This Bookshop is Made of — People!

Like a lot of second-hand stores, the books that fill the shelves of Happy Dusty Books represent the tastes and predilections of its customers. Our shop relies almost entirely on both random people swapping a few dog-eared hard-backs for in-store credit as much as we do the estates of deceased booklovers selling entire libraries to pay off debt (or to at least get rid of some thirty-odd volumes dedicated to the fine craft of butterfly collecting). Our stock of new editions is almost an afterthought. As such, my everyday task of pricing and shelving new arrivals is nothing if not rewarding. In fact, it’s not uncommon that I lock up the store each night with two or three newly-found treasures tucked under my arm. It’s a bit humbling, however, to think that the books our customers no longer want are often times far more random and interesting than whatever I’ve independently found for myself. Take a gander of the first page of my latest snag: I am not SPOCK, by Leonard Nimoy.

I don’t go around introducing myself to strangers as Mr. Spock. But when someone addresses a letter to “Mr. Spock, Hollywood, California,” I’m the one who gets it.

Most people play many roles in their lives. Roles like parent, child, breadwinner, homemaker, brother, sister, friend and lover. But most function under one collective role — individual identity.

Not so in my case. I am identified in at least two specific roles. Leonard Nimoy–actor, and Mr. Spock–Vulcan.

“I didn’t recognize you without your pointed ears.” I hear that all the time. It’s a joke, well intended and good natured, and it’s part of my life.

The obvious intention is to communicate with me. “You are Leonard Nimoy, an actor who plays the role of a pointed-eared Vulcan named Mr. Spock on Star Trek.”

Let’s try a variation. “You are Mr. Spock of Star Trek. You are standing here now, looking like a human named Leonard Nimoy. Therefore, I have difficulty recognizing you.”

One more variation. A parent holding a bewildered child by the hand says, “Johnny, this is Mr. Spock. Don’t you recognize him?” The child stares and in his eyes I see no recognition. If he had the verbal skills he would probably say, “No. That’s not Mr. Spock. Mr. Spock has pointed ears and arched eyebrows and greenish skin and wears his hair in bangs and he has a uniform with a blue shirt and black pants and boots and he’s on TV. This man doesn’t have any of those things and he’s not on TV, he’s standing here in front of me!

Who is correct, the parent or the child?

Wow. This man is on-point like a Vulcan’s ear (sorry, that’s a Rob Sonic lyric — I couldn’t resist). I never took a philosophy class in college (and I very consciously avoided all philosophical dialog at the coffee shop I once practically lived at), but damn, isn’t that deep? Wouldn’t you love to spend two hundred pages with Mr. Nimoy as he waxes poetic on matters of celebrity and identity? I for one sure would, but then again, before I made it past the first chapter, I switched Nimoy’s company for that of a nymphomaniac.

Shelving in the forever-disorganized Erotica section, I recently came across The Sexual Life of Catherine M. by Catherine Millet. What initially caught my attention wasn’t the word “sexual” in the title, but rather the Grove Press logo — a little cubist tree — printed on the book’s spine. In college I took a class titled “Modernism & Obscenity” in which we read a selection of books that had been banned throughout the middle half of the Twentieth Century (picks included James Joyce’s Ulysses [blech!] D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover [yeh!] and Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer [blech!] — the latter two published by Grove’s imprint Black Cat), and I’d come to associate Grove Press (kinda despite myself) with little that’s not odd-ball and smutty and highly intelligent, all at once.

Not the case, however, with Catherine Millet’s Sexual Life, a bukkake-covered autobio of the well-known (at least in France) art critic’s love of swingers’ parties, gang-bangs, and other gatherings in which she invites 100 plus men run the train on her. Sure, such accounts of wanton orifice-stuffing are sure to furnish something akin to j.o. material, but by time I reached the half-way point in the book, I realized that — despite myself — I was bored, which is probably the worst reaction the founder and editor of Art Press could have anticipated. It’s as if she assumes her swanky anecdotes are so sweltering, so titillating, that they practically tell themselves. All she needs to do — her attitude seems to indicate — after a passage in which she describes how much men (her observation, not mine) love to blow their load in a vagina already dripping with other men’s muck — is write something trite like “and so I rang in my thirties…”. It’s like she’s a somnambulant cowgirl riding bareback through the range who, from time to time, yanks on the horse’s mane as she navigates the stony creek of a chapter break. Hicc-cup!

