One who collects the lowest of the lowbrow in literature
I was momentarily confused when I first read a
City Paper excerpt from John Waters's latest book,
Carsick: John Waters Hitchhikes Across America (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014), about his encounter with a "rogue librarian." As a rogue librarian myself, I thought: how cool! Then I realized that "Bernice" was (like most things in life we wish for) too good to be true: this librarian was an entirely
fictional creation - though the lewd pulp paperbacks she collected were every bit as real as the doggy-doo Divine scarfed down in
Pink Flamingos. Even John Waters can't make up titles as delightfully demented as
Saddle Shoe Sex Kitten or
Freakout on Sunset Strip: Fags, Freaks and the Famous Turn the Street Into a Hippy Hell
As a collector of such titles myself, I knew the best thing about vintage sleaze paperbacks from the 1960s are their amazing covers, those era-defining "swatches of erotic eye-candy" that are so well-documented in Feral House's eye-popping collection
Sin-A-Rama. So when I read that Bernice was collecting remaindered pulp titles with the covers ripped off because she read sleaze for the
literature - I knew this was pure fiction!
Admittedly books like
Transvestite (which I am convinced was Ed Wood, Jr. writing as "Harry Guggeheim"),
Sunset Strip Sex Agent and
Nude Man in Jazz Town are good cover-to-cover reads whose narratives match the artistry of their come-on titles and covers - after all, many titles were penned under pseudonyms by later-respected authors like Donald Westlake, Robert Silverberg, Harlan Ellison and Lawrence Block trying to pay the rent in their early, pre-success days - but most of these sleaze pulps feature improbable plots leading to fairly tame (by today's gonzo porn standards) intimate encounters. Still, I was impressed by Waters's knowledge and love of the genre. I only wish his librarian was real so we could hang out and trade books!
Following is the Rogue Librarian excerpt that appeared in the June 4, 2014
City Paper.
*******************************
Bernice
Last Chance, Colorado, may have been the
first
chance I’ve had to be happy naked in public, but the carnival must move
on and so must I. Before the whole troupe wakes up I sneak a note
inside Polk-A-Dotty and Buster’s trailer thanking them for introducing
me to a new kind of living theater, the closest I’ll ever get to
Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty . . . only nice. You can never have too many
careers, I’ve always said, and now I write them, “If the book doesn’t
turn out or
Fruitcake underperforms, I’ll be back to ‘spin for my supper.’ ”
The sun is coming up and there’s no such thing as rush-hour traffic in
this part of the country but, yet again (!), the very first car that
approaches pulls over. The problem is,
how do I get in? The
entire vehicle, a beat-up yellow eighties Chevy Citation, is completely
filled with books—every kind imaginable—hardcovers, trade paperbacks,
but especially mass- market editions, some missing their covers. The
passenger seat is piled so high I can’t even see who’s behind the wheel.
Slowly, like a jigsaw puzzle being assembled in reverse, I see a face
as she throws the books in the back, under the seats, even in her lap.
“Sorry,” the rather haggard looking woman in her late sixties, with the
weakest chin I’ve ever seen in my life, mutters, “I like to read.”
“I can see that,” I answer good-naturedly as I jump in, pick books off
my seat, and then pile them back in my lap. “I like to read, too,” I
say, taking a gander at the eye-popping cover art of the vintage sex
paperback
Teen Girls Who Are Assaulted by Animals.“This one is
amazing,” I say, wondering what the editorial meeting at the publisher’s
could have been like to green- light this title. Here’s a niche
audience I hadn’t imagined. “
All books are amazing,” she
corrects me with a passion. “Are you a librarian?” I ask cheerfully,
knowing, after being
the keynote speaker for several of their conferences, how wild librarians can be. “Not officially . . . ,” she
answers with practiced bravery. “I was . . . ,” she confides, “and then
something happened and I wasn’t.” Oh. “I’m John,” I introduce myself,
trying to change the subject away from her obviously painful past. “They
call me Bernice,” she answers without fanfare, “
and I read your last book. I loved the chapter ‘Bookworm,’ but you’re too ‘literarily correct’ for my tastes.”
Before I can stick up for my published reading recommendations, she
suddenly brakes for a car that swerves around some tire rubble on the
highway, and a huge pile of cheap paperbacks stacked pack- rat style in
the backseat collapses on top of me. I pick off
Saddle Shoe Sex Kitten, Some Like It Hard, and
Freakout on Sunset Strip, with the amazing politically incorrect subtitle
Fags, Freaks and the Famous Turn the Street into a Hippy Hell.
