The Last Distro Catalog

• Chapter 1 P.O. Box 404
• Chapter 2 Toner on My Fingers
• Chapter 3 The Two-Dollar Bill in the SASE
• Chapter 4 Long-Arm Staplers and Exacto Blades
• Chapter 5 Winter Catalog, Issue No. 1
• Chapter 6 Trading by Moonlight
• Chapter 7 Half-Tones and Cheap Xerox Dreams
• Chapter 8 Letters from Olympia
• Chapter 9 The 24-Hour Copy Shop Heist
• Chapter 10 Dial Tones and Mosaic Windows
• Chapter 11 Tape Hiss and Ink Bleed
• Chapter 12 Postal Scale Confessions
• Chapter 13 The Girl with the Blue Pen Pals
• Chapter 14 Netscape Navigator
• Chapter 15 Dead Letter Office
• Chapter 16 HTML for Beginners
• Chapter 17 Spring Catalog, Shrinking Print Runs
• Chapter 18 Underground Basement Shows and Folded Paper
• Chapter 19 Digital Ghost Towns
• Chapter 20 Return to Sender
• Chapter 21 The Disappearing Mailboxes
• Chapter 22 Geocities and Graycard
• Chapter 23 The Last Bulk-Rate Stamp
• Chapter 24 Static on the Line
• Chapter 25 Final Issue, Run of Fifty
• Chapter 26 Archive of Paper and Pixels

The glass door of the suburban branch post office had a brass push-plate worn dull in the center by forty years of thumbprints. It swung shut with the pneumatic wheeze of a tired lung, sealing off the wet October asphalt of North Olmsted, Ohio, and dropping me into an interior that smelled perpetually of damp wool coats, drying floor wax, and industrial mucilage.

I was fifteen, wearing a corduroy jacket bought for four dollars at the Value World on Lorain Road, and my right hand was jammed into my pocket, fingers clenched around two small pieces of notched brass. Key number 404 was stamped on the larger of the two. It was light, stamped out of cheap alloy, but in the fall of 1993, it felt like the firing pin of an underground transmission network.

The lobby was narrow, illuminated by buzzing fluorescent tubes that made everyone’s skin look the color of skim milk. On the south wall, stacked eight high and stretching down a thirty-foot corridor, were the bronze doors of the rented post office boxes. Each door was three inches wide by five inches tall, fronted with a frosted glass window patterned like chicken wire, behind which sat a tiny, black-painted dial or a keyway. A miniature brass eagle with outstretched wings perched above each lock, looking down with a blank, bureaucratic stare at the people who came to claim what the world had sent them.

Box 404 lived in the fourth row from the bottom, slightly below waist height. To open it, you had to perform a modest half-curtsy, dipping one knee toward the terrazzo floor. You pushed the key into the slot until the tumblers clicked, turned it ninety degrees to the right, and swung the door wide on its stiff hinge.

Most days during that first month, Box 404 contained nothing but the empty, dust-furred green sheet metal of its own interior. Sometimes a loose slip of stiff yellow cardstock sat inside—a notice from the clerk behind the counter informing me that a piece of bulk circular mail from an insurance company or a local carpet-cleaning outlet had been misrouted. I would take the card, slide it back through the slot beneath the customer window, and walk out into the rain with my shoulders hunched, feeling like an imposter who had leased an embassy suite only to find that foreign nations had forgotten the address.

Getting the box had required a level of bureaucratic maneuvering that felt dangerously close to forgery. The application form, PS Form 1093, demanded two forms of identification and a physical home address. I didn't want mail coming to my parents' house on Meadow Lane. My mother had a habit of steaming open bank statements with the spout of a copper teakettle, and my father viewed any envelope without a printed return address as either a solicitation from a cult or an invoice from an abortion clinic. The world I was trying to reach had to remain hidden behind steel and glass, isolated from the linoleum dinner table where conversations circled endlessly around high school algebra grades and lawn aeration.

I had used my school library card and a learner’s permit, along with a crisp twenty-dollar bill saved from mowing the neighbor’s crabgrass. The clerk, a man named Mr. Henderson whose name tag was taped over a stain on his blue postal polo shirt, had looked at me over the rims of half-moon glasses. He took my twenty, looked at the scrawled name on the card—C. Miller / Black Dog Distro—and paused.

