Eat the Document Read online

  Nash didn’t do anything. He watched D. but berated himself: why have a fifteen-dollar skateboarder magazine for sale at all? Sealed so it can’t even be flipped through before you shelled out your fifteen bucks. Could there exist a more appropriate or likely object for shoplifting? But this was Nash’s problem, or one of them. He felt waves of ambivalence about shoplifting, and usually at crucial moments.

  That didn’t mean it didn’t upset him. He stared at that shoulder bag, at Davey D. as he continued wandering the store. Nash felt increasingly angry over it, in fact. What upset him (probably) was his sense that Davey D. was certainly one of those rich-raggedy kids. They looked poor, they acted poor, they smelled poor—but somewhere behind them or out ahead of them, somewhere in the surround of them, lurked big, ungainly scads of unearned money. Big Connecticut or Rhode Island Grandpappy dough. The more snaggly the hair, the worse the hygiene, the older the money. Nash didn’t know for sure, but he had developed what he felt was an accurate instinct about such things. After watching a lot of kids at close range, you could tell which ones had nets and which ones didn’t.

  Nevertheless, Nash did nothing about this particular theft, or any other. And the thefts had become rampant. Prairie Fire Books had been open only eighteen months. Eventually he hoped it would be run as a collective, by and for the people in the surrounding neighborhood, but for now it was funded by his benefactor, Henry Quinn, who gave Nash complete control of the place. Prairie Fire in no time became highly trafficked by the local youth and on many levels exceeded Nash and Henry’s expectations. Of course it never made money; it never would. But Nash had a modest ambition for it not to lose too much money. And if it wasn’t for all the theft, it probably wouldn’t lose money at all, even with the low pricing and the tables where people were invited to read before, or instead of, buying.

  Davey D. approached the cash register. He examined some flyers on the front rack—clubs, bands, zines and meetings. He wore a huge gray überflak jacket with oversized welt pockets, and there were deep and versatile zipper-and-Velcro-sealed pockets on his cargo pants, too. A veritable shoplifter’s uniform. Nash made eye contact with Davey D. and even greeted him warmly. Davey D. said “Hey” in a friendly tone, then calmly cruised out the door. Nash thought of his half-formed theory that if he could make these kids see the store as part of their space—or even worse, that word community—they wouldn’t indulge in petty thefts. But it was more complicated than that.

  Prairie Fire stocked largely fringe texts. They sold books that advocated subverting the status quo, abolishing property and ownership, resisting American hegemony, and embracing rebellion and nonconformity of any stripe. Books of this sort, it seemed, begged to be stolen, and lots were. Nash knew it was like a roach infestation: for every one you actually saw, there were dozens you missed. And he refused to hide things behind the counter the way they do at some bookstores. Henry suggested he ought to do at least that with the most frequently stolen texts. But Nash believed that created too much mystique for the stolen objects. It made the unstolen books look shabby. Or else the hiding of the books behind the counter made it less likely kids would buy those books because they had to ask for them. They couldn’t be silent, shuffling and begrudging about it; they had to be public and certain.

  He did however start writing notes and pasting them throughout the stacks and shelves. Especially in the areas he couldn’t see that easily.

  We are not a corporate chain—

  please don’t steal from us!

  or

  If you steal from us we will cease to exist.

  even as bad as

  Prairie Fire is not the “man,” so why are you stealing?

  and

  Petty thievery is not subversive, it is just petty.

  Henry—and after all he was the owner of the place, the man whose dime was on the line, Nash respected that—saw the problem as one of enforcement. If Nash would just bust one of these kids, they would stop. Nash conceded that Henry might be right about that. Word was out that they didn’t bust anyone.

  “The notes just remind them that stealing is an option. Hey, I should buy this, and then they see this note asking them to cut out stealing, and they think, Oh yeah, people steal. I forgot about that, that’s a good idea.”

  “Punk city,” Nash said. “Have you noticed they all use that word again, punk. And punk rock. But it seems to mean generally rebellious rather than specifically 1977. As in ‘You closed down traffic on I-5 during rush hour? Punk rock.’ Although they tend to say it in a sneering tone, so perhaps it is sort of ironic. Or both, everything is both earnest and ironic at the same time with them. Which is either a total dodge or some attempt at a new way to be.”

