Days after Nashville officials unanimously voted to reinstate Rep. Justin Jones, one of two Black Democrats expelled last week for participating in a gun control protest, the Shelby County Commission on Wednesday voted to reappoint Justin Pearson to Tennessee’s House of Representatives. 

HAPPENING NOW: @garrison_hayes is on the ground with some exclusive photos and video while we wait as the Shelby County Commission in Memphis votes to reinstate ousted Tennessee State Rep. Justin Pearson. Take a peek, and follow along pic.twitter.com/3cE5dUP75o

— Mother Jones (@MotherJones) April 12, 2023

Pearson, Jones, as well as Rep. Gloria Johnson, were thrust into the national spotlight last month after the three lawmakers, all Democrats, demonstrated in solidarity with Tennesseans demanding gun control after a mass shooting killed six people, including three nine-year-olds, at The Covenant School in Nashville. Johnson, a white woman, was subjected to a similar vote calling for her expulsion but was ultimately spared from removal. When asked why she survived the vote, Johnson suggested that her skin color had likely played a role.

“Is what’s happening outside these doors by Tennesseans who want to see change a ‘temper tantrum’?” Pearson said in a speech responding to Republican complaints that their protest was tantamount to a “temper tantrum.”

In nearly eight years of working at the Strand, I’ve become friends with many of the regulars who sell books to the store. Overseen by the Strand’s late owner, Fred Bass, until his death in 2018, our buying desk has always been known as a place to make a quick buck. For some, though, it has become a way to make a living.

Larry Campbell, now seventy-two, has been selling books to the Strand since the early nineties. He was once one of the few people we could count on seeing Monday through Saturday, sometimes multiple times a day. Over the past few years, Larry has come by less frequently, and with far fewer books, but he has always been a welcome character, soft-spoken and kind, at the fast-paced and sometimes tense atmosphere of the buying desk. Here, he discusses his life in New York, and how he got started selling books. This interview—part of an ongoing series of conversations with people who resell books in the city—was conducted across the street from Strand in September 2019.

—Troy Schipdam

Where I live is about twenty minutes from anywhere else in Los Angeles. What this actually means is that I live ten minutes from anything when there’s no traffic, and forty-five minutes when there is. In reality, there’s no given instance during the day when I actually live twenty minutes from any geographical point in LA, but it’s an easy way to say I live in the middle of town. The area lacks the socioeconomic and demographic cohesion common to most LA neighborhoods, so it’s not particularly cool or uncool, it’s just twenty minutes from places that are. It’s a neighborhood that’s special in the same way a local laundromat is special—you get people from all walks of life.

The building itself is a small, charming holdover from when old Hollywood was just called Hollywood. I park on the street, and I live in one of fourteen modest units, where I am very happy. I’ve lived in old buildings for most of my adult life, and it is my preference to do so. Of course, there are costs associated with living in an old building. You might have an occasional leak or wonky electrical wiring, but these are small problems that can be solved. As with any formative experience, part of the joy in fixing them is the skill gained, or the longevity of the solution. If you fix a leak and you did it right, it’ll take a second for the leak to come back. Once you’ve dealt with something once, it is not such a tragedy the next time. I think that’s what it is to get older: you get softer with age because you’ve experienced a lot of things once, and you’re equipped to do them again if you have to. Remember that first sip of alcohol, or the first cigarette? You turned your back on your innocence, but you didn’t die, so you did it again. However, when a task requires constant maintenance, there is no finish line, so there is no small victory. You never feel done, and it becomes the bane of your existence. The great scourge of my little life, twenty minutes from everywhere else in Los Angeles, is the dust.

LA is a dusty town, and in the century that my building has been around, it has only gathered more of it. The once airtight caulk around the windows has loosened its grip, and the drywall has eroded into Swiss cheese. It doesn’t help that I’m two blocks from an especially busy intersection, and it definitely doesn’t help that I have filled my home with secondhand objects that bring with them their own histories of dust. I clean constantly, with nightly touch-ups and a deep clean that eats up half of an honest weekend. I sweep, Swiffer (dry and wet), and vacuum, but really I am just displacing the dust. As I clean, I kick up more dust, and, betrayed by my own body, I make even more new dust by shedding dead skin cells throughout the process. There is no end in sight, because there is no end to the dust.

