There was a time in my life when I was so hard up that an issue of the New Yorker or Oxford American was a life raft. In just one dense little rectangle, there would be poetry, and photos, and stories, and reviews of books, and everyone just seemed so smart.
I loved checking the front of the New Yorker to see what bands were playing where in the Bowery. (I had never been to NYC). The tiny warning preceding the listings was thrilling: “nightclub proprietors and musicians lead complicated lives. It is advisable to confirm engagements.”
The Oxford American was supposed to be about places I lived but it seemed so glamorous and different. I had an idea of where Greenville was, but had never seen anyone that looked like Donna Tartt—her hair cut as sharp as the razor-edged shoulders of her suit coat. (I had never been to Washington County). I had met some writers; they looked rumpled, like last week’s clothes. She looked like one of The Endless from Sandman.
Meanwhile, I was driving an El Camino and had a one room basement apartment with bars on the window. When it rained, they would flood. Both of them. I needed a life raft. And for a while, it was Choctaw Books that kept me from sinking.
Jackson, Mississippi, 2009 (Polaroid 600)
A new century had just kicked in and the main way I learned about things was through someone telling me about it. I didn’t have a television and didn’t take the Clarion-Ledger. I don’t remember who it was told me about Choctaw, which was just around the corner from my soggy apartment behind the Jitney 14, or when. I just ended up there one day.
It looked like a normal little house from the outside, but it had been hollowed out. Inside it looked like a bomb had gone off, a riot of literature and trash. The shelving order theoretically made sense but everything was such a wreck you couldn’t ever find what you were looking for, and instead just wandered around seeing what there was to look at.
Ca. 2009 (Polaroid 600)
(I used to write on most of my Polaroids. I knocked it off sometime around 2010. I am very happy I knocked it off).
On my first visit I stumbled onto what seemed a gold mine. Not in the traditional sense, although Choctaw was studded with precious metals and gems—I once stepped on a first-edition Eudora while reaching for a copy of I Cannot Get You Close Enough, because it was just in a pile of other junk on the floor.
No, the gold mine was a whole run of Oxford Americans. I remember finding them because it mattered to me. It mattered so much. The shelf was flush with those early Ox-Ams that would have an unpublished story by Walker Percy, or a photo of Sally Mann standing in a cemetery in the Delta with a camera big as her while a little kid runs in the background, or were covered with a man holding a pool cue, his face obscured, in a dreamily psychedelic pool hall.
(Did I mention the Camino didn’t always like to start? Did I mention that the apartment that would flood when it rained didn’t have a kitchen, just a mini-fridge and a hotplate?)
I don’t know how much the magazines cost; the proprietor, Mr. Fred Smith, never seemed to charge me half of what I figured he could. I was obviously not one of those people hunting Levee Press editions by the Old Man or correspondence with Mr. Foote. Nonetheless I was always treated with respect.
Mr. Fred Smith, Jackson, Mississippi, 2014 (Polaroid 600 with Impossible B&W film)
I kind of loved that Choctaw was like an attic had exploded. Oxford had the clean and bright Square Books, all windows and staircases and gleaming co-eds, but Jackson had a mysterious little nook filled with secrets.
Over the years I scoured the building and came up with signed copies of The All-Girl Football Team, battered and moldy Reveilles from the 1930s, a tiny hardback volume of Dame St. Millay’s poetry, a quickie kiddie book about Blondie by Lester Bangs, paperback copies of Jujitsu for Christ, and a copy of Airships with the whole title page covered in a long, caring missive from Barry Hannah to a long-lost friend.
Ca. 2014, the place is visibly even more cluttered than 5 years before! (Polaroid 600 with Impossible B&W film)
In other words: the world. If you had a favorite, it was there, even if you didn’t know yet that it was your favorite.
I’m telling you about it because it’s gone now. It’s been gone a while now; the silver Polaroids above were during a patch of time it was back open to try to clear out the inventory. The building itself, which was not magic, was bulldozed down to the slab.
I still think of the books I did not buy, still feel the bittersweetness of wondering what happened to them, or why they were there in the first place.
I am telling you all this on a Saturday night because it does me good sometimes to remember that once I had bars on the one little window I had. That I had a set of $10 maypops on the Camino, another in the back for when one blew out. That once I found a life boat in an old building on a side street in Jackson, Mississippi.
I CANNOT STOP LISTENING to the new album by the Irish rockers Pillow Queen:
IN WRITING about Choctaw I had to dig into my archives to find the photos, which led to a healthy splash of despair. Perversely, it was both that the art I used to make was super CRINGE CITY (see: writing on everything), but also that it was sometimes so beautiful that I can never hit those heights again. Here, I’ll let Bart explain it better:
Stay safe and as always I am gorjusjxn on Instagram and you can see more of my photography at McCartyPolaroids.
Never quite sure if I have successfully 'liked' these. But I do like them... a lot