The Counterlife

Always greeted by an A-Frame chalkboard listing new arrivals in smudgy handwriting. The door opens and the bell clings. More of a tingle than a jingle. The clerk nods what’s up from behind the counter. Serial killer spectacles, shaved head, and a trumpet tattoo playing notes behind his ear. His buttoned shirt three-fourths unbuttoned. A well-earned beer belly below a god-awful chest piece hang loose. It all hangs loose. Faded concert posters from the 80’s, Violent Femmes and Jesus and Mary Chain, curl hello at the edges. Little smiling hooks. Could Hemingway really talk to fish?

Left-wing literature laid out all over. A man walks in with his kid. The door shuts. The bell clings—tingles. ‘State and Revolution.’ It’s been three days since she texted me back. Why won’t she text me back?! The usual suspects…

On the fiction shelves the same thing. It’s because of that tie I wore with the silly fish on it. It was trying too hard. Used bookstores, used record stores, struggle turning over fiction. Nobody reads. Wannabe art schoolers in faux leather jackets inbound, giggling about, wearing and discussing the borrowed nostalgia of the unremembered 80s. She picks up a paperback, flips through the pages dog-eared to death, and puts it back with an enviable stillness. Yea fiction doesn’t cycle through, not really, only Stephen King and the Alchemist and stories told on vinyl. I wouldn’t mind rain today. I think back to last month, when I was here staring at these same books. Was it Twain with a fetish for dead animals in jars? A jingle. No, damn it, it’s a tingle. Three more sets of cuffed jeans belted below Carhartt’s roll in laughing loudly. I like Stephen King.

 I like The Nation of Ulysses. The store is ideal for realizing my bookstore game plan. An ambulance rushes by outside, flashes of red, its siren caroling awkwardly, differently, this revolving glugging noise, like the blender in my kitchen astir. You forgot your protein shake and your meds this morning. Pay attention! This isn’t a condition to be trifled with! Gosh, I hated this book. I have to, no, I need to read today. Oh, I loved this one. This one too, but the ending confused me. Answer e-mails. I lie about liking this one. I lie about disliking this one. If only reading books was as fun as shopping for them. Get to the YMCA. No coffee until morning. Try to fall asleep without a handful of pills tonight. The sun imposes through the window, ceaselessly bright, but with strength like porcelain. The country skating on thin ice beneath a waning sun. Two more days. Three books only, the game plan. And don’t forget laundry later.

The game plan is what again? Right, the first book. Always a classic you’ve read and loved but for some reason don’t own. You feel your shelf incomplete without it so as soon as you see it, so long as the cover is clean, the binding sturdy, and it’s not annotated by an idiot you throw it in the bag. Right. The second book. This place, too buzzlit. Too overwhite. No demure, shadow lit aesthetic. Lighting it like the psych ward! Why? Why would they do that to me! Duped into a luminous void, no warning on the chalkboard! The second book is one you have not yet read but have heard so many good things about you are all but sure to love it. See it. Throw it in the bag. A father says son if you play Revolution 9 backwards you can hear Paul is dead and the kid says who’s Paul and starts to jump in place and the third book. Find a spot if you need to. In the corner just for a second. Find your embersoft hue and carry it with you. Okay. Embersoft. Dr. Flemming and me. Our word.

The third is a paperback on a whim. Ask an employee for a suggestion. Pick up some poetry. Maybe a collection of essays or a play you’ve never heard of. Then, pay and leave before the nerve-endings untangle completely.

Two of three always comes so easy, then I get like this, a nervous nelly for no good reason, shaking in quicksand. Happens in grocery stores. Behind the wheel, too. Unlocking its potential by potentially thinking about thinking about it. I crashed a car because I can’t turn this off. Thinking about thinking about it. Once the subconscious is frozen over the snowball rolls and rolls. The control room flattened. My left hand goes numb and all hell breaks loose and I lose all... shit. My left hand, there it goes. All the way through my neck and bones. Man was I lucky, those girls were so lucky. The mercurial mangled sheen of it all. Buzzlit and overwhite. I say sorry when I pass their aethers in town, but I know, for almost certain, that it is not their breathing shells I silently beckon to.

