I was busy at Happy Dusty Books instant messaging my girlfriend of three years, trying to convince her to write sexually explicit things to me while (theoretically) doing something sexually explicit things to herself. I’ll do that when I go to bed, sweetie, she wrote back. I respond: Just, I dunno, wrap your keyboard in saran-wrap and do it now. Haha. No, Sweetie.
I went out for a cigarette as a man came walking in. He held the door open for me as I passed. I assumed my usual spot against the glass window and its little brick lip, where I can see the front counter while resting an elbow on the cart of sale books we keep just outside. I light my cigarette and put my heel up on the brick foundation. This causes a jolt of heat to shoot through my patellar tendon. I put my heel down. I had to focus: how can I convince my girlfriend — never prudish but more than a little reserved — to write some hot shit for me while I wrap up the last couple hours here at work?
After tossing out my cigarette, I climbed behind the store computer and continued instant messaging slash pleading with my girlfriend. Aware of how absorbed I get in front of the monitor, I make a point of looking up now and again at the customers in the store. The guy slips into the used fiction section. Clack-clack-clack-clack-clack-clack. Now he’s thumbing through new volumes at the politics table. I notice he’s wearing a nondescript jean jacket. The wash is nothing special; the jacket is worn-in and soft-looking, though scraped around the corners, as if he spends afternoons lying on rough concrete tinkering with a Harley or something. He strikes me as the type of guy who’s been wearing a nondescript jean jacket decades before guys like me thought to wear factory-distressed jean jackets in college because we thought it made us look edgy and “proletariat.” Focus. I’ve reached a point of reasoning with my girlfriend, not about the merits of honest clothing but about the merits of engaging in textual acts of intimacy when the physical has been removed. She’s starting to work with me: I’m wearing that floral dress you love….Uh-huh? with black see-through stalkings. And above the stalkings? I’m wearing –
“–Excuse me?”
Clack-clack-clack. I look up at denim man, now standing at the front counter. Yeah?
“I wanna to see the photography book of Bruce Weber,” he says, pointing at our collection of rare books, locked securely in a series of glass cases.
Clack-clack-clack.
“Sure.”
Rubbing my face with my hand I have a flashback of the last guy to ask me to unlock the cases of rare books — he, too, wore an unaffected jean jacket. He also spent the better part of twenty minutes yanking out books (any one of them valued at hundreds of dollars) and, while very briskly turning pages not by the corners but by the bottom of the page close to the spine (a method of page-turning that puts undue stress on the pages, which of course may result in the ripping of said pages) and checking the publication dates. I collect first editions, he impishly told me, finally noticing the dirty glares I kept shooting him. In the end, dude bought a $6.99 pocketbook. New.
Assuming, naturally, that this guy would be as much as a dolt as the other guy, I get up and snatch the appropriate keyring and walk to the cases. As I crouch down, he corrects himself.
“I mean, I would like to see a book by Bruce Weber. Please,” he says, crouching down with me. Glancing at him I notice how the tip of his nose makes a drastic ascent, as if it were mimicking a Danny Way Mega Ramp. Jean jacket dude’s crouching next to me however, doesn’t make my task of sticking little flimsy keys into a shoddy little lock any easier. He’s squatting like a little league coach, watching a mediocre player pulling back at pitches that could go either way. I’m not getting the lock open.
“Hey, man, that’s cool. I don’t have to see it,” he says. He stands up and claps his hands on his jeans, as if to shake off the red dust of a baseball diamond.
Crk-pat!
The lock opens and I slide back the glass. I pull out the book and stand up and bring it over to the front counter for him.
“I used to have this book,” he tells me. I stand across from the counter watching him turn the pages. I tell him the book is worth $200. “Bruce gave me a copy, but someone stole it,” he says, flipping — by the corner of each page, I begrudgingly realize — to the center of the book. I ask him if he’d recently had a rowdy party or something. He does an impression of a weary laugh without looking up.
“No, no. Just friends. Well, so-called friends,” he says. He keeps flipping the pages until he finds what he’s apparently been looking for: a page-wide black and white photograph of a guy tugging a piece of rope from the mouth of a golden retriever. The man in the photograph is a couple decades younger than the guy beside me, and he has a ridiculously large cocka-doodle-doo pompadour. He’s also wearing — you guessed it — a jean jacket. I notice these things but I’m not making the connections that my this time should seem obvious.
“That’s my dog,” he says. I nod. His retriever somehow managed to serendipitously engage in a tug-of-war match that would later be depicted in an impossibly expensive art book. Stranger things have happened, I tell him; in fact, a horse my sister had once trained and sold later appeared on the cover of Ponies of America magazine. He nods in a way that conveys genuine appreciation. I lean over and point at the guy in the photo. I say now there, that’s a real cool dude. He makes that soft chuckling sound again. Yeah, he says. He turns the page and looks at it for awhile in silence.
“There’s my mom.”
He pulls over the page.
“There’s my old room.”
He pulls over the page.
“That’s my senior year photo, framed on my mother’s coffee table,” he says, looking up. “Can you believe someone broke into her house and stole that?”
It dawns on me: this guy is fucking famous!
In fact, I now recognize him as that cool yet remarkably sincere surfing rockabilly soloist who sang that really catchy yet sad song when I was in junior high. His record label must have paid MTV a lot of money because the network played the music video a lot in 1995. Therein we glimpse the singer, clad in a loose-fitting flannel shirt and sitting on a misplaced tree stump in the middle of a beach while strumming his guitar and singing a chorus about how somebody’s crying, and how that same somebody is also dying. In the video — which is interspersed with shots of him walking along a shoreline with a impossibly beautiful brunette — we see the pop singer zip up the front of his wet suit before lunging, in slow motion, onto a long board, gracefully parting the lip of a small wave before the p.o.v. dissolves into the whitewash.
I find myself awed and humbled by this man in denim. Nonetheless, Due to my everlasting hatred of people who act nicer to celebrities than normal people — especially in my case where their acquaintance with their work is fleeting at best — I continue to act like a surly store clerk who’s supervising a guy in a jean jacket thumb through a photo book he suspects might make off with at any minute. Besides, what kind of famous person walks into a dive-y little bookstore, pulls open a book worth a third of the clerk’s rent, and points at photographs of himself taken by a guy who currently shoots near-pornographic photos of meatheads for Abercrombie & Fitch? But despite what would normally be considered a supreme display of pompousness and egotism, this guy in the denim jacket is impossibly charming about the whole thing. With regards to his stolen senior portrait, I ask him if he ever bothered checking eBay.
“Naw,” he says. He closes the book and hands it back to me. He doesn’t smile but his eyes do. I put the book back in its spot in the case. He asks me if we have any books on painters. Well, I tell him, we have this one on Joan Miró, if you’re a fan of that type of guy. Because I am self-diagnosed as a retard, I forget to point out the alphabetized section of artist monographs that run half the length of the store. The store computer begins to make bloop bloop bloop noises — I have new instant messages.
“No, not really, ” he says.
And with that, Chris Isaak walks out the store.
