from The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs

For two months this summer I became a public character. My friend Richard, a bookseller, had to fly to Europe to take care of his ailing mother for a while, and I took over the management of his small used-book shop every weekday from ten a.m. until five p.m. I was paid nothing for this labor, but lately I’ve begun to think it might have been the most rewarding work I’ve ever done. It was also heart-rending. Not until I found myself operating a retail business did I fully comprehend just how widespread the current economic depravation is. Nearly every day the bookshop received multiple calls from jobseekers wanting to know if I was hiring. Nearly every day, someone came into the shop looking for employment. One young African-American, upon seeing the hundreds of unshelved books that were stacked behind the front counter, offered to shelve them all for me free of charge just to show what he could do. I had to turn down his offer. A lot of people came through the door carrying professional-looking resumes. When I explained to them that the shop was pretty much a one-man operation and that I myself was working without pay as a favor to the owner, many of them still asked if they could leave a resume with me – just in case. I never refused these requests. It’s one thing to say, “We’re not hiring now.” It’s another thing entirely to refuse to even accept a resume.

Most of my job applicants came from demographic groups that have been hit particularly hard by the current economic malaise – i.e. young people and minorities. During my first week on the job, a young woman who appeared to be in the 18-22 age group asked if I could give her cash for some used college texts books she was carrying. I would have loved to have accommodated her. She was fit, beautiful, and provocatively clad in a denim miniskirt and a skimpy black sleeveless top. Alas, I had to inform her that the store didn’t buy or sell textbooks. Crestfallen, she browsed the fiction section of the store for a while. About ten minutes later, when there were no other customers in the store, she came back to the check-out counter. In a voice that combined embarrassment with defiance, she told me, “I used to dance in a strip club here in town. If you’ll pay me one hundred dollars, I could put on a private show for you in the back room.”

As much as I would have liked to see her naked, I couldn’t accept her offer. For one thing, I didn’t have $100 to spare. What’s more, for all I knew she might be only 17 years old, and if I let her strip for me I could end up in jail for contributing to the delinquency of a minor – or worse. She seemed so pathetic, however, that I couldn’t bear to say no. “Tell you what,” I said. “How about if I give you ten dollars a week for the next ten weeks. You don’t have to do any stripping until I’ve paid you the whole one hundred dollars.”

“How do you know I won’t rip you off?” she asked, apparently not used to being trusted.

I took a piece of paper and wrote out a makeshift debit slip on it. At the top I wrote, “I received ten dollars from Kevin Mims on the dates listed below.” Under that I drew ten lines. I showed the document to my customer. “Every time I give you ten dollars, write down the date on one of the lines and put your initials next to it. Then we’ll have a record of our agreement.” She shrugged and then took the paper from me. She wrote down the date on the first line and put the initials KA next to it. Whether those were her real initials or a pseudonym of some sort, I can’t say; I never learned her name. I gave her a ten-dollar bill from my wallet and she left the store, still carrying her used textbooks.

After that I saw her once every week. I began to think of her as “Katie.” Each time she came into the store I gave her a ten-dollar bill, and she dated and initialed my debit slip. After our first meeting, neither of us ever again mentioned the nature of our agreement. I wasn’t worried about someday being arrested while receiving a private lap dance in the back of the store because I knew that I’d be gone before we reached the end of our arrangement. Every week, I hoped I wouldn’t see her. I hoped she’d find a decent job and no longer need my ten dollars. But every week she returned.

One of my regular visitors was a fortyish woman with a hearing disability. Let’s call her Deanne. She spoke in that loud nasally voice that many hearing-impaired persons use.  The first time I saw her she plunked a stack of books down on the counter and told me that Richard always paid her cash for her books, “so that I can eat.” This was news to me. Richard had instructed me not to give anything but store credit in exchange for books. But Deanne was lean and hungry-looking, and Richard is a notoriously soft touch when it comes to the needy, so I decided I’d give her ten dollars from the store’s cash register. As she left the store, she made the American Sign Language gesture of Thank You towards me. It looked almost as if she were blowing me a kiss. Suddenly, I felt better about having broken Richard’s “no cash” rule.

