Firmin Read online

  And what did I post next to my own name? When I was in the dumps, I posted GROTESQUE CLOWN and even RAT, but when I was up—which was often the case back then—I posted BUSINESSMAN. My business was books—consumption and exchange. I hung out in the Balloon and the Balcony and studied the trade. I leaned over the edge of the Balloon, in constant peril of falling, and read the morning paper over Norman’s shoulder. At times, when he placed his coffee cup just so, I could see my own reflection in the dark water—not an appetizing sight at breakfast time. Norman was a real reader too. He would feel about on the desk for his cup like a blind man, find it, grasp it, and raise it to his lips without ever taking his eyes off the newspaper. The aroma of coffee floated up and hung around the ceiling. I loved that smell, though it would be a long time before I actually tasted coffee.

  A man in a bar once asked me what books taste like “in an average sort of way.” I had a ready answer, but in order not to make him feel completely stupid, I pretended to ponder the question for a while before saying, “My friend, given the chasm that separates all your experiences from all of mine, I can bring you no closer to that singular savor than by saying that books, in an average sort of way, taste the way coffee smells.” This was a mouthful, and I could tell by the way he returned to his drink that I had given him plenty to think about. Now that I am alone again, I don’t ever smell coffee anymore, which is one more nice thing gone from my life.

  After the morning paper, I would eavesdrop on Norman’s dealings with his customers. Many—perhaps most—were true readers hoping to buy a few good books cheap. If they had not come in with a title on their lips or if their browsing seemed unfocused and vague, Norman was sure to notice, and he always knew how to steer them in the right direction. He was a real Sherlock Holmes when it came to the divination of character from outward appearances. He could tell at a glance—from their dress, their accents, their haircuts, even their gaits—the kind of books they liked, and he never made a mistake, never handed Peyton Place to someone who would have been happier with Doctor Zhivago. Nor vice versa—Norman Shine was not a snob. He was short and big-bottomed. He had a broad face—it seemed to be wider than it was long—and a very small mouth, which he would purse up when he listened. Ask him a question, ask him if he has Dombey and Son or Marivaux’s Life of Marianne in translation, and watch his mouth draw up. It was like pulling the string of a little sack or poking a sea anemone. And no matter how ordinary the question—“Who wrote War and Peace?” or “Where is your restroom?”—he would incline his head so as to look at you over the tops of his glasses, purse his lips, and in general act as if yours was the most profound of inquiries. Then the anemone would forget its fear, the drawstring would relax, his mouth would open in the gentlest of smiles, and raising an extended index finger as if testing the wind, he would say, “Back room, left-hand shelves, third shelf from the bottom, toward the end,” or some such precise thing. With his bald pate and horseshoe of bushy hair, he looked like a jolly friar. I sometimes mixed him up with Friar Tuck.

  On Saturday afternoons, especially when the weather was fine, the shop would be crowded with customers, and Norman would leave his desk by the door and move about the store helping people find what they wanted. He was beautiful then, moving gracefully among them. He was like a musketeer. He was Athos, quiet and reserved, slow to anger, but deadly when provoked. Assaulted by a question from behind, he spins about, thrusts his rapier at a top shelf, and draws down, impaled and flashing like a fish on a spear, Death in Venice. Another request might send him charging down an aisle, a turn at the corner of a shelf, a left feint in the direction of juvenilia, and then, crouching, a lunge to the right—and there, skewered by his sword point, is Betty Crocker’s Picture Cook Book. A third request, this time from an old woman in a mackintosh, bent and ugly, meets with the usual deference. A deep bow, a chivalrous pirouette, two lightning jabs, and The Power of Positive Thinking and Arthritis and Common Sense lie at her feet. Bravo, mon vieux Athos, bravo.

  But Norman’s most endearing moments occurred on rainy days, with no customers in the store, when he roamed the aisles armed with a large turkey-feather duster, and dusted to the right, dusted to the left, and hummed or whistled as he went. Seeing him then made me think how nice it was to be human. Rainy days were pleasant ones for me too. Lulled by the watery pit-a-pat, I occasionally dozed off at my post. And sometimes I had nightmares in which I died excruciating deaths, crushed beneath Webster’s unabridged or flushed screaming down a drain. And then I would wake up in the warm store to the gentle hissing of the rain and the whispering of the feather duster and feel happy again.

