The Cheese Monkeys: A Novel in Two Semesters

by Chip Kidd

  ” I began to put it back in my pocket.

  “Let me see that!”

  “Don't think so. It's all between the dean and my conscience, now.”

  She shot across the table and snatched it, knocking over the orange juice and dragging her sweater sleeve through the syrup. People began to stare.

  “How could you?” Hands shaking, she unfolded it.

  Himillsy Dodd

  defied her God.

  And He got even,

  while she got odd.

  “April fool.” And it was too.

  There was that wonderful moment when terror alchemized into relief, then tickled fury.

  “You prick!” Color rushed back into her face.

  I was actually thrilled to have her refer to me that way, in that manner—it was permission to scold her, to sweep us into an emotional exchange: “You are lucky I didn't, Miss Molecule. I sure as hell wanted to.” I smiled, in spite of myself. Damn, I just could not stay mad at her. “You couldn't even come up with more than one poem?”

  “I know, sorry.” Hand on heart, trying to slow it down. “My muse just went on hols . . .”

  • • •

  It's hard to pinpoint exactly when The Difference began, but as I bought my ticket from the Beaver Bus Travel Company to go home for Easter, I was really, really bothered by the fact that the color and shape of the logo on it (a Chicklet-toothed, dirt brown rodent in a baseball cap, madly waving good-bye with his right hand) did not match those on the sign above the sales booth (dark blue and waving with the left). Which was also completely different from the little bastards painted on the sides of the buses AND stamped on the schedule pamphlets (badly printed on a flimsy paper stock completely illsuited for the wear and tear of the long-term use they were no doubt intended for). And that's when I realized things like this had been occurring to me a lot lately. All signage—indeed, any typesetting, color schemes, and printed materials my eyes pounced on were automatically dissected and held to Draconian standards of graphic worthiness. It was all I could do to keep from grabbing the station attendant by the shoulders and shaking her into sense, screaming, “None of it's CONSISTENT! Don't you understand?! Somebody DO SOMETHING!!”

  No other explanation: I was becoming Winterized.

  And if that wasn't enough, there was the Himillsy Effect. Once home, I was decorating Easter eggs at the kitchen table on Saturday night when the H.E. prompted me to strive for a little more than the usual geometric patterns. Needing a reference, I got out the illustrated children's Bible from my room and opened it to the Gospels—Matthew. Perfect. I started with the narrow, dismissive eyes . . .

  “What's that you're making, hon?” Mom was in the dining room, putting the finishing touches on our centerpiece for tomorrow's dinner: Fourteen yellow marshmallow chickens with jellybean eyes arranged in a Busby Berkeley formation around a ceramic rabbit-shaped vase the size of a small beatific child clutching a basket, wearing a blue buttonless blazer and sprouting five purple lilies and two palm fronds from last Sunday out of its head. All on a stage of shredded pink and seafoam green plastic grass dotted with more jelly beans and foil-wrapped chocolate eggs and chickies.

  “An egg.” Next I did his small, pinched mouth. Hah!—try that with a Q-tip and Paas vegetable dye No. 6, Michelangelo!

  “I know. What's on it?” She was making the chickies spell out “HE IS RISEN.”

  “Pontius Pilate.”

  “Oh.” She wasn't really listening. Till I knocked over the bullet-shaped bottle of red dye, inflicting a blooming wound on the table-cloth.

  “GodDAMN it! Son of a bloody, Goddamned BITC—” Whoops. Forgot where I was for a sec. Uh oh.

  She gasped. A mask of mortification covered her face, as she watched her only son sentence himself to yet another week, at least, in Purgatory.

  “This . . . pilot . . . ,” she started, her relentless sense of holiday cheer overcoming her horror of blasphemy and steering things back to the realm of the festive, “. . . is he in the air force? Why put him on an egg?”

  A good question.

  And I knew the answer.

  • • •

  Not long after returning to campus and the home stretch of the semester, I was between classes on a crisp Tuesday afternoon when I happened upon the most extraordinary thing, about twenty yards away across the mall. A boy and a girl (both maybe a few years older than me) were sitting on a bench, books at their side, having a casual conversation. Then the boy leaned to kiss her and she obliged, her hand to his face. I didn't recognize them at first because they were two people who I could tell, even from where I was standing, enjoyed each other's company.

