The Cheese Monkeys: A Novel in Two Semesters

by Chip Kidd

Which was enough. The wall burst apart before his cowering figure, opening a small window into hell. It sounded as if someone had unfurled a huge blanket in a high wind, and the glare eclipsed the fluorescent lights into nothing. I felt a puff of searing breath on my cheeks and wondered if Mike would ever have eyebrows again. Maybelle let loose with a small, popping shriek. Almost as quickly as it had come, the blaze was gone, leaving a dark poster-sized patch on the cinder-block wall—reduced to, well, cinders. Sorbeck's face held mild interest.

  “Gee, when it was going, it was an A.”

  Mike trudged back to his seat and set the Zippo on the table. A virus of dread overtook me.

  “But that didn't last too long, did it?” The teacher picked up the lighter and relit his pipe. “You see, Bestine, the key to this assignment is choosing the right word. Then you go on with the proper execution. If you'd just gone for ‘Volatile,’ we wouldn't have had to go that extra step. Does everyone see what I mean?”

  Hmm. Yes.

  I took the pad of paper out of my satchel. It was (bless you D'Rathope), eleven by fourteen. I removed a sheet and scanned it. D'Rathope is very good paper, probably the best—each piece has a little something extra the company puts there. I found what I was looking for on the page and ripped a small corner out of it.

  “Next.” Here we go. Christ. I scribbled something on a piece of scrap paper and tossed it in front of Himillsy. I glared at her until she picked it up—it was the least she could do.

  I went to the front of the room, which still reeked from the smoldering remains of Mike's little armageddon. I glanced over at his drained, defeated phiz, and tried to ignore it, taping the piece of blank paper to the charred wall, vertically, with the small tear in the upper left-hand corner. For a moment I was struck by the contrast of the pristine sheet against the murky ruin of the wall. But then I turned and stood next to it. My living daylights had long since fled. He dove right in.

  “Don't tell me. It's Kimprobdag on a snowy day.”

  I took a breath. “Not at all, sir.”

  “Boy, this better be good.”

  I tried to keep my trembling in check, “Look . . . harder.”

  “You know, if the word is ‘invisible’, you flunk. Too obvious.”

  “It's not.”

  A mixture of anger and boredom. “Right. Look, it's the same as girleeny's—could be anything, whatever you say it is. Nice try. You fail.”

  Say it. Make myself say it. Powerless.

  “Sit down, son.”

  “Mr. Sorbeck . . . ”

  “Winter.”

  Winter? Brrr. “Winter,” going for broke, my tissue of confidence soaked, disintegrating. “I selected and wrote down my word . . . on Monday. She has it, in her hand.” I nodded towards Himillsy. She straightened, and held up the piece of paper I gave her above the table, on cue as if we'd practiced it. Winter Sorbeck now started to like this, I could tell, though he pretended to hate it.

  “Okay, liddlegirl,” he crooned like W. C. Fields, only more frightening, “What's the good word? Enlighten us all.”

  Mills opened the piece of paper, gave her throat a squeak:

  “Hope.”

  Every sheet of D'Rathope paper has a small, embossed water mark of the company's name on it. All I did was remove the corner with the “D'Rat,” and left the rest.

  Sorbeck: Iron-faced. Livid. Quiet. “Give me that.” He extended his arm and made Hims come up and pass it to him. He looked at it, and at me. Then, never taking his eyes from mine, face vacant as my attempt, held it up in his left hand, crushed it, and let it fall to the ground.

  “Gee. You're just a happy guy then, aren't ya?” He aped hammy despair, like a cast member from Lifeboat : “There is. No hope.”

  Oh, well, I tried. Next major, please. This one's too weird. I said, “No, it's there, really. Just look for it.” He came wearily towards the front of the room. Halfway there he saw it. He knew. “It's small and barely exists; it's high above the void, but it's there . . .” I began to remove the paper from the wall. Jeez, who was I fooling—how corny could I get? I tried something else, in franker tones. “Actually, a blank piece of paper always says ‘hope’ to me, until someone goes and screws it all up . . . ”

  “Tell ya what, Happy. Surprise. Now that I buy.”

  The blood left my head. He was Jekyll again. Unnerving.

