From a Bookstore in Central Florida

Peter M. Ives

I sit on the balcony, watching the crowd drift slowly up and down the book–lined aisles. Below me and to the far right is the children’s department, where a toddler makes a break for freedom, screaming maniacally as he disappears behind the row of critical studies. Above me and to the left is a giant mural depicting T. S. Eliot sitting at a café table with John Steinbeck and William Faulkner. Huddled at a table immediately behind them are Isaac Bashevis Singer, Pablo Neruda, and Franz Kafka. Had I painted the scene, I would have put Eliot with those three; let him defend “The Jew of Malta” against Singer and Kafka, talk politics with Neruda. As it is, he is relegated to discussing “The Wasteland” with two people who already know what it is like to be wasted.
    Although there must be two hundred people in the store on this Friday night, I notice that the checkout line is empty. A crowd has begun to gather for the live entertainment in the coffee bar, Starbuck’s Café, a literary name for those who remember George Starbuck, poet and teacher from Iowa, contemporary of Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, and Jack Kerouac, though not at all like them.
    I browse through a stack of literary journals I appropriated from the magazine rack: New Letters, the Atlanta, Gettysburg, and Iowa Reviews. I should pay for these, take them home, become a teal patron of the arts. But I am broke, I tell myself as I sip my second three–dollar cup of latte. But these chain bookstores are eager to please, and I am just the kind of freeloader that makes them happy.
    At such times of contrived ease and sophistication, I often think of my father. I can not imagine that he would wait fifteen minutes in line to pay this kind of money for coffee. If he were here, he would give me one of his patented “love taps” on the back of the head and say, “What are you? Some kind of big shot?” Then he would hijack me to a greasy spoon, where we’d drink fifty–cent coffee and share the New York Daily News, silently passing the sections back and forth to one another.
    I am stirred from this reverie by a husband–and–wife acoustic combo playing selections from James Taylor and Cat Stevens. From the speaker system overhead, the store continues to pipe in Mozart—or is it Schubert? I find the dissonance strangely appealing as I look over a stacked display of Tongue Pu: How to Deflect, Disarm, and Defuse Any Verbal Conflict and a center–aisle table filled with copies of Dating For Dummies. All around me customers are talking, laughing, sipping gourmet coffee, and eating two–dollar cinnamon scones. Literature seems to have become a spectator sport, a social affectation, a way to pass the time before going to the movies.

MY FOURTH–GRADE CLASS was divided into three reading groups. Group one was the highest, the A team; group two was for the average readers; group three for those below average. Reading aptitude was determined by speed and comprehension. I was a very slow reader, and because I could get only half the reading done in the prescribed time, my comprehension was lousy. Still, I didn’t mind being in the third level, where doing well required merely attendance and a pulse.
    By the fourth grade, I had developed an obsessive–compulsive disorder over the dictionary—a Webster’s Collegiate with small half–moon indents along the page edges for quick reference to the alphabet. Even as a child, I could not read past a word I did not understand. As I moved out of the primers and into the family bookcase—rows of encyclopedias, The Book of Knowledge, American Heritage picture histories of the Revolutionary and Civil Wars—I was able only to creep along. Words, big words, were strewn like roadblocks among the sentences. I would go to look up a word in the dictionary and find it defined by other words I did not know, so I would look up those words and move back and forth among the various definitions until I acquired some general idea of the meaning. One word led to another and to another and to an. other in a cognitive declension that gradually pulled the disparate pieces into referential order.
    There was no privacy in my house. I shared a bedroom with five brothers, and everything we owned—toys, clothes—was considered communal property. No one else in my family—with the exception of my sister Holley, who had left for college, or my father, who read the newspaper (cover to cover) every day—showed any interest in reading. The bookshelf and its contents were mine. I could leave a book anywhere without fear that Andy or Joey or Betsy or Sally or Tommy would snatch it up. Perhaps for this reason alone reading became my passion, a possession that could not be appropriated. It conferred upon me a quiet and mysterious realm of my own—a soothing respite from my father’s moods, my mother’s desperation over his drinking, and my own often violent confrontations with my brothers.

