On the Last Day of October

On the Last Day of October

by Harry Buschman

Greene Street is just around the corner from Washington Square and it’s the last place anybody would choose to open a book shop.

Out of town visitors to the Village would never find it and even if they did, it was so run down they wouldn’t bother to look in. Tourists don’t spend time in book shops in the first place, and native New Yorkers have more important things to do.

So why did John Reade pick this quiet side street to open his “Praxis” book shop?

The rent was cheap for one thing and there were two rooms in back big enough for a retired high school English teacher with modest means to live the little that’s left of his life surrounded by books, even if they weren’t his.

The smell of dust was the first thing you noticed when you opened the front door, and if you were careless and slammed the door too hard, the dust drifted down from the ceiling and the lights flickered. You had the uneasy feeling that if you breathed too deeply you would choke on the dust.

Faded books were scattered haphazardly in the show window as though they had been dumped there. The few passersby who might glance in at the titles quickly lost interest and instead their eyes drifted from the books to the speckled coils of fly paper hanging above them. Mr. Reade didn’t choose these books for their appearance, nor their content––it was just a convenient place to get them out of the way.

In the beginning Mr. Reade made an attempt to organize the books into coherent sections––fiction on the left, non-fiction on the right, children’s in the back and so on. He soon found himself buried under new arrivals that arrived on his doorstep every morning. He eventually threw up his hands and stacked them anywhere he found an empty shelf. Consequently, a browser might find Robert Louis Stevenson and Mary Higgins Clark in intimate proximity on a shelf labeled “Bible Studies.” Nobody cared, least of all John Reade.

Mr. Reade treated his book shop as though it was a place for him to live. A customer might find a forgotten cup of coffee or a half eaten sandwich abandoned on a stack of books if the phone at the cash register interrupted his lunch.

There were three small apartments above the Praxis book store, one above the other. They were occupied by extraordinary people, more extraordinary than Mr. Reade ... but not nearly so strange as some of the people that can be found in Greenwich Village, New York. The Village, it must be remembered, is a sort of ‘omphalos’, a hub of a strange and extraordinary castaways made up of the want-to-bes, used-to-bes and pretend-to-bes of the city.

The second floor was a tattoo parlor run by an ex-school principal by the name of Amadeo Russo. Mr. Russo, in his younger days, was a teacher in the city’s public schools. But unlike Mr. Reade, he moved up to be a principal, and finally an official of the Board of Education. His father, Bruno Russo, was a sailor in the Merchant Marine. He was tattooed from head to foot by experts in Marseilles, Shanghai and Alexandria, Egypt. His elaborately illustrated body fascinated the young Amadeo, and he could barely contain himself whenever his father made the lady on his pectorals undulate seductively.

He retired from the Board of Education at an early age and with his wife and teen-age son moved downtown to Greene Street. His lifelong dream of an exclusive tattoo parlor took shape above John Reade’s book store. Everyone was getting tattooed those days. Hippies, rock stars and even East Side ladies in their fifties and sixties looking for ‘tramp stamps’ came down to have butterflies and obscure erotic symbols tattooed on parts of their bodies only their most intimate friends would ever get to see. Only last week a woman arriving by chauffeured limousine endured the last of four painful three hour sessions to have a lion tattooed on her chest.

The elderly Mr. Holiday lived on the third floor –one floor above the Russo’s. He was ninety-six years old and chain smoked cigars. His doctor, (now deceased) told him more than thirty years ago to give up smoking or he would die of emphysema. He sat at his living room window in the morning and watched the co-eds walk by on their way to New York University. To get a better view he often leaned out precariously, both hands on the window sill with his neck craned out like an elderly giraffe.

His lunch and dinner were brought to him by an enormous black lady volunteer from the Meals on Wheels organization. It was one of the high points of his day. As she stored the food in his refrigerator he would stare down into the bottomless chasm of her cleavage and try to engage her in bawdy conversation. When she left, Mr. Holiday would consume both meals immediately, light a fresh cigar from the gas burner on his stove and resume his vigil at the living room window.

If the weather was mild, Mr. Holiday would struggle into his lumberjack’s shirt and hobble down the three flights of stairs to the street. He would walk to Washington Square Park where he would sit and watch the girls who sat in small conversational groups. How attractive they were! How appealing when they were unaware of men’s eyes!

On his return to Greene street he would stop and look in the show window of “Erotique” and gaze lovingly at the wide array of stimulating sexual paraphernalia. Mr. Holiday enjoyed a fuller sex life than many men half his age.

Mrs. Riordan lived above Mr. Holiday. She was a grass widow, and had lived in the Village all her life. She met her husband Timothy in a parking garage near the Bottom Line Strip Club. Mr. Riordan was an Irish poet who carried a framed diploma on his person proving he had an PHD in English literature from Harvard University. He read his poems on the street with the likes of Ginsberg, Kerouac and Bob Dylan. His golden voice and honeyed words quickly melted the heart of the future Mrs. Riordan, and before the month was out the two love birds were living in an abandoned Ford Biscayne under the West Side Highway. The union lasted all of three years, until Mr. Riordan found steady employment as a card dealer on a cruise ship that shuttled endlessly between the Greek islands.

Sad to say, Mrs. Riordan has tended towards the bottle of late––not heavily, but steadily. A beer for breakfast, a mid-morning snack with a bourbon chaser, a martini for lunch and a few highballs in the corner saloon in the afternoon.