"What is that, an import-export firm?" he asked. His voice had the dry, rattling texture of sorting bins sliding along rails.

"Printed matter," I said. My voice cracked slightly on the second syllable, which didn't help project an aura of international commerce. "Independent small press publications."

Henderson grunted, stamped the yellow slip with a heavy purple date-stamper that came down with the force of a gavel, and dropped the two brass keys onto the chipped laminate counter. "Keep your renewals paid by the first of the quarter. We cancel after ten days, and we dump the contents in the dead-letter crate behind the bulk scales. No exceptions."

"Understood," I said, snatching the keys before he could change his mind.

For the first three weeks, the box remained a dry hole. The reality of the zine underground, which I had read about with obsessive focus in the dog-eared back issues of Factsheet Five borrowed from an older kid who worked the register at Record Exchange, was that it moved at the speed of diesel trucks and human sorting hands. You didn't just plug in; you dropped a signal into a deep, slow-moving well, and you had to wait for the ripples to hit a distant wall and bounce all the way back.

I had placed three tiny classified advertisements. The first was in Factsheet Five itself, squeezed into the back pages among hundreds of eight-point text blocks offering everything from manifestos on municipal water fluoridation to instructions on how to build a shortwave receiver inside an Altoids tin. The second was in a local Cleveland punk zine called Scum-Bag, printed on cheap newsprint that turned your fingers charcoal-gray if you touched it for more than five seconds. The third was in a single-sheet xeroxed comic newsletter out of Minneapolis that I had found tucked inside a plastic baggie at a comic book convention at the Holiday Inn near the airport.

The ad was modest. It took up four lines of type, which I had composed on an electric Sears typewriter with a failing ribbon:

BLACK DOG DISTRO. Minicomics, punk art, weird fiction, strange essays. Issue #0 catalog available for 2 stamps or trade. Looking for artists, creators, self-publishers. Send samples to P.O. Box 404, North Olmsted, OH 44070.

Every day after the final bell rang at high school, while the yellow buses idled in the diesel-choked loop out front, I would unlock my ten-speed Schwinn from the rack behind the boiler room and ride the three miles to the post office. It was mid-autumn, and the wind off Lake Erie carried the smell of decaying leaves and industrial exhaust from the steel mills twenty miles to the east. My sneakers were usually wet by the time I reached the parking lot, water having seeped up through the worn canvas from the puddle-pocked gutters.

On the twenty-second of October, a Tuesday, I performed the ritual half-kneel, inserted the key, and turned it.

The interior was not empty.

Sitting at the back of the small metal tunnel, illuminated by the dusty light filtering through the glass front, was a stack of paper three inches thick. It looked huge, like an animal had crawled into the compartment to nest.

I didn't open them in the lobby. The presence of Henderson behind the counter, methodically weighing a package wrapped in brown butcher paper with heavy hemp twine, made me feel exposed. I gathered the bundle with both hands, jammed the mail into the inside pocket of my corduroy jacket until the canvas lining strained against its seams, locked the box, and walked out into the cold drizzle.

Around the corner from the post office sat an all-night laundromat called Suds & Duds. It was empty except for a woman in pink foam curlers asleep across three plastic chairs, the hum of twenty industrial dryers providing a steady, comforting low-frequency roar. The air inside was seventy-five degrees and smelled of lilac fabric softener and scorched cotton.

I took a booth in the back, beside a plastic table scarred with cigarette burns, and emptied my pockets.

There were eleven envelopes.

To anyone else, they would have looked like junk—the flotsam of a literacy that had failed to find a commercial publisher. But to me, spread across that orange laminate tabletop under the buzzing yellow lights, they looked like holy relics.

The first was a standard business envelope from Richmond, Virginia. The sender had used an old manual typewriter with an uneven platen; every capital letter E was raised slightly above the line of text, like a person stepping out of formation. In the corner was a tiny rubber stamp of a one-eyed cat. Inside was a single folded sheet of heavy gray bond paper and two unused twenty-nine-cent stamps showing an image of an American flag billowing over a white house.

