Pagan Heaven by Ruth Rouff

Author:Ruth Rouff
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Poetry Short Stories
Publisher: Bedazzled Ink Publishing
Published: 2016-09-02T04:00:00+00:00

Romance

Recently I was walking through “Bargain Book Warehouse,” a store filled with discounted books located in a nearby strip mall. The books were publisher’s overstocks: the unwanted stepchildren of the publishing industry. When I passed by the tables heavily laden with discounted paperback romances, I recalled how I used to heave armfuls of these books into stinking trash compactors in Kmarts throughout southern New Jersey.

This was back when I was working for the Reader’s Market, a division of the now-defunct Waldenbooks, which was in turn a subsidiary of Kmart. In addition to managing an expanded book department at the Clementon Kmart, I would go around to other Kmarts and service their smaller paperback book sections. Servicing their book departments invariably meant tearing the covers off of all the paperbacks that hadn’t sold after a period of a month or so and throwing the books out to make room for the new titles that were shipped every week. Since very few of the titles sold all that well, this amounted to heaps of books. I had to sort the torn covers and return them to the publishers, so the store could get credit for all the books that didn’t sell. During the two years I worked for Reader’s Market, I must have thrown out thousands of paperbacks.

A large percentage of the books I put on shelves and later trashed were romances. Working with this merchandise was very alienating for me as a lesbian. I had absolutely no interest in Harlequin romances or those titles known as bodice rippers featuring scantily clad men and women in period costume. In truth, I rather despised the women who bought them. I knew it was wrong for me to despise them. But did their desire have to take such cheesy form? All pinks and purples, the book covers throbbed like engorged genitalia. And the prose was so hackneyed, so devoid of literary value, it made Stephen King sound like Proust. I guess the woman who bought these books weren’t satisfied with their mates, if they had any. Then again, when is anyone ever completely satisfied with one’s mate? I mean sexually. The wives read romance novels while the husbands whacked off to Playboy (this was before streaming Internet porn). Freud had it right: civilization is discontent.

Not that lesbians are much better. But at least with lesbians, you know that both parties tend to be romantic. Are there lesbian romances? Yes, there are. In fact, they’re a growing market segment, although you’ll probably never find them on Kmart shelves. From what I’ve seen, they’re escapist nonsense too. They have titles like Passion’s Bright Fury and Wasted Heart. I don’t read them. Through bitter experience, I’ve come to believe that desire is the opiate of the people.

Let me tell you—in one of the Kmarts I serviced, I became attracted to a woman who worked in receiving. She was a big-boned, lusty-looking brunette with a Southern drawl and an air of vulnerability that belied her Junoesque stature. Her name was Jeannie.

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