ONE OF MY FAVORITE TV shows in those days was My Favorite Martian. Ray Walston played the part of a marooned interplanetary visitor who stored his disabled spaceship in the suburban garage of a young bachelor played by Bill Bixby. My favorite part of the show was not the spaceship, or the small Satan–like antennae that rose and descended from the back of Mr. Waiston’s head, or his ability to levitate objects via a magnetic beam that emanated from his index finger. What I liked most was how he read. He would pick up a book, pinch the pages between a thumb and finger, and rapidly flip through them like a card dealer. I bet he could have read the entire Encyclopedia Britannica, with photographic recall, in less than five minutes. I used to pretend I could read like a Martian, pulling down a book from the living–room shelf and flipping through it in a matter of seconds, running my hands over the cover as I tried to conjure a tactile presentiment of its contents.
    I was also a big fan of The Twilight Zone. The episode I remember most featured Burgess Meredith, who later became famous as the “Penguin” on the Batman series, playing a bespectacled, donnish, henpecked husband, a bibliophile whose wife enacted her meanness by restricting his reading, going so far as to snatch up the cereal boxes he read at the breakfast table. This was an exquisite point of identification for me; much of my early education came from General Mills, Kellogg’s, Quaker, and Nabisco boxes. A bank clerk, Mr. Meredith devised a plan to have himself “accidentally” locked into the bank vault, having beforehand smuggled in a pile of reading. Because the vault worked on a time lock, he could not get out until the next day, or perhaps not until the end of a weekend. As I write this I realize that I may be adding to the story.
    While he sat snugly in the vault reading his books, World War III broke out, and when the safe popped open, he discovered that the city had been decimated—not blown apart or burned to ashes, but depopulated. He emerged from the bank into a vacant, dreamlike landscape with newspapers blowing aimlessly about the deserted streets. Civilization seemed to have disappeared to a place off camera. Mr. Meredith’s bank clerk went immediately to the library and loaded up a pile of books. But when he came back out and was walking down the library steps, he fell and shattered his glasses. It felt like dying and being first delivered to paradise, then thrust down to hell. I remember my father saying “Water, water everywhere, but not a drop to drink,” slapping his palms on his thighs as the camera pulled back and Rod Serling narrated the close.
    I couldn’t understand how my father could be so lighthearted. Perhaps I would have been less shaken had I understood his literary allusion to Coleridge. Still, I waited for him to say something else, something that would align him with my own deep feelings of injustice and despair. But instead of that he rose from his chair and made his way to the kitchen, whistling.
    As I lay in bed that night, I kept running the episode over and over in my mind, trying to come up with a more acceptable ending: Mr. Meredith suddenly remembers a spare pair of glasses he kept in the inside pocket of his suit coat or a deserted ophthalmologist’s office is conveniently located directly across the street from the library. I could not let myself believe in a world as dark and hostile and hopeless as one without reading.

IN THE SUMMER OF 1964, when I was ten, my father came home from work one evening to tell us that after supper he would have an important announcement. I knew it was going to be good, because he was smiling and rubbing his hands together, the way he did on birthdays before we opened our presents. After we cleared the dessert dishes away, he announced—sounding like the announcer for Let’s Make a Deal—that he had put a deposit on a “brand new color television.” Everyone started cheering—except me.
    “Hey, Pete,” he said. “Aren’t you excited?”
    “I guess so.”
    “You guess so?”
    “I don’t know,” I said, feeling guilty. “What’s wrong with the TV we have now?”
    “But this is a color TV.”
    This only confused me more. “You mean the one in the living room isn’t color?”
    His face froze for a second, as though he were having a stroke; then he burst into laughter. Everyone else joined in.
    “What’s so funny?” I shouted.
    “Pete,” my father said, waving his right hand like a checkered flag to settle everyone down, “the TV’s black and white. Did you think it was color?”
    “I don’t know. I guess I never thought about it as anything.”
    After supper I joined my father in the living room to watch the CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite. In those days before cable, the picture was invariably grainy. I kept looking over at my father, noticing for the first time how his tanned face looked nothing like the bloodless countenances of Cronkite or the other correspondents. It was as if someone had turned a knob from somewhere behind my eyes, some kind of color contrast control, and I was seeing the color bleed away. It was disorienting; as I looked around the room, I could not tell whether I was seeing color or black and white for the first time.
    Every now and then my father would whistle and say “Whoo–ooh—wee, Pete. Look at that color,” then shake his head and laugh.
    I did not mind the teasing; I found it funny. In fact I loved being teased by my father: with nine brothers and sisters, the competition for his attention was fierce, and I savored whatever recognition I could get. What bothered me was that, once I realized my imagination had been supplying the color, I became almost immediately incapable of suspending my disbelief: cowboys bled black after gunfights, rivers ran the color of pewter, leaves and fields drained to gray indeterminacy. I could no longer watch TV without thinking that everything I saw was merely a faint echo of reality. I felt as though I had been the victim of a sustained hoax, and by the time the new TV came, I had already lost most of my interest.
    I do not remember making any conscious connection between reading and television, but I suddenly found myself reading more and with greater intensity. Somehow the black–and–white text of books yielded an infinitely greater reality than what was on the screen—an unconscious realization that color was an inside job.

