Chapter 3
I had sent Lucy to the reading nook to skim through the books about interviewing potential employees. She brought her new laptop, to make notes in Obsidian. It has been a really good day. It was fun being away over the past weekend, aside from the whole our friend’s grandfather figure was, we thought at the time, being extorted. Turns out it was just yippies being yippies.
The person I wanted to see was coming down the stairs.
“Hi Bianca, I wanted to have a chat but I didn’t want to cut into your writing time. Your writers workshop was a big success for the store. Lucy’s sales were up by thirty one percent. How did you and the writers do? Did you enjoy it?”
“Hi Laura, welcome back. Yes, everyone of the writers that participated were very happy how it turned out. A few of the writers who attended are also interested in joining the collective. The construction should be done on the third floor next week, that gives us eight more bedrooms. Plus three empty at Amy’s How do you want to handle it?”
“I’d like to have one or two bedrooms left open, like Willow’s collective keeps a guest room open. That way if anyone in the house wants to have a visitor that needs a room we would have a place for them. We could make up a calendar and have people pencil in or better yet a shared Google Calendar. Then everyone would know at a glance if the room was available. If we have the money, I thought the attic might be converted into two nice bedrooms with a shared bath maybe.”
“Laura, if we move in ten more writers we will definitely have the money. Do you want to vet the new writers or do you want us old writers to choose them?”
“Bianca, I think you guys should pick, you all work closely together. But I’ll add a little advice: you can take it or not, it's up to you. But Lucy and I are hiring a part timer and we are telling whoever gets hired up front it’s for a two week trial, we’re under time pressure that’s why it’s two weeks. If I were you guys, I’d tell prospective members it’s a one month trial. That way you have an easy out, at the end of the month vote if they stay or if they go.”
“That’s a good idea, if we do it and I think we should, I also think we need to give them a half price for the first month, because they will need to pay another month's rent wherever they are living now.”
“That’s fair, it’s better to lose a little money then get stuck with a terrible roommate. I wanted to talk to you about the workshop this weekend and the publishing idea.”
“Good, Laura, that’s why I really came down to schedule you in a time slot at the workshop if you still wanted to do it. Are you going to talk about the collective or editing, or just publishing in general.”
“None of those if it’s all right with you, I want to use my time to recruit writers for a free e-book I want to publish. After the government straight up murdered two people in Minneapolis while they were being recorded is just about the worst thing I’ve seen the American government do to its own citizens. I’m sure they have been getting away with it for years overseas. But before I go into another full blown rant about it. Let me tell you my idea. I want to collect essays from writers about safe nonviolent protest strategies. I’d love to have you write one. I have three old yippies down in Woodstock, I’m trying to get them to write about their experiences in the nineteen sixty eight police riots in Chicago.”
“I’d love to write something Laura, but I couldn’t honestly give people advice on how to protest safely. I’ve never been in a protest. Any advice I give would be more likely to get someone hurt.”
“The way I see it, there is more than one way to protest. I was hoping you’d write a piece on what would happen to Trump's popularity with the business community, if the people who didn’t vote for him cut their spending by five to ten percent. I thought your article could focus on the good it would do for the country but also what the person who cut their spending might do for themselves. Retirement account, vacation of a lifetime account. Take those American dollars and go spend them in Canada or Greenland or any of the other countries he’s insulted and made little of.”
“If those kinds of numbers cut their spending by that much it would come close to causing a depression.”
“So if we could get people to do it for three days, it would really show those in power what a weak position they are really in. In addition I’d like to target the companies that bowed to Trump that celebrated his inauguration. Let’s show Amazon and CBS that they can’t bribe a president in front of the whole world and walk away with a plus sign to their bottom line. I remember watching the remake of Heaven Can Wait with Warren Beatty where he goes into a board meeting and they are fighting over the price of a can of tuna. It would raise the price a nickel if they went dolphin friendly. Beatty tells them to raise the price and put a friendly dolphin on the label and advertise as the brand that cares and they will sell twice as much tuna. So we point out the businesses that compete with Amazon as the nice alternatives. We show people the studies that Facebook ran that showed they were harming kids and teens and did nothing about it because it would hurt their bottom line. As for Google, just point people to DuckDuckGo. It does everything Google does in search plus more. It has Bangs which lets you search another site entirely. If you do a search on DDG and you don’t like the results and want to see if Google can do better just add a !g to the search bar and now you are searching Google and there are hundreds and hundreds of these bangs and you can suggest more. Guess what !yt or !imdb do, these bangs are simple and easy to remember. The chrome browser you are handing google all your personal information on a silver platter. Firefox is free open source and focused on your privacy, it is not an ad company. I was hoping to talk Ezra into writing an essay for the book on these tech bros but maybe you guys could write one essay separately where you focus on the ten percent cutback target and he can focus on the tech. Then maybe collaborate on a second piece where finance and tech meet.”