I feel the watching. Customers creeping like leprosy. Pace slowly and breathe. Stern looks judging me when the spine audibly cracks. Clumsy philistine. I touch everything all the time. Put down your hands. At your side. You touch your face on dates and it’s unbecoming. That and the hideous tie. Hands down. Voice says good boy, very good boy. A cat wanders unbothered, brushing my leg. I felt her love. Can she feel my illness? How haven’t we invented a way to ask cats questions? VR concerts in headsets and I can’t ask a cat a question. I follow her for fun, whispering but

a poster of Morrisey stops me and demands my attention. His calculated arrogance, the performative melancholy caught so absolutely in that once-in-a-lifetime boyish face of his. So timeless I almost forgot I hate his guts now. So annoyingly unignorable. I hate so many people I once loved. It serves him right—Morrisey that one named prick—perched in perpetuity atop of the poetry section, considering he always fancied himself real poet. Now, he lives in places like this, condemned to people watching and a lifetime spent reading the work of better men. Did I turn off my iron? Two girls enter, both sporting wolf cuts. Some girls are bigger than others…

A single 6mm droplet of sweat departs from my armpit, a rogue agent tickling down my ribcage in a not so random zigzag. The sweat has a coherent, albeit scattershot configuration. A malicious intent. It’s a sawblade ripping me open! I watch a woman with bouffant red hair walk by, intrinsically skipping the dead spots in the wooden floorboards. Something about her, her attainable beauty, makes me blank over my bloodshed. Maybe it was the hip-sprung, streetwise attitude with which she moved. She seems effortlessly alert, poised yet sharp, but down on her luck too, like some character in an off-Broadway play soaked in gin, a sweetheart pacing… waiting for a phone call that never comes.

 “It’s the emotional honesty and the chords that endure, for me at least, ha-ha, more so than the pseudo-cerebral and dissonant sounds of OKC, in my opinion, although OKC does have No Surprises. And No Surprises is No Surprises.” Ha-Ha. The Panic. The girl looks down not embarrassed but worse; she’s deeply unimpressed. The Vomit. But God Loves His Children. Except that unoriginal try hard. Nobody loves him. Don’t say that. God loves me I’m his favorite. Don’t say that either. A carousel of personal photographs and Zuckerberg on a surfboard and bombs dropping; all the horror known to me fighting for facetime in my spooling brain. Why is He giving me a heart attack in a bookstore?

Vinyl stops spinning. Back to the 6mm droplet making its way under my hoodie. A snake in the grass. A schizophrenic EKG painted on my skin. The muffle of shoppers cutting through silence sounding like cymbals crashing. I look around, sheet white with shit in my pants, embarrassed to unironically be questioning the visibility of my intestines only to find out no one is paying any attention to me. No one cares. You’re a lunatic—fit for a straitjacket. The couple in the back share headphones plugged into a timeless jukebox. Whatever’s playing makes them smile.

No wonder you can’t get laid, you can’t even handle a bookstore. I didn’t get this book. I tell people I understood it, but Pynchon speaks Latin to me. Lost me at page 162. I remember exactly because it’s the number of games in a professional baseball season. You can’t buy eggs without hysterics. The author in this story goes into this pretentious digression about… I forget…I miss Chelsea. I don’t forget her. They way she laughed with her whole body as if she were a tree in a hurricane. Arms knees and legs quivering in a furious gust of joy. I feel it every time I step outside. I felt it, her, this morning. I hope she’s happy, truly, wherever she is.

