This whorehouse, by now a shop called Book Orgy, in a commercial district overlooking Newport Harbor, was a wonderfully atmospheric structure of many rooms, all filled with treasures upon treasures of magnificent books, and conducive to leisurely browsing, especially because the omnipresent odor, though as odd as that in the burlesque house, was frequently more appealing. Thomas, always present and assisted by his charming wife Pitty, was more of a host and friend to his customers than he was a retailer. By all accounts, he was an affable man and happy in his work, though he might have been dour if he had known that three years hence, in 1942, he would be run down by that 30,000-pound Acme steamroller and squashed flatter than a page of onionskin paper. Customers spent hours in this charming former bordello for midget prostitutes and height-challenged sailors, roaming room to room, and not one ever complained that the five-foot-high ceilings required them to browse on their hands and knees. If from time to time a small but highly aroused and extremely agitated sailor burst into the shop, looking for action and exhibiting little or no appreciation for literature… Well, this was no more awkward for Ed and Pitty than when they had been obliged to deal with the elderly strippers who had shown up at the former burlesque house, down on their luck and offering to take off their clothes for two dollars.
In 1941, Ed Thomas sold The Book of Counted Sorrows to Clete Reet, a breathtakingly stylish and hugely successful big-band leader who was as famous in his time as Benny Goodman and Glenn Miller and Tommy Dorsey, but who is now, sadly, as forgotten as Cream-‘o-Chaff, once the most popular breakfast cereal in America. On stage and off, Reet dressed the same, in top hat and tuxedo and white silk scarf, as if he had stepped off the cover of Vanity Fair. An Art Deco icon, he went everywhere with two elegant borzoi hounds on leashes, smoking a slim cigarette in a six-inch carved-ivory holder, with a monocle over his left eye – and with an incredibly witty wisecrack always on his lips, as was expected from every icon in that glittering era. In our own time, of course, icons are expected only to be surly, grunt out half-articulate sentences, scratch their crotches, and whine about their inadequacies and addictions on boring talk shows hosted by butt-kissing celebritymongers.
During the first year that he owned Counted Sorrows, overwhelmed by the demands of being an icon, with little time to read, Clete Reet sampled only a few of the verses in the book. In 1942, however, he became obsessed with the volume. He read it more than a hundred times, cover to cover, backwards, forwards, upside down, with monocle and without, abed and afoot, tipsy and sober, to his dogs with a keen eye for their reactions, at a distance of twenty feet with the assistance of high-quality binoculars – and finally at a distance of only sixteen feet but still with binoculars, this time bending forward from the waist, looking backward between his legs.
Two months after Ed Thomas met his end in a delicate dance of death with 30,000 pounds of rolling doom, on the fateful night of December 10, 1942, while having dinner at the Brown Derby, Clete Reet – dining with the suave William Powell and the delightful Myrna Loy, with dancer extraordinaire Fred Astaire and the incomparable Ginger Rogers – suddenly sat bolt upright in his chair and swallowed his tongue, whereafter he swallowed his teeth, his lips, his chin, his nose, the remainder of his face and skull, his neck complete with wing collar and black tuxedo tie, his shoulders, both arms, then his torso, his hips, his legs, and his feet, shoes and all, until nothing remained of him but a toothless red pulsing orifice. This toothless red pulsing orifice hungrily sucked in three poppy-seed dinner rolls, a champagne flute filled with Dom Perignon, Ginger Rogers’ exquisite pearl necklace, one of William Powell’s cufflinks, and a hapless busboy before at last imploding on itself and vanishing with a rude noise that would have embarrassed the stylish and impeccably well-mannered Mr. Reet if he had still been alive to hear it.