One of These Is True, the Other Is a Dream

1. Two work colleagues and I piled into a taxi to head out to lunch. The driver, a recent immigrant from India, was unfamiliar with the restaurant we directed him to and asked us to tell him how to get there. Although we were diligent in guiding him at first, we got lost in conversation and were soon enough lost on the road. Despite picking up and extra person who seemed to know the area, we ended up far from where we intended to be. I could not recall the name of the restaurant but, certain that I knew how to get there, I began telling the driver what road to take, where to turn, etc. Our party grew to a small convoy when another car responded to our appeal for assistance by saying, “Follow me.” One of the people in the cab claimed to be about to faint from low blood sugar and asked could we please stop at any store and pick up something small, like a bag of chips. Our driver pulled into a seedy looking corner store in a tough neighborhood. There was little in the store other than sugar—candy, soda, ice cream—and we declined to buy anything, preferring to soldier on to the restaurant. We got back in the cab and were immediately surrounded by young toughs who began beating on the roof and hood of the cab, taunting us for not spending money in their store. I said, don’t worry, they’re making fun of us for being white. The apparent ring leader heard this and started to laugh; he thrust a 40 through the window of the cab and I took it, drank some and passed it to the others. We spent much of the afternoon surrounded and drinking.

2. After obtaining a medical marijuana Rx and a license to grow, a woman in my building began cultivating plants on the roof and, after a few crop rotations, discovered she had an aptitude for producing incredibly strong ganja. Soon, the grow garden on the roof became a small farm that employs a handful of people at harvest time. Unfortunately, the woman’s profound attraction to abusive men is in direct, if inverse, proportion to her aptitude for producing splendid spliffs. As hindsight is universally recognized to be 20/20, we might reasonably argue that she should have seen trouble coming when her crop could be measured in bushels as opposed to plants. After the most recent harvest, one of her helpers stopped by for a brew. Though the harvest was a home grow for personal use, it was not hard to see it as a cash crop worth big money. Another beer and this chap had dollar signs gleaming in his eyes. My neighbor is spunky and when her visitor challenged her for the pot, she put up a fight. That’s when things got very bad. They fought hard and dirty. The woman was battered quite severely but this was not the first time she'd been attacked by a man she trusted. As she was being pushed against the counter, she had the presence of mind to grab a pair of scissors she’d been using to trim the plants and stabbed her assailant in the nuts. Hard. Later, the police were able to gather DNA evidence from the blood on the floor.

