WHEN I was a very young kid, I enjoyed a brief period of normalcy — you might even have described me as cool. I’m not kidding! Prior to adolescence and the slow toboggan ride of humiliation it brought, from enormous plastic-rim glasses to unfortunate acne, a mullet to an inconvenient love of text adventure games, I was a fleet-footed moppet who dominated his neighborhood peers by winning foot races and being adorable.
Obviously, it couldn’t have lasted. There was clearly a weirdo trapped inside this pale, gelatinous body. Within a few months of my twelfth birthday I had slid into permanent residence in the “nerd” category, and as is my Way I embraced it rather than try to wriggle free from its damp embrace. As is the case with a lot of folks in similar circumstances, I found myself immersing myself in books, reading more or less constantly. In the days before Amazon and the Internet, living as I did in the relative book desert of Jersey City, New Jersey, I had no choice but to travel into New York City on a regular basis in order to purchase paperbacks with my allowance monies.
That’s right: Not drugs, or cool clothes, or music — books. Around the age of eleven or twelve, I started taking the 99S bus from Jersey City into New York in order to hit the Barnes and Noble stores there.
Free Range
I was what you might call a “free range” kid. My parents, god love ’em, weren’t terribly concerned about my whereabouts at every minute of the day, and seemed to regard my survival as something more or less in god’s largely disinterested hands. It’s possible they also thought that since they also had my brother, Yan, if I happened to vanish one day they had a backup of sorts. So I was able to crawl around New York City in the 1980s more or less unfettered. All I needed was bus fare and some determination.
This is one reason it is hilarious to me when folks talk about the cities, and specifically New York City, as hellholes of crime and violence. Man, I was there in 1985 before Disney took over Times Square. I wandered around the city unsupervised as a child during a pretty bleak period in the city’s history and had pretty much zero problems or sketchy encounters. And I’ve been in New York — some kind of sketchy areas of New York, too — in recent months. If you’re telling me New York is somehow worse than it was in 1985, you are on crack.
This anti-city sentiment from people who have never actually spent time in a city isn’t new, of course. And it isn’t even the point of this essay. As a real, professional writer I have spent several hundred words meandering about before finally zeroing on my point, which is the time I thought a book was haunted.
Here’s what happened: My trips to New York City to blow all my allowance monies on paperback sci-fi and fantasy novels meant that I very quickly worked my way through most of the available titles that appealed to me, so I was forced to dip my toe into second-tier SFF novels and eventually books that were a little more complex in terms of genre. And this led me to a book that really wasn’t a good fit for me, but I bought it in a moment of desperation because I lacked fresh books to read.
And I quickly got a weird vibe from the book. It was told in a jumpy, timey-wimey way, with chort chapters describing various characters in variously weird situations, and I simply started to feel weird reading it. I can’t explain it, but 13-year-old Jeff just got squicked out by the book, like it was hitting me with this very strange energy, so I decided to do something I, a verified book hoarder, had never done: Return a book.
So I took my allowance monies and got on the bus and hoofed it back to the book store, and there was no obvious place to return a book, and I was also kind of embarrassed that my reason for returning the book was “it may be haunted,” so I eventually wimped out and simply slipped the book back onto the shelves and walked away, forfeiting my $3.95 plus tax. It only occurred to me later that if the book were haunted this was probably how it propagated its evil spell, by compelling soft idiots like myself to just keep leaving it on bookshelves to be bought over and over again.
Was that the most ridiculous moment in my life? No, but it was ridiculous. I think of that book often. I have never found any evidence that it actually existed. Which is worrying.