WHILE RUMMAGING THROUGH A YARD SALE some years ago, I purchased the entire Time–Life Civil War Collection. It was quite a coup—at least a dozen volumes complete with pictures, portraits, maps, graphics, and commentary. Now they are on the bookshelf in my son’s room. David is in the first grade; words are only now emerging from the ether of his childhood. On the same shelf with the battles of Gettysburg, Antietam, and the Wilderness are such books as The Berenstein Bears, The Polar Express, Piggie Pie, and Where the Wild Things Are. I love the incongruity. David pulls the Civil War volumes down from time to time. But although I let him choose what he wants to read, David is not much interested in reading. This troubles me. He will sit for hours in front of the TV and carry his Nintendo Gameboy around the way I used to carry my Boys’ Life, National Geographic, and my grandfather’s True Detective magazines. It is a constant battle to get him interested in reading, a battle that I fear I am losing.
    But tonight he surprises me. I walk into his room and find him in bed, stretched out on his belly, feet flat against the headboard. Time–Life’s Gettysburg volume yawns open before him as he distractedly scrolls through the black–and–white Matthew Brady photos.
    “Dad?” he asks. “Is this a war?” I look at the picmre he holds up, the bloody remnants of Pickett’s Charge. I say yes and tell him that it happened over a hundred years ago. A big war. Lots of dead. Abraham Lincoln was president. “The Civil War,” I say. He turns back to a series of cameo photographs of soldiers striking Napoleonic postures and asks, “Why were people so dirty back then?” I know immediately what he means; the pictures are old and grainy, stained, torn, and pieced together—drained by a century of light. But mostly, it is the black–and–white photography, the nascent technology, which makes the subjects look as worn and rundown as derelicts. I tell David this and reach out to flip through the pages, finding colored portraits of soldiers in various uniforms. “Here,” I say. “This is what they looked like.”
    David reaches Out tO touch the page. “But that’s a painting,” he says.
    I want to tell him that somewhere between the painting and the photograph resides the reality. “There’s no color in the photographs, that makes them look dirty. But there was as much color back then as there is now.”
    I want to tell him that somewhere between the painting and the photograph resides the reality.     “There’s no color in the photographs, that makes them look dirty. But there was as much color back then as there is now.”
    “I know,” he says, and in some fashion I suppose he does.
    I go out to the living–room bookshelf and return with a picture of my grandfather: a daguerreotype in a tin oval frame, taken in boot camp during the First World War. My grandfather poses with the stock of his Springfield rifle up against his shoulder, aiming the muzzle at a point somewhere to the left of the photographer. There is a trace of a smile as he squints one eye and takes aim. He looks like he is winking, aware of how silly this homesick, French–Canadian housepainter will look to future generations. Like the Civil War photos, this one has a scuffed look of antiquity. “I knew this man,” I say. “He was my mother’s father—my grandfather, your great–grandfather.” But I’ve told David this before. He sits quietly and listens. “He was in a war, too. Your grandma says I look just like him.” David looks closer, and I can tell he is trying to superimpose my features on the picture.
    I want David to see how this photo, like the books that line his bookcase, can provide a jumping–off place for the imagination, a vehicle through which he can enter whole new worlds, filling in the color as he goes. And so I try to help him excavate the color hidden within the daguerreotype’s subtle shadings. “That uniform is brown,” I say. “Your grandfather’s eyes are blue. The grass behind him is. . .”