Gift of God

I want to talk about my mother. No, no. Not the anguished confessions of therapy, more of a wake. I want to boil twigs and leaves to make a steaming mug of dirt brown tea, wrap up in a blanket, sit out on the chilly deck, under the dark blue night salted with white stars, and open up the faucet on my stream of consciousness. I want to reach deep into my chest and pull my mother forth—her cigarette in one hand, the gray smoke curling away, a flaming hot cup of coffee in the other; her beat-up Keds gripping the fleck-patterned linoleum in the kitchen. I want her in her forties when she thought she was no longer young and was no longer thin; wearing navy or tan Bermuda shorts topped by a plain, sleeveless, cotton shirt primitively laundered in our old tub washer and gruelingly ironed throughout the endless, flaming-hot summer that was my childhood; purple, blue, and green varicose veins tracing her stark white skin and making her legs look like road maps—the kind we kept in the glove box of our mammoth mint-green Buick.
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Although she was born in Indiana, Dot’s vocabulary and mannerisms suggested the south. Her father built Highway 51 running from the Gulf of Mexico up to the top of Wisconsin. Construction started in New Orleans the year Dorothy was born and ran north as fast as forty men could go working mule teams, digging road bed, and laying asphalt. My grandfather died when the crew reached southern Wisconsin and my grandmother put down roots in what became my hometown.
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Our town straddled the Wisconsin-Illinois border and, toponymistically, if not geographically, offered a demarcation of sorts between north and south. Illinois town names are southern: Centralia, Decatur, Vandalia—names that spoke of long, hot, dusty dry summers, a by-gone era and women named Blanche, as was my grandmother. Wisconsin, the complete opposite, was a land where Indians in loin cloths, stepping silently from the woods, met at the confluence of broad, green rivers to trade for skins with French trappers wearing coonskin caps and moccasins. Wisconsin towns follow the beds of its many rivers at evenly spaced intervals—as far as an ox cart could travel in a day—and bear French or Native names: Eau Claire, Prairie du Chien, Fond du Lac, or Menominee, Winnebago, Potawatami.
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Dot grew up going from town-to-town as her father pushed 51 north. My father claimed that when they first met, he couldn’t understand a word she said but they married. You may argue that the southern appellation is a stretch and I’ll listen but it does account for some of my mother’s foreignness; for example, calling pound cake Johnny cake, cantaloupe was muskmelon, and corn bread corn ‘pone.’ She loved Hoppin' John though she made it only rarely. I make it every New Year's Day, for luck as southern tradition dictates. I never heard Dot use “y’all” except in jest, but the remainder of the Southern lexicon was standard in our house, especially when Dot spoke to her mother but even my father adopted many of the phrases he once ridiculed. Dot preferred biscuits for Sunday breakfast and made them from scratch, pushing the rim of an empty juice can into the sticky dough and then hitting her wrist on the edge of the counter to free the paste-white disc from the barrel of the can.
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I was their second child. Between my alcoholic, army sergeant father and my mother who simply had to have been bipolar, I learned a rich and arresting vocabulary that not only shocked my teachers but to this day causes me grief. “Shit a meat ax.” I actually said that in kindergarten; it may even have been the first day. My father used it constantly. It was his way of expressing that he was unhappy. At four and having little experience with the outside world, I thought nothing of working these expletives into my vocabulary. It was in this same way that I first called my brother an asshole. He had brought the epithet home from the schoolyard and taught it to me. I’d already become a handful, largely because no one was paying any attention to my random acquisition of language and behavior.
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“Shut up or I’ll cram your teeth right down your throat,” was how my mother would settle our increasingly frequent arguments. I heard her bark into the phone, “You can stick that right up your ass and nail a board over it” so many times when she was working something out with my father that I thought it was a standard form of discourse; something of a non-endearment. It was only when I arrived in elementary school and began to meet other children and their families, that I realized how peculiar was mine. My mother had a narrow bandwidth for normal. She couldn’t stay “in the paint" too long, as they say in round ball. She was frightening when depressed; we held our breath thinking the least disturbance would finish her off. When she became manic, she was utterly terrifying.
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Her depressions had a southern gothic shading to them. Dot confided in me, when I was eight years old and she was about to leave us to go on one of her long, internal quests to find Eurydice and bring her back to the living world, that she never wanted children; had even wished, after each of us was born, that we would die so she wouldn’t have to take care of us. My most enduring memories of her, however, are both from her manic phases.
