Sunday the 15th

It was a mantra of mine that "saturday's child works hard for a living" and a point of pride in that I always took every job I had seriously and worked hard always, even when the job was ridiculous. Probably my worst job was a one-week temp job in the National Press Building in Washington D.C. when I had just dropped out of college (after my second year, which I did at George Washington University)in 1976. To get to this job I had to walk through Thomas Circle every morning. At the time this circle has populated by dozens of African-American prostitutes, who would all lazily proposition me as I passed by ("wanna date?"). Then I would arrive at the Press Building and take the elevator up a few floors and go down the hall to a tiny, narrow office where I sat on a stool with an open ledger book. I felt very much like Bob Cratchett from Dickens' A Christmas Carol story. My job was to transfer the data from large stacks of paper into these ledger books, line by line and point by point. The papers were surveys returned from menswear retailers and described the recent sales of a clothing item popular at the tine (this was at the height of disco) called "leisure suits". The point of the job was business analytics from data, remarkably similar to the work I currently do, only now it's called "big data" and we have "machine learning" tools to do the analysis. Ah, simpler times! We could easily see that sales of leisure suits had increased dramatically that year from the year before, and we didn't have to invest millions of dollars in "cloud infrastructure" to do it.

I had a similar temp job when I later moved to San Francisco, in  1982. This was in the offices of the telephone company (then known as Pacific Bell) and my job was to highlight, in different color highlighters, the phone calls made from certain numbers in the office, on the monthly paper bills the office received. All of this is trivial today. Any manager can readily get the data of his employees' calls (how many, how long, how much) from a simple, canned database search, but this job kept me employed for several days, and even had the side benefit of introducing me to a guy who took me to a party where I met a girl I even got to have sex with (right there in the bathroom of that party that night), a very unusual occurrence in my life story. The girl's husband was in jail for larceny and her baby daughter was downstairs with her mother and did I mention this girl was 19? Quite a catch, that one. Luckily I did not catch anything from her.

Shortly before I moved to San Francisco I had a very vivid dream about a magnificent bookstore. I was working there and loving it. It was three stories tall with wide sweeping marble staircases between each floor and jammed with books like a truly great bookstore. One reason I moved to San Francisco was this dream, and also because they had a lot of bookstores, and my brother Erik lived there at the time and when I'd visited him a  few years earlier I'd fallen in love with the city. I was more than ready to leave D.C., a city I never even liked but lived in for six years, first for college and then working in bookstores, smoking a lot of dope and ruining a perfectly impossible marriage. In San Francisco I had some trouble finding a job in any of those bookstores. One of them, called Green Apple Books, did hire me on a Friday, but when I showed up for work on a Monday the owner told me he had fired the manager who had hired me, and so I didn't have a job. That was disappointing. It was a marvelous little bookstore out in the avenues. I was dead set against applying for jobs in chain stores like Waldenbooks, B. Dalton or Brentano's (where are they now?) but finally broke down and went into Brentano's, and what do you know? It was physically exactly the bookstore in my dream, marble staircases and all. Unfortunately they were on the verge of bankruptcy, were "on hold" with every major publisher and distributor and so the shelves held hardly any books. They hired me anyway, since they had an opening for a shipping and receiving clerk. It was stupefying. They had no inventory, so there was nothing to ship, and nothing to receive. I saw down there in the basement listening to reggae on the radio and watching one very unusual fellow employee methodically lay out row upon row of crackers, on which he carefully placed one sardine after another, then proceeded to eat them in an orderly manner. This guy soon became one of the best friends I ever had, and he was engaged to be married to the store manager, who at that time was on holiday hiking the Himalayas. I only worked there for one month, but out of it came two crucially important relationships in my life.

