Cult of Jef

Though most peo­ple have never heard of it, book­seller E.S.P. exists.  It usu­ally goes off when the book­seller is work­ing in the book­store alone.  A cus­tomer enters who causes the bookseller’s sixth sense to tin­gle.  The bookseller’s inner book­seller shouts, “Dan­ger, Book­seller!  Dan­ger!  Dan­ger!”  But book­sellers can’t let it be known that they’re freak­ing out inside; they must appear calm and helpful.

Such was the case one win­ter evening when a pear-shaped, bald man entered the store.  He was wear­ing only a black turtle­neck sweater and glasses–no coat–and moved furtively around the store as if he was con­sid­er­ing dis­mem­ber­ing me and hid­ing the pieces in his bread maker.

I looked directly at him, smiled, and gave a cheery hello.  He turned his head in my direc­tion, but he seemed to look through me.  He said noth­ing, so I con­tin­ued leaned for­ward and con­tin­ued work­ing on the bookstore’s e-newsletter.

After a moment, I felt some­one star­ing at me, then a soft, high-pitched voice asked, “What’s the dif­fer­ence between Greek sex and Roman sex?”  I lifted my head up and saw the man stand­ing beside me.  His eyes seemed glazed.  I won­dered if he was high.

“Excuse me?” I asked.

He pulled his thin lips back into a smile.  “What’s the dif­fer­ence between Greek sex and Roman sex?”

I didn’t under­stand why he was ask­ing me this ques­tion.  Did I some­how carry myself in a way that sug­gested that I was a kinky fel­low?  Then again, wasn’t Greek sex an euphemism for anal sex, and French sex for oral sex?  But it was usu­ally mod­i­fied by the adjec­tives “active” or “pas­sive,” so as to indi­cate whom the recep­tive part­ner is.  Or was I think­ing of Aus­tralian rules foot­ball …  Finally, I decided to ask for clar­i­fi­ca­tion before I made a fool of myself.  After all, I didn’t want to give this guy any ideas.

“Um, in what context?”

The man turned and pointed toward the sex­u­al­ity sec­tion.  Things were not look­ing good.  “I noticed that you have a book enti­tled Greek Sex and one enti­tled Roman Sex.  I won­dered what might be the dif­fer­ence between them.”

I wan­dered back to the sex­u­al­ity sec­tion and pulled the books off the shelves.  I flipped through the pic­tures of pot­tery with lit­tle doo­dles of Greek men sodom­iz­ing one another.   “Well, one is about how the ancient Greeks got it on, and the other is about what the Romans got up to when they turned out the lights.”

The man stared at me, like I just told him the secret to the Uni­verse was Ben Vereen.  “Sold!”  He snatched the books from my hand and car­ried them to the counter.  I rang up his pur­chases and he was on his way.  “Have a nice evening,” I said, as he opened the door.  He paused and his fin­gers squeezed the books in the plain brown sack.

“I will,” he said, and then he was gone.