Sold a “Fully Armed” and a “Schiz” to a librarian/aspiring cartoonist with whom I originally connected through “The Comics Journal.” His reading of me has expanded into other areas, which is a rewarding experience. But not the week’s best story.
It begins…

She was an Iranian-born software engineer from Toronto. She wore a purple sweater, purple slacks, and a purple patterned scarf. She was in her 40s, with blonde highlights in her black hair and fingernails polished in different colors. She had woken at 4:00, she told me, meditated, and walked on Grizzly Peak. Because she planned to write her memoirs, she asked the universe to connect her with a writer. Then she had headed down toward campus and, without even noticing my books, had recognized me as one.
“I must compliment my stylist,” I said.
She asked if she might join me, so I cleared space at my table.
She had to call her daughter in an hour, but our conversation blew way past that. It actually was not that much of a conversation. She barely asked me a question and I did not have to ask her to learn her father had been in the Shah’s air force and, while in the United States as a governemental representative, had a secret marriage and child. She had been married at 19, arranged, unbeknownst to her, to reconcile her family with one with which it had been feuding. She has another “marriage” now, entered into to appease her husband’s father, but she and he do not live as husband and wife. (“Partners in crime,” she calls her husband and herself.). There is a man in the UK whom she has turned down four times already but who is now ill and whom she may visit tomorrow. She comes from a family of “nomads, but “Not like gypsies. We travel from palace to palace.” She had been sexually molested by a seven-year-old cousin when she was five. She would have been a model, but in her family you did not become a model. You became a lawyer or doctor or engineer. Her spiritual guides include Wayne Dyer, an Iranian physician/ nutritionist, whose name escaped me, and Louise Hay, who counsels loving one’s self in order to heal.
Of course, she would buy a book of mine. What would I recommend?
Cheesesteak.
And she wanted one for the man in the UK.
IWKYA.
And one for her partner.
Lollipop.
And one for each of two cousins.
Bob on Bob and Bob on Bob.
In the end she had bought all ten books I had with me.
But she did not have cash. I could not get my Square to work and I did not trust my bank (or me) to be able to handle the electronic transfer of funds she proposed, so she offered to go to an ATM.
W., who had arrived an hour into our interaction, waited with me.
And waited.
And waited.
She had left behind her glasses (of no use), her iPad (a cheap one, W. said), and all ten books, which I could easily re-sell if I ran across other Iranians with the same names as her, her friends and relatives.
I called Adele and said I would be late – but would have a good story.
W. had to get to work.
I waited some more.
She arrived with cash. She wanted to pay me extra for making me wait. (I settled for an orange juice.) She asked what I would charge to edit her memoir. I said to send me a few pages to look at. She said she would bring them with her the next day. What time would I be heré?
I have not seen or heard from her since.
Did she go to the UK?
Did she wake up and wonder what she was doing with these books?

Sold three books.
The first was a copy of the café journal which was purchased by R__, an ex-social worker and a regular, who wanted it as a gift for S__, a retired domestic relations attorney turned cast glass artist, garbed in a red, bulky cardigan, so bright hook-and-ladders would brake for him. S__ was visiting from NYC but had had lived in Berkeley for 50 years and been gone for ten.
Hearing R__’s request, F, my tablemate and unofficial under-assistant West Coast promo man, asked if R had read any of my books. He said, “The one about the homeless guy,” which surprised me since I had been chilly toward him for months, believing he hadn’t read any.
“Where’d you get it?” I said.
“From you.” Which immediately elevated him in my eyes while lowering me in the same.
F__, upping the ante, said he had read all of my books, and all were terrific, implying to cultivated person could do less. This sparked S__ to announce he had a shelf for books by authors he had met and picked up a “Lollipop” and an “Outlaws, Rebels…” for it.
“How’d you know to come to Berkeley in 1962?” I asked.
“I had bad grades,” he said, “but California was required to admit anyone who had high test scores, no matter from what state they were from and Berkeley was the best school I could get into.”
Of such are futures made.

