Last Bender

2.1

     Sally’s book wouldn’t be difficult to find, I thought, as I unpacked boxes of The Early English Text Society and The Early Scottish Text Society volumes. There were complete runs of each. They had a good clean smell. No mold or mildew. The leather bindings were still supple and the repaired bindings were beautifully done. I turned each book over and wrote down, in black ink, the condition and bibliographic information in a notebook labeled The Scottish Shipment. Then I checked each title off of the inventory with a red felt tipped pen. It would take days and days of sorting to see everything. I looked at the clock. Noon. An hour past opening. I stared at the phone and thought, I don’t want to talk to her here. The phone in 2B is the store phone, and I feel the guilt of every petty bourgeois when it rings. And pangs of pleasure too because not a day goes by when a lawyer for some developer doesn’t call to see if I will sell or lease. Oh yes, just what I want, a Starbucks or a Duane Reade downstairs. Maybe a French bistro or even a cutting edge eatery with deconstructed food and a celebrity chef. In their eyes it is an appalling waste of money to sell old books. And they treat you like a dangerous idiot, an enfeebled child. It isn’t a city if you have to have a million dollars to live in it. If everything is the same, if everything could be in Ohio or New Jersey, why the hell would anyone want to? I drag it out. Hem about the price, haw about my attorney. Word has gotten out. They don’t give up. They just throw a different dog at you. If nice doesn’t work, try nasty. Rational is no good? Send in emotional. Appeal to greed, appeal to pride, civic virtue, envy. I turned down a million dollars cash once. Where the hell would I go?

     I had barely made a dent on the boxes but I really did have to get down to the shop. I shut off the radio and the light, locked up and went downstairs.

     The storefront isn’t very big. It’s a narrow building, six floors, twenty-four apartments, two airshafts. It looks east across First Avenue. The shop used to be a bodega, Urena, and the social club next door. The guy who leased it was a decent sort of skeeve. He didn’t want to renew, I had a lot of books and had to put them somewhere. So I left the library, went freelance, and opened the shop, after some alterations. We knocked down all the walls, got rid of the refrigerators and deli cases, and crenellated the cave with book shelves and ranges built of unfinished pine.

     It was bright out, a hot Saturday in early June. The street was full of people. Summer was starting to shimmer in the distance, without the irritation. They were under the sign of Venus now, and of the sun. I opened the top and bottom padlocks on the grates and they shrieked and stuttered like a subway car going up. Then I unlocked the door, put on the lights and settled in. Up front, by the window, were a couple of chairs and a small table. The window display was, to the left, books of the 1920s, Ulysses, The Waste Land, all that stuff, nice editions, good covers; in the center a bouquet of dried flowers on a doll house desk, and the stuffed raven my friend Tammy Markham gave me when I opened; and to the right, apocryphal books, Old Testament pseudepigrapha. I sat down at the desk, put on the computer and Googled “Sally Babel” + Gynocracy. It was all over the place, Amazon, PBS, C-Span, a bunch of journals, and all the major newspapers.

     The door dinged. Someone was bashing into it with what appeared to be a shopping cart. I looked at the drawer where I kept Roy’s old revolver and then back up at the door, which was still dinging each time the object thrust against it, and saw the grey wheels of a double-wide turning in the air. Finally the door gave-in just the right way and it swung open. A woman wheeled in two toddlers, non-identical twins, a look of frustration and indignation on her face. She wore bicycle gloves and a visored cap that read, in big yellow letters on a navy-blue background, SPUD.

     I looked at her over my reading glasses and waited for her to speak.

     “The sign says eleven,” she said. “It’s after twelve.”

     “Yes,” I agreed.

     “You’re late. I’ve been waiting in the hot sun with two children for an hour.”

     I smiled and said, “Do you think I went into this business so I could show up to work on time?”

     She scowled. “You could at least widen the door.”

     “I’ll make a note of it.”

     “Where are the kids’ books?”

     “There aren’t any. And I don’t serve coffee either.”

     “What kind of a bookstore are you?” Her suspicions were aroused and she started to look the place over with the ever-vigilant eye she had decided a mother ought to possess. But whatever I was a front for wasn’t obvious. There is a message board on the wall to the left of the front door, shingled with notices dating back at least two years, and lots and lots of rough hewn pine bookshelves crammed with books. And there I am, at my desk, behind a computer and more piles and piles of books.