I wipe my brow. I unstick my balls from the inside of my thigh. Chinese for dinner? In my bag, somehow, is Rebecca Makkai’s the Great Believers and a collection of the Raymond Carver stories that inspired the movie Short Cuts, including a foreword by the man himself, Mr. Robert Altman. Apparently, I couldn’t find my classic; couldn’t check box one. Donald Trump is going to win. A new record spins—I recognize it—the B-Side of Bowie’s Low. Warszawa. Weeping Well. Subterraneans.

The cat jumps on top of the small press and stares at me like she’s the only one who knows what’s going on in my head. I try to read her mind, but cats don’t give themselves away. Not like dogs do. In two days he might be president-elect. It’s never been this bad. I always get like this during election season, but never this bad. Since my 18th birthday... before the first time, the first time under the florescent light of ward #4. Reduced to a frog on the dissector’s table. SHH! The music, focus on the music. Don’t check your pulse, for fuck’s sake don’t check your pulse—you’re fighting imaginary lions you putz. I wipe my left arm pit with the inside of my undershirt to make sure I’m not again torn asunder. I love this country.

Am I going to cry? Don’t cry. Christ, always overly emotional after a panic attack. Holy Moses. But remember, it’s the sensible that are certifiable. Or maybe they just tell us that we’re crazy, while everyone else walks around like they’re in a Prozac commercial or a Coldplay video, perusing a completely different planet on totally different terms. Those photos online, that dangling—. I envy those folks, the ones who sit still and take life as it comes but still feel things too.

She’s flawed. Bowie sings ‘Share Bride Falling Star.’ She sucks frankly, Kamala, but I just can’t go there with Donnie… Anyone who makes me look sane must be insane. Oh, there it is, ‘It can’t Happen Here.’ Speaking of the Devil. It very well might happen here.

Is anyone out there, anything on these wooden planks wanna say hi? A version of self-help, my version, the kind that uses misery and truth instead of sentimentality to tell me we’re all in this together and each day counts and I shouldn’t think those things. That’s the good stuff. The Perks of Being a Stoner. That’s John Williams? I make silly jokes up here. Where is that? 145 Days until baseball starts!

Really, it’s time to go. I don’t need a third copy of The Bell Jar. Oh, I remember this book. I read this in a dark place. You remember those ones a bit more vividly. So much love given to me so freely in these pages. By chance. It’s a wonderful world sometimes. Am I insane for loving how much Joker 2 hated me? Only I can hate me like that! Moving along… I couldn’t care less about Thomas Cromwell. Have enough Cormac. Iran is openly firing ballistics. I have to return that message about making an audiobook. Pay my phone bill and pick up half and half. No Russians, no Frenchman, no Alice Munro’s…I’m too wrapped up in America right now to read any of that!

The vinyl no longer spins and the sounds of the wooden floorboards begin to creak loudly in its place. What was I thinking? P-Q-R-R-a-b…R-o…Bingo. Roth. The Plot Against America. What guy better equipped to educate me on the times? I haven’t read it since junior year. That’s a lie. I even lie to myself, directly in my head. My fellow Jerseyman will guide me through this. I’ve never read it before. Helpless displaced people keep dying but I’m all set.  The Plot Against America. The Great Believers and Short Cuts.

‘Meow.’ ‘Meow. Here Kitty’ Ah, she’s busy people watching. She’d make a good author. Her gaze unflinching out the window and into the streets. Jazz, unwieldy and bombastic, spins on. A first edition copy of Perfume: The Story of a Murderer! 14.95? Don’t do it. Stop buying stuff. My wallets in my back pocket, right? Phew…

Rare, sealed first pressings tucked behind the counter mixed in with obscure bootlegs decorate the wall behind the old-school register. The kind that still goes cha-ching! Crates on crates of records on the checkered floor. Even a few CDs. No fiction. This jazz is coarse and bleak. I make it to the counter seemingly in one piece. The sun hits the corner of my eye. Maybe it won’t rain after all.

I place the three books on the counter with shaky hands and tell him I’m “all set.”

               “Sweet. Find everything okay?”

               “Yea. Nice shop you got here,” I say.

