The bookstore was busy, so Amy, the bird-thin day manager, had come up from the back to help and took the call.
Letty was ringing up purchases. Normally, she was downstairs doing books. The heavy foot traffic that started at lunch had lured her away from her financial duties. She took a kind of joy calculating sales in real-time. But now she was irritated that Amy was paying attention to a customer who was not literally and physically lined up at the counter. The phone was on the inside wall of the front desk. When Amy hung it up, she shook her head and squinted.
“Does David Mamet have an account here?” she asked.
Letty who was from Hong Kong was curt and cutting. “David who?”
Speed the Plow with Madonna had closed just a year or so before and so Amy said, “David Mamet. He’s a playwright. He used to live in here in Chicago.”
Letty handed a customer a bag full of Thomas Merton. “Never heard of him.”
Amy rolled her eyes. “He wants a copy of Homage to Catalonia and Psychopathology of Everyday Life. His assistant was calling from the airplane.”
At the time this was a big deal — and not just because it was David Mamet’s assistant. See, phones on airplanes were a new idea. They built them into the back of the chairs and you needed a second mortgage to afford a minute on one.
“I know we’ve got the Freud up here,” Amy said and then looked at me. “We keep the Orwell downstairs in fiction even though it’s not. Can you go down and get it?”
Now, it may sound odd that we were keeping the non-fiction Orwell down in the basement with the paperback fiction, but this was Stuart Brent Books, a store that had been run by a man of the same name for the last 40 years on Michigan Avenue. A charismatic but idiosyncratic 80 year-old, Mr. Brent — as we all called him — was part curbside Jeremiah and part old school charmer. He considered himself a Chicago legend with no shyness about saying so loudly and often. He spent most of his time at a big round oak table in the back with a manual typewriter on it. When he wasn’t sitting back there entertaining minor local literary celebrities like Studs Turkel or Victor Skrebneski, he was in the stacks de-alphabetizing books so, as he said, “People actually discover something new in themselves by discovering something they didn’t even know they were looking for.”
He wouldn’t accept that maybe people were just lost.
So we kept the Orwell downstairs for a very practical reason: By grouping everything by Orwell in one place and putting it with the fictional work most knew him for (1984 and Animal Farm), we were not only more likely to sell it, it was likely to be findable because Mr. Brent only went downstairs to yell at Glenn, the shipping kid, when lunch was late.
When I came back up, Amy handed me the Freud. “Have it delivered to the Drake, where he’s staying, okay? I’ll write up the account slip.”
Letty was non-plussed. “I don’t have any David Whatever-his-name-is in our account book. You make him pay cash.”
Amy wrote the bill up as a house account. I put the books in a bag addressed to “David Mamet, Drake Hotel” on the delivery cart next to the front desk.
A few minutes later, the bag was gone. I thought nothing of it, confident Glenn had picked it and was already on his way to the famous building just a few blocks north of Water Tower Place.
“No wonder we never make any money,” Letty said, looking at the receipt with a frown and clucking.
Whoever David Mamet was, she was sure he was a heel.
***
Snow fell that night in heavy, wet flakes. When I opened the store the next morning, Michigan Avenue was a frosted cake. It was slow, so when a man in round glasses and mustard-colored duster came in with a young woman in a pixie-like haircut, it was no secret who he was.
The woman (who I later learned was not really his assistant but Rebecca Pidgeon) wandered over to the books on kitchen decorations and he came to the front desk.
He put his forearms firmly on the counter. “I’m David Mamet. I’m wondering if you have my books?”
Had I simply missed them yesterday on the delivery cart next to the counter wall? I double checked to be sure they weren’t there — they weren’t.
I looked back to the stern, unsmiling Pulitzer winning playwright. I thought they had been delivered to the Drake I explained.
“I checked with the concierge. They’re not there,” he said calmly. In the background, Pidgeon flipped through a book about modern interiors.
“Let me see if I have another set of copies you can take now,” I said.
“Okay. I’ll wait.”
The Freud was easy. The store was known as having one of the best psychology libraries anywhere and we always had multiple copies of Freud’s work on hand.
I thought the Orwell would be just as simple. But when I went downstairs there was Animal Farm, 1984, Politics and the English Language, Burmese Days…. you name it.
But no Homage to Catalonia.
I went back to the shipping area hoping that maybe Glenn had simply forgotten it. I clearly saw it sitting perfectly in the bag I’d wrapped the books in on the work bench. But no such luck.
I took another pass at the shelf. Were any books behind the row with the spines out?
Nope.
Crap.
I took a deep breath and went back up to the man who’d written Glengarry Glen Ross, Sexual Perversity in Chicago, and American Buffalo.
He hadn’t moved from the counter.
“I’m sorry, Mr. Mamet” I said. “I have the Freud here, but not the Orwell for some reason. You can take the Freud now if you like, or I can have it delivered, but I’ll need to track down the Orwell for you. I’m sure it’s here, but I need to look a little more.”
Pidgeon joined him at the counter. “They don’t have it,” he said to her.
Her eyes grew.
“I’ll take the Freud,” he said.
A few minutes later he was gone.
Shit. SHIT. SHIT! Where the fuck was that book?
