Imagine Mr. Carnival

2025?!

Oh ha ha ha. If this is 2025, that makes this the distant future, and to be honest I never thought I’d make it here. 

As a kid I was lousy at math (no, I did not outgrow this lousiness), but I did glean a despairing sense of a universe statistically likely to do me in. Traffic, disease, foaming dogs, faulty kitchen appliances – the sheer blinding swirl of numerical happenstance convinced me that reaching 1997 was a crap shoot with someone else’s loaded dice. I had doubts about making it to the bubble-headed robots, jetpacks, and laser rifles we were promised in the wildly mistaken hit TV series Lost in Space. 

1997 was, after all, the thrillingly futuristic year the Space Family Robinson was said to have left Earth in their roomy flying saucer, the “Jupiter 2.” They sought a planet rumored to be circling Alpha Centauri.

In the mid-60s, 1997 sounded like a starry-eyed date in a far-flung, completely unimaginable future. Now the date “1997” conjures the cast of Friends gamboling playfully about in that fountain for the zillionth time; an image as dated and cornea-glazing as a postcard of Mount Rushmore. So, if 1997 wasn’t the future, where did the future go? 

Brylcreem Avatar

Mr. Carnival was a portly man of few words, and my school’s lone typing teacher. He was one of those men whose unruly hair, beaten back and tamed with a hairbrush, would resolve into a single dromedary ridge on the top his head. His hair was a single cresting wave shellacked with Brylcreem. 

He had thick black sideburns, black horn-rimmed glasses, and a light blue button-down short sleeved Van Heusen knockoff from JCPenney; one of those translucent blouses through which the undershirt is plainly visible. Even as a kid I felt indefinably bad for Mr. Carnival, who was not teaching History or Science or Home Economics. He taught typing. This largish, awkward gentleman was not given to conversation, possibly because his daily tormented walk through the valley of sassy teen typists had stolen the language right out from under his unpleasantly bushy mustache. But I speculate.

I had a huge crush that year – the little blue Smith-Corona manual typewriter that awaited me every day in Mr. Carnival’s class. It was all I could do not to pick it up and hug it. I was dumbstruck by its wonders, mesmerized by its insectoid moving parts, intrigued by the lubricant scent that rose like a perfume from its fantastical housing. 

I would dreamily spend 10-minute stretches tapping the spacebar just to hear the rounded little ‘bhumph’ of the spring-loaded carriage advancing to the left by degrees. This may date me. We had no typewriter at home, which vexed me for a time. When I found out my neighbor Cathy’s family owned a little-used typewriter, I pestered her with the tenacity of a campground gnat until she let me keep her family’s machine at my house. I would shut my bedroom door, slip a sheet of paper in and type. Sweet unbridled madness of youth!

Selectric Dreams

One day I walked in to find my classmates gathered around something at the back of the class, Kubrick apes around the Tycho Monolith. I pushed through the throng and saw on the desk a humming, low-slung gunmetal gray box of textured metal containing, I believed, our species’ collective destiny. It was enormous and machined and smelled faintly like an electric train. The IBM Selectric had arrived. 

“Watch this!” a classmate yelled, and lightly touched a key on the qwerty. A ball of metal flicked up out of nowhere and angrily struck the page with a sound like gunfire. I grew dangerously dizzy. Later in the week I dropped by after school and, by arrangement, examined for one bracing, forensic hour the ball element’s strange magic, touching keys and flinching when the thing stuck. 

Once I realized that the ball actually rose and turned and struck in one indescribably fast movement, I couldn’t get my mind around the design precision. The cipher-encrusted little sphere knew somehow which of its coordinates held the necessary letter and dutifully struck the page with ballistic quickness and accuracy. I remember thinking something like, “if we can do this, there’s no stopping us!”

Land of the Normal-Sized

Back in the ‘60s, the pop culture sci-fi zeitgeist saw all kinds of pulse-quickening stuff in the pipeline. The Space Family Robinson blasted off to Alpha Centauri in futuristic 1997, a “sub-orbital spacecraft” in techno-sleek 1983 took a fateful wrong turn and crashed in a Land of the Giants (obliging its brave crew to pitiably flee cats, dogs, and giant rubbery hands), Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea’s guppy-shaped sub, the Seaview, plied the future’s treacherous oceans sometime in the indefinite ‘80s; and of course Star Trek’s Enterprise begins its contract-breaching “5 Year Mission” in 2265 or so.

Well. Here we are. We made it to futuristic-sounding 2025 without the help of Time Tunnels, families heading out to colonize distant star systems, or accordion-armed robots. We did have a sub-orbital airplane but they shut that program down when one of them crashed into a hotel in France. 

The big Future News is the typing. It’s everywhere, and it’s everything. With the advent of the personal computer and other nagging developments, our workplaces, our playplaces – our Places – are defined by constant typing. Our miraculous, culture-defining smart phones – the Age’s most totemic, world-changing invention and the thing for which we swapped out rocket cars – are typewriters. Of course, for some of us, expressive typing became the rocket car. 

Had Mr. Carnival but known. See him sitting in the Teacher’s Lounge, alone and apart. The typing teacher! I don’t recall him ever fraternizing with his colleagues. Well, I’m going back, an emissary from the future. I’ll breeze into that teacher’s lounge, brush past Mr. Crowley (Earth Science) and give Mr. Carnival the straight dope. 

“Mr. Carnival, I’m visiting from the science-fictional year 2025. Your typing class will define Earth’s future – and my future in particular. Thank you, Mr. Carnival. For everything!” In my imagination the man’s enormous mustached face breaks into the warm, timid smile we would glimpse on rare occasions.

“Aren’t you the kid who used to hug his typewriter?”