Sale Away

A couple of years ago I had the idea to start a used bookstore. If you 're going to do that, of course, you need stock. And if you've got the time, a good way to start building stock is to hit the garage sales for used books. Santa Cruz is a reader's town, and after not many Saturdays I had the seeds of a decent inventory, for cheap.

Then it finally sank in for me that opening a used bookstore is a tough proposition in this day and age. Rents are high, profits low, and there's lots of online competition from eBay, Amazon, and others.

I found out that even Logos, the big used/new bookstore in town, only survives because the proprietor actually owns the building. So the bookstore doesn't really pay rent, and rents from other tenants in the building subsidize the bookstore.

So I gave up my plans (for now), flogged the valuable part of my stock to Logos for a humungous amount of trade and sold the rest dirt cheap at a flea market.

But I didn't stop going to garage sales. They're too much fun.

About one Saturday in two, Rhumba and I get up early, head out for breakfast at a little cafe on the East Side, and then roam around town under foggy skies looking for garage sale signs. We don't always know what we're looking for. But we usually find it. And we take the camera with us for anything that looks like a good shot: dogs, odd houses, plants and flowers that have gone wild in our almost ideal climate:


We pulled into a couple of places out in the Seabright district and found not much -- one was a Latino family selling tons of children's gear and household items; they didn't have much we were interested in. The contents of a garage sale say a lot about the people who are selling; and their driveway full of tiny bicycles, children's books, and Disney paraphanalia said "OUR CHILDREN ARE NOW IN MIDDLE SCHOOL! TAKE THIS JUNK AWAY!"

Not far away, better luck: a three-family sale in a sort of infomal triplex: a little old house up front, and a small two-flat building behind. Everybody spread their stuff up and down the main driveway and you couldn't tell who belonged to what, but that was alright.

Amiable dogs roamed back and forth between the porch of the front house and the driveway. "Three families, five dogs," a middle-aged woman said with a chuckle. A fence bordered the rear of the driveway, and a forlorn dog nose poked out underneath it. "We can't let her out, she'll just run off," the woman told us.


And we all talked about dogs and pets and having too much stuff and not enough space. "Yep, we have too much stuff," the woman said. "You want some of it?"

Sorry, we're in the same boat. But Rhumba perused a box of beads and jewelry bits for her knitting projects, and I found a book of some interest in a box of odds and ends.

"Quarter?" I asked a young woman in a sweatshirt, holding the thing up.

"Sure," she said.

I handed her the money. "I don't think a quarter's too much for the 'Collected Poetry of the Billings, Montana Arts League, 1957,'" I said jokingly. For that's what it was.

"OHMIGOD, my grandma's poems are in there! I didn't mean to sell it!!"

Of course I gave the book back to her at once and received back my quarter, and her thanks.

I wandered over to a box of pins and pendants, where a triangular stone pendant caught my eye -- nice inlay, very modern.

"How much," I asked the young woman?

"Nothing," she said. "Thanks again."

You're more than welcome. Nice people at that house.


We got back in the car and motored around Seabright a bit more, finding not much else. So we cruised up to Soquel Avenue and headed east.

Soquel Avenue is the backbone of the East Side, its major traffic artery. So when you don't know where the next sale is, you cruise Soquel and look for little handwritten signs stapled or taped to telephone poles or streetlight standards. Little, hard-to-read signs flapping in the breeze. In thin red marker on dark blue paper, or on crumpled bits of cardboard. Apparently the thing for motorists to read easily while gliding by at 30 mph on one of the city's busiest streets. WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU PEOPLE?

But at 9 am on a Saturday morning with Rhumba riding shotgun, we can just about go slowly enough to figure them out without being rear-ended. Though it's been close.

We found a couple of signs we could actually read east of Morrisey, so we turned north of Soquel into Outer Suburbia, a sort of giant cul-de-sac of shaded streets and eccentric houses butted up on two sides against the Harbor High School campus and Highway 1 -- without actually connecting to either of them. No through traffic cuts through it, because there is no "through" worth talking about. It's really, really quiet back there.

And there are strange conjunctions of street names: the corner of Marnell and Parnell, and of course the hallowed corner of Suburbia and Suburbia.


