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Some jewels escape everyday perception
© St. Petersburg Times, It's not much of a strip center, even as strip centers go. La Mexicana Grocery, American Check Cashing and a no-name beauty supply share space in the low-slung non-color building on Fletcher Avenue with the unlikely tenant Just Books. You go in, and sitting behind the counter in a room crammed with books is a guy with a gray beard and ponytail, wearing a bright orange T-shirt with a comic character espousing something or another. I don't think he would find it unflattering to say that the current fitness craze has passed him by. Behind the counter, the wall is plastered with snapshots of family members and friends and a sign that says: UNATTENDED CHILDREN WILL BE SOLD AS SLAVES. You gotta like this guy. Carl Jacoby, owner with his wife, Marilyn, aims a 409 bottle at the cover of the paperback of Red Azalea by Anchee Min. I gasp. "You're cleaning books with 409!" He says evenly, "It's not 409." "What is it?" A secret, he says. Okay. I don't clean my books anyway, but Carl does. In fact, every paperback in the store is checked, cleaned and wrapped. And he's got 84,000 books, 65,000 titles. He says his collection of science fiction, mystery and classic literature can't be touched anywhere around here. There's also contemporary fiction, non-fiction, cookbooks, poetry. Some romance, but none of smaller (books judged by size!) ones like Harlequin or Silhouette. As if on cue, a young woman in shorts comes in and asks if Carl will buy a bunch of them. Carl says no, thinks about it for a minute or two and suggests she take them to a nearby nursing home. An older fellow comes in carrying on a conversation with no one, booming "Is Nietzsche a genius?" The store has been here for 15 years. I've passed it a zillion times -- it's right across the street from Francesco Ristorante and on the way to USF from Interstate 275. I never saw it. Cities are like that; you can miss things if they're not where you can see them or expect them to be. Like Unique Video, in another drab strip center on Armenia and Waters that looks, well, not exactly welcoming. Inside you see not the hip young art film guy you expected but an older man with jet black hair wearing a guayabera. He turns out to be Frank Granda Sr., father of Jr., an actor and film critic who picks the videos, an amazing collection of 6,000 films you don't see at Blockbuster. They're displayed by country, by director, by type, along with Frank Jr.'s handwritten mini-reviews of the film. "This is a violent, erotic twisted movie," describes the uncut version of Joe D'Amato's Caligula. Frank Sr., who describes his involvement only as "the father," can nevertheless take you around and tell you all about the collection. He's got all of Fellini, all of Andy Warhol, all of Almodovar; he's got Lars Von Trier's uncut version of The Idiots, Akira Kurosawa's last movie and YiYi, the recent Chinese film. He's got the uncut NC-17 version of Lolita, the applauded Adrian Lyne film with Jeremy Irons that never was released in U.S. theaters. The cut version was shown on TV. All movies are $3.19 for an overnight rental. The store hours are a little strange -- it opens at 5 p.m. and closes at 10, 10:30 or 11 p.m., depending on the day. The place has been here for years. But I didn't know about it, and neither did friends who are avid movie-renters and continually complain about not being able to find the kind of films they have right here. It's summer; we need all the intellectual stimulation we can get. A city needs the small, shoe-string budget places like these. (Trust me, to say there is no glitz in either is a massive understatement.) See you there. - Sandra Thompson is a writer living in Tampa. She can be reached at Tampa@sptimes.com.
 © 2006 • All Rights Reserved • Tampa Bay Times
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Times columns today Lucy Morgan Alicia Caldwell Darrell Fry Sandra Thompson From the Times Metro desk Sandra Thompson |
