The Cheese Monkeys: A Novel in Two Semesters

by Chip Kidd

  Arms crossed. Didn't move.

  Once we were all reseated, he went to the front of the room and started bobbing his head at each of us. Then,

  “Shit. Only three went AWOL?”

  Mike raised his hand and said in a voice that sounded like Bing Crosby before puberty. “I, I think so.”

  And then, bam! The first of his magical transformations: now a human being—almost friendly. “I must be losing my touch.” He smiled and turned the air into a gas again and became the most beguiling person on earth. “Usually it's at least five. I'll have to work on that. You see, there's still eighteen people here. The class works better with twelve, best with fewer. Nine or ten is ideal. Of course, the Cookie Cutters in the front office of this Idiot Factory won't allow me to limit it to that, but I'm not worried. I'll whittle you down. No doubts.”

  I didn't like the sound of that.

  “Before we go on, I should state, it's a fact: Nothing worth knowing can ever be taught in a classroom.”

  No one stirred.

  “Well. Nobody fell for that. Now. Let's see what we've got.” He walked across the front of the room, and I was reminded of a shark I once saw during a high school field trip—it was turning in a tank of cloudy water, and I just kept staring at it, thinking, “How can something so huge and bulky move with such efficient, liquid ease?” Its fin broke the surface and bore down—Christ—on me. “Son, what is the name of this class?”

  His face: the Arrow shirt man after some hard, hard years.

  Survivalist reflexes almost made me shriek “Introduction to Commercial Art!” Almost. At the last second I remembered the sign. I cleared my throat. “Introduction to Graphic Desi—”

  “RIGHT!!” God. “Very good. You can stay. For now.” Maybelle was next. “Honey, can you tell me what Graphic Design is?”

  She thought for a moment. “No. I'm afraid not,” all eager smiles. “That's why I'm here, I suppose.”

  He seemed to accept that. “All right. Fair enough, you're in.”

  Back to Mike. Sorbeck folded his arms and leaned down on the table. “What does the world look like?”

  “Er, I don't think I understand the question.”

  “Now, that is a problem.” He stood up and reloaded his pipe. “That is a problem.

  “Everyone, understand: When you walk through that door you become a graphic designer. Whether or not you stay one after you leave is up to you, but I'd recommend you wear the mantle full time, all semester. We'll be spending the next weeks attempting to figure out what this means—to be a designer, graphic or otherwise.

  “Now who would like to take a little eye test? You two.” He gestured to Himillsy and the girl next to her—a real Margaret-from-Dennis-the-Menace type, with freckles and rust-colored ringlets propped up by two pink barrettes shaped like butterflies. “Up to the front of the room please, and face the class.” Hims rolled her eyes as she passed me.

  Then he said, serious as a cancer: “Okay, I want you ladies to close your eyes. NO peeking or out the door with you both. I'm watching. Understand?” They did as they were told and nodded. “Alright, we'll start with the pigtails. Sweetheart?”

  “Yes?” said Margaret.

  “What color is the floor?”

  “Uh.” She started to look down, and checked herself. Lids clenched tight. “I really, couldn't say for sure.”

  “I see. How about the walls?”

  “Oh. I. Didn't get a good look at them. Green?”

  “Hmm. How many windows are in this room?”

  “Gee. I . . . didn't count.”

  “Describe the dress of the girl next to you.”

  “Uh, orange.” Very fidgety.

  “Her shoes.”

  Silence.

  “My shoes. What color?”

  “Brown?”

  Hims had her hands clasped behind her through all of this, her tiny weight on her left leg. Smiling. Head tilted to the ceiling. Bored, bored, bored.

  “Pigtails, we have to teach you how to see. Either that or get you a tapping stick and a dog with a metal handle and a lot of patience.” Titters in the room. Then, quite grave: “You are a designer. You have to eat the world with your eyes. You must look at everything as if you're going to die in the next five minutes, because in the relative scheme of things, you are. You can't miss a trick. Now, you, girly.” He meant Himillsy. “In the fruit dress. What colo—”

  “The floor, originally I suppose, was white. As one would like to imagine that slush in the gutter was once new-fallen snow. Linoleum. Of the grade . . . usually found in Sears just before they remodeled. Scuffed now, beyond redemption.” She smirked slightly, into the dark.

