The things you carry

by David Benjamin 

“Never meet your heroes.” —Leroy Jethroe Gibbs, Rule #73

 

MADISON, Wis.—“Do you have a pen?”

This is a question to which I’ve never said, “No.” Pens are among the things I carry. To some degree, each of us is defined by the accessories we take along, wherever we go. Likewise, forgetting one of these items tends to induce feelings that range from consternation to “Goddammit!” to outright panic.

As I pondered this quirk in human nature, I thought of Vern, the pudgy kid in Stand By Me. Around the moment the boys in the film realize they’ve forgotten to bring food (an item one does not always carry) on their overnight quest, Vern tries to mitigate this crisis by pointing out that he brought a comb. Of course, no one needs a comb. What’s missing—what Gordie needs to carry, and can’t because it was stolen by the villainous Ace Merrill—is his dead brother’s baseball cap,.

If I had been among the boys in Stand By Me, I might have been wearing a baseball cap, or not. What I needed, what I had to wear was a pair of pants with two huge side-pockets, bulging with stuff that might have included baseball cards, stale bubble gum, a few smooth rocks, maybe an apple, flotsam and jetsam collected here and there and then disregarded for weeks (or months). And a knife. 

Before Jethroe Gibbs on “NCIS” issued his list of maxims, I was an adherent of his Rule #8: “Never go anywhere without a knife.” In my youth, I used to lose knives, either through a hole in my pocket, a bad bet on a marbles game or sheer carelessness. Now, I’m more conscientious, but I still lose knives—mainly to snoopy and zealous TSA agents x-raying my camera bag in airports. 

My current knife is a gracefully curved folding blade, with a birchwood grip, made in the French city of Thiers. Along with Laguiole, Thiers boasts one of France’s two great knifeworks. Both sources still make carbon-steel blades. I eschew stainless steel whenever possible because I don’t trust it to hold an edge. 

(Note that Jethro Gibbs’ knife is stainless steel, a serious error by the props department. If you’ve watched even a handful of “NCIS” episodes, you’d know intuitively that Gibbs is a no-frills, carbon-steel kind of cat.)

I lost a beautiful Laguiole to a TSA Smedley at O’Hare. Since then, I leave my Thiers behind when I fly. In Paris, I keep a four-inch carbon-steel Opinel. Of all souvenir items to buy in Paris, the most useful, durable and distinctive is an Opinel. It’s a thrifty folding knife—less than $10—in a feather-light pine grip, with a steel collar that twists to hold the blade rigid while cutting.

(Of course, any store that stocks Opinels also has Swiss Army knives priced four times as high, with quickly dulled stainless blades and a lot of cute tools that most people never use. And they’re too heavy for your average pants pocket.)

Like Gibbs, I wield my knife sparingly. But when I was a kid, my knife was a sort of psychic insurance policy, hidden in my pants, ready to to slash my way through any jungle that appeared in my path, poised to fend off hoods in leather jackets, handy for a game of mumblety-peg, adaptable as a screwdriver or prying device in a bicycle emergency. It affirmed simultaneously both my stand-your-ground manhood and my fanciful kidhood. 

Nowadays, I carry five items that are both necessary and self-defining. For example, because I tend to be stricken by thoughts, schemes and fancies that need writing down, I started carrying a pen, or several pens, while still in grade school. By high school, my pen of choice was the nineteen-cent Bic stick ballpoint with a cap. Since I always carry pens in my front right pocket, I avoid retractable ballpoints because—as we all know—if the tip is left exposed, rubbing against the fabric in your pocket, it will, for some reason, disgorge all of its ink in one catastrophic upchuck, ruining—or at least staining—your pants and leaving a blue blotch down your leg that will draw ridicule in the shower after gym class.

Because they were so cheap, Bics required maintenance. The brittle plastic shaft just beneath the tip tended to crack under the pressure of writing. This frequent issue rendered the pen useless although there remained ample ink in the tube. I hated to throw away a Bic that still had ink. So, I kept a supply of spare shafts. I also kept extra plugs. Even today, your typical Bic has a removable, rubbery plug at its butt end. One is tempted to nibble and gnaw on this tab while listening to Mr. Meissen in chemistry class. But if you remove it, lose it or swallow it, the Bic will lose its air pressure, allowing the ink, which is supposed to flow to the nib, to reverse its course, disgorging all of its ink in one catastrophic upchuck, ruining—or at least staining—your pants and leaving a black blotch down your leg that will draw ridicule in the shower after gym class.

I suspect I was the only kid at La Follette High who kept—and occasionally shared—spare parts for Bic pens.

Later, for a while, I worked as a stock picker at a stationery warehouse in South Boston. I roamed aisles stacked with 24-count cartons of every pen known to Western civilization, including the one that stole my heart, the Pentel Rollerball. I still carry both Bic and Rollerball, but I’m susceptible to temptation, to test dozens of ballpoints, felt-tips, markers and hi-liters in a rainbow of colors, in the vast pen departments of stationery stores in Japan, a nation where calligraphy—and its myriad devices—constitute a state religion competitive with Buddhism and Shinto. 

To occupy my pocketful of pens, I eventually realized I also had to always carry a notebook. I’ve come to refer to this companion as my “Triage” book, because its notes are messy, bloody and often dead before I get back to them. I scribble “To Do’s,” sketch out my weekly essays and, most important, I capture fleeting ideas—for books, essays, stories, letters—before they trickle from a brain more leaky than a capless Bic without its rubber plug. Here and there in Triage, I also Scotch-tape calendar cuties and strips from the daily funnies, lest I suffer visual tedium while editing my schedule and trying to decipher my handwriting. 

For example, on pp. 128-129, an old “B.C.” strip in which Wiley’s Dictionary defines”clique” as “sound made by a French camera.”

After I was thrust into a journalism career, I also developed the habit of carrying a camera—a serious Pentax K-70 SLR with two zoom lenses that cover a frame range from wide-angle to telephoto. Lately, of course, everyone has a phone camera that shoots acceptable snapshots, except me. A mobile phone is one item I don’t always carry. Besides, I’m a 35mm photo snob.

Certainly, the most important item I’ve always carried—since third or fourth grade—is a book. When I was in college, my roommate, Gerald Mackie, articulated a Gibbsian rule to which I’ve always been faithful: “Never go out without a book. You never know when you might get stuck somewhere.” 

My current book? I just finished Lion Feuchtwanger’s novel, The Opppermanns, about a well-to-do Jewish family in Berlin facing the rise of Nazism in 1933. Now, I’m carrying around Bring the War Home, Kathleen Belew’s chilling history of “white power” in America. 

These things—pen, knife, Triage, camera, book—packed into my camera bag, weigh me down as I trundle along. But their absence would tilt my equilibrium. Ideally, everyone should be able to function like a Zen monk, unburdened by stuff and habits. But few of us are so detached from earthly goods. Nor would we be, if we could choose.

What are the half-dozen things you carry? How much do they weigh, balanced against your need to keep them close? How would you feel—like the Jews in Feuchtwanger’s story—if you were forced to toss them all and venture into the world, bare of the encumbrances that you bear to signal your significance.