Dear Black Dog, the letter began. Saw your listing in FF5. We don’t have much going on down here except humidity and bad hardcore bands, but a few of us are making these books. Enclosed is my minicomic, "Cardboard Cathedrals #1." It’s eight pages, quarter-legal size, printed at the Kinko’s on Broad Street when my buddy worked the night shift. If you want to carry it, let me know. Wholesale is forty cents a copy, retail is a buck. Trade always welcome. Stay free.

Tucked inside the fold of the letter was the comic itself. It was tiny—four and a quarter inches by five and a half, the size of a folded index card—held together at the spine by a single steel staple that had been driven through from the outside and crimped down with the flat of a butter knife. The cover was drawn in heavy, scratchy black ink: an alleyway filled with overflowing garbage cans, behind which rose the gothic spires of a cathedral made entirely of corrugated shipping boxes.

I turned the pages slowly. The paper was rough, twenty-pound copy stock, and the toner had that faint, waxy sheen that comes from a machine running slightly too hot. But the drawings were detailed and furious. The panels didn't follow the clean grid of the Marvel and DC comics I had bought as a kid at the grocery store carousel rack; they tumbled into one another, dialogue running along the margins, figures breaking through the borders with an energy that felt completely unmanaged by editors, focus groups, or marketing departments. It was pure, unmediated thought transferred directly from someone’s brain to a drafting pen, run through a lens onto a drum, and pressed into paper.

The second envelope came from a girl named Sarah in Portland, Oregon. The envelope itself was an art object: she had cut it out of a full-page color advertisement for Plymouth station wagons from a 1962 Life magazine and folded it into shape, securing the seams with thick strips of clear packing tape. The address was written in silver ink across the hood of a sky-blue sedan. Inside, wrapped in a sheet of purple tissue paper, was a minicomic called Kitchen Sink Realism. It was even smaller than the Richmond book—barely three inches square—bound with red embroidery floss threaded through three hand-punched holes and tied in a neat square knot at the back.

Inside Sarah's envelope was a handwritten note on lined notebook paper: I don't need money. Just send me whatever you think is fair, or send me someone else's book that makes you feel like you aren't the only person alive who hates gym class. P.S. Don't use the yellow stamps with the roses on them, my mailman keeps peeling them off for his collection.

One by one, I went through the pile. A sixteen-page photocopied essay on the history of radical streetcar strikes in San Francisco from 1917; a surrealist comic about a boy whose shadow slowly detached itself and began working as a short-order cook at an IHOP in Boise; three different folded-paper newsletters featuring reviews of cassette tapes that were only available by sending four dollars in loose quarters to addresses in rural Pennsylvania and upstate New York.

Almost every envelope contained stamps. Some were pristine, torn carefully along the perforations from sheets bought at clean suburban counters. Others were crumpled, clearly retrieved from desk drawers or peeled off uncancelled mail with a wet sponge and re-gummed with a dab of glue stick. They were the currency of this country within a country—the legal tender of the dispossessed, the teenage, the reclusive, and the obsessed.

Sitting there in the laundromat, listening to the rhythmic thump-thump-thump of a sneaker bouncing around inside dryer number fourteen, I felt an extraordinary shift in the ground beneath me.

Until that afternoon, my existence had been defined by the geographical borders of Cuyahoga County: the strip malls of Brookpark Road, the gray concrete overpasses of Interstate 480, the identical split-level houses that lined our street like filing cabinets for families. Everyone I knew went to the same school, shopped at the same Sears, watched the same three evening news broadcasts, and bought their music at the same Camelot Music store in the mall, where the cassettes were locked behind clear plastic security frames that only a cashier with a special magnetic key could release.

The objects sitting on the orange table were completely outside that framework. They had not been approved by an art director. They hadn't passed through a corporate distribution warehouse in New Jersey. They didn't have barcodes. On the back covers, where the ISBN and the retail price should have been, there were only rubber-stamped P.O. Box numbers from small towns I had never heard of: Arcata, California; Denton, Texas; Orono, Maine.

These were things made by hand by people who had decided that waiting for someone to grant them permission to speak was a sucker’s game. If you had five dollars, an eight-and-a-half-by-eleven master sheet, and access to a machine that could project light through glass onto paper, you were a publisher. You were in the directory.

