The Path of the Bookseller

The Dancing Man came sailing up the escalator in our closing hour. The sounds of a Yemenite singer, mixed with disco beats, greeted him as we tried out Madonna’s new live album on the overhead system.

He bounded over to Material Girl and me as we stood by the information console. “Greetings to you!” he bellowed. “God bless you all with peace and respect for your friendliness and your knowledge! God bless this country with peace and respect!” He reached out a large hand and we shook on it as he continued with more benedictions.

Finally releasing his grip, he stepped toward the listening stations. I looked around for Material Girl, who had fled surprisingly quickly, the door to the back office closing behind her.

“Do you like to dance?” he said.

I shrugged, smiling. “It’s not quite in my skill set.”

“Everyone can dance!” he said and shifted into a sort of shuffling Wild and Crazy Guy motion, stepping back and forth, his shoulders rolling with the rhythm and his elbows flapping as he clenched his hands close to his heart.

He was good — very good, in fact, the wackiness of his dance steps elevated by the untarnished glee he took in moving to the music. The other customers had turned and were watching him, and he welcomed their gaze. One by one, his pleasure melted their embarassment at watching him, and they all began to smile. He gestured to several to join him. When no one did, he closed his eyes, tilted his head back, and continued to move to the music.

This is the first time that I had seen the Dancing Man in a long time. When he had first appeared, sometime last year, he would spend hours on the listening stations, often listening and dancing to the same thirty second snippet of the same song. “Best song in whole world!” he would call out to people who saw him. “Paula Cole! ‘I Don’t Want to Wait!’ Greatest song in whole world!” He would go on about the song as long as anyone would listen to him, though he couldn’t say much about it, his sentences spiraling around in greater and greater praises. I couldn’t place his accent (Material Girl told me that he is from Morocco), and his slightly scrambled, rather formal English would get more loopy as he rambled on.

Watching him, I was surprised to find myself singing along with the Yemenite singer on the CD, which got even stranger glances from some of the customers.

“How do you know that song?” Material Girl asked, having snuck back from the office.

“It was a big hit on an Ofra Haza record, and sampled all over the place a while back.” That was eighteen years ago. I was struck once again by the difference in time frames that I have from most of my coworkers. While I was thirty then, and it fits more or less into my vague sense of “now”, she was twelve at the time, and not yet noticing more than immediate pop.

“What’s it mean?” she asked.

“If the doors of heaven are closed, the doors of… um… something… will not be closed… or will not be open… or something.” (According to its Wikipedia entry, it means “Even if the gates of the rich will be closed, the gates of heaven will not be closed.”) “I used to know this, but can’t remember what the two most important words mean anymore.”

As the beat of Madonna’s “Isaac” dissolved seamlessly into the next song, the Dancing Man came out of his reverie and jogged back toward us. He shook my hand again as Material Girl once again backed away. “God bless you! God bless this country with peace and respect for us! Peace and respect, yes? God bless everyone here and this country!” He turned with a flourish and, in a more directional version of his shambling dance, headed to the escalator and down to the other floors.

“That is one happy man,” I said.

“Yeah,” said Material Girl, “but I wouldn’t shake hands with him. Shaggy said he saw that guy washing his hands in the urinal.”

“Eek. Um, uh, ick,” I eloquently announced, then shrugged. Material Girl went off to continue shelving books. I reached for the hand sanitizer, just in case, then went back to helping other customers.