Sign Here

Recently had a 'famous celebrity' do a book signing in the store. Although none of the store's managers know of my previous life as an entertainment/event kind of guy, they assigned me to supervise the control of the line and the actual signing area, something I was more than comfortable doing. This particular celeb is a mainstay on a popular cable channel, and has several books out already, but the appearance was highly anticipated and, it seems, a big deal for the store. The celeb had made an appearance in another Bay Area store and the crowd totaled between 700-900 people. We drew 300.

A note to the types from corporate who shepard and run these event from store to store: 1 -- the celeb is a human being, not an icon; 2 - the people in line - customers, I'll remind you -- find your rules about how to have the book that they just purchased open to the correct page for signing an inconvenience, and they're all right with it, until you admonish them to do it while they're still eighty-feet away from the signing table and they're carrying a stack of books, and they're taking care of their kids; 3 - take a fucking chill pill.

The celeb had two former NYPD detectives as bodyguards, not because the store is in a bad part of town, but because in this day and age, sadly, you're better off being proactive rather than reactive, no matter how nice the environment is. Out of three-hundred people, we had two that were obnoxious. I was actually more concerned, and somewhat saddened, at the guy who FINALLY put the cap on his lens after I told him, in no uncertain terms, no pictures, and who had obviously been drinking, and had his wife and three small children with him. He was nice enough, in that chummy drunk sort of way, but that behavior's kind of old, y'know?

The crowd was smaller than they expected, though not by much, and the celeb spent the down time signing more books. Eventually, every copy of the celeb's books in the store were signed, which meant that, aside from meeting the celeb for less than sixty-seconds, everyone who stood in line for just under three hours could have waited and popped in to by an autographed book the next day.

Quickies

I can't help it, the slobs still amaze me. They pull off the shrinkwrap from books that have it on for a reason, jog through the book, and leave the wrap and the book behind when they leave.

One of the booksellers spent an hour with a woman, pulled forty books for her, and the woman walked out without buying one.

While mom was perusing god knows what, her son brought in tracing paper and traced the continents from a huge atlas for his homework.

If you give people free treats, like little squares of cookies or whatevers, because it's Educators' Week and teachers are getting 25% off because they work their ass off and get paid shit, the people will eat the treats then leave the little plastic cups in which the treats were served on shelves everywhere in the store, even though the trash receptacles are not that hard to find.

Lemony Snicket's The End generated as many phone calls and requests as Woodward's State of Denial.

Non-book store related:

What do I do, if anything, about the mechanic that works on my truck, and happens to have a good-sized swastika tatoo on his upper arm?

I first noticed it the last time I had my truck worked on, about six or seven months ago. It's not the first time he's worked on it. We have that kind of realtionship where we've interacted enough that we would recognize each other outside of the shop where he works, and we can do that casual conversation thing when I bring in the truck. He 'seems' nice enough, and it's not like he wears a sleveless shirt and displays his beefy guns with the swastika for all to see. I noticied it because some of it was visible, extending below the sleeve of his T-shirt.

I'm like that -- I notice things about people. It's the writer and actor in me. In addition to the book project I've mentioned here before, I have several in various stages, one tentativley titled "Don't watch the pretty girl: (sub) watch the guy watching the pretty girl", the point being that if you're interested in trying to understand what makes people tick (even on the days when you think that's a hopeless endeavor), you've got to observe them in a way that's different than the way other people do. So, I tend to 'see' things that others miss.

Do I take the Buddhist path, and go with compassion, think that maybe the tatoo is the result of a misguided period in his life, or do I follow that with logic (dangerous), and follow with, "well, why hasn't he had it removed?"

Is it something I should ask him about? Is it my business? It's not so far up his arm that he meant to keep it hidden.

Do I pull a Google thing on him and the shop, and take my business elsewhere?

I don't think about it a lot, but it does cross my mind more often than not, because it's time to take the truck in. I'm leaning toward asking him. Really.

I'll let you know how it turns out.

Lips and ass kicking

Since Nut Korea's duck-and-cover game has pushed the Foley scandal off the front pages and dropped it down the list on news sites, I can share this story and not be a part of the madness that took place last week. It's my attempt to focus on an aspect of the Foley thing that gets mentioned as a "what happened", but gets shorted on the finding out why this aspect of the story hasn't received more scrutiny.

Forty years ago, maybe more, when I was in seventh or eighth grade, a short, pudgy man known as Lips followed boys around my neighborhood. I was one of them.

I can't recall who at school first talked about him. I went to a Catholic grammar school on the southwest side of Chicago -- White Sox, Marquette park, Midway Airport (which was actually closed back then), a square of life for me bordered by Kedzie to Western, 59th to 69th. We were all working class, the only people out and about during the weekdays were retirees and houswives, and none of us had ever heard of a Mercedes, but the sight of a battleship-sized, gleaming Cadillac made us stop and stare. I went to Catholic school for the quality of the education, not because my parents were devout Catholics. They ponyed up something like fifty bucks a month tuition, a freakin' hefty sum back then.

