“No, don’t do that. But Mitchell…”
“Yes.” I can handle whatever she delivers. The body is worth it, and the company keeps me on my toes.
“Would you mind if I asked you not to wear the yellow shirt. The one you wore last week? I don’t know, but for some reason it makes you look. I don’t know”
“I won’t wear it.”
“Kind of smallish. I mean not that you are… Anyway I’ve got to go.”
“I’ll wear blue. That’s bigger.” But she has already hung up leaving me with nothing but a dial tone and a hard-on.
There are seven or eight thrift shops on the west side of the 405 Freeway and north of Washington Boulevard, which is the area I try to cover. Most open at ten, but new books are usually not on the shelves until later in the day.
The employees that run things are vaguely aware that some of the books might be valuable, but their knowledge is limited and, to the average twelve-stepper who sorts these things, a big coffee table book with pictures of custom Harleys or of fancy window treatments is what is valuable and will be marked up to seven or eight dollars. These remainder-table books are worth a couple of dollars on Amazon, but a small, soiled book about optics and prisms might be worth two hundred and will get stamped ninety-nine cents. The first book scout who sees it will grab it like a frog snags a fly. That is why it is important to be there when the books are shelved.
There are no rare volumes to be found when lazing about the house and any morning it is key to get out and place myself in the path of scouting fortune. This is more than a normal morning, however. I want to recover my Hemingway. Midmorning at a local thrift store is a grazing field for Helmet Head.
HH’s best quality is that he’s easy to spot. It’s helpful when you want to avoid him. But today, I have driven past the Goodwill on Santa Monica Boulevard and the UCLA Hospital thrift shop on Sawtelle and, fueled by thoughts of the missing ostensible first-edition Hemingway, I am relieved to see the decrepit Yamaha leaning like a battle standard up against a utility pole in front of the National Council of Jewish Women thrift shop on Federal Avenue.
I pull into a nearby parking space, get out and walk toward it. The seat fabric is torn. Brown latex foam sprouts from the cracks. A film of dirty grease covers the motor and the rubber on the foot pegs is worn to the metal underneath. The plastic supermarket bags hanging from the handlebars are stretched with the weight of books. I look in the store window. There is no sign of HH. I peer into the bags and notice a few obsolete computer books. A red temporary registration certificate is attached right above the license plate, held in place by tattered and yellowing clear tape. My missing book is likely at the address on the certificate and finding where Helmet Head lives would be the first part of a plan. But the paper is creased and the ink is blurred from rain.
I squint and strain and then I am brought up short by a voice—his voice. It’s slightly guttural, and even though it has a patina of civility, I intuit a subsurface of threat.
“Looking for something?”
I realize too late that I’m not ready for this encounter. HH, strap swinging metronome-like from his helmet, continues over my apoplexy.
“Are you looking at my registration? Something interest you there, Ralphie?”
Should I engage? The perennial question. Should America have invaded Iraq? It is not a question of whether the provocation is serious enough to merit a response. It is a question of self-interest. Will a response serve my interests? Will I be closer to my missing book if I engage now, or will I be farther away? Will I be bogged down in an endless and inescapable quagmire?
“I was looking for you,” I say, trying to turn the conversation to my offensive.
“Why are you reading my registration, Ralph?” HH persists, referring unabashedly to the elephant in the room as crazy people are wont to do.
“After I got back from Anaheim and Nick and Doreen were taking care of me, remember you came over?” I continue, trying to deflect his challenge.
“Are you looking to find out where I live?” he persists.
“Maybe you were curious about what I picked up in Anaheim and you took a look at a couple of the books while you were in the driveway,” I offer, acting diffident as if theft were a natural and not notable activity.
“Why would I do that?” he replies. For the moment I have at least won the battle of topic. It’s encouraging. Perhaps dialectic is possible.
“There are some books I’m looking for.”
I don’t want to show my hand yet by zeroing in on the Hemingway.
“So why are you looking at my bike?”
“I’m missing some of the books I bought in Anaheim.”
“What does that have to do with me?”
“I thought you may have seen them.”
“Why would I have seen them?”
“Because over at Nick’s I saw you were looking at my stuff.”
“So why were you trying to find out where I live?” Uh-oh. Back at square one.
“Listen. It’s not a big deal.”
“Well, obviously it is a big deal.”
“Not really.”
“You know for a person in this particular business, you can be painfully transparent, Ralph.”
“Is that a compliment?”
“Do you think it is?
“No.” I am tempted to say, “No, Mister Helmet Head,” but I bite my tongue.
“It’s a post office box anyway…the address,” he offers, pointing to the registration.
“I don’t care where you live. I am wondering if you have any of my books and I would just like to get them back if you have them.”
I map out a strategy and continue.
“There was a textbook that I’d like to get back. I need it for a customer. If you have the same title I’ll pay. I’ll pay retail for it so I can fulfill the order.”
I will let on like what I really care about is the textbook and hope that will lead me to the Hemingway. Perhaps he isn’t aware of its value. Of course it’s hopelessly naive. But I can’t go forward without a plan and this is the best I can do for now.
