Buy Sell Trade

"Hey Hump, how come you don't move downtown?"
Dolly is sitting cross-legged on the linoleum floor, thumbing through the old comics in one of the long cardboard boxes gathering dust under the tables in the middle of the room.
"Why would I do that?"
"I dunno." She answers, never looking up from the box. "Nobody comes to Southside. Seems like everybody's going downtown."
She's right. Southside has been deteriorating for years. The irony is, it was once the opposite. They started tearing up the farmland and building up Southside in the early '70s, to serve the people who'd moved out here years before to get away from the crowded city. But the city followed them, and downtown was left with nothing but boarded-up windows and crumbling storefronts. Then in the '80s people started moving to the West Side to get away from the crowds here. And after the people went the gas stations, the grocery stores, the fast-food restaurants. Soon enough the big stores moved out there. One by one, the lights went out in the shopping centers along the main highway, the "Visit our new location!" signs were taped up in the few windows not boarded over with plywood, until all that remained were the tattoo parlors and the package stores and the used-car dealers, and people in other parts of The City started saying what those of us who live and work here already knew: Nobody comes to Southside.
But now everyone's moving to White County, trying to get away from the crowds in the West Side. And 10 or 20 years from now, they’ll probably move again, never realizing the joke's on them. They can move away from Southside as often as they like; sooner or later, Southside's going to move to them.
Dolly's right, though. The life is returning to Downtown. There are art galleries now, and antiques stores. Restaurants. Clubs. Seems like every day there's a new sign, a boardless window, a freshly-painted wall, all sprouting like new grass amid the dead blades in spring. The change is so slow it’s easy to miss, like the growth of a child. Not everything that opens up makes it, but enough of them do to keep drawing people.
But there’s no place for me there. This is where I belong. But maybe if I wait long enough, they'll get tired of Downtown again and head back to Southside.
The tape on the plastic sleeve around the comic book snaps loudly when Dolly opens it and pulls out the prize she's selected.
"How much for this one, Hump?"
It's an old one. Not old enough to be valuable or rare, just old enough to be old. Some flashy story about some flashy hero, printed on pulp with ink that comes off on your fingers. Dolly's always had good taste, at least as long as I've known her.
"That one? I'll let you have it for a quarter."
"A quarter? Is that all?"
"Well, if you really WANT to give me more for it ..."
"Nope, quarter's good."
The familiar honk of the car horn on the other side of the store window makes me jump from the rickety stool behind the counter, and I barely manage to avoid crashing into the glass display case beside me.
"Oops, gotta go." Dolly gets up, and the seat of her khaki shorts is dark brown from the filthy linoleum that's never been mopped -- at least not since I bought the place 11 years ago.
She hands me a particularly shiny quarter, tucks her upper lip under the lower one to blow a strand of hair that falls right back over her right eye, and looks at me expectantly.
"Well?"
"Well what?"
"Are you gonna move downtown?"
"Is your mom gonna drive all the way downtown once a week just so you can hang out in a comic book shop for the afternoon?"
"Probly not."
"Well, then, I have to stay here, right?"
She grins.
"Yeah, I guess you do."
A car horn always sounds more emphatic the second time, but now I’m prepared, feet planted firmly on the floor. Dolly skips toward the door.
"Gotta go. See ya, Hump!"
As she flings open the door, a flurry of pollen swirls into the room and settles into the sea of dust on the floor, and the sight puts a tingle in the back of my throat.
"Bye, Dolly. Take care. Tell your mom she’s welcome to actually come in the store to get you.”
“OK,” her laughing little-girl voice calls from outside, just beating the jangling string of bells as the door pulls itself closed.
I’ve never seen Dolly’s mom. Apparently she’s something of an intellectual snob; Dolly says she doesn’t like her reading comic books – a waste of time, she calls them – yet she still drives her over here once a week while she does the grocery shopping.
And I’m glad for it. Dolly’s a joy; her imagination is still alive and blooming. It seems that as we age our memories push our imaginations aside, but a child’s mind is a sprawling city of invention. And she’s always straightforward, still possessed of the one talent unique to children: She speaks and acts without implication. And she’s still young enough to know quiet in her own mind – even if she doesn’t like it.
I’ve tried before to spy Dolly’s mom through the front windows, but among the giant red and yellow painted “Buy, Sell, Trade” sign and all the layers of promotional posters the comic and game companies send me there’s only one small open spot on the window, and its view is always the same: the streetlight in the highway median, the favorite perch of a pair of crows.