  Meanwhile, the world outside the bookstore was looking more and more like a place I did not much want to be part of. During our orientation trip up top Mama had complained a lot to Luweena and me about our lack of gratitude for all she was doing for us in showing us the great scrape-and-scrounge spots. Which was ridiculous. From my point of view she had shown us mostly a bunch of death traps and not much to be grateful for. The one exception was the Rialto Theater, and for that even to this day my gratitude knows no bounds. No Rialto, no longing. No longing, no Lovelies. No Lovelies, and … what? No Lovelies, and a lonely rodent, at the closing of the garden, mulling the quality of his despair. The rest of my family were blessed in a way. Thanks to their dwarfish imaginations and short memories they did not ask for a lot, mostly just food and fornication, and they got enough of both to take them through life while it lasted. But that was not the life for me. Like an idiot, I had aspirations. And besides, I was terrified. The Rialto stood out as the one moderately safe place in the whole depressing neighborhood where you could still pick up something to eat, and eat it calmly without worrying about what calamity was going to fall on your head and turn you into a rug like Peewee. A combination movie theater and flophouse, the Rialto stayed open twenty-four hours a day. Half the audience was there only to sleep—it was cheaper than a room and warmer than a street. It was known affectionately as the Scratch House, and most rats avoided it because of the vermin, a voracious population of fleas and lice, and also because of the reek—a stench of old people, poor people, sweat and jism, mixed with the stink of the pesticides and disinfectants they dumped in once a week. But to me, given my temperament, that seemed a small price to pay. The Rialto screened old movies during the day and evening, perhaps forty films in all, which it continuously recirculated, in order to maintain a front of shabby respectability. Then at midnight, when the citizenry and its censors were tucked in bed and the cops could safely look the other way, it would switch over to pornography. At the stroke of midnight, a halt, scratched, and flickering Charlie Chan or Gene Autry would come to a clattering stop in midreel. Utter darkness would follow, a few short minutes of coughing and shuffling, and then the projector would whirr back to life, and even its sound would seem younger, brighter. The change was spectacular.

  Though the Rialto had a lot to offer, attendance was always sparse, and I found it easy to creep down the empty rows and with finikin discernment harvest the choicest bits of candy bar and popcorn and even an occasional serving of hot dog or smoked ham (the all-nighters often brought lunch with them) while the projector’s beam flashed like a searchlight above me. This profusion of provender, however, was for me not foremost among the Rialto’s attractions. For there on the midnight screen, naked and enormous as Amazons, were creatures just like the ones who had transfixed me with their loveliness in front of the Casino weeks before. But here they did not wear black rectangles on their chests and thighs, nor were they frozen in photographic stillness. Here they moved like real creatures in living color and danced and sometimes writhed on carpets that had obviously been made from animals far furrier than Peewee. They writhed alone or with men—whose gross presence, muscled and sinewed like enormous baby rats, I personally found superfluous and offensive—and sometimes they writhed in each other’s arms. How I longed for that smooth skin like soft chamois—to smell it, touch it, taste it; and that thi
ck flowing hair—to bury my face in it, to swoon. I was well aware of what the others of my putative species, the few who might venture in, would think of these velvet-skinned beings. Where I discerned angels, they would see only hideous upright animals, lumbering, hairless, and vain. And if they did not laugh, it would be only because they never do.

  The pull of these tremendous and fascinating creatures was so strong that I found myself sacrificing hours and even days at the bookstore just to behold them. I haul out my telescope once again. Trembling with impatience, I wait for my eyes to grow accustomed to the flickering darkness. Peering into that Rialto of dream and memory, I sweep my telescope this way and that until I find the younger me, the careless progenitor of this present wreck, locked in the circle of the lens: I am holding a little piece of what looks like a Snickers and I am perched on a seat in the front row among the drunken snorers, the mendicant munchers, the droolers, and the masturbators. Chewing quietly I contemplate the slow disrobings, the tentative undulations, the wild gyrations of the beings I have come to think of simply as “my Lovelies.” Chew and contemplate, contemplate and chew, utterly rapt, utterly happy. I am not ashamed. Sometimes I think that all anyone needs in life is lots of popcorn and a few Lovelies.

