When I graduated from high school, my father gave me a portable typewriter to take with me to college in the autumn. It was an Adler Tippa portable, made in Western Germany. It was manual, not electric; solid, heavy for its size, but not all that larger than the sort of PCs they were making up till a few years ago. When I took it with me to Western Michigan University, it was a practical and reliable part of my student's kit.

It was also kind of prosaic. Almost shy. It didn't draw attention to itself as it sat there on the desk; lidded, silent, at rest. It was small and unglamorous enough that it could be easily overlooked. Kind of like its owner, frankly. Other students wouldn't come into my dorm room, see it and exclaim, "Oh, man! You've got the new Adler Tippa! Is it great?! I was going to get it, but I hear they're putting out the new one in six months, so I'm holding off." There was nothing remarkable about it. It was my typewriter. I took it a little for granted, as you do with tools. The only time you thought about it was when you needed a new ribbon, or ran out of carbon paper.

It was a workhorse, though, the Tippa was. It was a small typewriter, but when I wrote on it, it was exceptionally vocal about it. There was the *thud* as the shift key went down, the CRASH as the carriage slammed back into place. The keys were white and perfect and snapped like snare drums when hit. The bell rang out joyously at the end of every line, followed by the slow grind of the carriage sliding back again, like the creative process itself made audible. SnapCRASHding!Kachug!chatterThud! When I was writing in those days, people knew about it. When I was in the groove, that little bastard could drown out my Leon Russell records.

I wrote a lot of letters on it and my father just recently gave me a box of them that I had sent to my mother and him, who were living in London at the time. Long letters, with some news, but mainly spouting a lot of pretentious philosophical twaddle, as students do. The letters to my friends tended to be more interesting. My friend Elliott got most of them. We would talk books and films and theatre and, naturally, women. He was eagerly awaiting the letter I would send him when I *finally* lost my virginity. He had insisted that I write and tell him the second I had got my ticket punched and when the day finally came, I wrote a letter so filled with confusion, grief and guilt that I find it almost impossible to read now with out weeping. On the bright side, I realize that an event in life which was treated cavalierly by many boys I knew, affected me more deeply than I could ever have imagined.

I expressed that signal change on my Tippa portable.

I wrote papers for college on it too, of course. I wrote one on Richard II for my Shakespeare class. It was callow and thoughtless. I got a D on it, which I deserved. I wrote final for an English Lit class in which (even then in the thrall of the Baker Street Irregulars) I proved beyond any reasonable doubt that Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson were real people, and Arthur Conan Doyle was just Watson's literary agent. Weeks after I handed it in, I got a message from from the teacher of the course asking me to get in touch with her, because she was worried about me. I wrote another paper for the Shakespeare class in which I did a comparative study of Romeo and Bingo Little, the often-in-love friend of Bertie Wooster's, in P.G. Wodehouse's Jeeves stories. That was the final straw for the Shakespeare class by the way. I failed it. But I failed it on my Tippa portable. It never judged me.

A good thing, too, because I also wrote poetry on it. Love poetry, unsurprisingly. Also short stories. I wrote my first play on it. I wrote my first attempt at a screenplay on it. It was a fictionalized life of the 15th Century French poet Francois Villon, which would've been a tough sell, even in 1973.

I still have the Tippa. Took it out a while back. I opened the lid, and smelled its instantly identifiable scent, distant and familiar: a mix of plastic, oil, ink, dreams and me. The keys are yellowed now, like an old man's teeth. I took it to the one place I knew in Los Angeles to have it cleaned and get a fresh ribbon installed. It came back to me looking young, revitalized and ready for anything. I wrote some of the corrections for "Revenge of the Nerd" on it. And I've started writing letters on it again.

And its clatter can still be heard from two floors away. "Western Germany" doesn't even exist as such anymore. But some things never die. Like its Adler Tippa portable typewriter.