You (You #1)(2)

“Everybody is always striving to be better, lose five pounds, read five books, go to a museum, buy a classical record and listen to it and like it. What they really want to do is eat doughnuts, read magazines, buy pop albums. And books? Fuck books. Get a Kindle. You know why Kindles are so successful?”

You laugh and you shake your head and you’re listening to me at the point when most people drift, go into their phone. And you’re pretty and you ask, “Why?”

“I’ll tell you why. The Internet put porn in your home—”

I just said porn, what a dummy, but you’re still listening, what a doll.

“And you didn’t have to go out and get it. You didn’t have to make eye contact with the guy at the store who now knows you like watching girls get spanked. Eye contact is what keeps us civilized.”

Your eyes are almonds and I go on. “Revealed.”

You don’t wear a wedding ring and I go on. “Human.”

You are patient and I need to shut up but I can’t. “And the Kindle, the Kindle takes all the integrity out of reading, which is exactly what the Internet did to porn. The checks and balances are gone. You can read your Dan Brown in public and in private all at once. It’s the end of civilization. But—”

“There’s always a but,” you say and I bet you come from a big family of healthy, loving people who hug a lot and sing songs around a campfire.

“But with no places to buy movies or albums, it’s come down to books. There are no more video stores so there are no more nerds who work in video stores and quote Tarantino and fight about Dario Argento and hate on people who rent Meg Ryan movies. That act, the interaction between seller and buyer, is the most important two-way street we got. And you can’t just eradicate two-way streets like that and not expect a fallout, you know?”

I don’t know if you know but you don’t tell me to stop talking the way people sometimes do and you nod. “Hmm.”

“See, the record store was the great equalizer. It gave the nerds power—‘You’re really buying Taylor Swift?’—even though all those nerds went home and jerked it to Taylor Swift.”

Stop saying Taylor Swift. Are you laughing at me or with me?

“Anyway,” I say, and I’ll stop if you tell me to.

“Anyway,” you say, and you want me to finish.

“The point is, buying stuff is one of the only honest things we do. That guy didn’t come in here for Dan Brown or Salinger. That guy came in here to confess.”

“Are you a priest?”

“No. I’m a church.”

“Amen.”

You look at your basket and I sound like a deranged loner and I look in your basket. Your phone. You don’t see it, but I do. It’s cracked. It’s in a yellow case. This means that you only take care of yourself when you’re beyond redemption. I bet you take zinc the third day of a cold. I pick up your phone and try to make a joke.

“You steal this off that guy?”

You take your phone and you redden. “Me and this phone . . .” you say. “I’m a bad mommy.”

Mommy. You’re dirty, you are.

“Nah.”

You smile and you’re definitely not wearing a bra. You take the books out of the basket and put the basket on the floor and look at me like it wouldn’t be remotely possible for me to criticize anything you ever did. Your nipples pop. You don’t cover them. You notice the Twizzlers I keep by the register. You point, hungry. “Can I?”

“Yes,” I say, and I am feeding you already. I pick up your first book, Impossible Vacation by Spalding Gray. “Interesting,” I say. “Most people get his monologues. This is a great book, but it’s not a book that people go around buying, particularly young women who don’t appear to be contemplating suicide, given the fate of the author.”

“Well, sometimes you just want to go where it’s dark, you know?”

“Yeah,” I say. “Yeah.”

If we were teenagers, I could kiss you. But I’m on a platform behind a counter wearing a name tag and we’re too old to be young. Night moves don’t work in the morning, and the light pours in through the windows. Aren’t bookstores supposed to be dark?

Note to self: Tell Mr. Mooney to get blinds. Curtains. Anything.

I pick up your second book, Desperate Characters by one of my favorite authors, Paula Fox. This is a good sign, but you could be buying it because you read on some stupid blog that she’s Courtney Love’s biological grandmother. I can’t be sure that you’re buying Paula Fox because you came to her the right way, from a Jonathan Franzen essay.

You reach into your wallet. “She’s the best, right? Kills me that she’s not more famous, even with Franzen gushing about her, you know?”

Thank God. I smile. “The Western Coast.”

You look away. “I haven’t gone there yet.” I look at you and you put your hands up, surrender. “Don’t shoot.” You giggle and I wish your nipples were still hard. “I’m gonna read The Western Coast someday and Desperate Characters I’ve read a zillion times. This one’s for a friend.”

“Uh-huh,” I say and the red lights flash danger. For a friend.

“It’s probably a waste of time. He won’t even read it. But at least she sells a book, right?”