  “Kiddies, let me tell you what just happened. Happy here forgot to bring his project. Which, I noticed, he only discovered shortly before Bestine's went up like a three-dollar dress on a two-dollar whore (Sorry, Maybelleen). This scared the poop out of him. But instead of giving me excuses, he made a plan. Not a great one, but doable in the time he had—about two minutes. He even had to rely on the little girl from Robbed'ngagged here, who's a wing nut to begin with, to deliver at the last second and make it seem worked out way in advance. When challenged on its flimsy quality, he didn't give up. He explained why he did what he did, though I wish he had held in there a little longer.

  “This is known, kidlings (allow me the cliché), as thinking on your feet, which none of you will ever be lucky enough to escape having to do. Remember that. Hap, I was waiting for a much better payoff than ‘hope.’ Jeez. Maybe something a little more appropriate like ‘brains.’ But it's only the second week. Think what geniuses you'll all be by June.” He made his way closer to the wall, leaned in, and squinted at the damage.

  “I must say though,” genuinely now, to no one or himself, “that I loved the image of the untouched paper in the middle of the scorch mark.” The reverie broke and he turned to me. “Hap, if you would have said, ‘This is Switzerland during World War Two’, all would have been forgiven. You'd have gotten at least a B plus. But you didn't. Was a great image though. I think I'll steal it for something that I'm working on.

  “That's another thing—listen up, folks, cardinal rule: Never show me anything that you don't want me to steal.”

  Or Himillsy.

  “Okay, kiddies, I've run out of steam. Everyone else, you all get Cs. Nobody gives a shit about grades anyway. If you don't believe me, wait till you're forty and the only grade you'll care about is the angle of your driveway. Now, next class is the first typography lesson. We'll be starting with Bodoni. Read up on it in the Tschichold and try not to get too distracted by what an asshole he is. Just concentrate on the form of the typeface and its history. I want you all to find and bring into class three examples of its use. See you Thursday.”

  We groggily started to move, not quite sure we were allowed to. My shirt pits sopping. Even Himillsy's brow was moist.

  “But Hap.”

  Everyone stopped and looked at me. Winter was calm but dead serious.

  “You will remember to bring your work to class. And if you ever try that again.” He shouldered his coat and turned, walking out of the room, already starting to forget me.

  “I'll make today seem like a lot of fun.”

  • • •

  We staggered into the hallway, slow with relief. Hims looked at her watch. “Well, that was a hoot. Sort of like the McCarthy hearings, only without the laughs.” She opened her bag. “Thanks for all the advance notice on your little plan. Next time you want to saw me in half, try putting me in a box first, Mandrake.”

  “And NEXT time you steal one of my ideas, remind me to KILL you first!” I said the words “next” and “kill” way too loudly. Screaming. She pivoted. It was more of a release than anything else—I was immediately sorry.

  “I didn't steal it!” Her eyes met mine for a brief standoff, then darted back to her purse. “You left that idea squealing on my doorstep!” She took out her compact and started to retouch her warpaint. “I just took it in and gave it a teat to draw from—improved on it immensely, ha ha.” Eyes to the sky. “For all the good it did. Christ, I'm melting. Dying for a beer. Let's beat it.”

  “Where's Maybelle, is she alright?”

  “She's in the can, wringing out her face. C'mon, pull your oar, before she tries to
climb into our lifeboat.” She was off. I trailed after her, helpless to do anything else. Was there ever any choice but to follow? After all, the lifeboat was ours . . .

  • • •

  “I should have called him on it.” Himillsy took a drag on her first cigarette of the day. We were waiting for beers in the Skeller—our bombed shelter.

  “On what?” I was letting my anger evaporate, still dizzy from the events of the class, the baseball-sized hailstorm of ideas. Hims pondered something far away and then came back to Earth.

  “He was wrong about Maybelle's—it was true to the concept of ‘inky.’” She drew in the smoke, let it go. “So what if her first choice was ‘ calligraphy.’ She ended up with ‘inky,’ and that's what mattered. Her presentation was blotchy, goopy, and smeared. If that's not inky what is, for Chrissake.” Took another puff and put it out. “Regardless of her mongoloid cat. He played us all for fools.” Meaning Sorbeck.

