Harrisburg, PA 56°F
In celebration of Halloween, I want to pay my respects to my favorite zombie: Borders. Although dead, it refuses to rest. The Camp Hill location has been infernally reanimated by a Halloween store, although it still wears the massive signage indicating that therein lies books, music, and a cafe. As those affected by the changing mores of retail media know, these signs are more expensive to move than to live with, and it's a shame that Border's are not more affronting. The former site of Coconuts in the Carlisle Walmart Plaza bosts a giant metal palm tree that has proved impossible to get rid of, and every time I see it, my heart swells with pride: the collapse of an industry cannot erase the youth that I spent stalking sales bins for My Life with the Thrill Kill Kult CDs and making silly, impassioned advances at employees.
Myself and others who worked at and frequented media retailers were staunchly supportive of hardworking artists who worked independently: musicians that ran their own labels and esoteric writers. Royalty rates for authors for digital publication is often at or around fifty percent; musicians can command the complete digital rights to their catalog and spare their camp and fans production costs. These advancements in technology enable artists to be more free about their work, but it also repositions the work farther and farther from the familiar and easily monetized product, and it obliterates the culture that grew around the commodification of that work. My belief is that this can contribute to a new reverance about art, but you can listen to me rant about this in all other venues, digital and IRL. For the sake of this article, I will acknowledge that it is sad that Borders is no more. As soon as I think of this, I think of the Occupy movement and the intense desire to inhabit a space with others for a common reason, a desire that is troubled by the mounting impossibility of the brick-and-mortar.
At Borders, my coworkers and I were united by common concerns. If one is not a reader, one might assume that everybody who reads and/or aligns himself or herself with a literary retailer has a default common concern. Not so. In terms of reading habits, I worked with people who loved variously genre, literary, and mainstream work. Several coworkers were committed cineastes, others were only concerned with maintaining the music section even as it dwindled to two rows incestuously intermingling the likes of country, jazz, and allegedly-bestselling soundtracks. And they were never more critical than when they encountered a customer descending upon their respective department with disappointing affirmations of their worst fears about the media-purchasing public. Many days I thought, you are leading us to our death, one-billionth girl who needs to read To Kill a Mockingbird for school yet cannot discern the location of "Lee, Harper" in a neatly alphabetized shelf.
The uniting factor among my coworkers at Borders was that everyone was smart and fierce and hyper-aware of the anomale we had collectively chanced into experiencing. Contrary to what has been stated and deduced by the end-of-days-ish capitalist decline, Borders did not go down because of the rise of ebooks. Borders was a very poorly run business. In its twilight, I attended a pre-fourth-quarter staff meeting where we were informed by our district manager that we were to reject totally the notion that we were a service-based business and approach our jobs henceforth like selling machines. Despite the fact that our customer base was made up of extremely loyal customers who came almost every single day, our alienation of these people was encouraged: no aspect of the bookseller-customer relationship went untainted by a script or promotion. As someone who loved working there, it is important to me that others understand that as a corporate entity, Borders did not have it together. The same people that read paper-books read ebooks, and those that switch buy ebooks with the voracity enabled by a portable library.
Former employees of the Camp Hill Borders communicate on a closed group on Facebook. I recently asked some of them what their most vivid memories were.
The amazing Cheryl Riddle was spot on in her evocation of the job: Mine seem so mundane...the old woman who got mad at me because I couldn't find the movie her husband watched during World War II in Yugoslavia because she didn't have the title or know who acted in it. The usual "I want the book that has the yellow cover that was on the third table a month ago, but I know nothing about it." The look on the guy's face when he and his wife were struggling to use the computer to find a book. I would ask if I could help, he would look at her and say "I doubt she knows where it is." Gary Chapman's Five Languages of Love? I turned went straight to the shelf and handed it to him. Priceless. Of course the schizophrenic who used to walk around making comments out loud, until he was banned for following two young girls and spouting obscenities. But I think the best was Jim and Joe's story of the the ancient exhibitionist who left the wet marks all over the chair. It was a brand new leather chair and it went in the dumpster."
Barbara Kiner Householder, among the most positive and supportive booksellers, observed, "There are so many little things or impressions that added up to the total experience, you know?" I know. All of these are perfect:
-- The lady who wanted the book that Oprah talked about "I think it was red, about this big..." I found it!
-- The guy standing at the cash register singing part of a song so I could figure out what CD he wanted!
-- There's always the crazy lady. She would leave PILES of books, mostly travel guides, on the cafe tables. I'm sure a lot of those travel books walked out of the store in the backpack she always had on. Then we had to carry all those travel books all the way to the back of the store to re-shelve. Police were called. She was the only person I remember that was banned from the store.
