Years ago, when I was still in Inglewood, I used to go to this place on Market Street. Mind you Market Street in Inglewood in the last three decades had been a collection of closed movie theaters from the 1940s (still proudly displaying weathered marquees), athletic shoe shops, beauty shops, liquor stores, and indoor swapmeets that abounded in counterfeit goods, and nearly all of these places were run by Koreans with some black and latino folks mixed in. I still don’t understand why that was, but I’m sure you can find someone who knows about urban development and cultural migration patterns to explain it, and mind you none of this stood out because it’s just the way it was. Thinking back I didn’t appreciate the fact that we even had a Main Street.
In any case if you’re picturing this, a street halfway between urban charm and quaint Main Street decay, then you need to throw in a brownstone building (though I didn’t know what a brownstone was because, again, Los Angeles), and in that brownstone there was the bookshop. It was like finding a back-alley hovel on the streets of Marrakech or some other place that may as well be Shangri-La to a kid from Inglewood. The inside wasn’t dark, but it was lit by the sun’s rays in the day and faint lights at night, both of which lent it an ethereal glow. There was also a fine dust in the air which contributed to the weird, hazy feel, like being in a TV soap flashback. The moment you entered there was the smell of wood smoke and that aforementioned haze, along with the occasional wisp of tobacco from the owner’s pipe. He was a middle-aged Vietnamese gentleman who greeted everyone with a smile and a “how are you, my friend,” and when you had a question it was “let me show you, my friend,” and when you’d chosen a book to buy it was “good choice, my friend.” This gentleman (and that’s what he was, more gentlemanly than you and I, that’s for damn sure), I never learned his name, much for the same reason I was always “my friend.”
The shop itself wasn’t laid out like a shop is supposed to be laid out, like the places at the mall. There weren’t neatly organized rows of plastic shelves and carefully categorized sections. A librarian’s nightmare no doubt, but there was a system.
“Science fiction?”
“Which is that, my friend?”
“Um, books about the future ‘n stuff. Robots, outer space.”
“Oh, back corner, over there.”
He’d point, and that was the system. He’d point at the wooden table in the center, or any one of the large, wooden shelves that lined the outer edges of the shop proper. You’d walk over and sure enough there’d be a collection of books from the genre, with old mixed in with the new, and none of it alphabetized. It wasn’t convenient if you were looking for a specific book but the best if you liked going on book-finding adventures. Sometimes you’d stumble across things like bookmarks, records, feathers, beads, hats, tobacco pipes, and other miscellaneous baubles that the shop owner liked to throw out there and sell, just for the hell of it.
Of course I haven’t told you about the best part of this bookshop. See, this gentleman, this connoisseur of the finest aged books and trinkets, he had a secret place. The wall of shelves at the far end of the shop only reached the midpoint of the shop’s space, and beyond those shelves there was always a green glow of sorts that you could see on the ceiling past the top of the shelf wall. There was no visible access to this part of the shop and if the owner wanted to get in there I imagine he’d have to climb over the bookshelves and jump over the shelf wall. He never did this, not while I was there anyway, but I bet that whatever he had back there, it was good. It had to be something like a collection of secret tomes that revealed some secret knowledge about the most secret things in the universe, like why the leaning tower of Pisa hasn’t fallen, or the method of aging an egg for a thousand years in the span of only a few months, or ten thousand ways to make love to a woman for ten thousand days.
That’s what I imagine now. Who knows what I must have thought back then and I certainly can’t be expected to recall, but it’s always peculiar that I could be sitting somewhere, like a flat boulder up in the Sierras or a shaky stool in a bar on Geary, or even in front of a computer with Tumblr on-screen, and have the memories of my visits to that shop float right back up to the surface, triggered by the faint recollection of dust, of green lights, and of a time when the world was something I read about in books.