Samuel Johnson Is Indignant

Alvin the Typesetter

Alvin and I worked together typesetting for a weekly newspaper in Brooklyn. We came in every Friday. This was the autumn that Reagan was elected President, and everyone at the newspaper suffered from a sense of foreboding and depression.

The old gray typesetting machines, with their scratches and scars, were set back to back in a tiny room next to the toilet. People raced in and out of the toilet all day long and the sound of flushing was always in our ears. Pinned to the corkboard walls around us as we bent over our keyboards was an ever-thickening forest of paper strips. The damp paper strips were covered with type, and when they had dried, they were taken away by the paste-up people to become columns on the newspaper page.

The work we had to do was not hard, but it required patience and care, and we were under constant pressure to work faster. I typed straight copy, and Alvin set ads. If the machines stopped rumbling for more than a few minutes, the boss would come downstairs to see what was holding us up. And so Alvin and I continued to type while we ate our lunch, and when we talked to each other, as we did from time to time, we talked surreptitiously, sticking our eyes up over the tops of the machines.

We were blue-collar workers. Every time I thought about how we were blue-collar workers, it surprised me, because we were also, with any luck, performing artists. I played the violin. As for Alvin, he was a standup comedian. Every Friday Alvin told me about his career and his life.

For seven months he had auditioned over and over again without success at a well-known club. At last the manager had relented and given him a spot. Every week now he came on in the dead early hours of Sunday morning for five minutes to close the show. Sometimes the audience liked him and sometimes it did not respond at all. If the manager occasionally left him on stage for ten minutes or gave him a spot earlier in the evening, at 9:30, Alvin felt this was an important advance in his career.

Alvin could not describe his art except to say that he had no script, no routine, that he never knew just what would happen on stage, and that this lack of preparation was part of his act. From the snatches of monologue he spoke for me, however, I could see that some of his patter was about sex — he made jokes about cream and sperm — and that some of his patter was about politics, and that he also liked to do impersonations.

He usually worked without any props. In the week of Election Day, in November, he carried to the nightclub a special patriotic kerchief covered with red, white, and blue American symbols to wear over his head. Most often, though, what he took out on stage was only himself, as though his long, solemn face were a mask, or his body a marionette that he controlled with strings from above, slim, loose-joined, floating over the floor. He had his stance, his silences, his bald head, and his clothes. He wore the same clothes on stage that he wore to work: dark formal pants and often a shirt of cheap synthetic material covered with palm trees or pine trees on a white background.

When I arrived at the office, Alvin would be typing at his machine in his stocking feet, and his long narrow shoes would be sitting next to my machine. If Alvin was glum, neither of us said much. If he was elated, he could not help standing up from his machine and talking. And on some days I would speak to him and he would look at me blankly. He would later admit that he had been smoking hash for days on end.

Over the clicking of the machines Alvin told me that he lived apart from his wife and son. His son did not like Alvin’s friends or the food Alvin ate, and made the same excuse over and over again not to see him. He told me about his circle of friends — a group of Brooklyn vegetarians. He was planning to eat Thanksgiving dinner with these vegetarians and he was planning to spend the Christmas holiday sleeping at the YMCA. He told me about his travels — to Boston and places in New Jersey. He asked me many times to go out on a date with him. We went once to the circus.

He told me about the typesetters’ agency that never found him any work. “Don’t I seem ambitious to you?” he asked. He complained to me about the lack of order in our office, and about the poor writing in the pieces we were given to typeset. He said it was not part of his job to correct spelling and grammar. He told me with indignation that he would not do more than should be expected of him. He and I had a sense of our superiority to those in charge of us, and this was only aggravated by the fact that we were so often treated as though we had no education.

Because Alvin was good-natured and presented himself to the rest of the newspaper staff without reservation, because his whole art consisted of isolating and exposing himself as a figure of fun, he was well liked by many of them but also became a natural victim of some: the manager of the production department, for instance, kept pushing him to work faster and often asked him to do his ads over again, and talked against Alvin behind his back. Alvin responded to this goading with injured pride. But worse than the production manager was the owner of the paper, who worked most of the week upstairs in his office but on press day came down to the production department and sat on a stool alongside the others.