None of the yard sales we went back there for turned out to be anything, but we ran into a pretty good one near Suburbia and Suburbia (of course). A couple of woman software geeks had strewn scads of household and office detrititus across their driveway. "Here's a router, only two bucks," one said. "One port doesn't work, but otherwise it's fine."

No, we have routers at home, thank you. I was however drawn to her rotating blue "caution" light, only 50 cents. "I priced that one to move," she said. "You can have your own blue light special." Just the thing for the office. Turned out she used to work for SurfControl, a pretty large local software company that I'd had some contact with in the past; but it had been bought out and absorbed by an LA company, she told me. "There are still six of us left in Santa Cruz working remotely," she explained.

"They gave all of us a ton of office crap when they closed down SurfControl, and we don't need any of it," she told me. The blue safety light had actually been company issue. Interesting company.

I had to have the blue light. Rhumba walked off with one of those collapsible hanging multi-level cylindrical storage thingies made of black netting. She'll store yarn in it.


Nothing else was cooking in Outer Suburbia, so it was time to finish up with the East Side. We looped back down Morrissey, a down-at-the-heels boulevard lined with frowsy palm trees, toward Soquel Avenue again. And about halfway down Morrissey we found the Girl Scout.

She had most of her worldly possessions laid out on the front lawn of her rental, and an old Volvo out front with license number GIRLSKT. She turned out to be a life-member girl scout who'd gone on to work with the local scout council while studying at UCSC. Rhumba had also been a pro girl scout back in the day, and they exchanged notes.

Then she showed us her tattoos:


Yes, she had girl scout merit badges tattooed down her arm. She'll be in uniform until she dies. Semper Girlscoutis, or what?

She was leaving town the next day for Chicago to enter a doctoral program in cultural anthropology. Remember, this is an in-it-for life girl scout who'd literally illustrated her body with her tribe's sacred symbols. Cultural anthro as a career choice was.... curiously appropriate.

Her antsy boyfriend urged us to buy, buy, buy, but Girl Scout was laid back about it. I got nothing, but Rhumba scored an LED flashlight that looks like a tropical bird, and an interesting little pin she's giving to a friend.

From there the day began to wind down. We headed to the West Side, but not much was happening. Out by Natural Bridges, a guy about my age was trying unsuccessfully to sell an obsolete RCA videodisk system than used needles, like an old record player. He had dozens of disks -- the Jane Fonda Workout, Saturday Night Fever. Dude, where's my puka beads?

Then we ran into a giggly young man on Western Drive who was selling -- Jerry Garcia. Nothing but Jerry. Books, comics, records -- all about Jerry and the Dead. He even had an overstuffed Jerry doll, and, well, a few astrology books ("I, uh, went through a phase."). And a rather filthy bong.

Next to last was an older, sad-faced woman up off High Street who still had a full driveway full of junk at 12:30 p.m. "I'm leaving the area, it all has to go." She was not young, but was well-stocked with old but high-quality children's toys. She'd apparently lived there a long time.

And there were boxes and boxes of meticulously labeled and -indexed home-made VHS tapes of classic war movies from the '30s, '40s, and '50s. Belonging to, I suspect, a husband who was no longer with us. No husband, children gone; she was alone. And maybe heading out to someplace where she wouldn't be alone anymore.

I took away a Jenga set for a buck, and a thoughtful frame of mind. Rhumba got a book of crochet patterns to give to an 85-year-old woman we know who crochets like a demon.

Thematically, we ended up near where we started, at a house of dogs. The man of the house kept three aged, overfed pugs. The woman kept cats. It was a point of contention between them.

"They (the dogs) chase and viciously attack my cats," she told me. In fact, one of them did chase a cat while we were there. The cat had no trouble escaping the slow-moving pug, and the man put the dog in a pen alongside the house. And in two minutes, it had freed itself and returned to the front yard. And the man just let it wander around again. I don't know who was in charge at that house, but it might not be the humans.

I ask you, does this look like the face of a cat-killer? (No, don't answer.)


I've had better days for making finds, but it was a good day for finding people. I'm no expert at connecting with people, but anyone can do it at garage sales. Hold up an object and ask: what is it, where did it come from, how did you use it? And people will tell you about themselves and sometimes show you amazing things. Because to be interested in people's stuff is to be interested in their lives. And what's more flattering than that?