  But no mistake: it was Garnett and Himillsy.

  Unnoticed, I stood gaping. Stumped. It seemed so . . . wrong. Ever since the Christmas party I'd been adding to their Hepburn-Tracy scenario in my head, except for H&G there would never be a third reel when they throw down their weapons, kiss, and stroll off arm in arm as the credits roll. She rarely even mentioned him when we were together. So which was the real her—G's or mine? Both? Neither?

  Then I realized there was no mine. And knowing there wouldn't be, I went on to class.

  Later that week, while rummaging through Thenson's desk drawer in desperate search of his emergency roll of Necco wafers, I came across some paperwork he'd filled out—an application to room next fall with Pompy Sugarland, a double-chinned boy from down the hall who picked his nose whenever he thought no one was looking. I should have felt betrayed, but I didn't. The things about Thenson I so initially admired—his aimlessness, his cavalier attitude about any coherent goal—were now reborn as my nemeses. He still had no idea what he wanted to do, and couldn't have cared less.

  And now, thanks to Winter, I did . . .

  • • •

  . . . which leads us to the third formal Graphic Design critique. Our problem combined conceptual theory and practical application. “Design a poster,” Winter ordered, “that gets me to either start doing something, or stop doing something.”

  • • •

  i v .

  T H E T H I R D C R I T I Q U E.

  Art 127 ( Introduction to Graphic Design),

  Winter Sorbeck, instr.

  For which we are to design a poster, so that upon seeing it, the viewer will feel strangely compelled either to start an action or cease one.

  Mike went first this time. Maybe he thought it would give him an advantage, or at least a license for ceremony: he gingerly untied and parted the covers of his faux-leather portfolio case, easing out a good-sized sheet of poster board; then slowly peeled back the layer of protecting vellum. Crenck tacked his piece to the wall with an air of solemn purpose, and stood back to make sure it was straight, to admire its soaring slogan,

  KEEP

  AMERICA

  BEAUTIFUL!

  Again, like his “hot” project, the craftsmanship was excellent. With a sign painter's prefab precision, he'd produced a rolling countryside complete with barn, silo, and tractor, all polished and rounded, but with just a hint of expression from the artist's hand—sort of in the manner of Grant Wood's ex-assistant after a few scotches. The type spanned the heavens: three lines on a tilted arc—in an electric orange which hit the azure sky and vibrated almost audibly.

  As did Winter. “And how are we supposed to do that, exactly?” Some sort of terrible crime had been committed here. I was baffled.

  “Do what?” Mike, all innocent.

  Sorbeck struggled to control himself. Jeez— what was the big deal? Was he looking at the same poster I was?

  “Keep. America. Beautiful. What does that even mean?”

  “I, it, means . . . you know . . .” Mike sounded and looked like a balloon with the air escaping.

  Winter waved his hand at the work. “Does it mean canvassing the countryside with sentimental claptrap?”

  Crenck, poor wretch, groped for an adequate reply. “No, I don't think—”

  “Haven't we had enough o
f this sort of thing, Bestine?” Winter looked around the room, went over to Margaret, and picked up a textbook from the stack next to her. “May I?”

  She nodded emphatically.

  It was called Titans of Industry —one of those massive Social Studies epics that makes you just want to seize it and run for the nearest bonfire. He flipped through, found what he wanted, and ripped it out. Then he grabbed Margaret's glue pot, slathered one side of the paper, walked up to the poster, and slapped it over the meticulously rendered landscape, leaving the slogan untouched.

  “Okay, everybody,” he said, “It's not the right size, I know. Use your imagination.”

  Now the words wafted over a full-page blackand-white photo of the industrial center of Pittsburgh. Four smoke stacks—steel monolith cylinders belching soot—rose out of a sea of smog, like gun barrels from a capsized destroyer.

  This changed the effect of the message completely, turning it over on itself and forging an altogether new meaning. Amazing.

