I'm not a neo-Luddite. I love technology. But how do I explain my first analog love to a boy who is a digital native? 

HIGHLANDS RANCH, Colo. - "What's that clacking noise?" I asked my 13-year-old son a few days ago.

"It's just an app on my iPod, Mom.”

"It sounds just like a typewriter," I told him. "I haven't heard one of those in years."

Surprisingly, he looked interested in what I was saying.

"I still remember my Smith-Corona electric typewriter. I saved up just enough money in high school, and I was going to buy an acoustic guitar or an electric typewriter. I chose the typewriter."

My son, an accomplished guitarist and drummer, shook his head in disgust. "Just think, Mom. You could have been Joan Jett instead of a journalist."

How do I explain my life choices to a boy who has never known a world without personal computers, smart phones, iPods, mobile apps, email and the Internet? He's what the experts call a "digital native." He could never understand the analog world I was born into. Or could he? I loved gadgets as much as he when I was a teenager. My first major investment in technolgy was a Smith-Corona electric typewriter. At the time, it was state-of-the-art. It was made for one thing, and one thing only: writing. It had an automatic return carriage, so there was no need to manually slap the carriage back and forth between each line of text. It had ink cartridges that eliminated the need for changing messy ink spools. And it came in a nifty (yes, nifty, that's the only word that really works here) hard-shell carrying case. It was beautiful. To me, it was just as beautiful as any laptop, tablet, iPhone or e-reader.

I bought it the summer between my junior and senior years of high school. I worked my butt off in a dark, steamy, cockroach-infested industrial laundry to earn money to buy it. I folded towels and table cloths, and fed wet sheets into a gigantic mangle that dry pressed sheets as they passed through several heavy cylinders. The female workers called it "the mangler," and told me about a young girl whose arm had gotten caught in the machine. I don't know if the story was true. Maybe they were testing me, teasing me, checking my gullibility and introducing me into the world of hard labor with a ghost story.

“He didn’t have the safety gate in place,” one of the women told me my first day at work, jerking her head toward the laundry owner, a heavy-set man with a blond crewcut, a paunchy belly and a florid complexion. "He said it slowed things down."

The owner’s onerous glances seemed to support the veracity of the story. He tromped around the plant with a cigar clenched between his teeth, scowling at the young Hispanic men who fed sheets, towels, table clothes and uniforms into industrial-size washing machines with lightning speed, and the Hispanic women who handled the pressing, folding and packaging at large tables. The safety gate, presumably, would have made it impossible for anyone’s fingers or arms to get caught in the mangle's gigantic, twirling cylinders, each one looking like it weighed at least a ton.

“He told everyone to stop the mangler so he could install the safety gate before the ambulance and police arrived,” the storyteller said. “There was blood everywhere. Her arm was smashed to the elbow. It was horrible. She was screaming and crying. We couldn't do or say a thing.”

(Years later, I read Stephen King’s “The Mangler,” and watched the campy horror movie based on his short story about an industrial mangle that comes to life and devours people. I wondered if King had worked in a laundry, and whether he had ever seen anyone get mangled.)

A friend’s mother had landed us the summer jobs. My friend bought herself a used Mustang after carefully banking her savings, but I blew mine wantonly on music, books, incense, stationary, clothing and makeup. Wearing purple Mary Quant eyeshadow, peasant blouses, platform wedgies and bell-bottomed jeans while listening to Joni Mitchell, the Rolling Stones and Jeff Beck was more important to me than a car. I had my 10-speed bike to get me around. That summer my friend and I rode a crosstown bus to work in an industrial area in our hometown. We walked the last few blocks to the laundry, talking nonstop as we passed rundown motels and single-story rental units, where a naked man posed in a doorway, offering his stiff cock to us. We screamed and laughed and ran to work, our faces flushed with embarrassment, and our bodies humming with arousal and the power of our young sexuality.

At night, alone in my bedroom, I listened to Joni Mitchell and wailed along to every song on “Court and Spark,” dreaming of acoustic guitars with tapestry straps looped over gauzy, poet-chick frocks. On weekends, I stopped at a guitar shop and admired the curvaceous lines, shiny wood and taut strings of the instruments that hung on walls and rested on guitar racks.

I thought of taking lessons and learning how to play “Help Me” or “Free Man in Paris,” even if there was no way in hell I'd be able to reach Joni’s high notes. Instead, pragmatism ruled, and I bought my typewriter. I brought it home and placed it gently on my desk. A few days later, I sat down and wrote a short story for a teen magazine contest, and was crushed when I got my first rejection letter several weeks after that.

The next fall, I took my Smith-Corona to college, and typed my first term paper while my roommate, a Southern belle from Memphis, fucked her Latin American marijuana dealer in the single bed behind me. She had ordered me out of the room, but I had refused, telling her my paper was due early the next morning. They refused to leave, and a Mexican standoff ensued. As I typed, the bedsprings creaked, the bed rocked, my roommate sighed, and her dealer grunted with pleasure. They rolled out of bed and rolled a joint.

"Belle" had brought a man into our room my very first night on campus. I had gone to bed with rollers in my hair, and woke up to find her and a tall, handsome blond man in bed. "Buenos dias, señorita," they chimed happily as they spooned, their lean, tanned bodies wrapped in a white sheet. I was a virgin, Catholic, and mortified. I was also pissed that they were calling me "señorita." I was born and raised in the United States, and their cute reference was a reminder that I was different, "the other," a foreigner in my own land.

All that semester I put up with Belle, and the countless boys and men she brought into our tiny dorm room. I came home or woke up to a white-haired retiree taking undergraduate classes; a naked Hawaiian who leaned out our window and threw snowballs at passersby; a virgin ROTC student; a suave, Algerian Muslim with a French accent; and a group of boys from back East who lived on the floor below us, and had heard about her version of Southern comfort.

I awoke every morning to the watery sound of Belle's bong, and watched her parcel out weed into baggies she sold to other students. I typed away night after night as she slipped into a slinky Diane Von Furstenberg wrap-around dress or a tight pair of jeans before heading into the night in her Honda Civic to hit the dance clubs.

After one particularly raucous night with the Hawaiian, I confronted her, called her a whore, and walked down the hallway of our dorm as all of the other women on our floor stepped our of their rooms and cheered and applauded me. After Christmas vacation, Belle came back to campus a born-again Christian, and begged my forgiveness. She confessed she had been so angry at me she had almost spiked my toothpaste with acid.

My Smith-Corona and I saw it all. In the end, though, I didn’t own that gleaming typewriter for very long. Just a year later I hocked it at a pawnshop to buy a Christmas present for my boyfriend, who later became my husband. We moved to California, and stood outside a packed dive bar on a hot summer night and watched the Runaways perform. I don't remember seeing Joan, but I remember seeing a bustier, garter belts, stockings and guitars.

I never learned to play an acoustic guitar like Joni or an electric guitar like Joan, but I’m holding out hope that my son will teach me some day––if I can just learn the chords and place my fingers between the frets without contortions. Maybe then I wouldn't be such a big disappointment to him.

“You know you get your musical skills from me, right?” I told him.

“What? Mom, No.”

“It’s true. All that yearning I had to play guitar, all that love of music, I poured it into you.”

He rolled his eyes, picked up his iPod and walked away with a smirk on his face. “Sure, Mom.”

OK. Maybe that’s a bit much. But, isn’t it funny how a simple sound can stir so many memories?

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