And while I revel in our bookshop’s liberal borrowing policy and the $200+ in credit I’ve accumulated by trading in all the paperbacks I’d stacked up during college, I think, after five months of employment, I’ve reached a breaking-point. After racking up great titles like Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States, Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49, Alberto Manguel’s A History of Reading, Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America, and Simon Winchester’s The Professor and the Madman, I think it’s about time I sit down and actually fucking read these books. Sometimes when customers buy a stack themselves, they feel a need to apologize for their apparent gluttony, or at least explain themselves. After I stuff Happy Dusty bookmarks into their fresh purchases, I wave my hands and say, “Hey, I work at a bookshop. You’re talking to the worst of them.” I wonder if they’d ever guess the extent of it. I’ve somehow become the type of guy who’s read the first twenty pages of every book that’s become a household title. Well, maybe that’s a stretch, but I’ve probably at least skimmed a good chunk of these books. Maybe I do it because I hope to impress an after-party by casually sizing-up the host’s book collection. Equally plausible is the act of consuming that I relish as much as I do reading. There’s not much a bookstore clerk earning minimum wage can afford (trust me, daily bus fares and coffees are luxuries), but second-hand books, on the other hand, coupled with a healthy employee discount, is always too tempting a pleasure to pass up. And the bolstering to one’s ego a slightly better-than-average knowledge of books provides? It might just be that the kid-in-a-candy-store syndrome has as much to do with it as a compulsion to flash my literary colors. I just don’t know which impulse is more childish.

Forever Clue(less)

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.

A Model for Fiction

So my girlfriend and I moved to San Francisco together. Me, her, and our cat, Noel Catward. But six weeks into it, she gets flown overnight to Paris. For an editorial internship (she’s fluent in French). She’s been there over two months already, and could very well be gone another a month. We don’t know. We can’t even plan on Christmas together.

Then she’s moving to New York in the new year. Indefinitely (this will all, in time, be another post).

So, as I often do when I’m at work, I sit behind the front counter in front of the desktop instant messaging my girlfriend. My girlfriend (let’s just call her ” my girlfriend”) and I are separated by a nine hour time difference. So that means she and I talk for the first couple hours of my shift before it quickly becomes three a.m. her time and she needs to tuck in before all her castings in the morning. This night was no different. It’s so typical I’m even asking my girlfriend to send me a quick nudie pic to get me through my shift.

“oh, no, sweetie, I’m so tired. The camera’s so far away, too. How about you wait until tomorrow until the lighting is better. It would just be too blurry,” she types.

“C’mon! I don’t care whether it’s in focus or is dark or whatever. I love the dark, blurry one I have of you! Please! Instant messages and nudie photos are all we have!!!!”

“No. G-night. Love you.”

She logs off.

I’m bummed. I am really bummed on my girlfriend and our circumstances and I’m swamped, uncharacteristically, with a long line of customers when the carbon receipt paper runs out. No bother, I’ll just switch in a new one. I can do this. I fiddle with the roll, shove it through the proper slot, wind the yellow paper around a spool, push the feed button and–

whirrrrrrrip!

The yellow strip has torn loose and has been sucked into the little machine. The whole printer is jammed, and judging by the impatient faces of our loyal customers, my little world is a shitstorm, and I’m wearing an asshat as I climb up on the counter and stretch precariously over the computer screen to reach the printer, much to the shaddenfreud of the queue. Somewhere between nearly toppling the little machine off the counter and scribbling down the details of each purchase (title, author’s name, isb number, price) I hear a familiar voice.

Hey, Joey…

I glance over at the new fiction section and see my girlfriend, of whom I become embarrassingly aware is seeing me for the first time in two months behaving exactly like the lunatic she knows me to be. I drag myself off the counter and kiss her. Only I kind of miscalculate and end up mashing my teeth against hers. This happens each time we see each other after being geographically separated. I realize there’s an older man standing by the counter, so I return to my post, ushering my girlfriend to sit at the desk, and vaguely apologize to the customer, muttering a string of words including “girlfriend,” “Paris,” “Two months,” “Horrendous trick.”

“Oh, no! That’s fine. This makes me want to buy more books,” he says. His really wide smile makes me uncomfortable.

The printer is still jammed. My girlfriend and I have intermittent conversation while I fuss with the computer. She complains, though, of terrible jet lag, and decides to catch the bus home to get some rest.

A half-hour after she leaves I get an instant message from my girlfriend.

“I just got my period on the bus.”