The Book Business

Paperback Traffic

I first learned that my friend D___ was gay when I ran into him, while I was a taxi driver in Phoenix, at one of the gay club/bars I didn’t know we had until I drove (See TAXI !!). The friends I followed to SF, including D___ were almost all gay (or bi) and they were here because of the burgeoning gay scene of the time.

That first summer in SF we had ridden the streetcar out to Castro Street -- the epicenter of all things gay -- not counting the other scenes on Polk and Folsom streets -- for lunch at a restaurant someone knew about. R___, who would soon be working at a Waldenbooks downtown, applied at the local general, new bookstore called Paperback Traffic (PBT). Time passes and PBT is looking for help so they call R___ who is now at Waldenbooks and refers them to D___. D___ gets the job and, again time passes and they again are hiring, and I get the call. R___ and D___, along with S___ from our advance party and T___ and L___ from the reinforcements that arrived from Arizona later that same summer, are now living in a huge Victorian flat in a bad part of town with another woman, J3. I’ve been socializing with them all and J3 is the person who’s leaving PBT, and she knows me well by this time.

I was sick when I interviewed for the bookstore job and didn’t make much of an impression, J3 told the manager of the store, J4, to just hire me, which she did. Within about a week I was the assistant manager and would remain in that position until they closed the store down (the owners of the business and building -- two remarkably stupid gay men -- finally realized that they could make more money, easier, by leasing out the space).

One of the perks of working in the retail book business is that, not only do you get a discount on purchases, but you can borrow books to read as long as they still look new when you return them. I’m still so careful with books that you can’t tell I’ve read a book several times. So now I could read even more widely and cheaply. Eventually I would do some buying for the store in my sections (science fiction, history, philosophy) so I could even make sure we had what I wanted to read. (There was a gotcha side to this as I still have many of these books on my shelves as I couldn’t stand to return them when they proved unpopular with the reading public, so I bought them myself.)

This means that for the final years of the ‘70s -- the peak of the Gay Revolution in San Francisco -- I was working every day on Castro street at the absolute epicenter of the Gay world (outside NYC). One member of our staff had been a Cockette (Pristine Condition) and was now a Sister of Perpetual Indulgence (and this was at the beginning, when Sisters were Sisters and could roller-skate in their habits).

When we first moved to SF the first thing we read in the newspaper every morning was the serialized Tales of the City by Armistead Maupin. This was a soap opera with characters of the moment, set in San Francisco, that has since been converted into a series of books and a TV mini-series. But what was amazing about it at the time was that Maupin worked-in actual events as they happened. If there was some big social event happening in the real world, the next morning you could read what your fictional friends had done at the event. I’m sure it was hard to be that creative on such a deadline, but it was one of the most brilliant experiments in fiction I’ve ever seen -- and it really sold newspapers.

I got to know Maupin by sight because he continued to create additional books with the same characters and he often came to our stores to sign and sell his latest book. I even got to spend time with Gore Vidal because his signing event was upstaged by some hullabaloo out on the street -- possibly involving the Sisters or the Gay Men’s Choir -- and I got the job of trying to keep him entertained as no one came in to see him or buy his latest book. For more about PBT people and the Castro/Gay scene back then, see Don and Clark.)

The Bookplate

Closing down a business -- your place of employment -- is always sad especially when that business was relatively healthy but the owners were just greedy. We sold off or otherwise disposed of all the books and fixtures and then ended up on unemployment... which wasn’t bad. I’d always kept my expenses low so I could survive on what I was getting from the government. But, at that time, you had to demonstrate you were actively seeking work by applying for jobs in your field. There had been a second PBT store that had closed even earlier. The assistant manager of that store had ended up as manager of a bookstore/restaurant combination called The Bookplate. I applied there with no intention of getting the job (I was happy collecting unemployment for a while) and the bastard hired me. So now I was working the late shift at a “bookstore” that was primarily a restaurant.

Mostly, I worked the cash register and flirted with the waitresses. The few things that I recall about this job were that the food was not bad, they played the same music tape (light Jazz) each night, which was fine until it started driving me nuts, and the mice.

Every night I would close out the register and work out the tips with the waitresses and then help clean up the restaurant space. After the tables had been cleared and the floor vacuumed, we would sneak up to this little utility door and throw it open to find a bunch of mice waiting for the Big Ones to leave so they could go foraging. Aside from the door -- now blocked by the Big Ones -- the only way out of this space was a hole in the floor a conduit pipe ran through. This hole was only large enough for one mouse to pass at a time so what the mice did was hop in place as one by one their friends dove through the hole to safety. It was absolutely hysterical to watch.

There was actually one other thing I remember about working there, but this had to do with the trip home on the bus every night after midnight. At the time, the best BBQ place in town was a little dive on Divisadero called Do City. Almost every night the bus driver would stop at Do City and get his dinner in a takeaway bag and bring it on the bus. The BBQ smells would already be permeating the bus as we sat waiting out front, but they just exploded from the bag once it was aboard. Christ, it smelled good. By this time I had been a vegetarian for over 10 years so I couldn’t have digested that food even if I had wanted to, but BBQ ribs was always my favorite. Once I learned to drive I used to frequent this dive BBQ place near downtown Phoenix where the food came out on waxed paper and the kitchen was behind bulletproof glass -- just like at Do City.

Cover to Cover

Eventually, I landed a job at Cover To Cover, another “real” independent bookstore just down the street from me in Noe Valley. I worked there for the remainder of my retail career. CTC had the advantage of being within two blocks of my apartment. The owner was a bit eccentric but that’s pretty much the norm in the book business. When I started there, J4 was the manager but she eventually moved on to other places where she imagined (falsely) she could have a saner work environment. I had built something or other (I only remember buying and sawing the wood at Cliff’s -- this wonderful hardware and variety store on Castro that still exists as a co-operative). I continued building bookcases and magazine racks and the like for CTC and for friends. My time in woodworking shop was finally paying off.

But something else from my educational past was also about to pay off and this would have remarkable repercussions. (See Programming & Tech Writing.

Bookstore epilogue

I am typing this from a cafe next door to the building where the Rizzoli Bookstore used to be near Union Square. Rizzoli was, in my opinion, the most beautiful bookstore in the city. It occupied several floors of a lovely old building and was always generously stocked. It was a perfect example of what a well capitalized bookstore could be. Within a few blocks, back in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, there was also a Waldenbooks, a Doubleday’s, a Brentano’s, the local Stacy’s, and the big Macy’s department store also had a book department. All these outlets closed, over the years, but Border’s opened a huge store and Cody’s briefly expanded here from Berkeley. Today they are all gone and you can not buy a new book in the biggest shopping district in town.