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I was still small—yellow seersucker pajamas, damp and sweat-tangled from a nap, clung about my legs; my baby fine hair was matted to the back of my neck—when she came bursting out the back door waving a frying pan in one hand and an egg and me in the other arm, shouting that it was hot enough to fry an egg on the sidewalk. “I’m gonna show you,” exclaimed my mother’s bright red mouth with an enthusiasm that stretched her smile too thin, startling and worrying me because it felt so wrong. “You stand right here and watch me.”
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I stood as instructed; staring down at the sidewalk where a glob of white grease was melting in the center of a pan struck full force by the sun. My mother crouched low to the ground and pushed her hair out of her eyes, then cracked the egg against the sidewalk. “Never crack an egg on the edge of the pan or the bowl, Claudette; you get a cleaner separation when you strike a flat surface.” She pulled the white oval open to let the clear snot and yellow ball drop slowly from the perfectly broken shell. On landing in the pan, the yolk slid forward as though it had been hit from behind and fell, skidding on its chin. Gradually, under the fierce sun, the clear part of the egg clouded to white and thickened. My mother grabbed me by the arms, swinging me into the sky above her head. Spinning me around faster and faster, she shouted, “See!” jubilant and red faced. “You didn’t believe me, did you? But I was right, god dammit. I was right!” And she laughed loud and wildly, swinging me in wider and higher circles, letting my arms slip through her hands until she was barely holding my small wrists and I grew sick.
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That manic gaiety was what stuck with me. As Dot cycled through her ups and downs, her mouth was the most important visual signal as to who I was dealing with—bright red lips pulled tight across lupine teeth meant trouble. But, and here is where it was so confusing, before getting there—and I mean the rise up the slope of the sine wave to manic—as she rose from depression and became more voluble, my mother was fascinating and I thrilled to be in her company. The best times were when we would start some large project that consumed our attention and bonded us where love could not, as when we tore up the backyard on a whim one day to plant a stand of birch, my mother delivering a discourse in canoe building as she swung a pickax into the dark earth of early spring.
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Even after accounting for the tendency of mourners to say only good things at a funeral, my cousins’ eulogies at Dot’s service stunned me. Who were they talking about? Who would fold her arms around them and pull them up onto her lap? Who always had time to listen and an encouraging word to offer? Who taught them to knit? Who, for the love of god, made sock monkeys for every other child in the universe?
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Just after World War II, when new siblings and cousins were arriving annually, my maternal grandmother marked our births by making for each of us a red, felt Christmas stocking. Each stocking bore a heraldry of sorts. All stockings ended with a Christmas tree at the toe, blazing with beadwork candles and garlands. The boys’ stockings featured a yellow star and white drum over a rocking horse, while the girls’ symbols were uniformly an angel accompanied by a blue bell. One stocking, however, was so completely different, so anomalous from the others it always invited mocking commentary—mine.
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Mine was the only stocking to bear the completely secular image of a blue bird whose spread wings, at their apex, were about to push down hard; almost as though they knew from the start that I was destined to fly away. Shortly after my mother’s funeral, I dreamed of a birch stand where a blue bird sang sweetly to me. I walked toward it and extended my hand but it remained on its branch, singing a dream tune of almost unbearable sweetness. I was awakened by the phone; friends calling to invite me to golf.
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Waiting on the first tee, a western blue bird swooped down from the high sky to land in a nearby tree. The western blue bird is almost extinct. People have lived their entire lives in California and never seen one. Even more amazing, of all the variety of trees lining the tee box—fir, aspen, liquid amber, Japanese maple—the blue bird landed on a birch bough and began to sing. I walked slowly up to it and came within five feet of the branch. We looked directly into each other’s eyes for several seconds before it darted away. It followed me the entire round; from branch to branch, from one hole to the next. And for the next twelve months or more, whenever I played golf, a blue bird would arrive at some tee box and stay with me for a while.
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You may call it what you like. I know that bird was my mother.