“They’re not for me,” she explains as she pulls off I-70 onto a rural
road; “they’re for my book club readers.” Before I can protest that I
can’t go off the interstate, she tells me, “Don’t worry, I’ll take you
back to the highway.” We cut back into an even less traveled country
road, turn the corner, and see a
Tobacco Road–style hut
constructed entirely out of paperback books missing their front covers.
The owner has shellacked the books to make them semi-weatherproof, but
the elements have not been kind—the volumes, soaked through many times
from rain, are swollen, tattered, and can’t offer much in the way of
protection. “Publishers don’t want cheap paperbacks returned when they
don’t sell,” Bernice explains. “The newsstand managers are supposed to
rip off the covers and turn those in and they get their refund. The
retail outlets are expected to then just throw away the books, but I
rescue them from this biblioclasm and redistribute the volumes to
alternative readers at the lowest end of the used-book market. I know
it’s hard to imagine, but a few very dedicated collectors only
want books
with torn-off covers. It’s these specialized readers I serve. I am not
alone. Flea-market vendors, paper-recycling workers, relatives of
deceased dirty-book collectors, we are united in a mission to do what
libraries cannot: bring the customer the lowest of the low in
literature.
“Ah, there’s Cash,” she says as a skinny, grubby fortyish-year-old
white guy with a potbelly and a Prince Valiant haircut comes out of his
self- styled reading room. I quickly realize by “Cash” she means her
customer’s name, not actual money. Her books are, of course, free. “Cash
is a very specific customer,” she explains. “His books must be
soft-core and pre-porn, with a missing cover done by a collectible
artist. He then actually reads these smutty volumes, writes endless
critiques of the writer’s style, which he never allows anyone else to
read, and then uses the ‘read’ book as a building block for another room
in his shantytown abode.”
“Hi, Bernice,” shouts Cash in some sort of regional accent too obscure
for me to identify. “Hello, sir,” she says with a literary grin, “this
is my friend John.” Cash completely ignores me, so Bernice just goes
into her routine. “I got some good ones for you today,” she promises as
Cash’s eyes light up and he licks his lips in anticipation. “Here you
go,” she teases, “
She’ll Get Hers by John Plunkett.” “With a
missing cover by
Rafael de Soto,” Cash yells back with postmodern
literary enthusiasm. “I remember that one, Cash,” Bernice reminisces
like the specialist she is; “that was great pulp art but it’s gone now!”
“Who wants to go to an art gallery?! I want to read!” yells Cash as he
grabs the volume and hugs it to his chest in literary fetishism. “How
about this one?” tempts Bernice, holding up a yellowing paperback with
both the front and the back binding ripped off . “Remember the pulp
jacket with the sexy lady on the couch clutching the pillow like her
lover?” she quizzes. “
Restless by Greg Hamilton,” Cash shouts back like he’s on a quiz show, “with cover art by Paul Rader. And I’m
glad the cover is gone. I
read these
books, Bernice, I don’t look at them! I read every word until I
understand perfectly what the author was saying just to me; the last
reader these volumes will ever have.” Bernice hands him the damaged
volume and he grabs it with a scary gratitude. “See you next Thursday,
Cash,” Bernice promises, and with that, we’re back in the car and off to
the next outsider reader.
“I’m no judge of what people read as long as they
read,”
explains Bernice once we’re on the road. “Are all your books dirty
ones?” I ask with great curatorial respect. “No,” she answers proudly,
“I’ve got true crime, too. A lot of libraries won’t carry the really
gruesome ones. Just like bookstores, they discriminate—putting the true
crime sections way in the back of the store. Hidden. Near the gay
section.” Before I can agree she gives me a sudden look of traumatic
desperation that stops me in my tracks. “Believe me,” she whispers sadly
as we suddenly pull into the driveway of a suburban ranch house, “I
know about censorship.”
Out comes Mrs. Adderly, a most unlikely matronly true crime reader
still dressed in her housecoat. “Hi, Bernice. I’m glad you’re here. I
got in a fight down at the library just yesterday. They take my taxes,
why can’t I have a say in what books the library buys?” “Hi, I’m John,” I
butt in. “I thought the library
had to get you a book if you ask for it.” “Oh, they
say
they do,” Mrs. Adderly answers without missing a beat, “but they lie! I
happen to be obsessed with ‘
womb raiders.’ Are you familiar with that
genre?” she asks me point-blank. “You mean women who tell their husbands
they’re pregnant when they’re not and then follow real pregnant ones,
kill them, cut out their babies and take them home claiming they’ve just
given birth?” I reply. “That’s the ones,” acknowledges Bernice,
impressed I’m so well-informed in this specialized field. “Well, I read
Lullaby and Goodnight by D. T. Hughes,” Mrs. Adderly continues, “but there’s another one I want.
