Upper Volta
A Story on the Short Side
I miss the old telex machines; the big green dinosaurs from the Second World War. They had sturdy maroon and green keys that gave you some resistance when you punched out a tape, keys you had to shift, or you’d get nothing but garble. Not just anyone could be a telex operator on one of those things. We were an elite group — grizzled old navy guys with tattoos and a short-fingered Filipino woman who taught me the words for sex organs in Tagalog. They sound like African names, butu, tutu, that sort of thing. I don’t remember what they mean.
When you talked to someone on an old telex machine you felt you were really talking to someone — like this woman from our branch in Johannesburg. She was proud of being an Afrikaans speaking, black woman. You could practically see everything she said. It showed up on yellow tape going through the window on the machine, every move her shiny black fingers made, one letter at a time, each character a different set of holes in the paper. We had some fine chats, the Afrikaans speaking black woman and me, some world class conversations.
“I RPT,” she’d say.
I don’t know what happened to her. Nobody’s heard a word. It’s been years. I don’t know if I’d even recognize her anymore on this computer screen; the whole blinking word pops up all at once.
STILL CHECKING.
That’s my guy in London. He’s telling me to hang on. I’m hanging, I tell him. We got a cable from Ouagadougou. Ouagadougou used to be the capital of Upper Volta. I don’t know what it is now. It changed. That’s what I’m checking with my guy in London about. Ouagadougou and I go way back. I got fired about Ouagadougou once. We have to look up where things come from for the guys who read them. They need to know everything. If there’s a frost in Florida, it’s in computers all over the world before the sun comes up. People make lots of money. The guy who finds out first is fixed for life. He goes around glowing. People want to touch him.
Ouagadougou was the capitol of Upper Volta at the time. I sent Tom Tolliver a note about it. He was a telex operator from the Navy and taught me all I needed to know about working at the bank when I got back from Viet Nam. We’d go to Pam Pam’s for lunch around three in the morning and watch the hookers come in and out of the fog. They left bright lipstick prints on the ends of cigarettes. He ate steak soup with lots of butter and garlic croutons.
“You see any action in Nam”? he asked one night.
“I mostly typed up recommendations for medals.”
“Yeah? I got a medal from Korea. You know that little bone that sticks out on the inside of your ankle? I don’t have one. The fucker got shot off.” He grinned.
“I gave out medals for nothing,” I said.
“It was a whole different war.”
“I didn’t pay much attention.”
Tom Tolliver loved telex machines. We took them apart and put them back together and he explained to me about electricity and resistance and the speed of light. He’s gone now. So is Pam Pam’s. He got in with some tax resistors up in the mountains. Oh, oh, here’s what the note about Ouagadougou said:
DEAREST TOM:
MARGO TELLS ME EVERY TIME SHE WALKS BY YOU TRY STICKING YOUR HAND UPPER VOLTA.
LOVE AND KISSES.
Margo was from Peru. I’m no fag but I’m not afraid to act like one. Ken, the guy who used to be graveyard supervisor, made no bones about being the flamingest fag in all San Francisco. He had a boyfriend named Rocky. They drank together at leather bars. Ken came in with bruises that healed up in all different shades of green and yellow, like paint on a palate. We all went in together and got him a pink silk negligee and a pair of handcuffs for his birthday. His stomach had already started bloating up like a starving Ethiopian from liver trouble. The nightie never quite fit right. They fired him for being drunk and made Tom the boss, but he joined the tax resistors. Then they made me the boss but got this new computer system and got rid of everyone else, so I was the boss of nobody. It was before any of that, though, that I got fired about Ouagadougou.
The telex machine I typed the note on was hooked up directly to Bob Jensen’s office. He was the president of the bank. My note was the first thing he saw the next morning. It was supposed to be an off-line machine but someone on the day shift had hooked it up. I got fired like a shot, personally, by a senior VP, George Bates. He was livid. The vein at his temple wriggled like a worm was caught in it.
Then it blew over. George Bates went berserk one day. He cut his wrists and bled all over his desk calendar. Then he bled all over the carpet by the elevator on the 42nd floor and told everyone he was not the Rock of Gibraltar. Tom told me the whole story when he got them to hire me back. Mr. Bates is still locked up somewhere. The bank got insurance money for the carpet.
Oops. There’s my guy in London.
COUP. NEW NAME: BURKINO FASO. CHEERS.
I knew it was something. I kind of like Upper Volta, myself. But Burkina Faso sounds all right, too, when you think about it. Birds are singing outside. I don’t know where they live. The sky’s getting light. Wait. The sky got light.