The Hard Way on Purpose (3 page)

POPULAR STORIES FOR BOYS

Lord, I
lived
inside those books. And they were not books that, conventionally speaking, you would choose to live inside, were you choosing to live inside some books. You would choose smart, new volumes: coffee-table books on hibiscus or vintage Vespas, I think, or you would choose something well glossed and shrink-wrapped, written by someone unthreateningly attractive and slightly more clever than you, someone like, say, Elizabeth Gilbert or Calvin Trillin, with whom you could put up for a while, like a hiking partner on the Appalachian Trail. (Yes: you would choose Bill Bryson.) You would not choose those books I chose on rainy Sunday afternoons when my parents took us to the used-book store near downtown, a place with rows and rows of faded spines organized by arcane, sometimes confounding principles of subject. “Paperback Fiction” covered the entire canon of, well, fiction published in paperback. But certain themes were diced and distilled to microscopic specifics such as “Aviation/WWII History/Allies/Lighter-Than-Air” and “Jewish Studies/Akron & Area.” There were tantalizing subcategories of antique firearms but no hint anywhere of the corresponding violence and death that is the platonic craving of the American boy.

The store was in an old building one ring from the center of town, and during the drive there—tucked with two brothers and a sister into the backseat of a gray AMC Pacer—covering the four miles from our house near the edge of the city, I could sense the gentle downhill slope toward downtown. If you ran out of gas and were in no hurry, you could roll there.

Industrial cities almost invariably evolved outward from their lakes and rivers, guided by liquid muses. Akron originally evolved as a canal town—the main drag once made of water—and later as a factory town, and so its development was based more on the principles of gravity and flow than the engineered order of lines and grids. The center of town was low, where the canal found its easiest course, and the neighborhoods evolved up the gentle slopes according to the prevailing winds. The poorest people lived in the places that smelled the worst and where settled the highest concentrations of soot, and the ascending classes followed in order, so that the castles (and some were
actual
castles) built by the wealthy founders and company presidents were just beyond reach of their own by-products of smoke and ash. Don't shit where you eat, the saying goes.

From where we parked for the bookstore, I could see the tall, round smokestacks of the B.F. Goodrich complex just yonder, and beyond that the tall, round smokestacks of Firestone. Viewed from this vantage, the spiked architecture of the smokestacks collectively formed a sort of bar code against the sky, as if they composed the imprint of our true self. Even on a Sunday, the air hung with a burnt pungency of sulfur, which I inhaled with equal shares of attraction and repulsion. It was like that glass jar of gumdrops on your grandmother's table: maybe sweet and maybe spice.

Inside the store was a cat that lay across the counter, obvious as a stage prop, watching us wander into our places. The owner, Frank Klein, was built with the sturdy earthiness of a russet potato—thick fingers and brawny shoulders and rocky facial features studded with sharp blue eyes. He looked like a relief map of Maine. His hair and beard were of the same shape and consistency as that on my Kung-Fu Grip G.I. Joe, whose follicles were described in the packaging as “lifelike.” Mr. Klein was highly social and often engaged my parents, and sometimes me, as we moved past the cat and into the store.

The store was called the Bookseller, the pun of whose name I had figured out myself at an earlier age when entendre represents revelation—
seller . . . cellar!
—and which I still appreciated as I headed toward the downstairs. The basement, underlit, musty, and damp, was devoted to books that a book dealer wouldn't feel uncomfortable storing in such a place, and that's where I always headed because that's where I had previously discovered a green volume whose glue had turned to the prediluvian dust of saints' bones, a book whose title—
Popular Stories for Boys—
was rendered entirely ironic by time, as it was published in—well, I don't know what year because the unhinged spine had released the title pages and the first two pages of text. Suffice to say that the “boys” with whom this book may originally have been “popular” had likely read it by gaslight, in shirtsleeves and suspenders. Because of the missing pages, I started on page three, halfway through a word that soldiered on without the aid of its lost prefix:

. . . truding from the body. But there was no sign of this—only a tiny hole through the center of its forehead, from which blood was oozing.