“Laura, I love that idea. I’ve seen some anti Trump, down with ICE protestors at city hall. While I applaud their commitment I don’t really see the point. The mayor is a democrat and is probably the last person in town who would have voted for Trump. But people all across the country could show that they don’t take what Trump and his cronies are doing to the country laying down. I’ll be happy to do both essays if you can get Ezra on board. So you are going to edit it and publish it as well.”
“Yes, consider it a dry run for your publishing company idea. I’m appointing Lucy manager of the store. She has been doing a great job. I need your financial advice as well about the store. I’m sorry I’m so clueless about this stuff, I’m more then willing to pay you a consulting fee.”
“That will not be necessary, but thanks for offering. Just consider my advice a part of my contribution to the collective. If I ever feel that I should be paid, I promise to tell you before I do the work. But you know I actually enjoy working on financial issues, I just don’t like making rich men richer. Somehow I have the idea that you will never come to me asking how you might become richer.”
“You got that right. Here’s what I want to do, I want to pay Lucy’s college tuition out of the store. I want to pay her a poverty line salary with health care once she ages off her father’s health care. Then I want the store to just barely break even, after making improvements and paying the staff. I’m not going to be taking a salary, with my retirement I’m already a little over the poverty line, but there is nothing I can do about it. I won’t be complicit in the madness the government is doing, which goes double for the store. But I also don’t want to break the law, I just want to use the tax code like Trump and Musk do to not pay taxes. They can’t force me to make a profit right?”
“No they can’t. In fact you could even become a nonprofit if that’s what you want.”
“No, I hope someday that Lucy can take over the place if she wants it, and at that point, I want her to decide what she wants for herself. I don’t want her to be forced down some path set by me. I might change my mind after the next presidential election if things don’t get a lot better, but we have three years until that happens. Besides, a for profit can do all the things a nonprofit can do. I don’t object to local and state taxes, in fact I want to support both. So any profit we make can go right back into improvements. So I’ve been thinking about the boathouse, there is nothing in it except for a few old canoes. We can make a canoe rack and store the canoes outside on the rack. They can even be covered in tarps. But then the boathouse could be converted into a meeting hall. For writer workshops in the colder months. A nice woodstove would keep the place toasty. You can also use the TTRPG room for meetings round a table. So we just keep taking whatever profits we make and put them right back into the house. How about a tiny elevator wheelchair size. That way we could accommodate writers who couldn’t get up and down the many many flights of stairs. The way I look at it is if Trump wants to go to war with the liberal parts of the country it’s fine by me, bring it on. But as Asimov says “Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent.” So let's be the most competent opponent that the world has ever seen. Let’s bring them to their knees economically. Money and profit is the only thing they care about so let’s make it go away.”
“Laura, I agree, you’ll have my full support and I’ll look over your books but your plan is already solid. If you make a profit, just put that money back into the business, so in the end you didn’t make a profit at all. Except now you have a better stronger store and writers collective. But there are limits as to how much you can pay Lucy’s tuition, it’s around five thousand. It’s a drop in the bucket of what school costs. But the MAGA crowd don’t want a well educated electorate, they are harder to deceive than the conspiracy loving crowd they cater to.”
“I also want my car to be under the business so that any of my employees can drive it and we are covered under the store’s insurance coverage.”
“Yep, ask Anais or Eve to help you legally transfer the title. Unfortunately you’ll have to go to the DMV to accomplish that.”
“That’s alright, that sounds like a store manager job to me, once she gets her license.”
