From Cyan Magenta Yellow Black

Duane Einwald, who was recently sent packing by his partners in an advertising agency, is working as a temp, on the advice of his therapist. He finds himself at a place that makes promotional mugs and is on his break when the designer who creates the mugs walks into the break room. Two fellow workers are already in the room. Neither of them is particularly interested in engaging with Duane.

He is wearing a stocking cap, even though we’re inside, and a t-shirt with a skeleton playing the banjo. His coolness is tentative, he’s not used to it being public. He’s used to an easy, familiar crowd: Steph and Eunice. He nods briskly at me, dude to dude, a truce of a nod. 

His fruit pie has that thin wrapper: bright white and enticing in a way that reminds me of sugar, streaked with two bands of red that I think are meant to invoke the Coke wave. 

“Did you ever see the Marvel comic book ads for those in the ‘70s?” 

“Nope.” 

“They have like Captain America or the Daredevil fight crime by giving the bad guys Hostess Fruit Pies. They’d say things like, ‘Better a Hostess Fruit Pie than the fruits of crime.’” 

“Nope.” He shakes his head and makes eye contact with bitter Steph. They act like I’m hallucinating and they are patronizing me. 

“They were some weird ads,” I say, as if confirming my sense of reality. 

He did not see the ads. My guess is that he may have read a few comic books and taken a graphic arts course in high school and realized he had a little talent at a vaguely cool thing. He did not run into the room as a five-year-old and stand, transfixed, in front of the TV when commercials came on. The kid in the banjo-playing skeleton t-shirt did not cover one wall of his boyhood room with a galaxy of red, green and blue Spirograph patterns. He did not take Polaroids of his etch-a-sketch drawings. He did not collect baseball cards to savor the pleasures of the typography and color theory long before he realized that such things as typography and color theory could be studied; he did not cadge old issues of Sport magazine from friends’ uncles so he could absorb the tobacco-and-cream smell of the 1950s’ paper and the testimonials for Brylcreem and Aqua Velva featuring line-drawn athletes with crew cut heads like exclamation marks. He did not stare at the strange appearance of a war bonneted Indian Chief on his dad’s Red Man chewing tobacco and he did not examine the Copenhagen chewing tobacco tins with the embossed tin lids and wonder how those images were deposited on that paper or stamped into that metal or how the blue plastic of Vicks vapor rub became blue. His room wasn’t arrayed with neat galleries of stamps and at-attention formations of army men and showrooms of Hot Wheels cars. 

The kid in the skeleton t-shirt did not cajole his teacher into letting him create a sixth-grade newspaper on fragrant purple mimeos which he cranked out himself and inhaled when they appeared, and he did not take it upon himself to create a scout troop paper on a strange long-since obsolete printing gel; he did not design his own merit badges. The cartoon kid in the cartoon t-shirt did not collect and index comic books; he didn’t live vicariously through their punches of meaning. The kid did not smell paste and the special plastic fragrance of encyclopedia binding and the nostalgic toxins of mimeo fluid and markers and think of home. 

As the kid in the skeleton shirt moved from a farm town to a larger town where he knew no one, he did not spend that first lonely summer looking up old television shows in TV trivia books, shows he had never seen, and making up episodes and creating graphics and promos. The kid in the skeleton shirt did not know that Pride of the Family, a half-hour sitcom starring Paul Hartman as the head of an advertising department for a local paper, ran just over a year in the early fifties. He did not know that Szysznyk starring Ned Beatty as a twenty-seven-year Marine Corps veteran who became the supervisor of the Northeast Community Center in Washington, D.C. “also featured Barry Miller as Fortwengler.” He was not so amused by the name Fortwengler that he made up a show about Fortwengler, making the logo a jaunty scarf of text, like the type on a pennant. 

In high school the kid in the skeleton shirt did not go to movies in Minnisapa, Minnesota with his tentatively made new friends and seethe through their wise guy yammering. He did not risk being seen as a loser by going to movies alone simply because he loved watching them. He was not amazed, when he moved from a small town without a movie theater to a bigger town with three at the idea of being able to walk to a building constructed for no other purpose than to showcase an image: he did not love the amnesia of the dark, the luminescent screen, the quick intimacy of the movie trailers. Skeleton banjo boy did not come to the Twin Cities after high school to study film-making, and then realize that he would never make films because when he had stood behind the camera he found that film was too suffused with the actual and the accidental, too crowded and random, too gratingly collaborative. He did not then gravitate to graphic design, attracted by its discipline and limits—the way type could be slid 1/64th of an inch, the way a serif could be delicately shaved, the way a good poster could be the world’s most subtle machine, the way colors and shapes and images could be selected so that they were a vivid and intelligent and efficient thing in a half-assed, first-draft, mumbling, misunderstood, shy, staticky and often stupid world. 

No, that was me.  

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