We lived in an apartment above a neighborhood grocer on 63rd street, one of the longest commercial streets in the city. Our front window looked out over the street, and I could sit on the radiator cover like it was a bench, and watch the show below. Our short block was between California and Mozart, our next door neighbors were Fred and his wife, an old couple who owned the bar downstairs, and beside them was Schultz's bakery -- owned by the Schultz family, who lived upstairs -- and across the steet was a large, vacant, weed-overgrown corner lot, another bar (or tavern, for you midwesteners), a tobacco store, dry cleaners and, close to the corner, the Velvet Lounge, a club that had live music and a good deal of fights.

On many nights, it was a better than watching TV.

It was a playground discussion, along the lines of "there's this guy named Lips and he's following kids around, only boys, though". It didn't ocurr to me to wonder how someone knew his name, or where that name actually came from, none of that was anywhere near as important as knowing that some guy was following us boys around. Over the next few weeks it seemed like everyone knew, including Marge, a thick, no-nonsense woman who was the crossing guard at 63rd and California. She didn't use these exact words, but I do recall one afternoon, waiting for the light to change, that she essentially said something to the effect that if she ever saw him she would kick his ass.

And then came the day when I actually saw him, when he followed me home. I wasn't coming home from school, or he would have had to get past Marge; I think I had been playing at the schoolyard, which was only three blocks from home. I didn't know it was him at first. In all the talk about him, no one had ever really described him. I just kind of noticed him at some point, not just walking behind me but looking at me. He was probably in his forties, no taller than five-foot-something, maybe five-four, something more than stocky, with a broad face. The whole 'Lips' thing, though, it must not have come from his physical attributes, because that area of his face seemed no bigger than it should have been. He was neither caucasion nor black -- which was the not quite the phrase of that time -- but I only note this because, as I later found out, his english was very, very limited.

Now, I wasn't any kind of big kid. I was fast, a decent size for my age, but certainly not big. I had a kind of confidence though, and a bit of daring. The daring thing was innate: I had an ability to be accepted and hang with some of those kids who eventually ended up in prison or dead, and I was not adverse to doing things that, had I been caught, I would have suffered grave consequences; the confidence, or whatever it might be called in a closer-to-skinny-than-not eleven year-old, that came from the judo and karate classes that my father and I had at the dojo on the corner of the next block, also visible from our front window. This was, by the way, just before Bruce Lee hit the small screen as Kato on the Green Hornet, so this was a bit of an exotic undertaking to a few of my friends.

When I realized that this was the infamous Lips, and that he was following me, I slowed a little and let him catch up, enough so that when I looked over my shoulder at him for the upteenth time, he smiled at me and nodded his head.

I picked up speed, took a detour through a short alley behind my house and came around the other side of the block. When I didn't see him on the street, and I was sure he wasn't around, I went in my front door.

I told my dad when he came home from work, leaving out the part about slowing down as I walked home. He was livid, and I knew that he wasn't livid at me. He told me, in no uncertain terms, that if I ever saw Lips again that I should stay away and, more importantly, tell him.

My dad is an Irishman; not just a man of Irish descent, but a man born and raised in Ireland. He met and married my mom in Glasgow, Scotland, and they emmigrated to Canada, where I popped out, before moving to Maine then Chicago. He was never one of those hard-drinking Irishman, but he had a temper. He'd been a Royal Marine commando at a pretty young age, and he was one of those men who could do anything he had to do, work any job necessary to take care of his family. He was a do'er.

I took his orders to heart.

I never told him about the second time I saw Lips. I spotted him walking along 63rd, and I fell in behind him, at a decent distance. I can't say why I followed him, exactly, but I remember it having to do with that feeling of, "there, how do you like it, weirdo". He noticed me, doing the over the shoulder thing, but something about the way I looked, I'm guessing, conveyed to him that I wasn't trying to be his buddy. We went like this for several blocks, and as he turned off 63rd and headed into a neighborhood I closed the distance between us. By the time he turned around to confront me, and the look on his face was a mix of fear and anger, we were only ten feet apart.

Again, I wasn't big, and I wasn't really 'bad', and the same can certainly be said of him, I was intimidated though, as any child can be by any adult. I stopped, but I started to harass him vocally, something along the lines of "c'mon Lips, ya' goon", and he turned and walked on. I followed, and he turned back to me. We stared at each other, he turned and walked off, and I turned to go home.

