Forty miles to a bad bookstore from my hometown. Calendars and coffee table
books, Rod McKuen and The Collected Poems
of Robert Frost. I was barely in high school and the teachers couldn’t tell just by
looking at me which book was going to change my life, years yet
before I packed up and went away to pan the silt of a college professor’s opinions,
always a stack of titles and subtitles
under “For Further Reading” on the back page of a purple-mimeographed
syllabus. Word got around about the box of rescued books
where my mother worked, rejects saved from the shredder by someone’s husband
who ran a press at Hall Printing Company, a pile of mis-cut
romance novels with offset covers, mass market paperbacks like Fear of Flying or
Tom Robbins’ Another Roadside Attraction—some of them,
for the life of me, I couldn’t tell how they were flawed. I was used to hand-me-
downs and castoffs. I wore my brother’s red Rawlings baseball spikes
exactly like Lou Brock’s, his frayed paisley shirts and platform shoes, a white
leather belt. And now these scrounged books. How could I find out
which ones were worth the taking? Their jacket copy blurbs gave up nothing.
Every book was “Magnificent!” every writer was “The voice
of a generation.” How many voices could one generation have? Not much left but
to trust the art on their covers. The Sound and the Fury
with its sunset-reddened graveyard. A peacock feather over the eye of Clamence
on Camus’ The Fall. I couldn’t decide
if it was a forest of men or blighted trees on Kafka’s The Trial. Any orange-spined
paperback with a penguin in an oval. You think it’s easy
to judge a book by its cover? I was a long time learning to do it, and never would
have without a grocery bag full of factory rejects
to learn on. Who was that man in safety glasses saving books for the people of a
town without books? Nobody would have called him savior
or lawbreaker either one, just some factory foreman rescuing a few blemished
books from the fire. What else were we going to read
out there, an oil embargo on, the hose nozzles laid on top of the gas pumps, and
not much of a bookstore at the end of an hour-long drive?