My First Education

Imagine... sex, celebrities, and all the books you could ever want to read

Two weeks until the fall semester begins. Except for the unknown agony of what an Oceanography course entails, I feel pretty confident moving into my senior year. I was a terrible student as a young person, but now that I am older, the mystery of how to work is gone. When you look at the actual class time that translates into a full load, it falls way short of the 40+ hour work week I’ve been slogging through since 1992.

When I dropped out of college and moved to New York in the early 90s, all I wanted was to be an actress and work a day job at a bookstore. I only had to suffer a few months as a busgirl at a place called Boogie’s Diner (where I wore a T-shirt that said—I shit you not—I PICK BOOGIES), before a job listing in the New York Times showed up for Doubleday Bookshop on Fifth Avenue, right across from Tiffany and Trump Tower. I only had one nice outfit—a rayon dress, white with pink roses and white patent leather shoes to match—and I wore that as I spun through the revolving glass door and into my informal education. Ed Shreve, the man who would become my boss, later recalled I looked like a southern Norma Jeane stumbling off the bus. In many ways, that place was my college. On my first day at work, Ed picked up a paperback copy of The Firm by John Grisham, tore off the front cover (as is custom in the book return world), and handed it to me to read. “This book is number one on the bestseller list. Start here and then read everything else.”

And I did. I fell in love with Nabokov and Bukowski. John Fowles and James Baldwin. Donna Tartt and Toni Morrison. William Styron and Amy Tan. I read all the classics from The Jungle to On the Road and every bestseller from American Psycho to Waiting to Exhale. I spent every second of my lunch break sitting on the back stairs eating strawberries bought off a street vendor, smoking Camel Lights, and reading Vanity Fair and the New Yorker from cover to cover. I made frenemies with the unioned stockroom workers, including the one who menaced me with sexual taunts and a baseball bat and the one who eventually left when we got computers and it was revealed that after working in a bookstore for thirty years he didn’t know how to read. I fell in love with the elderly and elegant John Donovan who came to work in a seersucker suit and a wicker hat and loved to tell stories about Marilyn Monroe and Jackie Kennedy. I tucked myself under the mothering wing of Emily Brenner who ran the children’s section and homeschooled her darling daughter on the sales floor. I confided in the opera-singing Evans Clough who taught me about false cadence and accidentally recorded the shot that killed John Lennon on his cassette deck during rehearsal one night.

Both customer and employee, that place was filled with legends. Actors and authors. Psychos and sycophants. With nothing but a spotty, microfiched inventory, I memorized every book in the place and helped Yoko Ono, Stephen King, and Imelda Marcos shop for poetry and science fiction. I went to fabulous parties where I got tipsy on free wine and bent the ears of Kurt Vonnegut and Ralph Ellison. It was a magical time to be twenty-something in New York, and in an era before Amazon and the internet, that store was one of the intellectual centers of it all. There was so much to love about that place that I could go on and on. It was the end of an era for bookstores in America, right before big box chains took over, and I was there to witness its beautiful last gasps.

It was also the first time I was fully away from my family, and I was young and impressionable and all the people and books at that place taught me all the things that a full load of college should have.

Fraternity. Celebrity guests. World literature. Sexual harassment. It had it all.

When I think back on that time more than 30 years ago—fueled by fiction and raging hormones—the people at that place supported me going through all kinds of tumultuous growing pains. My codependent mother who’d call me from Virginia almost every day and cry over one thing or another, leaving me in tears, flopped on the sales floor. I survived the breakup of the first love of my life by sorting overstock and weeping on the shoulder of whoever would listen, then proceeded to kiss everything that moved for a good long while. I was a raging, flirting, delirious child in a building full of parents more equipped to help raise me than my own. I spent five beautiful years there until the store shuddered in 1997, learning to navigate the world, surrounded by smart people with Harvard degrees who cut me a break at every turn, and all the books you could ever want to read.

If that isn’t a dream university, I’m not sure what is.