     “Used. Mostly Englysshe. Whatever interests me. Would you like help out the door?” Her face was tight. Everything she did was tight. Life ought not to be that way. Too much salad. Too much exercise. Too much effort at perfection. Some things are just what they are, flawed, unsuccessful, halfhearted. Shit just doesn’t turn out right. I rested my index finger on my beard and faced her with a single, pale blue eye and a raised brow.           She gave me this ironic look, as if to say, now I get you, but said, “You have a lot of books here. Mind if I look around?” The kids were starting to squirm some but they appeared to be, at least for now, inert, knocked out by their morning of Conversational Mandarin and Suzuki violin, though you would think the constant embryonic stimulation of Baby Bach and Mozart would have conditioned them for an Early Childhood of intense social and intellectual development, including a little browsing at the bookstore. “No, I don’t mind,” I said and turned my attention to the computer, scrolling through the screens.

     It was hard to decide what to open. The blue letters were mesmerizing. I watched the action on the street, clicked on a promising link and saw a full screen version of the cover. Queen Elizabeth, Eliza, Gloriana, Bess in scary white face. I felt repelled by the words, Gynocracy and its Discontents. Surely everyone imagines a rather large and commanding Vulva seated cross-legged on a red plush throne, Orb and Scepter in hand, surrounded by slightly fetal malcontents. It was provokation, epater, modernist gusto degenerating into postmodern platitude.

     I checked for e-mail orders, printed out the requests and dropped these on the to do pile and then considered briefly not packing and sending out the orders. But customers do want their books. So I went to the shipping and receiving area, about halfway back in the store, and to the right, against a wall. Big orders go upstairs, but here is where I process my Internet business, and, whenever I can’t avoid it, this is where I sit pricing some stranger’s box of woe. We have all sold books and there are many reasons to do so. But it is nine times out of ten a sad occasion that brings the books in. Divorce, death, poverty. And, once they have resigned themselves to the sale, they overvalue the collection; so you are bound to disappoint a person who is already in despair. In this, the used book person is like the agent and the editor on the other end of things.

     The first time I sold books was a few weeks after I had applied for and not gotten a job at The Strand. I have long held a grievance against them for this, though it was my own fault, I could not complete the application. And now, there I was, a few weeks later, selling my books to the very people who had denied me employment. I had my two-volume Stories of Somerset Maugham, from my mother’s library (a beautiful edition which I later bought again), and some other nice old hardcover books I had acquired in one way or another. It was so haphazard in those days. My copy of Post Office is a dog-eared Larchmont Public Library copy stamped Larchmont Train Station. Tammy Markham must have stolen it off the waiting room rack, because she later gave it to me at Gaylord’s. That book’s not worth a thing, but I wouldn’t sell it.

     Those hard covers and all the shitty paperbacks I could fit into a couple of boxes brought me about ten dollars. I thought for sure it would be seventy. The buyer looked everything over brusquely, sneered a little and nodded at the Maugham. When he told me the price of ten dollars, my face fell and he said, “The only reason I’m taking the paperbacks, is the hard covers.” He had recognized that I was a bookman too, and these were his hard words of consolation, from one bookman to another. I have tried them out over the years knowing how pitiless they sound. It doesn’t matter what you say anyway. After all, they are only books. And half the people trying to sell you things are psychos, and junkies, and bums. I’ve had all three in one many times. And sometimes they have good titles. You never know.

     On the worktable I had the orders, the books, in separate stacks, with a mailing label and packing slip on top. All that remained to be done was to find a suitable box, pack it and affix the proper labels. The UPS man Athol from South Africa came at around 2. What I can’t figure out is how a South African got a Teamster delivery job. I took out some flattened boxes and eyeballed the orders. Furey would fit into a mailer. I wrapped the books in bubble pack and put them in the mailbag. Everything was tight, so I taped it up. And so on. I forgot about the Bach babies and got to work on the boxes, something I started out doing in college.

     The circularity of things is sometimes arresting. It was Tammy Markham who got me the job at Gaylord’s, the textbook store on Eighteenth Street. That was when she said to me, “I always thought you were some kind of a dork.” Even as a child Tammy was mean.

     Tammy was at Flynt Park the first time Roy almost got me killed, in 1968, a bad year for us. My father was depressed and drinking too much. On the few occasions that he left his Midtown lair he sat alone in his car staring at the steering wheel. My mother had just moved us out of the city, up to the psychiatrist’s, whom she had been seeing for a couple of years. I was 10 years old and Roy was 13. We didn’t know anyone. Every day my mother would send us out on our bikes. Mine had a gold banana seat and chopper bars and Roy had a black ten speeder. For us, riding a bike meant racing around the courts and sidewalks of Stuyvesant Town. More happened there on ten feet of concrete, than on two miles of road in Larchmont.

