cts | The Page

When I was younger, just a boy, I would draw all the time. Constantly. It was how I made sense of the world. What made a cow so like a cow? I drew one. What made cars look like they were moving? I drew one. Airplanes flew, guns shot bullets, waves crashed, buildings had doors, stairs, windows, and people waved, shouted, and floated gently to the earth beneath their parachutes of silk. I couldn't really understand the world, but I understood a line making its way across the page. I understood the object enclosed by a line, the balance of the figure and the ground, the edge of the page and the movement of a story through the still image.

All I wanted was another set of markers. Mine ran out. Dried out, when I forgot to put the caps on tightly enough. They were mashed flat to shade the large areas, so they were useless for the detail lines. A new marker was filled with ideas. It had all of the hundreds of drawings it was going to make all coiled tightly in its bright plastic cylinder, ready to be pulled slowly out through the squeaking fiber plug at the end, as it was dragged over a clean white page.

My mother was indulgent. I am sure I had new markers all the time. For a few years the markers came in a box with a simple line drawing of a smiling cartoon face on the front. The smile was huge, and a cutout, so that the markers in the box were the brightly colored teeth of his grin. As I lost or exhausted the colors, the man's grin would wobble, marred by gaps and sloping canines. When he had only a few left rattling in his head I would start lobbying for a new box. One would often show up in the car after a doctor's visit or when I was home sick from school. Oh, the big grin tight with all the rainbow teeth again.

When I drew, the world receded. I knew my father was still dead (a large event in my short life; since he died when I was four it loomed over the rest of my single digit years), and I knew the kids at school were still teasing me because I was short and fatherless, but as the ninety degree arc of yellow filled in the color of the page, the sun lit up a new place, a place no one else controlled or knew about, a place where I made all of the decisions. Before I was ten I drew boats which lumbered out of lakes on wheels. I drew the Irish in an epic aerial battle with the Nazi war aces. In those worlds the worst thing that happened was when the lighter colors smudged the darker ones, causing a rare disconnect between what I saw in my head and what would slowly fill the page. Nothing so tragic that I couldn't fix it on the next drawing.

As I got older, the drawings told fewer stories about people and more stories about machines. There were boats with cars hidden in their bellies, and helicopters ready on deck to hoist them out. There were houses with large wheels on the corners and elaborate cistern systems and filters to allow their occupants to wander afield from the rigid connections of municipal water and sewer. I loved mechanical things and once sat for hours watching the repairmen in the pit of the small passenger elevator in our building in New York. I asked them what needed fixing and the foreman said, "There's a piece on the axle that helps with the voltage to the motor." I asked if he meant it needed a new commutator, the spilt ring which shifts the direct current from one set of magnets to the alternate set. He didn't answer, but he said to his workers, "I should have sent this kid down here yesterday and we would have known sooner what was wrong." I looked at all of the litter which had collected in the bottom of the elevator shaft and thought about how it was a giant, collaborative collage we had all been making. I wished there were more of the silver gum wrappers and more of the brightly colored Starburst wrappers.

The more I understood, the more the drawings had to tell. For weeks I worked on drawings of a vehicle for arctic exploration. Page after page for the plan of the living space it would need. The bathroom was modeled on the bathrooms I had seen up at the Boat Show with my stepfather. The metal treads were wider than the skis in the front for steering. The heater was tucked into a space under the tank for drinking water, which would keep it from freezing. The space for the driver was connected to the living space by a small opening with a sliding hatch so that the two explorers shared the view out the front while the machine glided and grunted over the packed snow.

As I entered puberty (after a two year delay, more short jokes) the machines were sometimes replaced with odd, gangly spiders with Don Martin eyes and Richard Scarry costumes for their occupations. To properly date it, there was a spider speed skater who would have given Eric Heiden a run on the rink, if it had ever managed to escape from my math book. A few cute, alien creatures tumbled down the margins of my composition books, but in high school I started imaging things which were beyond my abilities to draw. And then I took a drafting course.

We had to, at my high school. It was originally a high school for Math and Industrial Arts, back when Industrial Arts rated capitalization. One of those arts was drafting. There were two drafting teachers for the freshman at Stuyvesant: Flash Gordon and Mel Gordon. Flash Gordon was also the photography teacher, and he didn't really need his drafting students to do more than learn how to produce a decent bar graph by the end of the semester. Most were able to do that after the first week and Flash mostly strolled between the drafting tables while the kids socialized. His thick grey mustache would dance on his upper lip as he told them funny stories and if they came to class a little early they'd find him brushing his careful, grey pompadour.

