Hemingway's Computer

HEMINGWAY'S COMPUTER

That was the winter they put in the computer at Harry's Bar.

It was not a big computer for the crunching of numbers. It was a little computer for the crunching of words. It had a big disk, that little computer. Most of the words we put in were little and some were big. But the computer crunched all of them very clean and black on the yellow backs of the racing forms we did our printing on in those days when we had not much except words.

They did not put it so near the door that when little Scott F. Itzgerald hurried in the door it would bang its brass knob against the printer's backside. Nor did they put it on the rug of the color of whipped grass under the back tables where little Normal Maler scuffed his feet as he plotted campaigns against lady generals.

Normal heated to a fine sweat when he planned his seductions. Sometimes he would jab a finger at the aged telephone which he used to breathe obscenities into his opponent's ear. At such times, if it was winter and if he was standing on the green rug, sharp sparks liked to jump out of Normal's fingers.

"I'm hot today, boys," he would giggle.

If they had let Normal's fingers touch the keys of that lovely little computer there is no telling what kind of words may have come out. Unprintable, perhaps.

So Harry who owned and ran the bar, when they put in the computer told Normal to take off his shoes. Just in case.

We said how very nice it was of Harry to have the computer installed. First we would stand at the bar and rip off a few drinks and then sit at the computer and rip off a few pages.

The keys felt soft against our fingertips like little pony hooves running truly and with gentle accuracy on the fine green turf.

"It's a nice way to work," John O'Hair said.

He was a big man but the thing about not having the college education was sad for him and Scott F. never let him forget it.

O'Hair typed his college correspondence lessons on the computer. The thing we didn't like about O'Hair was when he ripped off too many pops and tried to sing the correspondence college's song.

But the arm wrestling was good with O'Hair and of course it was good to see little Scott go to his knees and beg the computer not to lose his words.

Scott thought he had more good words than the rest of us. We shrugged and grinned. We knew about the software and of course Scott did not know that. There were many things we knew that Scott did not know.

We knew that Scott liked to write when he had a load on.

What we would do with the software was while Scott was leaning on the bar and talking with his pretty mouth and gesturing with his little white hands about how the very drunk are different from the rest of us, we performed some delicate sabotage on the software.

And when Scott would write something very beautiful and very tender, the software would consider his words for awhile and then disappear the words, and the screen would tell Scott, "GARBAGE IN/ GARBAGE OUT."

After that, in what came later, in the time of the big troubles that obscured all our little ones, the little computer got shot in its big disk.

We looked at Scott F. standing there with a bottle of champagne in one hand and a smoking pistol in the other

We watched our words leak into the fine sawdust that covered Harry's floor.

LEft Behind, a really moral tale for your betterment.

“LEFT BEHIND”

copyright 2010 by Donald Henry Hinkle

812 words

Pepi had a family: mommy, daddy, and Fritz and Hans and Little Bethie. Pepi was a good dog with all of them, but especially he loved and took care of Little Bethie because she never pulled his tail or poked his eyes like the boys did. He slept in her bed.

One day, Pepi was walking Bethie to the school bus. He had stopped to sniff at a butterfly. Suddenly he felt a tug on his leash and he heard Bethie cry: “O no, Pepi!”

He looked up. Bethie was floating up in the sky, being carried by a big angel.

The angel looked at Pepi with gentle eyes as he disengaged Bethie’s hand from the leash.

“I want Pepi to go with me!” Bethie cried.

“I’m sorry, Bethie,” the big angel said. “No dogs allowed where you’re going.”

Her tears dropped down on Pepi’s nose. Pepi barked and barked to be taken along, but the angel carried Bethie up and up until she disappeared in a fluffy cloud.

Then Pepi saw that other people too were being carried up by angels.

He galloped back home and saw that Daddy was being carried up, while Mommy and Hans and Fritz were stood on the ground shouting at him.

“I’m sorry!” Daddy shouted back. “I’ll miss you all in heaven. But I warned you that if you didn’t do good this might happen!”