  “Those signs just don’t work,” Henry said.

  “But they would never use city as an intensifying suffix. Not yet, that is. But it will be back eventually, in some mangled retread. Count on it.”

  “But I leave it entirely up to you,” Henry said.

  They were having their nightly beer after the store closed. Or, more accurately, beers, as Henry would consume five to Nash’s one. Henry, bottle in hand, wandered through the store laughing at Nash’s signs.

  “But I still think that as we gradually make them feel it is their space, as more of them work here, they will respect that.”

  “Or you could just bust one of them,” Henry said.

  “Where do you stop? How much energy do you give it? Then you end up in lockdown. Beepers and cameras, mirrors and cops. Seizures and searches.”

  “You’re exaggerating.”

  “Charges. Pressed charges.”

  “Okay, do it your way. The whole point—”

  “Affidavits. Attorneys.”

  “—of the place is not—”

  “To cede yet another part of our lives to over-ordinance and constant surveillance.”

  Henry finished another beer in a long swig. He tossed the bottle in the recycling bin, where it clanked against the others. His face stretched into a painful-looking horizontal grimace that Nash understood to be Henry’s smile. He always had razor stubble along his cheeks and dark circles under his eyes. And he chain-smoked unfiltered Camels, which enhanced a rather nasty asthmalike illness. Nash watched as Henry downed beer after beer, only hesitating at the last beer in the six-pack, which he would unfailingly offer to Nash, and Nash would decline politely, and Henry would shrug and grab it.

  Neither Nash nor anyone else who really knew him would likely describe his life as particularly golden, not in the larger sense anyway, but in small ways Nash felt he would have to say it was lucky. Truly. Luck with people, friends—he was lucky with guys like Henry. Nash first met him at the bartending job Nash had taken to pay the bills. Prior to that he worked small-time construction jobs, but as a late-forty, he couldn’t take it anymore. Or his body couldn’t anyway.

  Nash was a lousy bartender. He didn’t know how to make many drinks, he wasn’t fast, and he gave drinks away (every other drink was a buyback if you looked like you needed it). But this particular bartending job mostly required a stoic ability to deal with drunks for twelve hours straight and not get drunk yourself. The clientele were clichéd lonely, older working men with cumulative, functional-but-chronic drinking habits. And occasionally the younger nonworking locals that liked to slum in dive bars. They ordered drinks and then smiled and whispered to each other, gesturing. They constantly telegraphed that they were there for a laugh only, as if getting older was contagious. Nash tolerated all of it, he occupied himself with wiping and polishing—tending the bar—as he listened.

  Henry was one of Nash’s regulars. He was one of those wiry, slight guys who could drink endlessly and never hesitate when he finally stood, never seem surprised by the sudden hardness of the ground beneath his feet. He did have bad days, though, days when he had that jumpy, look-over-your-shoulder habit. But Nash immediately liked him. They were about the same age, which for some reason seemed important. At the end of the night, or to
ward the end of the night, Nash would pour himself a beer or a drink and come around the bar and sit on a stool, and Henry would tell Nash stories about growing up in this neighborhood, what had changed and what hadn’t. He told good stories, and he didn’t repeat himself, both rarities in the drunk crowd. Henry did sometimes sweat a lot, but he never, ever slurred his words. Nash heard rumors from the other regulars that Henry had been an Army Ranger and seen combat. Or maybe it was the Marines, or the Air Force. Others said he had been in prison. It was obvious Henry had been through something, but Henry never told Nash anything about that. What was clear was that Henry had lost hearing in one of his ears. Nash noticed that he frequently said What? in an irritated voice if Nash had the radio or TV on. Whenever Henry came in, Nash turned the background noise way down or off. He didn’t make a fuss about doing it, and Henry certainly never asked for it, but that was how their rapport began.

  Eventually Henry invited Nash to get high with him. It was closing time, and after locking up they walked around the corner to Nash’s apartment.

