The Path of the Bookseller

The regulars didn’t show up to the store tonight. Tracksuit Guy, Mr Duffle, Opera Man, Crutch Lady and the rest all took the night off. It was St. Patrick’s Day, and all the amateur drinkers and those deranged by apparently unaccustomed partying showed up in force. The expert denizens knew to keep a low profile and wait for the frenzied to stumble back to their suburbs and their SUVs.

I tried to get into work early, knowing that we were in the middle of a four afternoon stretch when getting around downtown would be screwed up. Market Street was officially closed on Saturday for the St Patrick’s Day parade, and would be officially closed again on Sunday for an anti-war march. Further anti-war events were scheduled for Friday (at least I thought there was a “die-in” planned, though I haven’t seen any reporting of it) and more for Monday.

The BART was delayed coming into Berkeley, and had more delays as it went along into the city. At 3 PM, People were already stumbling on the platforms and meandering through the cars yelling. As I came up out of the BART at Powell Street, there was more of the same, with crewcut fullbacks bellowing as the rambled through the dense crowd. Parents pulled their children out of the way as the brawlers plowed forward and crashed into the walls outside Forever 21, attempting to show the wall who was boss. Some of them might even have believed that they succeeded.

The path uphill to the store was similarly mobbed, though it thinned as I got closer to the store — perhaps the steep hill defeated the attempts of some of them to climb. My supervisor, who was out on the square for his lunch, reported even stranger behavior: he saw several pairs of people ride into the square on bicycles. In each case, the one who wasn’t driving would hop off the bike, disrobe, be photographed, dress again, and zoom out of the square. It all seemed organized, though the purpose was unclear.

I got into work a couple of minutes late. While I should have gotten a sticker from the Loss Prevention person at the door to show that I had brought in the book that I was carrying from outside (so it wouldn’t be a problem when I tried to leave with it), he was tied up trying to explain something to a customer. I went into the office, got a sticker from a manager, and proceeded up to the music floor.

When I got up to the floor, the other workers told me that things were quiet — and then three of my usual avid customers came charging at me from different directions at once, each wanting to deal only with me. One wanted my opinion on some DVDs of Wagner’s Götterdämmerung, none of which I had seen. Another was asking about Joshua Bell’s recordings of Kreisler, quite loudly — though he is a choir director, he seems to have no control over the volume of his speaking voice. The third just wanted to say hello, but was very insistent on it.

What other customers there were weren’t too rambunctious, but many seemed either unusually clumsy or to be moving stiffly. As customer after customer got to the registers, I caught the whiff of beer on the breath of many. Several laughed too loudly at jokes, or tried hard to appear nonchalant about large purchases. Others were having a bit of trouble figuring out how money worked. And a large shared the excessively formality that people use in trying to show that they aren’t, in fact, trashed.

Other than that, though, there was little impact up on our floor. (I’m told that things were different at the front door, as the Loss Prevention folks had to convince a continuing stream of people that they couldn’t come into a bookstore while brandishing steins of beer.)

The most interesting question that I got today came from a woman who was walking around, picked up CDs, looking very closely at their covers, then putting them down. She didn’t seem to notice when I had asked her if she could find anything. But eventually she came up to me and asked if I worked there. (That I was on the store phone and was wearing a large badge might have suggested to her that I did.)

“Do you know jazz?” she asked.

“Somewhat,” I said. “What are you looking for?”

“I’m trying to find an album. I think it was recorded in 1957. I had a cover by the same guy who did this.” Digging into her bag, she pulled out the CD cover booklet of Dave Brubeck’s Time Out.

I was stumped. Looking through the book, I tried in vain to find out who did the cover, but came up cold. “I don’t have a clue,” I said. “The best thing you could do is get online, and search for ‘dave brubeck time out cover art.’ Come to think of it, it may be Joan Miró.Once you find that, search on the artist’s name, and it may take you to –”

I paused, as a image suddenly flashed through my head. Recognizing it, I stepped around to the next jazz aisle and pulled out a copy of Mingus’s Mingus Ah Um. “Is this it?” I asked.

She took the CD from me, looked closely at it, and then back at me. “How the hell did you figure that out? You must have every album cover in the store in your head.”

“Actually, someone else was looking for this same album a few hours ago, and I saw it then, so I must have still had it cached in RAM.” I immediately realized that she probably had no idea what “cached in RAM” would mean, but she didn’t look confused. She thanked me, and gleefully ran off with the CD.

