Weirdly Affordable Brautigan

So I find myself in posession of a second copy of Richard Brautigan’s "Sombrero Fallout: A Japanese Novel" which I was very happy, I recall, to get ahold of the first time ’round. Now I feel weirdly queasy about my second copy, and I’m not sure why.
That’s not 100% true. I am sure why: I feel queasy because I spent exactly zero dollars and seventy-nine cents on it. The price marked on the cover, sitting there innocuously at Bookland, between a well-thumbed paperback "couples" book with smiling, tanned, well-steroided people on the cover, and perhaps a romance novel on the other side (or, certainly, the romance novel was two books to the right of it... I forget what was immediately to the right...) "$0.75." And the four extra cents appeared in tax when I got it up to the register. I paid with a dollar bill and got change back.
I wish I had checked the price of that "couples" book. I was too suprised, I think, to find Brautigan there at all, and doubly surprised at the price. I though it a misprint. I thought it a blemish of some sort on the pricetag. I wandered aimlessly through the store, looking at other random tabletops for other, similarly-priced items of similar worth, to no avail.
I’m sure it’s meaningless to you that I found Brautigan for this price. You don’t know Brautigan. You might not have paid seventy-nine cents for this book. Even if you did, you might not think it the best seventy-nine cents you ever spent.
But lately I’ve been hanging on about used book stores. And Brautigan has always been my go-to. Whenever there’s a pile of used books somewhere, I go to the "B’s" and see what’s there. Because he’s out of print, mostly. If you want to read him, you find him like this. And he’s worth finding. And he’s worth reading. There’s something impossible about him that you have to spend some time with, and you still won’t believe it, but you’ll smile a lot, and shake your head, and wish you had thought of it.
I read a little snipped by Robert Frost -- he was talking about style: "...style is the way the man takes himself, and to be at all charming or even bearable... if it is with outer seriousness, it must be with inner humor. If it is with outer humor, it must be with inner seriousness. Neither one alone without the other will do." Brautigan is neither and both of these. The humor and the seriousness are interwoven like colors on a tie-dye shirt -- neither is the foreground, neither the background. There’s a lot of charm to it. A lot of style.
I have a small (slightly larger, now) shelf, right next to me here, where I keep my Brautigan. I’ve had 4 or 5 copies of "Trout Fishing in America" -- I still have two copies of "In Watermelon Sugar" but I think I’ll pass one of them along to a friend who may need it. I’ve had a couple copies of "The Abortion" and there are four or five others, waiting for company there.
It effects me, somehow, that I picked up my latest extra copy, my latest somewhat-treasured addition to my collection, for seventy-nine cents.
I know singers who blush to find their own CDs in the "Used" section. I’ve blushed too. But I look at some of the other titles there. U2, for instance. Van Morrison. Good company to be in.
But there on that bargain table? Lost, out-of-category, and priced to give away? Priced, almost, to throw away. I also know a lot of music, I suppose, that sits on that table. Real quality stuff. Powerful and quirky and alive and crafted and real. Just like Brautigan. I think what aggravates me most is that, sitting there, someone who didn’t know better might come along and see it there, piled with more or less harmless crap, with a seventy-nine cent price tag and think that they know what that book is worth. I almost see Brautigan himself, knee crossed over knee and gripped between clasped hands, waiting. Embarassed. Looking in disbelief, side to side. Or maybe it’s resignation on his face. An understanding, hated but accepted, that this is the way things are.
Leaving the book store, the full moon squatted over the streetlights and fast-food neon signs like an altar to some tropical god of war and fertility. Huge and menacing, quiet and smug as a cat.