Dispatches from the Borderslands
I was working the closing shift in the café at one of the last Borders bookstores in Kansas City. I’d had no customers for an hour, and still had several more to go before we locked the doors. I let myself slump against the cash register, looking around the mostly empty store, pondering if I should clean the counter for the fifth time or rearrange the steaming cups or maybe make a “practice drink” of something I’d done too many times before. Anything to kill a few minutes.
That’s when I saw her. I’d noticed the fedora first, then the red and green Freddy Krueger sweater, then the unusually short skirt, then the extremely high heels. She walked deliberately around one of the display tables in the middle of the store, an almost defiant smirk on her face. I made eye contact with my manager from across the store. The woman was on a mission. She positioned herself strategically in the line of my manager’s sight, pursed her lips, and slowly bent over, revealing a complete lack of underwear. She held the position for a few seconds, stood upright, and marched proudly out of the store. Borders never to be the same again. Shortly after Miss Krueger subjected my manager and me to her one woman show, the store would close permanently.
About a month after our specific location closed, the company filed for bankruptcy, and quite soon, all Borders Bookstores across the country were gone. I was surprised at my own reaction: grief. In the stultifying chill of the Catholic milieu in which I’d grown up, Borders had been a refuge. Especially the one where I worked. It was tucked away in a strip mall surrounded by unfashionable businesses: a regional gym chain, a cheap home goods store, a smattering of tacky chain restaurants. But our Borders stocked a better selection of books, music, and, most importantly, smutty gay rags, as I discovered one night when an older man came to my register with a stack of magazines. He kept his eyes on me the entire time as I scanned the magazines one by one, careful not to show any outward reaction when I happened upon a gay beefcake magazine tucked in between a Cooking Light and a New Yorker. I met his eyes as I handed him his bag of magazines, making contact for only a few brief seconds before he walked off into the night. After I clocked out, I went to the magazine stand and stood slightly to the side of where we stocked the gay ones, keeping my head in the direction of the food section but glancing now and then to the ‘beefcake’ section, feeling my face grow hot.
In his 1978 travelogue of gay America, States of Desire, Edmund White described Kansas City as “the 1950s in deep freeze.” I can relate. The Midwest I grew up in was a place where eccentricity was barely tolerated – anything deemed unpleasant or improper was studiously avoided in conversation and swept under the rug. Borders was a portal to another world. I’d spend hours after my shifts (and sometimes during!) thumbing through the pages of Tennessee Williams plays, Joan Didion essays, “The Laramie Project,” lurid horror novels, unhinged bodice rippers. I needed glimpses of a stranger existence, dispatches from a more exciting place and time. These glimpses, along with the people who came across my cash register, punctuated the long periods when I felt lost.
By the time I worked my last shift, Borders had been closed to the public for a couple of weeks. Our managers had kept the employees on as long as possible. In the store’s dying days, we would aimlessly roam the empty store, take turns bringing in burned CDs with weird tracks to try to impress each other, and reminisce on the time a customer had left a notebook open in the café that depicted an elaborate murder scene involving one of our baristas. On my last day, I clocked out for my half-hour lunch break and made my way across the maze of our parking lot to get a greasy sandwich from one of the nearby mediocre food chains. I dodged SUVs of ungodly size and made my way back into the store, sitting on an upturned crate. There were no books left in the store. No toys, no games, no tables or chairs in the café, no food products. I scanned the empty shelves, the silent cash registers. In the final weeks before we closed, I was often asked by customers about my next move, concern on their faces slackening into relief when I told them I was in my final year of college. They smiled and told me it was good that I’d be getting a “real job soon.”
Instead, I got a job at Barnes & Nobles. The Barnes & Nobles in our town were in more “prestigious” shopping centers: a glitzy shopping mall with trendy stores, a historic building in a part of the city modeled after Seville, a massive anchor space in a burgeoning suburb. The stores were better-run and more adaptive to the changing tides of bookselling in the ongoing wake of Amazon’s destruction. By the time I left Kansas City, half of the Barnes & Noble location where I worked after Borders closed seemed to have been converted to a toy and games shops. At the B&N where I worked, we were only allowed to play the CDs that corporate sent us: a revolving door of middlebrow monstrosities with even words like “damn” bowdlerized lest some customer be offended.
To supplement my few shifts at Barnes & Noble, I got a job writing copy for a sports apparel store. But I quickly tired of writing monotonous entries for hoodies. Instead, I began inventing deranged backstories for each product, writing the gayest copy I could imagine, imploring customers to “fly over the fields of Kansas” with various state school mascots in “gorgeous” sweaters. As punishment, I was banished to the warehouse to take an endless inventory of various articles of clothing in plastic bags and answer emails from irate customers. I missed the strange nights at Borders, the flashing exhibitionists, the woman who screamed at me in tears that our section of books on grief was too high up for her to reach. I began to feel that nothing would ever happen to me in my life. I grew bored of driving the same boulevards, trying to amuse myself by taking new and ever-more-complicated routes home from the warehouse I longed for any escape. I sat in my car outside the warehouse and created Grindr profiles, never putting my picture up, deleting them within ten minutes of creating them, hoping I’d see some closet case from my high school on there. Of course, I never did.
I would last for a year at the warehouse before moving to San Francisco. I’d had enough and needed to thaw out somewhere gayer, more exciting. No more strip malls. No more sanitized CDs. In hindsight, I now realize that there was always an alternate Kansas City lurking beneath what was immediately visible, but at the time I didn’t have the patience or desire to try to find it. After my move to the Bay Area, I would soon discover that feeling of stagnancy was by no means exclusive to the Midwest. But that is another story.