HH advances toward his bike, straddles it and raises the kickstand.
He kicks the starter.
“Is this because I am in possession of certain facts?”
“I don’t know what facts you’re talking about.”
“The government tells us that the steel in the towers melted and that’s why they came down. Steel melts at 2700 degrees. Jet fuel burns at 1200 degrees.”
“That’s very interesting. You didn’t happen to see my book?”
“Doesn’t that make you curious?”
“I’m curious about the book.”
“Who do you work for, Ralph? Maybe I should be looking at your registration. Maybe it’s from Langley, Virginia.”
It’s his exit line. He buzzes off wearing a smirk which he won’t even deign to send in my direction. I don’t know if he’s serious and I don’t know how to react. Does he really think I work for the CIA? Is he delusional or merely larcenous and clever? Regardless, I have lost the advantage.
I was asleep under the comforter in Angela’s bed the morning of 9/11/2001. It was a little before 6 AM in Los Angeles. She was up early and already pumping on her Stairmaster in the living room with the TV on when she saw footage of the first plane hitting the North Tower. She woke me up and together we watched in awe the second plane crash into the South Tower. Nobody knew what it meant. Possibly an imminent wider attack, war and even nuclear conflagration.
I went into Angela’s kitchen and called True who was just waking up and didn’t sound pleased to hear my voice.
“Turn on the TV.”
“Mitchell? What do you want?”
“Turn on the TV.”
“What for?”
“There’s some kind of attack.”
“What kind of attack?”
“Two planes just flew into the World Trade Center in New York.”
&nb
sp; “What do you mean ‘into it’?”
“Two planes. Two towers. They crashed into them.”
“Oh my God!”
I hear some fumbling with the phone and then the sound of the news from her TV.
“I can come over.”
“Oh my God! How could two planes do that?”
“I can come over.”
“Oh my—” An instant of call-waiting deadness interrupts the line. “That’s my brother calling me. I’ve got to go. Don’t come over.” She hung up. I returned to Angela and the TV. She was sweating hard on the Stairmaster as the commentators speculated on what comes next, and the sight of her firm muscles on her taut, tan waist below her halter top vied for my attention to the unfolding event. I remember on that morning I felt a burgeoning fear that fate would have me spending my last moments with the wrong person.
With Helmet Head out of my grasp, I am uneasy for the rest of the day. I continue on a perfunctory thrift store route and return home to find an unremarkable group of orders. I pack with lassitude and deliver them to the post office.
If I knew that the missing book was a real first edition, then I could face my situation with undiluted anger. But what if it is really just an ordinary old copy? Perhaps the blue tinted jacket is just an aspirational false memory.
Hopelessly stuck in my thoughts, I drive to Angela’s apartment to divert myself with a different sort of dialectic. There was a brief period at the beginning of our relationship when Angela would come to my apartment, and then there was a time when we would trade off venues, but now I only go to hers.
Angela lacks a sense of pace in sex. When she rides on top of me, as she gets more excited and gets close to orgasm, she starts to move too quickly, and she passes right over and past her personal narrow window for fulfillment. Unless I intervene, grabbing her hips, slowing her down, forcing her to build slowly and purposefully to the anticipated ecstatic moment, she will bypass it entirely and collapse in a withered and unfulfilled heap.
I bring an inexpensive Cabernet. She presents farfalle with sun-dried tomatoes and capers and a spinach salad. This fosters an unnecessary illusion that this isn’t just about fucking. Afterward, I am always amazed that we manage to fill the conversational void. Tonight we each offer up some morsels about travel to Europe, both employing the first person singular, speaking as if we traveled alone, when in fact we were each with our former spouses. We decide to leave dessert and go to the bedroom, not so much out of a breathless need for sex, but to shorten the conversation.
“Are you all right?” she asks, as we lie on the cool percale. She has orgasmed mightily. I didn’t get close. But her concern has to do with a tightness in my demeanor that transcends sex.
“I’m fine.”
“I came like church bells,” she offers. It is, I suppose, offered as a compliment, but its context is predictably Angela-centric, about her and her bells. She snuggles up under my arm, in an approximation of tenderness she no doubt saw in a French movie.
“Is Caleb all right?” Although she has never met Caleb, she knows that he is at the top of the list of things that might concern me.
“He’s fine.”
“And the ex?” Even I resent the diminution of True to the ex.
“Nothing new on that front.”
A pause. She lifts her head up and grins widely, as if I am an infant in a crib and will respond reflexively. I don’t. She takes her hand with its lovely, long manicured fingers, and its lithe arm, and slowly traces it down my chest to my pelvis.
“Don’t make any promises you don’t intend to keep,” I say. She slips lower and begins her work. It leads me to believe that an air of alienation might have its rewards with Angela. Perhaps I should learn to fake ennui. But I’m too transparent and she’s too perceptive. I stir as her head follows her hand.
“I can’t find a book I bought.”
“That’s too bad,” she says as she works me with her hand.
“It could be very valuable.”
“Well, what happened to it? Your book.” She warms to her work, as do I.
“I think maybe it was stolen.”
