One of my jobs was to process something called fraud reports. To this day, I don’t entirely understand what those fraud reports were, but they sounded important. Fraud is a bad word in general, and it’s a particularly bad word at a bank where, ya know, people keep their money and jewels. A fraud report, I assume, was something that required a great deal of care. From what I remember, it was a rundown of all sorts of flagged activity, like unusual withdrawals or transfers or weird signatures, like when your credit card company calls you and asks if it’s really you that’s been spending one hundred and fifty dollars a day at the dildo emporium in Queens, and you have to explain that yes, it’s perfectly acceptable for a grown man to visit the dildo emporium at eleven in the morning on a Tuesday, as you’ve explained before, so please stop calling this number because the emporium charges are going to continue.

I worked at the central branch of the bank, and my fraud report task was to break down each day’s accounts by branch and fax out a copy of the relevant information to the corresponding locations. Essentially, a little message to say, “Hey, one of your clients is maybe getting robbed, so be on the lookout for that.” Each day, I would make a small pile for each branch—I was nothing if not an organized gay—and, one by one, carry the stacks to the fax machine, because yes, we used fax machines, this was the 2000s and fax machines were the height of telecommunications technology, and I’d send each stack on its merry little way.

For the children who may be unfamiliar, a fax machine was the monstrous bastard child of a phone, a printer, a scanner, a calculator, and the devil, and to wield power over it, one had to smear the blood of one’s firstborn son at the machine’s feet, so as to appease the beast within. I believe, to this day, that no person on earth has ever truly learned all the secrets of a fax machine. Really, you just push a bunch of buttons in rapid succession, and then jam your thumb onto a giant green switch, and pray to God that whatever you’re trying to send happens to make its way to the other side. It’s about 5 percent technology, 95 percent voodoo magic.

I, however, prided myself on my fax machine mastery. Not to be crude, but I made that fax machine my bitch. I owned that shit. Every day, I walked over to that machine, and typed each number like I was slicing open the sternum of a dying patient so I could imbue her with a new beating heart that I’d grown myself from a petri dish. The machine was my instrument, and faxing was my beautiful music.