The Path of the Bookseller

Maybe it was the odd chill in the still-dry air; maybe it was that most of the crazed Europeans had run out of August days to spend here (though one family did get into a furious argument in Italian at my register as each tried to pay — one with a credit card, one with crumpled dollar bills, and one by dumping a small bag of change on the counter and trying to figure out the values of each coin in the mound — for one book; I stood, arms by my side, and waited, until the older man waved the charge card in the air in an odd gesture, inscrutable and possibly obscene, and got the other two to back down); maybe it was that the back-to-school materials were gone, and we were already getting memos about how earlier memos about the holiday schedule were wrong; but it was, quite ominously, beginning to feel a lot like Christmas.

The crowds in the store swarmed through in uneven bursts, never too much to handle, but never quite going away. The school year having gotten underway, the art books were getting pawed through and strewn about by the students at the arts college, who then, not finding what they wanted, stormed over to us and demanded that we find for them the books that their teachers had assigned. When we told them that we were out of the books, they made it seem like we had committed a horrible faux pas; suggesting that they recommend to their professors that they let us know ahead of time what books they’d be assigning didn’t help.

While I tried to help one regular customer figure out the name of a movie from the 80s that he vaguely remembered, another man stomped over, sun-burned and frazzle-haired, his Hawaiian shirt half in and half out of his shorts, and bellowed “Is anyone here to help customers, or are you just gabbing with this guy?” The one to whom I was talking said “I’ll be here for a while,” and stepped back. The interrupter went into an extended spiel about how he was looking for CDs in a “Twenty Best Of” series, since he had gotten one of them a long time ago and had just seen in the liner notes that there were more. When I searched on our computers, I found that we did have two in the series, one of showtunes and one of Bluegrass Gospel. “Bluegrass Gospel!” he shouted. “That’s what I want!”

We went over to the Bluegrass collections, and looked through them. He found the one he wanted, but then spotted two others. “Whoa, this one has thirty bluegrass gospels on two discs! And, no, wait, this one here has thirty on three discs for two bucks more? Is that gonna be two bucks better than the other one? Are they cramming the tunes on this one or stretching them on that one? You’ve heard them, right, which one sounds better? Or should I just stick with the twenty?”

I hadn’t heard any of them, and knew very little of the genre. But I did get him to stop talking long enough to show him how to use the scan-and-play systems, so he could listen to excerpts of each on his own. I then went back to the first customer, and did, indeed manage to figure out the movie that he wanted. While we talked, I heard the Bluegrass Gospel guy occasionally yell out, “Whoa!” and “Yes, Lord!” from his listening station.

After a while, he came over to me, and said, “Man, I’m buying all of these!” He then leaned closer and said conspiratorially, “But I gotta tell ya, everyone here is strange! That guy over there keeps falling asleep, that guy with the black hat is just staring at people, and that one with the pants falling down is stomping around talking to himself. And that one over there smells to high heaven, and that lady, well, she doesn’t smell bad really, but it’s like some bar of flower soap exploded all over her. Y’all’re just strange out here! But thank you for the records!”

As he lumbered off, I looked around at the other customers. He was right. There were a few unremarkable people around, but each of the others was as he described them.

By that point, the one with the pants falling down had landed in a chair near the DVDs, and was talking loudly enough to disturb the people near him. I wandered over to him, and picked up the two thick books of Kierkegaard that were on the ground next to the chair. “Are you still using these?” I asked. He waved his hand as if dismissing them, stood up, and headed toward the escalator. “Naw, I’m done with all that. I’m going to the religion section, gonna pick myself out a god. You picked a god out yet?” “Um, I think so,” I mumbled as he stomped down to the next floor, still talking.

The rest of that hour was relatively sane. I helped a drummer from San Diego find some classic Afro-Cuban jazz (”Man, the stores down where I am got nothing! All those Mexicans around, you think they’d have the classic stuff, but nothing”), and when we got to talk about rhythmic patterns, started explaining to him what I knew about the rhythmic structures in Bulgarian music. He got excited by it, and wanted to buy some, but our Eastern European section in World Music had been pretty much picked clean recently and hadn’t yet been restocked. I did print out some suggestions for him, though, and told him that our San Diego stores could order anything that we did.

I spent the next hour on the ground floor, manning a cash register. There was a steady flow of customers making their purchases.

One man stomped up to me and said flatly, “You don’t have any Israeli newspapers.” I’ve learned that when people say that, they don’t actually know if it’s true, but think it puts them in some sort of stronger conversational stance than asking. “Well, I said, I’m pretty sure we carry Haaretz and Yediot Achronot. I’ll see what we have.”

