Here are some bookstore stories. I worked for one of the big national chains for about eight years. Not the one that folded. The other one, the noble one. I started there after getting a B.A. in English, barely, and having no career prospects and facing a wintry economic climate, was glad to get a part-time, then full-time job surrounded by books. I wound up working three years at a suburban location and then five years at a downtown store after moving to the big city. Eventually I became disgruntled at the increased importance Corporate was putting on selling membership cards and other nonsense, and wanted to get a job where the annual raise would be more than an increased shiny quarter per hour. But I’m still close to many friends I made there, and have many great memories of the two stores.
I’m not saying I blame this particular thread, but news came yesterday that the downtown location is closing down in the next few months. Hopefully we’ll have some kind of reunion before it’s replaced by some crappy restaurant or Apple store.
Anyway, some stories:
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I once found a book that a customer was looking for. She could only describe it as a novel with a blue cover.
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We used to take personal checks, but because of frequent scams and whatnot, required a photo ID. Once a guy came up with a book and paid with a check. I asked him for his driver’s license. He looked a bit startled. I explained the policy. “No habla ingles,” he gasped. I look at the guy. Blond hair, blue eyes. I look at the name on the check. It was something like Bob Anderson. I look at the book he was buying, Sure enough, it was in English. I suspected this guy actually spoke English. I tried explaining in my best high school Spanish that I needed to see a driver’s license. I knew what he’s doing and he knew what he’s doing, but the art of retail means the customer is always right. Eventually I called up a manager, who cleared me to make a one-time-only exception in our check-taking policy. I rang up the non-English speaker. He grinned and said, “Is December too soon for an April Fool’s joke?” Asshole.
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Another guy came in for a special order. He said his name was John Smith and had ordered how-to books from Paladin Press with titles like “International Fugitive” and “How to Live Off The Grid”. Yes, he paid in cash.
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One of the worst aspects of the job was going through the restrooms to make sure some of our loyal customers hadn’t passed out in the stalls because of an excess of heroin or mouthwash, or were jacking off to our artier magazines that they hadn’t purchased. In retrospect, it is a weird thing to make eye contact with a dude sitting on the toilet. One time I had to wheel the mop bucket in there to take care of someone’s explosion. After mopping up all the vomit, I started pushing the bucket back to the janitor’s closet. As the bucket went from tile to carpet, it tipped over, spreading dirty water all over the entrance to the bathroom. Luckily the carpet soaked a lot of it up, and I had a mop in my hands to handle the rest.
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One time I was helping a co-worker with a book return. She did something odd, like hand the customer the wrong receipt back. I was about to call her on it when she suddenly slumped against my chest. I didn’t have the presence of mind to, y’know, catch her, so she slid off me and, knocking over a stool, collapsed on the floor. She then started convulsing. Seizure! I told another co-worked to call 911 then held her steady until her brain rebooted. I’d never seen anything like looking into dead eyes, then watch consciousness glimmer and flare up again in them.
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Shoplifting was a problem, as were scammers. Sometimes organized rings of assholes would come in, steal books, then return them, sometimes for cash. Changing corporate return policies helped a lot. These thieves didn’t care as much about store credit. We also had uniformed off-duty police in the store. They were happy to stand around, making forty bucks an hour, occasionally manhandling the belligerent drunk or thief caught read-handed (sorry). Usually when a shoplifter was caught, they were banned from the store on pain of a trespassing charge. Sometimes they’d be brought in and charged, but that was rare. Once I spotted a guy pushing a wheeled cart through the store. No crime in that, it’s like having a mule for urban living, but we gave him extra attention. Sure enough, he was ransacking the leather journals, slipping them into his cart. The journals were barely concealed by garbage bags lining the cart’s wire mesh… When our cop that night nabbed him, we totaled up how much this guy was stealing. It wound up being in the thousands of dollars, which meant this guy was facing a felony charge instead of a misdemeanor.
