Mele Kalikimaka, Emmett Otter, and Pecan Pizzelles

Christmas in Alabama was a two-edged sword. Though we lived in the deep south, it got cold. Very cold. And that meant several things. It meant that along with our usual early morning chores, we'd have to make sure that both stoves had wood. The kitchen one, small and bulbous, took branches, nothing thicker than a rolling pin; the living room one, big and boxy, took trunk wood, most of which had to be split to fit under the stove lids. It meant that we'd have to break, with heavy sticks, the ice in the water buckets of five horse stables and twenty-three discrete dog kennels. It also meant that rattlesnakes would crawl under the house where we kept our kindling and that mice would brazenly scamper towards the warmth: the kitchen, the living room, the cranked-up electric blankets that cocooned our sleeping bodies.

We lived in a converted fishing cabin built by a slipshod handyman named Rooster (I kid you not), and the winter wind whistled icily through the cracks in the unstained pine planks, which were graffitied with penciled saw lines (hopelessly overshot), splashes of basic addition, and scribbled phrases like "this side up." December meant that the gaps in the wall boards had to be covered with packing tape or stuffed with cotton.

But it also meant that mom would make homemade doughnuts, thick ropes of batter coiled into hot oil and then dusted with sugar, or apples and onions, both frontier recipes from the Little House Cookbook we'd gotten her last year. It meant that Christmas Eve dinner would consist entirely of the cookies we'd helped her make all week, the madelines and macaroons, the orange cranberry nut biscotti, the pecan praline lace, the pizzelles with toasted anise seed. (Well, that's how it was pitched, "all you can eat cookies," but the witch always managed to force some chowder into us too). It meant that my mother, brother, and I would saddle up three horses and scour the nine hundred acres of our ranch for the perfect tree. Once found, we'd tag it with the same blaze orange tape our stepfather frequently used to legally indicate that the crap hanging off the bed of his pickup, the pipes and planks, was too big and would crash right through your windshield if you got too close. Then Doctor--as we formally called our stepfather, a former army dentist--would head out the next day, chop it down, and haul it back.

It meant we'd make pasta angels from elbows and bow-ties, and Drummer Boy drums from TP tubes. It meant we'd string popcorn with red thread and lather pine cones with glue and dredge them with gold glitter. It meant singing carols around the blonde upright as Mom haltingly banged out "Mele Kalikimaka." It meant my brother and I would be able to pick one (but only one) Christmas special to watch on the usually off-limits TV. It was a tough decision and, fearing a blunder, we typically stuck to the tried and true: The Heat Miser, Emmett Otter, Peanuts. But a few times we took a chance on something new. Once a show was begun Mom forbid us to turn back (a lesson, she declared, in reality), and one year we swallowed a bitter pill indeed: a limp 1982 cartoon starring Pac Man and his family called Christmas Comes to Pac Land. I still feel the weight of that disappointment. Now, as I decorate the store in preparation for the "retail rush," as I garland the counter with a string of multi-colored lights made from the translucent casings of shotgun shells, as I crown the armless gold mannequin (Goldfingerless) that stands guard over our register with the felted chimney pot I once wore as a Central Park carriage driver (a holly spring added for festive flair), and as I listen to Shane MacGowan growl about "Christmas Eve in the drunk tank" on the holiday CD my girlfriend, Kristy, recently burned me, I think about those winters in Alabama. And you know what? I miss 'em. Even the snakes.

Mutant Mags, Scarecrow Contests, and Split-Toe Ninja Boots

"When the air smells like smoke, and the twilights are orange and ash gray, my mind goes back to Green Town the place where I grew up." This is the nostalgic narration (think Christmas Story without the drollery) that opens Walt Disney's production of Ray Bradbury's Something Wicked This Way Comes. Born and raised in the twenties, Bradbury's recollections of his hometown of Waukegan, Illinois (the real-life counterpart to Green Town) are a boy's eye view of a rural America long gone. It's the kind of place where everyone in town will stop work to attend a carnival.