IT WAS, I SUPPOSE, the spoken word that first interested me in reading. My father was a great storyteller. I occasionally accompanied him on his weekend rounds to the VFW, the American Legion, the Elks Club, and other dismal, smoky taverns around town. My father owned an oil delivery company and had a corner on what he referred to as “the gin mill market.” He called his rounds “collecting,” showing up at various taverns and veterans’ clubs with his receipt book—a small rectangular aluminum box with a pencil clipped to its side. I can still see him as we would pull up: he would look in the rearview mirror, pull the parka hood back from his head and run his hand over his thick, coarse, crew–cut hair. Then he would say, “Let’s go,” and I would set the emergency brake, listening to the ratcheting sounds as I pulled the lever up with both hands. My father had a swagger, not like John Wayne’s, whose walk I have always considered slightly effeminate, but like that of a wrestler or a football player—his massive chest thrust forward on his six–foot–plus frame, his body ramrod straight, as if an invisible string ran from the top of his head to a point somewhere in the sky. When we walked into a tavern, he would pause at the door, silhouetted by the outside light, and wait until a cacophony of voices started shouting: “Well! If it ain’t John Paul Getty,” “Hey, Johnny, get over here,” and “Jesus! Look what the cat dragged in.” My father would laugh, pause a second, raise his hand in acknowledgment, and say, “Damn! The things you see when you don’t have a shotgun.” Everybody would laugh, and we would walk the rest of the way in.
    Someone might point at me and say, “Careful, boys. Looks like Johnny’s got the boss riding with him today.” “You’ve got that right,” Dad would say, reaching down to rest his hand on my head. “So watch your language.” I would smile proudly and reach up to grab the sleeve of his jacket as we walked to the bar. He would lift me onto a barstool, call the manager over, and go through the motions of collecting the oil bill. Generally very little collecting was done. I would remain on the stool next to him, my legs reaching only halfway to the floor, sipping a coke from a highball glass and eating Beer Nuts while he drank and entertained the patrons. I was always proud of my father, proud of the way people liked him, proud of the way they would stop talking so they could listen and laugh at his stories. I loved the ease of his words, the mellifluous quality of his baritone voice. Because I was too young to understand irony, most of his jokes went over my head, but I would laugh anyway, taking my cue from his barmates. As I got older, I learned when to laugh just by paying close attention to his inflections, the rush of words followed by a pause, a dismissive wave of his hand, a tilt of his head, his voice hushed then barreling Out what I supposed was the punch line. He was a great mimic, slipping appropriated dialogue from friends into his stories, and everyone would laugh because he sounded so much like them: he reproduced perfectly Norm Johnson’s hollow–mouth monotone, the nasal squeak of Henry Pierson, Tom Irvine slurring drunken excuses to his irate wife. I knew that the humor was at somebody’s expense, but it was always funny.
    Beyond the laughter and the stories, what I liked most was the way he ordered the words, the way the words seemed to float in the smoke–filled air and drift among the jukeboxes, pool tables, Formica tabletops, jars of pickled eggs and Polish sausages, and the American flag and framed portrait of Nathan Hale on the wall. And there was the incongruity of my father, an oil delivery man and former Marine who remembered the poetic recitations of his youth, who would sometimes, from memory, recite “The Chambered Nautilus,” “Casey at the Bat,” and whole stanzas written about war by men whose names I had never heard. The pale faces of the drinkers would look up with the soft radiance of dimly lit lamps, and the room would hush, the words conferring an unexpected dignity upon their lives. And I would listen to the Psalm–like rhythms, thick with vowels and images, bloody and torn, which touched the experience of these blue–collar men who had kicked the hell out of Hitler and Tojo. My father moved with a special grace among them. In the years to come, it would be said that only Nixon could have gone to China; in the chauvinist atmosphere of the Ogdensburg, New York, chapter of the American Legion, only my father could recite Kipling.

WHEN I TAKE DAVID to the bookstore, he always goes for the “toy” books: books on lizards, which have rubber reptiles wrapped in plastic and stapled to the back covers; books on superheroes, Barney, dinosaurs, and sharks, all with assorted playthings attached. Text is used as an advertising platform, promotional fluff for Mattel and Disney and Hasbro. There are no story lines, only thick cardboard pages with icons parenthetically enclosed in the text. The name “Quasimodo” has the icon of a short, bucktoothed dwarf with one eye; the icon directs the reader to a keypad jutting out from the back cover; press the keypad and a microchip connected to a miniature speaker emits a Looney Tunes laugh.
    It is a form of extortion: what parent could deny his child the gift of reading? What I think I am doing is denying David the illusion of reading. I do not care what he selects so long as it is a story, something where the text is on a level playing field with the wrapping and pictures. Children do not read these gimmick books. They listen to them and they play with them, but they do not read them.
    But I should try to maintain perspective. My childhood reading had little to do with precocity, and my first books did not have to compete with VCRs and video games. For me, reading represented an alternate, unpatronized route—like the Dr Pepper I used to drink because my brothers and sisters hated the taste, or the fruitcake they refused to eat, watching in revulsion as I savored every bite. Reading was a respite from the din and hubbub of my household parliament.
    “It’s all fluff,” I tell David as he shows me a book with what appears to be fake vomit glued to the outside. “Toys are toys, and books are books.” But I know that he thinks I am stingy, as he watches me sip a large latte.
    “It’s not fair,” he says.
    “Just find a book,” I tell him. “Something without a toy stuck to it. If you want a toy I’ll take you to Toys ‘R’ Us.”
    “Okay,” he says. Suddenly the future seems bright. “Let’s go.”
    I feel as though I have been set up. We have been through this argument countless times. “No!” I say. “We’re looking for books. I’m not taking you to Toys ‘R’ Us.”
    “But you said. . .
    I start to reply but realize that this is a Heart of Darkness argument; I am drifting slowly down the convoluted stream of a child’s logic, and sooner or later the natives will pick me off from shore. I offer to help him select a book, something like what he has enjoyed before—like The Dumb Bunnies or The Three Little Wolves and the Big Bad Pig.
    “No!” he says.
    “Suit yourself,” I say, and I turn around and walk away.