Mel Gordon was the devil. Or, at the very least, he looked like the devil. He had just a few wisps of hair left near the back of his head, slicked back with something which made it almost as shiny as his pate. He had thin, high-arching eyebrows. Maybe they were plucked. They would curl down over his cinder-black eyes as he explained the twenty different ways we were going to spoil a drawing, before we had even taped the blank sheet to our drafting boards. (The first way was that we were going to tape it down incorrectly.)

So I had Mel. Not at first. At first I had Flash, but my older brother was at the same school two years ahead of me. He was in tight with the head of the Industrial Arts Department and said I was probably going to be good at drafting. Mr. Wright, the vice principal he was chummy with, said, "If you want him to be any good, I would suggest switching him into Mel's class." So a week after classes had started I carried my partially completed bar graph upstairs to Mel's drafting studio, where he tossed it in the trash and told me I would be producing something finer, something without compromise. And that it certainly wouldn't take me a semester to make a couple graphs on a page: that was expected by Friday. Morning.

Mel Gordon was amazing. He was an old-school instructor from the days of vocational programs, where how well you learned the trade the school was teaching you directly affected how much money you were going to bring home to your family. He still carried that responsibility in how seriously he took our efforts. As we toiled over our ninety square inches of bright white paper, he would stalk the aisle between the tables, promising us that he could "see a sixteenth of an inch error, from across the room, on an angle." My favorite moment of the entire year (because I stayed the next semester for the advanced, elective course) was when he kicked a student off of her stool and demonstrated, for less than five minutes, how he expected us to be able to draw.

"The page is taped down, there are no wrinkles, I am just picking up the triangle. There's a dusting of eraser bits on the page, so the triangle glides above the paper, it doesn't smudge any of the work I have already put down. I am not moving my hands quickly, but I don't stop moving, either. There's no time to sit back and admired the lines that I've drawn, because I'm always getting ready to draw the next line. I use the ruler as a measuring tool, not as a straight edge because it hasn't got one. I do a light enough tick to mark this dimension that I don't need to erase it later, it will become a memory on the page. And when I make these guidelines for the title text, I don't press down on the pencil, I just pull it across the page, the mass of the pencil is enough to give the line the weight I need." He was the sort of teacher who made a distinction between mass and weight, even though he was drawing not teaching physics. He had nearly finished the entire assignment, due in a week, in less than five minutes. He peeled the tape neatly from the corners, pinned it up next to the blackboard, and said, "I didn't do anything that any one of you couldn't do. So get to it."

It was in Mel Gordon's class that the magic happened. He had some artifact. Some piece of a machine. A chunk of metal with a purpose. It had a tunnel through it, a flange, a couple holes for bolts. It was the size of Mel's fist and he held it up against the board. He talked about needing to make it, that somewhere someone had an idea for this piece and they needed to tell someone in the metal shop how to make it. He set the piece on his desk. He pulled down the drafting machine attached to the blackboard. This was a contraption which provided a straight edge and an adjustable triangle so that he could demonstrate drafting techniques on the board with his chalk in a chalk holder.

"The would need to know what it looked like from the front..." the chalk hissed along the board. "They need to know where to drill the large hole..." hiss, bang, bang, hiss as the chalk danced a centerline for the tunnel. "They need to know about that arc..." bang, squeak as the compass described the arc in the front view. "You would have to dimension this... label that..." He stepped back. There were three views of the piece, a top, front and side, draw in what I learned was called orthographic projection. With a few dozen lines he had captured reality on the two dimensional black slate.

I gathered my books slowly at the end of class. We had started our own drawings, each working on a chunk from the metal shop. Mine had a chamfer, a fillet, and a few odd channels routed into one surface. I had blocked out the views and was starting to fill it in. It was very calming, pleasing work. The real world was being mapped to my other, virtual world on the page. The best part of Mel's demonstration, though, was an implication: the drawing came first. We were working backward. This was how to describe things which you wanted to make real.

I know other things happened in high school. I still have the text book from my Physics course because it was so interesting I believed I would want to reference it throughout my life. I know that I went to one dance because for the rest of my time in high school I was "the weird kid who showed up on roller skates." I had a friend. So I know things happened, but what mattered was the page. Now it could do so much more.

There were all these objects to be described. I was involved in the science fiction magazine so I drew the cover, a carefully drafted spacecraft was in orbit around a distant planet, a small shuttle craft angling toward the docking bay. There were more vehicles, some rockets and planes, but once you understand scale there's really only one thing you want to drawing: buildings.

Buildings have everything.