Join us out on the trail. You might not find the dining room set of your dreams for $25 (although you always might). But you will find some good memories to keep. They're the one thing you always have more room for, no matter how crowded your house.

Home at Work

It was bring-out-yer-dead day last week at the office. One of my cheerier co-workers put out the word: all the unlabeled items hiding in the back of the employee refrigerators would be claimed by their owners. And if not claimed -- tossed.

"How did you land this thankless task?" I asked him.

"I volunteered," he chirped brightly. He'll learn, I told myself. And he did. For his trouble, somebody nicked a bag of coffee he'd inherited from a departed employee. (Didn't have his name on it, after all.)

Any change in the employee kitchen is potential dynamite. Because everybody's staked out their little bits of territory. And you'd better not trespass.

Inside each fridge you'll apparently random hodgepodges of packaged sandwiches, soft drinks, plastic food containers, leftover pizza, muffins, and so on.

But there's little random about it; everything is labeled with its owner's initials; certain shelves or bins may even "belong" to a particular person by squatter's rights. Put not your lunch there, or face the wrath of a charging data entry operator. And if you forget to label something as your own, it will disappear.

The white-plastic-and-metal interior of the office fridge is the cold, sterile stage upon which the most self-serving human thought patterns can express themselves. It's not mine; but nobody's name is on it, and it's been here a day. Maybe it's just a leftover from an management meeting. And I didn't bring lunch. Maybe... and a hand reaches out. And a few hours later, maybe, the entire office receives an outraged email from somebody whose cold pizza walked away by itself. But nobody ever admits guilt.

Petty office shenanigans? Stereotypical primate social misbehavior? Sure, absolutely. But food theft is a bigger sin than it used to be, because a lot of people I work with now mainly eat or obtain their food on the job.

When I enter the kitchen at 8 a.m., there's a line of fellow employees nuking oatmeal, laying out nice little plates of fruit, waiting on English muffins from the toaster oven, or filling bowls with dry cereal, milk, and bananas. One of the cupboards is full of cereal boxes, each for the exclusive use of the person whose name is on it.

To walk around the office at that hour is to observe people who've mastered the art of one-armed workstation-eating: spoon the fruit into your mouth with one hand, shuffle papers or wrangle software with the other. Why do you think computer geeks invented the computer mouse and the point-and-click interface? So they could compute with one hand and eat with the other. This sort of thing has been coming on for a long time.

A little later in the day, the Sandwich God arrives, a bronzed surfer dude with a cooler full of sandwiches and salads and chili and brownies for those who didn't bring something of their own. And later in the day may come the Tamale Lady, the Espresso Truck, Rib King (in his stainless-steel chariot of barbecue), and others. It's a near-endless parade of meals on wheels.

Not a few of my co-workers, especially the ones who live alone, buy for dinner as well as lunch. The eats-like-a-bird executive secretary buys an extra-large hoagie from the Sandwich God and puts aside half for dinner. Or a young public information assistant of thermonuclear metabolism buys an extra couple of chicken tamales (heavier than lead, but big and cheap) from the Tamale Lady to take home later for heat-n-eat.

Frankly, I understand. Our workplace is intense; "lunch hour" is a vague concept for many. No one says you can't take it, but -- you are going to get that massive pile of work done by five -- aren't you? There's no time in the day to get away, run errands, shop at lunch -- all the things people used to be able to do at lunch at other jobs I had, long ago.

And so many of these people commute 30 or 45 minutes just to get to this palace of low-paying labor. (They can't afford the rents nearby.) Leave home at 7:15, work through the day, get home at 5:45 -- or later if they stop to shop. Who's got time to cook, or the energy? More and more of our feeding has to happen on the job.

We used to talk about "work at home." Now it's "home at work." Work so dominates the day that many of us have to, somehow, squeeze the necessities of daily life in between meetings, conference calls, and mad frenzies of data entry. There's no room left to live at home, five days a week anyway.

Welcome to the new American workplace for the 21st century. And if you don't like it -- well, there's plenty of obsolete high-tech workers and unemployed mortgage-loan officers waiting to take your place.

