THE JOY OF STORY
John M. Daniel’s Blog
April 15, 2017
Greetings, friends and celebrators
of the joy to be found in stories—writing them, reading them, telling them, or
hearing them. If you enjoy a good story, this weekly blog is for you.
This week’s post focuses on my last
year working as a bookstore clerk. You may have read this article before; it
was first published in the literary magazine Black Lamb, and I’ve posted it on this blog before. But I’m fond of
it, because it celebrates the pleasure of hand-selling books in a bookstore,
and it celebrates my decision to give up that way to make a living and move on
to other literary adventures.
§§§
THE YEAR OF
EATING DANGEROUSLY
John M. Daniel
When I lived and worked as a country
innkeeper at Wilbur Hot Springs, California, from September 1980 to September
1982, I ate well. Mostly vegetarian, with a lot of brown rice, yogurt, tofu and
other soy products in all different shapes and consistencies, fruit in season,
veggies from the garden, cheese made from our own goats’ milk, lots of granola,
and very little alcohol.
At
Wilbur Hot Springs I also became a musician, stretching my repertoire from Burl
Ives folksongs to the sophistication of Gershwin, Porter, Berlin, Rodgers &
Co., as I entertained a lounge full of guests with my guitar and serviceable
baritone voice on weekend nights.
And
another thing: at Wilbur I learned how to manage a staff and run a business,
and I took pride in the success of that business, knowing it was partly my
success.
But
this essay is not about my two years at Wilbur Hot Springs, during which I ate
well, became an entertainer on the rise, and managed a successful business. No,
this article is about the following year, September 1982 to September 1983,
which I spent in and around Palo Alto, California, during which I managed a
small business into the ground, tried and failed to perform American standards to deaf audiences, and ate
garbage.
Actually,
my Year of Eating Dangerously didn’t start out all that bad. Almost as soon as
I arrived in Palo Alto (which had been my stomping grounds before Wilbur), I
landed a gig at Savoir Fare, a brand new restaurant, playing dinner music for
$50 a night, five nights a week, plus tips and a free dinner. Good dinners,
too: steaks, salads, dishes with French names.
I
also landed a day job, five days a week, managing a small bookstore called
Kepler’s of Los Altos for $500 a month. I had worked there before, when the
store was owned by Kepler’s Books and Magazines of Menlo Park, the most
successful bookstore on the San Francisco Peninsula. By September 1982, the
smaller store had been sold off and was going through rough times, threatened
by a predatory Crown Books around the corner on El Camino Real and a predatory
Tower Books and Records in the shopping center across El Camino. But Kepler’s
of Los Altos still had its name, still served some loyal customers, and still
functioned in the same shopping center as before, which also featured a fine
deli and a health food store. So I started off the year with a good lunch every
day, as well as a good dinner. I had to pay for my lunches, but a sandwich was
only $1.50 back then.
Off
to such a good start, I decided I needed to buy some clothes, so I went to
Value Village, a classy thrift store in Redwood City, where I bought twenty
dollars worth of tweeds and dark slacks (for country club gigs, say), jackass
pants and loud shirts (for luau parties, say), and casual business wear for my
day job.
I
also found a home, sharing a condo with a woman named Irene. Irene and I were
friends only. Nothing intimate: separate bedrooms, separate bathrooms, separate
shelves in the refrigerator. We shared the kitchen but did not share food. I
ate my breakfasts there: granola with yogurt and fruit. Good, healthy food, at
least at first.
Irene,
meanwhile, ate her starchy breakfasts and heat-lamp lunches in the cafeteria of
the senior retirement center where she was an administrator. For dinner she
browsed the happy hour scene. She knew which bars had the pot-stickers, which
the Swedish meat balls, which the nachos, and which the deep-fat-fried
zucchini. If she wanted to splurge and get away from the bar crowd and the
fried food, Irene took advantage of the salad bar at The Sizzler. A little
roughage never hurts, and you could find a bit of protein there if you really
looked for it.
I
was scornful of Irene’s diet, at first.
Maybe
it was Irene who greased the slippery slope to junk food addiction, her and her
happy hour hors d’oeuvres. Of course I would never have cruised the cocktail
circuit if the gig at the Savoir Fare had lasted. But, like many a brand new
restaurant, the Savoir Fare went broke in a hurry. I hope my music didn’t
contribute to its demise, but it was clear I was expendable. They cut me back
to two nights a week, for tips only, and then they shut their doors.