***
That night at dinner, I gave pretty much the same speech to the writers and asked them to take a day or to consider if they might be able to contribute to the free ebook. Later that night as I was typing some notes for plans for the store, grounds and house into Obsidian. When there was a knock at my door, it was ‘Em’ , our resident romance author.
“Laura, do you have a minute to talk?”
“Sure Em, come on in. What’s up?”
“Well Laura, it was about what you said at dinner about being complicit. Well, I write a lot as you know, but I know nothing about protesting or about legal matters at all. I love that you are able to try this cashless summer and not make a profit, to not even want to make a profit. But as a writer, I have no one to fall back on. Health care went through the roof this year and unless I quit writing and take a job somewhere, I’m never going to get a pension. So I need to start saving money towards retirement. But I also don’t want to be complicit. I’ve never been a frivolous spender, so I’m not sure that I can cut my spending by ten percent, I think I could cut out five percent. So much as I’d love to add an essay, I just don’t have the experience to write something that, if followed, might not get people hurt or killed. So I don’t know what to do?”
Stolen content warning: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.
“Em, I’m really sorry. Sometimes I can be really stupid. I never ever meant to imply that if people didn't follow my ideas that they are complicit. You are right, we are not in the same positions. I was very lucky to work in an industry that still gave out pensions. It’s what I live on now. As long as the country is standing, I expect I'll get that check every month, plus now that I’m on medicare so my health care costs are constrained and also supplemented by my old company. But I have a couple of ideas. The first one is we are going to be getting eight to ten new writers. I propose that all of you writers elect a leader to approach Willow’s collective. If you can come to an agreement you’d be around forty strong, that is a good small to medium sized company, I’m sure that you could negotiate a much better rate with the insurance company for the forty members than you can for just yourself. The second thing is you have a lot more power than you think. You are a writer.”
“I understand the bargaining with the insurance company but I don’t see what you mean about power and being a writer. I write romance, hopefully entertaining romance.”
“Yes, it’s very entertaining. I've read all of your books, and I have loved each of them. When I was an editor, I read a horrible book that had just one saving grace. It had a great character. I tried to get the author to scrap his plot and just write a new story for this one character. He got mad and refused, walked out and as far as I know the book never got published. But that character just so happened to give an impassioned speech about vegetarianism. Which got me thinking about trying out a vegetarian lifestyle. So then I read Diet for a Small Planet and I was off to the races. I didn’t start eating meat until I moved back into the collective. I also always eat vegetarian when I’m ordering in a restaurant. So if that crummy author could write a compelling character to make me a life long omnivore consider trying a plant based diet. Just think what a published author could do with a character. It needn't be a main character, the character doesn’t even have to act on it. They can just think about it. Then I know that your books sell over twenty thousand copies each. So that means twenty thousand people are going to read that idea, if it resonates with one in twenty, that’s a thousand people that might act. If only a quarter of them do, that’s two hundred and fifty people taking a strike at greed, corporate and governmental. That’s more than I could possibly do in my own lifetime. That’s what I mean by power Em.”
“I’ve never considered that, you really think that fiction makes a person think about their own life in the real world.”
“Absolutely and I don’t mean preachy fiction. Tolkien hated parables or saying that his books meant something. But I remember reading Gandalf’s speech about killing and mercy and it was the first time I considered it. I mean everything I’d read up to that was the villain getting what was coming to him by the end, usually killed. After that I considered what was common back then the use of the death penalty as a horrible idea and I still feel like that. Only the very worst of human rights violating countries do that. China, Russia and the United States. I don’t believe in Let’s make America great again, anyone who knows any history at all knows that is a lie. But I do believe in let’s make America Great. The first step would be to get rid of the death penalty. The second central tenet that I got from fiction is from a science fiction book. “Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent.” The rebels in Star Wars are incompetent, that would have been so much more satisfying for me if instead of destroying the death star and all the people inside it. Must have been thousands upon thousands. What if they stole it? Landed it on an unknown uninhabited planet and forced everyone off. Those people are now out of the fight. I’ve told this to people before and they come back and say that is too unbelievable. But is that really less plausible then the designers leaving a big old target that could take out a small moon sized craft with one weak shot, no that is more implausible than a native taking out a fighter jet with a bow and arrow. Sorry Em, I’ve thought about this stuff way too much.”
