Though I was of age and was relatively sure that Shalvo took magazines to the back all the time I didn’t want Pamela to think I was that kind of guy—not because I took a shine to her, just because I think it would have sent my noia over the top, like if people knew I “read pornography” they would be more likely to suspect me of making off with Gogol’s Diary of a Madman and other stories or Meno and Phadrus by Plato.
***
I spent (usually) half of my shift alone, at least—the manager popping in at odd times and leaving always an hour or so into his shift if we were doubled—and the lack of customer base started giving me that detached, retail clerk headspace. I’d tuck myself behind the register, worried that if I stepped away someone would come in and ruin my tense tranquility.
This is what got me peeking through the cabinets, noting the piles of books with pink or yellow tags on them, folk’s names scribbled. Wonderful things in there—it was the first time I saw one of the standard white editions of Calvino (Cosmicomics) for example—and I put it together (noting the pile of pink and yellow tabs by the special order computer and remembering my ten minutes of training) that these books came in during shipment, the papers the special order pick up receipts—Paid (pink) or To Be Paid (yellow).
Curious as to when all these special orders were made (I had, for example, never had a customer ask me to order something, yet alone Calvino) I inspected the receipts—some were six months old, some were eight, some a few weeks.
It was just willy-nilly—they came in, they sat there.
***
The possibilities of adding to my book collection exponentially increased.
***
“Hey, am I allowed to buy any of these?” I asked Pamela.
She shook her head, though seemed to think special orders were all a farce.
“But it looks like these have been here for a year, you know?”
“We’re supposed to send them back. I think Shalvo is going to get around to it, we have more boxed up in back that are processed but we need some more forms from corporate to send the box.”
I nodded, no idea what any of that meant.
***
The form to place a special order didn’t require much—name, signature, identification number, phone number, all things that could be easily invented, not that it seemed they were ever checked (the phone number was the only problem, but I did note that a few sheets had scribbled across them No Calls—Hold for Pickup).
And of course I wouldn’t want to overdo it, would have to order something, let it lay around awhile, slip it out unsuspectingly after it had been forgotten—if someone actually did ship these all out in the meantime, well bad luck on me, but I just couldn’t imagine that being the one thing that actually got done.
***
I typed titles into the computer, author’s names, nothing in mind, particularly, to run off with—it was just possible, just a thing that could be done, no point not taking my chance.
My test case was an edition of A Clockwork Orange labeled ‘cloth, first’ which I imagined meant First Edition Hardcover. It sounded cool, but nothing could have prepared me for the beauty of the thing—no dustjacket, a kind of orange design all but engraved in the stiff cloth cover and it was the expurgated edition, twenty chapters long instead of twenty-one, glossary at the end. I couldn’t believe it when I saw it sitting on the counter, wrapped in a yellow receipt, No Calls—Hold For Pick Up scribble scrabbled across it, the imaginary name and imaginary drivers license number of my imaginary customer neatly written in felt marker in my own handwriting (I’d figured it was easier to say I had filled out the information than to attempt to disguise my hand).
***
Despite all of these treasures, I was at a point in my life where I had a lot of other things going on and so the job, like any job, started to take a pointlessly out-of-proportion toll on me. And like with all jobs, even though I didn’t do anything most shifts but talk to myself and abscond with whatever I wanted, I started wanting more hours and started needling my co-workers about the pointlessness of “company policies”.
I got defensive if my straightening techniques weren’t beloved and if customers came in and I didn’t like some little thing about them I would seethe—no one, you know, ever bought books, never did someone come in for something interesting, never did I have a nice chat with someone about something they had read or about writing in general.
Shalvo, Pamela—they, neither of them, read. Some other young guy who I never worked with, they said he read, but that didn’t help me.
I generally unspooled as the novelty of a job in a bookshop doing nothing started wearing off—even the books, lovely baubles that they were, they started becoming bland prizes, what could I do with them?
***
The register, how to grift from the register?
It couldn’t be so hard, but somehow I didn’t want to push my luck—I’d already lost my job at the movie theatre (three shops down the same strip) and at Baskin Robbins (the other side of the parking lot) and I didn’t have any other prospects set up, was taking enough risks as it was, figured I should leave the money alone.
And I did—I really did. Even when such scrambled up perfect opportunities to get an extra few bucks in my pocket came up.
For example: a man and his daughter (high school sophomore, I think, younger than me but didn’t seem like I should be that old yet) came in wondering did we have a Collected Works of Williams Shakespeare.
“Sure we do,” I said (despite having a girlfriend quite springy to show my cavalier and helpful attitude to the girl). And we should have had—should have had one of those faux leather cover, gilded edged tomes, remaindered, bargained, on sale for something like twenty bucks—should have had a stack of them, but they were nowhere to be found.
“That’s alright,” the father said.
“Well,” I hurried up, stumble talked, “did you need some play in particular?”
“I need The Tempest,” the girl said and I nodded, yes, like I knew just what that meant, like there was some deep understanding between us.
“For school?”