Today is the second day of fall and, walking the two Main Street blocks from my apartment to the shop, I too am reminded of "the place where I grew up." That place was a five hundred acre horse ranch just outside a small Alabama town of God-fearing bird-doggers called Hurtsboro. The Will Halloway to my Jim Nightshade was a bespectacled wisp of a boy named Aaron, who, twenty-five years later, remains one my best friends (see the Summer of '81 post). Autumn, in particular Halloween, was an important time of year for he and I. In part, because of the Fall Festival, a series of gaming tents and vendor tables that the Methodist Cultural Commission pitched along Church Street every October.

My first year (and first fall) in Alabama (my family had moved there from NJ), Aaron and I created a Marvel Universe ripoff called Mutant Mag to sell at the fair. I was nine, he was eight. Aaron's Mom was an artist. She had converted the hunting cabin adjacent to their house into a studio and this is where we worked, coloring by hand (fussily at first, but then, as dawn drew near, carelessly) the books we had, earlier in the day, copied at the Hurtsboro Savings Bank, which boasted the one Xerox machine in town. Marvel Universe, if you remember, wasn't really a comic book at all, but rather a encyclopedia of the various heroes, villains, and lusus naturae that peopled the Marvel macrocosm. Each page had a robust full body portrait of a character along with an origin profile that ran in a journalistic column of copy down the side. It was here that Aaron and I learned words like "cabalistic," "behemoth," and "reprobate," along with phrases like "latent mutant attributes," all of which we incorporated (mostly incorrectly) into our own publication. We created robotic chimeras with names like Android Wolf and Turtle Cyborg. Thumbtack was a dwarf who could manipulate his ribs so they curved up out his back like porcupine quills; Dutch Dike was a guy who could "fill any hole" (the innuendo was quite beyond us). All the Marvel characters had aliases and, accordingly, so did ours: Sha Corona (I'm not kidding) was the secret identity of a man with a motorized saw blade that half-mooned from his helmet like a rooster crest; Gareth Grimshaw the aka of a dimension jumper known professionally as Limbo. We sold out of the stapled digests within an hour, feeding our fall folie de grandeur and filling a coffee can with dollar bills (which we spent on hot dogs and a festival game called Tic Tac Toss).

Not our scarecrow.

The next year, our objective was to win the newly minted Scarecrow Contest. Our scarecrow was complicated and had a decidedly knotty back story. Martial arts warrior, werewolf, vampire killer. Its face was a nylon ninja hood over top a plastic wolfman mask. Its chest was covered with "chain mail" made from linked, supposedly silver, Stars-of-David, which we meticulously snipped from sheets of roofing tin. Its hands were a pair of long red leather biker gloves that flared at the forearm. We fastened a sharpened chopstick to each of these, gluing metallic pen caps to the base (where stick met glove) to imitate the steel bushing on Wolverine's knuckles (Wolverine is a Marvel character with retractable claws).The chop sticks were ostensibly wooden stakes that extracted any time our scarecrow saw a vampire. It also wore split toe ninja boots which, of course, helped the scarecrow with rope climbing and wall walking.

Anyway. I don't think the judges got it. First prize went to a freckled, rusty headed girl named Elizabeth who had, according to the panel, "ingeniously utilized" a plastic milk jug as a head. We didn't even place.

SET 'EM UP, INDY: Snakebites & Temple of Doom Shooters with the Raiders Boys

Eric Zala, Chris Strompolos, and me cloaked in the volcanic vapors that frequently follow a quickly downed round of Dooms.