Like Katie, Deanne returned every week. Each time she came into the store wearing a backpack loaded with used books. One morning, on my way to work, I spotted a sidewalk sale taking place at a local library. I stopped my car and browsed for a few minutes before proceeding to the bookstore. Later that day, Deanne came into the shop with a backpack full of used books. As I looked over her books, I was certain that I had seen one of them at the library sale earlier that day. Not merely the same title, but the exact same copy of the title. I recognized its distinctive blemishes. Several of the other books in Deanne’s bag looked familiar also. It seemed unlikely that she could have purchased all of these books from the library for less than ten dollars. But when I offered her the usual ten bucks for her books, she seemed happy to get it and blew me another ASL thank you. It dawned on me then that Deanne was a book thief.

I wasn’t sure what to do with this knowledge. Should I confront her with my suspicions? Should I email Richard and ask for guidance? Should I report my suspicions to the police or the local library? In the end I did none of the above. I had no real proof that Deanne was a book thief. Besides, I thought, it’s hard enough for the able-bodied to find work in the current economy. What must it be like for someone afflicted with a handicap? I decided to stick with the status quo and continue paying Deanne ten dollars a week for her books – stolen or not.

Among my other regular visitors was an elderly Iranian poet who had recently arrived in the United States. His full name was nearly unpronounceable to me, so he told me to call him Zia. In Iran, Zia taught classical Persian poetry at a university. As it happens, I am a longtime fan of Persian poetry. My home library contains many works by Ferdowsi, Rumi, Khayyam, Attar, Hafiz, and others. As a result, Zia and I formed an instant bond. It wasn’t easy for him to make his weekly pilgrimages to my shop. He owned no car and lived miles away in a suburb notably devoid of cultural offerings. Sacramento is not noted for the efficiency of its mass transit system. Nonetheless, each week Zia rode a succession of buses just to visit my bookshop in midtown Sacramento and spend some time discussing Persian poetry with a fellow enthusiast. Sometimes he brought a thermos full of hot Iranian tea for us to drink. He also brought along little sugar cubes and taught me to take my tea in the Iranian fashion, by putting a chunk of sugar between my teeth and sucking the tea through it. During his visits he not only talked to me about great Persian poems such as Vis and Ramin, The Conference of the Birds, and The Shahnameh, he also showed me some of his own poetry. He is the author of numerous books of poetry that have been published in Iran, and has also written many scholarly works on Iranian literature. Often he would bring some of his own poems into the shop, poems that had been written in Persian (or Farsi, as it is usually called these days) and then awkwardly translated into English by Zia himself, whose English is still somewhat rudimentary. He’d hand these English translations over to me and ask me to make them more grammatically sound. Here, for example, is one of the poems he asked me to help him with.

BIRDS

Birds had been gnawed the night

And have been gnawing the day

With all sun

That was arranged to be our director

In order that was perhaps

That we lost our way and

Gropingly

Circled around ourselves and

Did sunken in the lagoon

That was waiting for us.

It’s kind of pretty in its ungrammatical form, but together Zia and I produced the following version of the poem, which he found much more to his liking:

BIRDS

Birds have been gnawing on the night

And have been gnawing on the day,

Devouring everything including the sun,

Which was arranged to be our guide

So that we have lost our way and

Gropingly

Circle around ourselves

Sinking into the swamp

That awaits us.

It took a lot of back and forth between us to produce these translations. I wanted to use the word “created” in the fourth line rather than “arranged,” but Zia insisted that he didn’t want to use any word that suggested a divine hand. These sessions were great intellectual workouts for both of us and I enjoyed them immensely.

When Zia left Iran he was able to bring with him only a small handful of books. He carried them in for me to see one day. Because he had so few of them, he treated them like gold. He took a Persian edition of The Shahnameh out of his satchel and handed it to me. I mistakenly thought he had handed it to me upside down. I flipped it over and opened it to what I thought was its first page. Zia patiently removed the book from my hands and turned it over for me. In that way I learned that Persian books do not open from right to left. They open from left to right. What’s more, the words run from right to left on the page. While I held open the book, Zia stood beside me and recited from it. For the first time in all my years as an amateur Persian literature enthusiast, I found myself hearing a work of classical Persian in the language of its origin. It was a stirring moment.

