Chicken Out of Hell
An Andrew
Hamlin Joint
Please
Don't Let The Cats Out Dept.: Beauty & the Books, a
dilapidated used bookstore of three cavernous
rooms with one wide low-ceiling basement, on the
bottom floor of a multicolored mock mansion in
Seattle's University District, observed its last
day of business on Tuesday, March 31, with a keg
of beer and some sectioned sponge cake, and two
women up front ringing up sales at the eleventh,
twelfth, and possibly thirteenth hours. I'd been
aware of the impending end since the beginning of
that month, when I went in and noticed, for the
first time in my lifetime of patronizing the
shop, empty shelves in the long front room; the
one women behind the counter confirmed
"We're going out of business." None too
surprising really; the store had for months ran
continuous 50-70% off sales promoted with banners
longer than the room where I sleep; stories of
the IRS coming after Richard, the owner, ran rife
along "Ave" grapevines, and Richard
himself was known to ask that a check be made out
to "my good buddy, Cash."
Still, the idea
that this place I'd spent a good portion of my
growing up would upon next sunup not be there to
refract it carried palatable shock, the
slowly-leaking woe of losing a non-parental
relative, perhaps, but condensed into physical
sensation, the slot of a pulled tooth, since
after all Beauty & the Books was a place, a
micro-cosmos due to die in the night, as opposed
to the movable micro-cosmos of a human being. At
the last-night party I approached Richard and
asked him how long the shop had been there.
"Well..." he rasped, taking the
cigarette in holder away from his mouth, "we
opened in 1967, but, we were a head shop for
about a year in there..."
"Older than I
am," I said, nodding along.
He cracked a smile
at the speed of a knife spreading thick jam on
thin bread. "Not for very much longer."
From the very back a sound of bookshelf wood
being pried from brother bookshelf wood sang out
like a dying pterodactyl.
The shop sat at
the southern end of what is technically
University Way North East but is usually called
"The Ave" by people in the
neighborhood, many of them students at the
University of Washington's spread one block east,
and one door down from what was once a Sir Plus
and today is Second Time Around Records, a
Carlsbad-cavernous consolidation of three smaller
record stores into what's mostly likely the
biggest vinyl graveyard to ever call this city
home. Down the block and around to the right sits
the former site of Cellophane Square, once a
funky little new-and-used record shop in a cute,
cramped, box-shaped space, now a big, somewhat
funky new-and-used CD shop up on the Ave itself.
The record shops were good for gawking at leather
pants and leopard-print Spandex hung from
anti-theft chains in midnight, to contemplate the
used Velvet Underground records at ridiculous
prices, for dragging home Safe As Milk 
by Captain Beefheart or Songs
For Swinging Larvae by Renaldo and the Loaf
or the more-or-less complete works of Vanilla
Fudge, the New York Rock & Roll Ensemble, or
Blind Faith (yes, I do believe you could get the
complete works of Blind Faith for something right
around $1.99). A good place to stay on your feet.
But Beauty & the Books was a good place to
give your feet a rest--and your psyche, too, if
the latter was bound to head home, inevitably, to
a place where for the price of a bed and a full
belly it would wearily consent to being placed
back in a vice screwed tight.
Beauty & the
Books was too hot in the summer (even with the
grated back door thrown open to reveal the
incongruous alleyway) and too hot in the winter;
its furniture sometimes displayed bewildering
odors; and I never did learn the truth
about the thing in the basement which suggested,
in the absence of any other suggestions, a
burrito absconded with from Quatermass' Pit. But
it had the three things every used book store
should have: Comfortable dilapidated couches on
which to stretch out indefinitely, classical
music zimming the air from a stereo near the
front door, and by store's end, five felines,
with their own chart mounted on wooden backing
which gave each one's name (Fleur, Pousse, Minou,
Oliver, and Cyrano), age, identifying marks (they
were all black with varying splashes of white, so
this came in handy), and personality precis
(Fleur was the only real lap cat of the bunch,
and liked to sink her whole body onto my
midsection, assisting me in sinking ever farther
into the cushions with only a hardback first
edition of Albert Goldman's Elvis for
floatation.)
