Read The Hard Way on Purpose for Free Online Page B

first commercial scan of a UPC label took place here, in an Ohio grocery store, in 1974, just about exactly the moment our identity was spiraling into oblivion.
    My parents loved Gold Circle because it carried a broad range of merchandise that approximated the A-list offerings of suburban-­shopping-mall department stores, but at a considerably lower price. As a result, I had a pair of sneakers that looked to my parents exactly like the supercool Adidas Country running shoes (white leather; green stripes, suede yokes on the heel and the toe) that I not only coveted, but needed if I was ever going to achieve any level of cultural relevancy. My Gold Circle sneakers were indeed white running shoes, and unabashed knockoffs of the Adidas Country, but they were made not of leather but of a substandard polyvinyl that cracked prematurely, and worse, they had not three, but four stripes down the side. I may as well have shown up to gym class with an extra leg.
    In an era when a down-filled ski jacket was a very particular status symbol (pretty people skied), I had a Gold Circle coat that was clearly a cheap approximation—not puffy and robust as in the resort photographs, but instead insulated with stitched rows of flimsy polyester batting. I was therefore marked by my garment as the industrial-Midwest version of an upper-subcaste dalit.
    The winters were long and harsh, and I actively avoided going outside in that coat. So I holed up with my books instead. Even this attempt at dignity and freedom was complicated by my parents’ having found, at Gold Circle, sets of Bancroft Classics, abridged versions of the Western canon. These books came in boxed literary six-packs, like those beers of the world, where you like four of them very much and tolerate the rest simply because they’re beer. So I’d get a set that included Around the World in 80 Days and Kidnapped and Robinson Crusoe and The Man in the Iron Mask , but also included Heidi and Great Expectations .
    I read them all and then others too. I read The Lone Ranger and the Mystery Ranch lying on my bed inside a sleeping bag one Christmas break. I have never been more comfortable. I read Where the Red Fern Grows propped in the limbs of a backyard apple tree. I have never been more uncomfortable.
    I read in sunbeams and in a hammock and stretched out under the dining room table and in an old, exceedingly ugly swivel chair that smelled like dog.
    I’ll never know if I was a natural introvert, or if I had simply found something preferable and contrary to public life: the secret confidence of Grosset & Dunlap.
    *  *  *
    The bookstore was on fire.
    I suppose I smelled it first, though that’s hard to say. The fire’s announcement came whispering to almost every sense before it revealed itself whole. It got to my nose before I’d stepped into my car, nearly a mile away, but I thought little of that, preoccupied as I was with the end of the first day of my first serious job, writing for the local newspaper, the Akron Beacon Journal . Even if I’d taken greater notice, it likely wouldn’t have raised concern. Even then, 1994, long after the factories had closed, the smell of smoke remained part of the olfactory personality of the central city.
    Starting toward home, I felt the splash of one of the narrow rivers winnowing downhill as it sprayed up into my wheel wells, but paid it little heed. I heard the cavalry of sirens and the heavy engines urging through their gears. Then, as I crested the old canalway and climbed the hill up from downtown, I saw a wreck of smoke twisting into the sky. The closer I got, the more it drew me from my preoccupation with the day’s events. The question grew: What’s burning? And soon, with quickly decreasing possibilities, the answer.
    By the time I reached the makeshift detour, I knew. In ugly orange flames drenched in black, the question fell away. The Bookseller was raging, full on. The bookstore