  “Well well well.” His interest was finally sparked—the badger at the rabbit hole. “Go on.”

  “The walls are the shade of caked snot.”

  He said nothing.

  “Cinder block. There are either four windows or eight, depending on whether you count them in sections. Probably last washed during the Roosevelt administration. Teddy.” She was off and running—arms up into space. “I'm wearing my own stunning creation—I call it ‘Fruit Salad Surgery.’ My shoes are boys' size four patent black leather Buster Browns with kid straps.” She threw her hands crazily to the right. “Miss Nowhere is wearing a thigh-waisted fatigue tentdress she probably made in her spare time to save money for hair dye.”

  Margaret's eyes snapped open.

  “—speaking of which, someone might tell her that two killer moths the color of my tongue are attacking her head as I speak.”

  “Hey!”

  “And you, sir, since you asked, are shod in a pair of groaning black ox-bloods that really ought to be thrown away. You obviously aren't married, or Mrs. Sorbeck would have returned them apologetically to the beast they were ripped from, when you weren't looking, years ago.”

  He chuckled. “Oh, she tried. I'm always looking. And?”

  “I'm stuffed. ” She opened her lids. “My eyeballs are ready to burp their heads off.” She curtsied and headed for her seat. Margaret followed in a slump. I pictured those wavy cartoon heat lines rising from her head, and almost started to clap.

  Sorbeck was as amused as I ever would see him. Sober, anyway.

  “You're a pip, Miss Molecule.”

  She basked in the praise.

  “Kiddies, you all should have been able to do that. Sans, I would hope,” he threw a second's dismissive glance at Himillsy, “the undergraduate humor.”

  Hims's face broke and she made her eyes dark slits. She didn't like that. Not at all.

  “The Cookie Cutters can't think about anything beyond selling cookies, so they would have you believe this class is the Introduction to Commercial Art. It is not. Should that give you cause to leave this room, do so now—without the threat of being scorned, or having to think.”

  Nobody did. Leave, I mean.

  “But I've been put in charge of the store here, and I say it's Introduction to Graphic Design. The difference is as crucial as it is enormous—as important as the difference between pre- and postwar America. Uncle Sam . . . is Commercial Art. The American Flag is Graphic Design. Commercial Art tries to make you buy things. Graphic Design gives you ideas. One natters on and on, the other actually has something to say. They use the same tools—words, pictures, colors. The difference, as you'll be seeing, and as you'll be showing me, is how.” He bowed his head and paused, as if to take on a new load of thoughts. Then he paced, slowly, up and down the right side of the room.

  “You're lucky. I envy you—this is an interesting time for Graphic Design. Even though it's existed since the dawn of man, it's also in its infancy—not even a name for it until 1928, when a book designer named William Addison Dwiggins got sick of the term ‘Graphic Arts’ and changed it—in print, naturally. And he was right. It's not Art. And Art is not Design, though it used to be.” He stopped, relit his pipe. Drew it in.

  “Design is, literally, purposeful planning. Graphic Design, then, is the form t
hose plans will take.”

  More thoughts.

  “A bazillion years ago, some poor son of a bitch Cro-Magnon scratched a drawing of a buffalo onto the wall of his cave. He didn't do it because his muse had called to him, or to explore the texture of bauxite, or to start the neoprimitiveexpressionist movement. He did it because he killed a goddamn buffalo and he wanted someone else to know about it, after he was gone. He had a specific, definable purpose for making a piece of visual information. The first one.” He puffed. “Whether it's been up or downhill from there is a matter of debate for another time, but the truth is Art and Design only finally parted ways in the nineteenth century, with the introduction of photography. Now— Ssmile! —Zogg can take a picture of his Buffalo and save all those tedious drafting skills for . . . well, something else.”

  Sorbeck pulled a chair up to the front, sat, and propped his legs up on a desk, leaning back, hands behind his head.

