An Elegy for Borders

As all the book-loving world surely knows by now, Borders Books and Music is going out of business.
The big black & Yellow signs are draped all over my local Bridgewater NJ branch:
LIQUIDATION SALE!
UP TO 40% OFF!
ALL SALES FINAL!
NO CHECKS-CASH, VISA, DISCOVERY CARD ONLY.

A great swarm of vultures who have probably never cracked a book in their lives but who just can't resist a black & yellow sign promising them deep savings, no matter what the product may be, have already begun to descend upon the stacks, running amok through the aisles and leaving chaos in their wake. A clerk told me the other day she has to spend three hours after closing each night just cleaning the place up and getting ready for the next day.
By the time you are reading this it will be all over.
Borders is no more.
And I am not happy about that.
I have never before in my life felt sadness about a store closing, but this is close to heartbreak.

In some ways, the Borders in Bridgewater has been near the center of my life for the last 17 years. I just can't believe it is not going to be there anymore. The store has often been my lifeline, in good times and bad. No matter what was going on, I could always think to myself, "well, at least I can stop at Borders for a while." My great refuge from the world. We do have a large Barnes and Noble nearby, but I'll get to that in a minute. I don't know if I can even explain it if you're not a Borders devotee, but it was simply the greatest bookstore ever in the whole history of the world.

The really sad part, of course, is that we seem to have come to the end of the age of bookstores. And maybe even libraries too. Someone was telling me the other night that in this day and age libraries are really just a waste of space, since the information is available and more easily accessible online. I did manage to point out the libraries are also used for studying, for community events, reading groups and storytimes, etc. I don't know if I quite convinced him.

And how could I explain about the joys of roaming through the stacks of books that no one ever checks out anymore, just picking up whatever strikes you at the time---a history of great fires in New York, the autobiography of Jack Benny, or the worlds greatest chess matches, to name just three I've come across recently. Sure, maybe it's costing a lot of money to house books that no one is much interested in anymore, but for some of us it's one of life's great pleasures. I mean, there must be more people than just me doing this! It's a shame that this seems to be something that is going out of the world.

Well, I do understand why this is happening. I myself own a Kindle reader, and I do order most of my books from Amazon. I really do believe that this is the wave of the future. But if we lose bookstores we are losing something in modern life that can't be replaced. At least not for book lovers. These days I tend to spend more and more time at home or visiting with family. As I have gotten older, I haven't been going out a lot. Borders was one of the few places I would make a point to visit a couple of times a week. And there is a sense of community among book lovers, like a place where all of us belonged. Without Borders, there's just one less reason for even leaving the house.

A word about Barnes and Noble: I don't much like it---except for the DVD section, which is excellent. But as a bookstore...better than nothing, I guess, but it is more a generic bookstore, like the old Marlboro and Waldenbooks, only on a much larger scale. Borders was always a brighter and more cheerful place, that seemed to be run by people who knew and loved books and reading. Barnes and Noble just doesn't have the same feel. I guess it was partly that there was way more books in Borders. If you were looking for a copy Moby Dick or A Tale of Two Cities in Borders, you could be sure of finding at least three or four editions of the book, a nice hardcover, a quality paperback, a special illustrated version. In Barnes and Noble, you get the standard issue Bantam paperback. No comparison.

And then there is the fact that Borders was always more roomy and inviting, and the decor was warmer and more cheerful...I don't know, but just about everyone will tell you the same thing. People are heartbroken over the closing. Maybe it is just something indefinable. All I know is, B&N just isn't going to be able to fill the gap.

As I said above, I have never before felt sadness over a store closing. This is a first.

And when I die, and arrive at the Pearly Gates, the first thing I'm going to say to St. Peter is, "Forget the harp...where is the local Borders around here?"And if he tells me, "But we don't have a Borders here," then I'll know I've gone to the other place instead.

1974 (1)

So there was this place called Texas Weiners on Somerset Street in Plainfield NJ, and I remember one night waiting inside for the bus to arrive in a bad snow storm. Just one of those memories that stick with you throughout your life.

To help pass the time, I knocked back three dirty-water dogs with onions and Dusseldorf mustard and everything else they had piled on top. I was a teenager then, I could eat wood and wash it down with turpentine. Today, they'd have to call out the fire department.

