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.