Bookstore blues

Henry, he walked all jazzy like he was ceiling tall. But he was only French and overqualified to sell books at the bookstore for minimum wage, as he liked to remind us regularly in his French accent. ONree, he would correct anyone looking at his name badge. Why can’t you American’s get it right?

But maybe it was just some of us. Not all Americans. I couldn’t say. Besides, for all of his self-imagined height, he was five-foot-nine. Just like me. I suppose he would have said it was 175 centimeters, which is not wrong. Just very Henry.

And while his primary goal while working was to avoid working, he did like his jazz and got mortally offended when you told him, okay, it is Saturday evening and it is time to play something other than jazz because, well playing jazz doesn’t sell Top-40 CDs, playing Top-40 CDs gets people to buy Top-40 CDs.

He made a face like someone biting into an almond gone bad. Ugh! he would say and they would put him someplace where he could go back to the business of doing his best to not work while at work, in a corner of the store well away from the Top-40 music and any temptation to change the CD player over to something more in line with his tastes.

Much to the chagrin of all the American boys without outrageous French accents, boys with Useful Degrees like history or English Literature and woefully underpaid for their college degrees — ONree was like Spanish Fly to all of the woefully underpaid girls with Useful Degrees like Philosophy or Poli-Sci — and they would gush every time he passed by, although everyone seemed to agree that he was not the most handsome man working at the bookstore. Just the only one with an endearing French accent.

While the lads would stubbornly call him “HENry”, the gals would add inflection and accent to try their best to mimic how he said his name whenever the opportunity presented itself.

I asked Ali what his appeal might be. Duh, she said. Have you heard him speak?

She was either the right person or the wrong person to ask. She was only barely in the closet when it came to being gay. It was one of the bookstore’s worst kept secrets. And still she gushed after him until that night they worked the cafe together and he avoided working, talking to the customers in his stupid French accent while she slung sandwiches on the panini grill. It really got her steamed and suddenly ON-ree became dumbass and lazybones or something very close that was sometimes prefaced with a muttered “f-” word of one type or another.

Not a fan, as they like to say. And no, “Fan” was not the word she muttered.

The managers finally figured out how to make Henry work. He was assigned to register duty.

For a whole weekend.

And still Henry preferred to not work. So he never showed up on his scheduled Wednesday. Or scheduled Friday. Or any of the following scheduled weekend.

He really preferred to be Not-Working-ONree. And that’s the way it stayed. At least at that big-box book and music store. Maybe he not-worked elsewhere.

I didn’t spend much time finding out.