               He’s wearing a very cool shirt.  

               “Much appreciated. We do the best we can. Try to keep it like, curated.”

               His eyes light up and the notes from his trumpet are transferred from music out the side of his head to words out the front of his mouth.

               “You like music?” He asks.

               Really? Do I like music? Small talk is bad—even when it’s good.

               “Do I like music?” I say, “Yes, I do. I like music.” I say, fidgeting less than I expect.

               He picks up Short Cuts, turns it over and reads the penciled in price on the back.

               “These are cool, I mean good choices, right?” I ask, fidgeting less than I expect. “I loved the movie. Short Cuts. A cool friend of mine said it was cool. I saw it just last week. I know, so uncool, just now hearing of this guy.” I forced a laugh and began to sweat, starting to fidget as I’d expect, “but I like movies too. Believe it or not.”

               “He’s cool, I guess. I just find him a bit pander-y,” he says.

               “Pander what?” I ask.

               “You know… capitalism,” he says.

               “I’m not sure what you mean? How does one become pander-y? And are you referring to Altman or Carver?” I say.

               I flooded the guy with so many questions now he’s going to hate me. I try too hard. In small talk. On dates. That silly fish tie is getting thrown out when I get home.

               “Carver—although Altman isn’t ‘it’ either—the humor in Nashville and MASH*, super sexist and dated, wouldn’t you say, my guy?”

               “Not really.” I tap my card against the counter. “I don’t know. I’m not sure why I said not really. I’ve only seen three so far and I’ve liked them a lot. I googled him. He seems like a nice guy, kind of a rebel,” I say.

               I look over his head at a mosaic of Che Guevara with bling on wearing a Public Enemy Shirt. The clerk’s eyes follow mine and I follow his right back, searching to see if he caught slight at the intention of my gesture. Or maybe I just looked up nervously.

               “Do you like Leonard Cohen?” I ask. “He made a great soundtrack for—"

               “Fair, whatever.” He says, singing along to a new record at the same time, “but in regard to Carver, minimalism is just aestheticized austerity if you really think about it.”

               “What?” I say laughing, “no, no it isn’t. What? It was just a good movie.”

               This slogan deep idiot…

               “True. You’re right. I bet you’ll like Carver then. It’s super relatable,” he says.

               Maybe he’s a nice person after all.

               “The movie was relatable—”

               “…To those raised upper middle class. Those born oblivious. There are better collections on the table,” he scoffs.

               Nope, not a nice guy. He sets Short Cuts down like it’s radioactive and picks up The Great Believers and reads the pencil drawn price. I wonder what’s problematic about this one. The jacket says it’s about aids and homosexuals and it’s written by a woman.

               “Good book,” he says, “if you’re into pure narrative fiction.” He squints and pokes his thick rectangular frames back on the bridge of his flat nose before saying, “It’s kind of, I don’t know… lacking teeth. Did you check the table? Seriously, check the featured table behind you. It’s the featured table for a reason. Have you thought about picking up something by Sarah Schulman instead? Even heard of her… ‘Let the Record Show’ goes way deeper on ACT UP. It’s right there for—”

               “I’m good, thanks.” I say, cutting him off rather gracefully but fidgeting, “My friend said this book is very good, very moving she said.”

               He scoffs before placing both copies, with bookmarks, in a brown bag.

               “Is something wrong with ‘moving?’” I ask.

               “Nah, nah. Its just…sentimentality is how the neoliberals get you, my man. Driving Miss Daisy. Green Book. Gotta pay attention to that stuff.” He swears.

               I fight whatever’s lodged in my stomach—a sigh or a laugh or vomit or an offensive comment, I can’t tell which. I control my body before whatever it is reaches my lips. He picks up the last book, The Plot Against America and doesn’t extend me the same courtesy. The same inner warfare on behalf of cordiality is not extended to me. He lets out an exaggerated sigh, gasp, an “ugh,” as if it he was holding a copy of ‘God and Man at Yale.’