I thought I knew everything about bookstores. I'd worked at one while in high school, the bookstore at the college where my father taught, and then for six years in D.C., in the Kramer books and Olson books organizations. I was damn good at it, a heck of a cashier, stock boy, receiving clerk, inventory management specialist, but I was still a kid, only 24 when I moved to San Francisco and ended up working in a series of crazy bookstores - first at Brentano's, then something called the Bonanza Inn Bookshop, and then finally Books, Inc flagship store on Powell St near Union Square. I worked there for nearly 8 years, the last 5 as the store manager. This was all I really wanted to do with my life, aside from writing. There were no personal computers in those days, or hardly any, and certainly no internet or anything like that. Bookstores was where the information was, the new information, the up-to-date changing information. It was where the culture was, where the interesting people were, where the intellectual action was. Academia was too abstract. Bookstores, especially decent ones in the heart of bustling metropolitan cities like San Francisco, that was near to the wild heart of the world, and I wanted to be right there. I wanted to know what everyone was thinking about, what they were talking about, what the trends were, what the future held. I was an autodidact from a very early age, a voracious reader from the age of 8 or 9 on. I read almost all the time as a youth in my parents' house, and everything I could get my hands on. It was helpful and inspiring that my mother was a librarian, and her father had been a New York City publisher. Books were in my blood, especially history, politics, anthropology, and science fiction. From my time in Colombia I became a devotee of Latin American literature, and to this day my favorite writers are from South America - Clarice Lispector, Roberto Arlt, Roberto Bolano, Cesar Aira, Jorge Luis Borges, Julio Cortazar among them. In science fiction I was always interested in the idea writers - Philip K. Dick, Stanislaw Lem, the Brothers Strugatsky, and I loved anything that smacked of the absurd like Lewis Carroll, Glen Baxter, Gary Larson. All of these influences strongly formed my own notions of fiction, and in my early years in San Francisco I spent hours writing novels in longhand in blank books. I wrote more than 30 novels in three years, from 1982 to 1985, of which only a few turned out to be worth anything in the long run. I must have written a few million words, out of which I saved a few thousand. Survivors from that time were later re-written entirely, like Fixture, the Part Time People, Fissure Monroe, and Cashier World.  I wrote so much and so ferociously that I had a huge callous on my right index finger which took decades to dissipate. It's nearly all gone now.

I worked with so many interesting people in bookstores. Even though the work paid almost nothing and I lived paycheck to paycheck for nearly 20 years, the world was alive and pulsating and fascinating. I will relate some bookstore work stories some time in here, but for now I only want to mention that even now, and it's been nearly 25 years since I last worked in a bookstore, I still work in them in my dreams, and I never dream of working in a boring drab office on a computer, which is what my job-reality has been all this time since I said goodbye to my bookstore dream, went back to college in my thirties to get an engineering degree, and switched to computer programming instead.

When I write about my bookstore years, I will talk about things like typing away on an ancient manual typewriter while wearing gloves and a winter coat and wool hat in the unheated basement of Sidney Kramer Books, a few blocks from the White House, where I worked with a huge, dominant, imperious lesbian known as the "queen of the basement", and the very tall and theatrical male queen who went off to join the Navy so he could become a dentist while surrounded by 600 men on an aircraft carrier and the hillbilly shipping clerk who had smuggled his drop-dead gorgeous bride out of Russian-controlled Checkoslovakia in the trunk of the limousine he was driving at the time, and the rebellious, feminist actress who married a Filipino guerrilla fighter,  and the local drug dealer and part-time seducer of innocent young boys. The store was managed by a diva speed freak and featured such interesting dramas as the stock clerks caught fucking in the customer bathroom during store hours, and the floor manager who had memorized every art-house movie that played in the Inner Circle theatre down the street so he could always have a concise and believable description to offer his wife on those several evenings a week he supposedly went to the movies but was really screwing around in an endless procession of one night stands.

It seemed that every bookstore I worked in was stocked with remarkable characters, many of whom I grew to love and still do to this day, even though I have not seen or heard from most of them in years. The same can hardly be said for my decades in Silicon Valley high tech. I can count fewer than a dozen true friends from these years, and almost all of them from one single startup job.  They are just, as a whole, not my kind of people. Bookstore people were and I miss them.