Lupus est in fabula
You know how the three Grey Sisters sit in their cave waiting for Perseus to come and bully them, and to pass the time until he comes they share their one eye around their little circle, same as you would pass a joint if you had one and you were in a basement with two good friends who knew how to be polite, only they were in a cave and they only had the eye? When one of them took too long a drag on the Eye, “Sister,” the others would say, getting excited, “Sister, do you see the old times coming back?” Then when the murderer and thief Perseus stole their Eye they wrung their hands and wept tears out of their dry sockets and in the end they gave up their Terrible sisters, the Gorgons, to be slaughtered by the butcher Perseus in trade for their Eye back. They were sorry to do it, but memory is too good a drug to let go.
In the old times I personally look out for, I labored away behind a real live bookstore counter, watching the orange cat eat a packet of circa 1900 US Railroad Clergy Fare Certificates and making only token efforts to stop her. You got to eat them to get a discount on the ghost railroad now that the century has turned, and I wasn’t going to eat them myself, so let her have her chance, is what I thought. The owner was soft-hearted with regard to his cats so I would not have been shouted at even if he had spent money for these Clergy Tickets, which he hadn’t, or if they were rare, which they weren’t. I promise. They were buried in a very old copy of, as I remember it, Ignatius Donnelly’s The Great Cryptogram. Just imagine the very reverend man who must have once owned it, reading all about how Francis Bacon hid acrostics and equations in every corner of Shakespeare’s plays as he bounced along in his train car at the reduced religious man’s rate.
Anyway so it’s eleven years ago! Please get that part fixed in your mind before I tell you a couple of old stories, this is called Setting the scene and I need you to help me do it. These are some second-tier anecdotes that didn’t make it into the big bookstore melancholia of 2015. Direct quotes are real direct quotes as far as I could be trusted when I wrote them down fifteen minutes after they were said to me, so this is, as they say in serious books, faithfully adapted from contemporary accounts. It’s Werewolf September now whether anybody wants to deal with it or not, so in honor of that, I give you two strangers who could plausibly have been werewolves. I have every reason to believe that they were.
* * *
This short woman somewhere between seventy and ninety years old, white hair and a little potbelly and a fine European wardrobe and a fine European manner and as many bags as your strongest man can carry, she opens the door from the outside and stands right in the doorway blocking it and not moving, looks at me and cries out "Ach du lieber Gott, what happened in here?"
(She means: Was there a robbery, was there a vandalism, are these books hurting you, should I call someone. I tell her it isn’t really that anything has happened, more that a lot of things that were supposed to happen haven’t happened yet.) Getting her bearings and realizing what sort of establishment she has opened the door to, she says
"I have fourteen thousand books at home. I say like Erasmus of Rotterdam, when I have a little money I buy books, and if I have a little more I buy food and clothes. Do you know Erasmus of Rotterdam?"
(I allow as how I do know Erasmus of Rotterdam. That line is a quote you can get off a bookmark, if you like bookmarks, but she said it like Erasmus had told it to her in her own living room, and I said my Yes back to her just as if Erasmus was a frequent visitor to my living room as well.) She says
"I always tell my daughter to get a job in a bookstore, I tell my kids to hell with that Wall Street big-money business. Do you know there is a print you should get, you should get this German picture, it is a picture of a man on a ladder, surrounded by bookshelves, books from ceiling to floor, and in his hands he has a book and a book in the other hand and a book between his legs — here she lapsed into German to add what I believe was a dirty joke I could not follow —and he is what they call in German Buch-Wurm, Bookworm."
(I agree, lying, that we should put up this print.) She says
"I don't know why I spent all those years in teaching and social work, you have the best kind of job, with all the books and cats. I worked so hard and they would send the children back to their families. What families! Boys should learn how to take No for an answer, and if they can't learn to take No, all the girls should learn to —” and she gave a little hop-skip-punch-kick to illustrate, dropping none of her bags in the process. Then she took a turn!