Why I Write #2

I come from a family so challenged that, were we a Ronco Popeil slicer ad in which the amazing contraption faithfully shreds and tears as “Quick!," “Effortless!," and “Guaranteed!” urge the buyer on, the words flashing across our screen would be “Suicide!” “Alcoholism!” “Homosexuality!” I mean only to say that I did not have a good rapport with my mother. It is like running headlong into a minefield to write about our mother/daughter relationship, so suffice it to say we didn’t laugh much. “Suffice it to say.” That is my mother’s voice pulling me into her slipstream where I ride along behind her into the orange western sunset. Safe as a bug in a rug. There. See what I mean?
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“I’m going to rip your arm out of its socket and beat you with the bloody end of it!” “How'd you like a sharp stick in the eye?” “Judas Priest!" Pronounced: JUDE assed preeeeeeest. These were some of my mother’s favorite expressions. She could turn a phrase better than anyone else. Even when I was being beaten and she was screaming abuse at me, I would reflect with pride on how the things I heard my mother say, I never heard anybody else say. I believed she could talk the blue down from the sky and I was intensely in awe of that. Is that when I first wanted to be a writer?
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My mother's name was Dorothy, the inverse of Theodore. Both names mean 'gift of god;' one forward, the other in reverse. I loved listening to my mother. Those mornings before I started school and her friend Clara would come for coffee, I would pretend to play quietly nearby but secretly, I was listening. I wanted to hear the stories, hear her voice change as she confided a secret or again when she told of a betrayal. I learned that she believed the most outrageous things. Pranks too idiotic to be believed by any but the most gullible had become certified urban legends by the time she got hold of them and still she fell for them.
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I once overheard her talking with a woman from her PTA. They were discussing Betty Bonette whose husband was a salesman and traveled quite a bit. Casting a sideways look at me, which I knew to mean she was speaking in code, the PTA woman began telling my mother about Betty's 'lady problem.' My mother said she'd talked to Betty. She swore the source of Betty's problem was yellow toilet paper; dyes used to make toilet paper match your bathroom walls rather than plain white. The way her friend looked at her made me realize my mother was insane. Yellow toilet paper was all Betty had to explain herself to the world. It was good enough to sucker the woman who raised me.
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There was another story about a friend of a friend of someone’s cousin who bought a coat made in India. It was the end of the season and the woman put the coat away, placing it in a box and sliding it to the back of her closet. When the chilly season arrived again, the women pulled the box from the dark, warm back of her closet and slipped it on. Immediately, she felt it squirm as though alive. She died when the poisonous vipers just hatched from the eggs that had incubated for months in the lining of the coat devoured the first food they could find. I love that story. My mother actually believed it. She would just swallow anything hook, line, and sinker.
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One of the last times I saw Dot, I had just returned from Italy. I was showing her pictures of Roman catacombs. Even though she tried to be appreciative, I could see that she was growing more upset with each new view of stacked skulls and crossed arm bones. I asked whether it was too macabre. She looked at me without comprehension, as though I were speaking Urdu. What then? "It's just. . . well, how will these people find their bodies on Judgement Day if their bones are all mixed up?" I looked at her as though she were speaking in tongues. "What will they take up into heaven with them?"
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My mother’s voice is always with me, absorbed into the very fabric of my psyche where she broadcasts a show 24/7 on the internal station of the superego that Annie Lamont calls radio K-FUCKED. She died in April, my mother, the month Demeter trades places with her daughter Persephone in hell to renew the world. On the day of mom's funeral, in Wisconsin, the sun shone fiercely against the crystal clear late winter ice. Then it snowed, the wind came up, it rained, washing the snow and ice away, lighting split the sky, and lilac bushes exploded in ecstasy behind garages and along fences everywhere filling the air with an aching desire for another chance at life. The service had nothing of my mother in it; only her ashes, the charred remains. She had already been sucked to the underworld.
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When I write, Dorothy returns from Hades and gets to work subverting the narrator. I have the story arc, but mom has the voice. It’s not like hearing her voice inside my head. What happens is that I begin to see the world the way she saw it and the only way I can capture the images that unwind when I write is to use her language. I sometimes suspect the only reason I write is her voice. To hear it again.
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Aside from the engineering satisfactions of the craft, the major reason I write is that the time I spend working through a story is the time my mother and I have the most civil conversation of our lives despite the fact she has been dead for years. In an imaginary space where I can reinvent her as I need her, we get lost in each other. Lulled by our temparary truce, I operate comfortably in my own skin, feeling safe enough to be like her, to adopt her expressions and manner of speaking while she, like the good witch in a fairy tale, sees and speaks what is in my heart.