  “That's,” squeaked Margaret, aghast, “that's horrible. How could you do that?”

  “Do what?” Winter looked actor-hurt. “Build the smelting plant? Pigtails, that's America . . .”

  She was obviously skeptical, appalled. “No . . .”

  Sorbeck scowled, and became a snowball at the top of a mountain. He launched himself off the peak and rolled towards her, saying, “. . . and so is slavery.” Gathering size, mass . . . “And lynch mobs. And the H-bomb.” Growing, gaining speed . . . “And witch hunts. And murdering every Indian who gets in the way so we can build another Levittown.” Obliterating everything in his path, till— ka-blam! “Is that BEAUTIFUL enough for YOU?”

  “W-well, I think,” Margaret managed, shaking, putting her bravest face on it, “that the poster, the way it was, before . . .”

  “Yes, honey?”

  “. . . was good.”

  Winter narrowed his eyes.

  “Yesss . . .” he said, in a low rumble. He walked towards her “. . . it was. That's the problem.” I wouldn't have thought it possible, but he seemed to get even larger as he spoke. “All the other things, that I just mentioned—they used to be good too. Hell, a lot of people think they still are. Am I supposed to like that?”

  No doubt—she was fatally sorry she'd spoken up. Sorry that God had ever put a tongue in her mouth.

  “Pigtails, if Bestine really wants to keep America-beautiful, he might consider honestly showing us what will happen if we don't, instead of trying to prove what a great illustrator he thinks he is.”

  Mike shrank in mortification, beyond human speech. He just sort of gurgled and tried to cease to exist.

  Winter: “Kiddies, Graphic Design, if you wield it effectively, is Power. Power to transmit ideas that change everything. Power that can destroy an entire race or save a nation from despair. In this century, Germany chose to do the former with the swastika, and America opted for the latter with Mickey Mouse and Superman.” He hesitated, alarmed at his own observation. “Jesus, that's worthy of a good afternoon's dissertation in itself.”

  Was that next?

  “But do you know what's best about America?” He wasn't asking us. “Jackie Robinson. Frank Lloyd Wright. Billie Holiday. Albert Einstein. Cole Porter. In other words: A shine. A misogynist fop. A strung-out jigaboo. A displaced kike. A flaming flit. And who the hell CARES, because they're all so goddamn GREAT. They do what they do, and they're the BEST, and that's all that matters. That's what's best about America—‘good’ is never good enough, no matter WHO you are.” He stopped to breathe, and leaned in to level his face against Margaret's.

  “Now, Pigtails, I want you to repeat after me.”

  Margaret, terrified: “Y-yes?”

  “Good.”

  “G-good.”

  “Is.”

  “I-is.”

  “Dead.”

  “D-d—”

  “SAY IT!”

  “Dead.” She started to sob.

  “Now, all together, Sunshine.”

  She couldn't.

  He waited. “Say it, Pigtails.”

  She did what she could to pull herself together, slowly got her things in order, and walked out.

  So much for Pigtails.

  Winter went up to his chair in the front of the room, lit his pipe, and sat down. He was as rattled, actually, as she was.

  “This class is not a pretty picture postcard . . .” He put his Zippo in his shirt pocket. “. . . it's an urgent telegram.” We started to breathe again— he'd come back down to human size. Conversational. “Telegrams, by the way, if you've never seen one, are visually quite intriguing, because the static, sober typography and lack of punctuation can never accurately reflect the usually frantic and disquieting nature of the content.” He took a puff. “But I digress. Bestine, you are dismissed.” Mike shook himself to action, took down his poster, and sat.

  Winter: “Next. D Squared.”

  David David went to the front. He pulled a staplegun out of his army-issue kit bag, and with nary a flinch riveted his poster to the cinder blocks with four rifle-shot blasts, one in each corner. Two sets of words and two pictures had been placed on the board, alternated and stacked. All of the typography was assembled from letters cut out of screaming tabloid headlines. The first phrase was:

  WHEN YOU

  ENJOY

  followed by the front of a box of raspberry Jell-O, pasted onto the surface. Then below that,

  YOU

  ENJOY

  accompanied by an eight-by-ten glossy color photo of a close-up of a cow's foot, caked with filth.

