I never did find the naughty bits there I wanted!

When I was a kid, I went to a used bookstore called the Apollo. It was just across the boulevard on 18th Street, next to the music store where I got my Schirmer classical sheet music. It was a classic of its type: dark, confused, and full of toppling piles of paperbacks and magazines.

For a kid with only small amounts of kid money, it was paradise. I could get a big fat read for fifty cents. And the disorganization was really a plus. A visit to the Apollo meant strange finds and surprises, even if the surprise was a mechanical engineering manual from 1903 wedged in the “Occult” section.

Used bookstores are overstocked with the last few decades’ bestsellers in paperback, and the last generation’s bestsellers in hardback. You can always see who’s dying now by looking through old hardbacks. At the time, it was clear that the generation that read A.J. Cronin’s The Keys to the Kingdom and lots of Dreiser had just kicked the bucket. The paperbacks were a mix of 1960s radicals, 1960s radical reactionaries, 1960s freakouts, 1970s aquarium bubbleheadism, 1970s sexytime explosions, and 1970s thrillers. Since those were great decades for sf, I bought a lot of science fiction there too.

This is also where I met Madman Moriarty. He was an employee at the store and was… colorful. More than once he showed up in full 19th century Scots military finery including kilt, tam o’shanter, and assorted belts and medals. Civil war regalia occurred as well. He drifted in and out of a Scots accent. At 13 years old I had no tools for dealing with him, so I just listened as he described his war reenactment club’s activities, the glory of Scotland and the Scots fighting man, and many details of military life. He lived to correct small errors in his areas of expertise, but there weren’t many people breezing in from the Costa Mesa small business district to talk about Wallace’s last battle or the proper method for throwing a World War I German “potato masher” grenade.

Much later in life I realized that the 5149.5 stalker guy who hounded red_maenad at the bookstore and the over-the-top Scotsman who accosted vegemitelover and bruisedhips at the swap meet were the same affable madman who had delighted and terrified me 25 years before.

While I was in Los Angeles the Apollo moved from 18th street to a trailer in the parking lot next to Hi-Time Liquor. Nothing else changed. Over the years I bought some wonderful books there, including old recipe collections, vintage periodicals, and complete editions of both Pepys’ diaries and Burton’s Arabian Nights.

They’re closing now. After 44 years they’re packing it in, selling as many books as they can, and putting the rest on the Internet.

If you’re local, drop by and say hi and pick up a crappy paperback or two.

Workplace stories: The Smoker

P. was a file clerk at the hospital where I was a first a transcriptionist and later the supervisor. I worked with her for almost five years.

She was a short, slight woman in her late fifties. Her greying black hair was cut short and she had thick black-rimmed glasses. Every day she wore the same thing: black jeans or work pants, a t-shirt, and a Pendleton type button down overshirt. She lived in the Valley with her partner, an older woman with several disabilities that kept her at home. She never used the word “lesbian” or referred to sexuality in any way, in fact.

P. was a person of routine. Her job was to file and deliver medical reports. Every day on a strict schedule she would go from place to place in the hospital picking up some and putting others on the chart, and then return to our office to file, mail, staple, and prepare more reports. She was incapable of variation. If one day the anesthesia sheets were later than the radiology dictations she got flustered and misdelivered things. If the need arose for flexibility she collapsed and refused. A new computer system was a life-changing disaster. Kept on her train track, though, she was content, pleasant, and hard-working. She loved the music of the 1950s, television sitcoms and game shows, and rest.

Every day she had a cheese sandwich, plain, from the cafeteria. She would sample just about any food once, but she’d always go back to the sandwich. Precisely at her shift end she would clock out and head home to have dinner and then watch television with her partner. By her report the weekends consisted of more sitting and television. She always worked Christmas and Easter for the overtime. She said it was because she was a Jew, but really it was because she needed the money and never had much to do anyway.

P. was from Chicago. Occasionally she’d wear a bowling shirt completely covered with patches advertising leagues, victories, tournaments from a 25-year career. She had left bowling years ago, mostly because her partner couldn’t participate. She never talked about the Chicago days, or the bowling, or much of anything except current news and weather and a little office politics.

She was obliging and pleasant in conversation. Practically anything anyone said would get a “You got that right, babe” or “Yes ma’am!” If she disagreed or didn’t want to address something she’d just silently shake her bowed head. Any trouble related to work would immediately be brought to me and handed off with a characteristic palms forward gesture: “It’s all yours, boss. I dunno.”

I believe P. smoked more than anyone I’ve known. There was always a pack of Marlboros in the overshirt, and she must have been a three-pack-a-day smoker. Getting to close to her was not recommended due to the intense cigarette smell.

