Tumbleweeds
Musings on visionaries
The distant thunder rumbles. I take shelter in Shakespeare Books as the rain begins to drop in fat splats on hot Parisian sidewalks. The clerks flick on a lamp as the room darkens. The rain is picking up an urgency that is frightening. The skies blacken and the rain now sweeps across the street in sheets. The thunder moves closer. A musty smell of old books blooms. Then as fast as it came, it’s over. Trees drip, the sky brightens. Voices of neighbors float in. A breeze blows cool. The pigeons gurgle.
No matter the throngs of tourists, I still love this bookstore on the venerable Left Bank. I imagine — romantically no doubt — the night when the first owner, Sylvia Beach, carted the entire contents of the bookstore to an attic so the Nazis could not confiscate her precious cargo. Punishment was imminent for not handing over the last copy of Finnegan’s Wake, one of those decadent books that the Nazi’s so feared.
A Nazi officer had stopped in demanding a copy of Joyce’s newly published book — a book Beach herself published when no one else would — and when she refused, the officer promised to return and close down the store. Instead, she emptied the place. They didn’t get the books, but they got her. She would spend time in an internment camp for the resistance. She never returned to the bookstore.
In Beach’s honor, a shop reopened in another location, the one I am standing in now. If I’d known in my twenties that there was a bookstore in Paris where aspiring writers — “tumbleweeds” as they were known — could stay in exchange for reading a book a day, helping at the shop, and adding to the collection of nomads’ autobiographies, I would have been on a plane. As it was, I was barely aware what Europe was. I didn’t have the privilege of a “summer abroad.” It just wasn’t on my family’s radar. I spent my summers babysitting and walking beans.
If I’d known in my twenties that there was a bookstore in Paris where aspiring writers — “tumbleweeds” as they were known — could stay in exchange for reading a book a day, helping at the shop, and adding to the collection of nomads’ autobiographies, I would have been on a plane.
My family wasn’t poor or shunted to the sidelines by social class. We were smack middle of the road. But we were not the kind of family that talked about intellectual ideas. We were not Nicole Kidman and her biochemist/psychologist/author father hashing out the day’s ideas on creativity at the dinner table. We were not the sort of people with fathers who became lawyers for the ACLU or mothers who became artists. I did not know where Barnard was much lest that if I wanted to be a writer I should go there. Nor did I have sense of entitlement that allows a young woman to never think twice about her talents or never ask permission to do something, such as become a pilot, photographer, and artist like Natica Waterbury, one of the tumbleweeds. Or like Craig Walzer and Oliver Wise, two almost-tumbleweeds, who opened Atlantis Books in Santorini without a lick of experience — or fear. Such was the transformative experience of a stint as a tumbleweed.
Chicago Tumbleweed
My own tumbleweed version was not so august: Aspidistra Used Books, a stuffed-to-the-gills, dilapidated store on Clark Street in Chicago. It was 1986, and I needed a job. I was twenty-five, the same age as Natica and Craig were when launching their dreams, and had recently moved to the city from Minneapolis. While Aspidistra lacked the same esteemed DNA of Shakespeare & Co., its historical dust compensated. It was run by two men, one who hired me and disappeared, and the other a shaggy hippie who owned one suitcoat — a brown corduroy number — which he wore every single day. It was rapidly acquiring the patina of the homeless. His stringy long, thin gray hair did him no favors. He appeared to wash it as often as his coat. His name was Darrell.
While Aspidistra lacked the same esteemed DNA of Shakespeare & Co., its historical dust compensated.
The store was floor-to-ceiling bookshelves that sagged and tilted ever-so precariously. Underfoot was a once blue-green carpet, now riffled and puckered, that like a four-color magazine spread left in the back seat of a car too long, had faded to its opposite on the color wheel, a dirty pink.. A chest-high desk — better to intimidate the customers — was where my coworker and I perched, Bartleby like, I with my Iowa optimism and grumpy Gerald with the eyesight of a mole. Gerald was in charge of pricing the books people brought in to sell, and as such, he spent his days hidden behind a towering stack of yellowing books, perusing each mere inches from his face in order to make out the copyright and other necessary details in his arcane pricing system. Like unread issues of the New Yorker, he was so far behind the task was Sisyphean.