He was a little man with a red mustache and glasses who wore his flannel shirts tucked into his bluejeans and smelled of deodorant when he became excited. He never walked slowly and he was in and out of the toilet faster than anyone else: no sooner had the door shut behind him than we would hear the thunderous flush from the tank overhead and he would spring out the door again. For much of the week he talked to his employees with good humor, though not to us, the typesetters, and tolerated the caricatures of his face posted all over the room and the remarks about him written on the toilet wall. On press day, however, and when things were going badly at the paper, his sense of catastrophe would drive him to turn on us one by one and dress us down publicly in a way that was humiliating and surrounded by silence. What made this treatment especially hard to accept was that our pay was low and our paychecks bounced regularly. The accountant upstairs could not keep track of where the newspaper’s money was, and she added on her fingers.

Alvin received the worst of it and hardly defended himself at all: “I thought you said…I thought they told me to…I thought I was supposed to…” Any answer he made provoked another outburst from the boss, until Alvin retired in silence. I was embarrassed by his lack of pride. He was afraid of losing his job. But after Christmas his attitude changed.

Over the holidays, Alvin and I both performed. I played the violin in a concert of excerpts from “The Messiah.” Alvin’s performance was to be an entire evening of monologues and songs at a local club run by a friend. Before the event Alvin handed out a Xeroxed flyer with crooked lettering and a picture of himself wearing a beret. In his text he called himself “the widely acclaimed.” The tickets were five dollars. Our newspaper ran an ad for his performance and everyone who worked with us there showed great interest in the event, though when the evening came, no one from the newspaper actually went to see him.

When Alvin came in to work on the Friday following his performance, he was the center of attention for a few minutes and an aura of celebrity floated around him. But Alvin told a sad tale. There were only five people in the audience at his performance. Four were fellow comedians, and the fifth was Alvin’s friend Ira, who talked throughout his monologues.

Alvin was eloquent about his failure. He described the room, his friend the owner, his friend Ira. He talked for five minutes. The boss, who had been listening with the others, grew restless and distracted and told Alvin there was work waiting for him. Alvin raised a hand in concession and went into the typesetting room. The production people returned to their stools and bent over their pages. Our machines began rumbling. The boss hurried upstairs.

Then Alvin stopped typing. His pupils were dilated and he looked particularly remote. He stood up and walked out. He said to the production room at large: “Listen: I have work to do. But I haven’t started yet. I would like to perform for you first.”

Most of the production people smiled because they liked Alvin.

“Now I’m going to impersonate a chicken,” he said.

He climbed up on a stool and started flapping his arms and clucking. The room was quiet. The production people perched on their long-legged stools like a flock of resting egrets and stared at this bald chicken. When there was no applause, Alvin shrugged and climbed down and said, “Now I’m going to impersonate a duck,” and waddled across the room with his knees bent and toes turned in. The production people glanced around the room at one another. Their looks darted and hopped like sparrows. They gave Alvin a spattering of applause. Then he said, “Now I’m going to do a pigeon.” He shook his shoulders and jerked his head forward and back as he strutted in the circular patterns of a courting pigeon. He managed to convey something of the ostentation of a male pigeon. Abruptly he stopped and said to his audience, “Well, don’t you have any work to do? What are you sitting around for? All this should have been done yesterday!” The little hair he had was poking straight out from his head as though he were full of electricity. He swallowed his saliva. “That’s all we are,” he said. “A bunch of dumb birds.”

The smiles faded from the faces of his audience. The weariness of that leafless late December, our fear of our weakened government, our dread of its repressive spirit, descended on us once again.

Into the abrupt silence came the chiming of a church-bell across the street. The production manager by reflex checked his watch. Alvin’s body sagged. He turned and walked into our tiny room. The back of his head had its own expression of defeat.

For a moment everyone stared at him in amazement. He sat slumped over his machine, solitary, flooded by fluorescent light, exhausted by his performance. He had not been very funny, in fact he was a poor actor, and yet something about his act had been impressive: his grim determination, the violence of his feelings. One by one the production people went back to work: paper rustled, scissors clattered on the stone tabletop, murmurs passed back and forth over the sound of the radio. I sat down at my machine and Alvin looked up at me from under his heavy lids. His look carried all the hurt, the humiliation, the mockery of the past few months. He said without smiling, “They think I’m nothing. They can think what they like. I have my plans.”