That’s when I saw her. I’d noticed the fedora first, then the red and green Freddy Krueger sweater, then the unusually short skirt, then the extremely high heels. She walked deliberately around one of the display tables in the middle of the store, an almost defiant smirk on her face. I made eye contact with my manager from across the store. The woman was on a mission. She positioned herself strategically in the line of my manager’s sight, pursed her lips, and slowly bent over, revealing a complete lack of underwear. She held the position for a few seconds, stood upright, and marched proudly out of the store. Borders never to be the same again. Shortly after Miss Krueger subjected my manager and me to her one woman show, the store would close permanently.
About a month after our specific location closed, the company filed for bankruptcy, and quite soon, all Borders Bookstores across the country were gone. I was surprised at my own reaction: grief. In the stultifying chill of the Catholic milieu in which I’d grown up, Borders had been a refuge. Especially the one where I worked. It was tucked away in a strip mall surrounded by unfashionable businesses: a regional gym chain, a cheap home goods store, a smattering of tacky chain restaurants. But our Borders stocked a better selection of books, music, and, most importantly, smutty gay rags, as I discovered one night when an older man came to my register with a stack of magazines. He kept his eyes on me the entire time as I scanned the magazines one by one, careful not to show any outward reaction when I happened upon a gay beefcake magazine tucked in between a Cooking Light and a New Yorker. I met his eyes as I handed him his bag of magazines, making contact for only a few brief seconds before he walked off into the night. After I clocked out, I went to the magazine stand and stood slightly to the side of where we stocked the gay ones, keeping my head in the direction of the food section but glancing now and then to the ‘beefcake’ section, feeling my face grow hot.
In his 1978 travelogue of gay America, States of Desire, Edmund White described Kansas City as “the 1950s in deep freeze.” I can relate. The Midwest I grew up in was a place where eccentricity was barely tolerated – anything deemed unpleasant or improper was studiously avoided in conversation and swept under the rug. Borders was a portal to another world. I’d spend hours after my shifts (and sometimes during!) thumbing through the pages of Tennessee Williams plays, Joan Didion essays, “The Laramie Project,” lurid horror novels, unhinged bodice rippers. I needed glimpses of a stranger existence, dispatches from a more exciting place and time. These glimpses, along with the people who came across my cash register, punctuated the long periods when I felt lost.
By the time I worked my last shift, Borders had been closed to the public for a couple of weeks. Our managers had kept the employees on as long as possible. In the store’s dying days, we would aimlessly roam the empty store, take turns bringing in burned CDs with weird tracks to try to impress each other, and reminisce on the time a customer had left a notebook open in the café that depicted an elaborate murder scene involving one of our baristas. On my last day, I clocked out for my half-hour lunch break and made my way across the maze of our parking lot to get a greasy sandwich from one of the nearby mediocre food chains. I dodged SUVs of ungodly size and made my way back into the store, sitting on an upturned crate. There were no books left in the store. No toys, no games, no tables or chairs in the café, no food products. I scanned the empty shelves, the silent cash registers. In the final weeks before we closed, I was often asked by customers about my next move, concern on their faces slackening into relief when I told them I was in my final year of college. They smiled and told me it was good that I’d be getting a “real job soon.”
Instead, I got a job at Barnes & Nobles. The Barnes & Nobles in our town were in more “prestigious” shopping centers: a glitzy shopping mall with trendy stores, a historic building in a part of the city modeled after Seville, a massive anchor space in a burgeoning suburb. The stores were better-run and more adaptive to the changing tides of bookselling in the ongoing wake of Amazon’s destruction. By the time I left Kansas City, half of the Barnes & Noble location where I worked after Borders closed seemed to have been converted to a toy and games shops. At the B&N where I worked, we were only allowed to play the CDs that corporate sent us: a revolving door of middlebrow monstrosities with even words like “damn” bowdlerized lest some customer be offended.
To supplement my few shifts at Barnes & Noble, I got a job writing copy for a sports apparel store. But I quickly tired of writing monotonous entries for hoodies. Instead, I began inventing deranged backstories for each product, writing the gayest copy I could imagine, imploring customers to “fly over the fields of Kansas” with various state school mascots in “gorgeous” sweaters. As punishment, I was banished to the warehouse to take an endless inventory of various articles of clothing in plastic bags and answer emails from irate customers. I missed the strange nights at Borders, the flashing exhibitionists, the woman who screamed at me in tears that our section of books on grief was too high up for her to reach. I began to feel that nothing would ever happen to me in my life. I grew bored of driving the same boulevards, trying to amuse myself by taking new and ever-more-complicated routes home from the warehouse I longed for any escape. I sat in my car outside the warehouse and created Grindr profiles, never putting my picture up, deleting them within ten minutes of creating them, hoping I’d see some closet case from my high school on there. Of course, I never did.
I would last for a year at the warehouse before moving to San Francisco. I’d had enough and needed to thaw out somewhere gayer, more exciting. No more strip malls. No more sanitized CDs. In hindsight, I now realize that there was always an alternate Kansas City lurking beneath what was immediately visible, but at the time I didn’t have the patience or desire to try to find it. After my move to the Bay Area, I would soon discover that feeling of stagnancy was by no means exclusive to the Midwest. But that is another story.