Tags
creative writing, cults, humor, memory, short story, story, typewriter, writing
I was waiting all week for that magical typewriter. This was back in the 70s, before computers and all that, so to be a professional writer you needed a typewriter. Right? Anyway, I was promised a typewriter that would make my writing effortless and polished (something that ChatGPT is purported to do now, I suppose). So after a week of waiting, I had to break down and ask Clara what had happened. She was the one who had arranged the meeting between me and her super-secretive-all-knowing-guru.
When I met him, we talked about a lot of things: my school plans, his vegetarian diet, my native American ancestry on my mother’s side. At one point, he asked me what I wanted to be. I told him I wanted to be a writer. I was all of 16 and had big dreams of being someone along the lines of Bob Dylan or William Blake. A girl can dream. Anyway, he asked me to recite something I had written. We were sitting at Canter’s Deli, I remember, having a breakfast of bagels and scrambled eggs. (We both scraped off the excessive butter on the bagels.) I thought of something I had written that morning. I can’t remember everything about that poem, but I remember the final line: If I cannot love you, I can at least wish you well.
I don’t remember now why I had written this, if it was in connection with someone or something, but I do remember reeling it off easily enough for him. Other than seeming deep in thought, he didn’t react much to the poem. He just said he would send me a typewriter to help me write. A magical typewriter. He would leave it at the door to my apartment. Look for it, he said.
The following week, I was eager to get that typewriter. And each time I left my apartment or returned and found nothing, I grew increasingly disappointed not to find it, so that was why I asked Clara about it. And you know what she said, the faithful follower she was? Oh, she said, don’t you realize he has given it to you already? It was never a physical thing. Right, I thought. Shame on me for not gathering this all along. He did say, over breakfast, that he had seen me before in a vision, and he knew that I carried what he called an alien seed, due to my ancestry.
And yet during the breakfast and more so afterward, I felt wary. He was an intense man, small and swarthy, with dazzling black eyes that looked fixedly at me most of the time. All in all, he exuded utter seriousness of purpose, even when he showed his white straight teeth in a smile. He wasn’t overtly selling me the cult lifestyle, but I sensed an agenda anyway. So when we parted after that breakfast, I was okay if I never met with him again.
Now knowing the sad endings of many of his followers (one perished in the desert, waiting for his resurrection), I feel lucky that I never received a magical typewriter from him. I’m also glad my poem turned out to be, in some ways, fitting.