I pulled my notebook from my bag—a blue canvas-bound ledger with green-tinted ledger pages that I had stolen from my father’s workbench in the garage. On the first page, under the heading BLACK DOG INVENTORY - OCTOBER 1993, I began to write.

001. Cardboard Cathedrals #1. Richmond, VA. (8pp, b&w, staple). Price: $1.00. 002. Kitchen Sink Realism #3. Portland, OR. (12pp, hand-sewn, purple). Price: Trade only. 003. The Great Strike of the Geary Street Lines. SF, CA. (16pp, legal fold). Price: $1.50.

My handwriting was small, tight, and neat. I recorded the names, the return addresses, the format, the retail cost, and the number of copies they had provided on consignment. Most had sent five copies; a few had sent only one, treating it as an audition for a catalog that didn't yet exist anywhere except in my own head and on a single typed sheet folded into my pocket.

Outside, the rain had turned into a steady, cold October downpour, the kind that stripped the last yellow leaves from the pin oaks and plastered them like wet decals across the windshields of the cars parked along Lorain Road.

I repacked the envelopes, smoothing out the paper with my thumbs. I slid the ledger back into my bag, zipped the heavy canvas shut, and stood up. My legs were stiff from the low plastic bench, but as I pushed through the double glass doors of the laundromat into the damp evening air, the weight of the bag against my spine didn't feel like schoolwork or chores. It felt like ballast.

I walked the Schwinn across the intersection, the traffic lights reflecting in the oil slicks on the wet road. On the corner, in front of the local branch of National City Bank, a new installation had appeared over the summer: a heavy, brushed-steel automated teller machine with a green phosphor CRT screen that flickered under a sharp plastic hood. A tiny sign beside it boasted of twenty-four-hour access to electronic accounting networks across five states.

A block further down, in the window of the Radio Shack between the dry cleaners and the bakery, a display was set up around a boxy, beige personal computer called a Tandy. A paper streamer taped to the plate glass proclaimed: THE INFORMATION SUPERHIGHWAY IS COMING! ARE YOU READY? Inside the darkened store, the computer's monitor hummed quietly to itself, displaying a pattern of green dots against a black void, waiting for commands that nobody in North Olmsted had yet learned how to type.

I didn't look at the computer for more than a second. It looked cold, gray, and completely empty, like an office building after the cleaning crew had gone home.

Instead, I reached into my coat pocket and felt the cool, notched metal of key 404, nestled beside the thick, fibrous bundle of fresh paper. I climbed onto the bicycle, dropped my feet onto the pedals, and rode home through the dark, my fingers smelling of machine toner and rain.

The basement of our split-level on Meadow Lane was divided by a partition of faux-wood paneling into two distinct territories. The finished half held a brown plaid sectional sofa, a console television that required five minutes to warm up its cathode tube, and my father’s exercise bike, which had evolved into a high-end rack for winter coats. The unfinished half belonged to the furnace, the water heater, and a concrete-walled alcove tucked behind the laundry tubs where the previous owner had built a workbench out of two-by-fours and exterior-grade plywood.

That workbench was the headquarters of Black Dog Distro.

It smelled of damp cement, powdered laundry detergent, and the faint, sweet chemical tang of rubber cement that never entirely evaporated. Light came from a single bare sixty-watt bulb dangling from a porcelain fixture on a pull-chain, which hung low enough that I routinely banged my forehead against it whenever I stood up too quickly from my stool.

Before I could distribute anyone else’s comics, I had to produce my own. That was the unwritten rule of the exchange. In the zine ecosystem, you didn't simply set up shop as a broker or an armchair critic without offering skin in the game. You needed your own calling card, your own collateral, your own eight-page testament to the fact that you possessed a pen, a point of view, and access to a machine that could replicate your marks on dead trees.

My title was Static Cling. It was an autobiographical minicomic that drew heavily on the minor humiliations of tenth grade: the horror of group showers after physical education, the specific smell of the high school cafeteria’s tuna surprise, and long, panel-less rants about the municipal bus system. I drew it on regular twenty-pound typing paper cut down into quarters.

