In the past year my two favorite heaven-sent used bookstores got torn down.
 

The one in Ortley Beach was your typical Jersey seaside bookstore, with romance novels and mysterys jammed in every square inch of shelf space. But, intrepid explorer that I am, found the four feet long and four shelves high space in the world where I could pull out dusty, round-edge philosophy texts (which I never really read) and the novels and plays on my canon to-do list. I would truck back a block to the my grandmother’s Shore condo, heavy plastic bags of moldy, torn circa 1970 books cutting lines into my palms. The trips to the store and the piles of treasure I would return with irritated the hell out of my mom, who recognized that my bedroom was becoming a life-support system for my books. Fast forward to last month: the Ortley Beach used bookstore burned to the ground. Massive suckage.
 

My other favorite used bookstore was this goth joint, the Book Pit, in Red Bank. It was tucked away on a sidestreet behind an eyeglass repair shop. The only way someone from out of town would know how to get there was by the sandwich board sign with giant bat on it on the sidewalk.
 

(The sandwich board disappeared later on after the town passed an ordinance banning all of them from sidewalks. What I got from the bookstore owner was that a town officials had to drive down White Street and pass the giant bat sign every day to get home, and apparently, sent him into all kinds of spurts of intestinal damage. There was also a crazy blind guy who, though he was aware that the sign was there, would run into it daily–cursing, limbs flailing, the whole deal–and knock it over. So in the ordinance came and out the bat sign went.)
 

The Book Pit was one of those twisty-turny used bookstores. If you didn’t know the place well, you could wonder into a side room walled with books and never find your way out. For the rest of us, there were landmarks to light your way by, like the random pentagram pictures, or the dolls heads pinned up near the cash registers, or the B-list horror flick actors’ autographs by the occult books, or the giant sculpture of screaming sinners trying to crawl out from between the gory ribs of Satan’s torso (this art piece hanged over one of the exits). My friends would scour the LPs packed in milk crates that cluttered the already crowded floor. I headed over to the fiction, o’ course. The Book Pit definitely had a more impressive selection than the Ortley Beach bookstore. I would sit for hours just crawling my eyes over the titles.
 

I hadn’t been to the Book Pit in a helluva long time and, a few weeks ago, decided a trip was necessary. I knew that a nearby building, owned by the same family that ran the eyeglass repair shop, was torn down a few months before. The family, the Dorns, were Red Bank royalty so it was a huge deal when they decided to sell the building. The newspaper I worked for even did a big spread on it. However, my thick brain didn’t compute that it was very likely that both of the Dorns’ buildings were torn down. I showed up on White Street, my lower lip slack, my chin sliding down to my sternum in shock. There was a chainlink fence around the construction site and all that was left of the Book Pit was a giant dusty hole in the ground. Bastards.