The weekend began with us doing shot pitchers of a withering Asbury Lane concoction aptly called The Temple of Doom, with Chris and Eric, two thirty-something guys from Mississippi who'd shot a now nationally known adaptation of Raiders of the Lost Ark when they were ten. I'd been wanting to see the fan film since reading the breathless 10 page article Vanity Fair wrote about them three years back and had joined forces with Juicy Jenn, the programmer for the the Lanes, a bowling alley-cum-rockabilly joint in Asbury Park. Jenn, who was premiering the film the night before our screening, agreed to pay their airfare if we would handle ground transportation and board the boys in Metuchen for the weekend. Shop friend Grace Shackney offered up her beautiful Victorian, which stands adjacent to the former home of the late John Ciardi(an illustrious poet whose fame can be best described by the fact that he appeared twice on Johnny Carson). Grace is the administrative director of Princeton's esteemed McCarter Theater and the boys stayed in the same 2nd story suite (two adjoining bedrooms with a shared bathroom) where Athol Fugard, acclaimed South African playwright/former overnight guest, had slept.

It was my first time at the Lanes, though Raconteur house band The Roadside Graves play there frequently and have always spoken highly of it (and indeed friend Dan, a.k.a. Carrot-Top, is the "chef" at their burger counter).

The retro pine-paneled lounge at the Lanes.

It's unquestionably a cool venue, but, while we filled The Refectory, our 165 seat theater, they struggled to find an audience for the film. Mosh pits and burlesque shows are more their style and I fear the typical Raiders fan may have been intimidated by the Lane's notoriety as a venue full of face ink and nipple barbells. Conversely, The Raconteur battles not its own reputation, but rather the square pedantic standing of bookshops in general. While we've certainly had our share of academic evenings (the poet Rachel Hadas, Al Gore's global-warming road show, theatrical readings from Umberto Eco novels, etc.), we've also hosted hardcore nights, sword swallowers, graffiti exhibitions, and are presently organizing an event that will feature Ian Mckaye, former front man for Fugazi and the seminal punk band Minor Threat. Even still, I have a feeling we'll forever be thought of as a bit button-down by all you kids with bull rings and ten gauge lobes. Oh well. Chris Strompolos and I in the feverish throes of a T.O.D. buzz.

THE SUMMER OF '81

Raiders of the Ark was the first movie I can remember seeing more than once. I was eleven and lived on a horse ranch in southeastern Alabama. The Peachtree movie theater was almost an hour away in Columbus, Georgia. To see a movie multiple times meant multiple two hour round-trips across the state border. Not an easy thing to accomplish when you're in seventh grade. Fortunately, my family loved the film as much as I did, all of us watching wide-eyed and thunderstruck as the Ark heaved its sinister contents into the furious Cairo sky, again and again. After our fifth and final viewing, Mom bought the soundtrack so we could listen to our favorite scenes at home. My brother and I developed a rather complicated relationship to that tape. We loved listening to the scraps of dialog that littered the album, but, cranking the stereo dial to ten, our mother frequently used the now famous John Williams score to wake us up on Saturday mornings.

For my tenth birthday, my grandfather, an amateur filmmaker (he shot his vacations and screened silent reels of black and white Disney cartoons at family functions), bought me a super 8 camera. That summer, me and my best friend Aaron made several shorts which essentially consisted of animating action figures with a tedious technique called stop motion. We had modified the figures by detaching various plastic attributes from one figure (a shiny robot arm, a scaly dinosaur tail), then softening the edge or tip with a lighter and melting it to another figure. 1981, the year Raiders was released, we grew up. We quit animating our muscled toys and went live action, making movies we thought were wholly original, but which were, of course, Raider ripoffs. The films were shot in the legitimately snake-infested swamps (yellow-bellied moccasins and Eastern Diamondback rattlers) behind my house. Several trees had been upended by a recent tornado (a common occurrence in Alabama), and they precariously bridged a storm swollen brook, each trunk ending in a massive bomb crater of dirt and a jungle of splayed roots on the other side. Kudzu, an invasive, fast-climbing weed, covered an abandoned Dodge Dakota and scrambled over a tin roofed trapper's shack. Vines, as thick as garden hoses, lolled from branches. Spanish Moss made everything weep.