Why I Live In the Port of Oakland

The Unseen Sea from Simon Christen on Vimeo.

Running

Less than 10 miles from where I sit typing this still-dark morning, El Cerrito slumbers under a stringy web of Chinese elms and sagging power lines. Early, early in those lost mornings, lying in bed, letting the last of the summer breezes swell at the window, I would hear morning rise before its beams gave a pale glow to the luffing curtains. The sewing machine sound of the commuter train; the sticky suck of tires on asphalt; the slap and sigh of newspapers hitting driveways.
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Before Aurora could reveal among the shadows that spun as headlights swept the walls and ceiling, the stand by my wide bed, the book that sat there, that it was a red book, that it was Proust, I would hear the far off cries of trains pulling through the Port of Oakland and wonder where they had been, where they would go. "Hop on," whispered the memory of a lover whose wanderlust led her to do exactly that, now so many years past. "Hop on," called the ghost of Kerouac and the legions of unknown and unknowable rail riders who could not function in the thin oxygen of normal. But their calls would fade and I would sink again into sleep until dawn when the birds sang me back from the deep interior to begin again, to try again to carve out a place in the stultifying atmosphere of the regular, white, christian world.
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I did not hop on although I am near enough now that I could. The trains serving the port thunder past my bedroom not more than 100 yards from where I lay my head. Their whistles, once the far off cries of loons on the opposite side of the lake, now demand that I yield my consciousness entirely to them as they shake the ground, heavy wheels scrape the rails, grinding metal against metal, and monstrous whistles breathe out their warnings like whale songs reverberating through a pod of Leviathans but unmitigated by the dampening ocean.
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Many here find the train noise a nuisance, but it awakens in me the romance of fleeing; the thrill of being gone, gone, gone—the promise that sustained me through the wasteland of childhood. Proust excelled at ecphrasis, making me shy about attempting to describe the voice of these trains as they whine, moan, shout, or blast through my subconscious. It is a music for which one cannot acquire a taste but only recognize a sympathique of heart. Contrary to every other literary tradition, the iconic American character is a loner, usually on the lam often as the result of a wrong choice made at a critical moment. We are not a band of merry men living outside the law in a shady forest, nor are we a brigade of pirates on the surging main, a fraternity of musketeers bound by the shared blood of a cut in, nor a crusade, nor any of many legends of round tables or castles in Spain.
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The American hero is a black silhouette against the setting sun, walking/riding/driving into the eternal west, casting a long shadow back to the lesser beings left behind. I am about as west as I can get and still I want to run.
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My incessant need to escape makes the port an almost ideal residence. I am reminded constantly, by the screaming military jets that roar into low airspace, the boats that slide out of the harbor, the buses, the trains, the freeway snarl of the Oakland maze, the BART line just outside my window, that I can go and while these comfort me, my first choice will always be words. Nothing can carry me as far, as swiftly, or with as much delight. As for the others, it’s good to know they are waiting.