  Norman acquired most of his books at estate sales, and that for me was the only sad part of the book business. Returning from one of these sales, the old wood-paneled Buick wagon would be so weighed down with books that when he backed up to the shop door the bumper would scrape on the sidewalk. Opening the rear gate, he would carry them inside by the armful and stack them next to his desk in waist-high piles and during the days that followed open them one by one and pencil a price on the inside. I hated that part of the business. I hated most of all reading the inscriptions over his shoulder: “For my darling Peter on our fiftieth wedding anniversary” (in The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám), “This book was given me by dear dead Violet Swain when we were both seventeen” (in The Catcher in the Rye), “To Mary, may it bring her solace” (in John Donne’s Sermons), “Just to remind you of our fortnight of Italian heaven” (in Ruskin’s The Stones of Venice), “Madness is only misunderstood genius—pray for me” (in Blake’s Songs of Innocence and of Experience), “I live, I die; I have lived, I am dead; I shall die, I will live” (in Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling). Dozens of these in every carload. It was obscene. They should have buried the books with their owners, like the Egyptians, just so people couldn’t paw over them afterward—give them something to read on the long ride through eternity.

  Most books got priced at less than a dollar, though Norman had an eye for real value too, and—what with the bumps above his ears—a gift for secrecy. When he spotted a truly valuable book at one of those estate sales, he kept it up his sleeve until he had bought it for a song. He might pay a nickel for a book and then turn around, stick it in a glass-fronted case, and sell it for a thousand dollars the next day. When the collectors came in to see what he had, they put on white cotton gloves before touching anything in the case. And some of these were books that Norman had been schlepping around in his station wagon a few days before. But don’t tell that to the collectors! They sat there as solemn as Popes with their white gloves on, holding a book as gently as if it were a newborn baby, and talked about provenance, first printings, autographs, and the great Rosenbach. Some of these people knew a lot about the history of books, but none of them knew as much as Norman, and they could never put anything over on him. He was amazing. I came to believe that he knew everything. In my mind I had long since taken down the sign that labeled him as merely the Owner of the Desk, and next to his name I had put up two new signs: THE SWORDSMAN and THE BEARER OF THE KEY OF KNOWLEDGE. It was an easy step, via the image of the key, from there to St. Peter. And that was how the image of Norman Shine got mixed up in my mind with the idea of sainthood.

  There was another interesting aspect of the book business, one that brought Norman closer to the hidden projectionist at the Rialto. You see, besides the good used books on the shelves and the very used books in the basement and the rare books in the glass-fronted cabinets, there were also books in the old iron safe in front of the Rathole. These were the banned books, white-covered paperbacks published by Olympia Press and Obelisk Press and smuggled in from Paris. They had titles like Tropic of Cancer, Our Lady of the Flowers, The Ginger Man, Naked Lunch, My Life and Loves. The customers for these books spoke the names in whispers. If Norman knew the customer, or after sizing him up (they were all men) decided to trust him, off would come the Friar Tuck disguise: Norman’s round eyes would narrow, his little pocketbook mouth would flatten to a hard slit. It was like watching a different movie—here was the secret agent of the French underground handing out forged papers, or perhaps an underworld fence passing stolen diamonds. “Just a moment,” he would say, and he would shoot a quick glance around. Then, crouching in front of the safe so as to hide its contents from view, he would deftly angle the contraband into a plain brown bag, one without PEMBROKE BOOKS written on it, but not before a whiff of Paris—Gauloise Bleu and red wine and car exhaust—had wafted up from the open safe to mingle with the coffee smell on the ceiling. And I thought, Good old Norman, striking a blow for freedom. Which shows that even before meeting Jerry Magoon I was a revolutionary at heart. It also shows that I was hiding from myself the obvious fact that, besides the blow for freedom, Norman was making a killing. He was, I now understand, a mixed character. But in those days the only mixed character I had an eye for was myself.