               “Ah Mr. Roth. Bold choice.” A Ha-Ha. “Bold choice.” He shrugs.

               “The book is bold. Not so sure buying it is...I’m originally from Jersey. I love Philip Roth.”

               “Big yikes! That’s not something you hear people say proudly anymore,” he says.

               Is this guy serious? Embersoft and stay there. Embersoft.

               “Being from New Jersey or a fan of Philip Roth?” I ask.

               “People can’t control where they’re born. Turn on the news though. People can sure choose what and who they read,” he says. Embersoft and stay there. “He’s a great white writer sure yea, a chosen one…”

               A what?

               “This book was published in (I check the front) 2004. He’s a Jew from New Jersey. So what? So is Jon Stewart.”

               “See, like in this book here—it’s like he’s making ‘his’ version of fascism all about and only about Jewish suffering man. Which, I mean, valid no doubt, but don’t you think it kinda sidelines...other groups that suffer from fascist, imperialistic regimes?”

               “He’s not sidelining anyone by addressing the plight of the 20th century Jewish-American! He’s not obligated to pander-y to anyone! Or comment on the state of the world from his casket! He’s a good writer but he’s not Jesus. Oh Jesus, he wouldn’t like me saying that…” Sorry Philip, I won’t bless myself in apology.

               Well-intentioned silly goose. The two of us. Well-intentioned geese, I think.

               “True, yea true. Can’t ask him that. But his ‘what if America went fascist’ angle—even if it kinda already is, it has this “thank God for Israel” subtext that doesn’t vibe with today. It reads like ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin now, basically. Doesn’t exactly hold water today when looking at, say, Gaza,” he says.

               “I don’t think he was writing about Gaza today in 2004. I think, or I don’t think, frankly, I’m sure of it. You don’t know what you’re talking about—frankly—in my opinion. Jewish folks are a very peaceful people. And, for the record, I think Uncle Tom’s Cabin is an antislavery novel. Big Yikes!” I say. I smirk and my right leg stops fidgeting and starts shaking.

               “Were talking about systems bro, things more entrenched than government itself. And of course, a lib like you, you and Jon Stewart, would say that! Thinking the connotation from the title doesn’t overshadow it all. Get real.”

               “It’s only overshadowed because of people who talk without reading the book!”

               “Yea well, I read plenty,” he shrugs.

               “I’m sure, I didn’t mean to suggest otherwise. You know, there’s a big difference between the State of Israel and ‘The Jews.’ It’s important to remember. It makes talking about these things possible. Nobody likes what’s happening in Palestine. We’re all worked up,” I admit.

               “I don’t know man, you gotta admit, the line blurs when shit gets this hard to look at. There’s no time to be precise, to parse it out who believes what. And some aren’t worked up,” he says.

               The entire thing… Embersoft

               “No. It doesn’t. It never blurs and it’s never been more important to understand that. You’re saying a novel about fascism is obligated to comment on Gaza just because the writer is a Jew and that’s unfair. And not that it matters, but in other writings, Roth is quite ambivalent about Israel. Critical even.”

               I start to cry a little and quickly wipe away a tear with the sleeve of my hoodie.

               “Ambivalence is all the same. I don’t want to hear it. It’s stolen land, period. Full stop. Roth might say that stuff in diaries, little meaningless critiques, but he’s all about Jewish survival, however you want to spin it. He never interrogates what that very survival does to other people. Like the people of Palestine.”

               The Palestinians deserve so much better than you’re slogans!

               “Of course he’s about Jewish survival! Look what they’ve been through!”

               “And now they’re the enemy. Killing people on stolen land.”

               “Oh, please. Stolen land, stolen land, stolen land—Jews stood up for themselves in 1948! I’m sure that history is at least featured in one of these featured books. The country was sanctioned by the UN after they won a war. Such is life.” I say. I pant.

