The Ecstasy of Influence

by Jonathan Lethem

  Paloma Picasso

  My roommate was the night man at the shop on Broadway and Eightieth, a high narrow shop with a central staircase to a rare-book level upstairs, and used records in a bin beneath the stairs. I was the night man’s backup, closing the place alone on Friday and Sunday nights. The store buzzed between seven and ten on weekend nights, full of couples strolling after movies or dinner, the cash register whirring. The last hour, eleven to midnight, was pretty dead, especially on a Sunday. This night, reading as usual at the counter, I was alone there apart from a long-necked beauty in haute couture who amassed a mighty pile of art and photo books, making several trips up to the counter to drop off her accumulation, then returning to her browsing. I grew mildly curious as the expensive pile swelled, feeling a faint sexy complicity between us. Then, as in a television commercial famous at the time, she revealed her identity to me wordlessly, by paying with a credit card.

  Chris Butler

  The hole-in-the-wall used bookshop on Bergen Street lasted probably about six months, and when the owners, a sultry hippie couple (I had a crush on her), decided to close it, I considered buying the shop and living in it as my apartment in order to make it sustainable, and life in New York, affordable. I imagined myself sitting in the open shop all day, writing—it was certainly quiet enough. Instead I moved to California, where I would live for a decade after. The shop, barely bigger than a walk-in closet, became a video store, then a hot-dog joint.

  My two memories of the long empty afternoons there: I was at the counter listening to WBAI the day that the jazz drummer Philly Joe Jones died. Bizarrely, another jazz drummer, named Johnny Joe Jones, died within the same twenty-four hours. The disc jockey played examples of the music of both “Joe Joneses,” his tone soberly memorial, never dwelling on the absurd coincidence of their names. I’d not heard of either man before that day.

  And: One day Chris Butler, the songwriter-auteur of the Waitresses, came in and struck up a conversation. I don’t know how it was he revealed himself to me, but I must have been gregarious—desperate, really, for the sort of hipster customer he appeared to be.

  Imperious Memoirist

  An imperious middle-aged memoirist came into the store on Solano Avenue in Berkeley one afternoon. This was a vast commercial space, four used-book-lined walls stretching into a deep storefront full of tables of remainders and new books, bins of used records, and a long magazine rack high enough that it required a mirror for us to patrol shoplifters. Four or five of us manned the floor at any given time, usually two of us at the counter behind the registers.

  She had a train of courtiers with her—reverential local guides, perhaps a literary escort or two. They asked us whether we had any of her books. The staff began to find their sense of privilege funny; mere clerks drawing pay, the store nonetheless belonged to us, and we judged those who entered our space. One of us spoke rudely to the imperious memoirist. The phrase “Do you know who you’re talking to?” was uttered on her behalf.

  It was at this same store that we had to fend off persistent inquiries by spies for ASCAP, men and women who carried clipboards and dressed like Mormons. They wanted us to pay performance royalties on the used records we borrowed from the store’s bins and played on the turntable behind the counter. The music was of course audible throughout the store, but we argued with straight faces that it was for the private enjoyment of the clerks, and, further, that the customers usually only complained about the music, which was true. When they’d leave we’d titter behind our hands, amazed at the impoverished lives of bureaucratic stiffs.

  Lovecraft in the Basement

  The store on Livingston Street in Brooklyn had been in operation since sometime in the ’30s or early ’40s, no one was sure—it had been taken over by our present boss in the ’70s, and he was a man who hated books. The place was a ramshackle disaster—ancient books of neglected quality layered behind decades of dubious acquisitions. Our boss offset the uncertainties—and, to him, the mysteries—of the used-book trade by offering new editions of the Bible, books on dream interpretation, and guides to civil service tests (some guys came in and bought the test book for “Fireman” and then, after they failed, switched to “Sanitation Worker” or “Jail Guard”), and crates of used copies of Playboy and Penthouse. The store was deep and high and narrow, with ladders to reach the obscure stuff fifteen or twenty feet in the air. It also had a rank and moldy basement, at all times kept locked, and rumored to be full of treasure abandoned by the former owners, including a large collection of rare books acquired from the estate of H. P. Lovecraft.