In other news…
1.) A discussion between myself and five friends/correspondents led me to refer those interested in my books to my web site. Nary an order resulted and the only sign of anyone going there was a comments from one fellow pointing out that I had blogged two “Adventures” numbered “406″ but not even hinting that he had read any of them. [I did not thank him.]
2.) This was followed a few days later by the only comment to a FB post, which referred readers to a book review I had written, coming from a woman I had quoted as saying, “We were doing these dangerous things…” when, she wanted it known she had said, in fact, said “We ALL were doing…” She did not hint she had other thoughts about the review. [I pointed out that “We” implied “all.” Otherwise, she could have said, “SOME…”]

3.) Then there was the conversation between the mother (very sweet) who is foisting a “Bob on Bob” on her adult son (insufferable fellow with whom I have exchanged unpleasantries). “You’ve given that to me before,” I hear him say, not looking up from my laptop. “But have you read it?” she says. “Yes,” he says. “Did you a like it?” “Up to a point.”
So not a great week for words-of-mouth.

ALL OF BOB’S BOOKS ARE AVAILABLE FROM www.theboblevin.com. (Just don’t tell me I’ve numbered anything incorrectly.)
Teaser: And wait till you see what’ I’ve got for you next week.

https://www.firstofthemonth.org/and-clevelands-cold/

My latest piece is up at First of the Month. It begins:

I became aware of Cleveland when Lou Boudreau played shortstop and my Aunt Sylvia, who, to my six-year-old eyes, was really neat, perversely rooted for the Indians against her hometown Braves. I liked Marion Motley and Mac Speedie (good names!), when they came along a couple years later too, but I hadn’t thought much about Cleveland since. I certainly hadn’t registered it as a petri dish for disintegration and despair, capable of occasioning both vicious protest and futile resignation, from which would arise a musician capable of pinning lunch meat to his chest, blowing his nose in a slice, and eating it.
Then Aaron Lange’s “Ain’t It Fun: Peter Laughner & Proto-Punk in the Secret City” landed.

The link to my piece on the cartoonist Jessie Renklaw is below.

https://www.tcj.com/a-walker-by-any-other-name-multiple-ways-of-looking-at-a-cartoonist/

It begins:

“They think if something happened to them it is interesting because it happened to them…”
McCandless, on some writers, in William Gaddis’s Carpenter’s Gothic.

That is the challenge for memoirists. Make events from their lives meaningful to others. Wikipedia says about the cartoonist Jesse Reklaw little more than that he was born in Berkeley in 1971, grew up in Sacramento, studied at UC Santa Cruz, received an MA in computer science from Yale, dropped out of a PhD program in AI to draw comics, and lives in Portland with his cat. That would seem to leave Reklaw little with which to satisfy McCandless, especially if it was true, which it isn’t. The cat died six years ago, and Reklaw wasn’t born in 1971, Jesse Walker was but reversed the spelling of his last name when he turned 20.

Sold one “Bob.”
The buyer was a fellow I have known since the Creative Writing program at SF State. (An author of novels and non-fiction books, he is the one person I know to have made a living as a writer, with the side gigs that often entails.) The buy was to occur in person, but he has been lain up with pneumonia.

In other news…
My only conversation of note was with “Arnold,” who is of indeterminate middle-age and a sometime substitute school teacher. He has been coming to the café longer than I but somehow had arrived at the conclusion that I wrote poetry. Though I disabused him of that notion, it did not result in the ring of cash register bells. All he wanted to know was if “Best Ride” was autobiographical. When I told him it was not, he told me how much he had enjoyed Philadelphia – at least Manayunk – when he was there ten years ago. He knew the art museum and the Rodin but not the Barnes, so I filled him in on that.

