Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

Fucking John Grisham. Fucking Danielle Steele. Fucking Richard Patterson and fucking Clive Cussler. Worthless thick, shiny-jacketed, coarse-paper, airport novels sucking up precious space in a bin that could be filled with crisp volumes on Finnish architecture and Chinese history, fragrant leatherbacks with raised-band spines and gilt edges, or linen-covered quartos crammed with fine-paper prints of valuable Depression-era photographs. Books that will shine in a nicely offset stack of two or three on an original Mies coffee table. Books that I can buy at the Volunteer Veterans for a few dollars and sell for a hundred or more. Instead, I find yet another copy of The Greatest Generation by Tom Brokaw, with slight edge wear to the dust jacket and a Christmas inscription inside from Susan to Granddad. Experience has taught me that some books are for reading and some books are for selling.

A dozen different sellers on Amazon offer this yesteryear bestseller for a dollar. How can they sell a book for a dollar and survive? They're mills. They wrap the books in old newsprint, stuff them into cheap manila envelopes, mail them at bulk-rate a few hundred a day and glean an extra dollar of profit from the spread in the Amazon postage allowance. Or they're lonely housewives somewhere in Utah or South Dakota who value the act of selling a book to a stranger in a faraway state not in dollars earned but as a sad substitute for genuine social interaction.

I need to find and sell at least twenty mid-priced books every day including Sundays just to make rent, groceries and car insurance. I want to take Caleb to the San Diego Zoo. With souvenirs and overpriced hamburgers it's a hundred and fifty easy and I'm low on inventory. Nick warned me that Anaheim is sewn up by a belligerent local and that I should stay away, but I thought I would just take a drive down and check it out. I don't have to buy.

I lean over and dig deep in the big canvas bin. It's brownsmog hot in Anaheim. My polo shirt and I reek of sweat. What have we here? Beneath some orphaned volumes of a scarred and worthless Compton's Encyclopedia I see the heartening flash of a shiny white and red dust jacket. I pick up the book — Value Based Investing by Alvin W. Simpson, McGraw-Hill Publishers. Despite having been pummeled by a hundred other books thrown heedlessly into the bin, it remains in respectable shape. Books are exemplary in their resilience, as am I. There's a wrinkle on the dust jacket, but the pages are crisp. I have sold this title before. It's still in print with a jacket price of $49.95. It will bring about fifteen dollars on Amazon in designated "very good" used condition.

I open it up. Oops. What's that written on the fly page? An author's signature could add several dollars to the selling price. If it's just a gift inscription from some middle-exec to his golf pro, I'll have to take five dollars off. Am I feeling lucky? Maybe not today.

"Decent title," I hear behind me. I look up and see a thickset guy in his thirties with a crew cut, a T-shirt over a beer belly and tattoos on hambone arms. He focuses squinty, challenging eyes on me and my book. This volume is ranked 26,790 in popularity on the Amazon website, a semi-good number. There's an army of Amazon online shoppers out there ready to pounce on a good price for a clean copy.

"Not bad," I say warily as I look around.

I'm in an asphalt courtyard enclosed by a decaying chain-link fence and cinderblock walls. Around me is a small crowd, mostly Mexicans, Guatemalans and Salvadorans, sorting through big laundry-style bins of discarded clothing and old shoes. Some chat amiably in Spanish among big metal racks overflowing with obsolete computer parts, dead coffeemakers and aging fax machines. These hopeful entrepreneurs take what they believe they can sell on the streets of the barrio and stuff it into big cardboard boxes and carry the boxes out to beat-up vans and pickup trucks. The sub-detritus that remains gets thrown into dumpsters provided by the Volunteer Veterans and hauled away later on a flatbed truck.

"Where you from?" Buzzcut asks. His stance is tribal and territorial.

I think back to the California Mariners Yacht Club where I was once a member and kept a small J/24 sailboat for local club races. We could get tribal and territorial if an errant tourist wandered through our gate and onto our grounds looking to rent a boat by the hour for a harbor sail. But we managed to put forth a Corinthian facade.

At the CMYC one might be folding a sail or washing down a deck but it is noblesse oblige to exhibit forbearance to the interloper. "Ah ... the marina can be confusing. I'm sorry but this is a private yacht club and we don't really rent boats here. Try over at Fisherman's Village. They have a dock there where you can rent a boat by the hour."

In landlocked Anaheim, I sense an absence of gentility. This guy's lips are tight as he awaits my response.

"Santa Monica," I reply, reaching for an ingenuous smile.

"Santa Monica." He spits the name of my benign city by the sea as if it were Sodom. "I haven't seen you here before."

"First time. Just to check it out." I am the sheep rancher walking into the cattleman's saloon.

"Nothing but shit pickings down here. Probably not worth the gas."

"Yeah. I'm definitely not finding much," I say, feigning bonhomie.

