Many years ago, I worked in a bookstore in Chicago called Myopic Books. Tattered paperbacks, eccentric artists and bohemians. Enchantment and foolishness sloshing around. They were open until 1am, which is not an hour at which you imagine people purchasing books. Occasionally, they wandered in from the bars looking for some fragment of their youth.

There was a poetry series run by Thax Douglas, a soft-spoken surrealist with an eccentric knowledge of various topics. One day I was working the counter, playing Rachmaninoff on the stereo. Thax comes in and says, if you like the Russian Romantics, you should try Borodin or Glazunov. The Borodin string quartets are beautiful, and that’s how I learned about them.

At one point, I became the events coordinator. My job was to facilitate and supervise readings and other events. What we wanted was a schedule of events that we could put on our website. We needed the names of the writers who would be reading for the next 4-8 weeks. The owner of the store put gentle pressure on me to put gentle pressure on Thax to provide a calendar of names.

This is not the way that Thax conducted his salon. He circulated amongst writers and asked interesting writers that he met to come to do readings. I know this because that’s how I did my first reading in the basement of Myopic Books. (Perhaps two or three people were in attendance, though I can’t remember for sure.) I’m not certain whether he had read any of my poems. Thax also asked several of my friends to read at his salon, sometimes at the last minute.

The reading series was ad hoc, serendipitous, miscellaneous, and wonderful. Week after week, I asked Thax if he could provide a calendar of events that we could put on our website. But it never transpired.

After several months of this, the owner or manager encouraged me to let him go. Could I have resisted? Perhaps, but I was somehow attached enough to my tiny modicum of power to go along with it. I broke the news to him. He had been doing the salon for years and years. It was a disappointment to each of us.

Some time later, I was let go from the bookstore as well. It was devastating at the time, but maybe it was for the best.

Despite the ugliness of all that, I remember Thax’s poems fondly. I have one of his chapbooks and I pull it out every once in a while, read his strange poems, and put it back.

Thax, if you are reading this, I apologize. I should have found a way to say no.

Here are some of his poems: