Story: Brighton Bookshop

This past weekend my good friend Susan Moon led a Writing Retreat at Manzanita Village. It's amazing how exquisitely skilled she is at bringing out the writer in everyone. Everyone's work was astonishing. And we all went home with a dozen or more short pieces we had written. Sue will be doing her Writing Workshop here in April of next year. Check out manzanitavillage.org
for dates.

Here's one of my own short pieces from the weekend:

Brighton Bookshop
Caitriona Reed

It was after I had read Lenny Bruce’s story about borrowing two warehouse coats, and driving across to the city with his friend, and loading a refrigerator from one of the big electrical appliance stores onto his friend’s truck. His wife had been nagging him about a new one for weeks. No one noticed them hauling the heavy refrigerator out of the store.

I was seventeen. I liked books a lot. I liked having them almost as much as I like reading them. I was in Crawley one day with Don and Zoë. We went into W. H. Smiths and I walked straight to the back of the store where they kept the oversized books. I took down a copy of Larousse’s Encyclopedia of Mythology, put it casually under my arm, and walked out without batting an eye. I still have that book today.

That was back when people talked about liberating books, private property being an aberration and all that. The Anarchist Party of Great Britain was going strong, the Diggers were alive and well, and we used to hang out at Unicorn Bookshop in Brighton – where we didn’t steal books, because we were in awe of Bill Butler, the tall American poet, who ran it with his boyfriend Mike.

A few years later, Tony and I opened our own bookshop in Brighton, when Bill and Mike moved to Wales to start a publishing co-op. We bought their stock and fancied ourselves Brighton’s answer to Compendium Books in Camden. We started importing books from the States; Steven Gaskin, Alan Watts, Fritz Perls, Philip K. Dick. We sold Marx alongside astrological ephemeris, R. D. Laing, and Chogyam Trungpa. Of course, we refused to sell Linda Goodman’s Sun Signs or anything that remotely resembled a best seller.

We paid ourselves five pounds a week and kept lots of books for ourselves. Then we noticed that books were disappearing that we couldn’t account for from sales or from our own personal library-building activities. Someone was ripping us off. Several people probably, big-time!

Then one afternoon we discovered one of our regular customers, a history teacher form the Poly, someone we used to chat with whenever he came in, leaving the shop with a very large bag of books he hadn’t paid for.

“Right! We’re calling the fuzz.”

“Oh come on man. Don’t do that.”

“Well you can’t just walk out of here with a bag full of books. How do you expect us to survive? You’ve done this before too haven’t you?”

“Oh, come on man!”

We led him upstairs to wait for the police. As soon as we got to the top of the stairs he turned, pushed past me, and taking three steps at a time charged downstairs and straight through the plate glass door. He shattered it, tripped, and fell onto the pavement with blood streaming down his face and arms.

“Oh no, now we’re going to have to fix the door too. What’s wrong with you, man?”

When Tony moved to the States, Richard bought him out. A year later the shop closed. It turned out that Richard had a gambling problem. One week he lost three grand on the horses and wiped us out.

Sometimes I wonder if it wasn’t all some sort of retribution for that Larousse Encyclopedia.