Almost daily, a quivering mouse of a shopper would approach the towering desk, seeking validation for her fine taste in literature while also making this month’s rent. Darryl was the arbiter of her taste. He would flip through her box, which still often had a whiff of cat litter, grading her intellectual worth with a flick of his wrist. Yes, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. By the time he was done, he’d have a stack of a dozen keepers and three times as many nopes. The young girl would humbly acquiesce and take $15 for the lot. Every once in a while, an MBA grad would arrive. Daryl’s mouth would twitch in anticipation. He’d paw through the box and shove it back, the counter empty. “No thanks.” Nothing more. The bro would be incensed that his complete series of Tom Clancy books were worth nothing. “I can toss them in the dumpster where they belong,” Daryl would add, with a smirk, “or you can take them home with you. Your call.” The Booth School grad would stomp off with a huff and his box of books tucked on his hip like a small child.
Just take the money,” Darryl informed me. “Don’t redecorate.”
I was not allowed to organize or alphabetize the shelved books at all. My attempt to do so once was met with bafflement. “Just take the money,” Darryl informed me. “Don’t redecorate.” Instead I spent my days reading — lots of existentialism with dense tangles of ideas like “the nature of consciousness simultaneously is to be what it is not and not to be what it is.”
It’s a funny thing, looking back on jobs in your twenties. You think you were there forever, and it turns out to be six months, tops. I finally quit the day after Darrell brought in a bag of dried apricots and generously shared them with us all. I’d just come back from stomping down the trash in the dumpster in the alley. Darryl hated paying for “unnecessary” visits by the garbage men, so I was to trample down the accumulating boxes and other garbage to avoid weekly pickups. It occurred to me as I munched on the dried apricot that this wasn’t normal.
Two hours later, suddenly not feeling well, I excused myself and hopped on the Number 22 Clark Street bus toward home. Two blocks later I tugged on the bell-string and scurried off, frantically looking for privacy. I puked up chunky orange apricots in a bush in a courtyard apartment. Just because they are dried, Darrell, does not mean they keep forever. So ended my own tumbleweed career.
Back in Paris, I assemble my new books on the table over coffees — for readers, a similar thrill to Christmas as a kid. I bought three Patricia Highsmith’s. This is what Paris does to me. I go highbrow genre. Plus, Highsmith has a way of making you root for a psycho. I like that about her. That and her tortured, brilliant mind and her stubborn refusal to conform, or even be nice. Especially that.
My husband, Rex, joins me, after my coffee. We’d arrived in Paris in mid-August, seven months into our year-long escape from America and our middle-aged Wheel of Fortune routine that threated to submerge us. We walk the puddled back streets behind the Sorbonne toward “home,” an Airbnb on the Left Bank across the street from the Jardin de Plants, a garden with many, many rules for viewing flowers, I would later discover. This is not the place to stop and smell the roses. Doing so beckons a shrill whistle from a portly matron, legs spread in a defiant stance, colonial pith helmet atop her head, finger wagging as I step onto the border grass to sniff a flower.
Back then, we arrived in Paris in a jet-lagged haze with a duffle bag that could have easily fit a set of golf clubs and a pup tent.
We walk past the Hotel Claude Bernard where it all started — our first trip to Paris, to Europe (!), as a couple, nearly thirty years ago. All the existentialist reading I’d done instead of rearranging books on shelves at Aspidistra had made me want to go to Paris and sit in the Dôme or Deux Magots and soak up that world. Rex and I had scrimped up some savings and sprung for two ridiculously cheap tickets from a bucket shop ad in the New York Times. Our backup plan was to act as a document courier and fly for free. But even for gullible me, that sounded a bit suspect.
We’d read about this little hotel in a guidebook and set our sights on it from the airport. Call ahead, pshaw. We arrived in Paris in a jet-lagged haze with a duffle bag that could have easily fit a set of golf clubs and a pup tent. The first words spoken to us in French as we clamored up the metro steps and stood stupidly on the sidewalk with said duffle bag was, “fait attention!” Welcome to Paris.