The mechanics of minicomic assembly are deceptive. If you have never produced one, you imagine that pages progress naturally from one to the next, like a real book. But when you are making an eight-page booklet out of a single sheet of eight-and-a-half-by-eleven paper folded three times, the geometry of the page becomes an exercise in applied madness. Page eight has to sit upside down next to page one on the master sheet; page two and page seven share an edge; and pages three, four, five, and six live on the reverse side in an orientation that requires a mirror and a steady hand to calculate properly. If you make a mistake, you discover it only after you have run fifty double-sided copies, leaving you with a stack of paper where the protagonist's bus ride home takes place entirely on its head before flipping into the ending panel backwards.

I drafted everything with a 0.5mm Pilot Precise rolling-ball pen. It had a dark, liquid ink that would feather into the cheap paper if you left the nib in one place for longer than half a second. My drawing table was a pane of window glass salvaged from a discarded storm sash, propped across two stacks of telephone directories with a clamp-on desk lamp positioned underneath to create a homemade lightbox. Under the glare of the lamp, the glass grew hot enough to toast bread, and sweat would drip from my nose onto my master sheets, causing the water-soluble black ink to bloom into gray puddles that had to be furiously patched with dabbed flecks of Liquid Paper.

Liquid Paper was the great equalizer of the small-press world. In the early nineties, correction fluid smelled intoxicatingly of trichloroethane—a sharp, dizzying aroma that made long production sessions feel pleasantly detached from reality. You painted it over your line errors with the tiny built-in brush, blowing on it frantically to speed the drying time, and then smoothed it down with the edge of your thumbnail until it was flat enough to hold fresh ink without cracking. On the original paste-ups, these patches looked crude, chalky, and lumpy, like dried mortar on brickwork. But through the indiscriminate eye of an optical photocopier, the white fluid vanished completely. The lens saw only two things: pure black and pure white. Everything else was flattened into high-contrast certainty.

My paste-ups were collages in the truest sense. Text was produced on the Sears electric typewriter, hammered out on strips of paper that I cut out with an old pair of blunt-nosed kindergarten scissors and stuck down with a UHU glue stick. If a headline needed to be larger than standard twelve-point elite type, I had to hunt through my mother’s collection of Good Housekeeping and Ladies' Home Journal magazines, scouring the advertisements for laundry detergents and processed cheese to cut out individual letters. An A from an Ajax ad, an N from a bottle of Nesquik, an X lifted from a headline about Excedrin. It took forty-five minutes to assemble a single six-word sentence, and the resulting typography looked like an anonymous ransom note demanding the safe return of a kidnapped pet.

Once the master sheets were assembled, the real work began: finding a copier that would not bankrupt me.

In suburban Cleveland in 1993, copying was an economy of sharp class divisions. If you went to the local branch library, you paid fifteen cents a copy for the privilege of feeding nickels into a coin box bolted to the side of an ancient, wheezing Savin machine that produced copies looking like they had been dredged from the bottom of the Cuyahoga River. The blacks were faint, streaked with wide gray bands where the drum had been scratched by some patron’s metal belt buckle, and the machine jammed on every fourth sheet, requiring a librarian named Mrs. Gable to emerge from her office with a pair of long wooden tweezers and an expression of pure, enduring martyrdom.

At the other end of the spectrum was the corporate chain. The Kinko’s Copies on Great Northern Boulevard was an illuminated temple of modern reproduction, humming with air conditioning, the brisk efficiency of electric staplers, and the smell of hot toner. But Kinko’s charged eight cents a page for self-service black-and-white, which was an impossible figure for someone whose operating capital consisted of lawn-mowing money and whatever loose coins could be fished out from beneath the cushions of the basement sofa. To print fifty copies of Static Cling—twenty-five sheets of double-sided paper, fifty passes through the machine—would run me four dollars. Four dollars was an astronomical overhead; that was nearly two gallons of gas for a car I couldn't yet legally drive, or three issues of Factsheet Five, or eight postage stamps.

Survival meant finding an alternative supply line.

Mine was a tiny, independent business tucked into a dilapidated strip mall between a martial arts studio and a shop that repaired vacuum cleaners. It was called Quick-Print Services, owned and operated by a man named Arthur who wore short-sleeved nylon shirts and smoked unfiltered Camels behind a plastic register, completely indifferent to the posted municipal smoking ban.

