THE BOOKSTORE BOOK

Amazing Things You Find When You Search Your Documents!

So here’s what happened.

I have been really intent on completing my “It’s Beyond My Control” substack but one thing leads to another and I am posting THIS instead. It’s all Charlie Kirk’s fault. Because I read this post on X from him.

https://x.com/charliekirk11/status/1810849095000674681

And you probably can’t read it if your not on X and for some reason I can’t screenshot it so you can see it (I don’t know why) but it’s about all of the insane robberies in California which are driving big retailers out of business.

This all got me to thinking about they days in the 90s when I worked with my ex at his convenience tobacco stores. He wrote a book about it called No Customers, No Dinner (which I truly wish he had edited and published, but that is yet ANOTHER story.) So I searched for it on my PC and for some reason THIS came up instead and here is the beginning of MY BOOK. Should I continue on with it? Oh! The tales I have to tell. My mind is swirling with them.

THE BOOKSTORE BOOK

As I recently discovered from reading Ken Bruen’s books a really good mystery must absolutely be pithy.  A wry main character is essential and preferably one who is fighting an inner demon of the alcoholic variety.  I can read a Ken Bruen novel in one sitting, am hugely entertained the whole way through and am without fail zinged by the ending zinger.  He also has a way of tying up all loose ends into one nice satisfying package thus the ZING.  I also like the way he prefaces many chapters with quotable quotes and refers to musicians and authors throughout.  In other words, I like his style, and I wonder if perhaps my writing has always held a similar flair.

Enter moi.  A self-professed book goddess.  Seller of books of the gently used variety.  Many a mystery to be solved right there with the first question being how I got to be in such a tenable profession.  My question:  does it matter?

It always matters.

Suffice it to say that any proprietor on one side of the counter is well on their way to becoming attuned to those strangers on the other side of the counter.  The ones who read the books I sell.  If I sold only children's books then it would be those children and those children's providers who would become known to me.  Fortunately, I sell a wide variety of books in just about every genre known to man, resulting in a wide variety of customers who are each and every one colorful in their own right.  Each customer comporting themselves into my presence with the unasked question of how they got to be standing on the other side of my counter in search of a specific book.

Again I ask myself, does it matter?

It ALL matters.

Who shall be my victim of the day?  The little old lady buying my cheapest romance novels or the sweaty hefty man clutching his stash of cut-throat action adventure novels in which to vicariously live his alter being?  Both have a story.  And each tale of each of their lives may be more interesting than they realize when looked at by the standpoint of the bookseller.

Today, I choose the stalker.  So dubbed because I have no other words for a description of this one man who stands out from the rest.  He stands out because his persona is such that you don't know how to "take" him.  He leaves you, ME!, (even US, me AND Bill) wondering how not to mention the elephant in the room.  He is also the culprit who introduced me to the great author, Ken Bruen, this writer who writes the books I can't put down.

But I digress from my opening remarks.

BEFORE I owned The Bookstore and was standing in my jewelry booth at the market twiddling my thumbs my brain was pierced with the FOR SALE sign at the bookstore over on the other side of the aisle.  I watch a brisk business transact throughout each day.  It is quite possible, I think, that I have missed my calling.

I make a deal with the sellers and I'm in.  For an entire month they guide me in the guidelines of how to run this business.  They teach, they smile.  They even, out of a genuine kindness, provide lunch.  Then they take my money, hand over the keys and leave the country never to be heard from again.

I now own a book store.  I now own over 15,000 books.  I am in love with every one of them.

What demons do I also own?  What path have I hacked away for myself with a machete to get to this clearing where books rule?

Ah….what a life it's been.  A harrowing series of self-inflicted events, weaving and winding me through perilous highs and lows, racing along the twists and turns of a Pacific Highway.  A spiraling series of events in which alcoholic tendencies only succeed in taking the edge off a manic depressive personality.

Crash.  Climb.  Crash.  Climb.

With the bookstore there is now, finally, a plateau.

I can breathe.  At last I thought I could breathe until now.

But I am an alien in a strange land.  The flora and fauna of Florida is a wet smack in the face for a hardened New Yorker, having inhabited a world where shovels rule in the winter and the dog days of summer last for barely more than a month.  I do believe in blooming where you're planted but it is hard to be a perennial when you've no time to establish any roots.  So I've drooped and sweltered under an unrelenting sun for, oh, about five years now.

Does any of it matter?

I don't know anymore.

My bookshop is organized with aisles of authors alphabetized under category.  No Dewey Decimal System or Master's Degree required.  Just a healthy knowledge of the alphabet.  ABCDEFG.  And so on.  It works.