At eleven, I somehow considered myself a suitable candidate for the film's flinty, world weary lead. I was a newly minted JV wrestler and, accordingly, fairly fit for a tween, but I obviously imagined myself much burlier than my 98 pounds. Instead of Indy's leather bomber, I wore my stepfather's khaki field vest. It had a ruffled sash along the waist with a series of loops meant for shotgun shells, and this capacity to carry ammunition made it a rugged and reckless garment. I wore no hat. My stepfather had an expensive felt fedora called a Bogart that he kept in a round cardboard box filled with tissue paper. But borrowing his prize hat was risky, it could not end well, and we decided against it. My brother's barrel chested friend Scott, whose father owned one of the two gas stations in town, was our stock heavy. Scott was a varsity nose tackle several years older who got up at 5 AM to hunt deer in the woods outside of town before school. For reasons unclear to us, he agreed to participate in several of our shoots. One time we even got him to clench, between his teeth, the clay cherry of a smoke bomb, so that his character (inexplicably) belched billows of green smoke.

Aaron, at nine, was the cinematographer. When not hand held, the camera was atop a spindly tripod, the legs of which invariably sank to different heights in the boggy ground, canting shots and inadvertently introducing us to the somewhat noirish concept of the Dutch Angle. Firecrackers, which are legal down South, were wedged into crevices and poked into root tangles (a string of detonated Silver Salutes or Wolf Pack Crackers looks remarkably like exploding gunshots). Instead of a bullwhip, I carried an array of dressage and longe whips (used by my stepfather to train new colts), and occasionally a hunting crop. My weapon of choice, however, was a handful of throwing stars we'd bought at a martial arts expo held in a helicopter hangar at Fort Benning. The year before, my mother had taken my brother and I to Mexico, and the ceramic trinkets we'd bought at the Benito Juarez airport served us well, standing in for precious artifacts and archaeological macguffins, pressed into the soft mud of the swamp.

My brother, himself fired by the summer blockbuster, later majored in archeology at Auburn University and moved to South America (where the film's opening takes place). He once explained that Peru is to diggers what Hollywood is to filmmakers. I made a couple of films in my late twenties (most notably BARMAN, a feature inspired by my half decade as the weekend bartender for a central Jersey gutbucket called The Plum Street Pub), but nothing matched the exuberance of those early shoots. Aaron has since gone digital, upgrading to a silver JVC with an LCD monitor. Once a year he heads to New Orleans to shoot randy home videos of chesty college girls giddy with Bourbon Street exhibitionism, their necks thickly draped with Mardi Gras beads. And finally, Scott, perhaps predisposed by his recurring role as a gangster burping rags of green smoke, maintained a pack a day habit throughout his adolescence and ended up, I'm pretty sure, in jail.

The SH*T IN OUR SHOP

This is the first of several short and sweet posts concerning the eclectic items that decorate our shop. This framed daguerreotype is something I bought ten years ago at a Chelsea flea market. It's about three feet tall and the olive frame is made from plaster. I frequently tell people it's my grandfather, which, of course, it is not. My grandfather, whose parents were from Prussia, sort of looked like this guy, but his bristling mustache was more tube brush than crow wing. He wore a fur hat in the winter, though never, to my knowledge, a fur coat. His hat was an "ushanka" which literally translates to "ear flaps hat," but the hat in the picture appears to be flapless. He was an amateur filmmaker, a biker, and a carpenter for Dupont. I used to carry a tiny laminated photo of him on his Excelsior, a four cylinder motorcycle popular in the twenties. In the picture he wore massive boots that looked like they were made from truck tires and a flat top cap with a leather bill like the one Brando wore in The Wild One. He used to stamp all his tools with his initials, PK, and I have a silver swiss style hammerhead of his that I keep on a bookshelf at home. I miss him.