[Preliminary Note: A couple months ago, I met Fran at my café of choice. An electrician by trade, Fran is a man of many parts, one of which is reading everything he can find by any writer whose work intrigues him, which now includes me. Fran has read more offbeat than anyone I know, and his recommendations, as you will see, have influenced what follows.
So now in order of completion…]

1.Nadenzhda Mandelstam. “Hope Against Hope.” Osip Mandelstam’s widow’s account of life under Stalin’s Terror. (Recommended by another friend, Michael G.) Makes Putin’s Russia look like Candyland.
2. William Gaddis. “A Frolic of His Own.” When I had told Fran, I was reading “Carpenter’s Gothic” (See: List xxii), he said that, as I lawyer, I should read this. Once I began it, Gaddis had thoroughly hooked me. (See: 8 below – and List xxiv, forthcoming).
3. Aaron Lange. “Ain’t It Fun.” A mammoth, black-and-white social and cultural history of Cleveland, centered on the proto-punk musician Peter Laughner. I didn’t know Peter Laughner from Peter Bzystplx, but I knew Lange and his work, and after I had read it, I was asked to review it for FOM, so I am reading it again. I hope to make the Feb. 1 issue. You can read what I think then.
4. Michael De Forge. “Big Kids.” Loaned me by Fran. A charming, if puzzling, graphic mini-“novel and refreshing twist on the now standard troubled-adolescent-who-becomes-a-cartoonist yarn.
5. Marcel Benabou. “Why I Have Not Written Any of My Books.” Another Fran. Benabou, a member of Oulipou, with which I was less familiar than Peter Laughner, is a gang of French post-modern satirist artist/thinkers. While occasionally amusing, the book is not something you curl up with and sink into in front of a warm fire. But if you want to exercise your mind…
6. Britta Lee Shain. “Seeing the Real You At Last.” A friend of a former client, Shain had written a book about her travels – and fling – with Bob Dylan in the ‘80s. When “Bob on Bob” came out, we swapped copies. A fascinating, if unflattering (but understandable) look at him and that world.
7. David Lodge. “A Man of Parts.” A novel about the life of H.G. Wells. I’d expected more laughs, based on “Changing Places,” the only thing I’d written of his previously, and, given what else I’d been reading, it ordinariness (as a book, not as a life, which was certainly unusual) left me flat.
8. William Gaddis. “The Recognitions.” Third time – in 1970s, 1980s, and now. My history with G’s 950-page first novel actually goes back 60-years. I won’t get into that history now but once I saw how funny CG and FOHO were, I wondered if I’d missed something – well, I had no doubt I’d missed things – but funny? So I read it again. Now, I think, when I’ve finished the rest of Gaddis, I’ll start it over. In fact, I may read nothing but it forever.
9. Eliot Weinberger. “19 Ways of Looking at Wang Wei.” Loaned me by Fran. EW, a poet/translator, has taken a brief poem by an 8th century Chinese poet, looked at different translations of it, and commented upon each. Fascinating. When I looked at his other books, I saw he had co-authored one with the fiction writer/translator Lydia Davis, whose work I also like, so I bought…
10. Lydia Davis and Eliot Weinberger. “Two American Scenes.” These seem to be two “found” poems, one a manuscript by Davis’s great-great-great-grand uncle about the New England town in which he grew up, and the other a journal kept by a member of the first (non-Native American) traversers of the Colorado River. Davis offers a brief afterword on her contribution but Weinberger offers none, and I found virtually nothing informative about the book on-line. The writing is straightforward, direct, clean, impactful, frill-free. The “poetry” manifests through the breaking up of the lines on the page. Again, fascinating.

Sold three “Bob on Bob”s. (Only a dozen left.) Also, I forgot to mention last week a sale to a friend from Brandx now living in Berkeley.
This week’s initial purchaser was an electrician named, fortuitously another electrician buddy pointed out, “Buzz.” He was from Austin but is now working on a building under construction near the café. He had a grey goatee and earrings and wanted to “support the arts,” being a drummer himself. “All types of music,” he said. “Most recently, Christian rock.” He didn’t have cash, so I said he could take the book and leave the money with the barista the next day, but his buddy, Lyle, pointed out they couldn’t be sure where they’d be working and leant him $10.,
My next two sales were even more outside the demographics of my usual market. Stephanie was a six-foot-two, blonde trans woman, who had worked for decades in bio-tech, “trying to change the world.” Her shorter and older manfriend, Ted, was a cowboy-hatted, third-generation stone mason from Colorado, who is also an ardent drag racing fan. (Frequent readers may remember a previous palaver he and I’d had.) We had a good conversation about Berkeley, the ‘60s, “Dobie Gillis,” and open heart surgeries (Ted’s and mine). I bet they’ll be back.

