Excusing myself, I said, “You know, the man to pay you for this work is my landlord. If the wiring was faulty between the walls, obviously I have nothing to do with it. I’ll call him up. You can talk with him.”
My landlord must have been surprised at my cheery voice. “I have an interesting gentleman here who wants to talk with you,” I said. “He is a genius. The work he did for you in the installation of BX wires between the walls is something to be seen to be appreciated. You’ll marvel at its beauty. Here he is.”
I handed over the receiver. The storm of words coming from the other end nearly blew the young man off his feet. I couldn’t contain my laughter. I lurched over to a wall, holding my guts and laughing till I cried. It was marvelous. Wonderful. I had reversed the tables at last.
Naturally, I paid the bill. My landlord had new electrical outlets, but our relations were different. He continued to take advantage of me, but not any longer under the guise of wishing me “good luck” or a “great success.”
My landlord helped me. He taught me to be on guard. He taught me that it is, in fact, cold outside. He put me on trial—rather like K in Kafka’s The Trial. I could not just go running for help when trouble came. I could no longer retreat into the fantasy of pretending that running a bookstore was not a business. He taught me that the world requires people to take abuse, lying, cheating, duplicity—and outlast them.
Now when my landlord came to visit me, it was on an entirely new emotional basis. Nothing was different in appearance, yet in feeling everything was changed because I was no longer afraid. When he cheated me now, it was only a cheap triumph for him. I was free because I had become inwardly secure. I did not beat the Devil, but I knew positively that the Devil exists, that evil is real. Let him do his worst—his absolute worst—so long as you can handle yourself, he cannot ultimately triumph. Where K failed in The Trial was in his emotional inability to handle his threatened ego.
K’s trial is allegorical. So was my landlord. Only with the imagination can we see through into what is real. My landlord was one of the disguises of evil. I know now that had I let him throw me, I could never have withstood the trials of reality that were to come.
3
How to Get Started
in the Book Business
I had decided to become a bookseller because I loved good books. I assumed there must be many others who shared a love for reading and that I could minister to their needs. I thought of this as a calling. It never occurred to me to investigate bookselling as a business.
Had I done so, I should have learned that eighty percent of all the hardcover books purchased across the counter in America are sold by twenty booksellers. If I had been given the facts and sat down with pencil and paper, I could have discovered that to earn a living and continue to build the kind of inventory that would make it possible to go on selling, I would need to have an annual gross in the neighborhood of $100,000!