'I Learned Most By the Subject Matters'

Fifty years ago this month I walked into Kay’s Books on Prospect Avenue in downtown Cleveland, Ohio, and asked for a job. I was a twenty-two-year-old college dropout and for the previous year and a half had worked as a cook in a restaurant. I had been coming to Kay’s as a customer for more than a decade. I knew books and knew how the three-floor store was organized but not much else. 

You walked in the front door and there was a raised platform where the owner, Mrs. Kay – Rachel Kowan -- looked down on everyone. Augie March’s description of Grandma Lausch holds for Mrs. Kay: “an autocrat, hard-shelled, jesuitical, a pouncy old hawk of a Bolshevik.” Mrs. Kay was famous for changing – that is, raising – the price of a book when a customer handed one to her. She was short, walked like a beer-truck driver and always wore a blue blouse, black slacks and flamenco-dancer heels. Her silver-blue hair was permed into a helmet. My job interview consisted of Mrs. Kay handing me a stack of books pulled randomly from the shelves and having me alphabetize them by the author’s last name. That’s how Mrs. Kay determined I was literate.      

 

I worked on the second floor with Gary Dumm, already a veteran clerk at Kay’s, who remains a good friend. Gary is a cartoonist who worked on the late Harvey Pekar’s Cleveland-based comic American Splendor. In Gary’s first comic, Flaming Bologna, there’s a buried allusion to me. One of the characters is reading Thomas Pynchon, formerly one of my enthusiasms. Gary wrote to me on Monday: “I spent almost 10 years there and felt that I learned most by the subject matters that the customers turned me onto.”

 

One of the sections on the second floor, alongside science fiction, equine science and sociology, was soft core-porn – stacks of old cheesecake magazines with black and white photos, usually falling apart. We had a regular customer who always showed up in suit and tie, wearing a homburg. He spent hours browsing the porn, talking to himself and sometimes slapping his chest and face. Occasionally we stepped in and asked him to settle down. Otherwise, he was harmless. There was also a small selection of hardcore stuff available on request to select customers. We had an eight-millimeter reel of film purported to be a snuff flick and a paperback section devoted to enema porn. I remember that several of those titles were written by Colin Lavage. Also, gay titles, like Delivery in the Rear. Gary’s right about the “subject matters.” And yet on the same floor I found and bought three titles by Owen Barfield. Kay's was an education on several fronts.

 

The neighborhood was raffishly seedy. Across the street was June Bug’s shoeshine stand. Next door was the Domino Lounge, patronized mostly by blacks. A portion of the Kay’s basement was under the bar and you could hear the jukebox (“Papa Was a Rolling Stone” was still a favorite), people talking and dancing, and toilets flushing. Next came an Army-Navy store, where I bought cheap gloves that winter, and then the Savoy, where I drank Scotch for lunch on Saturdays. We worked six days a week for pitifully low wages and in some ways it was the best job I ever had.