Mulatto, out of my sight,” he would say, and he'd call her spawn of the devil. He was a deacon at the Third Fundamental Church of The Christ Arising. Because of him she left home at thirteen, another coincidence that she and Joe never discussed.

With a little good luck and a lot of perseverance throughout her young life Nelly managed to get through school, and finally took a degree in computer science. She had a special aptitude for keeping in her head, as if in discrete compartments, all the popular word processing and spreadsheet programs, as well as PageMaker and publishing programs, Adobe Photoshop, several complicated architectural design programs, and more. People who knew her work said that Nelly Mishbooker had a three-thousand-gigabyte head. She was skillful enough as a programmer to be able to write programs customized for individual clients. In short, she was a nerd and a whiz.

For solving Joe's problem, which was purely mechanical, she had almost too much skill; but it was the simplicity and physicality of it that attracted her. His difficulty was basic hardware clumsiness. She liked hardware problems because they made her feel more substantial. One of the minuses she had to accept in her profession was a frustration arising from how difficult it was to be real, really real in the world while working with computers.

It came to pass as time went by that Joe's attention to Nelly's instruction turned to an attention to Nelly herself. Because of his size he was aware of how he could intimidate, so he was always very careful, particularly when addressing small women. Nonetheless he managed one day, as the lesson was ending, to ask in his smallest, shyest voice, “Is it… what… are you having any plans for dinner?”

This surprised Nelly, because he had never before spoken to her personally. Her habits were cool, however, and nothing ever really shook her up. This came from years of living black in a white world, and fair-skinned in a black world. Prejudice from every side gave her a certain cool, an automatic delayed reaction.

“I'd be glad to,” she said after a long moment battling her own rule against socializing with students.

“Good,” Joe grinned. It was the biggest grin she'd ever seen. This made Joe so happy that he relaxed onto three chairs, and embraced five keyboards at once. Nothing that came up on the screens made any sense, until the winged toasters flew again.

At Angelo's Pizzeria, Joe confessed to her that he was a poet. She sat across from him in a booth that was narrow enough so that when she looked at him, even if she pressed the back of her head against the back of the booth, Nelly couldn't see all of him at once.

“I'm writing,” he said. “A long poem about the history of Colorado Springs. That's where I grew up, though I'm not sure I really ever grew up; anyway, that's where I got to full size. I wasn't born there. I was born in New Hampshire.”

“Did you like it there?” Nelly asked. To her, Colorado Springs was a spooky town, with all its military bases, the Air Force Academy, and Cheyenne Mountain hollowed out for the national defense nerve center and apocalypse survival complex. And then in the center of the town there was that little humanist school, Colorado College and all its sensitive people, like a drop of honey surrounded by a huge suicide pill.