  “Which is no small matter. You see, photography opened up quite a little Pandora's box, kiddies. Do you have any idea?” A quick scan of the room made it clear we didn't. “Once we no longer had to depend on drawing and painting to record our existence—once they became an option —they mutated . . . into a form of expression. And Art for its own sake, God help us, was born.

  “But Graphic Design for its own sake will never happen, because the concept cancels itself out—a poster about nothing other than itself is not Graphic Design, it's . . .” He pumped his fist rapidly up and down over his lap and started breathing in spasms. “. . . makin' ART.”

  My goodness.

  “Not that Design can't have . . . a look, a style — in fact it has to, even if the style is ‘no style’—but by definition, Design must always be in service to solving a problem, or it's not Design. I will not, so help me, ever attempt to define what Art is. But I know what it no longer is, and that's Graphic Design.

  “Now, as for Commercial Art, I could be crass and say the term is both repetitive and redundant, but that's too easy. Better to say the term is too limiting and too humiliating. I mean, do you really want to be a Commercial Artist ?” He somehow made his face ugly with those last two words, for just a second, then stood. Summing up his case.

  “Eight notes in the scale: you can write either ‘Smoke Gets In Your Eyes’ or The Marriage of Figaro.

  “Twenty-six letters: Marjorie Morningstar or Ulysses.

  “The man-made world means exactly that. There isn't an inch of it that doesn't have to be dealt with, figured out, executed. And it's waiting for you to decide what it's going to look like. Of course that's not true, but for this class you have to believe it.

  “So. Is it caked snot?

  “Or five coats of lacquered enamel?”

  We didn't dare make a peep. I was exhausted just listening.

  “Alright. Here's your first assignment . . . ”

  • • •

  “I wish I had a picture of him. Then my word could be ‘bastard.’ Problem solved.” Himillsy was burrowing through her purse, her last Camel hanging from her mouth for dear life. “Bloody matches . . .”

  For our first formal Graphic Design critique we had to select a word and design it, on an eleven-by-fourteen-inch piece of paper. The idea was to make it look appropriate to what it said. Sounds simple enough, until you try it— everything you think of is instant cliché. Himillsy and I met at Zingorelli's Pizza—their tomato-garlic strombolis could set off Vesuvius—the night before it was due, to commiserate.

  “How about the word ‘red,’ in red?” I asked.

  “Too easy. He'll hate it. There they are . . .” Breath a Sicilian stink bomb, she lit her smoke and motioned for her sixth Coke. “Plus like he said—it's too repetitive. He's looking for more.”

  A truck pulled up and parked on the curb outside the window next to our booth. It was huge. Lost in thought, I found myself trying to read the lettering on the side, but only part of it was in view, and all I could make out, just barely, was the word ‘big.’ Hmm. Now there was an idea.

  Was this Design? Taking the information on the side of that truck, and seeing not what it is, but what could be made of it? Learning from it?

  I decided yes. It was that moment—when the mind, instead of obsessively pacing the prison of its own puzzlement, suddenly, instinctively, deliriously, discovers a way to make wings out of wax and fly the maze.

  “What if the word was ‘big’ . . . ” I started, “but you just showed a white piece of paper?”

  She waited for me to explain. I said, “Because it's so big, you can't see it all.”

  She took a drag. “Interesting, but something about it . . . isn't right.” Sent smoke to the ceiling. “I wouldn't if I were you.” Dissmissal Herself.

  Ouch. Moment: RIP. “Yeah, I guess. What's everybody else doing?”

  A foreign concept. “What? Who cares?” Himillsy's camaraderie was often cut with a sense of narcissism that was scarcely less than monstrous.

  “That one guy, Mike,” I said, “he's been working on it for two nights, in the Belly.” (The Visual Arts building's basement workroom, where you went when you really needed to spread out. When you needed surfaces.) I already suspected that Mike was going to be one of those humble show-off types who worked harder than everybody else on each project and became teacher's pet. Annoying.

  “Pizza Face?” she sniffed. “Bully for him. Vote him Class Prez.”

  “Maybe I should try a noun. What are you going to do?”