Poor
Savoir Fare, and poor me; $50 a night poorer, and no more free dinners. I had
two choices, and I alternated between them: cook like a bachelor, which meant
frozen pot pies and TV dinners, plus a salad consisting of lettuce doused in
Wishbone Italian dressing; or barhop, which meant a drink or two to wash down
whatever I had picked out of the hot serving dishes. I got adept at loading a
tiny plate high with munchies, carrying my meal around the room, cocktail
napkins under my arm and a drink in my other hand. I felt right at home,
mingling and cracking jokes with others whose dreams had not yet come true.
My
music career wasn’t technically over yet, even if it had suffered a major
setback. I still played gigs around town—or towns,
plural, the Mid-Peninsula cities blending along “the” El Camino from strip mall
to strip mall. At a few of these gigs I was paid real money, although I never
again earned $50 for a night’s work. Mostly I got free drinks at bars, or more
often free coffee and pastry at coffee shops. That didn’t make for much of a
dinner, but that’s what I ate on nights when I was lucky enough to play for
tips. By the way, back in the early 1980s there was no rule of etiquette saying
tips had to be paper money. I often ended up counting out quarters, dimes, and
nickels, then spent them in a bar on the way home from the gig.
My
steadiest gig, during this year of eating dangerously, was as the weekend
evening entertainer for Uncle Gaylord’s Ice Cream Parlor in downtown Palo Alto,
where I competed with an espre-ssssss-o
machine and a Ms. Pacman’s doodleoodleooodle
as I labored to sell American standards to the deaf generation. Tips from
teenagers amounted to zilch-plus. But I got all the free ice cream I wanted,
plus coffee, plus cookies. I spent the spare change on a drink on the way home.
I parked and schlepped all my music equipment from the car to Irene’s condo,
then spent a couple of hours practicing my guitar before bed, to wear off the
alcohol, caffeine, and sugar enough to fall asleep.
I
still believed I had a future as a semiprofessional musician, if only because I
knew the lyrics, melodies, and Sears-Roebuck chord changes to hundreds of songs
from the golden age of American popular music, which had to count for
something.
Meanwhile,
though, my day job at the bookstore was in serious peril. In addition to the
Crown Books and the Tower Books and Records, we were at war with the landlord.
This landlord (by which I don’t mean a greedy person who wanted to join a
country club, but a corporation with no soul whatsoever) decided that Kepler’s
Books of Los Altos must die, lease or no lease. The store wasn’t tithing
enough, so the landlord hired goons to tear up our parking lot with boistrous
jackhammers. The closest places our customers could park were closer to Crown
Books or Tower Books and Records than they were to Kepler’s of Los Altos.
Managing
a failing bookstore—no customers, all day long—while I was earning shit wages
and virtually no spending cash as a musician was a two-pronged assault on my
finances and my self-esteem. What does a self-disrespecting musician do when he’s
going broke, fed up with his day job? Cut expenses, and eat crap. That’s why,
come lunchtime, I quit buying sandwiches from the deli and the health food
store and ambled across El Camino, then across San Antonio Road to the Sears
shopping center, and saved 50¢ by eating at Burger King. It was comforting
food: burger, fries, Coke. And it was lots to eat: “It takes two hands to
handle a Whopper, ’cause the burgers are bigger at Burger King.” (I didn’t add
that song to my repertoire.) I sometimes wondered why I became suddenly hungry
again two hours later, but that was easy to fix with a Snickers bar from the
deli. Oops, there went the 50¢.
By
the time late summer 1983 arrived, my fancy pants from Value Village no longer
fit me.
This
decline happened gradually, although looking back on it with time-lapse memory
my boredom and bad habits seem to have grown like weeds on steroids. The fact
is, it took what at the time seemed like the longest year in my life for me to
hit bottom. But come early August, 1983, here it was: bottom:
I
wake up at about eight o’clock of a Wednesday morning, shower, dress in
whatever is still clean and still fits, and load my amp, speakers, microphone
stand, and guitar into the back of my ten-year-old second-hand Volvo, and drive
from Irene’s condo to Kepler’s of Los Altos, stopping along the way to pick up
a couple of doughnuts and a cup of coffee. I park wherever I can find a spot,
on the other side of our shopping center, and walk to the store, open the
store, and sit behind the cash register. Another clerk comes in, and we sit. We
eat the two doughnuts and sit some more.