I went back downstairs. Not on the shelf. Not behind the books. Not behind the counter down there. Not in the shipping area.
I called Glenn at home. “Uh. I don’t know,” he said. “If it was on the cart, I delivered it.”
I called the Drake. “I’m sorry sir, but nothing has been delivered for Mr. Mamet here.”
Fuck. I looked at the clock. It was just after lunch.
Desperate times required desperate measures and that’s when I thought: If it wasn’t here maybe a store nearby had it. Yes. I could buy it from them and just send it to him.
Even before I called the Kroch’s across the street, I was congratulating myself on this brilliant plan.
“Who’s George Orwell?” asked the clerk who answered at Kroch’s.
“Uh, he’s a depression era English author. Wrote 1984.”
“Let me check. Fiction?”
“Maybe you should check both,” I said.
It was not promising and over the next hour I discovered that no bookstore in the Chicago area that I could get to had a copy of Orwell’s tale of political disillusion during the Spanish Civil War.
Not Barbara’s. Not Rizzoli’s. Not Crown. Not nobody, nowhere.
It was just a cold town full of snow to me at that moment.
I called Amy at home.
“We have a problem,” I started. “David Mamet’s books are lost.”
She listened to the story. She was amused at the number of clerks in Chicago who didn’t know who Orwell was, but it gave her an idea.
“I can’t remember if I have copy of it in my library. Do you have one?”
I had no trouble spotting it in my imagination. Right between Lorca’s Blood Wedding and Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet.
Then she said, “I see mine.”
About 30 minutes later she was pulling it out of her purse and I was writing a note apologizing about its shopworn state as well as its late arrival. I put it in one of the Stuart Brent book bags and walked up to the Drake after closing through the drifting Chicago snow.
I left it with the concierge thirty minutes after 6.
***
On Monday, Mr. Brent came in early. He did not wait to say why.
“You,” he pointed to me. “Lunch. Now.
“Mr. Brent, it’s only 10.30 in the morning.”
“Now.”
***
Mr. Brent was a good-looking man. He’d run a bookstore on Michigan Avenue for nearly 30 years, and before that a shop around the corner on Rush Street called the Seven Stairs. He was a fixture in the post-war Chicago literary scene and had become famous for selling a 1000 copies of Nelson Algren’s The Man with the Golden Arm when it first came out. He also claimed that Algren and Simone de Bouvier had carried on an affair above the store at one point in the ‘50s.
Even if an author was contracted to tour one of the book chains eating into our business nearby, they often stopped in to chat with him, sign books, and say hello.
This is how I met Phillip Roth, Saul Bellow, Tim O’Brien, George Will, Oliver Sacks, Irvin Yalom, Robert Coles, and many others.
He also had a reputation for a fast and cutting temper, but sitting at the darkness of Riccardo’s, he looked anxious and sad, like he could see some tragedy lurking in my future.
“Tell me, my boy, what happened this weekend at the store?”
I thought he was going to cry.
I did not wonder why. I simply told him the story of David Mamet and the missing books.
When I was done, he took a deep breath and looked at the glass of water in front of him.
“My boy, when we sat down, before you told me what had happened, I was going to fire you. I still may. He was over at my house for dinner last night and wanted to know what kind of knuckle heads I had working at the store."
In that moment, I saw him with his wife, in his home, sitting at his dinner table with David Mamet and Rebecca Pidgeon, hearing for the first time that in the age of airplane phones, the people at his book shop were like the people at any book shop in town: Bumbling fools that could not find books or make simple deliveries.
I could see that he was wrestling with himself, trying to calculate if his sense of pride would be restored by sacking me on the spot versus keeping me on and accepting that his store was nothing more or less than the people standing inside of it.
“I’m sorry about that,” I said. “I did the best I could.”
“Next time something like that happens, tell me.”
A moment passed and he ran his fingers through his gray, but still boyish hair.
“I’m really am sorry, Mr. Brent.”
“I know,” he said. “I know.”
And I knew he did know. But more importantly, I knew what kind of man he really was, then too. And I was glad I worked for him.
But I had one more thought too: David Mamet didn’t just have any old copy of Homage to Catalonia in his library. He had one with a real story to it.
***
CODA: The David Mamet Ending to the David Mamet Story
A few days later, the snow had melted and only blackened piles of slush remained. It was lunchtime and there was a rush on when a tall, thin man came to the counter.
“I’d like to return some books,” he said.
“Sure,” I said. But the moment I opened the worn bag, I realized the books he was returning were no ordinary books: Nice crisp copies of The Psychopathology of
Everyday Life and Homage to Catalonia flopped out onto the counter like shiny fish on a boat floor.
I paused and looked over at the shipping cart. Of course. On a busy day, a clerk puts a bag of books in a place that anyone can reach. Then that anyone comes by and picks it up, not knowing what’s inside or who it’s for, but just thinks it’s an easy score even if it turns out to be just a few bucks.
I smiled and turned my eyes up to the man looking at me nonchalantly.
“Do you have a receipt?” I asked.
“They were a gift,” he said.
“These two books by Freud and Orwell were a…”
Before I could finish, he’d swiveled and was in a full sprint toward the door.
Letty looked at me. “No wonder we don’t make any money.”