“How valuable is it?”
“Maybe thousands…”
“Do you know who stole it?”
“Somebody took it out of my car.”
She steps up her efforts at my midsection, perhaps in an attempt to distract me from my pain.
“What about the police?”
“I don’t think they can help.”
Her pace accelerates. My mind is like a nickelodeon flashing alternate images of HH and Angela.
“Can you get it back?”
“I will try.”
“I have faith in you, Mitchell.” She reasserts herself with vigor, transferring her duties to her lips.
I explode in her mouth. She swallows with a big grin. This is a first. She has never, ever swallowed. To some men, this is supposed to be the ne plus ultra of sexual gratification. God knows why. To me there is something ominous about this moment, as if she perceives I am a hapless soldier about to leave for the front. She dabs the corners of her mouth with the sheet.
“You are such a naughty boy for making me do that,” she says with a grin, and then lies back next to me. Even though I sense this night is different, I know I won’t stay. She turns on her side away from me, my cue to leave, and I do, pausing to admire her near-perfect ass.
“Don’t get used to it,” she offers, still not looking at me as I leave.
Chapter 14
It is 2 AM when I arrive home to turn on the computer and check my sales. Nothing special on the order list—a few ten-dollar books. I shower, brush my teeth and then go to my small bedroom. There is a bed, a table and a lamp, nothing else and all very basic. All our former furniture resides with True. Window shades and no curtains. Sometimes I think I like to live simply like a student, but more often the regression is merely demoralizing.
I fall on the bed and turn out the light. I am extremely tired, but doomed to fight my demons for a short spell as I lay in the dark. I think of errors I made. In judgment. In character. I wonder how Caleb will be marked by the experience of the separation. I think of the missing book and the futility of trying to recover it. Move on. Move on. I try to clear my mind, first by thinking of the color blue in abstraction. But I see my book and then HH’s motorbike, all in blue, and then I riff on various motorcycles I have ridden, trying purposefully to move into more calming territory. I travel purposefully into sense memories, trying to abstract them from their context—the feel of the motorcycle throttle on a Honda I once owned as a student. I find that for me the abstraction clears the mind. I twist the handgrip, and then I imagine the feel of its diamond rubber pattern and so on until slowly I am Morpheus borne.
The doorbell rings. Not in my dream, but in my living room. I stir. It rings again. I look at the clock and it says 4:14 AM. This can’t be good. I forget my dream, but the dread I feel is either a continuation of the dream or the certainty that when your doorbell rings at four in the morning, nothing good will follow. I drag myself to my feet and walk toward the door.
I open it on the chain, peek through the crack. It’s Helmet Head. Oh shit!
“Hey Ralph!” he says with patently false cheer.
My stomach suddenly feels like it’s on a down elevator.
“What the fuck are you doing here?” I ask.
“I don’t know why you think I’d steal anything from you, Ralph.”
“It’s four in the morning.”
“It’s not so hard to find out where somebody lives. I found out where you live.”
I look to see if he holds a gun or a knife. His hands are empty. His fingernails are cracked and dirty.
“What do you want?”
“You’re projecting, Ralph. You’re projecting all the anger and all the failure you feel inside onto me.”
“You are nuts and get away from my door.”
“To acquire wisdom, you need to be able to reco
gnize truth, regardless of the source.”
“The steel in the towers didn’t have to melt. They soften enough to lose strength at a thousand degrees and I’m going back to bed. I looked it up.” I start to close the door, but he puts his foot in the open space.
“You think it’s a joke? You think that the country has been taken from us is a joke?”
“I’m not laughing.”
“You can liberate yourself, you know.”
“Would you get your foot out of my door, please?”
“You have so much. I have so little.”
“Give me my book.”
“I don’t have your book. And if I did, it wouldn’t fix the problems that you have.”
“Take your foot out of the door or I’m calling the cops.”
“So where’s your kid?”
This hits me like a falling piano. What does he know about my kid?
“What are you talking about?” I stammer, trying to think of when he could have even seen me with Caleb.
He cranes his neck to look inside. “I guess he’s sleeping. Don’t want to wake him. Guess I’ll be going.”
He has a sickening, sociopathic grin on his face as he removes his foot from the door. I close it and wait several seconds to hear his motorbike start and drive away. I return to bed, but it takes an hour to get to sleep.
In the morning, I drive over to see Nick, hoping for guidance. I find him prowling in one of his storage sheds crammed with hundreds of books, searching for a missing volume in a stooped space designed for garden tools. There are some things I could teach Nick about inventory control. He has over 30,000 books and no SKU numbering system to keep track of them, which means he has to sort them by titles and authors and subjects, which in turn means that when he gets an order, maybe 10 percent of the time he can’t find it and has to refund the customer.
“You know the Flammarion catalogues rayzonay? You know… Toolooverpant?” Flammarion is a French publisher. He means “raisonée” and “tout l’oeuvre peint,” but although his French pronunciation is bad, he has knowledge of the actual books. I, on the other hand, know from prep school French how to pronounce the title including the rolled “r”.
Some Books Aren’t for Reading Page 12