Over the course of the next four or five weeks I brought in numerous Penguin Classics editions of great works of Persian literature. Thanks to my home library, Zia was able to see what Attar and Ferdowsi and Rumi and Hafiz looked like in modern English. I offered to let him take as many of them as he wanted home with him. Either out of politeness or because of the difficulty of carrying them with him on the long bus trip home, he only ever borrowed one of my books, Penguin’s slender edition of The Ruba’iyat of Omar Khayyam. The following week he returned the book to me and announced that the translation, by Peter Avery and John Heath-Stubbs, deserved high marks for accuracy. He was disappointed, however, that Avery and Heath-Stubbs had made no effort to capture the music of the original, its meter and rhyme. He suggested that we should try translating a few ruba’iyat (a Persian word meaning “quatrain”) into rhymed and metered English. We managed to force a few of Khayyam’s verses into dancing shoes, but it wasn’t easy. By the end of the day I was more sympathetic towards Avery and Heath-Stubbs decision to focus only on translating the meanings of the quatrains and not their music.

Thanks to Zia I learned a few helpful hints for pronouncing Persian words and names. I learned that the “K” in Omar Khayyam is mostly silent. Zia pronounced Khayyam as if it were the Jewish name Chaim. He taught me that only the middle syllable of ruba’iyat is accented (ru-BYE-ut). And it is thanks to Zia that I no longer pronounce The Shahnameh, the Persian book of Kings, as if it were a woman’s name (Shauna Mae). Zia taught me to pronounce it Shu-NAM-uh.

Curiously, another regular visitor to my shop was a Lebanese man of about Zia’s age (66). Abdul’s mother was Moroccan, and he himself had lived in a number of different countries in Europe, Africa, and the Middle East. As a result, he speaks six or seven languages, including Arabic and some Persian (apparently the two tongues are closely related). By coincidence, Abdul visited the shop one day while Zia was also there. I introduced them to each other, unsure of what relations were like between Lebanon and Iran. They got along fairly well and engaged in a lively discussion of Islamic literature. At one point, however, they began to disagree on a certain matter. Abdul argued that Hasan and Husain were the sons of the prophet Muhammad. Zia insisted that they were the sons of Fatima, Muhammad’s daughter, and thus the grandsons of Muhammad. The discussion quickly became heated and moved from English into some Middle Eastern tongue. For a moment I feared that an international incident was about to flare up in my little bookshop. But the two disputants eventually agreed to disagree about the nature of Muhammad’s relationship to Hasan and Husain. Zia told Abdul, “Perhaps in Lebanon Hasan and Husain are believed to be the sons of Muhammad, but in Iran they are the sons of Ali and Fatima.” Later that day, when these two visitors were gone, I investigated the matter on the internet. According to Wikipedia, Hasan and Husain were the sons of Ali and Fatima but “were cited by Muhammad to be his own sons.” I guess that explains the confusion.

Not a few of my regular visitors – I hesitate to call them customers because they never bought anything from me – were homeless street people, of which midtown Sacramento has quite a few. Often these people asked if they could “borrow” one of the battered old paperbacks in the 25-cent bin out in front of the store. Perhaps they thought they could barter these books for food or alcohol at some other shop. Or perhaps they genuinely wanted a book to read. Some of these homeless visitors were clearly alcoholics, but other than reeking of booze they seemed not much different from my other customers. One day a man radiating alcohol fumes staggered into the store and spent several minutes wandering from aisle to aisle, staring at all the books but touching none of them. Finally, he held out his hands and said to me, “Just think, every single one of these books represents the mind of some man or woman, all of their thoughts and ideas.” I nodded my head and told him that was an astute observation. Later I let him “borrow” a copy of John Grisham’s The Firm from the 25-cent bin out front.

