Goodbye, Dutton's!

When I think of the many readings I’ve attended and given at Dutton’s, one always stands out: a Sunday afternoon, many years ago, a program of readings by homeless writers, with a smattering of L.A. literary celebs. We were each to read for 10 minutes, no more (in their dreams). One literary celeb, who will remain unnamed, ignored the time limit, seduced by her own voice, her brilliance, and droned on for a good half-hour with no indication she intended to quit her perch. Her story, I remember, involved a kind of quasi-incest scene between a college-age girl and her rich father, some fondling and flirting, all breathlessly intoned, meant to be shocking, perhaps, but instead banal. I stood next to one of the homeless, a black man patiently awaiting his turn but nonetheless listening carefully to her story. When madam finally quit the mike, he turned and looked at me, smiled and said, rather wickedly, “Sounds like she kinda liked it, doncha think?” I find that I can never think of the woman who read that day without those delicious words passing through my head.

Goodbye, Dutton’s! Thank you, Doug, and everyone else who over the years helped to make that place so brilliant; the intellectual dispensary of the Westside.

As host of a zillion author events at Dutton’s Books, I have a snoot full of anecdotes. Among them: Eduardo Galeano spinning magical tales on the spot; Mario Vargas Llosa being suave in three languages; Anne Rice in Goth; Allen Ginsberg drawing pictures of erect and dripping penises in the books of young men (and I got a Buddha!); T.C. Boyle always asparkle and Kate Braverman winningly sardonic. Jennifer Egan so gracious. Susanna Moore beguiling. Robert Hughes was drunk but nonetheless learned and articulate. Edna O’Brien was jet-lagged, medicated and in bad temper and yet flashed her love of Shakespeare and Yeats. Jonathan Franzen, not a literary bully, just bleary-eyed and anxious. Who will shepherd these authors now?

I began haunting Dutton’s in the early ’80s. At least once a week I’d come, as a pilgrim, to witness some luckier writer read from a published work. I wanted so badly to become a writer — and I needed to hone my envy and ambition by seeing famous people wallowing in the limelight. Far more satisfying than just desecrating their pictures in Poets and Writers. The pleasure of examining the new fiction on the front tables, the reassurance, sitting on the floor in the front room at Dutton’s, reading (at length) from works I could only aspire to one day write, knowing I, a reader, was in the only safe place I knew in Los Angeles: the Palace of Reading.

When someone kindly asked, “Are you finding everything you’re looking for?,” I looked up and there was this incredibly handsome silver-haired man with bright-blue eyes talking to me as if we were friends. Me, this rejected piece-of-shit writer whom he didn’t know from Adam. Who nobody knew from Adam, and if they did, they tried to forget it as quickly as possible. But not at Dutton’s. Doug Dutton made my nothing self feel like a valued friend. This was a place where readers mattered. And it’s a standard to which I’ve held every bookstore, and which few approach.

It wasn’t just Doug, it was everyone he hired. I’ve never seen a bookstore with such a knowledgeable staff. I remember going in once to find some book I’d read about. “It’s something about a girl who had something about her face … an accident or something?” And Kristen said, “Oh, you mean Autobiography of a Face . It’s in the north room. We should have two copies.” Ever after, when I go to a bookstore and ask for a book, and they don’t know whether they have it or not, have to look it up on the computer, I always think, “You’re not Dutton’s, are you?”

When I finally did have a book (a young-adult book nobody had ever heard of, then or since), I timidly called Lise Friedman, the event booker at Dutton’s. Heart in mouth, I asked for a reading. I was local, I promised that all my numerous relatives would come and each buy three copies of the book. And wonder of wonders, the day came when I stood in the courtyard of Dutton’s, where I had seen such jaw-droppingly important writers as Robert Stone and Joyce Carol Oates, reading my newly published novel to 30 of my closest relatives, plus the pantheon of struggling L.A. writers who had been in workshop with me at one time or another, who themselves eventually had their own readings there. When you read in that courtyard, you truly had arrived.