I remember the owners, a married couple (or so for some reason I assumed) looked tired and anxious to close up and go home (the snow was really piling up), and yet they actually kept the place open an hour and a half so the three or four of us waiting wouldn't have to stand outside in the blizzard. I suppose we were all secretly wondering if they bus would ever get there, and then someone came right out and nervously joked about spending the night sleeping with our heads down on the counter. It didn't seem too pleasant a prospect, not to us and certainly not to the owners, but I couldn't help thinking at least there would be be eggs and bacon and pancakes hot off the grill for breakfast.

Then the conversation started up, the epic conversation, the one that can run on all night if you let it. We talked about favorite movies (unanimous agreement: The Godfather), about Vietnam and Nixon and about searching for something in life and whether or not anything means a damn thing in the end. When the bus finally did arrive, moving slowly but surely along the treacherous road, we ended up almost missing it. So we all went home and never saw each other again. Just one brief moment in the great warehouse of moments that make up our lives. A warm diner, friendly people, and snow falling outside.

Where does it all go to?

In Their Own Words:

“[O]f all the night that ever I slept in my life I never did pass a night with more epicurism of sleep; there being now and then a noise of people stirring that waked me, and then it was a very rainy night, and then I was a little weary, that what between waking and sleeping again, one after another, I never had so much content in all my life, and so my wife says it was with her.”
---Samuel Pepys

A Saloon Story

OK, so my father liked his beer. He drank, but not to excess---not really. Just one or two or a round dozen on a slow Saturday afternoon.

And he loved horses, too. Not the docile, half-lame pack horses my sister and I used to ride along bucolic trails in Prospect Park for a dollar an hour, nor yet the beautiful spotted Appaloosas we fed slices of our lunch-bag apples to over a high white stable fence when we stopped to stretch our legs on a long drive up to Bear Mountain.

No. Those horses he liked well-enough, I suppose, but the ones he was really passionate about had names like Spicy Bones and Beggar's Choice, and they ran in races in places called Aqueduct and Belmont and Saratoga and Pimlico. And since my father worked hard five days a week, supporting his family and supplying our every need, and as Sunday morning found him in dutiful attendance with the rest of us at 10:15 mass in St. Mary’s, it seemed only right and fair that he should have Saturday to do whatever he liked with.

What he liked to do of course was to go down to Falco's bar on Grand Street where his thirst for lager and propensity for equine wagering blended together very nicely.

Sometimes I'd go with him. In those days no one saw the harm in a kid sitting at a bar where alcohol was served. I could have even had a sip of my father's beer if I'd wanted, but I hated the taste. Instead I was kept supplied on those long ago afternoons with Coca Colas and thick slices of Sicilian pizza topped with pepperoni and anchovy. That was what I liked. Plus there was a big color Admiral TV over the bar---a rarity in those days---and when it was tuned to the baseball game you could actually see the blue in the Yankees' pinstripe, and the grass was more vividly green than anything you’d ever find in any backyard in Brooklyn.

(Of course that’s not counting the times, not infrequent, when the color tubes went ‘blooey’ and everything looked to be swimming in green gunk, like the inside of my friend Tommy Flood's aquarium that he never took care of. Truth be told, I never much cared for baseball anyway, but color TV was still a treat to watch in those days).

Mostly though, I went along to the bar because I was worried about my father's drinking. It got into my head that if I wasn't with him he might drink just a little too much and lose his way coming home and end up getting run over by a truck, leaving my mother destitute and the rest of us orphans. That was ridiculous, of course. My father never drank to the point of falling down. But I was the kind of kid who thought that way.

As we settled onto our usual high stools by the window my father would place a crisp new twenty-dollar bill on the bar in front of him , and over the course of the afternoon, between his ice cold Rheingolds and my soda and pizza, that crisp, clean twenty would transform itself into a series of beer-logged tens, crumpled fives, half-torn singles, plus a stack of smudgy quarters, dimes and nickels, until by five or six o'clock all that was left was a single and some change which my father left behind for Joe or Dominick, whichever Falco brother was tending bar when he finally slid off the stool and said 'good night.'