Because she could only do certain things, on a certain schedule, P. was constantly terrified that she’d lose her job. As a result she was a terrible paranoid and office gossip, and went about the floors on her rounds gathering any kind of unreliable information she could about the hospital. During a union fight in the nursing department she wholeheartedly supported management, wearing the anti-union button and arguing with nurses on the floor. When layoffs were announced, she was a fount of detailed misinformation about our imminent doom. She took great delight in bad news and declines and falls. With the same characteristic shake of the bowed head, she’d say over and over “That’s what I’m telling you, yup, yup, that’s how it is, it’s a damn shame” about the day’s crisis or gloomy news story.

Her greatest challenge arrived the day the new anti-smoking regulations went in. Suddenly she couldn’t smoke anywhere near the building, only in certain areas away from entrances. Before that she’d taken lots of unofficial little breaks to suck down a cig, but now that was impossible. And she couldn’t take enough breaks to feed the habit, or other employees would complain and I’d have to ask her to cut down. Several of us tried to help her with smoking cessation information, including the head of pulmonary medicine.

P. had a better solution. She broke up her runs to the floor into smaller chunks, so that she could deliver them more often. Since that still kept her inside hospital walls, though, she had to find a way to get a smoke. Her solution was to avoid the covered walkway between the two buildings and skip the elevator, and instead walk down a long staircase that took her from the top of a hill to the turnaround and main hospital entrance. It was about a thirty foot stairway. She’d light up at the top and inhale the whole way down, stubbing the cigarette out in the ashtray at the bottom. Then back into the hospital to finish her rounds.

So she did learn how to be flexible, after all. I never talked to her about her technique, but I admired her victory over circumstances.

Later that year so many of my staffers complained about the long walk to get outside to smoke that I got them a short cut as a favor from another department. We had a card key that opened into a secure area, from which they could easily step outside into a loading dock.

The secure area was full of dead people, though. Throughout my day, people would come to my desk and say “I need to smoke. Can I have the key to the morgue?”

While I was working there, my father died suddenly. P. came into my office right after I’d told everyone, and stood there for a moment as if pulling together for a confession. “I just wanted to tell you,” she said. “My mother died when I was 25, on Mother’s day. I’ve never got over it. I just wanted to say I’m sorry.” Then she delivered the characteristic head shake and went on another set of rounds.

I wonder if she is still alive? It’s been ten years since I left; I doubt it.

No one could say that she was left up on the shelf

Some of us never get over the childhood desire for the impossible. I remember a book I read as a kid, colorfully illustrated without words, in which some children get magical christmas presents of unknown origin. The presents turn out to be strange jumpsuits with backpacks on them. When they are put on and a button on the chest is pressed, the backpacks sprout wings and the children fly off.

The kids soar over beautiful green farmland and towns, land and visit friends, get ice cream, fly some more, and finally return home happily exhausted. When they wake up the next day, the magic flying suits are gone, and in fact never were; it was all a dream.

This is a terrible cheat. Not only is it a nasty trick to use the “it was all a dream” trick anywhere, but the author of this book didn’t have the balls to let the poor kids have their science fiction flying suits of the future in a work of fiction! I remember being really upset by the end of that little book.

Throughout childhood I had a series of impossible dreams: toys my parents could never buy, mostly. As I got older I wanted various Cool Stuff that was out of my reach: the ultimate bicycle, various electronic items, eventually a computer. I would make elaborate lists of the exact specifications of things I would never have. It’s not that I was a demanding child; quite the opposite! I was almost always too polite to ask for anything, and just hoped that someone would notice my obsession with the current golden dream and present it to me.

But I had a talent for wanting the unreachable. I wasn’t often satisfied; one bicycle and a walkie-talkie set stand out as dreams fulfilled. Rosebud! O my Raleigh 10 speed, and the little walkie talkies with the separate microphone that was so cool.

As the Apostle says, now that I think as a man I put away childish things. My toy planning now is limited to the occasional configuration rampage on an auto maker’s or computer company’s website. I don’t like to play the “if I won the Lottery” game or read books about how to become the CEO of a company. That stuff feels immature, silly.

But if there’s a woman I know who’s unavailable, I’ll fall for her whether she’s attached, uninterested, or just emotionally inaccessible. Reliably and fatally, I’m attracted to whomever won’t reciprocate: ice queens, people who live far away, people in love with someone else, and people who just aren’t interested.

And when I think about solving my problems I need to fix everything, now and forever; I insist on total cures for my ills and freedom from every demon that dogs me. I can hold up some ridiculous image of future perfection and call it a goal, and I’m being serious.

And when I let my mind drift and imagine some kind of happiness like that, I always next imagine betrayal and failure. Clearly I’d be dumped by anyone I wanted, obviously any success at defeating my troubles would blow back in my face sevenfold once I told myself I’d won. I build tragic ends to every daydream.

There’s life lived with nose pressed to the glass. The flying suits never arrive, and if they did it was all a dream. Real life is more like marching than like flying, and that’s never suited me.