WHEN I WAS A CHILD, with ten kids sleeping in two rooms, bedtime reading was a logistical impossibility. So my father installed speakers on the walls above our beds, running the wires to a phonograph he kept in his and my mother’s bedroom. After prayers, they’d turn out the lights and put a stack of story albums on the record changer. I can only remember a few of the stories: Peter and the Wolf, Alice in Wonderland, The Three Little Pigs, Little Red Riding Hood, and a quirky little story called Peter Churchmouse. But the one I recall most vividly was Hansel and Gretel, with its gingerbread children, wicked witch, and trail of bread crumbs winding through the labyrinthine paths of the Black Forest. As I lay in my bed, slowly drifting off to sleep, I was lulled by the words and stories and used the darkness as a backdrop on which to project my imagination. I loved the sound of the words, the order and precision of the story, the beginning and end of things, the sense that all of life was a story, enacted in the darkness.
    Still, in spite of all these books and stories, I consider prayers and hymns to be the primary literature of my early childhood. I was a choirboy and acolyte, and I spent several hours each week at church. Saint John’s Episcopal provided a confluence of intense sensations: the smell of incense, the pale blue smoke of it rising like the Holy Ghost above the altar; the ringing of bells at the moment of transubstantiation, when I would lower my head to let Christ invest Himself into the bread and wine; the booming and at times delicate clarity of the organ, its pipes, like giant stained teeth, framing the wall above the baptismal cistern. The prayers had wonderful titles in Latin and Greek: the Magnificat, Gloria Excelcius, A gnus Dei, Benedictus, Te Deum Laudamus. I loved the sound of fists pounding chests as the priest droned the absolution; the unison of voices in murmured prayer; the rolling words of the priest at the lectern, wearing his elegant robes, reading from the Old and New Testaments, stuffing them with bromides taken from the everyday; the elegance of the Psalms, both spoken and sung; the antiphonic structure of the litany; the wonderful ABAB or ABBA rhymes of the hymns and the musical circularity of their stanzas.

ON THE BOOKSHELF above my writing table today is a copy of Edith Hamilton’s Mythology: Timeless Tales of Gods and Heroes. I bought it at an estate sale some years ago, remembering that I was ten years old the first time I came across it—retrieving it from a stack of college texts my sister Holley had lugged home from Potsdam State Teachers’ University. The book is not much to look at, with print so small and tight that the letters seem to vibrate. But I love the black–and–white illustrations—of the Titans; of Hercules carrying the carcass of Cerberus; of Pandora lifting the lid from her box and releasing sorrow and pain into the world; of the Sirens drawing the brave Ulysses toward the rocky reefs. This was the book of my fourth–grade year, filled with difficult words with impossible spellings and sounds: Dionysus, Bacchus, Agamemnon, Euripides, Clytemnestra. Narcissus. The sentences appeared as a dense maze of language darkened by a sinister and brooding religious imagination. I read it daily, sometimes hacking through only one paragraph at a sitting, spending more time in the dictionary than on the myths themselves, looking up words that spiraled into a chain of etymological investigation. Each page was a struggle, a translation from a foreign tongue. Though I would forget almost immediately most of the words, their meanings accreted in my memory through repeated trips to the same dictionary page. By the end of the year, the painful, seemingly endless quest to finish the book made me feel like Ulysses. But the last few chapters went by, if not quickly, then at least more easily: I recognized words and meanings and came to realize that the world, composed as it was of words and language, was something I could enter via the private and solitary apprenticeship of reading.
    As the end of the book approached, I started carrying it places with me. The tattered cover and dog–eared pages signified its importance in my life. Mr. Lyons, my fourth–grade teacher, caught me reading it during recess on a beautiful late spring day. All the other kids were playing kick ball or tag, but I had taken a seat on the ground, catching the shade from the aluminum awning that shielded the school’s side entrance. He asked me what I was reading, and when I lifted the book to show him, he snatched it from my hands.
    “Mythology,” he said, reading the title. “Timeless Tales of Gods and Heroes,” his voice deep and grave as if I had hidden one of my grandfather’s girlie magazines inside the cover. “Where did you get this?” he asked.
    “My sister.”
    He flipped through the pages, pausing every now and then at the illustrations. “You like the pictures?” he asked.
    “Some of them,” I said.
    “How ‘bout this one?” He held the book open to the picture of The Rape of Persephone. It was a dark picture of a chariot descending into the black maw of a mountain chasm. I had looked up “rape” and had followed its etymological daisy chain to my satisfaction, confirming my discovery by eliciting the opinion of my older brother John, who knew everything about sex. I knew Mr. Lyons assumed my interest was only prurient, so I decided to play stupid and said nothing.
    “Does your sister know you have this?” he asked, holding up the book like Exhibit A.
    “Yes,” I said, which was half true. She knew that I had looked at it, but she was away from home and probably had no idea that it had become an obsession. As far as The Rape of Persephone went, the allegorical nature of the drawing deprived it of any salacious interest. Even my brother John found it boring.
    Mr. Lyons looked toward the other kids as they kicked the ball and ran around the playground. “Why aren’t you out there?” he asked.
    “Because I wanted to read.”
    “This?” he said, thumbing the pages like a deck of cards. “Stop showing off and go play. You just want to look at the pictures.”
    I held out my hand for the book, refusing to move until he gave it back. He hesitated for a moment before dropping it into my lap. I got up without saying a word, tucked it into the back of my waistband, and walked slowly onto the playground.
    I had taken a series of aptitude tests that spring, in math, vocabulary, and reading. Because they were called “the Iowa tests,” I imagined them being graded by corn farmers, stopping their combines in the midday sun and heading for picnic tables loaded with ungraded examinations. The test results shocked everyone: I scored off the map in reading—my comprehension and vocabulary approaching the high–school level. This was a slap in the face to Mr. Lyons and the powers that had funneled me into the third–level reading class. I like to think that my parents were excited, but as I sift through the strata of memory, I realize that they were more amused than proud. As far as Mr. Lyons was concerned, he must have thought the farmer who graded my test had been in the sun too long. No adjustment was made in my reading level or curriculum. I did not care one way or the other. In fact, I liked the feeling of being underestimated, which made surpassing the expectations of others a piece of cake—not to mention less homework.
    In the ensuing years I must have taken dozens of additional aptitude tests, but I have always refused to take any of them seriously. The extent of my intellectual subterfuge would depend on my mood and level of boredom. I would skip questions and make zigzag designs across columns as I randomly penciled in circles on the computerized grading cards. As a result, my eighth–grade guidance counselor suggested trade school, even though it was a known fact in my household that I could not distinguish the working end of a hammer. I let him finish his pitch—”sheet metal shop”—and told him I would have to discuss it with my parents. When I told my father later that day, he dismissed the suggestion as “the most ridiculous thing I have ever heard.” For weeks it became a private joke between him and me: “sheet metal shop,” one of us would blurt out, the joke and punch line economically wrapped into one short phrase, and we would bend over in laughter.