Arthur’s shop was a graveyard of obsolete printing hardware. In the back sat a pair of offset presses that looked like iron locomotives, surrounded by open cans of oily purple ink and towering skids of twenty-pound pastel bond paper in shades of canary yellow, goldenrod, and seafoam green. In the front, near the glass door, were three massive Canon NP-series copiers that looked like gray refrigerators tipped onto their sides.

Arthur didn't like customers who lingered, and he despised teenagers on principle. But Arthur had one redeeming quality that made him a crucial node in my network: he did not care about copyright, he did not care about content, and on weekday afternoons between three-thirty and four-fifteen, he offered an unadvertised rate of three cents a copy for self-service, provided you paid in exact change and cleared your own paper jams without bothering him.

"You're back," Arthur said, barely looking up from a racing form when the bell above the door jangled.

"Just twenty-five sheets, two-sided," I said, setting my corduroy jacket on the counter.

He waved a smoke-stained finger toward the machine furthest from the register—the Canon that had a hand-lettered sign taped to its lid reading USE LIGHT/DARK SLIDER WITH CARE. "Tray two has white. Don't touch tray one, it's loaded with legal salmon for the church bulletin."

I took my position in front of the machine. The glass platen was slightly warm to the touch, and through the cooling vents at the side, the exhaust fan blew a gentle, dry wind that smelled of scorched resin and high-voltage ozone. It was an unmistakable perfume: the scent of information being duplicated at high velocity.

The photocopier was not a neutral conduit; it was an active collaborator in the aesthetic. You had to learn the individual temperament of the machine. Arthur’s Canon ran notoriously hot and heavy on the toner, which meant that fine crosshatch shading would clog up into solid black blobs unless you set the manual exposure slider two notches toward the lighter end of the spectrum. Conversely, if you nudged the slider too far, the typed text would break apart, the small loops of the e’s and a’s crumbling into ghostly outlines that were impossible to read in dim light.

I lifted the heavy, rubberized platen cover. The underside was marked with faint gray smudges—ghost prints of tax returns, resumes, and lost-dog flyers that had left their trace on the rubber backing. I placed my master sheet face down against the glass, aligning the top corner carefully with the molded plastic arrow in the upper-left margin.

I set the dial to twenty-five, checked that the paper cassette was properly seated, and pressed the large green START button.

The machine shuddered deep in its gut. Somewhere inside, a fluorescent exposure lamp flickered to life with a low, hydraulic hum, and then began its slow, deliberate glide across the underside of the glass. A bar of blinding white light traversed the platen, illuminating the underside of my master sheet with the intensity of an operating room lamp.

Inside the dark steel belly of the unit, the physics of electrophotography were unfolding in fractions of a second. The light bounced off the white portions of my paper, striking an aluminum drum coated with a thin layer of photoconductive selenium. Where the light hit, the static electrical charge dissipated into the ground; where the dark drawn lines of my ink and the typed characters absorbed the light, the charge remained. The drum rotated past a hopper of toner—a microscopic powder made of pulverized plastic resin and carbon black—which leaped across the gap, clinging only to the magnetized areas of latent charge. Then, a sheet of paper was pulled from tray two by a rubber feed roller that sounded like an old throat clearing itself, passed beneath the drum, received the powder, and was driven into the fuser unit: two heated rollers coated with Teflon that melted the plastic powder directly into the fibers of the paper under four hundred degrees of heat and mechanical pressure.

Ka-chunk. Whirrrr. Shluck.

The first copy slid out into the receiving tray.

I picked it up immediately. The paper was hot, stiff, and curling slightly at the edges from the moisture being driven out of the wood pulp. I brought it to my face. The scent was sharp, clean, and unmistakable—the smell of molten plastic and fresh heat. I ran my thumb across the surface. The ink wasn't flat like a page from a library book; it had a distinct physical topography. You could feel the slight, raised ridges of the toner where the machine had deposited heavy layers of black to render my poorly drawn shadows.

I checked the test print against the original. The contrast was brutal. The delicate pencil guidelines I had forgotten to erase with my art gum had vanished completely, erased by the brilliance of the exposure lamp, but the edges of the cut-out paper strips showed up as faint, hair-thin gray rectangles where the lens had caught the drop-shadow of the paper’s edge. In the small-press world, this was known as the paste-up line, and you didn't apologize for it; it was the signature of authenticity, proof that the work had been assembled by hand on a tabletop rather than spit out by a computerized typesetting machine.