  He stared at all of us with impassive distaste.

  After an airless minute, Winter said, “Okay, D Squared, I think I got it. I'll let you explain.”

  David David closed his eyes for a moment, readied himself, and delivered, in not even a monotone—a dial tone:

  “Any and all gelatin products manufactured in North America and Western Europe consist entirely of the dismembered hooves of cows, horses, pigs, and goats, which are boiled until the blood and the dirt and the hair and the shit are washed away and the resulting sebaceous mass can be left to dry and be ground into dust and put into boxes covered with laughing people and drawings of fruit and pretty colors, for our idle pleasure. Jell-O. JuJubees. Smuckers. Gum drops. Dong Dongs: They are all the feet of the Quadruped Oppressed, trampling our hot, wet, jelly tongues, while we laugh and sing and dance . . .”

  Note to self: Cut this guy a wide berth.

  “. . . as the animals, legless and screaming—”

  “Alright, ALRIGHT,” Winter yelled. “Point taken.”

  A girl in the back raised her hand. “Wait a minute! Is that really TRUE?” DD turned to her.

  “Do you realize that your left leg contains enough tallow to produce at least four boxes of Nabisco Chew-eez Lemon Squares? And your breasts—”

  “CORK IT!” shouted Winter, silencing the room. “Let's try to address the poster itself. Any comments?”

  I put my arm up, disregarding my own safety. “I think it's a strong idea. But the presentation makes it a little . . . unclear.”

  “Thank you, Happy. Yes. While D-Squared's information, I assume, is of impeccable accuracy, without his inimitable vocal presentation, it remains an enigma. This is not, if one were controlling the funds of some sort of Board in the Effort of Shielding the Hooved, as one would have wished. What he's done though, which is indeed graphically in the realm of the interesting, lies in his keenly selected substitution of images for words. Had he literally said, ‘If you eat Jell-O, you eat a shit-smeared pig's foot,’ it wouldn't have the same effect.”

  Hims spoke up. “So what's the best solution?”

  Winter thought a moment. “Probably, I'm afraid, a television commercial. He requires the benefits of sound and movement, which unfortunately the limits of two-dimensional Graphic Design do not afford. It also wouldn't hurt to have someone who doesn't seem to be demanding a ransom handle the typography. D-Squared
, you may step down, free to resume your contragelatinous crusade; and you, Girleen, while we're at it, may come forward.”

  Himillsy made her way up, lugging something heavy covered with a plastic tarp. She unwrapped and pulled out a piece of crumpled sheet metal about two-and-a-half feet wide and three feet tall. It was all she could do to hoist it onto the chalk ledge and let it land against the wall with a clang. It read,:

  NO PARKING

  7 AM - 5 PM

  MON THRU FRI

  VIOLATORS

  WILL BE TOWED

  AT OWNER'S

  EXPENSE

  There were two nasty gashes in it—one at the top and one at the bottom—both centered. She seemed pleased.

  Winter did not. “Darlin', Christ on a bicycle! You were supposed to design it yourself! ”

  Himillsy, suddenly furious, at the top of her lungs: “I altered it! It used to be on a pole! I made it my own!”

  “Girleen,” Sorbeck was rubbing his eyes, at wit's end, “when are you going to decide to do some work?”

  “I'm sorry?” Hims practically threw thunderbolts. “When was the last time you climbed onto the roof of your car in wedgies, with nothing but a Phillips screwdriver and a ball-peen hammer, to rip a five-pound sheet of tin from the base of a streetlight at four o'clock in the morning?” She was breathless. “Without getting arrested? If that's not work, Mr. Chips, then enlighten me, forsooth, what is?”

  “Thinking up your own idea, girlygirl. Not the township's.”

  “What about Duchamp?”

  “What about him?”

  “Well, he said a piss pot was Art, and Shazzam! it was Art. I say, Shazzam! This sign is Graphic Design!”

  “And it is! Kazowie! The Traffic Department's!”

  This was going nowhere. I felt like ringing a bell and sending them both back to their corners.