Undeterred, we followed our paper map to Rue des Ecole and the Claude Bernard. CB is one of those quaint hotels with 25 rooms and an elevator the size of a phone booth, where you are required to hand in your heavy brass key every time you leave. We had no key yet, and instead we had a clucking, tsking French matron at the front desk who was none too pleased with our planning skills. Finally, after several more minutes of muttering and sighing, pretending to consult the register, she took a key from the board and showed us to a room with two single beds. We paused.
“Uh, do you have a double?” I stammered, in fractured French.
“Ah oui,” she said. And pushed the two beds together. A housekeeper was summoned to make up the bed with a queen sheet spread across the two beds. Voila. No matter, we were smitten. And young. It would do. We spent that week exploring the city, knocking off four flats of eggs from a towering pile in a cheese shop, ordering half-carafes of wine instead of full bottles to the consternation and more tsking of the waiter, seeing the Louvre, and on a whim, watching a Cary Grant movie at a one-screen movie theater. We did everything wrong, could not speak a lick of French, but loved every minute.
And here we were now, a few blocks from Claude Bernard, standing in front of the same movie theater, The Desperado, now showing a “Night of the Living Dead” retrospective. My 26-year-old self flashed before my eyes, and I remembered the scene as if it were yesterday and I was buying the tickets and taking the stairs down to the tiny theater for “Bringing Up Baby,” where we laughed before everyone else, who were reading the subtitles. I thought I was so cool back then. I smoked clove cigarettes and dressed like a bohemian. I never, ever set foot in a dance club favoring instead dark dive bars with pool tables and Dave Brubeck on the jukebox, I drank English ales in a pint glass, watched Wim Wenders movies and Bergman retrospectives, and never, ever thought of living in the suburbs. Those were the rules of my sect, the anti-Preppies, the anti-Yuppies, and I lived and breathed them. A young man in a beard and his waif girlfriend buy two tickets to this arthouse retrospective. Some things never change.
I thought I was so cool back then. I smoked clove cigarettes and dressed like a bohemian. I never, ever set foot in a dance club.Those were the rules of my sect, the anti-Preppies, the anti-Yuppies, and I lived and breathed them.
We decided not to go in because sometimes you simply can’t go back again. So we walk on, past the humanities bookstore — only in Paris — and past the August-closed hardware/everything shop, a corner shop with a red striped awning and a window stuffed with the kinds of things that only grandmothers use today.
We’re seeing Paris in a different frame of mind these days. It is not a vacation mindset with sights set on seeing the Louvre or Notre Dame. Instead, we are choosing the tiny shops for practical things. We take a side street instead of a famous main one. We stop in the grocery store instead of a bistro. We get off the Metro at a neighborhood stop, not a museum stop. We have breakfast in our apartment. We buy croissants on a Sunday morning with everyone else. We struggle in French for practical things, like toothpaste and hope we don’t end up with denture crème, or asking if I can return the clothes I just bought in a momentary delusion that I was young and thin.
Curiosities and Passion
We stop at a shop on a side street that catches my eye, Librairie Galerie Louis Rozen. I love proprietors who have a passion and a quirky vision that makes you wonder how on earth does they make a living. Louis Rozen’s vision for his shop, he told us, is that of a curio cabinet of memories that spark each of the senses. Vintage posters on walls, art books, curios in boxes, Willy Ronin black and white photos, a Life Magazinecover shot from January 1959 of a Roman woman laughing full-on. Music on vinyl for the ears, the smell of old paper and faded ink.
August in Paris, meet hot flash.
I could have spent hours poking through the bins of photos and posters or flipping pages in art books, but my t-shirt was blooming from a sudden onslaught of sweat. August in Paris, meet hot flash. “You must cool down,” my internal thermometer yells. “Launch the sprinklers.” I tried to listen to his engaging stories, but I was so self-conscious of my blooming t-shirt and sweat-pooling forehead that I couldn’t. He says, “un moment,” and disappears behind a curtain to a back room. He returns with a cold glass of water — “for the fifth sense, touch,” he says. I put the cool glass to my cheek before slaking my thirst and hoping it will notch down my overheated thermostat. What a quiet passion he has for this shop, something I cannot fathom, this a deep-dive obsessional commitment to it, enough belief to sink some money into it and open a shop, and then tend to the shop with loving care. Whole hearted. Full stop. I met another such proprietor, in Berlin. He refurbished vintage eyeglasses — cat eyes and Lyndon Johnson style frames, Dior from the 1980s — all carefully displayed under glass. On the walls, his wife’s creepy surrealist collage art.