  All these new experiences got a tremendous battle going in my mind between Pembroke Books and the Rialto. To me they were like rival temples vying for my worship—sages and arhats on the one hand, angels on the other. Sometimes I gave in to the one and sometimes I gave in to the other. And when I gave in to the Rialto side I would often stay on right through the night. That way I could catch the daytime features without having to walk the streets in daylight. Among the continuously recycled black-and-white movies, besides Charlie Chan and Gene Autry, were westerns, gangster movies, and musicals, films with Joan Fontaine, Paulette Godard, James Cagney, Abbott and Costello, and Fred Astaire. The projectionist must have had a soft spot for Fred Astaire, he showed so many of his movies, and it was not long before I had a soft spot for him too. When his movies were showing I always stayed on. I was sure the projectionist was another guardian of the mysteries, like Norman. Two temples, two priests. I longed to catch a glimpse of him, but I never did.

  Fred Astaire became my shining example—his walk, his talk, his tastes. So I naturally developed a soft spot for Ginger Rogers too, and I put her in with my Lovelies. It happened now and then that a movie with her in it was the last thing showing before the apotheosis at midnight. Dressed in a floating gown and clasping Astaire’s outstretched hand, the bejeweled and apparently weightless Ginger, suspended in arabesque penché, would suddenly vanish, wrapped in a cloud of night like Eurydice. And I, huddled in the coughing, shuffling darkness that had swallowed her up, would imagine that she had disappeared forever. And I experienced real—not imagined—grief. In fact, I would manage to work up a pretty good head of emotional steam, when suddenly, accompanied by the whirr of the projector—a sound that had become as stirring as Wagner’s Ride of the Valkyries—there she would be again, back from the dead, naked and assumed into heaven, writhing on a rug. It was magical. I longed to approach her as a supplicant, a stemless rose in my paws, and humbly place the blossom in the little vase of her navel, like an offering. But I guess all that emotion, all that yearning, was too enormous for my little frame to bear, and on those nights, coming home to my dusty hovel in the ceiling of the bookshop, I would grow terribly depressed. Unrequited love is bad, but unrequitable love can really get you down.

  I wouldn’t eat for two days. I would read Byron. I would read Wuthering Heights. I changed my name to Heathcliff. I lay on my back. I looked at my toes. After that I would throw myself into my work with increased energy. I was Jay Gatsby. I showed a great capacity
for bouncing back. I carried on with business. Outwardly I was my old affable self, and who could know that I was hiding a broken heart?

  Every morning Norman and I read the Boston Globe. We read it all the way through, including the want ads. I became informed about the world, I became a well-informed citizen, and when the paper referred to “the general public,” I felt a little pang of narcissistic pride. I learned to orient myself in space: when I stood facing the glass cabinet my nose drove a wedge toward Provincetown across the bay, and my tail sent a spear along Route 2 to Fitchburg. And in time: just behind me lay the election of a Catholic as president of the United States, the crash of a spy plane in Russia, a massacre in South Africa, while in front of me, according to the Globe, loomed nuclear annihilation, shorter skirts, and a lot of new movies.

  Closer to home, I learned how the Red Sox were doing and about the plans for the disappearance of Scollay Square. Disappearance by means of the persistent application of heavy machinery. This was a hard thing to read about, especially for me. After all, this was the only life I had ever known. Where would I be without the bookstore, without the Rialto? And I could tell it was hard on Norman too, because he talked about it a lot. He talked about it with tall, balding Alvin Sweat, owner of Sweat’s Sweets next door, and with adipose and balding George Vahradyan, who ran an amalgamation of drugstore and carpet emporium across the street called Drugs and Rugs. Some days, according to the Globe, the destruction was imminent, and some days it was projected, and some days it was impending. On rainy days, when there were no customers, it must have been just plain threatening, because on those days the three bald heads would bob around Norman’s desk below the Balloon, drink his coffee, talk about what was going to happen—and when it was going to happen and what in God’s name they were going to do after it had happened—and complain. Alvin had a weakness for colorful language and George had a weakness for big cigars, and standing around the desk talking to Norman, Alvin’s “flying fucks,” “asses from elbows,” and “busted nuts,” would mingle with George’s cigar smoke and both would float up to the ceiling, where they mixed with the smells of coffee and Paris. These conversations naturally did nothing to save the neighborhood, and they usually left Norman and me so depressed we would just bury ourselves in work, taking out books and wiping them with a cloth, if nothing else. That was, of course, Norman. As for me, I lay on my back in bed and worked on my poem “Ode to Night.” It began “Hail, Darkness.”