  He lived on the top floor of a small house. The old woman who owned the place lived downstairs and never raised the rent once in eight years. Nash felt that was being lucky in small ways. Henry followed him up the back stairs to the entrance door on the second-story porch. He was winded by the climb and waved Nash off as he caught his breath. From the back door and windows the distant downtown of the city gleamed and twinkled. During the day Nash could easily see the Sound and even the jagged, painterly Cascade Mountains beyond like a two-dimensional backdrop, so pretty they looked artificial to him and not pretty at all. He didn’t really believe in them. He would catch a glimpse of them on clear days and then shake his head and mutter, “Yeah, sure. Ha.”

  “Do you own this place?” Henry asked when he stopped gasping from the stair climb. “I get these breathing irregularities at unpredictable times. More to do with anxiety than lungs.” Breath. “I guess.”

  “No. I just rent it.” Nash turned on the light. He rarely had guests, and only now did it occur to him that his apartment had a college feel to it, peculiar in a man his age: a secondhand couch with a blanket slipcover, a recycled industrial wire spindle turned on its side for a coffee table, a stereo (an actual vintage hi-fi turntable) with stacks of LPs at its side. Books strewn everywhere. Books in shelves made of crates and actual carpenter-made shelves, and more books doubled in front. Books shoved sideways on top of the books on the shelves. The room had no decoration except an oversized Persian-style area rug. And against one wall, lined up on several built-in shelves, was a collection of broken things: a series of vintage plastic objects, not so much a plate or a radio but a piece of something, a curve, a handle, a corner. They were that old imitation ivory with faded, prefab, fake imperfections—more beautiful older and faded, even cracked. Nash knew everything about them: they were urea resins, or acrylic, or phenolic molding masses. Co- or homopolymers. They were called made-up words with futuristic, hybrid, exotic formations: melamine, Bakelite, celluloid. They were resiny yellows with strands of darker color to evoke tortoise, or they were unnatural blow-molded reds and greens, meant to evoke nothing in nature. They had curves that went nowhere, and Nash found them all in junk shops and dumps, garbage bins and giveaway boxes at yard sales. He was not a collector, but he felt drawn to these plastic remnants. He liked looking at them, touching them, smelling them. (All of them still emitted odd, vintage toxins that you could detect, faintly, if you pushed the piece right against a nostril and inhaled. The odor reminded Nash of their slow evaporation into the air, of how they would disappear after a thousand years of low vapor emittance, and of their true plasticity, unstable and variable.) But of course to the guest visiting the chances were that these industrial relics—these detrital treasures—looked like, well, garbage.

  Henry stepped into the room, barely glanced at the plastic pieces, the stereo or the books, and sat on the couch. He took out a pipe and a lighter and began to smoke.

  “It has been ages for me. I never smoke anymore.”

  “How come?” Henry said.

  Nash put his hand on his chin and frowned, glancing at the floor and then back to Henry. “I don’t know. It was an expensive habit. I have a no-frills existence, a modest life,” he said. He took the pipe from Henry and inhaled while he held the flame to the bowl. Nash didn’t smoke anymore because at some point it began to have an unpredictable effect on him; sometimes it made him uncomfortable in deep, existential ways, making even the feel of his breath suspect, as if he were inhabiting a strange, wrong body.

  So Nash didn’t mind that smoking after all this time wasn’t making him feel high in the slightest. But the gesture of smoking, particularly with Henry, was relaxing. “How modest a life? How no frills?” Henry said, sucking in air, holding it and then gulping in more. Nash couldn’t help noticing how bad Henry looked away from the low bar light, the ragged edges beneath the surface, the deep creases on his face and the yellowness of his skin. Nash shrugged.

  “Pretty fucking modest. Humble, plain. In every way imaginable.”

  “Health insurance?”

  Nash shook his head.

  “Stocks? Mutual funds?”

  “No. God no.”

  “Real estate?”

  “I said really modest.”

  “A savings account? A bank account?” Henry asked, hard-grinning at someone unseen and shaking his head.

  “I use money orders and cash. There is not much left over. What there is, I stash.” Nash took the smoking pipe from Henry’s outstretched hand, leaving a faint smoke trail of herbal sweetness. He put his lips to it and inhaled. He began to feel the diffusion of the pot easing his muscles. Good, that was what he had hoped for—a nice physical high.

  Henry watched him for a minute and then started laughing and rasping. It seemed unlikely that he would be able to stop for a while.