He wanders over to my pile of books and looks them over with an appraiser's eye. I have piled up a lot of heal-yourself, conquer-cancer-with-vegetables, New-Age crap — trade paperbacks in new or near-new condition. Some doomed optimist probably expired while hewing to one of these pathetic programs and then a relative dumped the books in a box and they wound up clumped in a bin at the Volunteer Veterans distribution center. Volunteer Veterans, already overstocked with merchandise for its shelves, relegated them as surplus to be unloaded in bulk to buyers like me. Books like these will sell quickly online at around seven to ten dollars, and I've got a few dozen stacked up already.

I also have an aging copy of The Old Man and the Sea. It's a hardcover with a mildly faded dust jacket that I put in the stack mostly for sentimental reasons. I read it when I was a boy and recall that its hero, Santiago, had gone many weeks without catching a fish before hooking into the big one. I remember it as a great tale of patience, persistence and reward. A copy is common as dirt so it's not worth anything to sell but I think I'll take it to read to Caleb.

There's one promising textbook, Literature and Language, a current edition in perfect condition with a sealed CD-ROM in its sleeve on the inside cover. I can sell it overnight for sixty bucks. I paid forty dollars for the bin and I've only looked at half the books, so theoretically I'm already ahead, a fact that does not seem to be lost on Buzzcut as he peruses.

"Haven't they got a Salvation Army auction in Santa Monica?" he asks. He knows they do.

"They've got a new manager who's skimming all the decent books." This is the truth, but I know it sounds like pure mendacity as it leaves my lips.

"Yeah. Well, it's not so terrific here either. That don't mean I'm gonna go tooling up the 405 and poach on somebody else's territory." He takes an aggressive step toward me.

I have the wisdom to be obsequious. I worked in advertising for sixteen years. I have a long history of baring my neck. Just tell him this is my first time here and I didn't realize that it was staked out and I don't want to cause a problem. Just act stupid and naive and back away. Except that today magma is bubbling and festering in my core. I struggle to suppress it.

"You're right," I say. "I missed you on the 405." I'm not even sure what that means, but it comes out fuck-you hostile. Buzzcut doesn't take it well. His red face turns redder.

Then erupting out of my mouth comes, "Of course I'm usually not trolling for shitkickers when I'm driving." Uh-oh. What am I doing? I haven't raised a fist since prep school. Maybe he's going to haul off and slug me. No. He simmers for a beat, and then turns on his heels and walks away. I could follow him. No. It's not even rage I feel. There's nothing to accomplish. I'll finish packing my books, leave, and never return to the Volunteer Veterans in Anaheim.

When I first arrived there were six bins of books sitting on the loading dock and no book buyers — local or imported. Except for the choking inland smog, everything seemed benign. The auctioneer, an out-of-rehab, ear-ringed, jive black ectomorph who looked like he had begun his life again at least a dozen times asked me if I was looking to bid.

"You got books to sell?" I ask, trying to sound seasoned and casual. It is at times like this that I wish that I had inherited more from my black grandfather than his upwardly mobile yearnings and a slight nappiness to my hair. For this moment at least, I would have preferred to have his dark brown skin and a hint of his smooth Louisiana drawl.

"How many you looking for, my man?" he shoots back. He probably takes me with my brownish tint for a swarthy, Sephardic Jew. Many do, especially my fellow African-Americans.

"Just a few."

"Forty a bin. I got four bins out here now and more comin'. How many you want?"

I had already scoped out one of the crammed containers. Mostly fiction and junk paperbacks, salted with a few promising textbooks and some trade non-fiction. They had only minor potential.

"How about twenty-five?" I say, hoping for thirty and willing to settle for thirty-five.

"These are good bins, my man. I can sell these bins all day for fifty." For emphasis he starts to turn away to a Mexican who is tugging at his sleeve about a large rack full of decrepit DVD players.

"Thirty would work better," I say, trying to keep his attention. He sneers.

"I got one price. You want it at forty or you don't?"

"Okay," I say. "Four bins." I'm desperate for product. He smells it.

"Go get a number," he says, pointing to a flimsy little makeshift ticket-booth/shed where a young woman with stylish glasses and a streak of purple in her hair sits imprisoned with a calculator and a cash box. She hands me a small, worn bidding paddle hand — inscribed in magic marker with lucky number "84." I hold up the number to the ectomorph who writes "84" on the form on his clipboard and I hand the woman in the booth eight twenties. She writes a crude receipt. I know I am overpaying, but I need the inventory. I pull my empty boxes out of the car and begin sorting.

From over my shoulder I hear, "Take what you got and go back to Santa Monica." I turn to see Buzzcut on his way out. I wait two beats but I don't seem to be in control of my lips.

"Asshole." I say, mostly to myself. Not too loud. Loud enough so that it catches the ears of a few of the Mexicans. Loud enough apparently for Buzzcut. He wheels around and narrows his eyes, but moves on with a sneer. I go back to sorting these unspectacular books.