Sadly I did have a few customers who were clearly afflicted with mental illness. I had a special fondness for one of these men (they were mostly men). He possessed the wild-eyed expression of a Biblical prophet and he often came in to deliver long semi-coherent rants about spaceships and aliens and a secret black train that traveled from London into outer space. He occasionally denounced Capitalism, but most of his diatribes were just wild bursts of verbal free association. There was a poetic quality to his ramblings that made them beautiful to listen to but ineffably sad, as if a vast and intelligent vocabulary had somehow gotten lodged into a brain that could no longer make proper use of it. Had he not been claimed by mental illness he might have been a great poet or thinker. He wore open-toed sandals and his toes were always black with grime. He was painfully skinny and I always encouraged him to eat a bit of whatever snack I happened to have with me that day – chocolate-chip cookies, grapes, half a sandwich. Even when there were customers in the store who seemed annoyed by him, I made no effort to curtail his monologues. I tried several times to wheedle his life story from him but all I could learn was that he was once a bike messenger in New York and that after that he had lived for a long time in Berkeley (which might explain his anti-Capitalism bent). I asked him once, “How old are you?” and he said to me, “Do you mean in earth years?”

Other interesting regulars included Crystal, a hippie chick in her 60s with a fondness for the science fiction of the 1950s and 1960s (Alfred Bester was her favorite writer). Another regular, also sixtysomething, was a woman who had written the libretto for an opera based on Jane Austen’s Emma and was looking around for a composer to put it to music. She was very bright and literate. She’d graduated from U.C. Berkeley with an English degree but ill health kept her from fulfilling her dream of teaching high school English and she wound up working at the Social Security Administration instead. Now retired, she does a lot of reading and writes librettos to operas that will probably never be produced. She and I share a passion for Victorian sensation fiction and we spent a lot of time chatting about such writers as Wilkie Collins and Mary Elizabeth Braddon.

I encountered a handful of celebrities or semi-celebrities during my summer vacation in the bookshop. Wayne Thiebaud, a local artist with an international reputation, came into the shop one day and spent an hour or two browsing, mostly in the art section, naturally. While I was ringing up his books, we spent some time chatting about British author Julian Barnes. After he had left the shop, I made a photocopy of his credit card slip so that I could show his signature to my wife when I got home. My wife is an oil painter herself and a big fan of Thiebaud’s. When I showed her the signed slip she said, “Why didn’t you have him doodle something on a sheet of paper and sign it for you? We could have framed it and told everybody that we owned an original Wayne Thiebaud.”

Another somewhat celebrated visitor was Bill Orzen, an artist from Tucson who also happens to be the common law spouse of the award-winning novelist Leslie Marmon Silko. He was in town visiting his son and he told me some fascinating stories about Silko and various friends of hers who are also literary luminaries (Larry McMurtry, Joy Harjo, Tony Hillerman, etc.).