In other news…
1.) Well, nothing about the Air Pirates movie, of course.
2.) But some interesting reader – and one non-reader – responses.
Let’s begin with the non-reader, a woman veteran of the music business. My standard line, when someone eyes my display, is to charmingly, winningly say, “Wanna buy a book?” This woman was neither charmed nor won. My blatant worship of Mammon appalled her. “How can you talk to Bob?” she asked a mutual friend. “Only money interests him.”
Then “ Bob on Bob” turned out to disappoint a fellow who’d known Dylan in the Village in the early ‘60s. He’d hoped to learn something he didn’t know about Dylan but, disappointingly, found himself learning primarily about me. Now this is a nice fellow, eminently knowledgeable about American roots music; but he also believes Dylan’s song writing peaked with “Only a Hobo,” so I can’t be too distressed by his dismissal.
Third, was the gay landscape designer who had bought “Cheesesteak” six “Adventures” ago. Having avoided eye contact with me since, she confronted me to say that, while she had liked the early portions, the book had lost her when it became “too much guy stuff.” That was a reaction I could engage with, and we had a good discussion about why that was and what women might have related to instead. (I suggested she skip ahead until I hit college, so we’ll see where that goes.)
Finally, “Bob” drew praise from a fellow from my basketball game. A few years younger than me, he was from a Catholic family in Chicago and had served in Viet Nam because that’s what people from his family did. Now a therapist, north of here, he emailed how important Dylan had been to him. “He told me I wasn’t just a nut case in relation to our culture. He put words on things I hadn’t figured out. He understood something not yet formed in me.”
A gratifying reaction.

Sold two “Bob”s and one “IWKYA.”
One “Bob” went to a high school classmate, who worked in the public health field in D.C. The other went to a retired physician, whom I met several weeks ago at the café. He is from Chicago and bought a “Lollipop.” Between then and now, someone had told him about “IWYA,” and he bought that too.

The week’s featured “No Sale” story involves a woman who comes to the café most days. She is in her 70s, tall and stately, with (assisted) red hair. She dresses elegantly, this day with matching purple shawl and scarf. I believe she is retired from UC, in one of the sciences. Her speech is impaired, perhaps from a stroke, which means she must write down a word or question or show it to me on her iPhone. I have seen her reading Clausewitz “On War” and the poetry of Osip Mandlestam but our conversation is usually confined to admiring each others boots. Then she asked to see some of my books and returned to her table with six of them.
Well, no one had ever compared me to Clausewitz. Or Mandelstam.

In other news…
The entry of “Steamboat Willie” into the public domain has renewed interest in the Air Pirates and, not incidently, my book, including the possibility of a film.
I have been down this road before. Occasionally punji pits had to be avoided. Commonly they petered out nowhere. Once in a while bread (or cake) crumbs were picked up before the trail abruptly ended. The starting point is always exciting, the journey usually entertaining; but as I age, the excitement is less. As one Hollywood macher said to me, “You know how it is, Bob. I tell you how much I love your work. And then you never hear from me again.”
On this occasion – and it is not entirely clear – one (or two) film makers of actual (but modest) credentials have associated in a “producer,” with greater (though not terribly current) experience in the sphere of socially conscious documentaries. Because he has the most familiarity with matters like options, he is to contact me. Whether there is funding or, if not, where it is to come from has not been disclosed.
No matter. I would like to see the project proceed. I will not stand in anybody’s way.

Sold a “Cheesesteak” and three “Bob”s.
The former went to a “business system analyst,” which means he helps people do their jobs better. (NOT an efficiency expert. He insisted I get that straight.) He familiarizes his clients with their software “In preparation for the new world.”
“Richard,” who was in town from Dallas, was of average height, about 40, wore plastic-rimmed glasses, and dressed in unobtrusive blues and greys. He was fascinated by the different types of people who congregated in Berkeley’s cafes – and me, selling my books. (He took my picture. Then had a barrista take a picture of the two of us together to prove he had met me.) He was a tad unfamiliar with local history, not knowing people had been shot on Telegraph Ave. in the ‘60s, or that troop-bearing military vehicles had rolled down the very street we were on, or that tear gas had spiced our air.
He had wanted a book to read on his flight home, hence my recommendation – but I also gave him a copy of the café journal for his cultural enrichment.