Hush Little Baby,
by Jim Carrier, where the ‘raider’ cuts out the baby with the mother’s
car keys and the baby actually lives! Well, this literary snob of a
librarian says to me when I ask if she has the book, ‘There’s no need to
know about somebody
that ugly.’”
“Yes, there is!” I yell in outrage, completely agreeing with Mrs.
Adderly’s anger. “The public needs to know,” I rant, “that when you’re
pregnant, strangers are following your every step, ready to jump out and
cut out your baby with your car keys! Womb raiders are everywhere.”
“Exactly!” agrees Mrs. Adderly, thrilled to have someone else in her
corner. Bernice gets a sly grin on her face and whips out a
mint-condition bound galley of this very title and hands it over. “Oh,
Bernice,” Mrs. Adderly gushes, “you know how to make a true crime buff
happy. Thank you from the bottom of my black little heart.”
We’re off. I’m impressed. Bernice turns on the radio and we hear that
delightful little country song “
Swingin’ Down the Lane” by Jerry Wallace
and merrily sing along, harmonizing over the instrumental bridge
between verses. I continue picking through the books on the floor by my
feet and laugh at
One Hole Town, a hilariously titled soft-core
vintage gay stroke book. “You want that one?” she asks with generosity.
“Sure,” I say, mentally adding this rare title to my collection of
cheesy gay-sex paperbacks. “It would go right along with my ‘chicken’
volumes,” I tell her. “You mean titles with the word
chicken in them?” she asks immediately, understanding my oddball bibliophile specialty. “Yes, I’ve got
Uncle’s Little Chicken,
Trickin’ the Chicken,
Chicken for the Hardhat, even
Chain Gang Chicken.” “I know them well,” she announces with bibliographical respect.
“And you, Bernice,” I gently pry, “what kind of terrible books do you
collect?” She freezes, suddenly protective of her most private scholarly
taste, but then seems eager to have someone in whom she can confide.
“The novelization of
porn parody movies,” she admits with great pride.
“It’s a small genre, but one that is growing in importance,” she
explains with deep knowledge of her field. “I tried to introduce these
specialized volumes to the general public when I was head librarian in
my hometown of Eagle. But Colorado is such a backward state! Trouble
started as soon as I displayed
Splendor in the Ass and
Homo Alone
with the covers out instead of spine in. Busybody little prudes noticed
and made a big deal out of it, but I stood strong against censorship.
Porn parody titles need to be discovered
and celebrated. I was
vilified in both the local and the national press, but I didn’t care! I
fought back! I passed out valuable, extremely rare copies of
Clitty Clitty Bang Bang to any high school reader in the library who asked for it. Satire needs to be taught! These youngsters loved
Clitty
but I was fired! I called the Kids’ Right to Read and the National
Coalition Against Censorship organizations, but they wouldn’t help me. I
became a scapegoat for the humor-impaired.”
Before I can offer my unbridled support, she pulls her car over to the
I-70W entrance ramp and we are buried in sliding paperback books. With
great concern and kindness she asks gently, “Do you have the
Twelve Inches series?” “Yes,” I murmur in excitement, trying to stack Bernice’s volumes back up in some kind of order. “I’ve got
Twelve Inches,
Twelve Inches with a Vengeance, Twelve Inches Around the World.” “But do you have
Twelve Inches in Peril?”
she demands with excitement, whipping the title out from inside her
glove compartment and holding it up like the Holy Grail. “No!” I shout
with rabid delight, quivering in reverse literary excitement. We look at
each other in our love of disreputable books and she hands it over,
completing my collection. “Thank you, Bernice,” I say in heartfelt
appreciation, caressing this title like a sexual partner. “You must go
now, John,” she says with sudden concern. “I can’t be exposed. My
readers will continue to hide me. They know. They know I’m the best damn
alternative librarian in the country.” “You should be proud, Bernice,” I
say as I get out, bow in respect, and blow her a kiss goodbye. “Run,”
she says with urgency; “run to read!” But where do you run to in
Parachute, Colorado?
Excerpted from CARSICK: John Waters Hitchhikes Across America by John
Waters, published in June 2014 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC.
Copyright © 2014 by John Waters. All rights reserved.
