High-Octane Dreiser

On a recent rainy day, opting for full service at a local Texaco station, I was waiting for my tank to fill when the attendant leaned toward my open window and asked in a foreign accent: “What do you think of Theodore Dreiser.”

I didn’t believe I’d heard it. How often distraction mashes words in curious ways. Maybe he’d mentioned my visor. I flipped it up and down. No problem. I looked at him, annoyed. I saw brownish eyes beneath a baseball cap, a slight man gripping closed the collar of a jogging outfit. It had to be a linguistic mirage. I lifted my credit card into view.

Like a bird trying to catch its own tune, he asked again: “Do you like Theodore Dreiser?”

“Yes,” I stammered.

An ecstasy of shared delight spread across his face. “Yes, I do, a lot,” I said. I don’t remember who said what next. We talked a long time. I told him I’d read and reread Dreiser since my early 20s, seized by the sensitive way he wrote about people riding the frightening arc of success and failure. Finding someone out here amid the Jiffy Lubes and Blockbusters who also honored Dreiser was joyous, amazing and eerie.

This was Gengiz Babaev. He’s helped out at Manhattan Beach Texaco for the past seven years. His uncle, Essie Nayebdadash, owns the station; with him, I’d chatted before. I hadn’t noticed Gengiz, probably because I mostly used self-service pumps when I pulled in from Manhattan Beach Boulevard, where it crosses Sepulveda Boulevard on a hilltop nearly within sight of the ocean.

Gengiz is 55, slightly built, with an elegantly long nose and eyes that touch you like velvet. The accent is that of Baku, his native city in the former Soviet republic of Azerbaijan. Since then, we’ve talked whenever I stop for gas, about many writers, Lev Tolstoy (he uses the two names), Mark Twain, Balzac and Gogol. But the author of “Sister Carrie” and “An American Tragedy” is the one he asks others about.

“How many people have you asked?” I inquire when I return on Gengiz’s day off. I’ve brought copies of several Dreiser novels with me, and we sit and talk at a small metal table inside the garage while mechanics work on cars.

“I don’t ask everybody,” Gengiz says. His English balances precariously atop the stack of other languages he speaks, Russian, Iranian, German and Turkish. “If they look friendly, then I ask. Not every person looks like they want me to ask about Theodore Dreiser.”

We settle on fewer than 500, but more than 100, people he’s polled.

Why does he ask?

“I want American people to be proud of Dreiser,” says Gengiz, who read Dreiser in Russian. He looks forward to mastering English well enough to read novels. “They should know of him and read his works.”

“How many knew Dreiser well enough to have an opinion?”

“Five,” he says. “No more.”

I ask if this sign of his customers’ lack of gusto for their cultural monuments dismays him as much as it does me. “They’re busy,” he says. “People don’t have time for everything. But I want them to know.” The most enduring impression of Gengiz is the dignified charm with which he avoids saying bad things about anybody.

I describe to him the full strangeness of his asking me. He laughs when I tell him about my habit of asking people what they think of Theodore Dreiser, and how upset the wrong answer can make me. I almost came to blows with an English professor I met at a party who called Dreiser unrefined, a literary barbarian, while I defended his rare mix of intensity and delicacy. In Baku, Gengiz says, “Dreiser was popular for the same reasons as Dostoevsky. He’s a psychological writer. In Azerbaijan, we like a psychologist. We like to investigate what people are thinking.”

He learned about Dreiser when he was 16, from his mother. “She loved especially the character of Carrie.” He pauses to absorb the emotion of remembering his late mother’s attachment to Caroline Meeber, known to her family as Sister Carrie, who makes her way into Chicago in the opening pages of Dreiser’s novel and emerges as a hard-bitten actress.

Batul Babaev read the novel repeatedly, as she sat on a divan beneath an old lamp in their home in Baku. She followed Carrie’s life during the “hard, tough times of the war” against Hitler. “Carrie was tough,” Gengiz says. “I think my mother liked that. It was a tough life my mother had then. It was not an easy war.”

Putting the Flute Aside to Make a Living

Gengiz was a professional flutist in the former Soviet Union. From the age of 9, he attended special schools in Baku for gifted musicians, and he arrived here in 1994 with a single suitcase and his instrument, as part of a touring orchestra from Azerbaijan. Sometimes, when things are slow at the garage, he takes out his flute and performs for the rows of tires and the empty seats of cars under repair. I’ve listened to him play music by Bach and Prokofiev, and Poulenc’s wonderful flute sonata.

I tell him I feel sure he could find work playing his flute in the movie studios or with an ensemble. A musician’s livelihood is shaky, he explains. He has his wife and two children in Baku to support; his English must improve. “Someday soon, I will try with music, perhaps to teach,” he says.

Life in Baku, whose famous oil reserves have largely dried up, is tough economically. New finds are hoped for. Financial strain brought Gengiz here.

His path through Dreiser veered from his mother’s. A librarian saw him at the shelf of Dreiser’s novels, approached and asked, “You want to read his best book?” She pulled down “The Genius,” and he loved it. After that, he read “An American Tragedy,” and finally “Sister Carrie.”

“Do you have a favorite Dreiser character?” I ask.

“Clyde Griffiths,” he says with a sighing fervor. “Clyde Griffiths in ‘An American Tragedy.’ His life was very difficult. He is the same as Rashkolnikov. Have you thought that?”

I admit that I had not associated Dreiser’s protagonist with Dostoevsky’s in “Crime and Punishment.”

“Rashkolnikov kills, the same as Clyde. Rashkolnikov kills the old lady. For nothing. For a few rubles.” Others who are doing business between the cars in the garage stop and listen as Gengiz talks. “Clyde Griffiths kills too. What is her name? It’s terrible, but I have forgotten her name.” Embarrassed, I find that I, too, have forgotten it. I look it up in the novel I’ve brought along: Roberta Alden.

“Yes, Roberta. She’s nice,” Gengiz says. “They are in a boat. She is working in a factory. She is working hard. And he makes a mistake. He does a bad thing, but he’s not a bad person. There is a difference. He wants to make something of his life. Clyde Griffiths. He doesn’t think. He’s in a difficult situation. He doesn’t think about what he is doing. It is very sad.”

When I ask him to generalize about why reading has been important to him, he looks bored at having to state the obvious: “Reading books has made my life more interesting. I have learned about people. I have learned to understand them, and how to face my problems. I have learned how to think about life. In Baku, people read everywhere, in parks, on subway cars, in all the public spaces, always their faces in the printed paper!” He wonders if the increased exposure to the television age, popular culture, American culture has changed that.

Not one to give up, I ask again: “What do you think of reading habits here based on your survey?”

I want to tempt a condemnatory note about its meager results. I want him to plant pride in reading more forcefully, so that others might know the wonderful shared experience we have had, through another man’s imagination. He shrugs and smiles. “Here, people are going forward, forward, forward. They are too busy. You have a lot of choices in America--and you learn ‘Just do it.’ That’s what they say, ‘Just do it!’ ” But, he adds with a shrug, “maybe ‘Just do it’ is good. It’s a new era,” he says. “There is a lot of information. There is technology. America is always changing.”

Somehow, it is not the answer I wanted. I fall quiet before the tender, slightly ritualized intentness with which he fits the object of our abstract intimacy into the business of the new. I say, “No more questions.”

With that, he mounts his gleaming blue bicycle, heading off for the stationary bike he likes to ride at a local health club. Then, tonight, he will resume pumping gas and looking for the generous connection of a dead writer’s name.