Twenty dollars was a lot of money in those days, but happily my father was able to afford it. We lived in working-class Brooklyn where a really good job meant you belonged to the printer's union or better yet had a cushy job with the city. My father, who went off to far-away New Jersey every morning, worked the other side of the street. He had gone to night school and held a good management job with the Standard Oil Company and he brought home a pretty good check, as they used to say. That was a blessing for us kids. My sister had a closet full of the latest teen fashion clothes, and I was never short of money for movies, comic books and monster magazines. In every other way though my father remained true to his blue collar roots. It just meant that we all had a few more bucks to do what we liked with. I liked comics, my sister liked clothes and records, and my mother liked buying groceries for the nuns at St. Mary's, which I suppose gave her a leg up in the climb toward heaven.

What my father liked was to play the horses. Along about two in the afternoon Charlie the Bookie would saunter into Falco’s and make his way down the bar, shaking hands with the patrons and enquiring after the health of their families. On the sartorial evidence, Charlie made a very good living at his chosen trade; he was always splendidly turned out in a chocolate-brown suit, bright pink shirt, tie and pin. And you couldn’t help notice that he wore on the little finger of his right hand a pinky ring with a small diamond that sparkled when it caught the light. Guys in that neighborhood didn’t wear rings on their little fingers, certainly not rings with diamonds that sparkled. Charlie was making out OK I supposed.

"How's everything, Jack?" he'd ask when he came to my father. If I were sitting alongside dad at the time Charlie would ruffle my hair and ask, "How are things, kid? How old are you now?"

"Nine," I'd tell him, "but I'll be ten next June."

"That so?" I could feel his interest in me waning (assuming it ever actually existed in the first place) as he made his way to the next customer. Every week Charlie asked me how old I was, and every week I gave him the same answer, but what with being a bookie and all he probably had too many numbers banging around in his head already without being bothered about remembering my age.

When he was finished making his rounds Charlie would take a seat in a booth on the other side of the low wall that divided the bar from the restaurant, and he'd take out a small black notebook and a pen and place them on the table in front of him. Throughout the afternoon most of the men at the bar, my father included, would find a few minutes to slide across from Charlie in his booth, whisper a few words and surreptitiously slip him some bills that had already been folded to the size of a match book. Charlie would make a note in his book. Once in a while a cop would stop by to see Charlie, but instead of arresting him the cop would just put in his bet like everyone else. No one saw any harm in it.

When all the men who were going to whisper to Charlie had whispered to him, he'd get up and make his way back along the bar, shaking hands again and wishing everyone well. "Stay out of trouble now," he'd tell me, for no particular reason I could discern.

At around four o’clock Joe or Dominick would turn on the racing on Channel 9. Or if it wasn’t being broadcast, all the men who had been at Falco's would check the results that night in the early edition of the Daily News to see if Charlie the Bookie owed them a pile of cash the next day. His immaculate chocolate-brown suits and sparkling ring attested to the fact that he seldom if ever did.

Sometimes after Charlie left, a character named Apples would stop by. Apples was also a bookie of sorts. More specifically, he ran the 'numbers', an illegal forerunner of the lottery based on the 'total mutual handle' (all the money raked in) at the track that day. The 'number' was popular throughout the neighborhood yet oddly less prestigious than playing the horses. Like the other men, my father would slip Apples fifty cents and a small piece of paper with three digits written on it. I can't say I remember that he ever actually 'hit' the number. No matter. As with all other games, the fun, I suppose, was in the playing.

Was all of this a bad influence on an impressionable nine-year-old kid? It seems not to have been. I never developed a taste for beer or any other alcohol, I don't like bars, and I don't gamble beyond kicking a couple of bucks into the office lottery pool. So maybe there's a lesson somewhere in all that. Or maybe not.

Characters abounded in Falco's. Late in the afternoon a strange, disheveled man known to me only as "Wacky Benny" would make his way down the bar with a large brown shopping bag that held his wares: handkerchiefs, socks, shoelaces, ball point pens, and the like. My father usually bought something for a buck. When he'd finished his rounds Wacky would drink up his profits in a corner by himself where he kept up a running monologue about President Kennedy and the Masonic Lodge and a plot to overthrow the Queen of England. No one paid him any mind.

