50 percent off day at Goodwill
and the wife and I waded
into the crowd
out for what they could get
loading shopping carts with shit
other people throw away. I know
better than to follow her around
when she’s shopping – even though
it was a specific trip this time,
for art supplies. Frames and boards. So
I strolled into the books and records
section to kill time and to see
what books didn’t make the cut. At first,
it was the usual kind of stuff. Religious tracts.
Bible study guides. Diet books. Self-help minutiae.
Outdated textbooks. A bunch of old literary journals
and college literature texts – looked like
some poor bastard either got the point of it all
or was evicted. Came across a hard cover Nabokov.
I passed it over. Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet
was meant for someone else. Left a Thomas Wolfe—
one more whiner in the stack won’t make
a difference. Contemporary pulp with
made into movie covers. Jammed between
a Vegan cookbook promising Tasty
Tofu Sloppy Joes and
a biography of the Pope, I spied a copy
of The Monkey Wrench Gang. It was just
a mass market paperback. No pious introductions,
glossaries, reader’s guides, or hollow critical
interpretations by scholars
who wouldn’t know good writing
if it car-jacked them mid-day
on an empty city street. The price sticker
on the spine read $1.99. I looked around.
I was sandwiched between a woman
who looked like she inhaled cheap romance novels
and ice cream with the same speed
and a housewife
with an annoyed husband standing behind her
(he hadn’t learned not to follow) either
waiting on her to be done or
protecting her from the grabby hands
of the questionable folk who shop
at Goodwill… one of them might
grab her ass or (even worse)
his credit card. She moved on
and I was going to grab the book and go;
but she was replaced by
an asthmatic shopping cart stuffer
in search of the perfect book
to cure her raging kleptomania. I waited.
I kept my eye on the book. For a second
I thought the romance eater
might grab Abbey first, but she picked one
with sleazy cover, all cleavage and broad
shoulders, and squeezed out
of the narrow aisle. I saw my chance,
grabbed the book, and escaped,
only to find my wife standing there
staring at me and wondering
what the hell was taking me
so long.