At Old Capitol Books

Before we stopped talking, she quoted Hunter S. Thompson in an email. Plenty of people express mild thunderclap when it is revealed that I’ve never read Thomspon. So did she.

And but so I am standing outside of Old Capitol Books, months later. Eddie Vedder’s mandolin is in my ears. Fog is trumped by sunlight and it is too warm for what I’m wearing. The song no one else can hear abruptly collides with corporeal shouts of “fuck you.” A homeless man is riding a bicycle very slowly down the middle of the street and he is screaming “fuck you” at the line of cars queuing up behind him. A grimy, cardboard sign on the back of his bicycle reads, “I need you.”

I walk in.

I go inside and I inhale a fragrance of paper must and I imagine that I am Dillion in the film version of Fogle’s “Drugstore Cowboy.” My every step is delimited by row upon row of crammed bookshelves and I am uncharacteristically content.

My calf is itchy and when I bend and scratch at it I see legs wrapped in nylon. A weakness. I don’t want this sort of massive distraction. I search for a flaw in her sculpture and I decide her ankles are too thick and I stop scratching the calf and I move on.

She doesn’t notice me notice.

She has Plath in her palm. Her face is a less equine Nadya Suleman. I think of Julia Stiles in “10 Things I Hate About You.” Which of course brings to mind “Taming of the Shrew.” And but I glance back to the nylons and I remember reading Plath only because I thought she was hot. Plath, the hot chick who is joined by Hemingway and by David Foster Wallace in Dante’s Wood of the Suicides, each a tree contorted into a representation of his, or her self-murder.

The girl in the nylons absently twists her hair with her free hand. Nail polish. Her eyes don’t vary from “The Bell Jar.” I consider what I recall of “The Bell Jar.” I remember it being terrible, but necessary and iconic, a la “Silent Spring.” The primary difference being that Sylvia Plath was far more gorgeous and therefore more tolerable than Rachel Carson. I picture Carson and I picture Plath and I understand that I probably need to get laid instead of looking for a book passively suggested by a chick I no longer talk to and instead of obsessing over a stranger’s legs and instead of weighing the merits of imaginary coitus with an author who carked it six years before I was born.

I don’t want her, per se. I don’t want the girl with the not-quite-so-horsey Nadya Suleman face. Even if her fat ankles were only an illusion. Which they are. I know I’ll never speak to her, never confirm my suspicions that she’s a pain in the ass because she’s into Plath, never see the nylons cast to the floor, empty and flat, as though the victim of a cartoon steamroller accident.

I refuse to care.

Not interested.

Even if.

I look away from the perfect legs. Nearby, Melville’s work is on its side. When he died he was obscure. Forgotten, and almost a century away from Montalban reciting Ahab’s soliloquy in “Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan.” Must have, I think, it must’ve sucked being Melville.

I locate the T’s. They are isolated in an awkward spot along the back wall. Printed on spines are the names and titles of many familiar friends.

But there’s no Thompson. I leave with nothing.

Outside, the homeless man has vanished. Combined, his statement to the world is, “Fuck you, I need you.”

I want to find him and I want to tell him that I get it.