Big Mike: Child Porn At Barnes & Noble

Don’t tell Constance, the Big Potato over at the Book Case, where I work peddling copies of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies three days a week, but The Loved One and I spend our Sundays at Barnes & Noble. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know all about how we should be supporting local and independent businesses — and we do, for the most part — but going to B&N on Sundays has become such an ingrained part of our lives that we can’t seem to break the habit now.

We get the New York Times and whatever the local paper paper is, depending on which city we’re living in at the moment. These days it’s the Bloomington Herald Times. (I don’t want to be a jerk about it but the H-T would be hard-pressed to be compelling if it were a weekly paper. As it is, most of the paper’s headlines deal with traffic accidents and new tree plantings.) Anyway, we get our coffee and tea and sit in the cafe where I do my crossword while The Loved One scans the ad inserts for coupons.

How could anything be more innocuous? Only this Sunday as we were walking out of the place, The Loved One dashed up to me and said, “Well, I just did my civic duty. I told the manager to call the police.”

And here I thought she’d only been in the bathroom.

“What the hell happened?”

“That guy is sick,” she said.

“Who?”

“That guy who was causing all the trouble.”

There’d been a guy who spoke in a thick Chinese accent sitting at a table behind us. He was involved in a tense confrontation with another man as we walked in. They were arguing over territory, as near as we could make out. Our best guess was that the Chinese man had come in and moved the other guy’s table and chair and put his in their places while the second guy was in the bathroom. Then, and I’m only sort of sure this is what was being said, the Chinese guy unplugged the other guy’s laptop and plugged his in.

A couple of B&N booksellers were involved and soon the manager was called in. The manager took great pains to tell both guys that he valued their business and everybody was free to sit here and cruise the Internet or do homework or whatever. He kept saying things like, “I understand where you’re coming from,” and “I hear what you’re saying,” which are corporate-speak for “I think you’re full of shit but I’m prohibited by company policy from saying so.”

The Chinese guy was all hot and bothered. He started throwing out accusations of discrimination. Oddly, we could hardly understand a word he was saying except when he started repeating, “You discriminate against me!”

Naturally, the manager fell all over himself denying that he was discriminating against anybody. It’s the worst charge a human being can bring against a corporate operative. You could accuse the manager of being a serial killer or a sleeper agent for Castro’s Cuba and neither would chill his blood so much as the utterance of the term discrimination.

The contretemps went on for a good fifteen minutes. The Loved One and I started exchanging nervous smiles with other cafe patrons. A few shook their heads. The dispute wasn’t actually settled; the manager simply managed to slip away. But the Chinese man kept getting up and trying to chase down the manager and, failing that, pulling aside any old bookseller to plead his case again. They looked helpless as they listened to him, that is if they hadn’t been quick enough to duck away when they saw him coming.

Eventually, I finished my puzzle (and reading the comics, of course) and The Loved One was happily filing away her new coupons for Irish Spring and AA batteries. I got up to go to the bathroom. When I came back, The Loved One was gone so I packed up and waited for her near the door. That’s when she came bounding up to tell me about doing her civic duty.

She elaborated after we got in the car.

“I know what the whole argument was about now,” she said. “The guy comes here all the time. He always moves the chair and table.”

I had, in fact, heard the manager make reference to that.

She continued. “The manager didn’t realize why he does it but I figured it out. He always moves so he’s not sitting near the window. He doesn’t want anyone seeing what he’s doing. He wants to be in a secluded corner.”

Swear to god, the implications of his desire to be isolated hadn’t occurred to me yet. “Why does he do that?” I asked.

“I’ll tell you,” she said. “I walked over there and peeked over his shoulder.”

“Why’d you do that?”

“Once when he’d got up, he bumped his laptop and it moved in such a way that I could see the screen for a second. I thought I saw pornography on it.”

“No!”

“Yes. I don’t want him thinking he’s getting away with something so I walked over and looked over  his shoulder. And I was right — it was porn. Child porn.”

“Come on, nobody’d be that stupid to be looking at child porn at Barnes & Noble.”

“Well, he was.”

“Real honest to goodness child porn? Not smallish grown woman dressed in Catholic schoolgirl uniforms? That’s really big on the Internet.”

“How do you know?”

“Um, uh, y’know, I read about these things, In fact, there was an academic study done not long ago….”

“Yeah, yeah, I know. Anyway these were children, like seven or nine years old.”

I actually said the word Yuck.

“Then I told the manager what he was looking at.”

“You did the right thing.”

“I know I did.”

We were silent for a moment. Finally, The Loved One posed a question. “Why do all these men go in for that kind of stuff?”

I pride myself on being able to answer The Loved One’s questions. I like her to think I’m the smartest guy she’s ever kissed. Even when I don’t know the answer, I try to come up with really creative obfuscations.

Not so this time. I could only say, “I have no idea.”

• share:
• Recommend on Facebook
• Buzz up
• Tweet this
• Tell a friend