RAC FEST RECAP

Deep-throated Bindlestiff, Keith Nelson, wolfs down a yard of neon.

The Raconteur Festival began with a bang, or rather with a piercing, pulsating screech: the sound of the church's fire alarms going off as smoke poured out of drummer Elf's over-sized floor tom during the crashing opening number of The Dan Whitley Band (front man Dan is the younger brother of the late blues legend Chris Whitley). It concluded with the alt country combo, The Roadside Graves, playing fiddles in the aisles as fans stomped their feet.

In between Keith Nelson of the Bindlestiff Family Cirkus swallowed a three foot illuminated neon tube and rammed a screwdriver up his nose. Seville folk singer, Sandra Rubio, sang in English, Portuguese, and Spanish. Critical darling Charles Bock gave away rock posters inspired by his hit book Beautiful Children to audience members who correctly responded to a series of literary questions (I don't remember the questions but the answers were William Burroughs, Cold Mountain, and Flea). Then he threw guitar picks imprinted with the novel's logo out into the audience.

Samantha Hunt read from her acclaimed novel about Tesla, The Invention of Everything Else.Then, realizing she was mere miles from the home/lab of bitter Tesla rival Thomas Edison -- making the surrounding area a "Tesla blackout zone" -- proceeded to explain exactly who he was (he invented the AC motor, wireless communication, etc.). The Idiom, a local literary fanzine, provided strolling buskers and a 4' Science Fair volcano that hiccuped rags of smoke. Prodigiously talented singer/songwriter Jeremy Benson tried to mack Rac volunteer Marcy while Chaos Kitchen, a local punk rock cooking show, served World Fantasy Award Winner/Yale prof John Crowley some sort of meat.

Crowley eyes a paper plate of punk rock pork.

Participants were all given newly minted Raconteur book totes (Rac Sacks) with copies of The Raconteur Reader (the inaugural volume of our budding publishing house) tucked inside. Limited edition Motorcycle Club T-shirts (that's right, motorcycle club, click here for relevant post) were given to shop friend/frequent guest Paul Watkins, a two time Booker Prize finalist who apparently traded his previous Club tee to a keg-chested Viking biker he met on a recent trip to Norway, and Keith Nelson, whose wife Stephanie regularly rides a motorcycle on a tightrope. Charles Bock, who vowed to join our upcoming ride to the Robert Louis Stevenson cottage in Lake Saranac NY, was also given a shirt, which he put on immediately and wore throughout the day.

Lit bad boy Bock becomes honorary RMC member.

After the festival, which ran six hours, participants and staff mingled down at the shop, drinking Islay Malts and occasionally breaking things (ex: a framed and autographed Harvey Pekar comic cover). I spoke at length to team Bindlestiff about their now defunct traveling sideshow/bookstore, The Autonomadic Bookmobile.

The Edison U-Haul on Route 1 has revamped their fleet with brand new cargo vans and are, accordingly, selling off their old moving trucks. And while we've taken no pragmatic steps, I must say, the idea of a rolling Raconteur, a Rac rig, is very appealing.

John Crowley, who once wrote an entire novel from Lord Byron's perspective and was recently compared to Thomas Mann by The San Francisco Chronicle, met his intellectual match in the shop's resident braniac Larry Mintz, a painter and former academic who is, quite simply, the smartest person I know. Holed up in a balefully lit corner, they twittered about renaissance philosophers while The Roadside Graves hunkered around an oak table and compared arm ink while sucking down Sierra Nevadas. Store overheads are turned out for parties/events and the shop was moodily lit by red and blue clamp spots, a string of Christmas lights made from shot gun shells, and a handful of lamps (including a gold Orient Express repro and a little tassled number that once sat on a highboy in a 1940s brothel).

Crowley poses for pic in blood red light while Graves caper behind in frosty glow.

