WHERE’S MY BOOKSTORE, DUDE?

by Melodie Johnson Howe

I love reading the Sheriff’s Blotter in our local village paper. Recently I came across this bit of news:

Friday, December 27, 2:30p.m. – Deputy Bordon, Deputy Neel, and Sergeant Moore were dispatched to a residence on Ladera Lane to investigate a report of a burglary. The woman at the residence reported that when she arrived home she noticed her door was closed but unlocked. When she entered the residence she did not notice anything missing. After she had been home for about thirty minutes she walked into her bedroom and observed a man standing in the bathroom. She said he smelled like dirt and alcohol and described him as a “street person.” When the woman screamed at the subject the suspect turned to her and said, “Jeez lady, I was just looking for the bookstore.” The suspect then walked through the living room and out the front door. The woman had no idea why the man was in her home and did not notice anything was out of place. A report was taken.

Jeez, a bookstore? I like this guy. What better excuse could you have for standing in a woman’s bathroom? I was looking for a hardware store takes on a slightly sexual, even threatening tone. Or I was looking for the nearest bar is just too dead on. But a bookstore lends him the sense of erudite respectability. A man who reads, who understands the power of words.

This got me to thinking. Was this man, before the booze and his descent into hell, a reader? Or a writer who couldn’t cut it? Maybe he once worked in a bookstore. Maybe he was an exec recently ousted from one of the big publishing houses. Whatever he was, he had to have been a man with dreams. On the other hand he could be one of those self-help writers — Self-Worth for Dummies — who spiraled out of control because no dummies would listen to him.

The woman is also interesting. It’s unclear whether she left the door unlocked or not. But if she didn’t she behaved as if she were her in a horror movie. No, no, don’t go into that house. And of course she does. She even looks around to see if anything is missing. But doesn’t look through the entire house. It took her thirty minutes to get to the bedroom and then the bathroom to discover the bookstore searcher. What were these people doing in those thirty minutes? Was the man trying to figure out how to get through the bathroom mirror to the bookstore? And did the woman think because nothing was taken in some of the rooms nothing would be taken in her bedroom? What distracted her? Was Oprah on? Or did she think she was acting foolish and of course her house hadn’t been burgled. There are too many paranoid people in these hard economic times that feel their possessions are in jeopardy.

I can tell by her choice of words that she has been well trained in the PC way of talking. She sounds prim and proper when she describes the man as smelling of “dirt and alcohol.” Not filth and booze. Or stinking body odor and rot gut. Or piss, vomit, and rye. And then she refers to him as a “street person” giving him the elevation of a title. The word bum, jerk, drunk, degenerate, boozer or even homeless never escaped her lips.

And the man in search of a bookstore? He just walked out the front door. What happened to him? I‘m sure he is still wandering off. That is what he does. Maybe somewhere in his blurred mind there are treasured scraps of Fyodor Dostoevsky. Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett and Jane Austen that float up into his memory and sooth him at night. I hope so.