And I work in the public/nonprofit sector! What's private industry like these days?

The Lost Boys

In my travels yesterday, I stopped for a red light at the intersection of River Street and Highway 1, just north of downtown Santa Cruz. I was first in line in the left turn lane on 1, waiting to turn north onto River I make this turn a lot. It's a busy intersection:


A disheveled young guy with a couple of weeks of blond beard literally stumbled out into the crosswalk from the far side of the road. He caught himself, straightened up a bit and proceeded -- still none too steadily. He paused at the center island a moment, then continued on across the nose of my car.

But he stopped for a moment, turned, and stuck his tongue out at me. All the way out.

What could I do? I waved.

He tottered on across the final two lanes, tongue still extended. He turned back toward me a couple of times to make absolutely sure that I could see it. I shrugged, and made my left turn.

Sigh.

The Homeless Services Center is just beyond the north side of the intersection. There, homeless locals and nomads can get a free meal, a shower, a locker, counseling, and other services. Regular foot traffic moves back and forth across the highway here between the homeless center and downtown Santa Cruz, right past the giant blue-and-yellow RIVER STREET -- WELCOME TO SANTA CRUZ sign.


Most of the time the homeless and/or nomadic cross in an orderly manner, like anyone; a few of them walk right in front of moving cars without looking; another few scream and rant at the cars, the sky, or life in general. Some of them, like Tongue Boy, try to get a rise out of drivers who stopped for the red.

These are the marginalized: mentally ill or addicted or just plain disaffected, not important to society, but clinging to this life-raft of charity that Santa Cruz puts out for them. Which was created to provide aid to our fairly constant influx of homeless visitors, but also to keep them from constantly panhandling downtown for food or whatever. That's why the homeless center is north of Highway 1 in a sparsely-populated industrial neighborhood. Your classic mixed message in a town full of mixed messages. And you bet the homeless are aware of both sides of the message.

What set off Tongue Boy? Could be anything. Maybe he didn't like my shiny hybrid car -- anarchists, hybrids are just another corporate scam meant to make consumers feel better about themselves. (I've gotten that lecture before.) Maybe he was a mean drunk. Maybe I resembled somebody who made his life hell once. Maybe I looked wealthy and complacent (hah). Who knows?

So he was angry, and he raised a little fuss. You see a a fair amount of that in Santa Cruz: Scruffy men in tatterered clothing standing in the middle of the street to block traffic, ignoring the horns of impatient drivers; men and women who scream at pedestrians or stand in their paths as they walk down the street, daring others to notice them.

And if you get mad at them, or swear at them, or shrink away from them -- well, at least you've acknowledged their existence. They made you do something.

Like I said, they're the marginalized. The only power they have left in the world is the power to be inconvenient: to block a road, yell, get in the way. It's a poor and common power; everyone has it. Four-year-old children have it. The men and women who rant at you -- they've got nothing else left.

And that's why I don't get angry anymore, don't react beyond a wave or a "Have a nice day." I don't agree with the way some of these folks react to powerlessness, to invisibility. But I understand. So I wave. I don't talk otherwise beyond a simple greeting; tried that on the street a few times. Usually they can only rant or attack. They're beyond listening back. Drugs, mental illness, just anger? Who knows?

That same day Rhumba and I went out to an auto dealership to see about some service for our car. In the twenty yards between our car and the service department door, a salesman charged us like a shark: how were we doing? What could he show us? The lot bulged with unsold cars. And he was on commission. I could see the desperation. Later, I realized I dealt with him just as if he were an aggressive homeless man: smile; wave; don't engage.

On the way out again through the lot -- crowded with cars, empty of people -- I saw a young salesman slump dejectedly on a bench in the dubious shade of some small tree. Ignored by all of the few who passed by.

It's pretty easy to be marginalized in Santa Cruz. And he didn't even have the power to yell.

Startling Stories

For some reason, I thought about Boadacea Starke the other day. I met her a only a couple of times 25 years ago or so. But I remember her well because she was an interesting person, and because the world keeps showing me signs of her. Through books.