-- Were you working there when Joe threw out one of our brand new chairs because of what the shady lady was doing on it?
-- The parents who would let their child/ren pull books off the shelf and then just leave them strewn about. No respect for books! A terrible thing. This was sad because it happened often.
-- I absolutely LOVED the midnight release party for Harry Potter! The store was just wall-to-wall people all there for the love of a book!
-- And the Breaking Dawn release party...give me the wall-to-wall Harry Potter fans over the giggling twelve and thirteen year old girls any day.
-- Do you remember Christian and John on the overhead? John was promoting cafe items and Christian would say an off-the-wall word into the headset that John was always able to add into his monologue!
-- The black t-shirt guy who would come in at 9:25 and get 2 or 3 books off the shelves and go to the back corner to read. When he heard the store is closed announcement, he would put the books back where they belonged and then leave. He only bought something once or twice that I remember and he came in several times a week.
A lot of these straggly customers haunt me, too. And I'm disappointed to acknowledge in front of the world that I did not experience this shady leather-chair-ruining exhibitionist, although I'm grateful to Cheryl and Barb for acknowledging how I would have loved it.
Barb was also reminded by my questioning of her time at Waldenbooks in the Capital City Mall. "A mom and two little kids came into the store every couple weeks and they would sit on the floor in the back - the kids section - and choose a book to purchase. She never rushed them as they paged through books and read parts and they always put the books back they didn't want. It was almost like a ritual, a quiet time. She once told me when she was growing up the family was very poor but her mother always found a little money to buy a book now and then because "books are food for the soul." I'm all teary just thinking about that again! It really made an impression on me as I'm sure it did on the children."
I heartily agree with what Pam Gingrich wrote to me: "It was actually scary at first until I became familiar with these 'inspiring; personalities. We all had our niche and I must admit, I miss it terribly. I loved being surrounded by the constant influx of new books, music, video's, classics, history, biographies. Being able to discuss our personal likes and listening to others was enlightening. I met my partner, a fellow artist, at Border's this way. I believe our store had a character lacking from others."
Most of what my former coworkers came up with and have either sent to me or posted in the group make me miss being surrounded by them in that distinct and desperate state that overtakes one when has only an hour to filter the crazy before taking on the legion. Steve Mayer, with whom I once shared a much-needed observation about the drug-paraphernalia-like quality of the whipped cream dispensers, addressed the appearance of Sherman Hemsley: "He complained about the price of Lindor Balls at the register. I thought 'you're George Jefferson! You have a deluxe apartment in the sky!'" Books Supervisor Extraordinaire Laura Monegan asked me "What happened with the syrup dispensers?" And because the syrup dispensers were my responsibility as a cafe employee and because I still think of her as my boss, I won't answer that. Roxanne Walter, one of my much-adored cafe-compatriots, was a first responder to my call for vignettes. She referenced the benevolent high-rollers who gave us ten and fifteen dollar tips. If you're out there, ladies and gentlemen: I can still make coffee for you. I am in no way above it.
Some of the most deserving souls were installed for a short time in the Harrisburg store after the demise of Camp Hill. Christian Stump was one of those. He and Sara Sweger sustained the running of the store. While they did not do everything, without their work ethic and ebullience, conditions were grim and nothing was done with nearly the efficiency and vim that characterized their presences. Sara and I celebrated being free of retail by getting hammered at El Rodeo and ultimately un-shut-up-able with ambivalence over our loss of that space and those people. Christian went to Harrisburg, and not long after he arrived did this jewel occur: "A lady called the Harrisburg store complaining about how she had been trying to get a hold of the Camp Hill store AAALLLLLLL morning! I said "Yeah, they never answer their phones over. Really unprofessional staff."
I am really challenged to identify a favorite memory. The joy and dynamism of working alongside Christian and Sara, Deaf Night in the Cafe with the brilliant Sam Hinchey, the wildly off-color Black Friday ten a.m. lunch break conversation I had with Jim and Cheyl, meeting my incredible boyfriend Seth, also a former employee whose favorite memory includes a hell-bent burnout on the trail of a book chronicling the history of bananas. It was on this night a year ago that Sara intimated to me as we were closing that the guy that gets the small latte all the time had it badly for me. The fact that that does not win hands-down bespeaks the power of the positive memories that Borders generated for me.
Kari Larsen's chapbook, Say you're a fiction, is forthcoming from Dancing Girl Press in the summer of 2012. More information on this and other projects can be found at her blog, Cold Rubies.
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