“I know!” wailed Mommy. “But I thought the Rapture wouldn’t happen until the next generation!”

“Goodbye, kids,” Daddy shouted from higher up. “Try to be good even though it’s too late now before the Apocalypse!”

The boys cried and wept and beat their breasts, but no angel would pick them up.

Hans said to Fritz: “OK, he was good, but not that good!”

Fritz said: “I wonder how he got the fix in?”

All over town, indeed, all over the world, similar scenes happened, as some people were carried up to heaven and many others were left behind. Including all the dogs and cats and elephants and lions. And horses.

Pepi saw a neighbor being carried up. He was a fat man and the angel was very small. The fat man’s mother wouldn’t let go of his hand.

Pepi barked sharply at the angel.

The angel, of course, understood what Pepi was saying.

“I’m sorry,” the angel said to Pepi, “but those are my orders from the Angel In Charge.”

“Who is he?” barked Pepi. “Please let me talk to him?”

The little angel stopped struggling with the fat man for a minute and pulled out a heavenly cellphone, which was pink and blue. He, or maybe it was a she, spoke into the phone.

“Okay,” the angel said to Pepi. “He’ll be down, but I don’t think he’ll change his mind. He’s very strict.”

Soon, a large ugly angel descended and stood facing Pepi.

Pepi barked out a long story about how he had always been a good dog and a loving dog and had never done anything more wrong than mere puppyish mischief, and how Little Bethie loved him and wouldn’t be consoled without him.

The big angel snarled, “No dogs in heaven!” and flew away.

The little angel had finally loosed the mother’s hands from the fat man and had him ten or twelve feet in the air. The angel sighed loudly and said to Pepi: “I’ll talk to the Big Guy and see if anything can be done.”

Then quickly he or she and the fat man soared out of sight.

Pepi sat patiently and waited, his tongue lolling. He watched all the other people being separated from each other. “Like sorting out bad treats from good treats,” Pepi thought, being a dog who liked analogies.

Suddenly the sky darkened dramatically and a heavenly bright light descended.

From its midst, a quiet voice spoke to Pepi. “I see what has gone wrong. The wrong angel was put in charge. He is Quentin Tarantino, a director of savage moving pictures. My people were misled by idolaters who called him, ‘a god among men.’ He doesn’t belong in this Exodus at all. He selected many of the wrong people, so we have a lot of returns.”

As Pepi listened, he noticed a loud wailing and saw a body falling from an unimaginable height, at the end of a trail of feathers, until it disappeared into a boggy swamp.

The bright light spoke once more and said, “Come, good dog!” to Pepi. Pepi felt himself rising.

He rose higher and higher until Earth was far below, and he saw Bethie waiting for him, with a big bone!

The End.

How I learned to eat

Dinner time. My mother had “slaved” in the kitchen and was hot and not pleased. Vegetables were steamed soft, meat overcooked in the pan or oven. She did not have the touch. However, we ate it. My father’s cooking wasn’t much better. I was about 30 years old before I learned that cooked liver could be deliciously tender and juicy.

Mom’s best dish was a tuna casserole that included a can or so of tuna, and mushroom soup out of a Campbell’s can, poured over alternating layers of Fritos; she gave me the recipe and I made it for myself when I was a working bachelor. Fritos were one of my favorite food groups. I could buy some new comics or science fiction magazines, get a cold Pepsi and a bag of Fritos and sit on the porch in an afternoon and have a grand time.

The college fraternity cooks were okay. I was usually hungry. Plus there were all the hamburgers and French fries and fried chickens and chicken-fried steaks in between. And late night in the dorm, the hamburger and milkshake guy would come through. He sold hamburgers made of some kind of ground meat, greasy in the bun, and frozen milkshakes.

The military cooks had the license to keep us fueled. It was fuel, you couldn’t care too much how it tasted. Could a car complain about Cities’ Service gasoline instead of Phillips? Was Gulf too rich, did (Conoco betray its dirty origins?

So--later in life--when I was assigned to a fancy series of books about food... I required extensive and rapid education.