Free Firmin by Sam Savage

wore on. We kept one eye on the business and one on General Logue, and a sense of doom began to gather around us like a poison mist.
     

Chapter 6
     

     
    P embroke Books was a very well-known bookshop, the kind of place famous people sometimes visit. More than once I had heard Norman tell about how Jack Kennedy, who had become president of the United States, used to drop in for coffee and a chat when he was just a congressman, and also Ted Williams, who was a famous hitter for the Red Sox. I didn’t care much about them. But Norman also liked to tell people about the time the famous playwright Arthur Miller stopped in to buy a copy of his own play. I wished I could have been there. I kept hoping he would come back, or if not him somebody else - John Steinbeck, Robert Frost, or even Grace Metalious. None of them lived that far away. And then there was Robert Lowell, who lived around the corner. But he never came either.
     
    Only one writer ever came in during my tenure and he was a disappointment at first. He was not famous yet, and Alvin, talking to Norman one day when the writer had just left the shop, called him ‘that bohemian character.’ At that time I was still in my bourgeois phase and so this was not yet an appellation that I aspired to. Norman also once described him as an experimental novelist, though he might have meant that as a joke. At other times he called him a crackpot and a drunk. This writer lived upstairs from the bookstore, though I did not know that yet - I did not even know there was an upstairs. You reached his place through a doorway between Pembroke Books and the Tattoo Palace. This doorway was under ROOMS and the door itself had frosted glass on its top half and DR LIEBERMAN PAINLESS DENTIST written in a semicircle of gold letters on the glass. Usually when this writer stopped in the store he was on his way someplace else, often faraway places like Harvard Square across the river in Cambridge, and he was going there on a very old bicycle with a large wire basket in front. It had green fenders and between the bars a little white button for the horn. I don’t know if the horn worked. He often left the bicycle leaning against the store window, despite the fact that Norman had asked him not to. I did not know how to admire that trait yet, so I took Norman’s side and at first did not feel a lot of respect for this writer. He was not at all a young man and I thought he had better hurry if he was going to be famous. That’s how bourgeois I was. He was the only man I had ever seen with hair to his shoulders. It was gray and thinning and bound at the top by a blue headband like an Indian’s. Otherwise he did not look anything like an Indian. His name was Jerry Magoon. He was a short stocky man with a big head. He had a small Irish nose, a big drooping mustache over a wide thin-lipped mouth, and blue eyes, one of which was always staring off to the side. People could never be sure if he was looking at them or not. And he always wore the same rumpled blue suit and black knit tie. This gave him an oddly contradictory appearance, as if on the one hand he was trying to be neat and proper and on the other hand he was sleeping in his clothes.
     
    Except for the suit and tie, he looked like a prospector in one of the Rialto westerns and before I learned his name I always called him the Prospector. Later I called him the Smartest Man in the World. He came often during my tenure at the store. He was one of the regulars, and he always hung around a long time, usually in the basement, where the cheapest books were, pulling volumes out of the shelves, leafing through them, and putting them back, and sometimes, when he found one he liked, he would read it all the way through just standing there. While he read he mumbled to himself and wagged his big head. It was a long bike ride to Cambridge and he was a pretty old man, so I supposed he was in no hurry to get going. And Norman didn’t seem to mind. After a