Selling My Books on the Streets of Brooklyn 4/16

"A winter's day in a deep and dark..." - no, not December, as Simon and Garfunkel sang in I Am a Rock, but mid April. Yuck! Another deluge is on the way, two inches of rain expected. The high winds have been here since morning.
Yesterday, young Marvin came gliding up to the floating bookshop on his skateboard and cried: "The Man in the Box, that was the ...." He described it in a glowing hip hop phrase I don't recall. He'd purchased A Hitch in Twilight a couple of weeks ago. Box is its lead story, inspired by Alice in Chains' awesome Man in the Box, featuring one of the all-time great rock vocals by the late Layne Staley. As so often occurs, as I was hanging out with my buddy Bags, as I usually do for an hour or so every Saturday, the song came up in his i-tunes rotation. It is an absolutely riveting track, not for the faint-hearted. As for Marvin, he has said he has lived a wayward life, despite his youth. I may have seen evidence of that. Someone dropped off a whole slew of electronica, among it two video games. I offered one to Marvin, which he accepted for his little brother and, when he thought I wasn't looking, he swiped the Tiger Woods game. I didn't say anything. After all, he bought one of my books. I just hope it wasn't a demonstration of a complete lack of self control that will keep him on a dark path. Good luck, son.
And, in keeping with the music theme, today was the last of my annual torture sessions with the dentist. As we were waiting for the new cap to set, he gave me a bit of background I hadn't already heard from him. In the '50's he was in a rock n roll band. Every Saturday night he used to go to the home of one of the DJs of the long defunct WWRL, where a host of them would gather to receive payments from managers seeking to have their group's records aired. This later became a scandal under the tag payola.  I'm kicking myself because I neglected to ask if any of the records had charted or if any are available to download. Dr. K's first wife was a tap dancer, whom he used to book into night clubs. In those days, dentistry was his side job. To show how far back he goes, office visits were a dollar when he first started as an Army dentist. The price of gold, of which most crowns were made then, was $35 an ounce. It is now in the neighborhood of $1500. His assistant, Anne, is his third, and will be, I believe, his last wife. I hope I remember to ask him about this next year - the music, that is.
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