A Book Tour Disaster Story from Barrie Jean Borich

By the time I arrived in Bellingham in the fall of 2000, touring My Lesbian Husband, I thought my experiences plugging the book in the Midwest and California had prepared me for anything. I'd been one of two authors in a Bay Area feminist bookstore reading to an audience of one, while seated at a round table (were we expected to reach consensus?) as bored collective members washed dishes and filed endless stacks of index cards; I was impressed by the pre-reading crowd gathering in an Ohio store, until I realized they were the local lesbian roller skating club, rendezvousing before their weekly outing; I'd kept my cool while the guy in another Ohio store noisily flipped pages of a gay entertainment magazine, then interrupted my reading to ask visitor's bureau information questions about the Minneapolis setting of my material.

By comparison the Pacific Northwest junket was going well. I was spending the last of a grant to team up with another writer to tour the now vanishing GLBT and women's bookstore circuit. My travel companion lived in Vancouver and her home crowd was so welcoming I didn't mind that the airline had misplaced my luggage, forcing me to read that first night in rumpled plane clothes. Attendance in Seattle was light, but Portland, where the feminist bookstore had a loyal clientele, was better. Our finale in Bellingham was to be an afternoon event in a little GLBT store called Rainbow something.

We drove up the coast after spending the night in side-by-side Howard Johnson's rooms. Considering our tiny budget we should have doubled-up; that we did not speaks to the tensions of a driving tour undertaken by two strangers. We two didn't have much in common aside from lesbianism, me a literary essayist and she the author of popular fiction and editor of erotica anthologies. We both had long-time beloveds at home and I can't say there was any particular spark between us. Yet those hours we spent in the car, the repeated shared act of gearing up for performance, and that we both, judging by the looks of our current lovers, vaguely resembled the sort of woman the other might hook up with, had we been single-- she a suit-jacket-and-tie sort of woman, me a girlier opposite-- added to our off-synch intimacy.

An hour before reaching Bellingham we shared the curious closeness of changing our clothes in a moving car, and for the rest of the trip rehearsed, prepping what was to be our crescendo. By the time we got to Bellingham we could have passed as old show-biz marrieds.

We pulled into town assuming we'd be able to find the bookstore easily. The stores and bars flying the queer rainbow flag in any locale tend to be off Main street, but Bellingham is not that big. We had the address, found the block. We circled. Where was the store? We circled again. The teenage clerk in the video shop said "Oh man that place closed months ago," but he couldn't be right. We'd hired a publicist who'd promised us this gig was verified, advertised. When we called the store the recorded voice was chipper. The first message I left was equally cheerful--we're here, we're ready, now where are you located? As we circled the block a few more times I kept calling, my messages increasingly tight, sharp, the last conveyed in the pitch that gets movie stars in trouble on celebrity gossip TV.

Our last time around the block I looked harder at a funny angled turn I'd mistaken for an alley, a shadow street I can't find on a map today. A few strides in I found what we sought, and I can see the moment still. The clean plate glass of the shop. The wide and slightly dusty expanse of empty shelves and bare walls. A little transparent rainbow flag sticker in the corner of the glass door the only evidence of what had existed here. The two writers, momentarily mated, dressed for company, hands shading our eyes, peering in, wondering if this was what the rest of our literary lives had in store.


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Barrie Jean Borich is the author of My Lesbian Husband (Graywolf), winner of an American Library Association GLBT Nonfiction Book Award, and Restoring the Color of Roses (Firebrand), a memoir set in the Calumet Region of Chicago. She has essays forthcoming in Hotel Amerika, New Ohio Review and Seattle Review and her work has been listed as a Notable Essay in Best American Essays and received Special Mention in the annual Pushcart Prize anthology. She is the nonfiction editor of Water~Stone Review and an assistant professor in the MFA program at Hamline University's Graduate School of Liberal Studies in St. Paul Minnesota.