  The boss hired clerks who knew more about books than he did—he couldn’t help that—and then distrusted them, fearing that they’d gather items of neglected value and ferret them from the store, out from under his nose. We would. He had strict and absurd policies in place: No employee was allowed to buy more than two books a week, even at full face value. This forced me to use friends as shills: They’d come in, pretending not to know me, and I’d put items in their hands that I wished them to buy for me. We were also strictly forbidden to linger in the basement for more than a minute or two. The boss would send us down there for a specific item—lightbulbs or a box of paper bags, not books—and then nervously wring his hands and, if we took too long, begin yelling. He feared we were trying to excavate treasure from the labyrinthine, impossible dark shelves in the basement—books whose value he could only guess at, but we might know. We were. He never left us alone in the store, not for more than a few minutes.

  One morning another clerk and I (the same guy who became my roommate and was the night man at the Broadway store) got up at seven in the morning and used our keys to get inside the store and explore the basement privately and thoroughly, before opening hours and the boss’s arrival. For our efforts we found maybe five or six items of interest, nothing special, and certainly no sign of the Lovecraft hoard. We each quit the store within a few weeks.

  Conlon Nancarrow

  A stooped and frail man with an elegant goatee browsed the record bins at the Solano store, guided deferentially by a local fellow we knew as a slightly preening, semi-famous experimental musician. When with trembling hand the elder man filled out a check to pay for the records he’d picked out, the name on the check was Conlon Nancarrow, the legendary exiled avant-gardist, who’d spent decades in Mexico punching out player-piano rolls, composing music too rapid for any human performer. I exclaimed at meeting him, and called our record buyer out of his hiding place in the back of the store. We luckily had a supply of Conlon Nancarrow LPs, a remainder item, and he signed their jackets for us with a silver marker.

  Book Thieves

  Word circulated among the several Berkeley stores: A ring of book thieves was plundering expensive art books and reselling them, a quick and easy racket. Our books had been identified by other clerks at other stores—and we’d been accidentally guilty of buying stock filched from our neighbor stores. The description of the thieves went out—seedy, eccentric, and gay—and we clerks at the Solano Avenue store put ourselves on high alert.

  Soon enough came the day when they were detected in the store, three of them, two men and a woman, idling in the back aisles. We quietly assembled a posse of four or five clerks and, buzzing on our own outrage and adrenaline, asked them to step into the back of the store. Caught, the thieves glumly unloaded six or seven coffee-table books from under jackets and inside satchels, an astounding and brazen volume of material. We confronted them stammeringly, made insensate with fury: How could anyone bohemian, anyone who valued books, force us clerks into the role of cops? Wasn’t that a breach of some bargain? Better if the book thieves had looked like the ASCAP Mormons. These thieves were awkward mirrors of ourselves, gormless, shaggy, hip—clerklike. We banished them and congratulated ourselves uneasily. I’ve never worked in a bookstore where the clerks didn’t sometimes help themselves to the books, where we didn’t feel that the wares belonged more to us than to the paying customers. And one of
the best and purest and most dedicated clerks I ever worked with later ended up in a federal prison, convicted of rescuing deaccessioned antiquarian books and papers from a university library with what a judge considered excessive zeal.

  Eldridge Cleaver, Greg Bear, Joseph McBride

  At another Berkeley store—the grandest, in the middle of the campus strip on Telegraph Avenue, a four-story palace created in the ’60s by one of the legends of Californian used-book selling—famous faces among the clientele were nothing terribly special. The store tended to attract any visitor to the campus, notable scholars who’d lose themselves in the deep third-floor humanities sections, while the rare-book room and art-book shop on the top floor were host to a stream of artists, photographers, and elite collectors. We were famous ourselves, in a way, famous for our clerkly arrogance. In friendly California, we dared to sniff and snap like New York bookstore clerks. Our totemic founding father was still present in the store, usually at the front counter, looming like Pere Ubu, spitting cigar-flavored droplets as he frowned and swore at the inferior wares offered to him at the store’s buying counter, eating dim sum with his stained fingers and wearing hot sauce on his chin and collar for the rest of the afternoon. Among the rather desperate Bay Area characters who would regularly appear with a few miserable books to try to sell to the store was Eldridge Cleaver, in the last years before his death. When his books were rejected, Cleaver would only mumble and lower his eyes, wholly stripped of pride.