Satisfied, I let the run continue. The copier settled into its rhythm, a mechanical heartbeat that filled the quiet shop: chug-click, whoosh, slap. Twenty-five times the carriage moved; twenty-five times the bright green light flashed out from beneath the rim of the rubber lid, casting rhythmic, skeletal shadows across the laminate flooring.

Now came the delicate part: the reverse side.

Double-sided copying on an older analog machine was an art that required nerve. If you reloaded the paper while it was still hot, the static charge clinging to the sheets would cause them to fuse together, resulting in a multi-sheet feed that would instantly wrap itself around the internal rollers with a terrifying sound like tearing cardboard.

I took the stack of twenty-five freshly printed sheets, held them by the corners, and fanned them repeatedly in the cool air of the shop, letting the heat dissipate. Then, I had to orient them correctly for the second pass. If I flipped them end-over-end, the interior pages would print right-side up; if I flipped them side-to-side, they would print upside down. I stood there for thirty seconds, turning the paper in my hands like a pilot calculating wind drift, staring at the feed diagrams printed on the cassette lid.

"Don't stand there thinking," Arthur muttered from behind the counter, not looking up from his paper. "Thinking wears out the carpet. Load it or don't."

I slid the stack into the manual bypass slot on the side of the machine, lined up the paper guides until they touched the edges without pinching, lifted the lid, swapped the first master sheet for the second, and hit the green button again.

The machine devoured the bypass stack one sheet at a time, pulling them back through the heat and the light. It did not jam. It did not misfeed. When the final sheet slid into the metal hopper, I picked up the top copy, performed the complex three-way fold with my fingers, and opened the miniature book.

Page one led to page two. Page two faced page three. The panels aligned across the center spread within a sixteenth of an inch. The text was crisp, the blacks were dense and dirty, and the entire thing held together like a real, physical object that had not existed forty minutes earlier.

I walked to the counter, pulled three quarters and two dimes from my jeans pocket, and laid them on the rubber change mat. Arthur scooped up the silver with a flick of his wrist and dropped it into the open wooden drawer beneath the register without counting it.

"You got black stuff on your forehead," he said.

I touched my face with the back of my hand. My fingers came away smudged with a charcoal-colored film. Copy toner was notorious for its invasiveness; it didn't just sit on paper, it drifted through the air in microscopic clouds, settling into the pores of your skin, rimming your fingernails like machine grease, and coating the inside of your cuffs. It defied hand soap, resisting water until you attacked it with rubbing alcohol or heavy-duty mechanic's pumice.

"It washes off," I said.

"No it doesn't," Arthur said, turning a page of his racing form. "It stays in your lungs until you're forty, then it turns into gravel. Don't forget your jacket."

I stuffed the stack of fifty unfolded sheets into my backpack, wrapping them in a clean plastic grocery bag to protect them from the persistent drizzle that waited outside.

Back in the Meadow Lane basement, the manufacturing process entered its assembly-line phase.

Mass-producing minicomics is an act of repetitive, manual devotion. A print run of fifty copies doesn't sound like much until you realize that each individual copy requires four distinct physical operations: folding, trimming, collating, and binding. Fifty copies meant two hundred separate manipulations of paper, each one performed by hand on the concrete workbench under the sixty-watt pull-chain bulb.

First came the folding. To get a clean, sharp crease that wouldn't make the spine of the book swell up like an overstuffed sausage, you couldn't just use your fingers. Skin was too soft; it left rounded, puffy folds that caused the books to spring open on their own. You needed a bone folder.

I didn't have the money to buy a real bone folder from the high-end art supply store downtown, so I used a yellow plastic spoon stolen from a Dairy Queen sundae. The smooth, curved back of the spoon’s bowl was an ideal substitute. I folded the eight-and-a-half-by-eleven sheet in half lengthwise, held the paper down with my left thumb, and dragged the back of the plastic spoon firmly along the edge with my right hand until the paper hissed in protest. The resulting crease was knife-sharp, flat enough to hold its shape without clamping.

