Fountain pens have been a source of anguish for me as they have been, I suspect, for you. I don’t know anyone who actually likes fountain pens. (That’s not true. I know a guy who collects the damn things but I always hoped it was just to get them off the street and out of the hands of gangbangers and other miscreants.)
A fountain pen, of course, is an old fashioned hybrid between a quill and a Bic. Instead of dipping your quill in a bottle of ink before splattering the ink on parchment, you’d syringe ink into a leaky bladder inside the pen before splotching it as you wrote on vellum paper. Now, of course, the ink is already inside the Bic, where it remains until it leaks into your shirt pocket.
When I was a lad, we were taught penmanship in school. We used fountain pens and learned to write in cursive (which has the same Latin root as ‘curse’). (I don’t think that last parenthetical phrase is correct, but it sounds as if it should be.) Mrs. Bartholomew walked around the room, peering over our shoulders and making us very nervous as we struggled to keep the ink from rorschaching all over the place. I never really got the hang of it. My ‘o’, my ‘a’, and my ‘u’ all looked about the same and needed to be interpreted in the context of sentences.
But that’s not what this story is about. It is about a very particular fountain pen that I had when I was in the third grade. It was an exploding pen that could be obtained wherever whoopee cushions and hand buzzers were sold. It is a story about my own personal exploding pen, which I carried around with me for weeks, until The Event.
Now, this exploding pen contained no ink at all. It was simply a device that, when the top was removed, set off a gunpowder cap that came embedded in rolls of red paper that were intended to be fed into cap guns. One would (that is to say, I would) tear off a cap, place it into a receptacle in the pen, fold over a spring-loaded detonator lever, and hold the lever in place by screwing on the pen top. When the unsuspecting dupe removed the top, the cap would explode causing shock and awe among all within ear shot.
When unsuspecting dupes were not to be found, my friends and I just loaded the pen and handed it around to each other, feigning surprise at the explosion. We were our own best dupes. I usually kept the pen loaded and at the ready, until, or course, The Event.
One day, as I sat in class, I became obsessed with the pen in my desk. My fear was that it would, somehow, explode during class. We had very old-fashioned desks that were bolted to the floor, had a writing surface that could be hinged up to reveal a storage space beneath, and had an ink well hole on top. These desks, I suspect, harkened from colonial days when students needed a readily available source of ink to supply their quill pens.
That reminds me of a story that took place much later in my academic career. When I was in junior high school and we’d change rooms between classes, I found myself at one of these old fashioned desks during third period English class. On the first day of the semester, I drew a tiny footprint at the corner of the desk. Each day, I’d add another footprint and, as the semester progressed, it became clear that a tiny and very inebriated gentleman was stumbling around the desk top. On the last day of the semester, of course, this ill-fated soul took a step that dropped him into the ink well, never to be found.
But I digress.
So, there I sat (not in junior high, but back in third grade), listening to the imagined ticking of the exploding pen just beneath the surface of my desk. I became alarmed with the sound of the ticking and with the horror that would follow the eventual and inevitable explosion. I knew there was only one course of action that could save the day. I had to disarm the dastardly device.
You already know the end of this story. I surreptitiously lifted by desk cover and retrieved the pen. I then carefully unscrewed the pen top, reaching under to hold the lever with my finger so it wouldn’t spring back and set off the cap. When I had a good hold on the lever, I slowly lifted the cap off of the pen. Unfortunately, I had not secured the lever sufficiently. A terrifying explosion filled the classroom with smoke and caused, I am quite, sure, eardrums to burst and small children to wail.
My teacher looked at me and I looked with surprise and outrage at the instrument in my hands, attempting to give the impression that I had never seen the device before and had no idea how it materialized in my grasp. I suspect the ruse failed.
My teacher calmly asked me to put the pen away. She then continued with whatever pedagogical exercise had engaged her and the class before The Event. I, of course, lived the rest of that day and, indeed, the rest of that week, in expectation of the guillotine. The blade, however, never fell and I vowed to eschew exploding pens, whoopee cushions, hand buzzers and their ilk. a vow that I kept for a good month or so.