Take Ray Bradbury’s advice on Acres

PHOTO by DANIEL DE BOOM

I was back under the tin roof at Acres of Books that Ray Bradbury especially loves when it rains, and when I went to prowl early for Bradbury books—they don’t come through so often, but I found first-edition Bester instead—someone had Lee Hazlewood playing in that mysterious very last room, where the shack-and-shingle acoustics lift loud voices to the ceiling: “Seems we’re always doing something to hurt each other,” said Lee. His obituary was clipped and stapled to the bookshelf in the room where they put Bradbury, 88 and unafraid to say “Goddamn!” and “Jesus Christ!” as he slaps his forehead and unafraid to say: I love this place. Save this place. Do not move it or change it.

Fahrenheit 451 is the Bradbury story everyone is remembering right now—where the books are all destroyed and only memories are left, and that’s certainly so appropriate to the occasion that it even stings a bit. But Fahrenheit fits best after Acres is flattened and plowed under sometime during the next year. (Why can’t they build around Acres? Bradbury asked; I asked our staff expert Theo Douglas and he said they don’t want to because it would take more work and cost more money.) The story now is “Usher II” from The Martian Chronicles, where the bureaucrats (with Dismantlers—Bradbury’s capitals—somewhere behind them) come to destroy the house built on books: “You know the law. Strict to the letter,” says their man. “No books, no houses, nothing to be produced which in any way suggests ghosts, vampires, fairies or any creature of the imagination.” He suffers a particularly appropriate end: “Do you know why I’ve done this to you? Because you burned Mr. Poe’s books without really reading them. You took other people’s advice that they needed burning.” So who was it that suggested Acres needed burning? Craig Beck already told our editor Will Swaim and reporter Theo Douglas that CityPlace was a development mistake, though it happened long before he was even working for the RDA so he can’t be held responsible. But there must have been another person—who held Craig Beck’s job way back when—who thought CityPlace was a great idea, and so CityPlace was built. And once Acres is razed and replaced with a set of live-work lofts—obviously necessary in a collapsed housing market where foreclosures offer the only growth opportunity—we can look forward to an apology from Craig Beck’s successor in 2018, who will admit that Acres should have been saved. But Acres will be gone. Luckily our future man will then present a brand-new plan to sink the Queen Mary and turn it into luxury condominiums, which this time once-and-for-all will restore downtown Long Beach the glory it would have always had if it had never torn all its landmarks down.

Of LBPost.com’s reader-selected 10 worst decisions in Long Beach history, four are explicitly downtown. (Many of the rest are linked to downtown.) The story of development there is simple: approve, demolish and apologize. Acres’ situation is complex—no one knows now if the store will come back or if the owners will take their buy-out and retire. But why were they—and the rest of the business owners on the block—chased out? Are these live-work skyrises really what we need now when the city is millions of dollars in debt? Or should we stop getting rid of what few uniquely Long Beach things we have left until we solve more fundamental problems? There were plenty of media there to meet Ray Bradbury—apparently some of us felt this was an important event—but who was there from the city who could answer these kinds of questions? I didn’t see Suja. I have no idea what Craig Beck looks like. Maybe he was one of the three young girls, or the guy with the devil-lock who liked Fahrenheit 451, or the boy who had to explain to a videocamera what he liked about the Martian Chronicles and why—it’s one of the best American books of the 20th century so don’t worry, kid, you can’t be wrong.

I would have loved to see someone explain right to Ray Bradbury’s face why it was a good thing that Acres is going to be torn down: How it would be back better than ever because it’s such a routine simple thing to move ten million books into some accommodating new home, especially when the book business is just bursting with surplus revenue, and then there’s the generous RDA buy-out, too, which works out to 30 cents a book and erases any argument for saving Acres anyway. All parties concerned are now legal, satisfied and happy even though the Acres staff thanked me for everything I’d written the way you thank a physician at a funeral. But Bradbury had explained it to himself and everyone in “The Off Season,” too, where the man tells the Martian that the “old got to give way for the new—that’s the law of give and take.” “Think of the money!” that man tells his wife later. You can’t stop something that is going to make a lot of people a lot of money with stories about rainy afternoons and first editions, or you can’t unless you are Ray Bradbury. He asked us all if we wanted him to call the mayor—he said he’d done it before, and it worked then but it’s a much worse situation now. But do it anyway, Ray. We need you, and at the very least I would love to hear just how the mayor tells you no.

Tags: acres of books, lee hazlewood, ray bradbury, rda