Great Old Missed Maybes
There wasn’t much he missed about that place. He’d left for a reason, after all. He’d burnt his bridges there for a reason, and it was a good reason at that.
But all the same, there were a few things he missed.
He missed being able to walk wherever he wanted when the four walls and too-quiet of his room got to be too much. No matter what time of the day, night, or in-between it was, he could get some fresh air.
Never mind that it eventually started to feel like he was trading a four-walled brick cage for one built like a small town. Being alone on the streets at 3 AM started feeling like it wasn’t a million miles away from being alone in bed.
Course, ha-ha, the former was where he got more exercise.
He missed the bookstore. The used bookstore tucked in the back of that ghost town mini-mall. He’d found Brett Halliday novels there. The old Dell ones, in a size they don’t make anymore and with Robert McGuiness girls on the covers. Beautiful painted women, two parts Bond girl to one part film noir fatale.
He’d bought some, spent money he didn’t really have on them. Same with the collection of Rolling Stone interviews with the original Saturday Night Live cast.
There were wonders in that place. Him being him, it was a kind of holy ground, a sacred temple of great old words in great old packages.
The Flash Gordon paperbacks, little black and white remixes from the newspaper strips.
The big book of Aragones illustrations from MAD, ten or so years worth of margin doodles and comics and spot illustrations. And some Spy vs Spy collections, the old school stuff, the only stuff he ever really dug from MAD besides Aragones’ scribbles.
The big Asterisk hardcover, the first he’d ever seen. European comics, foreign in more ways than one, and weirdly beautiful.
What else…the dozen or so Pauline Kael books, some Thompson. Did they have Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang? Maybe. He doesn’t remember.
When he lets himself regret anything about leaving that place, it’s that he left all those books unbought. It’s a stupid thing to regret, of course. In terms of weight, it’s a lot lighter than any of the other dozen little gut shots he gets when he thinks about that town.
On the other hand, maybe that was the price of getting out of there. A lot of missed maybes.
Some of which, at least, he can solve by way of ebay.
