My Contribution to the Genre of Addiction Literature

In the grand tradition of De Quincey's Confessions of an Opium-Eater

I started stockpiling books at age 20. I’d ravage through used bookstores, looking for cheap classics, like the slakeless Charlie Chaplin ravaging through an audition room.

I accumulated so many books, people eventually started giving old paperbacks to me like you might drop your half-eaten sandwich on the homeless guy outside the restaurant.

I’m guessing I have around 4,000 volumes. It’s beautiful . . . in appearance, mass, and effect . . . even when that Savonarolic scold I live with tells me I can’t store my books in the fridge. (They’re a fire hazard in the stove, so WTH, woman?)

The volumes range from those ratty paperback classics I bought for the price of a used flossing stick to beautiful volumes my dad got, and I inherited, with his Folio Society subscription, including Steven Runciman’s tryptych of the Crusades.

I’m going to add this biography of Runciman to my library. I hear it’s a wild read, plus I’ve determined that my library is, on a weighted average, light on biography, and I’ve come to conclude that few, if any genres, are as important as biography.

I say this as a former young man who read a lot of those books, gathered a lot of facts, and cobbled up grand ideas like Buffalo Bill stitching together that woman’s suit, while at the same time ignoring everyday social niceties that make a person pleasant to be around. I was, in other words, a first-rate prick.

Today, I no longer have those grand ideas and put little stock in those facts. I’m still socially clumsy, but I now stand before you as a mere second-rate prick.

That’s why I fell short of my goal of becoming the definitive scholar about Albert Jay Nock (well, that, and a tenacity that parallels a newborn’s grip). Nock strongly believed that biography was irrelevant. I’ve come to conclude nothing else is relevant. He strongly believed that the life of the mind is all that counts. I’ve concluded that a faculty liable to shift imperceptibly into erotic thoughts while saying the Rosary is about as trustworthy as a homeless guy with a bottomless bottle of Night Train.

But if I’m being honest, I don’t think I ever really thought I’d finish my Nock studies. It was probably just a foil for that semi-conscious intent that surges like a dammed river through a sluice: the acquisition of more books. I also used my grand Nock project to try to get past the (troglodytic) harridan defiantly guarding the fridge as more and more books arrived from the world’s largest drug dealer: Amazon.

The most bizarre thing about this addiction?

I don’t even read the books these days and don’t even plan to. I just like lookin’ at ‘em, like the man who’d been drunk for a week sat in Jay Gatsby’s library, hoping the books would magically sober him up.

I’m almost as pathetic as Hugh Hefner toward the end of his life who couldn’t even bed any of those babes he liked looking at. The big difference between old Hef and me is, I still get an erection when I look at my books.