Memoir Experiment Part Five

By Patrick
09 Jun 14 at 06:27 AM
In: Micellanea

My friend Todd and I used to spend a great deal of time trolling used bookstores, looking for bargains. I remember distinctly one particular shop we visited, though I cannot recall its name. It was on Highland Avenue and is no longer there. I recall I was looking for cheap copies of books I needed for some graduate classes I was taking. I always brought my soiled thrift shop editions to class, where fellow students gripping pristine copies would look on derisively. They weren’t shy about addressing their fears that my different pagination would throw a wrench into our class discussions. But I used to have a remarkable knack for visual memory and could picture a quote in its quadrant (upper left) and location in the book (about a third of the way through, for example), so I found the quotes we would discuss readily enough. They, on the other hand, had a profound difficulty surmounting their lack of wit and talent. My problem was poverty. I was smoking generic cigarettes and drinking rotgut. What’s a poor scholar to do? Buy his texts at eccentric little bookstores, that’s what.

Todd and I pushed our way into the chaos of this crowded little shop and were met immediately with a waft of cumin and frying meat. “Howdy Boys.” The owner was a barrel shaped old man with a military haircut the color of iron and a twinkle in his eye. He had a stove behind the checkout counter, and there he was cooking up tacos. This, he told us was his daily meal. He had dedicated himself to these tacos and feeding his hard round belly. There was little else to do but read, for he had few visitors to his spicy scented lair. Most of the books were genre trash, with a good many romance novels. But there was one shelf labeled “Classic Literature.” I combed these shelves and, lo! I actually found a few of the titles I needed for two different courses. I know I found Updike’s Rabbit, Run! and Conrad’s Victory. I then scanned some shelves of miscellanea and found a fat paperback edition of the Kinsey report on female sexual behavior. It fit in well with the smell segment of my library dedicated to prurience. I must have it in a crate somewhere, but cannot lay hands on it. The last I saw it, my friend Brian was studying it intently at my old apartment on Magnolia (fifteen years ago?). When I took my selections up to the counter, the old man stopped munching on his taco and wiped his hands on his trousers. He handled each soiled tattered paperback with a kind of reverence usually reserved for some kind of religious apparatus. He picked the final book up and shifted its distance away from his face to account for his age-befogged corneas. He looked at the Kinsey report and then at my friend and me. He looked back and forth again then set the book gently down. “Boys, let me tell you, no matter how hard you try, you ain’t never gonna understand that puss!” What was the correct response? A noncommittal ”I dare say”? or a jaunty “Oh I say, you old trout, it’s not as complicated as all that!” If memory serves we smiled nervously, then he let out a guffaw.

I like to think he had come to some quiet and final understanding of the inscrutable puss. He had dedicated his declining years to eating tacos. No amount of reading and study would equal that. He has probably moved on from this life, but if he lives on, I wish him the solid teeth and strong jaws to keep at his life’s work.