More Tower Memories

There was a man named Elmer who worked at Tower Books, and he worked circles around everybody else. This was either despite, or because of, the fact that he was in his seventies. He came from a generation with a serious work ethic. Because he'd lost his son (to cancer, if I remember right), he treated the rest of us like his kids. He was a wonderful man.

One day, when the power went out, I had to climb the bookshelves at the back of the store, remove a panel in the ceiling, and crawl up and over the wall dividing the store from the back room. One would think there would be a better way to circumvent the keypad allowing access to the back room in the event of a power outage, but no.

There was a homeless guy named Mike who made a living washing car windows out in the parking lot (at least in part - there were rumors that he was also a drug dealer), and when I talked to him about how much money he made, discovered that he was making more than me. One day, he pulled into the parking lot in an old camper, complete with prostitute and a jumble of old super 8 films. Looking back, I guess he was kind of a sketchy character. None of us were interested in the prostitute, but we took some of the films, along with the projector he had, and watched some of them in the count-out room in the back of the store. The room was tiny, but had the advantage of being windowless, which made it perfect for watching films. Of course, most of the films were erotica. One was even a bestiality film. I won't divulge which co-worker kept that one, other than to say it definitely wasn't me. There were also a few home movies and other similarly innocuous films. I think we ended up using one of these films for an irr.app.(ext.) performance some years later. I ran into Mike much later on, in Berkeley, near the building where my brother works. He saw me and asked jokingly, "what are you doing in my city?".

There was another time when one of my coworkers initiated a conversation about sex by asking me which of my coworkers I'd have sex with. She shared her list as well. We were on each others lists. Of course, she had the bad judgement to start the conversation during a register shift, and I had the bad judgement to continue it. Or maybe we just didn't care. While we were talking, a customer walked up and asked, "is there an admission fee to this conversation?". I can't remember our reply. It's a good thing that customers seemed to expect that kind of thing at Tower.

We would dress up for Halloween, and sometimes when it wasn't Halloween. In the picture above, I have an entire roll of toilet paper wrapped around my head. There was another guy, Allan, who would periodically show up in a dress. He wasn't a cross dresser in the normal sense of the word, but more of a surrealist. He liked to mess with people. When our instore cassette player died, he went to a thrift store and bought an 8-track player to replace it. This inspired the rest of us to do the rounds of all the thrift shops in the area so we could buy 8-track tapes to play in it. We had some good ones, including 8-tracks by Can, Black Sabbath, and other bands that I still listen to today. Sometimes when we were bored, we'd cut up the inferior 8 track tapes and splice bits of tape in backwards, making strange sonic art, which we of course then played for customers. I would also buy CDs next door and often my first listen would be during a register shift. This sometimes backfired due to the occasional massively inappropriate song lurking within. Nick Cave's "Stagger Lee" is the one I remember most.