On the last night
of the store I ate the cake and drank quite a bit
of the beer out of a small plastic cup. I chatted
with a Satanic sculptor who fashioned the head of
Geoffrey Fieger, Jack Kevorkian's lawyer, and
sent it to the attorney but received no response.
The Satanist explained the tenets of his faith to
his audience of two: "If you're going to
fashion your own god, why not fashion the god
that gives you the greatest personal power?"
I shared my quote from the novel Children of
God by Mary Doria Russell, a mafia don who
remarks at a morally ambiguous moment, "You
know, I've always thought it was a tactical
mistake for God to love us in the aggregate, when
Satan is willing to make a special effort to
seduce each of us individually." My audience
of two roared.
I did not venture
into the basement, with its low ceiling and
shelves scientifically placed to make crossing
the room in a straight line impossible; I'd had
quite a bit of quite a bit of beer by the time
the idea even struck me, and anyway I'd made my
goodbyes to that part a week or two earlier, when
I bought Frederick Exley's A Fan's Notes
when I slipped into the basement and flitted
furtively across the now-unlit space. I
remembered the piercing white light of
fluorescent tubes just inches from your forehead.
I remember an old friend, now lost to me,
flipping open a Harlan Ellison book and filling
the room with fine, round tones telling the story
of Ellison hearing--never seeing--a murder in a
darkened movie theater. I remember finding The
Prodigy by Amy Wallace, the biography of
William James Sidis, who graduated Harvard at
thirteen, which I bought, and a mostly
handwritten paperback written by a paranoid
schizophrenic who'd run for president, which I
did not.
A young woman with
big eyes sat on the sofa in what used to be the
Music Books section with Fleur on her lap. She
said how sad it was that Pousse and Fleur were
being split up, because they always slept curled
over each other. An elderly lady came in and
chatted with us awhile; it turned out that the
young woman had once been the elderly woman's
dance student at a dance studio just down the
block. Yes, the older woman said, I remember you.
I've only had two students in all these years
with that name. Could you talk to Richard, the
younger woman, said, could you ask him to ask his
ex-wife to take Fleur when she takes Pousse? That
way they could both sleep at night, and they
wouldn't be quite so scared of a brand new place.
Yes, said the
older one, I'll go do it right now. And she did.
Someone said a
book store up the street might take the cats. I
don't know, the younger woman said before the
older woman came back saying she'd given Richard
the message, I don't know. I think they deserve a
few years of not being book store cats.
One New Year's day
many years ago, I woke up from the party where
I'd stayed the night and slipped my coat on and
walked silently to Beauty & the Books, and
flipped through the pages of Gene Wolfe's
Book of Days, which I didn't understand, but
which agitated me. I walked south from the store,
to the end of the Ave, across Boat Street, where
my father kept his first Seattle apartment, to
the water's edge, and I decided to try and stop
talking to myself. That was my New Year's
resolution, standing in the tiny park that met
the water. No more talking to myself. Didn't
last, of course. Even walking to the water,
wrapped in my London Fog casing, the things I
needed to say to myself rumbled inside my mouth,
around my teeth, under my coat. They needed to
come out.
When I left Beauty
& the Books for the last time, I turned
north. The tiny park south of Boat Street was
gone, I knew, suffocated under chain-link fence
and the gouges of earth-moving equipment. Richard
had fitted another cigarette into his holder, and
I offered him a light. He thanked me and my red
plastic lighter clicked on the flame, and I went
out the door bound for a house on 8th and Buffy
The Vampire Slayer and whatever future might
lie in losing the only place where I could
imagine, just for a short while, that I had made
it, made something out of all the things I said
to myself, and was now relaxing in my slightly
too-large and cheerfully eccentric den, friends,
well-wishers, and feline accomplices ringed
around me in silent, sweat-inducing furnace heat
through the horrid season of no light in the sky.
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