Then came the cut.

To turn the folded sheet into an eight-page booklet, you had to slice through the top horizontal fold to free up the pages. A hobby knife was too slow and dragged against the fibers, leaving jagged, feathered edges. A pair of scissors produced uneven, wavy lines that made the book look like it had been chewed open by mice.

The secret was an old, heavy steel butter knife that I had smuggled down from the kitchen silverware drawer. The edge was completely unsharpened, slightly rounded by thirty years of spreading margarine on toast. You slid the blunt blade into the interior of the fold, held the paper taut with your free hand, and drew the blade upward through the crease in a single, swift motion. If you did it with the right angle and speed, the paper didn't tear; it separated with a clean, satisfying snick that sounded like someone opening a heavy linen envelope with an ivory letter opener.

Finally, the staple.

Standard office staplers are useless for comic books. Their throats are only three or four inches deep, which means you cannot reach the spine of a folded booklet without crumpling the body of the paper into an accordion to squeeze it beneath the metal arm. Professional publishers used long-arm saddle staplers—magnificent, heavy iron machines with twelve-inch throats that cost fifty dollars in the back of the stationery supply catalog.

I didn't have fifty dollars. I didn't even have five.

My binding rig was an exercise in garage engineering. I opened an ordinary swing-arm Bostitch desktop stapler all the way until it was flat, like a jaw unhinged. I placed the folded comic face down on top of a thick block of white styrofoam salvaged from the packing carton of my parents' new microwave oven. I centered the spine over the styrofoam, aligned the head of the stapler by eye with the midpoint of the crease, and brought the palm of my hand down hard on the top of the chrome housing.

Thunk.

The steel staple drove cleanly through the eight layers of paper, its two sharp prongs embedding themselves straight down into the soft styrofoam beneath. I gently lifted the booklet off the foam block; the prongs stuck straight out of the spine like tiny silver fangs. Then, using the rounded curve of my Dairy Queen spoon, I pressed each prong down flat against the paper, folding them inward toward the center until they lay flush against the fold.

It was crude, it was slow, and it left tiny dents in the paper around the staple. But it held. The spine was tight, the pages turned freely without catching, and the finished product had the solid, compact weight of something designed to survive inside an overcoat pocket through a Midwestern winter.

By nine o'clock that evening, the workbench was cleared of scraps.

Arranged in five neat stacks of ten were fifty finished copies of Static Cling #1. They were tiny—four and a quarter inches wide by five and a half inches tall. The cover showed a scratchy, black-ink illustration of a kid sitting alone on a radiator under a flickering basement window, his knees pulled up to his chin, surrounded by clouds of radiating black lines meant to represent either teenage angst or poor electrical grounding.

On the back cover, printed in tiny six-point letters that had barely survived Arthur's hot toner drum, was the colophon:

Static Cling #1. November 1993. Published by Black Dog Distro, P.O. Box 404, North Olmsted, OH 44070. Print run: 50 copies. Cost: $1.00 or trade for your zine, cool stamps, or weird postcards. No checks, no cash through the mail unless wrapped in dark paper. Copying is encouraged; credit is polite.

I picked up the top copy and slipped it into the breast pocket of my corduroy jacket. It fit perfectly, disappearing completely beneath the fabric, leaving no bulge, no visible outline to alert my parents or my teachers that I was carrying contraband thoughts across their borders.

I turned out the pull-chain light. The basement went black, except for the tiny orange pilot light glowing through the inspection window of the natural-gas furnace across the room. I stood there in the dark for a moment, listening to the hum of the water heater and the distant, muffled sound of the ten o'clock news drifting down through the floorboards above my head—the anchor’s voice reporting on car crashes on the Ohio Turnpike, local property tax debates, and the ongoing construction of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame on the downtown lakefront.

None of that mattered. In the pocket over my ribs, the little stack of paper rested warm against my skin. My thumbs and forefingers were permanently stained gray with iron oxide and carbon black, a dark, powdery watermark that soap couldn't lift.

I climbed the carpeted stairs into the kitchen, careful to avoid the fifth tread that always creaked, carrying the scent of the copy shop into the quiet, sleeping house like an undercover transmission from an unrecognized country.