I encourage the dust even further by leaving my windows wide open during the day. This is an attempt to cycle out the stale air for fresh air, but who am I kidding? LA is famous for having some of the worst air in the world. But to me it smells good. It smells like everything it has ever touched. It smells like the elements and it smells like argan oil. Sometimes it smells like jasmine, sometimes like wildfires, and, if you try hard enough, it smells like nickels, and the dream of a sweaty handshake from some producer that made moving across the country all worth it, because that handshake is going to change your life. I have knowingly created ideal conditions in which dust thrives, but what’s the point of California if you’re not going to blur the line between indoor and out?

Still, in vain, I clean, because I’m supposed to. I clean because it makes me feel necessary in my own home, and because I come from a long line of people who clean. Even as I clean, on some level I accept defeat. I may be stupid, but I am not dumb. I know I cannot control the dust; it is bigger than me. It was here before me, and it will be here long after I am gone. I am but a guest in a world covered in dust. It’s everywhere—not just in my apartment or at that intersection, or in California but everywhere. Between all the space where there is oxygen, look a little harder—there’s dust. You can’t see it until you do, and what you call it might depend on how long your hair is: dead space, vibes, the ether. Between enemies, it might be called animus; between two lovers, it might be the Fourth of July. But it really isn’t any of that. That which separates your face from mine is just dust. In death, I will become dust, when in reticence I’ll accept that I can’t beat ‘em, so I join ‘em. You, me, and everyone else—we’re all dust that just hasn’t formed yet, but until I am dust, I will continue to move it from one place to the next.

Steak is like sex, is like art: bloody; gets you high; is disgusting if you think about it for too long. And blue steak, then, is like sex work: a carefully crafted artifice that allows for the presentation of something ostensibly raw to the consumer, without the risks of actual raw consumption. The person who orders blue steak feels it as real, and animal, though it is sanitized, and carefully so.

In SoHo, there is a boutique hotel whose rooms are blue. Blue carpet, blue ceiling, blue-patterned sheets. I met a client there several years ago, when I still had short bangs. I wore a vintage skirt-and-top set—black, with colorful flowers—and black lingerie from l’Agent, the now-defunct, less expensive little sister brand to Agent Provocateur. My client wanted our time together to feel like a movie. He didn’t say this, but his behavior made it clear. He booked me for only an hour but wanted an experiential arc: he sat me first in the small living room area of his suite, presenting liquor he had put on ice for me. Music played softly through the room’s sound system: “Nothing’s Gonna Hurt You Baby” by Cigarettes After Sex, a song that I’d only ever heard as the background of a bad television show. He moved me into the bedroom, bantering, as though he had to charm me. I have absolutely no recollection of what he looked like or what his name was. This isn’t because I was seeing so many clients I couldn’t keep track, but because it’s useless information to retain after the fact. I remember how he behaved—the only salient thing—which was annoying, and also standard, fine. I overstayed our appointment because the sex refused to end, as happens often with older men who want to paw at a young woman but don’t quite care whether or not they finish, and certainly not in the allotted time. “Nothing’s Gonna Hurt You Baby” returned to the playlist; it was looping, as was the experience.

I played the song for myself after, alone in my own room. A user called “i’m cyborg but that’s ok” had uploaded it to YouTube along with a compilation of scenes from Lost in Translation, a movie I’d never seen but that I knew was about a relationship between a washed-up older man having a midlife crisis and a beautiful young woman. The video compilation looked like an escort advertisement: in the opening scene, Scarlett Johansson sits in a hotel room window wearing only a large men’s shirt—blue—looking down at the wide expanse of Tokyo beneath her; in the next scene, she dives into an enormous, empty hotel pool, at night—the pool and the surrounding windowpanes all blue, too. The images spoke of money and alienation. The song captured the affect of a certain type of client: slightly flat; grasping toward a Daddy-esque certainty but falling short; single-mindedly offering reassurance, but of what he hardly seemed to know. I grew oddly attached to the song and to cyborg’s music video for a period. I would watch it on my way to work, flattening my own affect, compacting myself into a version of a girl aligned with the lyrics:

Whispered something in your ear
It was a perverted thing to say
But I said it anyway
Made you smile and look away
Nothing’s gonna hurt you, baby.

Ai Weiwei talks imprisonment, solutions, and making sense of the world

February 10 – April 8, 2023

March 9 – April 8, 2023