In those long-ago days I was living in a rundown apartment just off Polk Street in San Francisco -- just me and 10,000 books. I collected old paperbacks and pulp magazines and hardbacks in those days -- mostly science fiction and fantasy, but a fair amount of just plain old pulp fiction. Lurid '50s paperbacks with lurid '50s covers -- gunslinging private eyes holding a buxom babe on one arm while shooting holes in the bad guys; whip-wielding Commie nurses and bloodthirsty dwarfs terrorizing patients in an insane asylum.

Stuff like that. When you spend your formative years with real pulp, you sneer at fanboy posers like Quentin Tarantino. But I'd lost interest in hunting for new stuff, and decided to start unloading my collection. My friend Lick, who got me started in collecting and had even more books that I did, went in with me.

We didn't have the Internet in those days, so I went through the whole process of printing a catalog (on mimeograph, no less), advertising in a couple of sci-fi trade magazines, and sending out copies to a mailing list I borrowed from a sci-fi bookstore.

My catalog was a cynical rant against the very books I was selling (at high prices, too). I'd kind of burned out on sci-fi, had met nearly all the top authors and found the majority to be heavy-drinking middle-aged doofs. (Always excepting Fritz Leiber. Leiber was a prince.) I showed no respect to anything I was selling, spattered vitriol on the classics of the genre, even spit on the Shroud of Turin (aka Robert Heinlein). I'd discovered edginess, and I didn't even know it.

And the phone started ringing. Unusual people began coming to my divey apartment or engaging me in protracted, impassioned long-distance phone calls.

Anton LaVey, pope of the Church of Satan, came over to take my bondage pulps off me. (Whip-wielding Commie nurses, remember?) He'd been the devil-worshipping bad boy of the nation back in the '60s, but the guy I met was a pleasant, slightly odd old duffer in a colorless windbreaker. We spent a long and pleasant evening talking about American sexuality, Marilyn Monroe, dionysian themes in early-20th-century grape-crate labels (I gave him one), and his father's job as Ernest and Julio Gallo's first salesman. He drove away in a Gremlin, I kid you not.



Another one of my visitors was a cabbie who dressed up in a trenchcoat and gave tours of San Francisco locales portrayed in Dashiell Hammet's "The Maltese Falcon." He'd salvaged two giant rotating dog-in-a-chef's hat signs from the failing Doggie Diner hot dog chain, and put them on his property in Sonoma County. I forget what he bought.

One of the books in our catalog was a battered old sci-fi hardback from the 50s, would have been worth $30 in good shape, but it wasn't. No dust jacket, threadbare and scuffed cover, and a previous owner had scrawled his rather odd (to me) name in big sloppy letters on the flyleaf. In writing up the condition, I snarked "Inscribed by the incomparable Fergus O'Breen."

Two weeks later, I got a phone call late at night. It was Fergus O'Breen.

"You've got my book," he said.

"Do you want to buy it again?"

"No."

"Then why are you calling?"

"Well you said 'incomparable.'"

Fair enough, although I'd really been making fun of his name. He was an old bookseller who'd worked around the Bay Area for 30 years. He'd sold that book up in Oregon many years before. We could only guess how it had gotten back here. We chatted for half an hour.

There were others, not all of them pleasant but most of them odd. Book collectors are like that.

And then there was Boadacea. Sci-fi and pulp collecting was mainly a guy thing in those days, so I was a little surprised to get a woman on the phone. But of course she was welcome to come over.

If I'd been a little more mature, I'd have realized that coming over to a strange man's apartment could be a bit of a push for a woman alone, even a fellow collector. True, I couldn't haul a couple of thousand books down to the local coffee shop for a meet in public. But I should have invited a woman friend over, or even the big-hearted queen who managed the apartment building.

So there was a knock on the door at the appointed time, and I opened it, and there was Boadacea, five feet and small change of lean San Francisco dyke: jeans, sleeveless t-shirt. close-cropped hair, and all. And she seemed very, very nervous. It was obvious that the apartment of a unknown and greasy six-foot man was really not a place she was comfortable being.

But some things are stronger than discomfort, and collector's lust is one of them. It turned out that I had a Kurt Vonnegut first edition that she'd been after for years. I offered elaborate courtesy and apologized for the book's poor condition (despite its high price). She courtesied me right back and allowed that the book's price was justified by its rarity. (It has never been reprinted.)