IT IS 1974, and I am a nineteen–year–old Navy medic attached to a Marine infantry unit in Okinawa. We have been playing war games for a week in the dense jungle of the northern mountains. My squad has bivouacked for the night, digging foxholes in the red clay of a ridge line facing southwest across the East China Sea. The sun is a giant orange disk in a cloudless, deep–blue sky. In my mind I see the coastline of Vietnam, hovering like a mirage about three thousand miles down my line of sight. The Paris Peace Accords are unraveling, and Nixon keeps putting us on alert. Two or three times a month, we pack up and truck down to Kadena Air Force Base, where we bivouac on the tarmac and wait for the giant C–i 8o transports to fall from the sky, open their monstrous jaws, and swallow us for the long flight to a place where all the games turn real. I should be scared, but I am not. The platoon sergeant says I am “too fucking dumb” to be scared. He served two tours in Vietnam and is in no hurry to return. He tells me that when he looks at the platoon, he does not see a fighting unit so much as he sees a body count. “Just zip yourself into a body bag right now,” he tells me. “Get used to the feel.” To him we are insanely cavalier, completely unprepared for the vicious reality that awaits.
    I half expect to hear the sun hiss when it reaches the water’s surface. About an hour of light remains, and I have pulled a book out of the ammunition pouch I keep secured to my backpack. I read a book every two or three days when I am in the field, checking them out at the base library—a small prefabricated building next to the base movie theater. John, a Navy medic with an English literature degree from Arkansas, helps me; I am his reading protégé. We go to the library when I come in from the field, free–ranging over the neglected aisles; aside from us, the only visitors are a few Marine officers who read military history and old copies of stateside newspapers. I feel like a winner of one of those grocery sweepstakes, the kind where the store is emptied of all other customers, and I have half an hour to cart as much as I can to the cash register. Books are like food, and my eyes have always been bigger than my stomach: Faulkner, Salinger, Vonnegut, Hemingway, Frost, Dickinson, Wordsworth, Whitman, Mencken, Conrad, Fitzgerald, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Kafka, Jung. John allows me an occasional pass through the less literary work of John le Carré, Elmore Leonard, and Hunter Thompson, or indulges my love of history with Bruce Catton and Barbara Tuchman.
    My squad specializes in harassment, setting ambushes and doing nighttime infiltrations; in the parlance of military training, we are aggressors. Right now we are making the life of Hotel company a royal pain in the ass for two weeks, about five books’ worth of reading. Reading provides a perfect pastime for military life, where everything is “hurry up and wait.” We will slog through the hot jungle for three or four hours, set an ambush, wait another two or three hours for the unsuspecting prey to saunter by, then attack with semiautomatic weapons, firing blanks, throwing smoke grenades rather than real ones. Noncommissioned officers serve as judges of these contests. Identified by white adhesive tape wrapped like halos around their fatigue hats, they walk casually around during the firefight, estimating combat effectiveness and casualties. We are supposed to act as if they are invisible as we run by, hauling ass to set an ambush farther down the line. In between skirmishes I sleep and read, read and sleep, in dappled jungle light.
    I must be a sight to look at: despite my deeply tanned cheeks and forehead, the rest of my head and my chin are stark white—a marble bust wearing a flesh–colored party mask. I have shaved off all my hair and my beard. Now, in the midday heat, I have stripped down to my underwear and am lounging in my foxhole with an open copy of Lyndon Johnson’s memoir, The Vantage Point, on my lap.
    “Hey, Doc!” Lieutenant Grizzard shouts as he approaches.
    I hear subdued laughter starting up in the foxholes around me. Grizzard is the kind of officer who thinks that all enlisted men—sailors in particular— are retarded. He is about three years older than I am, a ninety–day wonder from Officer Candidate School—a cliché dressed in jungle fatigues. Skinny and frail looking, with a narrow, pockmarked face, he has absolutely no martial aptitude—is barely able to take a compass reading, let alone lead a team into combat.
    Grizzard walks up to my hole and looks down. “Shit! Doc, what you got going here?”
    “Just trying to cool down, sir.”
    “Not that. . .“ he says, bending down and snatching the book from my hand. “This!” He and I have a running argument about Vietnam, Grizzard believing that if it were not for spineless politicians caving in to long–haired peace demonstrators, the U.S. could have had a military victory. I have to be careful when I argue with him. He fights dirty and when losing an argument, likes to pull rank.
    “Are you actually reading this?” Grizzard asks as he scans the index and photo sections.
    “Yes, sir.”
    “What do you think of it?” A patronizing smile crosses his beet–red face.
    “Well, sir, basically I think Johnson is an asshole, sir.”
    Grizzard stands up straight. The smile leaves his face. Except for the wind whipping through the saw grass, there is no sound. Conversations in all the adjacent foxholes stop. Everyone is listening, knowing that I have stepped over the line. “You’re talking about your former commander in chief,” he snaps.
    I knew that he would have to resort, sooner or later, to this Mickey Mouse horseshit—pulling rank and the chain of command in order to win an argument. I start to laugh. “He was never my commander in chief, sir. I was sworn in under Nixon.”
    “So, tell me, Doc, do you think President Nixon is a liar?”
    I do not know how to answer this. The question is so patently ridiculous. “Are you talking about the war, sir?”
    “Do you think the president is a liar? Just answer the question.”
    “Cambodia, sir.” Even Grizzard can not miss my reference to Nixon’s dirty little secret war. I smile.
    He tosses the book on the ground beside me. “Doc,” he says, putting his hands on his hips, “get dressed. This isn’t a fucking whorehouse.”
    “Aye aye, sir,” I say as Grizzard crisply turns and walks away. I stand and dress. Heads pop up in the foxholes around me. Everyone is smiling, and soon the smiles transform into quiet laughter. i sit on the edge of my hole, light a cigar, and wait for the rest of the sun to disappear.