I was stting at the front window, early evening, the third and last time I saw Lips. He was across the street, walking, and he stepped off the sidewalk into the vacant lot. It was early evening, already dark, but the streetlights and light from all the stores cast enough ambient light into the lot that even though he went to the middle of what was a pretty big space, I could tell what he was doing. He was unzipping his pants to take a leak, in the middle of the field.

"He dad, there's that guy Lips, that guy that follows us around."

My dad was at my side in a heartbeat. "Where?"

"In the field, taking a pee."

He was gone down the stairs as fast as he had been at my side. I watched as he crossed the middle of the street and walked onto the lot. I saw Lips turn, still taking a leak, barely able to get his tool back into his pants before my father grabbed a handful of his jacket at the shoulder and pushed, dragged and manhandled Lips back to the sidewalk. I could see that my father was giving him an earful, and as they reached the sidewak, he threw Lips forward. Somehow the little guy managed to keep his feet, and he was moving forward at a clip that I found remarkable, considering he wasn't running, but it wasn't fast enough for my father, who stepped up behind Lips and kicked him in the ass so hard that Lips actually left the ground.

I watched my father watch Lips scamper away. When he came back upstairs, he said Lips had kept saying "weak stew, weak stew" and pointing to his stomach. My father looked at me and said, "tell me if you ever see him again", and I actually felt bad for a brief moment, becuase I was pretty sure my old man might kill Lips if he ever saw him again.

I never saw Lips again. Some time later, someone in the schoolyard said they'd heard Lips was dead, stabbed to death in a bar.

There are a few things in life that are more than warnings. Lips didn't follow boys around because he wanted to be their friend; that's not what a normal forty year-old man does. A normal forty year-old man, or any adult man, can love kids, want to be around them because he realizes the magic of kids, the potential that's wrapped up in them, and he can be involved in their lives, as a father, uncle, mentor, teacher, coach, be there for them, all those important times. But normal men know that following boys around is abberant behavior.

Abberant behavior. An elder statesman who initiates conversations with male teenagers, asking them directly -- as opposed to introducing himself to the parents and explaining why he would like a photograph to include in some official aspect of the Page program, for instance -- asking the teenager for a photograph, initiating direct, private conversations and encouraging discussions that can easily be considered as suggestive and inappropriate, this is abberant behavior.

In the face of abberant behavior, and evidence of this abberant behavior, how would anyone come to believe that a 'warning' to stop engaging in such behavior would be prudent, effective or acceptable? While I accept that we are all at the mercy of what we get from the news on this episode, one consistent aspect of the story seems to be that regardless of WHEN people knew about Foley's behavior, the initial action was to tell him to stop it.

They told him to stop it. Like a warning ticket for speeding, or an admonition for being caught in a lie.

He was told to "knock it off."

The possibility of a cover-up, lying politicians trying to cover their asses, that's old news and unsurprising. I am truly, truly saddened that from the very first opportunity to deal with this, that these men -- and we are talking about highly educated, powerful men -- believed that telling a man who was engaging underage teens in questionable, private conversations, and making inappropriate requests, to 'stop it' was a responsible course of action.

This is about so much more than political parties and fingerpointing; this is about something that was shameful from the first moment, about something that should have been confronted and dealt with from the first inlking that it was ocurring.

The first person who told Foley to "stop it", and everyone else who thought that was good enough, should have their ass kicked. Hard.

Observing the bookstore universe

Want to sell your book? Get a leader from another country to hold your book up as he speaks in front of the United Nations. Noam Chomsky -- I'll do some research as to the provenance of the name Noam, but let me know if you already have that info -- is one of the world's leading intellectuallists. How'd ya' like to have THAT as your claim to fame? Over the years, even though he is a relatively down-to-earth kind of guy, he's gotten flack about his staunch anti-American government views. The key here, before any of you patriots get your drawers in a knot, is the 'government' part of that description. Chomsky doesn't believe that it's just the American government that has a problem, it's government in general that is a problem, and historically, he easily supports those views and that perspective.

But, let's not get into his specifics here, although, like anything else that people develop strong opinions about, I STRONGLY suggest you read something he's written (as opposed to reading something 'about' him) before you go off on a tangent.

The point is, finally, that in this world of instantaneous exposure, where few nooks or crannies are left unexplored, one of the smartest guys in the civilized world, who has dozens of published titles known to a somewhat small, selective and educated market, sees a jump in sales of one of his titles because the leader of a country, who is a pain in the ass to our current president, takes the podium at the United Nations and holds up Chomsky's book --Hegemony or Survival -- as he calls our President the devil.

For several days after, people call requesting the book, or they come in the bookstore looking for it. I don't think we had a copy in the store, even though we had a shelf full of other his other titles. I've had my copy for two years.

What a world.

The other way to sell a book is to be Bob Woodward and write an eight-pound tome about the arroagance, ignorance and mind-numbing, ill-advised stubborness of powerful men who are so mission focused on doing things their way that they are blinded, some by choice as to the bigger picture emerging from the war in Iraq.