Things were not always like this. Long ago, I am told, in former halcyon days of thrift store book auctions, these bins could easily be cornucopias that brought forth magic. That was before the Volunteer Veterans and the Salvation Army and the Goodwill started skimming the really good titles off the top for their own online stores. There was once a golden time when managers in charge naively believed that the only worth of their book donations was as two-dollar fodder for parsimonious eggheads while the real money was in selling broken-down Sony TVs and castoff ten-speed bikes. It is said in the great body of booksellers' myth and apocrypha that once, in a Pasadena Salvation Army auction, on a misty June morning, a dozen first-edition Steinbecks in pristine original dust jackets, signed by the master Depression-era author himself, were sold in a sixty-dollar bin along with the Danielle Steeles and the National Geographics. Once, it is told and retold in clusters of nostalgic booksellers that stand waiting for library book sales to open, one could regularly expect to find these bins replete with large, heavy volumes on art and architecture, and shiny new textbooks discarded by wastrel community college students who dropped their survey courses after a week or two without opening their books. Before Lucent and JDS Uniphase, and Enron. Before the towers fell and before George W. Bush. When all was right with the world.

I stack my books carefully in the file boxes. I buy the boxes new and unassembled and get continual and surprising satisfaction from folding a flat piece of cardboard into a crisp, sturdy box in a few seconds. Some of my compatriots are happy to toss books willy-nilly into discarded wine cartons. That is not my choice. I pack them thoughtfully. One stack of large books occupies half the space, and two stacks of smaller books take the other half. Never should books be creased or bent to fit. The secret is in interleaving them perfectly, so that they all fit snugly. I am good at it. Nick, a friendly competitor and seer who has been at it for years, is a master. He can pack books like a stonemason can build a wall. Without a crack. The smallness and specificity of my task is soothing. As I pack today's haul I feel better and thoughts of Buzzcut evaporate.

I put the boxes into three piles of three. Any higher than three and the cardboard sags and crushes from the weight of the books. I unfold my little dolly and stack three of the boxes on it. I look around and find a friendly face — a squat, wide-faced woman who is triaging a bin of old shoes. I have no idea where one sells used shoes. Not on eBay or even Craigslist.

I know that because of my darkish skin she expects to be spoken to in Spanish. She smiles blankly when I ask, "Could you keep an eye on these for a minute?" So I use sign language and an idiot grin. She nods agreeably to the caveman gestures. I wheel my boxes out the gate to the parking lot where I will load them into the Volvo.

The Volvo sports an assortment of parking lot dings and scratches. I bought it new five years ago from the dealer, flush with my stock market successes at the time. I opted for the intercooled turbo engine and the leather heated seats — good for the frequent Sierra ski trips that I expected to take.

On the tony west side of Los Angeles, this prematurely obsolescent, slate-gray Swedish iron, with its worn tires, whiny power steering and cracked taillight lens marks me as a has-been. Of course in the parking lot of Volunteer Veterans in Anaheim, in the company of ancient vans and rusting pickups, I seem quite the country squire.

I wheel my neatly stacked bounty out to the parking lot. The Volvo is in a corner, far away from the busy area where the pickups and vans move in and out. As I approach I see that my wagon hunkers down in the back left, sitting on the wheel rim, the tire squashed airless and flat. I examine the tire, expecting to find a nail, and discover an eight-inch knife-cut on the sidewall.

I look around the lot. The few people present pointedly avoid my gaze. Near the entrance, about fifty yards away, I intersect Buzzcut's glance as he stands next to a new Dodge 4x4 pickup. He chuckles fraternally with the auctioneer guy and looks away from me dismissively.

Behind the tailgate I have a jack and a worn spare. It will take twenty minutes to change the tire as Buzzcut postures and guffaws to the locals. Because in my former life I had sprung for the gaudy and useless eighteen-inch alloy spoke wheels, the big tire will cost me a day's wage to replace, and put me closer to the limit on my newly acquired, pauper-class Fleet Bank MasterCard on which I will pay 28 percent. And thus I will sink further into debt. I walk toward Buzzcut. He pretends not to notice. I'm twenty feet from him and he looks up at me with a sneer.

"Did you slash my tire?" I don't know why I'm even asking. I don't anticipate a response that would satisfy.

"Say what, Captain?" he smirks.

I reflexively catapult headlong into unyielding righteousness and repeat, "Did you slash my fucking tire?!!"

Without responding he opens the door of the pickup, gets in and revs the big V8. I move to the front of the truck and he looks at me with a put-on look of incredulity. I hold my ground. I see his right arm move and I hear the beefy truck's transmission thunk into gear.

---

Excerpted from "Some Books Aren't for Reading"
by .
Copyright © 2018 Howard Marc Chesley.
Excerpted by permission of John Hunt Publishing Ltd..
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

---