Return of the desk

So here's the desk I wrote Mailman and Happyland sitting at, among other things. It used to live in my little 8x10 writing shed at our old house, with the tiny woodstove sitting on the left and the wall of corkboard on the right, and through the window in front of it I could watch squirrels stealing all the seeds from our bird feeder.

Then I got this job and found myself going to my office at Cornell instead of to the shed. Plus I was between novels and not writing much, and I didn't require a lot of solitude to do the editing stuff I was then busy with, and so for the better part of a year I didn't use the desk at all. Around this time we decided to move, so I went out to the shed to begin cleaning it out. I then discovered that mice had taken up residence in my files and in my typewriter, had shat upon many of my books, torn others of them up for bedding, and completely destroyed pretty much every personal letter I had ever received. They messed up the desk, too--the drawers were filled with seeds. One was so awful I had to punch out the bottom panel and burn it, along with all my ruined papers.

After we moved, I stored it in the basement, where it grew a thin layer of mildew. More mice moved into it. It sat there for more than two years.

Then, this past Thursday, I hauled it out into the light, washed the entire thing with bleach-soaked rags, let it dry, then rubbed it all over with Orange Glo. I did the same to my old office chair, and moved them both into our back room. Then I went to Target and bought a lamp.

I feel as though a great sin has been atoned for. I should never have let it get to that state! Right now my novel manuscript is sitting on it, waiting to be read--I will start on that tomorrow. I'm hoping the desk still has a bit of mojo in it, and if so, will forgive me for what I put it through.

Desks

Over the past five years I've done most of my writing in an 8-by-10-foot garden shed that I outfitted with bookshelves, a wood stove, and a hardwood floor. It stands in our back yard, and has stood mostly unused since September, when I started this teaching job--I have a nice big office at work now that is pleasant to write in.

But since we're putting our house up for sale, I had to clean out the shed, and I made a gruesome discovery--a mouse had taken up residence in my desk. (I think it's the same mouse I mentioned in the typewriter post, the one that lived briefly in one of our typewriters.) I spent the afternoon cleaning everything and burning all my old papers that stank of rodent, and at one point I encountered the poor little bugger, clinging in horror to the edge of a mesh paper basket. Sorry, dude.

There is something awfully violating about having my desk infested. It's a big old (1930's, I'd say) wooden thing with drawers that stick and various parts falling off; it used to belong to a childhood neighbor, Mr. Baxter, who would sit at it in his cellar, thumbing through his vast collection of gruesome crime scene photos. Before I got it, I used to write at a buffet table, an idea I got from Chris Offutt, whose dank basement writing lair in Missoula inspired me to aestheticize glumly utilitarian surroundings into a kind of workaday literary fetish.

My desk at work is huge and hideous and aluminum, with a formica top printed in a woodlike pattern. It's awesome. You could fit entire children into the file drawers, though I mostly have them filled with excess paper napkins from the cafe underneath the arts library. I owned its love child when I was in college, an aluminum-and-formica affair barely big enough to get my legs under, and at it I wrote my first unfinished novel, a dumb fictionalization of some boring crap I did in high school.

My first actually-finished, worthless novel was called Telegraph Road, and it was about a rock band, and my teacher at the time said, "John, maybe you don't want this to be your first novel." It was written on the kitchen table. So were all the crappy short stories I wrote after college. I still write at the kitchen table from time to time. Different table, same vibe. And my juvenilia was written at a metal school desk my dad found at work, and later at my bedroom desk, the centerpiece of a hardwood desk-and-dresser sectional off of which my mother would clear any and all scraps of scribbled-on paper, however important, unless I carefully hid them.

Maybe it's my mother's fastidiousness that today makes me enjoy indulging in a hideously messy desk, with papers and books scattered everywhere, at least for short periods of time. The only thing I like better, in fact, is clearing it all off and starting something new. I can only hope that mouse, evicted once and for all, can similarly appreciate the pleasures of a fresh start.