On the whole, my father's drinking companions were an agreeable crowd of oddballs and eccentrics, their 'uniqueness' reflected in their colorful 'names': Apples was so called on account of his puffy, booze-red cheeks. A fellow called the Cabbage was awarded his moniker based on the general shape of his head. The Gag was known to down his first beer of the day so fast he invariably choked on it, while The Bomb fretted over a possible attack on the US by Russia. Stilts was named for his long, skinny legs, Wacky Benny for his precarious mental state. I was always glad that my father, whose name was Jack, was called simply Jack.

In spite of all this colorful activity I always became restless after an hour or so. Like all kids, I was bored by the adult world. I was lured to the bar because of my concern for my father and because I would go anywhere that included pepperoni pizza. But after a while I would start spinning around on my stool. My father knew then to slip me a couple of bucks, and if there was a horror movie with Vincent Price playing at the Rainbow I'd catch a matinee, otherwise I'd go down to the Grand Book Center and pick out some used monster magazines. Sometimes I'd go looking for my friends, but they usually bored me as much as the grownups did. Mostly I lived inside my own head, I suppose. Sometimes I thought in advance to bring a paperback with me, stories by Edgar Allen Poe or maybe A Tale of Two Cities or The Hound of the Baskervilles. But always I was back at my father's side before he had a chance to wander off by himself into the nether reaches of Brooklyn and become lost to us forever.

So the day would come to an end, and we’d slide off our stools and make our way across Grand Street and turn onto Manhattan Avenue for the six-block trek home.

One afternoon as the late-winter sun flooded the big plate glass window and suffused the bar in a lovely coppery-red glow, my father stood up from his stool and lifted his glass for his customary last swallow before saying good night.

“Not leaving already, Jackie?” someone I knew only as Frankie asked. “Little woman got you on a schedule?”

Several other men chuckled good-naturedly. My father lowered his glass, laughed, and seemed about to make some likewise good-natured reply but then stopped. He glanced down the bar at the well-accustomed sight of men hunkered down for a night of drinking. I remember that for the briefest fraction of a moment a kind of puzzled, almost startled expression passed across his face---as if he were looking at something familiar but seeing it for the first time. Then he laughed again, took his last swallow, and set the glass down on the bar.

“Good night, guys,” he said.

It may just be the way I’m remembering it, but it seems to me now that from that night on my father’s interest in Falco’s and even horses started to wane. He still dropped in on Saturdays of course, only now he’d miss a few here and there. He’d buy a six-pack and watch the baseball game at home on (black & white) TV. Eventually he stopped going altogether. By the time he retired after his many years with Standard Oil he had given up drinking (and horses) completely, and was inspeparable from my mother.

That's the way it happened. At least, that’s the way I remember it.

As for Falco’s, it shut down after Joe or Dominick took a sudden heart attack and the surviving brother sold the place and moved to Florida. It was a delicatessen for a while, and later a shoe store. For a number of years whenever I drove through the neighborhood to visit my mother I saw it was boarded up and deserted. Since then that particular neighborhood has gone upscale in a big way, and I’m told that Falco’s now houses the offices of a stock broker and the offices of a financial planner.

It makes me think that somewhere Charlie the Bookie and Apples are smiling

In Their Own Words:

"Nature, which makes nothing durable, always repeats itself so that nothing which it makes may be lost."

-- Oscar Wilde

A Holiday Observation

Funny thing about Christmas gifts. For a few days they're still new and special enough to keep out under the tree or even piled up neatly in a corner of the living room floor, but even before the tree comes down these wonderful shiny new treasures just sort of become...absorbed...into all the other 'stuff' we own.

And maybe one day in late January you look around and say, "Hey, where did all those Christmas gifts go to?"

Well, speaking for myself, the no longer exactly 'new' shirts are hanging in my closet, and the books I bought with the gift certificates thoughtful family members were kind enough to gift me with are on the shelf mixed in with my 10,000 other books.

This year I received from my sister a very nice brass floor lamp which I have positioned next to my recliner, allowing me to read in that comfortable chair for the first time. A great gift, but after a while I probably won't associate it with Christmas, it will simply be part of the general furniture.

Well, you would think at my age I'd have more important things to think about than the fate of Christmas gifts...but I guess I don't.