To Market, To Market

I am driving home under the harbor, heading back to Oakland through the Webster tube—a short tunnel that connects Jack London to the 1950s. I emerge in Oakland's Chinatown, where I now must negotiate a left onto 8th. To be successful requires, in equal measures, a game of chicken and a persistent slide to the right at the top of the turn like a pat of butter skidding along a hot griddle; a maneuver dictated by local custom rather than the rules of the road. I am driving through a slice of my neighborhood that is accessible to me only on the surface—I will never penetrate the deeper psychology of Chinatown. It will always be a kaleidoscope of sounds, smells, images, and automotive attitude that let me know I may visit, but I am just passing through; always the butter, never the skillet.
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I am heading west to Broadway, about eight blocks. Is this what the world looked like to my grandmother who came to New York from a small Eastern European village during the huge migrations at the turn of the last century? Sidewalks of artfully stacked crates; cornucopias of deep purple eggplant, tawny cantaloupe, the soothing green and white of onions and leeks, dark crimson beetle nuts, alien sea cucumbers, brown eggs, white eggs, black eggs, fresh fish on chipped ice, the full spectrum of what is possible for green, mushrooms that are as dark and old as the earth, bright oranges and bananas hanging from an awning held up by a broom, women hoisting parasols that splash away sunbeams, men offloading dressed chickens and pigs from the backs of trucks—a market from some other time, some other place, replete with noodle bars, chop houses, steam tables, bakeries, and white steam clouding from cooking vents. Forklifts are not permitted and men run back and forth, sprinting loads of onions, racks of clothes, and buckets of oysters through dense traffic.
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With few exceptions, stores here are miniscule compared to the big box stores that dominate the landscape of the American interior. Shops in Chinatown are the size of an auto repair service bay, some even less. Typically, it is the cash register and the cold cases that are inside while the rest of the merchandise is piled on the sidewalk. To make the most of limited floor space in a densely packed neighborhood, merchants here use their stores literally—as storage. Each evening they drag all their wares in from the sidewalk that is their true market and pull shut the scissoring burglar-gate. Every morning they haul it all back out to the light of day.
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Every street is double parked on both sides. I have never seen a meter cop in Chinatown. Drivers stop whenever and wherever they want and people get in or out of cars at any unpredictable moment. With sidewalks narrowed by merchandise to thin strips, bottle necks form and are relieved only when everyone rushes into the street carrying a bright pink plastic bag, twisted at the top and knotted, or pushing a wheeled, wire shopping basket brimming with produce and small, shiny packages topped by a small dog for ballast. Although this neighborhood is best described as pan-Asian, commerce here is heavily Chinese and Vietnamese. Everything is seemingly familiar but nothing is the same.
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The young are separated from the old by bling and sunglasses as much as by age. Fashionable girls wear short shorts and cork-heeled slides; the boys style tight, white tees, khakis, and Vans. Smart phones swing from wrist chains but the flirting and posturing are universal. Daily life in Chinatown is lived on the street, not in the office or at the mall but in the pho bars, bakeries, and produce stalls where friends are met, news exchanged, ungrateful children are chided, and the old shuffle their way to barrels of dried fish. The restaurants are not the haute cuisine of Michelin stars and celebrity chefs (San Francisco). There is no slow food movement, no manifesto about eating local to save the planet (Berkeley). Chinatown restaurants are about a family making a living serving lunch and dinner to other families off a menu that changes seasonally if at all.
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I had to be initiated into this world of a restaurant behind every other door. Coming from a big farm state settled by Germans, Norwegians, and Swedes, I grew up eating sausage and hotdogs, salami, headcheese and wursts—foods that are more appetizing when the ingredients are left off the packaging—along with fish pickled in a sharp, tangy cream sauce and crispy sardines fried whole. I should be prepared for a bold menu. Eating here demands some familiarity with a cuisine that cooks with fish oil and includes squid, pig uterus, duck eggs that have been buried in the ground to ferment, stinky tofu, and a menu written in hanzi. More importantly, one should bring an appetite, a spirit of adventure, a willingness to experiment, and the cultural appreciation that one man’s shrimp is another man’s grub worm.
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Now I have “my place” for tender, white salt-and-pepper squid; my place for deep fried spicy tofu, oily and golden, hidden under a mound of dried red chili peppers served in a wooden boat. I have a stable of dim sum places scattered throughout the area. Almost as complex as shopping for wine in California supermarkets where one must discriminate among hundreds of competing labels that stretch across many aisles, I am learning to buy tea in dark, smoky shops where I can only point and sniff like a hunting dog. All of these now receding in my rearview mirror as I make the turn onto Broadway heading toward the waterfront and home—or what I call home today.