Midmorning
I take a walk across El Camino to a branch of my bank, where there’s a coffee
urn and a stack of miniature styrofoam cups. I wire myself together with more
coffee, which tastes like yesterday’s.
About
two p.m., I get my lunch break. I use two hands to handle my Whopper. I can’t
finish my fries, but I sneak a refill on my Coke.
Late
in the afternoon, when one clerk goes home and another comes on, I begin the
process of changing the back room into a night club. The store has dwindled,
and there are almost no books left in the back room; so the owner has moved in
a bunch of lumpy thrift-store furniture, to turn this strip-mall bookstore with
no parking lot into a community gathering spot. Nobody gathers, but on
Wednesday evenings I try to lure in the world by offering my golden oldies. I
put out a bowl of trail mix from the Lucky’s supermarket next to Tower Books
and Records, set up my equipment, place a tip jar on a stool, and stand there
singing and strumming and entertaining nobody till nine-thirty. By nine-thirty
most of the trail mix is gone, thanks to me. Then I start lugging all my
equipment back to my used Volvo, which has leaked oil on the parking asphalt
but I don’t care, and by the time the car is packed, it’s ten o’clock and time
to close the store.
Dinner
time. I drive into the heart of Los Altos, park and lock, and walk into Mac’s
Tea Room, one of the last piano bars on the Peninsula to hold out against disco
and sports bars. I’m well known at Mac’s. I’m a star. Other customers greet me
with smiles. Women want to sit next to me. The piano player urges me to the
microphone, and I sing. They all applaud, and I’m invited, urged, to sing
another. Do I get paid for this? No. In fact I throw dollar bills into the tip
bowl, so I’m paying to give my songs away, and it’s worth every penny. Besides,
by now Mac’s Tea Room and Uncle Gaylord’s Ice Cream Parlor are my only steady
gigs. Only gigs period, lately.
Besides,
when I’m singing at Mac’s I get free dinner. Dinner: bowl after bowl of free
popcorn, as long as I keep buying drinks.
And
I can hear that sweet siren’s song, encouraging me to keep buying drinks until
I am flat broke.
I’m
pleased to say this story has a happy ending. In mid-August, while I was
sitting behind the register at the bookstore with nothing else to do, I read an
article in Newsweek about small-press
publishers in Santa Barbara. I had spent most of my adult life on the fringes
of the publishing industry, I still believed in small businesses, and I had
loved Santa Barbara for years. I had a good friend living there, who told me he
would house me temporarily and help me find work. And Santa Barbara was
populated by wealthy older people who might enjoy my music.
Within
a month I was gone from Palo Alto and the Mid-Peninsula happy hours. Gone from
Kepler’s of Los Altos, gone from Uncle Gaylord’s Ice Cream Parlor, gone from
Mac’s Tea Room, gone from Irene’s condo, and gone from Burger King.
I
was off to a new land, a friendly city, where I could make a whole new set of
mistakes, perhaps, but a land where I would relearn to eat like a human being
instead of a garbage disposal.
§§§
Call for submissions: Your 99-Word
Stories
The
deadline for May’s 99-word story submissions is May 1, 2017. The stories will
appear on my blog post for May 13, and will stay posted for a week.
note: this 99-word story feature
is a game, not a contest. Obey the rules and I’ll include your story. I may
edit the story to make it stronger, and it’s understood that you will submit to
my editing willingly. That’s an unwritten rule.
Rules for the 99-word
story feature are as follows:
1. Your story must be 99
words long, exactly.
2. One story per writer,
per month.
3. The story must be a
story. That means it needs plot (something or somebody has to change), characters,
and conflict.
4. The story must be
inspired by the prompt I assign.
5. The deadline: the
first of the month. Stories will appear on this blog the second Saturday of the
month.
6. I will copy edit the
story. The author of the story retains all rights.
7.
Email me your story (in the body of your email, or as a Word attachment) to: jmd@danielpublishing.com
THIS
MONTH’S PROMPT FOR NEXT MONTH’S 99-WORD STORY: “Tra la, it's May, the lusty Month of May, That lovely
month when everyone goes blissfully astray.”
§§§
Calling
all published authors—
I try to feature a guest
author the third Saturday (and week following) of each month. If you’re
interested in posting an essay on my blog—it’s also a chance to promote a
published book—email me directly at jmd@danielpublishing.com.
§§§
Thank you for visiting.
Please drop by next week!
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