The knowledge of authors and their books is absorbed if a person has any interest in them at all.  Maybe my quenchless thirst for books during my petulant solitary teenage years and then on into my 20's and 30's has finally paid off.

I know my books.  Having a computer to list and categorize them all would be superfluous.  My books are in my head and that's where I prefer them to be.

Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451.  The "book people."  I have often asked myself which book I would choose to BE.  "Alice in Wonderland" usually comes to mind first because I have already memorized Lewis Carroll's poem "Jabberwocky" almost perfectly and can recite it even after all these years with few mistakes.  However, "Jabberwocky" was actually a poem in "Alice through the Looking Glass" and not in "Wonderland."  So…I don't know.  Which book would I become?  I like them both very much.  And I often feel as if I live in Wonderland and through the Looking Glass simultaneously.  Life is like that, you know.  Bizarre.  Surreal.  Events transpire opposite of what you might expect with no reason whatsoever.  Maybe it IS the wine occluding my senses.  I don't know.

On the other hand, "The Secret," has been no secret to me.  Serendipity and being at one with the Universe rules when you are totally immersed in your books.  I have countless anecdotes about those experiences.  And yet, I still manage to move forward in my life as if nothing magical has happened at all.

Who am I anyway?  That question, I do believe, deserves an answer.

I am Estelle Goodwin.  Stella, if you like.  I am approaching senior citizenship.  Not so close that I am truly afraid of being old but still too close for comfort.  At the point in life where death has become a real option.  A former skinny woman who now sports muffin tops and thanks goodness for spandex fibers!  These blobs below my former waist, I freely admit, are due solely to daily wine infested evenings.  Apparent good genetics or else I would be six feet under by now.  Why do I screw with them so?

Nothing like a rhetorical question of which I am chock full of.  Life moves on.  I am with a partner NOW.  Yet I am alone.  But never for long.  I am with a partner.  Then I am alone.  But not for long.  Never a moment to catch my breath because I move forward at light speed.  Patience is not an option.  For me.

Yes.  It helps to resolve, to bring into the light, to find some understanding of the simple why of it all by writing it all down, dissecting the thoughts, the emotions, the experiences onto the page and into black and white.

Books.  Pages and pages and pages.  A plethora of pages.  All in black and white, dissecting, informing, taking you on a wild ride into possibilities, wrenching your heart with regrets, comparing, always comparing, you to those fantastic characters on the written page..  Simpatico.  I have been there.  Vicarious.  I wish I were you.  Places, people, scenarios we will never experience firsthand, alive in our minds.  We live their words.  And their worlds.  We travel the universe.  And we wake up in our bed.

So the day to day life moves on whether you are in a bookshop or not.  It is a continual revolving door of people you have never seen, people you have seen, people you like and, when you think about it, very rarely, people you do not like.  Always keep close to your heart the profound saying that if you meet an asshole in the morning, maybe you just met an asshole.  But if you meet assholes all day long?  Maybe you're the asshole.

Thankfully, I hardly ever meet an asshole.  But there are some.  There's the guy who yells at me, "What, you don't want to buy my shitty books?  I'll find someone else to buy my shitty books!"  Really, all I can do is wish him good luck in that venture.

There's the woman who asks me how much my paperbacks sell for and is appalled that they go for $2.00 each or three for $5.00.  Hrrrumph!  No way.  Highway robbery!  But not when you consider my rent is $1600 a month.  I met an asshole.  Oh!  And I hope you enjoy your 25 cent books from the garage sale that smell like a moldy, mildewy old shed.  Happy reading!  Here's a a paperclip for your nose!

There are also the customers, usually women, who spend hours, HOURS, looking, looking, looking, inspecting every book, reading every blurb, and just simply cannot decide.  On one book.  Asshole?  Or not an asshole?  You decide.

Mostly though, all is well at the bookstore.

Except for the stalker.

I couldn't help but notice him.  I was bright green in my new shoes as proprietor.  I saw him as he passed and then disappear into an aisle.  "No Country for Old Men", by Cormac McCarthy was still festering in my brain by the sheer brutality of its psychopathic lead character which Javier Bardem brought viciously to life in the movie by the same name.

Here he was in my store.  What was it that made me compare the two?

For starters, it was the hair.  Brown/black/gray longish curling under like a pageboy.  He wore a cap and sunglasses.  He donned a denim jacket, black tee-shirt, jeans, and wore fingerless leather gloves.   He bought his three books without a word and left.  He left an imprint on my brain.

