Just a few years ago, my friend Sizzy Rocket was hired for one of the most interesting “on-campus” jobs we’ve ever heard of— this position was no work study, not found using Wasserman and definitely is not recognized by the university.
When Sizzy was starting her first year in the Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music, she was approached by a fellow student who asked if she’d like an easy job that paid in cash. She said yes. This started a period of her life involving payphones, late-night trudges across Houston pushing carts carrying over a hundred pounds of books, and bone-chilling days outside of Bobst peddling pages upon pages of print to the masses.
If you go to NYU, you’ve probably seen Everett. He stands at a series of tables outside of Bobst daily, usually dressed in a hat and shorts (no matter the weather), with a beard that would make Merlin jealous. This dude is a serious businessman, but you’d never know it. All his student employees are hired through word of mouth and paid every day in cash.
Everett doesn’t conduct his business via cell phones; he prefers arranging meetings and interviews using payphones and the phones of his employees. Sizzy met Everett for the first time on Minetta Lane (by the famous Minetta Tavern and Café Reggio) in the dirty heart of the Village. They sat on a stoop for an hour talking about life. By the end of the conversation, she was a professional bookseller; sounds weird, but that’s NYU for you.
Everett is admittedly strange (but awesome). He is a man who has an apartment full of his books in SoHo. He chooses not to sleep in this apartment, and refuses to pander to the modern-day need for immediacy. Instead he purposefully and thoughtfully determines when and how he will contact the people in his life.
When asked about Everett, two years after working with him, Sizzy remarked, “I would say Everett is the most misunderstood man of all time.” During their days on the sidewalk they would speak about topics ranging from existentialism to family life; more often than not, these deep discussion would end with Everett gifting a book to his employee.
While he kept watch over his table full of merchandise, we asked Everett if he’d want to talk about NYU or being a part of the community, he said smiled and said yes, but he didn’t want anything officially in print. We talked about William Carlos Williams instead. So next time you’re walking by those tables you should stop, say hey to Everett, and maybe pick up something new to read for less than five dollars.
[Image via.]
whoa! love this.
Hi,
NYU alum here. Everett is actually my great-uncle and I worked with him for about a year while in school. He’s very much estranged from my family and I had no relationship with him until I moved to the city.
I won’t speak for him and the way in which he lives as that’s something I suspect he would be uncomfortable with but I will say that he’s been incredibly important in my own self-discovery over the years since connecting with him. He’s a kind and gentle being with an encyclopedic knowledge of books (obviously), but also film, philosophy, art, and the geography of New York City. Over the years we’ve had long dialogues about the representation of self, Polish cinema and the rise of neo-realism, Tuli Kupferberg (and if you don’t know who he is, you best look it up…), his family (in the Bronx, I believe) and his relationship with his sister (my grandmother), the weather, and the paths of our lives.
I know it has recently been tough for him to continue his business with the rise of eBooks and eReaders, a trend he is very aware of. Everett does everything he can to ensure that he’s working as little as posisble over the cold months in the winter, despite the fact that he’ll still wear shorts. (He likes the feeling…)
There used to be far more book sellers on West 4th street but unfortunately NYU is a lot of the reason why that isn’t the case any longer. I find it inspiring and amazing that he’s still doing this at his age.
He still calls me from time to time and whenever I’m in the area on the weekends I make sure to stop by and say hello. He asks about how work is going and what my family is up to and he even continues to hold books for me based on my interests. I have an always growing stack of books from him that years later I’m still working my way through.
I ultimately believe that we live in a state of entropy. (I mean “state” in a, ergh, “cosmic” sense, but also in the context of New York State/Manhattan as some vile and hyper-realistic visualization of entropy in action on an incomprehensibly universal scale.) Everett is a hold out from a different time, an entropic anti-hero. He’s a living representation of a New York City that has sadly been swept aside in favor of, among many things, a gross university business that has been polluting what used to be a culturally rich environment.
I would urge anyone who passes by to just say Hello. Maybe you’ll buy a book, too.
-JK