Crowley, who hails from Northampton, Mass, spent the night in Metuchen. Shop friends Beth and Will have a looming Victorian on Rector and frequently offer B&B services to our esteemed out-of-town guests. In the past, they'd hosted overseas author Jeremy Mercer, who wrote a heralded account of living and working in the famed Parisian bookstore Shakespeare and Co., and former Sudanese lost boy Abraham Awolich, who made the shop a stop on his national tour earlier this year. Mr. Crowley (who, I'm told, has no association with the Ozzy Osbourne song of the same name) was leaving early the next morning, and because breakfast with our overnight guests, especially ones as charming as Crowley, is a treat Kristy and I look forward too, we were up at 6 AM the next day for scrambled eggs. Over piping hot cups of Café Bom Dia, we talked about Crowley's Aegypt quartet and Rosamond Purcell (whose picture of decaying books was on the cover of the recently published final installment). Purcell has made a career photographing putrefying artifacts at a shuttered antique warehouse called the Owl's Nest, and Crowley described her photograph of moldering dice so vividly that I immediately searched for it online later that morning.

Purcell's decomposing dice commissioned by sleight-of-hand performer/Mamet regular Ricky Jay.

We talked about our mutual friend Nebula award winner Kelly Link (Magic for Beginners), her publishing house, Small Beer Press, which released Crowley's last book, and Northampton, where they both live. "It would," Crowley suggested, "make an excellent destination for The Raconteur Motorcycle Club." Beth and Will, who are happy to board Raconteur guests provided we never saddle them with "twits or assholes," were enchanted by Crowley's company, as were we, and the meal was a delight.

So now the festival is over. But as agreeable replies dribble in from authors we'd contacted but who, for one reason or another, had originally failed to respond, like Gary Shteyngart (Absurdistan) and Jennifer Egan (The Keep); as effusive e-mails from impressed festival goers flood my inbox and post-show pics of sword swallowers pop up in local papers, festival co-coordinator Dan and I scheme and plan. "The next one," Dan says, fluttering his templed hands, "will be even better." And, indeed, it may well be.

I'M FAMOUS...BUY ME A DRINK

One thing I recently realized is that acclaim has nothing to do with wealth, or even stability. While we cease to simply be a village shop, drawing newfound clientele from as far away as Manhattan and Phillie, let alone New Brunswick and Princeton. While we continue to garner attention from internationally circulated periodicals (The Guardian, The New York Times), and host lauded guests such as punk diarist Jim Carroll (The Basketball Diaries) and 2008 Oscar winning documentarian Alex Gibney (Taxi to the Dark Side), we can’t always well, just a small thing really, heh, heh, um…pay ourselves. Perhaps this dichotomy between fame and funds shouldn’t come as a surprise. Celebrated Welsh poet Dylan Thomas was often broke. Pubs frequently stood him drinks and at the height of his popularity he asked for a small loan from actor Richard Burton. Landmarks like The Lion’s Head are forced to close despite the vigilant campaigns of noted patrons (in this case, Norman Mailer and playwright Lanford Wilson). George Whitman’s famous Parisian bookstore, Shakespeare and Co., listed dangerously at the beginning of the decade (Whitman, frugal to the point of eccentricity, lived in the shop and used leftover pancake batter to paste down curling carpets), before righting itself (just barely) two years back. McSweeney’s, an ostensibly successful publishing house founded by superstar author Dave Eggers and known for printing work by contemporary lit’s brightest bulbs (Michael Chabon, Jim Shepard, Kelly Link), recently auctioned off original comic strip panels by Maakies creator Tony Millionaire to stave off bankruptcy. Don’t misunderstand, The Raconteur is successful compared to other used bookstores. Indeed, many such as we give up the ghost every year. Charing Cross, once known for antiquarian tomes, suffered the shuttering of four shops last year, and is now recognized for its excellent curry (it has six Indian restaurants). But compare our business to a shop selling, say, Moto cell phones and we’re the penniless poet bumming whiskey shooters. So…what to do?