Plate I — the basement, after midnight.
The machine at rest.
Two budding jazz musicians share a house not far from the college they attend on scholarship in a drab Navy town outside of Seattle. A creative community is unwittingly ignited — adding color to the landscape & a renaissance despite the gravity of a blue-collar world.
Spring of 2000, almost finals week at Olympic College, and the music department lounge is full of students before Jazz Band rehearsal — horns blowing faintly from the practice rooms down the hall. Around the oval table sits a cross-section of a town: kids fresh out of high school, and guys who used to be in the Navy band, back on the G.I. Bill.
One of them lives in a 1973 Volkswagen bus, busks the Bainbridge ferry for a hundred and fifty a day, hosts the Wednesday open mic at a dive with crooked floors, and hauls a late-1940s Remington portable everywhere he goes. He is going to spend the next year turning a shipyard town into a scene.
The book is written entirely in dialogue — built to be heard. Every scene carries a tune. Play it in order and you have a record.
Not a prop and not a metaphor. In this book the typewriter is cast, credited and played: it keeps time behind the poems, it goes on stage at the dive bar, and it gets its own name in the title.
I'm writing a bunch & doing this crazy art thing using this typewriter I call the tingg* Machine as not only the esthetic of the project but also a central character. Bub — Act I, Scene 5
Your typewriter seems to be its own character. — That's exactly it. I seem to take on another persona when my fingers are pounding away on that thing. Dr. Hong & Bub — Act II, Scene 5
"Every lick, every arpeggio, every space, every color, & texture… Everything." — T.J., Act II, Scene 2
Cascading cups of caffeinated concentrate drip dela drip, creme dela creme packed tight port-a-filter handy shots to shoot it down round wound and up we go free to flow, this juice in my veins Sammy Hagar high, can't cry when it rains with bebop jazz and espresso addictions — leaving little turd colored cakes.
Tighten up those base lines I feel fine Ears sweet like the fifth glass of wine Slappin' & poppin' — shakin' up the love in your jazz skillet Tappin' on those tapping keys It's not me – she's… left speechless After the bow solo SO— LOW oh – Ray Brown Blues
Wanna stick my head in the middle of that horn circle
clock time telling one to drink coffee & Stay, up, late—
after you've done everything you can think of to do
you go to bed but can't sleep
'Cause of all the caffeine runnin'
'Round your veins
Keepin' your lids locked open
to run with Wiley Coyotes in the desert
covered with checkerboard chairs
inviting one to sit with trinkets & things that sparkle—
[…]
Here, it all comes back to the list of fabulous people
"Well, who's on the list?"
"These fabulous people."
It feels like my boat sank and I had to abandon ship swim to shore, dance barefoot up the beach over barnacled rocks to stand shivering wet at the steps of a bougie waterfront house knocking on the back door praying for the kindness of strangers
Poet, guitar player, ferry busker, open-mic host, and for one particular year, the guy who lived in a Volkswagen bus and carried a typewriter into every room he entered.
Bub self-published three hand-made books in the span of the story you're about to hear — cut with scissors and a glue stick, set in the font of a late-forties Remington, sold for five bucks a copy on the Seattle–Bainbridge run. He fronted a band called Spoken Jazz, playing the typewriter, and made a room full of drinkers in a crooked-floored dive go so quiet you could hear a pin drop.
Twenty-two scenes, twenty-two standards, and one shipyard town that had no idea what was about to happen to it. Available now on Kindle.
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