And she looked through the other books that I had to offer and we found a common language to speak -- books. Every collector has a store of special knowledge about the books he or she prefers, and these were area we could discuss with some comfort, when we had almost nothing else at hand to discuss. We talked of authors, publishers, condition problems of certain lines of paperbacks, and so on.

Among other things, Boadacea collected mass-market '50s paperbacks with lesbian themes. I had a big box of old paperbacks that I'd picked up for the lurid cover art alone. "But I don't remember any lesbian ones," I said.

She dug through the entire box and found ten. Mainstream publishers didn't usually come right and scream LESBIAN LOVE AFFAIR on book covers in the early '50s, but they had other ways of getting the message across for those who were looking. She explained the code words and images to look for: two women on the cover, one hard-eyed and smirking, the other innocent and passive-looking; blurb phrases like "forbidden love," "unnatural attraction," and so on. She knew her stuff. It was great, like a little seminar.

We parted on good terms. The next time I put out a catalog Boadacea called me up promptly and came over to buy a few things and geek out about books for a few minutes. I can't say that we would ever be good friends, but she was something almost as valuable: a fellow scholar in an abstruse and unaccredited field, and a good and considerate customer as well. It's always good -- and too often rare - when two people whose paths won't otherwise cross can find some small space where they can be real with each other. Even if it's over the buying and selling of crazy old books.

I didn't see Boadacea after that, because Lick and I stopped putting out catalogs. Several years later I was over at my then-girlfriend Melon's house when I saw a cool, humorous calendar on the wall with Boadacea's name on it. "I've known Boadacea for years," Melon said. She was a hobby bisexual from East Coast Ivy League society. "She got a Mac and learned desktop publishing. She does all sorts of projects." This was the '80s, when such skills weren't so common.

"Where is she now?"

"Up at a nudist commune and resort. She works for her keep, and for spare time to write."

A couple of years later, after moving to Santa Cruz, I ran into a book Boadacea wrote, a history of the (rather well-known) commune. I read it, and it was pretty good.

And ever since then, every couple of years, I see her name somewhere: on a book, in the pages of the sci-fi trade magazines that I still browse sometimes down at Bookshop Santa Cruz. It's nice to know that she's out there and doing well at what she wants to do, though I'll probably never cross paths with her again. But I never would have known her at all without the books and book collecting.

Now I understand that life brings change. Someday we may download everything we read, or have it printed out for us by automated book-making machines in some streamlined, practical format at the local bookstore. And it may really all be for the best.



But there's something about a book as artifact that might be lost. The cover art, the advertising blurbs, even what the owners wrote in them -- they all speak to what people were thinking when that book was written, to the kind of world the produced it. And crazy collectors and antiquarians like me who can pick up on these things and whom they resonate with, can gather together and discuss things that most people, even good readers, don't even think of. But which are, in their way, important. And make a connection with one another.

In other words, I'll miss the old book world when it's gone. I sold off my sci-fi and pulp collection years ago through subsequent adventures with Lick and beyond. But I've found other types of books to collect, though never again in take-over-the-house quantities. I'll never be one of the big collectors with massive collections, because I know about moderation. Some of the great, most obsessive collectors -- well, it's Twilight Zone material. You can go weird. I came close to that, but turned back.

So I moved on. So did Lick; he gave up his collection but started a used bookstore (actually, several at one time or another) where he buys and sells the books he loves all the time. "This way," he explained, "I can have the books for a while. And when I sell them, I know I'll have them again someday." That's a sensible way to keep your collector's obsession in check.

And in checking up on Boadacea on the web, I see that she's moved on to vintage toys; buys them and sells them on the Internet, which is probably a good way for an underpaid writer (all writers are underpaid) to get by. I think it's true that as you change, your collections should change, too.

Dusty old books -- it's a nerd's hobby, but it led me to a squadron of interesting people who I never would have met otherwise, and all with something special to impart (intentionally or otherwise). Boadacea was one, there are many others.

So thanks to the lurid old books, for all the people I met while comparing dusty old covers of half-naked space babes and snarling gunmen. It was an education beyond price and one that, I fear, won't be had by swapping downloads.