  “You stash your dough? Like under your mattress?” he said between guffaws.

  “I’m not going to tell you, asshole. I’m not stupid.” Nash started laughing too.

  “Ex-wife?” Breath. “Kids?”

  “No. No! Look, I buy thrift store clothes. All right? I never eat out—I cook everything myself. Is that all? Oh yeah, I don’t have a telephone, man. Did you hear me? I get mail, so why do I need a telephone?”

  Henry stopped laughing finally and just smiled. “That’s amazing. You are off the grid. Right here in the city.”

  “Sort of, I guess. But I have electricity and refrigeration. I’m quite content with that.”

  “Off the fucking grid.”

  “No cabin in Montana.”

  “No goddamned phone.”

  “But you know, I wouldn’t mind being one of those guys in Arizona or New Mexico who have spent twenty years building some massive landwork in the desert. Some earth-altering sculptural dream of the future and God, until you die one day in a tractor moving the never-ending piles of dirt, unfinished but still—up until your last breath you are implacable, relentless and alone. Alone except perhaps for the young acolyte wife, desert tan, a woman with braids and devotion, her never-ceasing and only ambition being to help you—a man thirty years her senior—realize your dream. Your lifelong project, monument, statement. Your unyielding testament to, uh…well, unyielding.”

  “Sounds great,” Henry said. He offered the pipe again. Nash shook his head and leaned back on the couch. There was a second of silence, and then Henry barked out a huge laugh.

  Nash nodded. “It sure does, doesn’t it?” They laughed until silence gradually set in. Nash then got up from the couch and sat cross-legged on the rug.

  “Are you married?” Nash asked.

  Henry sighed. “I’m divorced. I got a kid, too. I have two houses and I own a few buildings.”

  “No shit? Really?”

  “How do you think I can afford to be at the bar all the time? I’m a man of leisure.”

  “You don’t seem like someone who doesn’t work.”


  “Good.”

  They sat for what felt like a long time. Nash studied his rug. Then his ceiling light fixture.

  “That’s beautiful. Braids in the desert. A tractor,” Henry finally said.

  “Yeah.”

  “You know what you are? You’re a fucking priest, man.”

  “No, I’m not. I just slightly exist. Lots of people in the world live like that, they’re just more ashamed and less deliberate about it.”

  “Maybe, maybe not.”

  Henry agreed to fund Prairie Fire. Mostly, Nash guessed, because Henry wanted to do something for him. They took over the basement space of one of his buildings; Nash left his bartending job. Once the store opened, Henry became more interested in it. He would spend hours looking at the books, not exactly reading them but pulling them from the shelves, studying the back covers, looking at the tables of contents, fanning the pages with his fingers. He even sat in on some of the meetings, although he never said anything.

  One of Nash’s ideas to help the place make extra money and keep traffic up had been to stay open late for various local meetings. He modeled his idea on European “infoshops.” They put in two long wood tables with benches in a recessed area at the back of the store. He hired a middle-teen high schooler, Roland, to sell coffeehouse beverages from a station in the corner. It was through these drinks that the meetings brought in some money. But most important, the meetings made Prairie Fire into a fairly interesting place: a sanctuary of subversion for misfits and scragglers. And even occasionally those kids referred to by the other kids as the marginalites. (Nash guessed they were either the elite among the marginals or considered only lightly marginal. Probably both.) They read books or magazines, met people or just watched, wrote, ate, and even organized various protest events.

  Nash enjoyed sitting among them at the long table, working but also drinking a soda, listening and occasionally talking. It all fit into a subject dear to his heart, and which he called by various names: His Antiology, or study of all things anti. His Counter-Catalog. Compendium of Dissidence. Ana-encyclopedia. The Resist List. His Contradictionary. He liked to think he observed them with a nearly clinical objectivity: the scrappy outsider kids who either stood in the park and discussed various actions and take-it-to-the-street strategies or sat all day in the coffee shop inventing manifestos and declaring their opposition—often to a seemingly arbitrary object, as much, perhaps, for opposition’s own sake and energy as for a desire for social change. Nash thought that was okay, in fact he loved that specifically adolescent perversity: the brief window when the monolith of the culture had not yet made a convincing claim on their souls and they were able to muster some resistance to it all.