Therefore, it was not surprising that Mr. Reade found Mrs. Riordan wandering aimlessly through the Halloween festivities in Washington Square Park on the last day of October.

Mr. Reade spotted her walking without purpose through the park and talking to herself. He graciously volunteered to see her home from the Halloween party. Had he not done so, Mrs. Riordan would have undoubtedly spent the night on a bench.

“I don’t normally allow myself to be picked up in the park,” she remarked primly to Mr. Reade as he took her arm and steered her back to Greene Street. “Did you know I am still married, Mr. Reade? Yes. after all these years. The little bastard walked out on me thirty years ago, bad cess and good riddance to him.”

Were it not for Mr. Reade, Mrs. Riordan’s rubbery knees would have given way more than once on the walk back to Greene Street. He had a difficult job keeping her in a straight line despite his steady hand. “He was an uncouth bugger,” she went on. “Do you think he would put the toilet seat down? Oh no! Oh no, not Timothy Riordan. ‘I need it up’ he would say. ‘You don’t hear me complain when you leave it down, do you’ he would say.” They stopped in the street outside the vestibule to her apartment and Mrs. Riordan stared at the building she had lived in for three decades. “Why are we stopping here, Mr. Reade.”

“You live here, Mrs. Riordan.” Mr. Reade regretted seeing Mrs. Riordan in the park. He could be reading in bed by now if it wasn’t for this absurd woman––now it appeared he would have to see her to her door.

They made their way awkwardly up the three flights of stairs to her apartment, Mrs. Riordan in front and Mr. Reade pushing her from behind. When they reached her door he asked her for her key. “My key, why? she asked, "what on earth would you want with my key?”

“So I can open the door to your apartment Mrs. Riordan.”

“You must think I’m incapbubble of ... “ She considered the possibility of letting herself in, then unslung her shoulder bag and handed it to Mr. Reade, who fished through tissues, both clean and used, combs, nail files, bills and match book folders from every bar in Greenwich Village until he found her key.

“A woman in my position can’t be too careful Mr. Reade. Only last month a friend of mine on Houston Street had her snatch pursed in Bloomingdales.” She leaned against the wall while Mr. Reade unlocked her door. “Did you know I was a prominent vocalist in my day? The critics said I had a pure almost angelic voice, Mr. Reade,” She smiled in her remembrance of a happier day. "On a good evening I could stretch three octaves.” She belched loudly. “I’ll have you know I auditioned for Massanet’s “Le Cid” and Gounod’s “Faust.” She leaned back against the wall and slid her entire body down to a sitting position on the floor with her knees spread wide as Mr. Reade got the door open.

Alone at last in the Praxis book store, Mr. Reade picked up the letter the landlord left that afternoon. He looked out at the dark street through his fly specked show window. The word “Praxis” stared back at him in mirror image––a life’s dream come true. To live and work, to sleep and eat, in the close companionship of the world’s best literature! Well, maybe not the best, the best was, and would always be, a matter of opinion.

But they were good books, every last one of them. The feel of them, the smell of the paper and ink. The binding and glue that held them all together. The sound of the pages when you riffled them with your thumb. Even the amazing concept of the last word on a page carrying over to the first word on a new page that kept the reader going on and on long into the night.

He placed his hand on the cover of “Moby Dick,” removed it and then placed it on the cover of “For Whom the Bell Tolls.” He could feel the different worlds inside them. The blind fanaticism and the impartial hand of fate. The acts of courage and cowardice, sacrifice and greed. Each and every book held a universe of its own, living within its own laws, its own space and time.

He read the letter again ...

Dear Mr. Reade;

I am writing to you as the prime lessee of 422 Greene St. to inform you of my intention to sell the entire premises to Werner Gottlieb & Sons, agent for the Greater Greenwich Development Co.

The 422 Greene St. tenement will become part of a larger parcel devoted entirely to commercial properties. The building must be vacated no later than December 31st of this year.

As the major tenant and superintendent of this building I am notifying you a month in advance of the others.

Very truly yours,

Byron Frazier, Esq.

He switched on the fluorescent lights in the ceiling above the haphazardly arranged book racks and absent-mindedly began to re-arrange them. “I should have done this months ago,” he mumbled to himself. “It shows a lack of respect, “Leopold Bloom doesn’t belong there ... he should be over here with the crew of the Pequod.”

What would happen to his beloved books, he wondered, when he was put out in the street? Would they be safe? “Yes,” he assured himself, “of course they will. They are immortal! They will make their way to a distribution warehouse somewhere or find their way to the musty vaults of Amazon.” Yes, his books were immortal––but people were not. Queeg, Captain Ahab, Lorna Doone––nothing could happen to these people. Age would not wither them, they would be just as the author left them years ago. Ever green. Ever young. The author would shrivel and die, the reader would fade away, but the heroes and heroines were immortal. Every time a person picked up a book they would live again.

“Ah! But the Russos,” he reminded himself. “Mr. Holiday and Mrs. Riordan. What about them? And what about you, John Reade? We all wax and we all wane. We finally expire, and like sour milk and cheese we must be taken off the dairy shelf ... lest we contaminate the rest of the produce.”

“Good night my friends, sleep well. I will give you the news tomorrow."