ALAN LELCHUK
595
out of those. When I told him that I worked on Fourth Avenue, over at .
Schulte's, he smiled warmly, said he knew Mosey, and using a small pencil on
a pad, said he'd let me have the machine for $62.50. On the spot I gave him
a five dollar deposit to hold it, thanked him, and walked off, almost flying
from my high, not the autumn wind. Just the sight and thought of the sleek
gray machine excited me the way cars had revved up my friends' hearts. I
had always written out in longhand my pieces for the high school newspaper,
and then had to type them over in school; this way I could type it straight on
the machine. Especially since typing had been the best class I had had at ju–
nior high. A typewriter. No one in my family had ever owned one, you see,
and here I was, going to earn one for myself.
(
....
)
After a few months, in November or so, I began to settle in, getting the
hang of the place, the feel for the different rooms and slower or grubbier
way of life down below. Of the rooms, there was the Special Collections:
leatherbound sets housed in a small raggedy place, an odd hole for Thack–
eray, Dickens, Trollope in soft Moroccan leather, say. The Americana room
was more noble, a long rectangular area with larger shelving, to ac–
commodate geography, photography, history, regionalism books, with an en–
trance consisting of two narrow swinging wood-and-glass doors like an old
Western saloon. (This was Bernie's domain, and he attended to it once or
twice weekly.) Next, a Detective Fiction room, whose afficionados, re–
spectably dressed, seemed to resemble their favorite shadowy characters,
giving me furtive glances if I tried to help them, and bearing away their
books in mysterious paper bags. Ofcourse the main room, complemented by
many divergent aisles and alcoves, was devoted to adult fiction; this area
was a very large square room so crammed with endless green metal shelves
that the space seemed smaller, more suffocating. Chiefly, I became familiar
with the thousands of books there: the rows and rows of semi-battered
spines and dusty covers that faced me wherever I turned, and threatened to
eat up all the space. Gradually, however, I felt those books not merely as
inanimate objects, but as comrades of sorts, all of us hunkered down below in
that boiler room of the Strange Ship Schulte's. In fact I grew so cozy below,
with my pals and me, that I came to resent going up, on deck, to help out, if
Lewis or George signalled for me.
Mostly however I didn't need to. For on the whole I was left by my–
self, below, to bring some order to L's and H's say, to continue to unpack the
year- or two-year-old unopened cartons, and to increase my knowledge of
which books we had in stock. Periodically, during the day, I'd be interrupted
by Lewis buzzing me from upstairs and who, when I went to the bottom of
the special, unused stairway, would call down to me, "Aaron, do we happen