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One of my favorite perks was the occasional celebrity encounter. Sometimes they would be there for signings; sometimes they’d just be in town, bored, and need a book or a magazine to get them through the crushing dullness of Minneapolis. I once drifted around the store on a glorious haze because Danica McKellar, one of my first childhood crushes (Winnie Cooper, guys! Winnie Cooper!), was wandering around the store with her then-husband. I couldn’t work up the courage to bother her though. Nor did I gush over Bruce Springsteen… to his face. I did tell Ethan Coen how much I enjoyed his movies, but that was after annoying him with my membership card spiel. I once told our county attorney to get in the back of the line; she was coming through the line’s exit, not the entrance. Now that woman is our U.S. senator. The time Pete Townsend came to the store was something else, though.
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So there’s this English musician named Rachel Fuller. Rachel makes perfectly lovely music for English housewives that is not my cup of tea. Apparently she and her boyfriend, rock icon Pete Townshend, were friends with the brothers that were, respectively, CEO and president of this bookstore chain. Rachel had a new CD out, and somehow worked out a deal with her bookstore-owning friends that she would go to a few of their stores, play a quick set, and reap the benefits in record sales. Her boyfriend would tag along for moral support. Word got out to the local classic rock station that the bookstore was going to have a free Pete Townshend concert. This was not actually the truth, but hey, any publicity is good publicity, right?
The day of the Rachel Fuller/PETE TOWNSHEND concert, I’m helping a friend in the music department ring up customers. Out of the corner of my eye, I see her talking to a tall scruffy-looking guy. I see him hand her something and say “afterwards, look at this. It will explain everything.” Then he left. He had given her a CD-ROM. I asked what that was about, and she summons the manager and cop on duty. The guy had told her that Pete Townshend had stolen one of his songs and owed him an enormous amount of money (I regret my memory fails me as to how much money he wanted. The guy was sure that Townshend owed him a very specific sum, like sixty-one thousand dollars or two hundred grand, or something) and “after twenty-nine years, it will finally come to an end.” Well, that sounded like some sort of threat, didn’t it? Some kind of imminent deadly threat to a celebrity? The cop was on it. The crazed fan had left the store, but our cop started reviewing security footage with an alacrity I had never before seen him use. He was able to take the crazy’s image, get it to the police department downtown. Soon they had the guy identified. They try to track him down. They call his parents.
“Oh, we haven’t seen him in months, but we know he stopped taking his medication!”
Our community relations manager puts the CD the crazed fan had dropped off in her PC upstairs. On it is some sort of multimedia presentation. It looked like it was addressed to Pete, and each animated frame of his slide show had some message. They might have been ravings, they might have been references to Townshend’s lyrics. Honestly, I’m not much of a Who fan, could be either. Stuff like “If you look through your Mirror Door, you know what you must do.”
Two hours before the concert starts, and every police officer we had ever hired for off-duty security is hanging out in the store, whether they were scheduled to be there or not. This is Christmas for cops. The crazed fan walks in the store. It’s crowded, but the police spot him right away. They surround him and bustle him into a cop car. I hear he’s held for a mental health examination for 24 hours. Sometimes the best climax is an anti-climax. The show eventually begins. Rachel Fuller comes out with her synthesizer and puts on a few numbers, her boyfriend backs her up on vocals for a few of those songs. It’s nice enough music, I guess. I never see the crazed fan again.
- I helped train a pretty girl who started working there part-time. At one point she dropped the word “shiny” in conversation, as slang for something cool, as in “That’s shiny.” So we started talking about Firefly. We found we both liked Neil Gaiman books. Eventually I asked her out, and she didn’t shoot me down. Eventually, but not as soon as you would think, gossip spread that she and I were dating. And we continued to date. Years later, while I had moved on to another job, and while she had graduated from college and had a good Monday-Friday job, she still worked at the bookstore on weekends for extra cash and the employee discount. But eventually she tired of it and gave her two week notice. On her last day, which happened to be New Year’s Eve, I came by to pick her up from work. After she punched out, I walked her over between some bookshelves. She’s kind of a private person. I told her that this is the end of one chapter of our lives and I hoped it would be the start of another. That’s when I pulled out the ring, got down on one knee, and asked her to marry me. Reader, she did!