(I just tried the search strategy that I suggested to her, and, to my relief, it did work.  I was wrong about Joan Miró, though. He did Brubeck’s next album, Time Further Out. This one was by Neil Fujita.)

The earlier customer who was looking for the Mingus CD had originally asked for a Miles Davis album named So What. It took a bit of doing to convince him that what he really wanted was Kind of Blue. (And I just found online an apparent album named So What. but it looks like a bootleg.) He had just started reading John Szwed’s biography, which is named So What, and wanted to get the corresponding album. We went over to the jazz books, and I flipped through discographies until I was able to convince him that no official album of that name existed.

Another frequent customer, who was usually angry about something, showed up later, looking for a recording by Leonard Bernstein of Beethoven’s 5th Symphony. (She was pleased to have gotten the main riff as her cellphone ringtone, and wanted to have the rest of the piece.)

The one recording that we had in stock also had Beethoven’s 4th Symphony and Egmont Overture. She had looked at it skeptically. “It has another symphony and this Eg– Eg– this Eg thing on it, too? Are you sure it has the whole 5th symphony?”

I had assured her that it did, and asked if she would like to get it.

“Oh, no,” she replied. “I had already ordered it from you, and you have it for me downstairs. I just wanted to see if it was the right thing before I waited in line for it.” She zoomed off before I could explain to her that there were several different releases of Bernstein’s Beethoven’s 5th, and that there was no certainly that what she had ordered was the same one,

When I took my ten-minute break toward the end of the day, she showed up again as I tried to flee for the breakroom. As usual, she was annoyed. “This is not the same recording!” She handed me the CD that she had ordered. It did, indeed, have the 5th on it, but laso had an interview with Bernstein about the work. “This has talking on it! I do not want to hear someone who’s dead talking about the music. That’s just too creepy!”

I looked at the CD, and at the price sticker. “We can certainly exchange it. This one is the same price as the one that I showed you earlier.”

“Where can I find it? Where were we when you showed it to me?”

“It was up in the Beethoven area, near the beginning of classical, in the… um… come on upstairs, I’ll get it for you.”

“But aren’t you headed to your break or lunch or something?”

“Yes, but this takes priority.”

“Oh! I wish more stores had service like this!”

What I didn’t tell her was that I had gotten utterly flummoxed trying to describe where the CD was. Since I have trouble with “left” and “right”, especially in mapping the words to the actual directions when I’m not actually pointing at something, odds were very strong that any directions that I would have given her would have been incomplete or just plain wrong.

We got upstairs, and I quickly got the CD from the rack for her. “If you bring it back downstairs to the ground floor registers, they can do the exchange for you.”

“Here,” she said, “let me give you this for it.” She reached into her bag and pulled out a very well-made, but obviously fake million dollar bill. “Now don’t leave this lying around. People have a way of running off with them.”

(About the ten-minute breaks: I had wondered for a while if there was an optimum time to take one. A few months ago, while bored, I did some calculations. Since it’s good to have the earlier part of the shift be a bit longer than the later part, I figured that the ratio between them should be that of the Golden Section. By my calculations, that means that the best time to take a break in a four-hour shift is about two hours and eighteen minutes after it starts. For a three-hour shift, the best time for a break is one hour and forty-five minutes from the start. And I suspect that John will quickly show me that my math was wrong.)

Fortunately, all the customers cleared out of the store fairly early, and we actually had reshelved all the books by closing time, so we zoomed out soon after we closed. I even managed to get down to the BART station in time for the last train, and didn’t have to take the bus. A coworker was glad that I accompanied her down the hill, Powell Street still being full of revelers, some of whom she had found threatening when they had gotten and early start on the drinking the night before.

The BART took longer than usual. It was crowded, and several people had trouble understanding that this was the last train and that they had to board it. Some also had some trouble getting into the train, and remaining standing or sitting once the train lurched into motion.

A lot of people laughed and talked loudly, some cursing volubly, as the trip progressed. A few couples also appeared to be a bit more avidly intertwined than might be appropriate on public transit.

By the time we approached Berkeley, most had gotten off. The person sitting alone in front of me alternated between stern grimaces and brief explosions of laughter, sometimes pounding on his bicycle and shaking his head as if in response to music, though he didn’t appear to be wearing headphones. Despite the shamrock stamped on the back of his hand, though, I recognized him as the one of the regulars from the train rides. As I got off the train and his sudden howl faded away, I felt assured that things were getting back to normal.