"Untitled Typewriter Story" by David Zellnik

From TRUTH BE TOLD's June 10th, 2025 show ("First Love/First Lust") David Zellik's  "Untitled Typewriter Story" tells of what happens when David's mom discovers a porn he has written on her hand-me-down typewriter. He is 12 years old. 

DAVID ZELLNIK is a playwright, lyricist, and monologist based in NYC and Vienna. Also he was once a nerdy gay kid in 1980’s South Jersey in love with musicals. He and his brother Joseph wrote the WW2 love story Yank!, and with composer Eric Svejcar, the serial musical podcast Loveville High. For more, check out davidzellnik.net.

TRUTH BE TOLD was created by Susan Kim and David Zellnik and each episode was produced and scored by Eric Svejcar. Logo designed by Joseph Zellnik.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:04

Hello and welcome to Truth Be Told Season 1: Love and Monsters. Each of these 14 episodes will feature one story performed at Ensemble Studio Theater in New York City as part of the live event Truth Be Told. This story night was created by Susan Kim and David Zelnick and features members of EST and friends who tell heartbreaking, embarrassing, hilarious, true stories based on a theme. This seven-week season draws from our first two sold-out nights, one called First Love, First Lust, and the other Scary Monsters. Please note, our first night was not captured live, so this story was recorded and scored in a studio. And now, without further ado, a story of an electric typewriter, a depressed mom, and a porn story by a 12-year-old, written and performed by David Zelnick.