ABOUT A YEAR AGO, I read Tobias Wolff’s This Boy’s Life. A close friend, Chantel, had lent it to me two years before, and I finished it on a sleepless night while lying in bed with a battery–operated plastic reading lamp planted on my chest. When I got to page 287, I found—scrawled across the lower right margin—a note from Chantel: “Pete, check this out!” The adjacent paragraph was bracketed in pencil:

    When we are green, still half–created, we believe that our dreams are rights, that the world is disposed to act in our best interests, and that falling and dying are for quitters. We live on the innocent and monstrous assurance that we alone, of all the people ever born, have a special arrangement whereby we will be allowed to stay green forever.

    I wrote next to Chantel’s inscription, “Thank you. Yes! So Beautiful,” and highlighted the passage in yellow. How wonderful, I thought, that a book could be the intersection for a conversation interrupted by time and responsibilities.
    My old books have become my dialogues with past times. I open the pages of Faulkner’s Light in August and find where I, in an earlier incarnation, wrote next to a passage, “Would it hurt too much to be a little less opaque?’ My initial reaction is to slap the younger man who wrote out that unexamined observation, but instead I circle those words and write beneath them, “Patience. He’ll get you there.” In a way, both my past and present have become part of the page. If reading is a conversation between author and reader, then these books are now conversations in three parts.