The cell phone “ring” sounds enough like mine to break my train of thought. But then I hear the too-loud voice of a customer I hadn’t even noticed next to the new comics wall.
“Hello? What? No, I’m shoppin’. Shoppin’. Shop-PING. I’m in Another World. No, it’s a comic book shop down Southside.
“No, I’m alone. No, I am. I AM. Hey, man,” he turns to me, “Hey, am I alone here?”
I nod.
“See?”
I try to ignore him, turning my gaze instead to the girl who has just walked in – having apparently burst fully formed from the mind of a sexually frustrated 17-year-old. I do my best to focus on her long, straight blonde hair, her bright blue eyes and the light freckles across the bridge of her nose, and nearly fool myself into imagining her as a demure young lady before she saunters by the front counter and my gaze is drawn below her neck, where the illusion is immediately shattered by the complete lack of modesty in her choice of clothing.
I’m ashamed that I don’t have the willpower not to stare as she bends to look at the comics on the bottom rack and the frayed hem of her denim miniskirt crawls even higher up her thighs.
The guy on the phone is just as brazen, tilting his head toward the floor even as he tells the person on the other end of the call, “I love you, too.”
The very large man who just stepped behind her must be her boyfriend. He puts his arm around her waist, and when she rises he presses two fingers to the base of her cheek, turning her face toward his so he can kiss her. It’s a show of possession for everyone else in the room, and he never suspects it of betraying his lack of confidence. But it’s pathetically obvious to me – subconsciously, he knows she’s only temporarily his. He grabs her wrist and leads her to the raw-lumber shelves of used books on the right side of the room.
As they go, the string of bells jangle in a familiar pattern as the front door opens and closes twice in quick succession, then opens one more time so Monty can come in.
The first time you set eyes on Monty, you can’t believe he’s real. Scoliosis has put a permanent shrug in his shoulders, and the thick lenses of his glasses make his eyes look half again as large as they should be. He’s tall and gangly, with matted hair that often shelters bits of lint or wayward string, and pimples always mark the dark skin of his face. I can’t help but like him.
“H-h-hi, H-Hump,” he stutters.
“Hey, Monty. What’s new?”
“N-nothing.”
He shuffles toward the new comics wall, head down, carefully scooting one foot forward as though he’s testing the surface of the ground before the rest of his body follows. No matter how many times I see it, his walk fascinates me; this time it’s so distracting that at first I don’t notice the golden-haired nymph re-emerging from the used-book shelves, leaping gleefully toward the front counter with an old hardback book pressed tightly to her chest. Just before she reaches the counter, something falls from the pages, and she halts, turns and bends to pick it up.
It’s a flower, and I immediately know which book she’s picked out: a collection of poems by Paul Hamilton Hayne, a 19th century writer now mostly forgotten. It’s one of the only books rescued from a fire that burned one of those old downtown mansions to the ground a couple of years ago. I was shocked when the guy came in and sold it to me; he called it “part of a memory that needed purging.”
I’m so impressed by her choice that I modestly turn my gaze to the ceiling while she’s bent at the waist to retrieve the errant dried petals, looking down only when she’s again upright.
“How much for this?” she almost yells.
I’m not sure how old it is; the seller said it was a gift from a friend, and she apparently got it from an old-maid friend of her grandmother. The pressed flowers had been in it even then, the girlish whim of a lonely heart, captured forever as brown, petal-shaped stains on the pages. In bookseller terms, it’s a reading copy, with bumped corners. In poetic terms, it’s a treasure. Priceless.
“Let’s see … $8?”
“Oh, yes!” she rushes back to the shelves, then returns with her boyfriend.
“Don’t you have any new books, or some car magazines or something?” he asks as he reaches into his pocket and pulls out a few crumpled bills.
A bolder man would tell him how stupid he is for asking that question, would derisively explain to him that you can get new books anywhere, but these books have stories beyond the pages inside – something his girl apparently knows, but he’ll never understand, and that’s just one more reason why he clings to her so tightly.
“Nope.”
She snatches the money and passes it along to me, then leans over the counter and throws her arms around my neck.
“Thank you SO much! My grandma had a book just like this, and she used to read poems from it to me when I stayed over.”
She catches me by surprise, and for a second, I put my arms around her, too, but I get only an instant to savor the touch of her warm skin and the thrilling sensation of her perky breasts pressing against my flabby chest before shame takes over, and I’m already dropping my arms before I notice her boyfriend glaring at me with death in his eyes.