We went over to the cubbyholes of newspapers behind the left end of the register counter. The customer, as so many do, stepped right over the barrier that’s supposed to keep them away. “I see you have nothing,” he said.

After I looked for a while, I did spot one, and picked it out for him. “Here’s Yediot,” I said. He grabbed it and handed it to an older woman who was following him. She glanced at it and slapped it back at me. “It’s old. It’s no good,” she said. “I look at the headline and I see the news is already since a week old. Find a new one.”

I shrugged. “That’s what we have.”

“So I find a good one somewhere?”

“Probably not at eleven at night. But since it’s a week old, I’m guessing that we’ll have the next one in a day or two.”

“So. Maybe I am back then.” She pivoted away, and stomped off with the other two.

None of the other customers were quite as grumpy. But it did take quite a bit of explaining to communicate to a couple from Romania why, due to the DVD region codes, the DVDs that they were getting might not play on their systems at home.

I did pretty well at signing customers up for our free discount cards. I have my spiel down to a line that I can deliver in a single breath, and most who don’t already have the card willingly give me their email addresses.

One customer handed me her credit card and spewed a charming malaproprism: “I am my first name, underscore, my last name, at dotmail hot com.” I understood what she meant, and managed not to laugh.

As I was finishing the transaction, the Romanians returned, barging into the line and shoving the DVD that they had bought at me, nearly hitting the other customer. “I don’t want this. But I get this. Maybe it works different at my home.”

“OK,” I said, “but I have to finish with this customer.” I quickly unkeepered and bagged that customer’s purchase, waited for her to leave, and turned back to the Romanians.

I looked at the new DVD. “Neither of these say if they have region codes. You’d be gambling with this one as much as with the other.”

“OK,” she said. “But you take this. I take that instead. It is the same price.” She slammed the already-purchased DVD on the counter and stuffed the new one, with the security keeper still on it, in her bag.

“Wait!” I said. “I still have to officially exchange it.”

“OK. Yes. OK,” she said, looking put-upon. I rang up the return and purchase. Since they were, indeed, the same price, no money changed hands.

But when I looked down to hand her the receipt, I saw a credit card on the register keyboard. I picked it up, confused. “Is this yours?” I asked.

“No,” she said, “I gave you no card now. It was the same price.”

I looked more closely at the card. “Oh,” I said, “this is bad. It’s from the customer who was just here.” I frantically looked around, and saw that she was gone. I then called the service manager, and told him of the forgotten card. He took it and put it in the safe.

It wasn’t until I was walking through the church, doing my second job on the way home, that I realized that I still remembered the email address of the person who had left the card. I’m usually oddly good at remembering the personal name parts of email addresses, but terrible at remembering, even for a moment, the domains, especially if they’re from the Big Four (Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo, or AOL). But since this customer had garbled the domain amusingly, I remembered it. When I got home, I emailed the Human Resources Manager, who I think will be the first one at the store in a few hours, told her the story, and asked her to email the customer to tell her that we have the card.

Most of the people were gone by the time the store closed, but one person lagged for a long time in the men’s room. After a long wait, we finally heard a flush, and a disheveled, smelly man staggered out, carrying a book, and went down the escalator. One worker shrieked as she saw him from behind. “He’s got poo on his pants!” she said.

A corresponding shriek came from downstairs a moment later. We got down there to see another worker staring in horror at the book he had dropped by the information desk. “What is that on this book?” We looked down and saw a brown streak across the cover. Another worker took two pieces of printer paper, gingerly picked it up with them, and put a “Damaged” flag on it.

Even with all that delay (and with my having to make an added trip from the basement up to the fourth floor to return the phone that I had forgotten to leave there), I still managed to catch the last BART on time, and to get to my favorite eatery well before 1:30 AM, so the kitchen was still open. I relaxed with a hamburger and a newspaper and let most of the day wear off.

As I left, I heard an intermittent, high howling sound come toward me. A ragged man was walking down the street in a shaky zig-zag pattern. His hand to his face, and the heel of his thumb in his mouth, he screamed repeatedly. He then moved his hand away, stood still, silently looked away, then stuck his hand back in his mouth and resumed walking and screaming.

I crossed the street as he passed, put on my iPod headphones, and put on the gentle sounds of the new Kaki King album, bringing a quiet end to another night, busier than some, crazier than others, but on the whole, not all that unusual.