The Nut Buzzer

by Al McKee

We were having some trouble hanging on to the expensive photography books, specifically the large-format nudes. At least once a month, sometimes twice, Ray would approach with a remnant of shredded shrink-wrap in his hands and the weight of the accumulating losses on his face. “Did anyone sell Helmut Newton?” he would ask, and a pall would settle on the front of the bookstore. Ray would then make a show of going through the sales lists in search of the title until everyone at the counter felt thoroughly ill at ease, at which point he would look up in a kind of perverse triumph and announce, “Not here! Stolen!” Then walk away.

It was almost always the same kind of book—upscale erotica packaged as art. “Coffee-table porn,” Patricia called it. Big, gorgeous spreads of fetish and infatuation: girls with their nipples so provoked they looked like doorbells; models with cigarettes in their teeth; high-fashion women stitched up in rubber or leather or lace or slicked with oil and lit from behind so their skins gave off a kind of planetary glow; documentary nudes showing bruises and bite-marks; or peepshow shots of Japanese girls stripped to their socks and hog-tied for the camera—all of it made respectable by presentation, by creamy paper and heavy binding, and the imprimatur of the publisher’s trademark stamped on the spine like a coat of arms: Phaidon Press, Taschen, Thames & Hudson, Assouline.

None of these books cost less than fifty bucks, and a few were a hundred or more, which meant whoever was stealing them was getting away with significant money. For a short time, Ray had the photography section moved to a shelf behind the counter, but there really wasn’t room for it there. And, of course, you were never going to sell erotica if people had to ask to see it. Ray knew such books were best displayed in a corner affording sufficient privacy for a man to examine a volume alone and work up the nerve to carry it to the register. Within a couple of days, he’d changed his mind and ordered the section returned to the sales floor

Those of us who worked at Rolling River Books debated endlessly who the culprit might be. Our location on Haight Street assured us a clientele of burned-out hippies, juiceheads, druggies, runaways, and recent parolees, but it was generally agreed that none of these people possessed the competence or the commitment to sustain a long campaign of petty theft.

Patricia suspected a masturbator too shy to purchase the stuff outright. Austin was skeptical: “If a guy is too timid to buy these books, he’s not going to have the balls to steal them. Besides, you can get all the hardcore you want for free on the Internet. Why risk humiliation?” Austin believed it was a professional—or a team of professionals—stealing the books for resale to other stores. Ray agreed, citing the high-end nature of the merchandise and the fact that the thief always snatched new releases. Rita, ever the staff contrarian, maintained her own suspicions: “I’ll bet it’s that priest who’s always in here.”

I had no theory. Before working at the bookstore, my sole experience of stealing was standing guard at Stop N Save at age 13, while my friend Arthur Hatcher filled his coat with Snacky Cakes. My job was to watch the cashier, a poor woman so encumbered with hearing aids, thick bifocals, and an orthodontic harness she could not have had an unobstructed view of her fingertips, much less of anything happening on a distant surveillance monitor. Still, my heart knocked hard in my chest as I watched her. Outside, I declined my share of the cakes, not from any excess of honesty, but because I was convinced that when I turned onto my street there would be a police car parked in front of my parents’ house.

Limited though my knowledge of criminal conduct was, one thing seemed obvious. The layout at Rolling River encouraged people to steal—the chaos of the place, the rambling rooms, blind corners, and book-jammed cul-de-sacs. Even before the erotica spree, we were constantly under siege. I enjoyed hearing Ray, a bookseller of 30 years, expound on the topic: how children stole The Tropic of Cancer and adults The Wizard of Oz; how Dostoevsky was more frequently stolen than Tolstoy, Faulkner more frequently than Hemingway, and the King James Bible more frequently than either; how some thefts were obviously economic, say, five copies of a bestseller swiped in one grab off a table display, while others suggested more personal motives, say, the disappearance of a book of haiku or a guide to sexually transmitted diseases; how people, when caught, often felt themselves justified by the high cost of books or by a notion that literature belonged to the world; and how you could never ever tell by appearance who might be hiding a book in his clothes.

“Watch the suits,” Ray cautioned, not that we got many suits on Haight Street....