First of all, I want you all to know that I don’t really work at the Barnes and Noble on the Middlesex Turnpike in Burlington (“no, ma’am, we’re not at the mall: go one block past the mall and it’ll be on your right, near the Tower Records; yeah, look for the big Taco Bell sign and get ready to park...”).
Yeah, I’m there, 20 hours a week. But here’s the secret truth: I actually have been stationed by the Peace Corps in a small and highly illiterate country called Suburbia (you can find it on a map, near route 128; its political boundaries haven’t changed too much over the years). I have been stationed in Suburbia by the Peace Corps, to teach Literature as a Foreign Language. Sure, that’s it. That’s the story. That makes it easier to answer politely, when asked, for the fourth time, if “Toni Morrison is the guy that wrote the Oprah club book.” Hey, it’s an image that works for me.
My manager calls me Satan. She means it as a compliment. What this refers to is the fact that if you are unlucky enough to come into the store and ask me where the 50-cent maps of Boston are, as opposed to asking one of the other booksellers... Well, I consider it my civic duty to make sure, using ancient Chinese secrets of hypnosis, that you leave with the 190-dollar National Geographic Atlas of the World, because I have convinced you that you really want to know exactly where Boston is, I mean in a global sense. So this is why my manager calls me Satan, and while the other booksellers have to shelve, my assignment is to troll the stacks, bait in hand, looking for customers to reel in.
I will confess that despair would be easy. Take the 13-year-old girl who came in looking for books on Nietzsche:
“Is this for a paper?” I asked politely.
“No, I just wanna know what Nietzsche says about God.”
“Well,” I said, “um, Nietzche pretty much says that God is dead. Perhaps you’d like Kierkegaard.”
“Nope, it’s gotta be Nietzsche.”
“And this isn’t for a paper?”
“No, it’s because Marilyn Manson quotes Nietzche in his biography.” (And please do not make me tell you that the Marilyn Manson biography is on the bestseller list.)
“Well,” I said, “yeah, a lot of people have liked Nietzsche. You know, in fact, Hitler really really liked Nietzsche a whole lot.”
“What band did he play in?”
Oops, I thought, there goes humanity. “He played for the Nazis,” I said, not skipping a beat. “They were really big, a while back.”
This is not an easy job. There is no one else like me in this bookstore. My manager has had to convince the district manager that I am a diabetic and that my nose ring is actually the way I receive my insulin every day. And what’s even worse: that ploy actually worked. So you gotta know, from the get-go: These people are stupid.
We’re talking about customers who come in and look at the criminally huge display of Leonardo DiCaprio and buy everything on it. And there’s a lot of books to buy about this boy. His two biographies (that each take about 15 minutes to read, and neither of which tells those girls he’d much rather sleep with their brothers), three books of posters, four magazines, a huge photo-“essay” book, and the like. It got so bad that, when the movie-tie-in cover came in on The Man in the Iron Mask, with Leo on the cover, a man said to me in disgust, “This Leonardo DiCaprio thing has gone too far. I mean, for Chrissakes, the movie hasn’t even come out yet and you’re selling the book!” I put up a big sign that said, “Before there was Leonardo DiCaprio, there was Alexandre Dumas.” I do what I gotta do, you know: the Peace Corps demands nothing less.
