the gentle madness

The muscles of his naked calves bulged below his worn and dirty kimono.  The dark cloth flapped behind him as he strode with chest out and sword over one shoulder.  The top-knot stood high on the back of his head as a badge and a warning.  Everything about him declared: I have earned this.

So begins William Dale Jennings’s The Ronin. When I hefted my stack of books out of the Goodwill store in Blacksburg I knew exactly how the young Ronin felt. At Goodwill prices I bought ten good titles and still had enough change to buy a twenty ounce bottle of Sierra Nevada Pale Ale to sip while I sorted my loot.  I earned this.

OK, I’m exaggerating.  Really all it took was about ten bucks and the will to endure the green glow of fluorescent lights and the horrific music oozing down on me as I made my selections.  My tooth enamel will never recover, but I found books.  Books I grew up with, like The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, and happy accidents like Calvin Trillins’s Travels With Alice.

So, what’s the score?  Title for title, “the Thrift,” as it is known locally, had more books of lesser quality – which is to be expected this close to their annual book fair – and I had to search carefully to find the keepers. But if you look hard enough the quality is there, for cheap.  The Thrift feels old-school, funky, and cool.  In one pass the Goodwill store had a better selection in a smaller space (I left without a few I would normally have taken if not for that bottle of beer ruining my budget) but my ears were bleeding from the saccharine heartbreak anthems drilling into my skull by the time I staggered to the checkout. Subsequent visits have not turned up the same quality of books.

True bibliophiles care less about the shopping experience than they do about finding the books they came for. Neither the YMCA Thrift nor the Goodwill Store qualifies as a bona fide bookstore.  That’s part of the fun.  The YMCA staff have dedicated themselves to it longer and on a good day, it shows.  The shelves are organized and they stock enough gems to maintain a high level of anticipation among bargain book lovers.  The selection at Goodwill might surprise you, though.  It surprised me.  Spend a Saturday afternoon thrift-shopping for books in Blacksburg and you will certainly find something worth reading.  If you have time for only one stop, then the YMCA Thrift’s selection will prove to be more consistent and rewarding.

I am (imp)ulsive.  Saturday mornings are busy here at the Easy Chair but the afternoons are sleepy and we close at two o’clock.  An evening off is a rare gift and I decided to spend one feeding The Gentle Madness.  I had about thirty dollars to spend.  First stop, the YMCA Thrift Store in Blacksburg where I found these books.  I was pissed off to find Bee Season in the free pile on my way out the door, not because it cost me two bucks but because I don’t actually have time to read it.  Not while I have Infinite Jest to finish, or Colum McCann’s This Side of Brightness, begging me to forget about Infinite Jest, enticing me with words like sandhog and manlock.  The copy I found at the Thrift was dogeared and it contains this:

“When he was a ten-year-old boy in the swamps of Georgia, Walker forced a water snake to stay on a rickety wooden pier for five hours.  He had heard it would dehydrate in the sun.  The snake fought ferociously at first, wiggling from the pier toward the water, but he kept pulling it back by its head and tail.  Remembering an old saying, he knew the snake wasn’t poisonous: Red and yellow kill a fellow, red and black be nice to Jack.  He didn’t want to kill it himself, he just wanted the snake to die in the heat, but it just kept on thrashing.  The sun began to sink low in the Okefenokee sky.  In frustration, the young boy put his foot on the snake’s neck and slipped his knife in.  Its innards were warm and he knocked them into the water.  He brought the skin home to hang on his wall.  Most of the house was made with logs, but his own room was composed of cinder block.  He made a lot of noise hammering the nails.  When the snake was stretched above his bed, his mother came in and asked him where he had gotten it.  He told her the story, and she whipped him for his lack of respect.”

All right.  So, score one for the Thrift.  Add a New Stories From the South anthology and a near-new copy of Midnight’s Children to the mix and the Y is out in front.  (Insert foreboding here.)

So, what happened at the brand-spanking-new Blacksburg Goodwill Store?