  “Skip class.”

  “Seriously.”

  “Oh I don't know. I'll do what I always do.” She drained her glass, stubbed out her Camel's tail. We got up to leave. “I'll think of something at the last minute. Drop you?”

  • • •

  i i .

  T H E F I R S T C R I T I Q U E.

  In Art 127 (Introduction to Graphic Design),

  W. Sorbeck, instr.

  Our task: Choose a word and then design it with the typography and materials of our choice, on a piece of paper 11'' × 14'', to be viewed vertically or horizontally.

  Give the word appropriate form based on its content.

  Allow me to elaborate on Himillsy's observations of Room 207 of the Baxter building. Until a couple of years ago, it had been part of the chem lab. Now, State pretended it was an art studio—an aesthetic silk purse that couldn't disguise its sulfuric pigskin lining. Impotent gas jets poked their chromium heads out of the center of the five twelve-foot-long tables we used for desks. The flat, fossilized remains of countless experiments covered their surfaces—a dropcloth of compounds and colors which would have made even Pollock queasy.

  At precisely two twenty-five we entered and sat, facing what used to be the blackboard, having given place to a blank cinder-block expanse dotted with a rectangle of holes. The chalk ledge had stayed behind. The door was to the rear left of the room, and it loomed with the vague suggestion that you'd be wise to cast an eye to it now and then. I was at the front table, farthest to the right, Mike to my left, Himillsy and two others to his.

  I had decided at the last minute to go with my original idea—the one that Hims had scotched—I would put up a blank piece of paper, say my word was “big,” and then say it was so big that only a small section of it was visible. It still seemed not quite right, but I just couldn't think of anything else.

  At two twenty-seven, the fluorescent lights snapped on, and what had been a dusky waiting room became a garish operating theater. Sorbeck strode in and sat on a wooden armchair off to the rear right of us, which annoyed me—you could only look to the front or to him, but not both. He removed his pipe from a leather envelope the color of dried ketchup, loaded, and lit. Its invisible custard smoke took a stroll though the room.

  “Morning. We'll go one at a time. Put your solution up on the front wall and face the class, please. Let's begin from the first row, left to right, and work our way back. Starting with you.”

  He nodded to Kirk Brutenhausen. Sophomore, Drawing major. Di
rty blond, B-movie looks, and Da Vinci aspirations. Sigma Chi. Only a so-so draftsman—I'd seen his stuff tacked up in the hallway. He could put out a beautiful line, but his shading was all over the place. I'd glance at it in passing and think, “No, Kurt, chiaroscuro means one light source on the pear, not fourteen.” Dottie worshiped him and he let her lick it up—the rooster in the henhouse of Still Life 201.

  Thought his shit was toothpaste.

  Now he stood in the front of the room in his Greek letter sweatshirt and madras pants, clutching a small piece of pencil-flecked tracing paper. The look on his face implied he was going to get this troublesome little formality over with toot sweet and sit back down.

  “Well, I didn't have time to do much,” he said, “it being rush week and all—I'm on the committee. But I have a coupla ideas in the works. Frankly, this one sorta threw me for a loop—I mean, it is a pretty nutty assignment. Anyway, I've got this part of a sketch of—”

  “Get out.”

  Sorbeck's Voice. God. He made it into a bucket of ice water dumped on Brutey's head. Kurt acted as if he was hearing things. He was.

  “P-pardon?”

  “Of this room. Get. Out.”

  “But I—”

  He stood up and took the pipe out of his mouth. “Son.” Held it like a grenade he just yanked the pin out of. “This isn't a classroom, it's an arena. And I'd like nothing more than to scour the floor of it with your mirror-kissing lips. But the thing is, we charge admission here. Your ticket is your assignment, completed. Then I rip it in two and may or may not give you back the stub for your scrapbook. No exceptions. Last Thursday I made that as clear as you probably think your skin is.”

  Jesus Christ.

  “Rush on home, Stigma Guy. Rush rush.” Then, putting a hand to his ear and his eyes skyward, “I think I hear your committee trying to make a decision without you.”