I was hooked.

Popular Stories for Boys
compiled four complete books:
Bomba the Jungle Boy
;
Sky Riders of the Atlantic
;
Bob Dexter, Club House Mystery
;
and
Wrecked on Cannibal Island
. It ran on close to nine hundred pages and I read them all. This book, and those that followed, did many things for me in terms of imagination and aesthetic and the rituals of reading and so on. But first, mostly, and most profoundly, they took me down with their smell.

As if in response to the olfactory challenge of the factory-town air, the books in that basement were pungent and complex—dust, pulp, ink, cotton duck, binding strings—and when I found myself alone, I pulled down a volume and buried my nose into the center crease, pulling the sage up into my nostrils until I needed to exhale and inhale again. Sometimes (first looking this way and that) I touched my tongue to the page for a taste.

Here was an invocation: however deeply I could draw the scent into myself—literal inspiration—I could then exhale my wish for the answers to all these sacred mysteries.

*  *  *

From the time I learned to read I knew that I wanted to be a writer, and I knew exactly what that meant: I had committed myself to an insoluble mystery. I had no idea how books were made, nor any manifestation of who made them. Half the time, the name of the person on the cover turned out to be a pseudonym, fictions within fictions—Samuel Clemens mingling with Poor Richard and Theodor Geisel and for God's sake Theo. LeSieg—all of them pouring stories through their funnels of deception.

Following the direction of
Popular Stories for Boys
, I took particular interest in books on the subjects of the American past, but more specifically, I sought books written
in
the American past, so that my childhood library and the vocabulary I absorbed by osmosis was markedly anachronistic, with titles such as Arthur M. Winfield's
Rover Boys Out West
from the “Rover Boys Series for Young Americans,” published in 1900 by the Mershon Company (a used book, inscribed “For Byron in the hope he may enjoy reading about the Rover Boys Out West,” and signed “Uncle Bob, May 14, 1932,” an inscription that seemed oddly redundant).

I also read Winfield's
Poor but Plucky
from the “Bright and Bold” series and some of the Jerry Todd books he wrote:
Jerry Todd and the Purring Egg
,
Jerry Todd and the Whispering Cave
, etc. (The prolific Arthur M. Winfield turned out to be the pen name of a man known to the civilian world as Edward Stratemeyer. Mysteries within mysteries.)

I read
The X Bar X Boys at Nugget Camp
(1928) and
The X Bar X Boys in Thunder Canyon
(1926), installments in a series by James Cody Ferris, which if that was his real name is awesome.

All these books had certain elements in common. They began with fanciful frontispieces, black-and-white illustrations captioned with a snippet of text:

In her hand the woman held a long barreled rifle.

Walter sprang in to save the lives of the horses.

Bomba brought the paddle down with all his force.

Nearly every chapter ended with a cliff-hanger, which often literally included someone hanging off a cliff.

Yes, sir, the Cap'n had been knocked out by a loaded catchup bottle. And the mysterious humpback who had committed the deed had escaped into the night.

Eventually, I recognized that many of these books were published by Grosset & Dunlap. I can't say that I went specifically looking for that imprint on the spine, but by early adolescence, I could be best described as a “G&D man.” I carried the belief that “pluck” was among the most desirable personality traits a young man could possess, and also that it was not unusual for boys to drink black coffee nor to whittle as a pastime, nor to have friends named Red and Stumpy and Slim and High Hat Frank (a tramp, an actual tramp!) nor also to be heroic orphans. I called skunks
polecats
and knew that when the time came to put my acquired knowledge into practice, I would be able to identify fool's gold by pressing it between my teeth.

I also believed that normal human conversation was conducted in highly expository back-and-forth exchanges of quick wit and hyperbolic dialect:

“And what do you think about it, Pop?” Roy asked at length. “Any pronounced opinions on the subject?”

“You mean about goin'?”

“I mean about the chances of striking gold at Nugget Camp.”

“Oh!” The old puncher rubbed his chin thoughtfully. “Well, if you really want to know, Roy—I think the chances are pretty blame good!”