He returned periodically.  Cyclically, as I look back on it now.  And I always thought, there he is again.  And again a swift transaction and gone.  But always the same outfit.  The hat, the sunglasses, the denim jacket.  And the glove.  Never a variation regardless of the weather.

How could I not think?  How strange.

Our relationship has grown.  Since then.

Every mystery must have a murder.  No?  But must it be a murder of the human kind?  Can it be a squirrel?  Can it be a cat?  Would it be pushing the envelope if it were a Palmetto bug?

Cats pee all around the market when no one is looking.  It stinks to high heaven and much worse than the mothball aroma which permeates every aisle in an attempt by fellow marketeers to deter the cats' territorial instinct by inflicting upon them a pungent odor they do NOT like.  Thus arises the "Cat Wars."  Between those bleeding heart cat lovers and those who can't stand another day of coming into a booth with cat pee pervading the normally glorious flea market atmosphere.

Today, there was a dead rat.  Murdered I'm sure.  By hands unknown.  Does said dead rat deserve a homily?

I was grateful to have Bill sweep him away and take care of the disposal.  The rat, that is.

I left the market and drove home.

Strange, how some commutes repeat themselves day in and day out as if no time has passed whatsoever.  Like Bill Murray in Groundhog's Day, you just keep reliving the same exact events.  The same car is in front of you as you leave your driveway.  You know in advance which lights you will hit and which will let you sail through.  We live each in by our own timeclocks but so often they intersect with the timeclocks of the "others."  If you leave just one minute earlier or later, it all changes.  Even gaining or losing a mere second in the your habitual routine can change your life irrevocably forever.

Even GOOGLE knows my schedule! One morning GOOGLE told me, “It’s time to leave for work! It will take you ten minutes! Leave now!” That was the day I turned off Google forever.

On my home, I make the right onto 42 and there is the man wearing no shirt, gleaning in perspiration as he finishes push mowing his acre lot.  A mow on an acre is a hard push with a regular lawnmower.  Not sitting pretty on a ride-on.  Ho hum for that one.  No.  This man pushed and sweat his way across the back and ended up in the front yard where here he was again in the exact same position I observed him last week at this exact same time.  Like turning on the evening news and being greeted by all the familiar faces.

I felt like pulling over and shouting, hey, I know you!  What's up?  He does a good job, by the way, the lawn all nice and neat and trim.  You can tell when people have some pride in their homestead.  Sweat and consistency is the tell.

And I resume my drive home to the same old same old.

Who's fault is that?  Who is the progenitor of your daily humdrum existence if not yourself?  You pull in, grab the mail, let the happy dogs out, leaf through the mail, fill your glass with ice and pour that first delightful glass of Sauvignon Blanc.  Which you take to your desk.  And proceed onto to deskly things.  Like email and all that computer junk.  While you ponder what's to be on the dinner table.

But here's the kick for me now.

I have lost the ability to function on the homefront.

My desk is in a filthy disarray.  I shuffle papers from side to side.  I HATE BEING AT MY DESK and yet I MUST BE AT MY DESK.  The state of my keyboard would drive Bill Gates into a frenzy.  Both keyboards.  My wireless regular keyboard which is filled with cigarette ashes AND my laptop keyboard somehow shorted out and lost its entire string of QUERTY letters by a clumsy glass of wine and which is also speckled with cigarette ashes.

And that's just for starters.

A jumble of stuff to my right.  From bottom up a folder containing tax returns, papers consisting of aborted recipes and receipts, a Mapquest of directions to the Ocala library, my very valuable book of PASSWORDS and sign on names, a stray paperback, an empty Fedex packet, my personal checkbook hovers to the left under which lies a neon green highlighting pencil and a cello wrapped toothbrush, next to an unopened package proclaiming 1 ¾" safety hasp which I have no idea what or why.

There's more.

Beyond is the ubiquitous glass holder of pens, pencils, nail files, tubes, markers, a magnifying glass, a bottle of Elmer's glue, a pretty pansy container containing coins, another hold all glass artifact containing more junk, an empty reed handled basket, an  unplugged pencil sharpener.  These are all just to the right.

To the left is much worse.

I cannot, am not, able to get a handle on all of this junk and it is making me feel physically ill.

(To Be Continued)

Should I? Should I continue with this rambling tale of an unraveling bookseller? Or should I FINALLY write The Used Bookstore Manual so you, too, can delve into the delightful world of selling books? It truly is (it was) a utopia. Until the fire.

Thank you for reading, dear reader and fellow book lover. Please consider giving a hand up to a struggler by subscribing. Or, maybe some advice or a kind word of encouragement by leaving a comment.