  “He knew his audience.” I said, not caring about the ramifications. Odd for her to defend, of all people, Maybelle—but it wasn't a defense of her so much as an attack on Winter. “Some of us are barn-sized targets, aren't we?” I asked.

  “Not anymore. Happy.”

  “What? You're dropping?”

  Hims looked at me as if I were nuts. “You want to go through that twice a week for the rest of the semester? Please.” She signaled for Greck.

  “Well, isn't that a little hasty? I mean, yeah, he's a bit odd, but you've got to admit,” I wasn't sure where I was going with this, “He's. It's. Interesting, isn't it?”

  “So was Hiroshima. At a distance.”

  That made me angry. “What are you scared of?” She didn't like the question. I didn't go on, but I could have. I could have said “Are you suddenly so afraid of being challenged by someone other than Garnett? Of finding a teacher who, for the first time in your life, might actually be smarter than you are, than Garnett is? Who might actually, God forbid, teach you something?”

  Winter was a scary guy, yes. But wasn't he exactly what we'd been waiting for? The fact that he was even here at State was miraculous in itself. She had to know that. I said, “Look. Why not give it another shot. He's not going to do a critique every class, or even every week, and you know he just wants to rattle us. Besides, he obviously likes you.” This had an effect on her, which she (poorly) tried to hide.

  “Sorry,” she demurred, “I scratched necrophilia off my list a long time ago.”

  • • •

  As it turned out I didn't even have to coax her to stick with Art 127—the Burser did it for me— wouldn't let her out. We were too far into the semester—everything else for the period was filled, it was too late to declare an audit; and, sealing it: she'd dropped too many times in the past. For once the bureaucracy of the hive worked in my favor.

  At the next class we went over the typographic samples we'd collected, passing them up to Winter for discussion. When he wasn't in full critiquebattle mode, he was much easier to deal with.

  “You,” he nodded to someone in the back of the room, “wutcha got.”

  A tow-headed boy in a black turtleneck and black work pants stood up. Mummy thin. He took a crumpled piece of paper out of his pocket. Instead of passing it forward he began to recite, with tortured, monotone gravity,

  “If the clouds could speak, they would hate you. If—”

  “If I had a gun I'd stab you. What the hell is that ?”

  “It's a poem.” The boy's eyes were hollow and glazed. “I wrote it last night.”

  “With what, the hand that wasn't holding the needle? It's crap.” Sorbeck rapped his pipe on the table to empty it, sending a spray of moist ashes to the floor. He did that a lot, and it never failed to fill me with awed repulsion. “Besides, the two actions are mutually exclusive. You don't need to be able to speak in order to hate someone! Don't you think there are legions of loathing mutes out there?” Winter paused, amazed and horrified that he'd even been brought to ask such a question. “Jesus, why am I bothering with this? Read Whitman, for Chrissakes. Mr . . .”

  “David.”

  “David what.”

  “David. David David.”

  “David David?”

  “Yes.”

  “Let me guess, your parents were twins.”

  “No. I've released myself from the tyranny of a bourgeois societal abattoir that brands its cowlike subjects with meaningless labels in order to more efficiently herd them.” He was serious. Winter threw it right back at him.

  “No, you've forsaken your family's good name in a sadly misguided exchange for a false identity even more dull and conformist than the one you think you're escaping. At some point you will grow up, and the very notion of it will make you wince in your sleep.”

  David David stood unblinking, impervious. He probably heard it all the time. Lived for it.

  “Plant it, D Squared. Bestine?” Mike handed in another hand-rendering of the word “Hot,” but in red and set in the typeface we were assigned.

  “Bestine, give it up. You're smitten with this idea and it's making a fool of you. Type is nice though. Everyone?” He stood. “Never fall in love with an idea. They're whores: if the one you're with isn't doing the job, there's always, always, always another.”

  • • •

  Two days later, we were on our way to the Hutzle Union building to renew Mills's campus parking sticker when suddenly she chirped, “Hey! It's the Happy-Clappies! Let's go give 'em a spark.”