These books led to an interest in fanciful history (
The Life of Kit Carson
,
The Oregon Trail
,
With Crockett and Bowie: Fighting for the Lone Star Flag
), and then led sort of accidentally to
Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass: An American Slave
, and then by calculated chance to Laura Ingalls Wilder. I may be the only heterosexual boy in Ohio history who not only read all the
Little House
books, but also as a result took up sewing because the skill seemed absolutely necessary to my survival here on the lone prairie. (Which was actually the twin bed in the room I shared with my late-twentieth-century, middle-class brother.)

These books, most of them, shared one other common trait. In their opening pages, on that thick cottony paper, were lists of other titles. By 1927, for instance, Arthur M. Winfield had written a “first” Rover Boys series consisting of twenty titles, and a “second” series of ten more, and also, apparently in his downtime, six titles of a Putnam Hall series, which I'd never even seen. This list wasn't complete. It didn't mention Winfield's Bright and Bold series, published in the late nineteenth century, a series at whose scope and breadth I could only guess, because the list on the
Poor but Plucky
title page indexed a few titles followed by “etc., etc.,” suggesting that Mr. Winfield's prolificness was best not expressed in finite terms.

Leo Edwards, meanwhile, had already published eleven books in the Jerry Todd series, plus eight Poppy Ott books, three Trigger Berg books, and four Tuffy Beans. (A previous owner of this copy of
Jerry Todd and the Purring Egg
had penciled marks next to the titles—check marks and little circles, apparently to indicate those read and those yet to be read, an accounting of desire whose echo carries into the Amazon Wish List.)

The bit of copy that preceded the list indicated a body of work filled with “Pirates! Mystery! Detectives! Adventure! Ghosts! Buried Treasure! Achievement!”

The list of books in the X Bar X Boys series ended with a preemptive strike: “Other volumes in preparation.”

Books were being written everywhere, at every hour of the day and night, in the mystery of creation, but with such speed and efficiency that they could not be accounted for by anything but the promise that they would come, they would come, they would come. Mystery! Adventure! Buried Treasure! Achievement! Etc.!

All of this combined to make two things quite clear, both of which were ultimately depressing.

1. I would never be able to read all the books.

2. If I wanted to be a writer, I was already dreadfully far behind.

*  *  *

The idea of choices was complicated in the industrial Midwest.

It wasn't just that this was a land of plenty. It specifically was a land of plenty for a newly mature and uniquely American set of consumers, a deeply nuanced middle class that begged for equally nuanced ways to indulge its proud discretionary income. The suburban shopping mall had almost completely replaced the urban downtown department store, and its concoursed nooks and honey­combs catered to increasingly concise stratifications of patronage. (Think a Chess King man would be caught dead in a Frye boots outlet? Think again, hombre.) Mail order found its sweet spot in the era between the Sears Wish Book and the Internet. We received catalogs in our mailbox by the rubber-banded bundle: Lands' End, Sharper Image, Renovator's Supply, Best Products, and on and on.

K-Mart, meanwhile, as the proletarian standard-bearer, was deepening its sensitivity to its own micro-demographics and would soon, depending on the locale, evolve into Super K, Big K, K-Mart Super Center.

The first two K-Mart Super Centers were built in suburbs of Akron. We were the national test market, and we embraced that like an honor. In the same way that Ohio seems invisible and irrelevant to the rest of the country until it comes time to elect a president, so too is it the kind of place whose clientele might seem nondescript until it comes time to put a mainstream, middle-class, mass-market shopping concept through its paces. Then a little eureka-bulb lights up.

Ohio!

As a rookie small-town newspaper reporter in 1991, I covered the opening of the very first K-Mart Super Center in the suburban town of Medina, Ohio. It was a huge event locally, with a ribbon cutting and throngs of curiosity seekers, and it also drew national media coverage. The news of the day included a woman's wandering through the parking lot, crying and lost, unable to find her car in the vast acreage of automobiles. The police finally got involved, and after an extensive search the two were reunited.