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From six to midnight six nights a week I worked like a clerk within the Eighth Street Bookshop in Greenwich Village. For your young writer to work from the Eighth Street Bookshop was as a young painter apprenticing with Michelangelo or Titian. Like City Lights in North Beach and the Grolier in Harvard Square, the Eighth Street Bookshop was no mere bookstore; it was a literary hot spot of people and ideas. It was the ideal job. I could drink after work from midnight to four in the morning, probably the most time to become in the bars. From the mornings, I wrote, generally inside a notebook since I could not afford a typewriter and my living problems had been as well precarious to have possessions other than the clothes I wore and also the bag I carried with my notebook, pens, and whatever book I was reading at the time. Always I slept at the apartments of close friends or with some girlfriend or inside the abandoned building on Second Avenue and Second Street, where the Saint Mark’s from the Bowery Poetry Project held its writing workshops during the week. Besides the books over a shelves—the shop consisted of four floors of books—and the books becoming read and forever discussed behind the counter and out over a floor, there had been the shoppers who regularly visited the Eighth Street Bookshop. Everyone who was anyone within the literary and cultural worlds had a charge account at the store, and to charge was not some impersonal credit-card affair, but a clerk writing up every purchase: 1 sheet filed from the funds register, the other given for the customer. The normal charge consumers included Edward Albee, Anaïs Nin, Donald Barthelme, Albert Murray, and numerous times a week—usually on his motorcycle, which he parked outside the store—the author and neurologist Oliver Sacks. The list of writers and celebrities whose charge accounts were frozen was both equally illustrious—a who’s who of downtown cultural life. Friends stopped by to talk, as did these kinds of Village locals as Djuna Barnes, author of Nightwood, who lived in a chic cul-de-sac on the corner. Blustering, drunken celebrities wandered in—Paul Ford (Sergeant Bilko), Jack Palance, and possibly probably the most unusual of them all, a single with the Gallos, a local Mafia superstar who lived across the street. “I read many Albert Camus,” Gallo once told me, perusing the fiction section. A lifetime later I’d walk by Umberto’s Clam Bar in Smaller Italy, and to whomever I was with I’d say, “Where 1 in the Gallos got whacked,” as if my owning talked to a single of those Gallos in the bookshop on Eighth Street gave me a higher proximity to this hoodlum and his brother. Nearly everyone I met in the bookshop, regardless of whether a clerk or customer, had an interest in literature. “Interest” is perhaps not the proper word; they were passionate about ideas, and obsessed by books and writers. Their adore seemed virtually erotic; they talked about reading a book the way an individual else may perhaps speak of the love-conquest. “I read all of my very first volume of Proust over the weekend, not leaving the apartment once,” a clerk would say. Another clerk might respond with: “I’ve been locked away with Madame Bovary for days.”
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