     The psychiatrist’s house was in a remote area at the edge of town, on a narrow, wooded road, dark with over-hanging boughs of eastern hemlock, with long, hidden driveways marked by white rocks. The houses stood back behind stone walls and chain link fences and tall hedges.

     Close by was a road that hugged the coast of Long Island Sound for a couple of miles before turning west into town. It crossed a red bridge over an inlet where people fished sometimes and kids got drunk at night; then went along the water, past stone mansions built on spits of land behind weeping willows so green, so grand, they looked like emerald fountains; past the beach club, its sailboats harbored by a rocky cove; and the yacht club, which stood behind enormous King Kong gates; and finally down a dead end street through a marsh of ten foot pampas grass. It ended at a large public park, with tennis courts, swings and picnic pavilions, ball fields and bocce courts. We’d lock up our bikes and Roy would head off without me.

     Men in shorts with aprons grilled hot dogs while kids and uncles played badminton. There was an inlet from the Sound into a tidal marsh and bird sanctuary, separated from a muddy field of landfill by a line of stacked boulders that would heat up and glitter in the sun. At low tide I watched the mud for fiddler crabs and bugs skating on the stranded water. All summer I explored the trails. There were pheasants in the woods, and swans on the water, and in the tall grasses, red wing blackbirds and muskrats.

     Tammy Markham played tennis there every day. I noticed her hanging around the open building next to the courts, where there were bathrooms, a drinking fountain and a red, aerodynamic soda machine from the forties, which had orange and grape Crush in long bottles. She was eleven, dressed in tennis whites with a wristband, tall, and she had dark eyes with long eyelashes. She would stand there panting, pretending I didn’t exist, sucking down a bottle of Orange Crush. I can still taste the sweat on her upper lip.

     One day Roy came running up, carrying his shirt in one hand and his transistor radio in the other, dressed in cutoffs. Already at the end of June he was tanned. The blackened nail of his left big toe poked up from a hole in his sneakers. I was watching Tammy glug down a bottle of grape Crush, my small heart in her small fist. Roy was all worked up and paced circles around Tammy, huffing and sweating, trying to catch his breath. She followed him with her eyes and then she smiled. I had been at it for weeks with no response, and he spends what, 30 seconds?

     “C’mon,” Roy said, ignoring her. “I found a boat, down in the weeds. C’mon. We got work to do.”

     He was so persuasive, his eyes were like yeses. We took off. It was time to run. We ran over cracked and faded black top, past metal jungle gyms and slides in the sand, along a wall of swamp grass to the park we biked past every day. It was wooded and landscaped with lawns and hedges and paths that rambled through stands of oak and maple, and along Larchmont Harbor. There was a pagoda at the head of a point and the glacial rock, half-submerged in the earth, rolled and tumbled down to the water. There were Tudor mansions in the distance and miles away, Long Island was a low hump on the horizon. The shoreline of the park formed into coves and shallows surrounded by bladder weed and barnacle encrusted rock or beaches of pebbled sand. “C’mon, here it is!” he yelled, pointing wildly to an orange dinghy with three benches and a small outboard motor. The boat squeaked and squooshed against the bladder weed and barnacles. “I found it down in the weeds,” he said importantly. “The thing is, I need your help.”

     “What do I do?” I asked.

     He shook a cigarette out of a crumpled pack and lit it with a strike anywhere match. He blinked the smoke out of his eyes. “You gotta steer me clear of the rocks. You gotta be my navigator.”

     I started to get suspicious. “Where’d you say you found it?”

     “I think some guy must have lost it or something, cause there was nothing in it. I don’t see a name, do you? Just the fishing place it comes from. We’ll bring it back and maybe get a rerward.”

     “A reward?”

     “Don’t you know about the rerward? Like shopping carts.”

     “They don’t give out rewards for those. Roy, look! It’s gonna wash out to sea.” The water was cold. A thin, hot sun shined down on us. The tide was coming in and the waves were pushing the boat into the rocks harder and harder. Each pulse loosened the rope. Roy handed me his shirt and radio. Any doubt about the seriousness of our situation was dispelled by this gesture. “I’ll take care of it. Watch my shit.” He dove into the water in his torn shorts and black sneakers and came up five feet out in a noisy spout. “C’mon,” he whooped, and swam up to the boat. He seized hold of the gunwales with both hands and tried to pull himself in, nearly capsizing it. Finally, after a few attempts, he got a leg over and sort of fell into the boat. “Come on, asshole, let’s go! Now!” –bashing the water with the oar, to splash me. Then he reached out his hand to pull me in. “And don’t forget my shirt and the radio, and don’t get my fucking smokes wet either.”

