SEXIS WRONG

stock was occasionally interesting but mainly decrepit. For
instance, I found in the back of the shop a half-dozen sealed
cardboard boxes covered in dust, which didn’t look to have
been touched or opened for about fifteen years. I pulled
off the perished sticking tape that clung to the first box and
found inside scrapbooks containing a collection of news clippings—all
relating to music groups of the Merseybeat era.
The scrapbooks were comprehensive and should have been
in a library or museum.
“Who does this belong to?” I asked Bob. But he didn’t know
and wasn’t particularly interested.
I didn’t bother looking in the other boxes. They were filthy—
I’d need to wash my hands, and there was no running water
in Bookchain, so I let them be.
There was a deep-rooted feeling of paranoia that came with
working in the place. The feeling dispersed somewhat in the
short time I was there but never went away completely. I was
warned about this. According to Bob, in order to function you
had to suppress the thought that you might get busted by the
police at any moment.
If a bust did come, I was advised that I should pretend I was
a customer.
Every few hours, into the basement Bob would go for a
smoke. The place had noise blaring out the door, reeked of
dope, and was a target for police harassment. It was a combination
that didn’t make for an easy mind.
I decided I would stick the job out until Christmas. Any longer
and I would have gone insane—not necessarily with the
anticipation of being busted but out of boredom. The shop
was never particularly busy. A dozen sales on a Saturday
afternoon was pretty good going. On a bad afternoon, you
might manage only a single sale. Most people who came into
the shop came for pornography (I loved it whenever anyone
bought anything else), and you had to watch that they didn’t
steal anything…or at least at first I thought that was the reason
I was watching them. I later figured I watched them for
something to do.
Other distractions consisted of a cassette player with which
Bob listened to old rock’n’roll at a volume that positively invited
trouble, and a temperamental TV set with built-in VCR
on which we played Two-Lane Blacktop and filled the shop
with the sounds of a revving Chevy. The Chevy noises and
rock’n’roll made it difficult for customers to communicate
with us, not that many ever did, but occasionally one would
have a question or a complaint.
A good deal of the porn that Bookchain carried was of a fetish
variety, in particular spanking material—that peculiarly quaint
British relish. One day an unhappy gentleman returned a videotape.
The insidious paranoia was not helped by the fact that Manchester’s
central police station was situated over the road, a
mere two- or three-minute walk from the shop front.
On more than one occasion, I thought the raid
had come. Whenever police walked past the
shop front—invariably with a “we’ve got you
marked” expression on their faces—I half-expected
them to make a dive for the door with
a notice of seizure. One morning the outside of the shop was
cordoned off, but it transpired that Frank Bruno, the boxer,
was due to arrive in town to star in panto,* and the whole of
the thoroughfare was being closed to traffic. Seeing as the
police had started with the shop—which was neither at one
end of the street nor the other, but in the middle—I figured it
to be some kind of dark on-duty humor.
Did I really think that a raid would be telegraphed with the use
of police cones? I wasn’t thinking straight.
In the end, no raid happened while I was at Bookchain…although
a priest did come into the shop once, and on another
occasion someone spat at us in disgust.
“I like a bit of spanking,” the customer said, “but this is ridiculous.”
According to Bob, in order to function
you had to suppress the thought
that you might get busted by
the police at any moment.
Bob asked whether there was a fault with the tape and
placed the thing in the VCR. The screen came to life with a
man bringing his palm down on a woman’s naked bottom.
Except the whole thing was played in slow motion, enhanced
by an effect that gave the scene an audio and visual echo. It
was annoying, to say the least. The hand would come down
slowly, leaving behind a trail of hands. Impact. The sound of
a slap-slap-slap-slap, fading. The hand slowly lifted. Down
again. Slap-slap-slap-slap.
Bob hit the fast-forward button. It was a little further into the
tape, but the same scene was still being acted out, only the
audio and visual delay had gotten longer.
“Not a fault as such…” the guy said.
It didn’t make good business sense to hand back cash to a
customer, and it never happened while I was there. The guy
FIRE, BRICK, SAND, CONCRETE 173