The “Bob”s went to (a) a high school classmate; (b) a friend/semi-cousin of Adele’s, who’d lived here but, for decades, has been a psychiatric-social worker outside Philadelphia; and © a retired-from-Kaiser anaesthesiologist back from a Doctors-Without-Borders stint in India.

In other news…
1.) My top no-book-sold encounter was with Iris, a fifth-grader in a “Merry Christmas Ya Filthy Animal” sweatshirt. (From “Home Alone,” it was explained to me, the culturally unenlightened.) She lives in Virginia City with her mother, Jess, who joined us – and said I could use their real names. Jess, a digital designer/librarian, knew of Bob Crabbe but not Dan O’Neill, my primary Nevada-City-connected-names-to-be-dropped. The most significant thing about Iris is that, in a city with much home schooling, she insists on attending public school. She does not want to miss the experience of being around other children. Good for her.
2.) A Mystery Solved: My pal Fran picked up two copies of “Outlaws, Rebels…” from Moe’s for me, which I can mark-up and peddle. One is immaculate, but one is signed “Bob, Thanks” by one of the cartoonists profiled in it. “Why would he be signing a book by me to me?” I wondered. The answer came from another pal, Wes. “He was giving the book to another ‘Bob.’” That made perfect sense because the cartoonist was a magalomaniac and probably felt that since he was in the book, it was about him. Not only that, I thought I knew the “Bob” to whom he had signed it.
When I mentioned the name, Fran thought he knew him too.
3.) Finished the article I’d been working on for “Comic Book Creator” about the life and tragic end of the Chief Writer and Editor in Chief of “Penthouse Comix.” “Great piece,” the editor said, which was satisfying and exciting since I had never heard of him or it before the assignment before it was offered. I’d literally begun with nothing and ended up with 6000 words.
Now the editor has a bigger story for me.
Cool.

Sold 14 “Bob”s and one “Lollipop.” Gave away another “Lollipop” and swapped another “Bob” to a vintage vinyl and clothing store in Lexington, KY for a t-shirt designed by my the cartoonist and – I am proud to say – my illustrator/colleague J.T. Dockery.
The Bob” buyers were four people from the café, one former client, a nephew, who also bought a copy for his daughter, a Swiftie employed in high tech, four high school classmates (two girls, two boys), a VISTA colleague, a fellow who knows me through my writing on comix, and one who connected through my writing at FOM. One of the café purchasers had never bought a book from me (and received the gift “Lollipop” because he was from Chicago and had lived there during the year in question) and another café purchaser had made “Bob” her first purchase a week earlier and now wanted one for the girl friend with whom she had seen Dylan in 1964 when they were 13 and he he played the Berkeley Community Theater and half the audience walked out when he came out with a band for the second set. (I said Dylan didn’t go electric until 1965. She said she would check her diary and get back to me.)
The most notable comment the book received was from a fellow at the café who called “The Man, the Moment…” “a worthwhile piece,” which didn’t quite match my personal evaluation of it as “The best thing about Bob Dylan ever written,” though I realize experts may differ. I also overheard two of the more strongly opinionated regulars share the surprising recognition that I was quite a good writer.
Surprising to them anyway. I haven’t doubted that for a half-a-century.

In other news…
1. I previously called attention at FB to my making the pages of “Variety” with my Air Pirates book. While taking satisfaction from being quoted in the company of IP experts whose law school class rank, I am sure, far outdid mine, I was a trifle irked to see my 20-minutes of bon mots reduced to one sentence at the article’s tail end. But as my pal Benj noted, this meant the author had allowed me to dramatically ring down the curtain.
2. Two others have now followed me into selling their books in the café. Both are elder statesmen whose tenure on the scene dwarfs mine. One, an honored member of the local folk music community, ran a landmark guitar store in the Village in the early ‘60s, and the other studied mime in Paris and mask making dance in Bali and has been active in the Bay Area alternative performing arts scene since the 1970. We may turn the place into the Bouquenistes of Berkeley. Look for us in the Tourist Guiides.