Book shopping with Sharp

Inside the K-W Bookstore looking for some new reads. I finished Henry and June by Anais Nin last week, and I’ve been in a pretty thorough frenzy through all of Kitchener’s purveyors of fine literature to find either Incest or her “famous prose-poem” House of Incest (I bet you notice a theme; have a cookie). I’d likely have luck at the library had they not hired a collection agency to extort my non-existent income over a book of Ginsberg’s poems that I may have lost. While perusing the New Arrivals section, I notice a truck-load of suburban white teenage girls come pouring in through the front doors. None of them have a particularly intelligent look about them – they carry on loudly about high school trivialities and suddenly I wish that I was allowed in the library.

“Um, do you have… A Clockwork Orange?” one of the girls up-talks while rotating her ankle with her toe to the ground, playing with a lock of her hair. God, I think she might as well take a shot counting the molecules that comprise the bookshelf. I wander up the isle to where I’d find the Nin: no luck on either incestuous work, and I’m beginning to think I could use the same analogy for the girl to describe me finding them in a used bookstore.

I cruise up and down the isles, hoping something catches my eye. I’m midway up the Science-Fiction isle, which is positioned across from the heavy wooden shelves that are backed into a wall away from the rest of the store that house the pornography, when I hear a quiet voice. It sounds like American depictions of Nazi interrogators in films.

“You! You with the glasses!”

I pivot left and right trying to home in on the voice, seeing nobody in the isle.

“You! Down here!” the voice says. I try following it, but I have a terrible sense of direction. “To your left, dumbass. No, now to your right. Holy shit! Can’t you see?! Stop. Yes. Right there.”

I see a pocket-sized book with a trashy pulp look to it lying on the floor. I pick it up and see that it’s a Dickson. “Hey man, can you put me back on the shelf. D – I.” it directs me.

“Um…” I’m having trouble finding words to say that might adequately express my surprise. I’ve never talked to a book before. Once I smoked salvia divinorum and I was a book, but that closed speaking entirely. “Do you…?”

“Just put me on the shelf. D – I.” The book sounds pretty pissed off, so I decide to do what it says instead of suffer its wrath, although I’m fairly uncertain what form of wrath a Dickson paperback would take, were it wrathful. “Thanks, man,” it says and follows up with “You should try the de Lint.”

“Thanks.”

I crouch down to look for something by the author. I reach for the smaller of the two books on the shelf, Moonlight & Vines when another, this time much deeper, guttural voice speaks behind me:

“There’s a de Lint hardcover on the top shelf.”

I crank my neck to check my six, and I see a rather obese – like a goddamn beanbag-chair-belly-watermelon-man-tits obese – two-headed sci-fi geek, standing about 7’2”, complete with a set of fuzzy unkempt goatees and greasy hair pulled into ponytails. There’s some miracle in his/its feat of sneaking up on me like that, and no sooner than I register it in my vision do I register him/it with my nose. I remember finding a rotting squirrel once cleaning a friends deck for some cash – I’m put in mind of its lovely biological musk.

“I’ll get it for you,” the other head says. The ogre reaches up and grabs me a hardcover copy of Spirits in the Wires.

“Thanks…”

“Moonlight & Vines is one of his first books.”

“Not his first though; it was Dreams Underfoot that got him recognition.”

“I said ‘one of’.”

“Is it any good?”

“You haven’t read him?”

He sounds surprised.

“No. The Dickson…”

“You’ll love him.”

“It’s worth reading everything he’s ever written.”

“This has the Newford characters.”

“Greenmantle is set in Ottawa.”

“A solid setting, I guess.”

“Start with the Newford books.”

“They’re our favourite and we have everything by him.”

They shove the pair of books into my arms, with big proud smiles on their faces.

“Just don’t blame us if you get addicted!”

“I think I have another face I can place blame on for that.” I say while cautiously eyeing the Dickson paperback on the shelf.

The heads laugh, one at a time, bobbing up and down like Tweedledee and Tweedle Dumb in the Disney version of Alice in Wonderland. If I had to share a diaphragm and lungs with two heads I’d have to make use of what air I brought in – we both laugh hard at the same time and it might spell some kind of disaster, although I’m definitely not sure that I even begin to fathom the biological implications of the beast.

Staggering out from the sci-fi isle in a daze, unsure of what just happened to me, I see a line of teenage girls at the check out. They’re buying Memoirs of Geisha and the Sex in the City novelization – I don’t think the one girl ever did find A Clockwork Orange, and probably for the better. As they clear out I lay the pair of de Lint books down. The total comes to $12.49. I hand the man two fives and the change, thinking about something else entirely.

I step through the front door into the mechanical groans of the street, stopping for a second on the sidewalk to ponder what the hell just happened. Then I spin on my heel and walk back into the bookstore.

“What do you use to clean the porno section?”