AS A CHILD, probably no more than eight or nine, I had a recurring dream of an undiscovered street, somewhere near my grandfather’s house. Walking around the neighborhood, I would see this dirt road, its entrance partially obscured by a natural wreath of overhanging branches. I would follow the road, its surface muddy and full of potholes, down a steep hill. In the distance I could see a small town with a huge Ferris wheel spinning above the rooftops—a world on the edge of darkness, a permanent twilight. As I entered the town, I saw carnival booths and rides set up along the streets. Everything was free: games, rides, cotton candy, popcorn, the funhouses with big, bald barkers standing outside, shouting above the music and the murmurous clamor of the crowd. And yet everything seemed worn and slightly gone to seed. I remember a feeling of nervous excitement, that there was something frightening in my extraordinary discovery. I was not used to such independence, and even though I felt as though I could go on forever, I wanted to get home to tell my brother David. It would become our secret—this endless, thrilling world that no one else would know about, hidden right beneath our noses. Then I would wake up and realize that it was only a dream, but the joy would cling to me for days. I had this dream many times, and the residual feeling was always the same— the thrill of a secret and undiscovered place.
    Around the same time, I wrote my first poem, something about the stars and moon. Even at eight or nine I was biting off more than I could chew. The rhyme scheme was ABAB, ordered quatfains to define a universe I barely knew. What I remember most about the poem is the rightness of it, the sense of words and sounds, the feeling of order and control, the knowledge that I had chosen the words—my words, not someone else’s. I remember the joy of seeing the words collect on the page, not knowing where they would go, following an invisible trail of rhythm and childish rhyme into the unknown. It was like learning a town, the streets, the houses, the front yards with bikes and skateboards scattered across the silent lawns and driveways, then the intersections you look down and wonder, Where does this go? How far?...
    I gave this poem to my father. He held it out, stiff–armed, reading with farsighted intensity. A broad smile emerged from the dark corners of his mouth as he folded it twice, tucked it into his pocket, and left for the oil depot.

CHILD BEHAVIORISTS BELIEVE that the reason we can not remember much—if anything—of our first few years of life is because of the absence of language. Language, it seems, is the tagging device for memory. In many of the same ways, books—the associative vessels of language—have become reference points for my own memories. I pick up Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five and remember reading it while hitchhiking from Washington, D.C., to my home in New York state. When I read The Great Gatsby, any part of it, I remember that those words entered my consciousness while I was a medic with the Marines, humping through the dense heat and jungle of Northern Okinawa in 1974. Looking at the musty pages of The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, I remember being sent to the principal’s office for reading it (after persistent warnings) in my eighth–grade math class. I remember reading War and Peace while on fire watch at my barracks in Camp Schwab, falling asleep with the open book on my chest while a thief broke into the barracks’ storage locker. Just a whiff of Lord of the Flies takes me to the week of my father’s death.
    I pick up my copy of Whitman’s Poetical Works and go back ten years to the months after my brother David’s death. Kafka once wrote that literature “is the axe for the frozen sea within us,” and I suppose that I needed Walt to help me break out of my rage and depression—thinking I might find at least part of the answer in poetry. The solitary act of reading narrows the field of existential inquiry simply because of its privateness. I think of Winfield Townley Scott’s poem “Five for the Grace of Man”:

    I am always waiting for something I do not know
    And may as well wait here as any place.
    Back streets are better than main streets for waiting
    And night is better than day, being privater,
    Vacated by all I am not looking for.

    Reading is the back street of my undiscovered self. It is the place where I choose to wait, a hidden and mysterious place where memory and truth and meaning and beauty and consolation are magnified by the absence of everything else.
    If I should ever have an estate, a good part of it will be my books. Someday, my children will open one of them and come upon a page where I have written “Bullshit!” in the margins. I will be gone, but they will have a piece of me that photographs, or eight–millimeter movies, or videos, or tape recordings can never capture. They will see me thinking, see one of my sometimes wise— but more often immature, impulsive, and ill–considered—rantings. Through my wild and furious engagements with a page, my children will have an Unobstructed view of who I was. And the conversations in three parts will become a quartet as they follow the rest of the pages—the marginalia I left for them like a trail of bread crumbs.

Peter M. Ives teaches English at Trinity Prepatory School in Winter Park, Florida, and creative writing at the University of Central Florida. His most recent essay, "The Whole Truth," appears in the Spring 1999 issue of The Fourth Genre.

“From a Bookstore in Central Florida” appears in our Winter 1999 issue.