I don’t feel threatened; in fact I find it almost comical that he would react that way. Surely he knows what I know all too well: This bright young vessel of life embraces me only out of gratitude; there’s not even the slightest possibility that the young goddess could ever view me as a sexual object.
And anyway, she’s not what I want, either, I tell myself as she drops back down to the other side of the counter and her boyfriend rushes to wrap his arm around her waist and lead her out the door. I silently declare that I’m too old to chase after pretty young things, knowing full well she’d laugh in my face if I even imagined being with her.
Over by the comics shelves, Monty is kicking at the floor, and the rubber of his cheap sneakers is making shrill squeaking noises each time it makes contact with the linoleum. He starts pacing, looking even more frustrated than usual, then turns to the off-white display shelves that divide the comics area from the storage space. He flips through the graphic novels, manga and trade paperbacks on those shelves, slamming the stacks back into place after he finishes each row.
“You looking for something in particular, Monty?”
He steps to the counter and leans in, speaking as softly as he can without whispering:
“Edmund Dulac.”
Now that’s unusual. Dulac was a French artist, one of the biggest names of the “Golden Age” of book illustrators just after the turn of the 20th century – when changes in printing technology made inexpensive color reproductions available for the first time and lavishly illustrated editions of classic stories became wildly popular. His style is marvelous: moody; full of atmosphere; always fantastic, never cartoonish – perfect for children’s books. I have a copy of his Arabian Nights in my own collection, but his style of illustration fell out of favor after World War I, and he’s not exactly in high demand among the comic book crowd. I wonder how Monty’s even heard of him.
“Hmm … I don’t think I’ve ever had his stuff in inventory.”
Monty nods and lowers his head in disappointment. He heads for the door, again testing the solidity of the linoleum tile with each step.
“Hey, Monty, hang on.”
I trot to the door at the back left corner of the store and duck into the three-room living quarters I set up in the old office/storeroom area. It’s hot; keeping the AC running in both the store and my apartment at the same time taxes the old system too much, so I have to choose. I open the lone window that looks out on the overgrown asphalt lot in back, then rummage through disorganized stacks of books, tossing various volumes onto my mattress before I remember that Arabian Nights is on the top shelf to the right of the bed, sandwiched between Winsor McCay’s Dreams of a Rarebit Fiend and an Arthur Rackham-illustrated Alice in Wonderland.
The Brodart plastic cover wrapped around the dust jacket crinkles with each step as I trot back to the front and hand the book to Monty.
“Here you go, buddy.”
His eyes light up when he sees the blue-gray cover, and he grins.
“I can’t sell it to you, but I’ll let you borrow it as long as you promise to bring it back.”
“OK. Thanks, Hump.”
It’s the first time I’ve heard him speak without stuttering.
“You know much about old illustrators?”
He’s gone back to nodding.
“Excuse me!”
This might be the busiest Tuesday I’ve ever had. I hadn’t even noticed the middle-aged woman at the end of the counter, and judging by the shrill tone of her voice, she’s not too happy about that. A lesson in patience wouldn’t hurt her, I decide, and I turn back to Monty.
“Next time you come in, we can talk about it; I have a lot more collections you might want to see.”
“Excuse me!” the woman with the dyed red hair interrupts again, and dumps a plastic grocery bag full of paperbacks on the counter. “I’d like to trade these in for store credit.”
I step slowly toward her.
“OK,” I reply behind my businessman smile, “did you want to go look for some books in the stacks while I ring these up?”
“No, that’s OK, I’ll wait.”
Apparently she doesn’t trust me to give her the proper amount of credit unless she’s there to monitor the accounting. Great.
Something about her self-righteous expression turns my stomach. I get the feeling that if she had been present when Jesus admonished the angry mob in defense of the prostitute, she would have lobbed a rock anyway. Seeing her makes me sad for the passing of true piety, the kind my Grandma had, the kind that compelled her to dress in her Sunday best EVERY Sunday, not out of pride but out of reverence. And you couldn’t catch her dead in a book store or any other place of business on the Sabbath. But times have changed.
I know without looking that the books in the woman’s bag are all series romances. In my experience, there are two major styles of series romance novels: the ones with white covers and the ones with red covers. The white covers are schoolgirl fantasies, crescendos of chaste desire played out in forbidden situations. The red covers are quite a bit racier, and more explicit. The books that fall out of the grocery bag are all red covers.
They’re also all former inventory; most still have the small round price stickers on the inside cover. That’s OK, it’ll make them that much easier to shelve later.
Only now do I notice that Monty is still standing near the counter, looking behind me intently.
