There used to be this place on Hawthorne Blvd, below 32nd , A shabby storefront kitty corner from a great old house, I mean a large house with a surrounding porch that had be made into a group home from some private sector outfit called Morrison house. They had offices on Morrison. This isn’t about Morrison House though. I can barely remember the storefront, it was old, like 1950’s old, which old that tried to look modern; dated, let’s call it dated. Almost sidewalk to ceiling windows framed in aluminum or some dull gray metal that shows the weather. It was the sort of place that if there were a crack in the window it would have been duct taped.
The place sold old periodicals, not collector items, just old periodicals. It was like a garage sale in there, even smelled like one, somehow beneath the smell of mildewed paper was faint traces of old oil, rain and kitty litter. I think I revolved the same five bucks buying old Asimov’s and Analog sci-fi magazines for a quarter and getting a quarter back in trade. I don’t know, maybe I was down five or ten.
I’d browse occasionally as if I were interested in anything else or to see if they had vintage smut. I don’[t recall finding any; vintage smut or anything else I was interested in. The two thoughts that struck me hard enough to remember was 1) it was a money laundering outfit for nickel and dime thieves, the kind of idiot that steals a cassette deck from a car with a crowbar and a handful of homemade cassette tapes. And 2) People would come in to buy a copy of Time or Life from the year they born or the year their grandfather died or something, people just sentimental to drop a quarter but not enough to contact Time Warner.
I never saw any evidence of either; no criminal types and no sentiment, well, not enough of either to feel out of place. It wasn’t the sort of place you made eye contact, less like a porn theatre more like an elevator. Hmmm, more directly, it just seemed impolite to make eye contact, not creepy, though below 32nd there was always a bit of both. Things got gentrified further up the Blvd., I don’t recall any gentrification in that area though.
From Mt Tabor parks west face Hawthorne looks like a major artery to the city. It’s an illusion, sort of, though for me personally Hawthorne had been a major artery. My daughter was born in this drafty barn of a house we rented off of 45th and Hawthorne. Before she was born I was still in school and I used to ride my bike down Hawthorne, cross the bridge and ride to the University, PSU that is. From 45th to the river Hawthorne was like a speedway for a bike, all downhill, dropping maybe a thousand foot in 45 blocks. It was a ten minute ride to school and a forty five minute ride home. Speedway is a stupid word, I was going to say roller-coaster except roller coasters go up and down, it was all down from 45th to the river.
So the reason I was thinking about that musty periodical shop where I sometimes bought disposable magazines of sci fi short fiction, was, or still is, I guess, because I was thinking about OD for the first time in at least a year today. Open Diary in case it’s fallen from memory completely. You could buy yellowed articles in yellowed magazines by dead authors about the Dodgers moving out of New York or things so much less infamous I can’t honestly reference them. I could make stuff up I suppose, I used to be good at that, but it would detract from the line of thought; actual events fading into obscurity. The Dodgers of course never will, baseball fans love history and stats.
OD, however, all that blood and sweat and shit and fuck and useless beauty and high camp and mud and dust and oyster shells and vitriol and angst and births and deaths — you can’t even find them in a broke down periodical store below 32nd. There are no old meth heads and there is no old websites. Any kid will tell you nothing really gets deleted online, but outside of forensic curiosity, stuff gets buried whether it complains about it or not. Somewhere on at least one of my hard drives is my own back up of my own diary and at least one version has notes. That’s not the same thing.
I have digital backups of the stuff I felt like keeping of my own, garage sales worth of useless stuff, but I have it. What I can’t do is go back and look at Quiddity or Angry young Spaceman or, oh shit, I’ve forgotten so much, Boo-bop and that one guy with the gay comic strip or ‘… nothing much happened today …’
And yeah I wouldn’t find anything that interested me enough to drop a whole quarter outside of analog and Asimov’s in the fairly large periodical nickel money laundering store front, but I liked looking all the same, I liked thinking about how these lost issues of lost magazines and newspapers made it to a store full of lost things; nothing was preserved, no plastic bags, the ones with staples were rusty. I could go on about how sad and lost those mounds of paper were, but, in light of that digital journal that outlasted my second marriage those mounds of paper were downright cheery. Wait, I meant to say my relationship with OD lasted longer from beginning to end than my marriage, both running concurrently. Neither the ex nor OD is sitting in a box below 32nd waiting for you to thumb through, not making eye contact, thinking about what you’ll do for lunch or that person you met on the bus with the grubby ankles sporting a delicate ankle bracelet.
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