She chuckled out her nose, nodded.
“We have The Tempest,” I said, business-like turning back to the father. Then, no preparation, no thought of how it might come across, I said “Look, we really ought to have had that collected edition and we didn’t—you’re put out and I want to make it right by you. That collection would’ve cost you twenty bucks, so I’ll tell you what—you go to the Theatre section, right down there, bottom two rows, and you take all of the Shakespeare we have and it’s yours for…fifteen, we’ll call it fifteen since the whole set should have cost you twenty.”
For whatever reason—and this sometimes puzzles me, now that I am a full grown adult—this father thought it was a great idea, a crackerjack deal. “Alright, sir—I appreciate your wanting to do right by the customer.”
I nodded, simpleton, the girl having laughed like she wasn’t sure about any of it, the father having tapped her elbow that yes she should go get all of the individual editions of Shakespeare she could find.
I just popped the register with the button underneath, took the guy’s twenty—all of a sudden dead bashful, unable to even look at the girl when she said “Thank you so much, this turned out even better, I like them one at a time like this”—and shut it in.
Then stood there, not moving.
***
Wasn’t it obvious that I could take that twenty? That it was mine—that I had not only let half of the theatre inventory out the door for nothing but had unnecessarily taken this guy’s money—couldn’t I keep it in my pocket, order pizza, have a celebration of some kind?
Yes, but I didn’t.
Instead, I browsed the shelves until I found three books, totaling just over twenty-one dollars, rang them into the register, took the difference in price out of my pocket (rounded up to the near
est dollar) bagged the books and set them, with receipt, on the counter.
Somehow, this seemed to minimize everything, it seemed to show me I was capable of reasonably keeping myself somewhat restrained.
no. three: the manager, Peter Crisp
Peter Crisp was the manager of Bravado Bookmark, a thing he seemed to take simultaneously as a badge of distinction and a cross to bear—he was middle-late thirties, seemed baked by life, wiry and out of shape, bent over a cigarette or incessantly scuffing his hair. I was still fledgling to retail work, so it was easy for him to spin himself as some kind of poorman champion of the free world to me—not that I believed him, but I had no call to know that he didn’t really do any work and so had little to complain about, littler still to hold his head up, over. It was made evident fairly quickly, though, that the rest of the staff didn’t particularly cotton to him—a sad thing, in retrospect, because it wasn’t so much because he was a flawed leader, but because he was standing in their way from advancing to slightly better hours, retaining the same rate of pay (not that they showed any clear indicators of being able to breathe life into Bravado, they were just waiting out the retail evolutionary clock, easier than looking for work elsewhere).
***
When we worked together, Peter would spend a good deal of time in the little office—not quite a separate room, just a partitioned off area, the walls not quite reaching the ceiling so that all of his telephone conversations were distinctly audible from anyplace in the store. To take the curse off this—as most of the calls seemed to be contentious and personal in nature—he would put in a cassette of Scott Adams reading from The Dilbert Principle. I didn’t complain, because some of it was funny, but as he tended to not turn on the store lights (the only switch being in this little office) the few customers who did wander in would pause on the threshold, see me leaning on the counter, blink, look at the ceiling until I’d assure them we were open.
“This is Scott Adams, the guy who does Dilbert”, I’d explain and they’d nod and grunt some smiles, vaguely happy and relieved.
“I like Dilbert”.
“Yeah, Dilbert’s good stuff.”
***
Peter would tell me how he could leave the job at any moment if district management wouldn’t lay off him.
“They have their own deals to be worrying about—I run this store. They want to make it like this store is bringing their company down, I don’t think so”.
He (according to himself and asserted quite regularly) could go be a handyman, any time, any place. As he had traveled across five states for this book store manager job and was only living in a hotel down the way, it didn’t matter to him at all.
***
One day I was walking along with my friend Nicolai Clover—this in the strip mall just over from the strip mall where Bravado was located, connected by a thin patch of grass between parking lot curbs—and Peter came riding up behind us on his bicycle (helmet on, cigarette in tight fingers at the handle bar).
“Hey guys, how’s it going?”
Nicolai sort of shyly nodded, at a loss, and I just said “It’s going fine.”
He rode his bicycle in circles around us, straightening his legs out and exerting at the handle bars like as though to do bunny hops, but never quite got the bounce and to control his turns he’d have to bend his legs, every few seconds, his orbits getting woozy until he just put both feet down and walked the circles, still straddled on the bike.
“You all want to come eat?”
“We just ate at Roy’s, actually” I said, Nicolai just shrugging when Peter looked at him as though to confirm.
“I’m just going back to the hotel, you know? Did some grocery shopping?” He elbowed at the single bag in the little holding compartment over the back wheel.
“Cool”.
“What are you all doing?”
***
I showed up to work one day to find Peter just getting there, unlocking the door though the store should have been open for several hours by that time—he was wearing roller blades, thick shin-guards and knee pads, elbow pads and a helmet, cigarettes dangling from his lip, what turned out to be a helium canister on the pavement at his feet, leaned to the brick of the store front, a bag from the grocery store rumpled next to it.
