On July 30th, 2024, East Bay Booksellers in Oakland, California was completely destroyed by a fire. The bookstore (previously DIESEL, a Bookstore) had been in that location for thirty years. In the months that followed, its owner, Brad Johnson, began keeping a journal of thoughts. What follows is a reconstruction of those entries.
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People in New York knew about the fire before I did. A few days before I had turned the ringer off on my phone. I slept in. I never sleep in, not even when I’ve been up all night. I awoke to my wife telling me, “Get up, the store’s on fire.”
By the time I got there, the burn seemed complete. Books had become picturesque trash strewn down the street. I mostly wandered around. The pure immediacy of it all was both a state of shock and suspended animation. It’s where action and reaction are indecipherable, strength and helplessness staring one another down.
Everyone seemed to be performing roles, capably and professionally. Even I, as useless as I felt, must have done the same. Everyone was or seemed sincere in their shock and grief. I guess that’s also the thing about pure immediacy. I wouldn’t say it necessarily brings out the best in people, but it does tend to show what’s there when time for reflection is removed.
I believe everyone who apologized for the loss. And yet “loss” was also the one thing not truly there in that moment. It loomed, yes. It was even staring at me from behind the line no one was permitted, into the blackened hole, blown apart violently, of what used to be a bookstore. I guess what I mean is that silent truths, the reality of all things taken and gone, are such because they don’t have to be announced in order to be true.
By the time I got to my car, I knew I would have to say something more than whatever was quoted by reporters. Fortunately, nobody who knew me well expected something especially well-crafted. Given the circumstances, yes, but also because I’d always taken a devil-may-care sort of attitude with social media. The most eloquent thing I could manage was also the most simple: what you’ve maybe already heard about is true. And though it was not as bad as it could have been, it was as bad as it was. And like any loss, it would endure.
I returned to the store a few hours later to meet with a public claims adjuster. He had lost his home to a fire a couple of decades ago. I couldn’t imagine. This paled in comparison, but in these matters nobody is really comparing. You feel what you feel when you feel it. It’s always as bad as it is. Am I up to the task of being better than what I am?
He talked me through the claim process. I mostly understood what he meant about the property loss—if you were to turn the store upside down, anything that falls out is property—but barely at all what he said about future losses. It wasn’t until I got home that I had a sense that the future often has more to lose than the present.
My instinct, however, had long been that a business should succeed or fail as a business. Admittedly, this is a peculiar position to square with my politics.
“It’s been a helluva day,” was how I started the video I posted online that evening. I’d sat down in my office at home with no notes or even a real intention to record anything at all. As I scrolled through the comments on my earlier post and clicked through the posts of others, marveling at the geographical distance the responses reached, I started and deleted at least a dozen responses.
Thinking back, I realize I talked more that day than I might have expected. I internalize a lot of things, to my body’s distress. And yet, between the multiple reporters, the adjuster, my wife and co-workers, my landlord, my former boss at the bookstore, I was in conversation all day. What I think I missed, as I opened up the video program on my computer, was the gathering of thoughts that sometimes only happens alone. Not to assemble them coherently or inspirationally, but as you might debris. To sift through all that is broken for something worth salvaging. I thought that maybe the camera might help.
When I do author introductions at events, I often walk to the microphone without a script. I’ve described it less as improvisation, which is a proper art, and more as talking myself into a corner to see if I can fight out. As I hit record, something similar happened. Clawing my way through the brute reality of the circumstances, I eventually scraped against the tiniest bit of dumb resolve. A resolve that simply knows no better or other. The immediacy of the day’s loss had, by its exhausted close, discovered “Well … now what?”
As a store, we rarely were ones to ask for things or favors from others. I’d managed to avoid donations as a means to buy the store seven years ago, waiting to do so until we had what we needed via micro-loans. What we raised when we finally did so helped pay for the attorney who told me I probably shouldn’t be buying a bookstore. There’s something funny about that.
I’ve heard and had arguments with others about making fundraising a part of the independent bookstore business model. They are a cultural good, the argument goes, and should enjoy the subsidization that most local, state, and federal governments are not providing. Of course, too, there are the tight margins inherent to selling books. Some add that maybe there would need to be fewer larger-margin tchotchkes for sale if there was a non-commercial revenue stream. There is more potential merit to these arguments than I used to admit.
My instinct, however, had long been that a business should succeed or fail as a business. Admittedly, this is a peculiar position to square with my politics. My point wasn’t that financial viability is the sum total of success. No, access to capital may move the world, but it does so by distorting history and diminishing the future. Workers are better judges of the weight and measure of what counts as their workplace’s success. As such, I think it is both possible and necessary for a business to prioritize their time and labor. Because doing so is not always cut-and-dry obvious, the formal and informal negotiation(s) required describe a fluid but constant baseline. If the business is incapable of that, then as a business, whatever its bottom line figure, it is failing.
Whether or not this is right or wrong, it seems obvious to me now that fundraising does not undermine what I had in mind. It has the potential to move a store beyond its natural and/or learned motivations. It may affirm one’s roles in a particular community, where a lease simply confirms its place. And, yes, it can fill the semi-occasional, if hopefully not gapingly systemic, gaps in a store’s cash flow.