“And if you don't want to have kids, you shouldn't screw, the Church of Rome says! And do you know what they did in the middle ages, the God-Damn Church of Rome, they would pay little children a penny a sack for a sack of black cats, and they would throw the cats in the ovens with the witches, and the more they screamed and howled the happier they would be for the devils leaving them, and they said they would go to Purgatory instead of Hell, and do you know what I think? I think they should throw him [the Pope] in there!
Part of my gift as a bookseller in an open shop was that I flew into a panic at the barest hint of a disruption to my routine (i.e. anyone coming in) but stayed exquisitely calm when really difficult things were happening or were said to me — in particular I am good with people, or werewolves, who Take a Turn because I am always ready to believe there was an important paragraph I missed through not paying attention — so I maintained my receptive affect and only wondered which Pope she meant. One of the Gregories, it would have had to be. After airing her feelings about Popes of past times, she said
"In Edmonds I have a garden and I feed eight cats besides my own cats, they all come to visit. And the raccoons come trooping up and share a dish with the cats, and my cats are very snobbish, they sniff and say Who let you come along, you raccoons, our social inferiors. I call my garden the Garden of Eden Two.
"There was a fire in a house, and the firemen got the cat out, and the mother cat, there was a cat who lived there, she went back into the fire and came out with her little kitten in her mouth, she was all scorched. A human woman wouldn't do as much for her children! You'd never catch one of those bitches doing that.
"I never had a television in my house when I was young. No! Only books and crafts, and we were never bored. You know what my son's wife said, she said she wanted to send her daughter to a nursery school to be socialized, to be a proper American girl, not one of those European bluestockings -- you know what is a bluestocking?"
(I do.)
"Well, but for her to know that word, that woman!
The older I get, the more I prefer animals to humans. Goodbye, dear."
and she left, with her white hair standing on end with the electricity she generated and all her bags full of mystery, and the whole time she stood there telling me vigorous opinions she never came in all the way past the threshold, or said a word about what she had come for at all, how do you like that.
How am I sure she wasn’t a vampire instead of the other thing? Because it was broad daylight outside, that’s how.
* * *
The other seasonally appropriate memory I bring you is of a man who eyed our occasional Erotic Windows with the starving look of a stray dog at a snausage factory. In the day-to-day run of things we were not a filthy book concern, but then we bought fifteen bags of erotica from a walk-in, so come Valentine’s Day I didn’t have to be creative to fill out the display for once.
This guy, starting right around Lupercalia, came in once a week, wore a camel-colored suit always, and sunglasses and strong cologne, slicked his hair back with some last-century patent hair tonic, he was like a man who spends all his spare time looking up suave and louche in the dictionary and trying to split the difference. He always bought a stack of three or four things: a thriller, some forgettable popular nonfiction, and a naughty book or magazine slipped in at the bottom of the pile, Bosoms or some such thing, chosen with absolute regularity and devoted lack of discrimination: he would search a thing out in the general shelves if he had to, never asking for directions, but if I put a thing in the lascivious window display it called to him, and without fail he answered the call. The dirti(er) Goblin Market, a Mapplethorpe photo book, the poems of Thomas Wyatt, Bosoms IV, it was all the same to him.
I hope it is clear that he was not at all a creep as I judge these things, and I was happy enough to see him come in, week to week. Unlike the woman of the first story, I do not believe he had but lately come to the shores of Seattle, or that, like her, he had a great rolling memory storehouse of bounding on four fur legs through the Hercynian Forest between the giant oaks, catching birds whose feathers (Pliny tells us) shone like fire and snapping at the jointless (Caesar says) elk: I estimate he was no more than one hundred years older than he should have been and it showed. He was only consumed by the strange and relentless drive to conceal, to acquire, and to hoard. The cats had an equally urgent need to watch him but could not look at him, they would roll over and over in an effort to resolve the contradiction. He gave them fits and they were always glad to see the back of him.
* * *
There are my two werewolves for Werewolf September. So much for them.