Season of the Witch

Exactly one year ago I moved from leafy, suburban El Cerrito to the trash-lined streets of West Oakland where I live in what a friend charmingly calls a cement box and I call a loft. The trajectory from a single house to the shared ownership of a condo is kind of a salmon run—backwards by most standards—but then no one would ever file me under “Ordinary.”
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If forced to use one word to describe the core principle of my personal weltanschauung, it would be: escape. I cannot stay in any one place for too long and I use “place” loosely to mean apartment, relationship, house, geography, frame of mind, or job. The one exception to this rule is: obliterating obsession. When I latch on to something or, rather, when something locks onto me, it is with a kind of rigor that is unbreakable, as though I am under a spell cast by a fairy tale witch. I believe my house years were a form of obsession in exploring the idea of home, something I’d never experienced and was intensely curious about. The enchantment lasted 17 years. Despite the long residency, I was, in other matters, perpetually in flight; more comfortable as a wanderer, more Moses than Henry Darger although I have much sympathy for Mr. Darger and his monstrous, introverted talent.
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At not-quite-sixty, I have lived long enough to profit from some form of life review and can see a well-established pattern of destruction and renewal that has defined my years and provided them context if not meaning. Before Augusten Burroughs, whom I admire very much as an artist, won his private war, he drank because he needed distraction from his emotions. I obsess because I need to rub them raw and then run. Both are attempts at some form of control. And control, or the illusion of safety it brings, is important to those who grew up among alcoholics or other crazy people. So I surprised myself when I left a monochromatic, predictable suburb for the volatile intensity of a highly passionate neighborhood sandwiched between a freeway and the ocean. I was done with substituting living space for home. They are not at all the same.
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For all its many virtues, Jack London has some serious flaws. We have a lot of police action nearby, it’s noisy and dirty. The air quality is noxious and the port is loud 24/7. Even more tiresome from a practical, quotidian standpoint, Jack London has no grocery store. I have learned the easiest way to get food is to take a quick hop under the bay through the Webster tube and pop up in Alameda, an island in the estuary where one is instantly transported back to the Eisenhower/Kennedy years with the exception of a spiffy new Safeway and a Trader Joe’s literally right next door to it. Crawling up the sleepy main drag of the town that time forgot, my new Acura transmogrifies into one of my mother’s enormous old, high-seated, cavernous Plymouth sedans from the 40s. They weren’t even new when we had, first, a mint green Leviathan and, then, a blue and white two-tone; both with steering wheels the size of a hula hoop because it took the strength of Hercules to turn a corner.
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In this state of drifting reverie, I notice, for the first time in scores of grocery runs, a trim little shop set back from the street, its recessed entrance neatly bisected—half in slanting shadow, half in searing white—its slatted blinds drawn tight against the hot, late-August morning. I feel an instant vibration between me and that door which is open, but barely ajar. I have learned to recognize when I am being called and I am helpless to resist so I get out of the car to hop on the magic bus to see where it might take me this time.
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A small, neat sign instructs more than asks me to knock, and I do leaning in to scan the shaded interior of Biche’s, purveyor of rare books and collectible first editions. The room, when my eyes adjust to the low light, is as I imagine would be Mr. Toad’s of Toad Hall: filled in that meticulous way that suggests every item has been thoughtfully selected and placed and, when room had run out, concessions had been made but, while space had grown tight, the perfection of neatness had not been forfeit. The bookshelves lining the walls reach floor to ceiling and are stacked in clean, orderly rows. The center cases are lower, made of richly grained and polished wood that captures and holds the honeyed hues of morning. Instead of the chaotic jumble of every other used bookstore I have been in, there is an immediately discernable principle of order that is so welcoming to my categorizing brain that I am flooded with relief and intense curiosity—a charmed mixture that always makes my heart sing.
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M. Biche is at first nothing more than a detached voice from the center of the room telling me I may enter but, soon as I am fully in the shop, he rises from the concealing embrace of a circle of bookcases to greet me. The first thing one notices about M. Biche is that he hasn’t shaved in two days so that the stubble on his cheeks matches the cropped hair on his balding dome. He is fastidiously dressed in khaki shorts and a pressed Hawaiian shirt neatly tucked behind a brown leather belt with a shiny brass buckle. He’s not at all strange, but I get the distinct feeling he could go there in an instant. I feel comfortable enough to take a risk so I introduce myself with my recently-learned open sesame to the book trade. I extend my hand to him and say, “Hi. I collect.” At once the man and the chamber all around us are transformed as though touched by what Proust would call “the uplifted finger of day” so that everything shines in that exacting light of the transient intersection where truth and unconscious longing made manifest meet and open their welcoming arms to one who has traveled so long without rest.
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I am made as welcome as the angels that visited Abraham and invited to browse as long and deep as I wish through two rooms of precisely arranged books of spectacular quality and presentation. My eyes spin in my head until the plums are all aligned and the jackpot bell rings while plumes of smoke blast from my ears. There is treasure everywhere I look. This is more than a used bookstore. This is a whole new level; a true antiquarian book store where every dust jacket wears mylar and every spine is visible like pretty maids all in a row. Patterned rugs quiet footsteps and give the open, clear aisles a cozy warmth rather than an intimidating veneer of ostentation. I like it here. M. Biche is a discerning rag picker, selecting only the best copies for his store. There are no broken spines nor did I see a chipped jacket and yet the prices are reasonable; certainly higher than at my neighborhood seller where the goal is simply to move product regardless of collectability. M. Biche is in the business of satisfying those of us who are in the thrall of book collecting.
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I am curious about who such people are largely because I appear to be one of them—a late life surprise. The idea of owning a mint condition, first printing of all the Pulitzer Prize winning novels hit me with stunning force only this year. I have been swept into a community of rare and specific delight. It is one of those diversions that take a life and completely recalibrate it, providing new language, new associates, new routes through the stretch of years that remain. M. Biche is a harbinger. I must pay close attention for he is a guide.
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“My first career was as a search and rescue pilot for the Coast Guard,” he tells me as though to explain his low-fat, swimmer’s physique and a sartorial style that hints at a military past. “Now I search out and rescue old books.” It is an occupation, I learn, that is not for the faint hearted. M. Biche explains that when he first delved into collecting, when he was a novice, he says pointedly and looking directly into my eyes, he became consumed but was without focus. He bought everything that he came across; there was no strategy. I shift uncomfortably and glance away to see what might be happening on the street, i.e., nothing. “I burned through a ton of money,” he says instructively, “To the point where it caused harm in my marriage.” He pauses for an instant. Perhaps he has not looked at this aspect of himself since the last time a rookie bounded in from left field. “I mean, we divorced.”
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I may not be a Pulitzer Prize winning author, but I know the start of a terrific story when I hear one and did the only thing I could in that particular situation. I sat down and said, “Then what happened?” The answer, predictably in any initiation to a way of being or a spiritual practice, was that he acquired discipline. He transformed himself from an idiot to a savant. We talked for over an hour. These randomly encountered sellers are my teachers. I learn language, practices, conferences, bad guys, good guys, how to look for and recognize the signs of my tribe. I tell him of a book purchase I am considering and he walks me through the valuation process step-by-step, instructing me, shaping me. I leave having ascended a few steps in the order. I am no longer a white belt. As proof, I am holding a complimentary pass to the rare book dealer show later this month in Sacramento. I am M. Biche’s guest.
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When I shut the door behind me and walk back to my car, I have the pleasurable feeling of having penetrated some membrane, of having stepped through some veil and entered non-ordinary, luminous space; of having temporarily left the mundane world for the numinous. They were there all along. My people. And I need not worry whether I have found them or they have found me. I am home.