It took something like a fundraiser for me to appreciate the store—what it is and does and represents, and my place in all that—as so many different things at once.
What does it say of me personally, then, that my immediate reaction the day of the fire, when I was repeatedly told that I had to start raising money, the quicker the better, was Let me think about it?
I’m aware that in part I was simply still in shock. “Simply,” of course, in this case is inadequate. Much was jolted loose that day, not least the metrics I’d used to understand myself: what I’m doing at any moment and why. The available answers suddenly made less sense than the questions. There was a brutality to the fact that the questions one poses may simply be the answers spoken differently.
Let me think about it.
I knew we would raise some money, and had no doubt that what we raised would be helpful. But I confess the thought I was thinking most was itself an accusation: “Who am I even to ask?” It’s perverse, really. One of the forms arrogance takes when it can’t bear to be seen as it is, so it pretends to be removed, somehow set apart as an arbiter of what is worthy and what is not.
Let me think about it.
Plainly put, the question is as foolish as it has become natural. What if the worthiness of any thing’s need isn’t equal to the weight of its crisis or its value? “I think, therefore I am,” said the philosopher, but why should our thinking matter so much? What if by dismissing as irrelevant whether or how one is regarded by others is to miss the point at all? Might it mean we are never merely this or that, weighed as right or wrong, here today and gone tomorrow? We are, rather, memories, and we are hopes, and we are dreams, and we are regrets. We are slanders, we are promises. We are secrets kept, beans spilled; we are vendettas sworn to death, we are cowardice kept alive.
It took something like a fundraiser for me to appreciate the store—what it is and does and represents, and my place in all that—as so many different things at once. Its deep and expansive roots, spread out over multiple generations, show how the past in all its abundance and different forms may yet nourish a present that never stands still and is never simple.
So maybe instead, let me be thought about.
If it’s the deepness of one’s past that creates the connections that make care possible, it seems it’s the present that instills the trust and confidence that this care won’t be abused. Or at least that’s what I’ve come to hope, and why the accepted efforts of others have motivated the subsequent efforts I’ve required of myself.
We reopened at a new location on November 30th, just before the holiday rush. A whole lot of pieces had to fall into place in just the right way at just the right time for such a quick turnaround.
Those efforts themselves were never especially interesting. Maybe this is because they were all necessities. But were they necessary? Possibly not for the store. I had a responsibility to our insurance company to, in their words, “mitigate the loss,” but they neither expected nor applauded my efforts at how I went about it. When asked now how I managed to deal with everything at the time the best answer is perhaps not the healthiest: I was an object desperate to stay in motion, so that’s what I did. From my workspace in the breakroom of a friendly bookstore to multiple order drop-off locations to the post office to vacant storefronts, I just kept moving.
I sometimes wondered if I was working so hard to avoid feeling grief.
Though there was no avoiding it. Each day there would be a new conversation with someone deeply wounded by the loss of the store. I wasn’t responsible for the fire, but I felt accountable to respect the wounds it left on others. All they saw afterward was a boarded up facade and an absence. They were not privy to where my movements were taking me or to the possibilities that were opening up.
My closest friends laughed when they saw people commenting on how positive I was. Suffice it to say, I’m not known to them as an optimist. I won’t say I was pretending or putting on a happy show for people so much as I just had more knowledge about what was happening unseen. I was the immediate recipient of others’ good will that could not be publicly tracked by donation dollar amount.
Do I think most people’s default setting is goodness? No, certainly not. But it certainly helps when you surround yourself with good people. It was never optimism that motivated me to keep moving from an ad hoc workspace at a friend’s bookstore to order drop-off locations at friends’ stores to pop-up events at a friend’s gallery. Notice a pattern there?
So no, not optimism. But certainly an openness I perhaps in the past had shied from. I was always eager for compliments, but rarely open to accepting them. Same with generosity. I’d been squeamish about solidarity as it relates to something so mundane as retail. But at the beginning and end of the day, even retail is just people. It’s what happens in-between that skews it one way or the other.
We reopened at a new location on November 30th, just before the holiday rush. A whole lot of pieces had to fall into place in just the right way at just the right time for such a quick turnaround.
Was it ultimately a feel-good story, then, this one? A community rallying around a cultural hub in crisis, that was most of the journalists’ hook. My old feisty self would squirm from that a bit, opting instead to describe it as a story about defiance. Of not letting circumstances write the full story. We always have a say in matters, even when we say or do nothing.
A reporter called earlier that same day and asked about the silver linings of taking the store completely online while we were closed. My response was immediate and untactful: “There were none.” That part wasn’t included in the nice piece they published, but I used it as motivation for my tipsy toast later that afternoon to our packed new store. “To the wonderful obsolescence of bookstores!”
I don’t find anything intrinsically special about bookstores. I wouldn’t even say their value is created. That’s too “finance bro” for me. In ebbs and flows, with peaks and valleys, there is something special though in the intimacy of how it comes to be valued. By intimacy I mean it comes in moments, quiet and loud, as when a customer is newly heartbroken or in love, and encounters the heartbreak and love of others, and the curiosities they walked in with carom in new directions. That isn’t something there waiting to be found in the bookstore, another purchase for the bottom-line. It’s just something that can happen there, not unlike a fire.