  One quiet day the science-fiction writer Greg Bear, a large and kingly man, and at that time the president of the Science Fiction Writers of America, came to the counter to make a purchase. I recognized him—as usual, from his name on his credit card. Feeling sly, I told him that I was in fact a dues-paying member of his organization—I’d at that time sold three or four stories to science-fiction magazines, but there was no chance he’d know my name. At that, Greg Bear widened his eyes and threw open his arms (offering a Greg Bear Hug), seemingly recipient of a Socialist epiphany: Little men everywhere, even the clerk at a bookstore he’d wandered into, could be encompassed in Science Fiction’s legions.

  Another night, working alone at that counter on a Friday, a bearded man descended from the third floor, in the company of a woman. They’d been browsing the film section, and now presented a Paloma Picassoesque stack of out-of-print film books. The man’s checkbook revealed him as Joseph McBride, biographer of John Ford, Orson Welles, and Frank Capra, a man I knew had spent long afternoons talking and hanging out on the set with Welles and Howard Hawks, among others. I blurted out: “Are you the Joseph McBride?” Before McBride could reply to me, the woman raised her eyebrows and deadpanned perfectly: “That’s the first time I’ve ever heard anyone put it quite that way.”

  Closing the Shop

  Closing the shop on Telegraph was a lot of work. We’d have to visit each of the four floors and the mezzanine—did I mention the mezzanine? that place was a kind of stadium—and flush out the recalcitrant browsers and homeless people who’d lodged in the store for the evening, ignoring our warning shouts up the stairwell that we were about to close. Eventually we’d switch off the banks of lights, one at a time, in a sequence designed to chase people toward the exits, like the exit lights along the floor of an airplane. Invariably we’d get guff from people who’d made a home in one section or another, and who felt outraged to be informed that it was in fact a bookstore and that it was closing. One night a man in the grip of rage at being exiled from the third floor called me an “effete rich boy” when I turned off the lights on him (I had long hair at that time). The insult was such a non sequitur—I was a clerk!—that I found myself laughing. But I understood later that what he’d reached for in his inchoate slur was a version of the same class defiance that clerks themselves felt: The bookstore belongs to me, because I love it more than you.

  Closing on Solano Avenue, a suburban quadrant of Berkeley, was more peaceful. I’d make the announcement—“We’re closing in five minutes”—and then drop the needle on the last track of Bob Dylan’s Bringing It All Back Home, which begins with the words:

