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Someone told me real men don't blog. That's a double-dawg dare, Bub. |
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Seems to me there are too damned many things going on that I don't write about. Seems I need to get my writin' chops up. These are similar to but not exactly the same as pork chops. (seems to me I said that somewhere else, one time). Anyway, I wasn't exactly intending to go vegetarian - so chops of any sort or description sound mighty tasty at this point. Is writing a substitute for food? (I might be on to something here...) I have no idea what this will turn into, if anything. I think I'll just relax, and enjoy the ride. If my hair turns white overnight I'll know who to blame.... - this is your captain speaking have a safe flight. Captain Midnight just let me laugh when it's funny and when it's sad, let me cry |
| Well now, I figure it's about time maybe, that I tell this little story. It's a long way back now. Back in the days when I was so young I was positively ancient. I was 21, and gently drifting my way through the higher halls of academia. Smarter than I looked, but only just barely. I was a dude, but I was clean. No followers, and no leaders either. Busy negotiating my way through what was then, a kinder, gentler time in our modern history. It was 1973. Yeah, weird hair (mine was just long) weird clothes (mine were standard and conventional) weird music (but for me the 1970s were the age of the songwriter, which as a musician myself, was what I paid attention to.) The Fab bands of the 1960s were setting like a tired old sun. The 70s were the age of the solitary hero, male or female, it didn't matter. So I landed myself a job in this bookstore, you see. Downtown on lower Yonge Street. Along the strip. Which was a rinky-dink little collection of 3 or 4 short blocks with radical ideas, putting on airs, thinking of itself as our little heavenly hell, a walk on the wild side, a bit of 7th Avenue and 42nd Street. Even the bookstore's name was Times Square. Up over the door with no shame, and no apologies. So being the bookworm I already was, I showed up believing myself to qualify for the vocation, and fit in almost instantly. Now, that store certainly was a product of its era. We all smoked and scattered ashtrays throughout the place. (I didn't.) But we were a fun bunch. Some of us brought our kids to work. (I didn't have any at the time.) Some of us brought our dogs to work. (I didn't have any of those, either.) All of us brought our music to work. Vinyl records. We had a record player up on a shelf halfway down the store. And through the business day, which started at 10 o'clock in the morning, and went on to 2am...it was a constant soundtrack backdrop to the ambience of the place. Now this store was not large, and not exactly small either. As I recall, it was just about the right size. The walls were painted in a kind of retro purple. There were posters (Hendrix, Guevera, Dylan) typical for the time. And a whole lot of books of every description. There were magazine racks that offered just about every kind of magazine going. And then there were the girlie mags. Pretty brutal - but completely tame, really, I would imagine, by today's standards. There was even a movie room in the back. Beyond a doorway with a sort of curtain pulled across, and beneath a ridiculous sign that said "Art Films" there extended a corridor with little closets on both sides, about ten or twenty of them, as I recall. Inside each closet was a bench, a hole in the back wall through which poked the lens of an 8mm film projector, and a white screen on the back of the door. A quarter bought about 2 minutes of movie, apparently. Again, ridiculously tame by today's standards. Now, all us bunch of young misfits who worked in this store, understood pretty well that it was the movies and the mags that paid the bills. We just sort of accepted that. It was a financial little fact of life. We went on working the books, looking after the babies and toddlers and dogs, racking the record player tunes, serving the customers, and earning our daily bread. But the cute thing - was how earnestly we pushed real books. We were all readers. All around the same age. All busy discovering the classics. And to us, classics became a list a thousand authors long, if not more. It was just endless. I won't even start naming that list, or listing those names, as the case may be. If you read classics, use your wild imagination. But on top of this list, were the art books. And photography. This was when I discovered the great black and white photographers of the 20th century, the great illustrators of the 19th (and early 20th.) Poetry. Tons of it. So there we were, just pickled in literary and artistic culture. Good music, good books, bad porn. I sometimes wonder if there still is a bookstore that could be found, anything like our Times Square. For about a year and a half of my life, it became my way of life. A time in which, slowly but surely, great gangs of university students discovered us, spread the news by way of mouth, and haunted our store looking for things they couldn't find elsewhere, or could, but those places just didn't have the same panache. For that era, we were the hip. We occupied this rare little world of our own design, while the larger world raged by out on the street. We served the street. The Zanzibar dance girls come in to buy our Harlequin romances, nurse novels, the occasional bestseller. The sporting dudes came in for the racing forms. Kids came in for comics (and the earliest forms of graphic novels) and once in awhile we'd finding them inching their way toward the movie room, and hustle them back toward the front. Intellectuals perused our New Directions and City Lights collections, rustled like nesting squirrels through our pamphlets, periodicals, radical newspapers, and poetry. College kids ravaged our English lit classics. And every once in awhile some damned fool would re-shelve Lady Chatterly's Lover into the porn novel section. Even the Marquis de Sade didn't belong there. Or Henry Miller, either. Okay, I'm starting to name names now. I'll stop. Because it will never end. Times Square bookstore played a significant role in my life. It gave me a place to be that made sense at the time. It opened me up to many more things than just a mere college education ever could. It had its own little radical focus on the world, and provided me and my fellow compatriots with a meaning that stepped outside of convention. We became sort of a family, motley, a little rough and ragged around the edges, devotional to all things found between covers, and truly thankful for literacy. All this and more, in an outrageously social setting. All of us characters in our own literary play. |
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