               Who’s cat is this? She is adorable…

               “That’s bullshit.” He says. “And what’s worse is having people like you laugh at me! For caring about the kids and calling it what it is! And the joke is on me! This country and Palestine and many others. Stolen L-A-N-D.”

               “Every border is drawn after a war. The Arabs have been there and have a right to be, but the Jews were there since Babylon. Seven centuries before Muhammad was born.”

               “You’re going to Holy Books now?”

               “They do!”

               “It’s not about Holy Books!”

               “It is to the worst of them.”

               “Holy shit, dude. They just say that—the establishment—to make Palestine out to be radical. It’s about the bloodshed and apartheid. It’s about a stupid idea, this imperialistic and all-American notion that Israel had the right to build a state on Arab land because God said so. Israel is a superstitious idea and it should never exist!”

               “But it does exist.”

               “And it’s committing genocide!”

               “It’s hard to watch, all of it. The women over there. Don’t forget.”

               Meow. He probably feeds you tofu all day.

               “The people are waking up to you Zionists. The kids are mobilizing.”

               He hands me a featured pamphlet inviting me to a Pro Palestine rally next week and I want to ball it up, toss it up so he looks, and punch him square in those Jeffrey Dahmer looking glasses. But there’s no hate in this man’s heart. Just misunderstanding.  

               “Israel is not going anywhere. It’s corrupt, sure, I guess if you say so. We tried a lot of those ideologies on the featured table too, not all of them ended with paradise.”

               “They’ve never been implemented by good faith people,” he says.

               Man, the Palestinian’s deserve better than me too.

               “I was just saying, do what you can. Save what you love.”

               “You make it sound nice,” he says sadly.

               “Who are you voting for on Tuesday?” I ask

               “It doesn’t matter. They’ll both fund Genocide,” he replies.

“Just because they both suck doesn’t mean it doesn’t matter. This is American politics not an ice cream sundae,” I say.

               “What does that mean?”

               “It means you can’t have it exactly the way you want it.”

               “I wish they’d all burn in hell. How’s that?”

               He does care about people. Dumb as he is.

               I gesture sweepingly, hand-shaping the endless layers of vinyl and paper among us and remind him, “If you judged everyone on your shelves that harshly, everyone in your vinyl bins with that much anger, you’d have nothing left to sell.”

               The two wolf cuts get in line behind me with matching copies of Middlemarch. I smile.

               “Ok, pal lets get you out of here,” he says.

               “How much?”

               “26.55”

               I need a new card. One that taps like the ones the fancy folks have.

               “Hold on,” he tells me and hurries behind a curtain. He hurries back. “Here.”

               “‘Unfortunately, It Was Paradise,’” I read the title aloud.

               “Keep it. It’s short. Moving poems about the Palestinian struggle.”

               “I thought you didn’t like moving?”

               The clerk blushed, half-smiled.

               “You know I’m not some monster, right? Thank you. I’ll read it with an open mind.”

               I will never read a word of this collection.

               I walk over to the poetry section with my three books bagged and go directly to the beginning, the A’s, the top left.

               “You don’t have any Yehuda Amichai,” I observe

               “Who’s that?” He asks.

               “Google him. Give him a read. I’ll read the poetry, and you read Amichai. We can make a deal. How’s that?”

               I put a five in the tip jar. To help fund a purchase he’ll never make. An olive branch, I guess.

               “Yea, sure. I mean. Okay yea. That seems cool.” He says, almost sounding sincere.

               “It is cool. Reading. Talking about reading. It calms down my brain.”

               “I’ll see you next week and let you know what I think,” he says.

               “Next week we get started on the Fountainhead.” I joke.

               “Hey man that’s not—”

               Cling.

               He’s never going to read a Jewish writer so long as he lives.

Always bid farewell by the curbside chalkboard listing new arrivals.

               I do hope he finds the deep seated joy of reading something ‘moving.’ I wish that to all. Even the worst of us.

               …it is more of a jingle.