  You must leave now, take what you need, you think will last

  But whatever you wish to keep, you better grab it fast …

  —New and Used, 2006

  The Books They Read

  The Hippie Parents weren’t, for all their distraction and funk, for their love triangles and LPs and antiwar demonstrations, illiterates. There might have been a few of the “back to the land” variety who subsisted on the Whole Earth Catalog and Possum Living, perhaps an oil-stained VW repair manual, but the city kind, they read books, they did. You’d find the books in the downstairs bathroom, or on their bedside tables, or maybe see them unwrapped at holidays as gifts, a cherished revelation passed from one to another, shared like a joint: Love’s Body by Norman O. Brown, Couples by John Updike, I’m OK, You’re OK by Thomas Harris, Another Roadside Attraction by Tom Robbins, Knots by R. D. Laing. The Hite Report. Marshall McLuhan, Timothy Leary, Carlos Castaneda, Theodore Roszak, Anaïs Nin, Philip Slater, Buckminster Fuller. The day’s best sellers, books which made their world as Malcolm Gladwell, say, and Deepak Chopra, Mitch Albom, The Lovely Bones, American Psycho, and The Rules made ours. In retrospect the titles are motley, contradictory, as variable as the songs on a given decade’s top-ten list or a list of its top-grossing movies. But boy, they were seekers’ books, weren’t they? Those people, they weren’t retrenching, they had little fear of the unknown. Give them that. They were open not only to expansions of their cultural or social selves, their bodies and their arts and their families, but also to a bigger inside, a bigger within. The collective brain had more labyrinths back then. To reanimate the world of the Hippie Parents in any form deeper than a paisley cartoon would mean doing an archaeological reconstruction of those shelves, and then devoting ourselves to them as readers, to do justice to the world-mind that’s now sunk in a sea of time like the Titanic. An outright impossibility. The Hippie Parents, floating far past the wreck on that sea’s surface, couldn’t do it themselves. The books, if they haven’t been tossed into boxes and moved to the basement, or long since donated to thrift stores that couldn’t move them, are ciphers, tiny headstones. We Hippie Children remember them as prospects, promises, opaque and threatening talismans. Now, after all, we were right. The books of the Hippie Parents have been returned to mystery. The Hippie Parents have forgotten them, if they ever really read them in the first place, and by the time we could penetrate their books, we had our own.

  —Amazon.com, 2006

  This next piece irks me. Predating my grasp of what the personal essay is for, it sticks at the layer of anecdote, never opens any door. Like hitchhiking itself, the journey is a little overrated—a destination would be nice. Yet the self-portraiture is honest, even in the inadvertent sense of a photograph which captures its subject ducking for cover behind his own charm.

  Going Under in Wendover

  I’m a black dot in the desert, a period crawling across a straight line drawn on a vast white page, sweating literally and metaphorically, regretting everything, at ground zero in midsummer 1984. I’ll ask you to picture this: The highway patrol on Route 80 outside of Wendover, Nevada, had directed me to walk a mile of desert landscape, back to Utah, in noon’s blazing sun—but to get you there, to help you understand how I could have been in that position, I have to convey what I’d misunderstood about the difference between hitchhiking in New England and hitchhiking across the deserts and mountains of the West. To do the tale justice I need to rewind, to a back road near Chatham, New York, a few weeks earlier, to a ride hitched from a hippie named Melvin in an orange Volkswagen Bug.

  It was the summer after freshman year. My friend Eliot and I had each taken “leaves of absence”—Eliot’s from the University of Chicago, mine from Bennington. After shrugging off college we’d run aground at Eliot’s family home in upstate New York. There we contracted with Eliot’s mom to prep and paint the exterior of their lar
ge house in exchange for room and board, and in our desultory way were following through—though the paint we applied would soon flake away like psoriasis, due to unfortunate shortcuts in our notion of prep. Each day, after sleeping in until Eliot’s mother was out of the house, we got stoned, stacked the player with vinyl—James Brown, the Minutemen, and Little Feat were in heavy rotation—ascended the scaffolding, killed hornets in the eaves, and dreamed escape.

  I’d left a girlfriend behind in Vermont, and one June day, horny, sick of fumes, out of dope, I defected from the paint job and hitchhiked to Bennington to see her. That one-hour drive could usually be hitched in three. This was the reliable ratio for jaunts between the small towns that dot the New England map. You stuck out your thumb and strung together ten or fifteen short hops: bored salesmen in pickups, kindly dads, daydreaming, harmless gays, and, most of all, students from Hampshire or Bard in Toyota Corollas, who could be counted on to get you high during your ten minutes in their car. Hitchhiking was low-impact, low-commitment. You made small talk and put a few towns behind you.

  Melvin was thirtyish, bearded, intense. He stopped his Bug for me somewhere just out of Chatham, and within a few miles I was, yes, stoned, and letting him fish for my story. I laid it out: girlfriend, paint job, cabin fever. Eliot and I hoped to jaunt out West to visit his crazy uncle in Berkeley, I explained, but we needed a car.