Chaz: My Bookcase

Ever since I can remember I have had this small wooden bookcase in my room. The bookcase is only about 2 1/2 feet high and 3 feet wide and is made out of pine.  It has a small piece of scrollwork right under the top shelf that gives it a modest classic presence and the wood is stained a golden honey color.

When I was a child it stood between my bed and my brother's bed.  The bookcase sat right under the window that looked to the east.  I would lean on the bookcase and brace myself so that I could look out that window and watch the sun rise over Omak Mountain. I would also check to see if the neighbor kids were up yet and playing outside in their yard.

I kept my favorite books on this bookcase.  20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, The Hound of the Baskervilles and the Last of the Mohicans were the books I remember.  Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde was my favorite and I was always thumbing through it looking for the most gruesome parts before I went to sleep. I also had an old copy of Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson who I think I really wanted to become when I grew up.I remember that this copy of Treasure Island had some great maps in it and a picture of Stevenson dressed as a Pirate.

Later as I became a teenager I had a radio on the bookcase.  My parent's house had these copper balls on the roof of the house that were supposed to attract lightning strikes instead of having the lightning hitting the roof.  The thought that lightning was going to strike the house was troublesome to me as a kid but the copper balls made for a great antenna for my radio.  One day I scurried out on the roof of the house and attached my radios antenna, via more copper electrical wire, to the lightening balls. Voila, I could listen to rock stations, at night, from as far away as San Francisco. 

I remember lying in bed and listening to KNBR, a station in San Francisco that had a DJ who had a show late at night called the Crazy World of Arthur Brown who used to sing about being lowered into fire or something like that between songs.  Later on he made this little ditty into a hit song called Fire.  He would scream out that he was the god of Hellfire and this would bounce out into the darkness of my room and I would laugh out loud.  Every night I would lie in bed and hear all the hit songs coming out of the Bay Area in the mid sixties.  I first heard Janis Joplin, the Grateful Dead and the Fugs on this station.  I loved feeling a part of the 60's even if it was only by listening to the radio.  The 60's were a long ways away from the Okanogan back then.

Back to the copper lightning balls, there was once a storm that came up with a lot of lightning and thunder and I leaned on the bookcase and yelled out "come on hit the lightning rods and let's see if they work!"  If I had any sense I would have realized that the copper ball was about five feet from my face and if lightning had struck I would have probably been burned to death. 

Another big thrill for me, associated with this bookcase, came with my discovery of the "Catcher In the Rye" by JD Salinger.  During the 60's this book was the most coveted by kids because it was so hated by adults and it was banned from libraries and it was thought of as pornography.  Well one day I was going through my parent's books to find something to read and as I scanned the books I thought out loud.

Let's see, Readers Digests, enough Raymond Chandler mysteries to paper over downtown Omak, Time and Newsweek magazines and then suddenly there it was "The Catcher In the Rye," My eyes blinked 600 times and I couldn't believe my find.  The most notorious book in the world is just sitting in my house.  What the hell is going on?  How can it be that I am actually touching this book?  At first I was almost afraid to open the book thinking demons were going to jump out of the pages with naked women wrapped around them. 

I looked around the room to see if my parents were watching me and then I just calmly put the book under my arm and quickly walked upstairs into my room.  I tucked the book on the shelf of my bookcase and for days I just looked at the title of the book staring back out at me just beaming to know I had the book when so many kids across America weren't even allowed to see the book.  What fortune, I Charlie Grimes have "The Catcher in the Rye " right here in my own god damned room and I actually found it on my parent's bookshelf.  I didn't have to break any laws to get this book.  The book just landed in my lap when I wasn't even looking.  I would run home from school and climb the stairs to my room at full speed just to make sure the book was still there on the bookcase.  I didn't even tell my friends I had it thinking they would tell someone else and then my parent's would find out I had found it and take the book away.  Gradually I began to read the book and then the voodoo of the book being dirty wore off and the insight and angst of being a confused teenager forever changed me.  The constant swearing was great too. I learned some great comeback lines from Salinger.   Every time I clip my toenails I think of Holden and his college roommates.  Funny thing about that book my parent's never even noticed it was missing from their bookcase and they never went looking for it.  I thought then that providence wanted me to have it.

 In high school I talked my parents into having a teenage phone line in my bedroom.  The green rotary dial phone sat on the bookcase.   At least it did for a while until one day, as I was talking to my girlfriend in Tonasket, my father drove home and calmly walked into my bedroom.  He went over to the phone cord and pulled it out of the wall.  This is back in the days when phone lines were hardwired into the wall.  The long distance bill had just come that day for the phone and this was my father's way of announcing the phone was now gone from my life.

 When I left for college this bookcase always was near my bed and I always laid the important books of my days on top of my little wooden friend.  Books of Greek history, Nietzsche, Jung and Rilke were always to be found there.  I would read these books with great intensity and then lay them down for safekeeping on this little bookcase.

 When Melanie and I got married and moved into our first house all we had was two suitcases full of clothes, an old blue velour chair, a mattress and this bookcase.  I put Melanie's picture on top of it to keep her safe.  Throughout these past 40 years since I left my parent's home this bookcase has been with me.  In our home on Queen Anne, in Seattle, for 25 years I kept only my favorite books on its shelves.  It's funny how I have become attached to this little bookcase.  It's not really any thing to look at but it has served me well for so long it's like a part of me.  This bookcase has observed my entire life and been a partner in my best moments of reflection and thought.

Today that bookcase lives with me in Ann Arbor.  Once again my radio sits on top of it and I have my favorite rocking chair right next to the bookcase and it is here that I read, reflect and listen to classical music.  I am sitting next to it now as I write this and my favorite book on the Peloponnesian war sits on top of it.  Some things never change.

When I am old and unsteady I will have to get up from my chair and brace myself on this bookcase like I did as a small child trying to see out the window of my bedroom.  I wonder what I will be reading then or what I will see out the window.

 

Charles