“Did you want something else, Monty?”
His head snaps up, like I’ve caught him at something, and after a minute he nods and points behind my left hip, at the rack of girlie magazines I keep behind the counter.
I’m sympathetic enough not to make him ask for it. I turn and pull a plastic-wrapped magazine from the second row of the metal rack.
“This one?”
Monty shakes his head and wags his finger downward. I put my hand on a copy in the next row, and he nods enthusiastically.
I pull out the magazine with the wide-eyed brunette on the cover. She’s strikingly beautiful, with pale skin but exotic features, a stark contrast to the air-brushed, tan blondes who posture across the other magazines in the rack. In fact, she’s the spitting image of one of Dulac’s Persian princesses.
Monty definitely has good taste.
“It’s $8.50.”
He pulls out the bills, hands them to me with a trembling hand and snatches the magazine to his chest before tucking it under his arm next to my book.
The woman with the red hair and the red covers looks at Monty with disgust, and he seems to shrink from her gaze as he walks to the front door, opens and closes it twice, then exits.
“That’s awful,” she huffs in his direction before turning back to me and shaking her head. “I don’t know why you sell that filth.”
I don’t even bother to argue, even though the books she’s trading in are every bit as bawdy as the magazine I just sold. Judging from Monty’s appearance and mannerisms, that magazine is the closest he ever gets to female contact, and judging from the lady standing in front of me, those books are the closest she gets to fulfilling her amorous fantasies. One is verbal, the other visual, but the purpose is the same. I guess some people just have skewed perspectives.
I grab a book at random from the pile and push it back to her side of the counter.
“I can’t take this one. Sorry.”
“What?”
What do you know, her voice can get shriller.
“Why not?”
“Back cover’s ripped. There’s a corner missing. And besides, I already have five copies of this one in stock.”
I glance at the front cover for the first time and make note of the title, “Fire and Fury.”
“That cover was ripped when I bought this book here the first time, three weeks ago!”
She’s livid. It’s amazing how worked up someone can get over something worth a dollar at most.
“I’m sorry, but I have no way of knowing that. Our policy, as you’ll see posted throughout the store –“ I point toward one of the sheets of printer paper tacked to the side of the used-book shelves, “— is that we reserve the right to refuse any book for any reason. I’ll give you a trade for the rest of these, but this one’s no good.”
“No, forget it. Just forget it,” she blurts out in a tone as threatening as she can muster without yelling. She snatches at the stack of books and starts hurling them back into the grocery bag, ripping a hole in one side of the flimsy plastic. “I’ll just take my business elsewhere. This is bull crap!”
Bull crap? Apparently she’s OK with cursing at someone just as long as she avoids an arbitrary list of “filthy” words. There really is nothing more pathetic than false piety.
She stomps out, and one of the books drops through the hole in the bag and makes a slapping sound as it hits the floor. It’s all I can do not to laugh at her as she tries to angrily swipe the book without stopping, but misses and has to turn around and bend over to pick it up.
A moment after the door shuts behind her, a thunderclap rattles the windows, and I rush to the curtained nook next to my apartment door to grab a mop, then turn the sign on the front door to “Sorry, we’re closed” and head into the used-book stacks to make sure the rain bucket is in place under the leaky spot, hoping the rust-colored stain in the acoustic tile of the drop ceiling won’t spread any further. The bad spot is in the furthest depths of the paperback labyrinth – right over the shelves of old movie and TV adaptations. Hardly anyone ever ventures this far back, which is why I’ve never felt any overwhelming urge to fix the problem.
On the way back, I can’t help noticing a particular stack of red-covered books in the series romances. Turns out I really did have five copies of “Fire and Fury.” Good; I hate the idea of being a liar.
Out of curiosity I pull a copy from the shelf, admire the voluptuous redhead being manhandled by some stubbly-faced guy on the cover, then skim the blurb on the back:
“After the devastating inferno robbed her of her parents, her home and her children, Johanna found both a phobia and a fascination in the flames. But when a young firefighter begins renting the loft apartment above her art studio, it’s only a matter of time before she abandons her inhibitions and embraces the heat within …”
Now that’s quality literature.
I stick the book in a random spot on the shelf and take up my standard thunderstorm position, staring at the ceiling and waiting for the first sign of water to penetrate my shop. Then I hear the bells on the front door jingle, and before I even have time to shout to the newcomer that the store is closed, Cami is well into her conversation:
“You wouldn’t believe the attitude this woman gave me today! I mean, doesn’t anybody have any manners anymore?”