One day, three people visited my store and marched directly to the science-fiction section. I gathered from their conversation that two of them, a man and a woman, were married to each other. The third was a man who spoke with what I thought was an Australian accent, although I suppose it could have been a New Zealand accent or even some English accent of which I’m not familiar. At any rate, the threesome talked in very loud voices about the various Hugo awards they had been nominated for or won. At one point, the American man told the Australian, “You were robbed at the 2001 Hugo Awards.” Sitting at the computer station behind the front counter, I accessed an internet search engine and typed in “2001 Hugo Awards.” I started cross-referencing the male losers with the Wikipedia to see if any of them were Australians. Sure enough, Greg Egan, whose novella “Oracle” was nominated for a Hugo in 2001 (the winner was “The Ultimate Earth” by Jack Williamson) turned out to be an Australian. Unfortunately, Egan’s Wikipedia entry also noted that “Egan does not attend science-fiction conventions, does not sign books, and appears in no photographs on the web.” Because no photos of Egan appear on the web (how does he manage that?) I couldn’t verify that my customer was Egan. But further web research revealed that the Hugo Awards were being held in a day or two in Reno. Most likely, my three noisy browsers were Bay Area science-fiction writers who were driving to Reno for the Hugo ceremony and just happened to stop in Sacramento along the way. And, since he doesn’t attend science-fiction gatherings, my Australian customer couldn’t have been Greg Egan. While I searched the internet for another possibility, the Australian asked his two companions what they did with their own Hugo Awards. The female half of the duo said, “We just keep them on a shelf in the back of the house. The cats are always knocking them over.” Eventually, the Americans came across a copy of the Tom Reamy novel Blind Voices and asked their Australian companion if he’d ever read it. I was surprised when the Australian answered that he’d never heard of Tom Reamy, since even I, no great sci-fi buff, have heard of Reamy and own a copy of not only Blind Voices but of his cult-classic story collection San Diego Lightfoot Sue. Eventually the threesome made their way up to the cash register. They knew I had overheard every word they said and they were practically daring me to ask them who they were. But, being obstinate and too proud to play the celebrity fawner, I refused to give them the satisfaction of inquiring into their identities. The Australian bought the copy of Blind Voices but, alas, he paid with cash (a credit card would have revealed his name). I never learned the identities of my three Hugo-obsessed visitors. Further internet searches proved fruitless.

At one point in my bookshop stint, I almost attained a touch of local celebrity myself. When it was announced in August that the national chain store Borders Books & Music was closing, I got a call from a local television reporter. She was doing a story about how the closing of Borders would affect small independent booksellers in Sacramento. She asked if she could come down and interview me on camera in front of the store. Alas, my shyness prevailed, and I turned down the opportunity to appear on the evening news.

My stint at the bookstore ended in mid-September. I enjoyed it immensely, but it was eating up too much of my time. Before giving up the bookshop job I exchanged email addresses with Zia. He still sends me English translations of his poems and asks me to clean up the grammar. I am hopeful that he and I will be able to get together every now and then and discuss Persian poetry. I passed along Zia’s name and email address to Sacramento’s Poet Laureate, Bob Stanley. The Sacramento Poetry Center is planning a month-long salute to Rumi next January and Bob plans to ask Zia to give a reading of Rumi’s works in the original Persian. That should cheer Zia up a bit and give him a taste of the literary celebrity that he enjoyed back in Iran.

Before leaving the shop, I also asked Deanne for her phone number. As it turns out, she doesn’t have a home phone. She wrote down her name and address for me and asked me to recommend her to anyone who might be looking for a housekeeper or gardener. I like Deanne a lot, but because I suspect that she is a thief, I don’t think I will recommend her housekeeping or gardening services to anyone I know and like.

As for “Katie,” I don’t know what will become of her. Downtown Sacramento is a small place. If she stays in the area, I’m almost certain to see her again, perhaps when I’m standing in line at the grocery store or the post office. I’m a little worried that my wife and I will be sitting in a restaurant someday when suddenly Katie will appear beside the table and say, “Hi, my name’s Kellie and I’ll be your server today.” In some ways this might be a good thing. At least I will know that she has found a steady and respectable job. And so long as she doesn’t dump a Coke over my head, I’ll know that she doesn’t harbor any resentment towards me due to the nature of our former arrangement. I’m not sure if I did the right thing where Katie is concerned. Perhaps I should have given her some tough love and banished her from the bookstore as soon as she made her offer to strip for me. All I have left of her is my debit slip, which she initialed for me eight times. Under the terms of our agreement I still owe her another twenty dollars. But sometimes I wonder if I don’t owe her a lot more than that. Largely unemployed myself these days and struggling to earn a living with my pen, I’m in no position to help anyone else out financially. But I’m 53 years old and I ought to at least be savvy enough to warn a younger person that the road she’s on is likely to lead to no good. Alas, it’s too late for me to be of any help to Katie now.

Personally, I think that our federal government owes Katie and Deanne and other jobless people like them a much less bleak economic outlook. With any luck, a rising tide of prosperity will sweep Sacramento soon, and people like Katie and Deanne, who are basically decent, won’t have to stoop any longer to tawdry means of making money.