Or Jacqueline, a Parisian pharmacist who decided to chuck it all and buy Domaine de Saint Ser, a vineyard in Provence. The hitch. She was a single woman, and in her mid-fifties. The townspeople were all a-twitter, she tells us, convinced (hoping) that she’d fail. Windy, rocky, at the foot of the mountain, the vineyard was a tough row to hoe. Alone. But she didn’t fail. Instead, she doubled down on her outlier status and introduced new biodynamic techniques. “It’s not the way things are done,” she was told. But she persevered. She’s now in her late sixties, sun-wrinkled, blue eyes and a wry smile. “I was crazy,” she says of her move from Paris. Crazy but right.
Colette, too. The shop, not the author. Here a mother and daughter in 1997 had a vision for a new kind of shop.The idea then: “a proposal of what we think is most exciting at the moment,” Colette’s daughter and co-owner told Vogue. It was a shop that reflected an aesthetic lifestyle, and now an altar of the fashion cognoscenti.(And soon to close as Colette wanted to retire.) The two sought out creative people and brought their work into the store, because they wanted to be surrounded by creativity. Simple as that. This, at a time when Gap commercials were all the rage. Yes commerce dressed up as art is now ubiquitous and the word “curated” is far, far overused. But I’m here for the visionary.
Colette’s store window is a riot of t-shirts displayed like a romper room color wheel. Inside hordes with carefully chosen outfits mill around tables laid out with pop culture artefacts. A rack of exactly five t-shirts stands nearby. A fussy man keeps rushing over and re-spacing them just so. There’s an outsized number of Japanese toys along with overpriced tech gear, reverentially placed behind glass cases like diamonds. Vinyl albums of cutting edge music. A set of beach chairs. Racks of street wear. I buy a $15 eraser so I can get a shopping bag. There are no plans to expand with multiple locations, no marketing plans, and no plans to sell. When they’re done, they’ll close and figure out what’s next.
Fashion saturated, we stop for a glass of roséin a small café ($3 each, god bless ‘em), where we pull up a chair at the outside corner and watch the chic world pass. Fashion update from ground zero: French women cut off their jeans to make 7/8 pants with frayed hems. They button up their blouses to the top, neat and prim. They tuck.
The passion of these shop owners — from Louis Rozen to Colette — thrill me. They have taken an enormous risk — renting a shop, buying the stock, putting aside “the climb” to middle-class security in favor of a passion — and it has paid off. It has paid off because they have put aside middle-class security in favor of passion. Their confidence in their own vision shines through. It is that dedicated clarity in what they like that puts most of us to shame. Maybe it’s something you learn, but I suspect it’s something you’re born with, this self-confidence, this positive form of entitlement. Why not me, they ask without pause, as the rest of us ask, what makes me think I can do that? Some people have an uncanny sense of self that tells them, you like this, others will too. My high school boyfriend got a perm in 1979 and declared it cool. It looked utterly ridiculous on him, like Shirley Temple in drag. He had no business declaring himself cool. But he had the confidence to pull it off, and people followed.
It is the same confidence that propels tumbleweeds to Shakespeare & Co. From all around the globe, they gravitate to this dingy, decrepit pile of books to find mirrors of themselves — the brave ones, the fearless ones, ones seeking something different even without knowing the ultimate end. Scruffy, gruff George Whitman, the owner, testing their bougie leanings. He once offered Maria Callaswine in a used tuna can. She was repulsed — “fatally bourgeoisie,” George called her.
Yes, we love to follow these inspiring people, the ones who remain ungroomed by society’s rigor and expectations. No Rhodes Scholars here. No Harvard aces. No perfect students majoring in high-earning professions. Those are a dime a dozen in our hyper-credentialed world. But not these visionaries. They see things differently from you and me. And thank god they do, these tumbleweeds.