People who read on a regular basis are also aware of when books are set for release, which is why so many calls come in on the day of or day after the release of a widely anticipated book, especialy one that gets major media exposure weeks before it's actually released. The surprise for me was the number of phone calls and in-store inquiries I fielded from people who, by my own subjective observations, were not the usual readers of government/current events/history non-fiction.

And there were a LOT of calls and requests.

I am still amzaed at the delight that people display when you have 'their' book. My latest giggle came from the young woman with a beaming smile who actually did a tiny jump when I led her to a book on organic chemistry. And there was also the woman who was on hold for six minutes while I searched for a book on overcoming depression, then thanked me with a degree of sincerity that is hard to put into words.

The pay remians shit, but the expreiences are much more enriching than I had anticipated.

Regrouping

It's one thing to be tired due to work, exercise, or family stress, financial pressure and such, but it's another thing entirely to be tired due to the daily carpet bombing of my sense and sensibility by stories of mentally disturbed politicians, deceptive leaders, rats in suits and ties, and the unfathomable deaths of children at the hands of madman. I don't even know how to make a smooth transition from this to the rest of my post, so I'll just get on with it.

Somewhere, I think in a cover story in a business mag, someone wrote that one of the important features of a "successful" blog -- whatever that is -- is to post daily, without fail. This I have not done over the last month. It's not that my life has been that crazy, but it has been going off in many directions. Here's what's up:

The Show
The solo performance piece I did last month went well -- I give it a 97%. The audience was most appreciative, several described the show as enriching, and two members said they felt "changed," which is magical. I have been invited by a member of an organization to perform it again at a large conference in November, and I have accepted.

I didn't plan on a second performance, and I don't plan on a third. I've been around enough to live by simple but important rule, which is "one gig at a time," which allows me to focus on the gig, and prevents me from entertaining any inclinations to think, imagine or fantasize about the future, which doesn't 'exsist' anyway.

The Book & Movie Thing
The book rights are about an event and its aftermath, and at its center is a gun, but IT'S NOT A GUN RIGHTS/GUN CONTROL/SECOND AMMENDMENT story; whether the gun thing puts publishers off or not, I'm in no position to really judge. My agent believes that the story is now stale, and that's his belief as to why so many publishers have passed, even after taking the time to hold editorial review meetings with senior editors to discuss the story.

The Strive Agency, that biggest ape in Hollywood agency who wanted the movie rights to the story, have said they're really interested in repping the story to studios, but they're not willing to include optioning the book, nor are they willing to entertain any notions about my involvement in bringing the story to the smaller screen (they firmly see it as a cable TV movie, not a big screen thing). The people at the heart of the story have said they don't want to do anything -- especially within the limitations dictatd by Strive -- without me, and, thus, the entire deal has fallen apart after a year of haggling.

My Job
Yep, had to get a part-time job, for a shitload of reasons, but really because I've invested three years of time and money in the book project, and it's just not feasible to continue on. Where does a writer/media guy go when he needs to get a part-time gig? Why, to a book and media store, of course. It's with one of the 'big' bookstore chains, the pay is shit, but it's interesting to constantly interact with people who like to, who HAVE to read. In one of those buzzy moments, on the first day of training, I walked past a book for which I had been content editor. There's just an odd feling when you're walking past a book that you may have to ring up in your job as cashier, and the book has a short paragraph in the acknowlegments where the author thanks you for your work.

As a writer, I welcome every opportunity to study the human race, to observe, to question, to decipher, and to wonder about, well, about us. In this reagrd, I'm getting a headful of material, observing a wide spectrum of types and behaviors. Some quick observations:

- Just because a stylish woman is decked out in expensive clothes, with a haircut that costs more than the yearly salary of people in many developing countries, and with a level of intelligence and apparently successful career, doesn't mean she isn't a slob. She's not the only one, but to actually see her take a stack of magazines from one end of the store to the kids department, flip through them for an hour, then get up and stride out of the store and leave them in a pile for some poor worker like me to pickup after her is a revelation. She's not alone, though, and I only use her because the irony of her appearance and comportment vs. her actions is an eye-opener.

- For many people, the only difference between spending an entire day or evening in a large bookstore and spending the same amount of time in a public library is that you can't get coffee at the library.

- People who come in looking for a specific book are overjoyed when you find it for them. Really.

I'll try not to bore y'all with work stories for however long this period of employment goes on.

The Future of Story & Pictures
Yeah, I'm still going to get off Blogger (see my earlier post about Google and Blogger if you need a refresher), and I'm working on the concept and look for the next generation of S&P. I'll also be posting on a regular basis, because, well...just got to do it, y'know?

Peace.