“Want to help me blow up some balloons?” He was breathing heavily and in the five minutes it took him to get out of his roller blades he explained that he’d been meaning to get this helium canister for awhile, that everyone needed to get trained on it.
“What do you mean?”
The thing was, he felt that it was always a good idea to have decorative balloons for sale, that people really bought them.
There was a balloon store just a few shops down, but I didn’t mention anything, just wondered either is this where he got the idea or was this something that I should try to keep him from learning to protect his feelings. “We sell balloons, now?”
“We’ll blow some up, decorative ones, have them around and people can buy them and we’ll have extras behind the counter, in case they want a fresh one.”
“Okay. I see.”
“And then I got some regular balloons too, so we can just blow those up when kids come in, get the parents in a happy mood to shop and then maybe the kid’ll see the bigger balloon and we’ll get a sale there, too.”
I’d never seen a kid in the store and the only identifiable parents had been the few people who had browsed our miniscule Children’s section for five minutes before asking me did we have Yertle the Turtle or Harold and the Purple Crayon or Goodnight Moon to which I would say No, but would offer to special order them.
***
Peter had troubles, troubles—and because I was the noncommittal, non-judgmental type (at least face-to-face, aloud) when he started arbitrarily turning against the rest of the staff I became his confidant. It put me off, though my girlfriend and Nicolai and the few other people I knew just made it into an in-joke, this thirty-seven-year-old guy trying to be best buddies with the kid just out of highschool.
He told me how he had taken the job because things had gone south with his special lady—this is who he was on the phone with most of the time—and he’d just wanted to be away. He said it was alright living in the hotel, but that it overall was a bad deal because he had been promised promotion to District Manager, had given up his lucrative career as a general fix-it guy, thinking it would be all be some grand adventure. Laced in with all of this was what seemed like really earnest promises to make me manager when he finally did get the bump—Pamela really thought she was next in line and overdue the position, but there was no way things would go that way, as far as Peter was concerned, because she was a ditz who always messed up the magazine shipment. I didn’t know what to make of any of it though, because he never even got me more hours when I would ask—in fact, it seemed he had little to do with making the schedule and when I’d ask Pamela she said that she was only supposed to split the hours between shift managers.
“Aren’t I a shift manager?”
“I don’t think so, you’ve only been here a month and you can’t work nights.”
“I can work nights. I prefer working nights.”
To Peter’s credit, she was a ditz, always flitting her eyelids completely non-flirtatiously and her train of thought would disintegrate from the motion.
***
At the close of business one night, Peter met up with some guy he’d become pals with—I was meeting Nicolai to wander around, talk about the novels we wanted to write.
“What are you guys doing?”
We both shrugged, said we were just gonna go to get burgers at Roy’s, hang out.
“You’ve gotta come to this rib place over here (he gestured to the next strip mall over) this place is amazing and Ryan says they have free trivia.”
I didn’t know what “free trivia” was and so Peter enthusiastically explained, as though th
is explanation was imperative, would seal the deal on our foursome for the night.
So we wound up going—it was a franchise rib place—and he tried to flirt with the waitress while asking for trivia pads (electronic devices to play along with the perpetual trivia questions that were displayed, thirty second timer, on strategically placed televisions) but the advances came across more like he was propositioning a whore.
He and this Ryan seemed to have become fast friends, laughing at everything the other said—kind of angry laughter, like they had been though some history together and were facing down the barrel of something, again. And when Peter abruptly stopped me midsentence at one point—big gesture of both palms up, traffic cop—and said “Hold on hold on…alright guys: Rock Quiz” like an audio footnote or a Greek chorus Ryan (his voice an even mix of NPR announcer monotone and jive hipster) explained that “When he says Rock Quiz, you gotta stop, listen to what’s playing on the speakers, name the song, the artist, the album the…(he lost steam, got doubtful)…the…year of the album…whatever…the…(“The singer, the guitarist” Peter rolled his hands, cutting in over top)…yeah the singer, the guitarist…the album, whatever. Each thing gets you points.”
Not so complicated or groundbreaking a thing to do, but Nicolai and I nodded at the detailed explanation. It must be noted here that when most people do a “rock quiz”, it’s when a deep cut from some album is playing, or a cover-version of something obscure, or a live recording from a particular concert, hence the title Rock Quiz—Peter, though, did it when the answer was “The Beatles…Back in the U.S.S.R…The White Album” or “Pink Floyd…Another Brick in the Wall (“Which part?”)…Part Two…The Wall” or “Sympathy for the Devil…The Rolling Stones…” and so on.
I ended up not wanting my burger because I’d ordered it plain but at this place plain meant it still had sauce all over it, so I just ate fries and Nicolai and I turned down all of Peter’s offers to sneak us some beer by having us finish our waters and he’d pour some beer in, really quick, and then we’d drink it really quick and then he’d order another because it was “like two dollars a beer or something, it’s really good here.”
Seven Stories About Working in a Bookstore Page 2