W
hen I first started working in our family’s office equipment and supply store on Saturdays, my brother Glen was sometimes in charge so our father could take the day off. This only happened during one or two summers when he was home from college.
Glen would be at my father’s desk toward the back, and I’d be sitting a couple of desks up. I was nine or ten years old and my only goals in life were to build model cars and read books. When Glen and I weren’t waiting on customers, we were adding up the books.
This was a straightforward task that involved adding long columns of numbers in a post binder, then cross-verifying the totals to make certain that everything matched. Simple bookkeeping. I was learning to operate a ten-key adding machine by touch.
The Olympia SM9 was our best-selling typewriter. It was shipped to our store inside a carrying case inside a cardboard box, and they packed it well. SM9s came with interlocks: small throw-away plastic and metal pieces that were there to keep the carriage and key-basket rigid during transit. The machines came all the way from Wilhelmshaven, Germany, with many bumpity-bumps along the way, and Olympia wanted each one to be perfect on arrival.
In addition to the interlocks, there were rubber bands, about four per machine. Strong little suckers, you couldn’t stretch them more than six inches, max. If you made a circle with your thumb and middle finger, that would be the circumference of one of these round bands: about two inches across, and a quarter-inch wide. They were red in color so they couldn’t be missed in the unpacking process, and they accumulated over time (we sold a lot of SM9s).
We didn’t have any particular use for them, but couldn’t see just throwing them away, so they ended up in different places in the Service Department. There were handfuls of them in a couple of parts drawers, but they were also scattered around the shop, like red rubber clutter.
One day Glen and I were running the store. The place was quiet: no customers. The only sound was that of our adding machines totting up columns of numbers. I was trying to gain skill, speed, and muscle memory in my fingers on the Clary adding machine, when —bam!—out of nowhere I got hit in the back of the head with one of those red rubber bands. And it stung!
I looked back. Glen was grinning at me, with another one loaded on his forefinger, stretched back and ready to fire. I could see evaluation in his eyes, trying to anticipate me. My brother had sneaked back to the shop and grabbed a handful while I’d been absorbed in my task. I had to give him credit for accuracy; he got me dead center with his first shot.
I ducked when I saw the second one come at me, but not in time; he got me square before I could get out of the way. And then it was on. For the next half-hour, Glen and I ran for cover, shot at each other from behind shelving full of office supplies (sometimes aiming through gaps in the merchandise), and ducked behind desks.
We stopped dead and acted sober as judges when a customer came in, but started again as soon as the coast was clear. Glen was more accurate and could shoot farther, but I was smaller and less visible.
Occasionally one of us would run out of ammo and have to scamper back to the Service Department to load up. Those rubber bands flew fast and hard, and they could sting at close range. We mostly missed each other, but sometimes one would hit, and of course, they were all over the store.
I remember the two of us going around picking them up afterward so there wouldn’t be difficult questions on Monday. Years later, I was way the hell up our tall wooden ladder, replacing one of the many fluorescent lightbulbs that lit the store, and I found one of those red rubber bands, balanced high up on one of those long glass tubes—mute witness to a long-forgotten Saturday afternoon and two brothers existing in the moment.
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