  As you've no doubt deduced by now, Miss Dodd had a rather thorny view of religion, which was best summed up by the fact that she got thrown out of vacation Bible school at age eleven for making a St. Sebastian toothpick holder in Crafts.

  Every now and then, walking past Old Main, one would spot the Campus Crusaders, a flock of prematurely Redeemed Souls who felt it wasn't enough that God was your Creator, he also had to be your Pal.

  “Look at them. It's illegal to be that happy.”

  A chunky girl in a red plaid skirt who appeared to be completely normal casually walked up to Himillsy and asked, just a little too loudly, “Did you know that Jesus loves you?” She handed us a pamphlet with a cartoon drawing on the front of the crucified Savior, bleeding like new dungarees in the wash. He looked ecstatic, as if he'd just won the Lottery. Hims took it and used it to fan herself, even though it was just below freezing.

  “Of course, dear, and we're just dying to get married, but Mummy is dead set against it.” Hims leaned into her, very conspiratorial, “He's N.O.K.D., and if we elope she'll cut us off.”

  Our little Merry Magdalene didn't seem to understand. She turned to me, on to her next mission, and said, now a tad unsure of herself, “God loves you too.”

  “Obviously,” I said. “I'm white, I have a penis, and fabulous taste.”

  Himillsy's surprise had just the right note of archness. “Darling! A penis? Really! Why didn't you tell me? Whose is it?”

  “Not sure. I haven't opened it yet.”

  “Oh come, let's do!” she said, taking my arm. “You must really rate! All I got was a slash that smells like carp and leaks blood every month!” She winked at the girl—whose face was as blank as her checks to the Church.

  We skipped away, arm in arm. Hims looked back to the group, right before we made the xcorner, and shouted, “Praise Him!”

  • • •

  The problem for the next formal critique was, thankfully, less opaque than the first. You had to design a symbol, or “trademark” for yourself, and apply it to an eight-and-a-half-by-eleven piece of stationery. The only hitch was you couldn't use any typography. You had to hand it in anonymously, and if he couldn't figure out which one was yours, you failed.

  I did not care to exchange ideas on this one with Hims, thank you very much.

  Instead I sat in the Belly that night and toured the brothel of my head for the right approach to show me some leg, as per Winter's quaint comparison. I wondered if my Social Security number would count as typogr
aphy. Probably. Next—symbols, markings, identification. A way of saying, “This is me!” without words. A photo of myself? Cop-out. A drawing? I turned a piece of black conte crayon end over end in my fingers. Thinkthinkthink.

  In the high school library, during study halls when I found an especially brilliant or idiotic passage in a book, I'd make a comics word balloon around it, pointing to the margin. Then in the space I'd draw a cartoon of my head, a Disney version, saying it—marking a trail to nowhere for some poor shmo after I was long gone. Hmmm. I picked up a piece of D'Rathope (I was now a lifetime customer). Whoops. Smudged it. Rats. Wiped my fing—

  Wait.

  My pal, the Almighty, had already given me a trademark— ten of them. I took out my ink pad, flipped up the lid. Carefully pressed my left thumb onto it, and then rolled it onto the paper, like they do on Dragnet.

  A perfect oval.

  I drew a neck and shoulders underneath it, in a dress shirt, jacket, and tie. Coup d'état: gave it glasses like mine.

  Liked it.

  Didn't dare love it . . .

  • • •

  i i i .

  T H E S E C O N D C R I T I Q U E.

  Art 127 ( Introduction to Graphic Design),

  Winter Sorbeck, instr.

  For which we are asked to design a personal identity mark, or “logo,” for use as a symbol to be placed on business cards and the like in order to invite inquiry, generate capital, etc. No typographic information, of any kind, may be used.

  “Okay, pass them up.”

  We handed our papers forward. Without looking, he put them in his briefcase and snapped it shut. “Fine. Now, can anyone tell me what that assignment was about ?” Silence. He sighed. “Nobody?”

  Nobody.

  “Thought so. Surprise, kiddies—pop quiz.” Pop quiz? In art class?

  He pointed to a box of Magic Markers and a stack of poster board. “Everybody will take one of each, please.” Once we had done it and returned to our seats, he spoke, pacing across the front.