Cami – short for Camellia – Bonne runs a consignment shop in the otherwise deserted strip mall next door. She has never started a conversation with “Hello” or any other formal introduction, not even the first time she burst into my shop two years ago to announce that she had opened up a health food store right next door to me, and that if I ever needed any kind of herbal tea blends, she had me covered. I’m sure she has told me before, in excruciating detail, how a health food store became a consignment shop, but I certainly wasn’t listening.
“She was eyeing this pair of jade earrings in the case up front, you know? They’re really pretty – look like huge, green teardrops – the girl who sold them to me said her ex-boyfriend bought them for her on a trip, and she didn’t want them around anymore because they reminded her of him. Anyway, I ask this woman if she’s interested in them, and she says, ‘Well, can you replace the jade with pearls?’
“And I tell her, ‘We don’t really do that here, ma’am, but if you buy them you can probably take them to a jeweler and get them replaced,’ you know?
“So she said, ‘But then I’ll still have the jade. What am I supposed to do with that?’ and she’s really huffy about it, you know? So I say, ‘Well, you can do whatever you like with them. I think they’re really pretty.’ And she makes this ‘Ugh!’ noise, you know? And says ‘Well, maybe they’re fine for SOME people, but if you can’t replace them with pearls, I’m just not interested.’
“So even though I’m totally sick of this woman, I play the helpful shopkeep and say, ‘Well, I’m sorry we couldn’t help you there, ma’am; is there anything else you’re interested in?’
“‘No, thank you,’ she spits out and turns toward the door, and then as she’s walking out she just keeps talking, loud enough for me to hear: ‘I don’t know how anyone would expect to stay in business if they won’t provide a little service.’
“Can you believe that? I mean, where do these people come from, you know? She had a bag full of books with her, so I was worried that she’d be coming your way. Got a Coke?”
It takes a moment for my brain to register that that last question wasn’t rhetorical, and once her chattering stops I notice how wet her hair and clothes are and how loudly the rain is hitting the roof.
“There should be some in the fridge in back; I need to go check on the leak in the corner.”
She’s already headed toward my kitchenette, calling across the store to me, “When you gonna get that fixed?”
“When my Lotto numbers hit,” I yell back.
The thin stream of brownish water is dribbling safely into the plastic bucket on the floor – and the bucket’s not even a quarter full. Good. As long as this rain doesn’t last too long, it’ll be fine.
“Hey, your window’s open back here!” She calls from the tiny rooms in back. “Who tore up your bookshelves?”
“I did,” I answer, rushing back to meet her, hoping the rain hasn’t already soaked my mattress. “I was looking for a book to loan to a friend.”
I get to the room in time to see her pick up a collection of Gil Elvgren pinup art.
“Why are you going through my stuff?”
“Sorry,” she says, flipping open the cover, “I saw the chaos, and I was drawn to it.” She flips a page to a buxom, brown-skinned island girl barely wearing a sarong. “She’s cute. So you loaned out a book? You never do that. Was it valuable?”
I snatch the book from her hand, and she feigns surprise, then grins.
“I thought you said the window was open.”
“It was. I closed it – duh. What’d you think, I was just gonna leave it and let all your stuff get soaked?”
She puts her hand to her temple and brushes a drenched strand of normally wavy brown hair from her freckled cheek, leaving a trail on her skin and subtly reminding me of her own waterlogged condition.
“Do you need a towel or a dry shirt or something?”
“Nah. I’m good. It’s kind of refreshing,” she says, raising her arms vertically over her head, and I turn to the mini fridge next to the bed, trying to ignore how immodestly the soaked cotton clings to her chest. “Anyway, you didn’t answer my question. Was the book valuable?”
“It was to me,” I answer, handing her a can of Coke.
She opens it with a loud “pop!” and takes a sip while I return the pinup book to the top shelf.
“Well,” she says after lowering the can from her lips and gulping, “that was a mistake. You know you’ll never see it again.”
She takes another sip, keeping her eyes on me and raising her eyebrows.
This time I’m grateful for the ringing phone.
Even though it violates my principles, I rush to answer the call and push Cami toward the door, figuring I’ve selected the lesser of two annoyances.
One word tells me I’m wrong.
“Hump?”
The voice is so quiet and broken that I barely recognize it. It doesn’t help that I haven’t heard it in nearly five years.
“Jay?”
“She’s gone, Hump.”
I should have known better. Rule No. 1 of living a peaceful life: Never pick up the phone.