Remember your third-grade desk, the little station you owned every day, a ship with a crew of one, and every member of that crew was captain?

You didn’t care that the desk belonged to others before you, some of whom scarred its body with messages:

• their names, of course,
• their most belovèd profanities, of course,
• and peace signs, pentagrams, and that famous S-shape thing, the “Cool S,” symbols which are the beginning of the end of adventurous doodling; they’re prefab forms that yawn before the imagination; it pours itself into them, the wee molds. Graves. Once doodlers dig these graves, they’re in danger of never leaving them. They Cool S their way to the big mold where the mortal doodle that is the body unwinds into all the little lines that make up a drawing, but in this case, (I beg your pardon) we’re talking (what else?) worms.

My desk was the best kind: the flip top. It had four legs and a wooden lid, which opened like a trap door, God bless it. Beneath the door, a metal basin, one big enough to bathe five gremlins or to drown one big rat...