***
I made an effort the next morning to get to the store five minutes before we were due to open. Lucy was already at the counter working on the help wanted poster for our front door.
“So I take it, you feel ready to begin the job interviews?”
“Yeah Laura, I skimmed through both of those books but I think we came up with better criteria then either of these books maybe because a bookstore is more unique at least your bookstore that doesn’t want to profit from its existence. No you know what I think I said that wrong. A bookstore that doesn’t measure profit in dollars and cents.”
“Oh, I like that line, I’ll probably steal it from you at some point. What do you think about selling used books, if it doesn’t hurt the used bookstore in Saranac.”
“I was surprised that you weren’t already doing that when I started working here.”
“Well, when I bring your sign to their store I’ll talk to their owner and see if we can get into used books in a way that doesn’t damage their business. Some niche they don’t cover. Hey, what time is your driving lesson with Anais?”
“Eleven Thirty. Why?”
“Because I’m giving a talk at the library at noon time. We can close if Anais can’t come earlier or later, no big deal. I’ll call her.”
Anais was here by ten thirty.
“Laura, we’ll be back by ten minutes to twelve.”
“Alright, but take your time, I can just lock up, it’s really not a big deal.”
“Of course it’s a big deal. You have posted store hours, those are the hours you are supposed to be open. What if a customer drives an hour to get here, only to find you closed. You think they are ever likely to come back here again."
“No I suppose not.”
***
At ten minutes to twelve precisely my car pulled back into the parking lot. This was great, later I’d be able to find out just how exactly did Anais arrive here at the store at the precise time she said they would. Did they just drive back and forth in front of the store until some alarm rang telling them it was now time to pull into the lot. Well I will find out later.
But for now I hurried out the front door, Lucy was smiling.
“Did you have a good lesson?”
“Yes, Anais says I’m ready to schedule my drivers test.”
“That’s wonderful, you go in and call and make the appointment, just take the first slot, Amy or I or your teacher can take you. Well done.”
She ran inside to take over the store while I was gone.
“Thank you Anais, it was very nice of you to take time out of your day to teach her. Is she really doing well? I want her to be safe.”
“Laura if you mean that, then if you two ever need to drive somewhere together, let her drive.”
“Very funny Anais, very funny. Well I have to go. But seriously, thanks again, for helping Lucy."
“I’m coming with you, I want to see how the seniors respond to your hippie ideas.”
***
They didn’t respond spectacularly to say the very least.
“So to wrap it up, I’ll take questions and if any of you have participated in a protest and feel like writing it up, I’d be happy to consider it to be included in the e-book.”
An old man raised his hand and when I acknowledged him.
“If someone broke into your house, and I was out front protesting the police so they couldn’t save you. I bet you’d change your tune.”
“Sir, you are right, I would want the police to save me from someone who broke into my home. This book, while spurred by the recent deaths among protestors, is meant to keep any and all protestors safe. If the protestors are safe there will be fewer conflicts with law enforcement. Which means law enforcers will be safer as well. It is meant to de-escalate the violence not to add to it. Have you ever done any protesting sir?”
“No I have not. I love my country.”
“Yes, sir, so do I, even if I am deeply ashamed of it right now.”
This actually earned me a smattering of applause. Not much, and not for long. But I took it as a win. It was the best I was going to get. One nice old lady asked if I thought a bake sale would help. She said she would be happy to help organize one. I thanked her but told her that we didn’t need one right now. That was it except for one old guy who said he protested at Target. He went in and told the Target manager he didn’t believe in Pride Month. He said how come the gays get a whole month and Jesus only gets christmas. It just doesn’t make any sense, he said.
***
“Well. I’m very proud of you hippie.”
“Very funny Anais.”
“No, I mean it, I thought you would have gone after the old man, when he told his story about Target.”
“What’s the point, he had to be at least eighty five. I wonder who came up with that crap about elders and wisdom. Anyway I could have spent twenty minutes explaining why he was wrong about just about everything but really where would that get me. He would have walked out as bigoted as when he walked in.
“True enough Laura, that's why I'm proud you didn’t.”
