For six weeks, ever since anonymous, a boy I lived with far too briefly many many moons ago and have been trying to find ever since, or at least since there was a Switchboard, contacted me via this blog and then promptly disappeared on vacation to the only place on earth where presumably there is no Internet connection, I have been walking around in - how to say this -- does "a constant state of arousal" do it? Wandering around Walmart wondering what I went for and vaguely wishing I'd made a list, driving there or to the few other places here that make up my existence -- the landfill, Gospel Mission Thrift Shop, the tennis courts if I can find someone to play with me -- talking on the phone to whoever might be on the other end, digging up plants that aren't happy and moving them somewhere where they might be -- sex, sex and more sex is all that I've had on my mind, all of it, of course, with anonymous, someone I have not seen for forty-five years, and may well never see again.
That sums it up pretty neatly and avoids mentioning the detailed erotic fantasies that go along with thinking about sex during every waking moment, and of course some of the non-waking moments but we don't need to get into that here, and in the meantime life chugs along and off we go in our beloved 1992 Volvo for a long-planned trip to California to visit best friend in the world, detour to Las Vegas in the middle to win a free buffet for two, back to California and then after a week back to Silver, on back roads as much as possible with only an hour on the 10 between Phoenix and Quartzsite.
This is probably the tenth or so time I've made this trip, each time, back and forth, whizzing past what looks like an interesting bookstore right off the 10 at Quartzsite and never stopping, just as I whizz past Fresh Home-made Jerky in Parker. This time, on my way back to Silver, I was determined to stop at both places, but a gigantic truck between me and Fresh Jerky took paid to that stop and made me extra-determined to check out the bookstore.
No big trucks in Quartzsite, and I was able to pull into the Oasis (great name for a bookstore in the middle of the desert) parking lot with no problems, of course with my mind firmly fixed on one of the afore-mentioned erotic fantasies. The store -- a great big wooden shed half-open to the outside -- seemed to be empty, and I made straight for the Drama Section and started to poke around. It was a real bookstore, an Aladdin's Cave for someone like me, and I was rifling through books when I sensed someone behind me. I turned to see the scrawny naked back of what was obviously a man, even to someone who hadn't had sex for thirty years. He turned towards me, showing an equally naked front except he was wearing, if that's the word, a kind of enclosed hair scrunchie over what my sister would call his bits, and with a friendly smile said "Looking for anything in particular?"
"I wonder if you have a copy of Albee's Zoo Story," I say, Miss Unflappable International Playwright and New Yorker for forty years before I moved somewhere where you have to take your own trash to the dump. "Sure," he says, "I think I have at least one," and for the next ten minutes we discuss books, theater, the importance of hydration in the desert, the gem show and flea market that I learn are held in Quartzsite every January and February, how air-conditioning would cost him $500 a month so instead he offers all his customers free cold drinks -- many many interesting topics except why he's wearing a scrunchie over his bits and nothing else, and why after driving past his store twenty times over eight years I choose the one time I have nothing but sex on my brain to stop, although God knows I think the ten minutes I spent talking to him were probably the longest time I've gone WITHOUT thinking about sex since May 10, not that he wasn't perfectly charming and informative and knowledgeable and all.
I was back in the Volvo and halfway to Phoenix pondering the last paragraph before the obvious struck me -- duh, he's a nudist (!!!!!!!) -- and as soon I got home I googled Quartzsite Bookstores. Naturally (ha ha) everyone in the world except me is aware of him and his bookstore -- 22,600 results in 0.39 seconds -- but I'd still like to know what possessed me to stop there this past time and that time only. Boy, that universe...
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