     I got on and he pushed off the rocks and we started to float further out from land. The water was calm enough but it had a scary color I didn’t like, like dirty dishwater. I didn’t swim very well. Roy yanked away at the rope; the engine coughed, neither got anywhere.

     “This fucking thing. Fuck you,” he muttered, squeezing the black bulb on the gas hose. Even with the wind, gas fumes filled the air. “Maybe it’s the choke.” He yanked some more. Smoke puffed out of the vents in the engine. The current took us out in a slow arc. We had floated much farther from shore than either of us could swim. We were surrounded by water. The choppy little waves grew into long swells. “Any time you wanna start rowing, bro, would be great.”

     I looked at the oars. The oars were filthy, stowed on the bottom in about an inch of water. It was just deep enough to support a growth of slime. It smelled like dead fish and used motor oil. Worm crud and sun-dried offal crusted the sides of the benches. A couple of beer bottles that smelled like piss and some cushions slid back and forth, rolling in the water. Between reflections of the sun a rainbow slick irridesced. I picked an oar up. “I never rowed a boat, Roy. I don’t even know how to swim. Thanks a lot.”

     “Do I have to do everything?”

     “I thought I was the navigator.”

     “Then navigate with the paddles. Aw fuck, it’s flooded now. He turned around and sat in the stern facing me. His skin was all blue and goosebumped and the hair was still sticking to his shoulders, though wisps had begun to dry. He lit a cigarette in the cup of his hand. “Just stick the paddles in those metal clamps there. If we sink, you grab a hold of a seat cushion. I’ll do the dead-man’s float and tread water.” He looked up at the sky and squinted meaningfully. “I’d say we have about five hours day light left. At the rate the boat is filling up we’ll sink at dark. Ever see that movie Lifeboat? You know, the one where they’re on this lifeboat–” I pretended to look furtively at my compass. He laughed. “So you know what happens to William Bendix. They cut his foot off, his gangrenous foot off, and then he goes mad with thirst and drinks seawater. So, no matter what happens, don’t drink the water, it will kill you.” It was 3:30. They wouldn’t call the police till long after dark. The cushions were floating now. Cold water soaked slowly into my sneakers. I stuck the oars in the oarlocks and started to row as best as I could manage.

     “It’d be nice out here at night,” Roy said, gazing about. “All the stars. Do you suppose there are sharks?”

     “I don’t think it’s hot enough here for sharks,” I said.

     “Not the Great White shark. He prefers the cold waters of the North Atlantic this time of year.”

     “I didn’t know that.”

     “What I don’t know is if the mouth of the Sound is wide enough. The Great White draws a lot of water. Great White’s not just the most vicious, he’s one of the biggest too.”

     The coast was actually getting closer now, but we were way past the park. There was a stone mansion with all these flags, and an enormous clock tower. “Look,” I said, “It’s Big Ben.”

     “It’s the yacht club, that’s what it is. You know that place we go by with the King Kong gates? They don’t let in Jews, or blacks either, that’s what dad said, and the psychiatrist. Now shut up and duck. They got the Coast Guard at this place.” We bent close to the water. It smelled like a dirty porta-san. I gagged. The boat drifted into the densest part of the harbor, through masts and moorings and motorboats that reared above us. There was a black junk at anchor, and a sleek, three-masted schooner. The hulls passed by overhead. I felt small. Periodically someone would blast an air horn and a launch would come out to it. “Look at that guy,” Roy said, pointing to a man seated in a director’s chair on the deck of an old Criss Craft cabin cruiser, sipping a cocktail. He was wearing some sort of bogus nautical uniform with a snappy cap. We laughed so loud the man turned around and stared at us. Roy gave him the finger and he mouthed, Nasty little boys.

     A low horn boomed across the water. I looked up at a giant wedge of white fiberglass bearing down on us. They had no idea we were under them. I could feel the shadow running over me when Roy stood up, rocking the boat violently. The water we had taken on sloshed back and forth. “Get out! Sweim!” he yelled, but I was paralyzed. He grabbed my arm and dragged me overboard with him. The cold exploded around me. Foam and confusion without end. The wake churned about and I thrashed against it, sucking water in and out of my nose and mouth. Roy pulled me away and whispered in my ear, gently, “I’ve got you now. Take it easy.” I spat out the hard salty water, the taste of power tools in my mouth.