SPEAKER_01 1:07

When I was 12, my mother found a typewritten porn story I'd written. I had gotten the electric typewriter from her, a hand-me-down. I had always loved the sound of her typing in her room late at night, doing copy editing for a part-time job on Madison Avenue, a job she'd commute an hour and 40 minutes to, two days a week, from our home in South Jersey. I also loved the smell of the typing ribbon, acrid, static, electrified dust. She was a quick typist. She hit the keys hard, though it wasn't electric, perhaps because she'd learned on a manual. The keys sounded like bullets. They leave a letter not only on the page, but also shoot through to the carbon copy behind it, to another piece of paper placed under the first. My mother typed two copies at once, so she'd have a record of her work if the mail didn't go through, because sometimes she mailed her assignment into the office. I am thinking of calling this piece electric. I am thinking of calling this piece hand me down. I am thinking of calling this piece Carbon Copy. I was in sixth grade, and the first thing I wrote on it, the first thing I remember writing, was a long story. It was twenty-eight whole pages. It was about a girl, a castle, a knight, a curse. Something vaguely inspired by a board game I loved that year called Dark Tower, or perhaps the movie Excalibur. I remember only one line from that story because it amused my mother so much. The prince gave her a nickel, with which she bought a house, some clothes, and other needed things. I am thinking of calling this piece Dark Tower. By seventh grade, I had progressed to different fascinations. I don't remember writing the porn my mother eventually found, but I do remember reading it and rereading it that year, that year I was twelve, amazed that a fantasy could live on paper like that, that sex could live in words, words I wrote. I remember the thrill of reading this forbidden fantasy about classmates who were also twelve, though some thirteen, some of whom had hit puberty, which I suppose I had too, but some of them had huge dicks, which is suddenly what mattered to me there in the locker room where this story was set, this story of my being raped. Wait. I remember. I remember writing this story. I wrote it in one sitting, breathless as I typed. The substance of the air in the room changed, my senses hyperaware. Then I folded the paper the story was written on in quarters, in eighths, sixteenths, and shoved it to the bottom of a pile next to the typewriter on my desk. I folded it up, unfolded it when needed, folded and unfolded so many times the creases made it seem like deconstructed origami. I remember timing the exact number of seconds I'd spend jerking off to it, because it became important for me to know for how long I had left my body. I remember hating the word horny, which I found ugly, hating the locker room where I always felt horny, where I would stand naked, fat, underdeveloped, next to bodies that seemed godlike. This is a common adolescent scene, right? Though I was twelve, Jesus. I wonder if kids still shower naked in one space, where fat closeted boys still hide their erections. Here are other things I loved at age twelve. The musical cats. My two cats, Tashi and Merlin. Singing every song from Oklahoma on car rides, especially Lori's, especially out of my dreams. Pretending I hadn't eaten for weeks, then eating an entire bag of dinner rolls with my sister as though we had just gotten off a ship with no food and we were famished. We called this game The Mayflower. We were both becoming enormous. I loved my sister. I loved the movie Mommy Dearest. I loved my brother, with whom I played Mommy Dearest. I was always Christina. I loved the movie Clockwork Orange, was fascinated by the horrifying, clearly eroticized rape scene in Clockwork Orange. I loved the book Rosemary's Baby, which my mom read to me and my brother before bed every night. I loved the nonfiction book Against Our Will, which I found on the bookshelf by second-wave feminist Susan Brownmiller, because one chapter was on male-male rape, the only place I could read about men having sex, which I know makes this all seem so obvious. Pat, and for the record, I would like to say many straight people have rape fantasies too. Even as I write this, I am hearing the analysis of my 12-year-old's fantasy as written by some imagined second wave feminist, and I resent it. I resent her line of reasoning, possibly because it is true. I am thinking of calling this piece against our will. I am thinking of calling this piece out of my dreams. But first, my mom was a frustrated writer, always sure she had taken one wrong career turn. My mom was a copywriter, which I don't know exactly what means in her case, but I think she wrote blurbs for books at her small half office in New York. She shared this office with a gay guy, one whose lover died of AIDS, as my mom told me later, and for all I know, he died of it too. She also wrote her own work on her typewriter at home in South Jersey, late at night, recipes for a school cookbook, and the occasional poem for our synagogue's mimeographed prayer book. Her poems weren't bad, but seemed fake to me even as a kid. Oceanic, dusty, and not the electric kind. Late at night she'd also write on the new computer my dad bought downstairs in the basement. Texas instruments with amber floating letters on a humming small screen, and you'd save your files on wide floppy disks. I found my mom's files once on that computer in the basement. I remember her moony journal entries. I remembered the obscene thrill reading them. She'd write things like, Laura, don't give up on yourself. Laura, feeling sorry for yourself helps nothing. My mom never wrote porn, at least to my knowledge. So I came home one day in seventh grade, went up to my room, and I froze. The folded piece of porn sat unfolded, exposed, at the top of the pile it had been hidden under. My mom had swept my room that day, tidied my desk, I don't know, and the story was there, open, red, and I went numb. I was caught inside a sexual shame so vast it shocked me. Me, who already knew there was nothing truly shameful about being gay, but who also knew it could never be mentioned. I actually feel shame now thinking of that moment, and I wonder, why does guilt or sadness mellow with time, but shame always burn? I can't read you the actual story, I don't know where it is now. But I will tell you the plot. It starts in a locker room, a seventh grade locker room. That year they made all the boys shower together, the boys with small penises and the boys with huge penises. And in the story, there is joking and banter, then horseplay, which leads somehow to me being forced to give them all blowjobs after they catch me, dick hard staring, which leads to my gym teacher, grey haired, slim enough so you could still see the Vietnam soldier he'd been. He comes in, he yells, and looks at me with pity, and then he smiles, jokes on me, a joke shared with the real guys who cheer as he rapes me too. In the story, I write in the third person. In the story, I change the names. I should call this changed names. And in that moment, that unable to breathe moment I'm standing in my room, and I know my mother has found the story and read it, I stand for what feels like hours. And then I go downstairs and watch a repeat of Mikhail's Navy, as I did sometimes after school. I eat dinner, I watch the Love Boat, then I watch Fantasy Island, my eyes glue themselves to the screen. My mom cries at the table, but this is normal for her at the time, excepted. There is always some moment, something my father has said, or that I or my siblings have said that triggers this, this sobbing. In retrospect, of course, she was depressed, but I thought at the time that was just what some moms did. I think now it must take a lot of work to be depressed like that, crying that much, being triggered endlessly, repetitively every day, living it anew each time. Although I suppose that's also the story of porn. I sit and watch TV and say nothing to her, and she says nothing to me. Seven years later, I am home, after I came out in college, that first long summer home, and I bring it up, the story. She had been shocked by my coming out, and I said, Surely you knew I was gay after reading that story. And she said, I assumed a classmate of yours wrote it, and it was one of those things kids passed around. She said, David, I thought it was hot. My mother is gone now, electric typewriters are gone. The story is perhaps in some box, deep storage. The family house is gone, the love boat gone, floppy disks gone, the crazy lust of puberty gone, yet the memory of my mom telling me she found it hot. This fantasy of my rape at age twelve, in this story that has no name, that has many names. Oh man, that still burns.

SPEAKER_00 12:34

David Zelnick is a playwright, lyricist, and monologist based in New York City and Vienna. Also, he was once a nerdy gay kid in 1980 South Jersey, in love with musicals. He and his brother Joseph wrote the World War II love story Yank, and with composer Eric Svaikar, the serial musical podcast Lovel High. For more, check out DavidZelnick.net. Truth Be Told was created by Susan Kim and David Zelnick, and each episode was produced and scored by Eric Zveikar. If you enjoyed this, please tell your friends and keep listening. More stories of love and lust will be released every Monday and scary monsters every Thursday. And do hit like and subscribe, it really helps. Till next time, remember, truth wants to be known. Yours too.