This past Christmas I took a trip down memory lane. My present to myself this year was a book that I had been coveting for many years. It has been out of print for decades and is fairly obscure. Here and there I would hunt for it at bookstores and never find it. Several years ago I continued my search on the Internet. Copies of it were surfacing on ebay and sites of other used booksellers with some regularity. It was amazing how high the asking prices were. Years passed and I still didn't buy it.
I've scored numerous other books on the Internet and usually my "treasures" cost me less than $15 including shipping and handling. Often less than $10 if I'm shopping on ebay. Usually they are books that have touched me somehow in the past when I read them in paperback, so I buy them in hardbound editions since I plan on keeping them forever.
Anyways, this one particular book, a biography, bedeviled me for years since it was so expensive. Did I really want it that badly?- I would ask myself. After all, it did cost more than my car payment.
Several days before Christmas it showed up on ebay yet again. This time I bought it. Below are the e-mails I exchanged with the seller after my winning bid.

The seller wrote:
> I sent an invoice through ebay 417.00 shipping and
> insurance included. I will ship within 24 hours of
> receiving payment. I do have one question if you
> don't mind. I bought this book from Walton's book
> store in Independence, MO. when it was new. I've
> ridden Harley's my whole life and am interested in
> story's and related items. Somehow this book seemed
> to stay with me through the years. I been trying to
> thin out allot of years of accumulation. I sell a
> little bit on ebay not allot and that is why I
> normally start my auctions at around 10 dollars.
> It's not worth it to me to box and ship one item for
> a couple of dollars. This has blown me away. I
> figured someone would buy it just to read. I had no
> ideal it would bring this much. Are you able to tell me why all the interest in this book? Thanks. (name withheld)

Date: Sun, 22 Dec 2002 22:15:53 -0800 (PST)
From: "tanya danielle"  | This is Spam | Add to Address Book
Subject: Re: A WAYWARD ANGEL. Item 2900510265
To: (name withheld)


Hi (name withheld)! My interest in this book is kind of odd. I
grew up in a conservative town in Northern California.
My older half-brother was always considered a
troublemaker and began hanging out with some (name of members of a motorcycle club) as a teenager. My mother told me that they were
all the scum of the earth. Of course the first thing I
did was go to the local library and look up ("name of the motorcycle club") in the card catalog. "A Wayward Angel" was the only match so I started reading it when I was about 8
years old. My mother took it away from me before I
finished, but it had a profound impact on me
nonetheless. Last year my friend took me to a
cemetery in a bad section of LA for my birthday. I
asked to go there because I'd been near it, but never
in it and inexplicably it called to me. I came across
a tombstone for George Wethern. It wasn't the same
George Wethern as (the main character) in the book, I don't think, but the
coincidence spooked me and made me realize that
there's some reason that I need to read the book
again. I've thought about it often in the last several decades, but I need to read it again to know why it has
some meaning for me.
When I started searching for it last year I thought
I'd be lucky to find a trace of it. I'm sure you can
imagine my shock when I found one copy available on
amazon.com for... $500. Over the past year I've
sporadically seen copies on ebay, amazon.com, and
other sources going for $400- $500. There are 2 copies
on Amazon.com available right now. Evidently the book
hold a great deal of appeal for some people, but I'm
not sure why. I'm also not sure why I'm haunted by it
either.
You had the number 81 in parentheses after your
seller name on ebay. I don't know if that's
coincidence as well, but I think that number has some
significance to (the motorcycle club) as well. Everything came
together this afternoon when I saw your listing on
ebay and it all prompted me to finally try to get a
hold of this book and understand why I need to read
it.
This is probably more than you wanted to know, but I
found myself trying to explain my interest to myself,
as well as to you, once I began typing. Happy
Holidays! Tanya

So finally I have a copy of the book that has lingered in my mind for so many years. I've only read about half of it in the past month because I've found that it takes me awhile to take in what I'm reading. Every chapter provokes so many thoughts because I was 8 years old when I last read it. The book describes the life of a violent criminal in blunt, brutal detail. I can picture the rooms of my childhood home where I sat reading this book as a young girl. I remember how much the book upset me, but how I felt strangely compelled to keep on reading it. Somehow it seemed very necessary to read it and absorb it. There was something I needed to understand. Now I think I know what it was.
When I first checked that book out of the Menlo Park Library in Northern California I had almost no experience of anything outside of my conservative family and the school system in that very conservative, uptight area. When any of the adults I knew spoke of their children they spoke of which the best schools were and in terms of how their children could be successful. In addition to the emphasis on shools and grades, the parents encouraged, or forced, their kids to pursue sports and other extracurricular activities so their kids would be admitted to private college-preparatory highschools. The emphasis from a young age was on a "well-rounded" student. That's what the "good" schools were looking for. Almost no one that I knew, including myself, ended up at a public highschool. That's in spite of the fact that the public highschools were very strong academically in that area. The private school parents believed that they were providing their kids with the best chance at being admitted to a prestigious four-year university by paying $10,000 a year for them to attend a prestigious highschool. They also wanted their kids to interact with kids from other well-heeled families and to stay away from the "middle-class" ones in public schools.
When I started reading "A Wayward Angel" I was 8 and my parents were trying to groom me to succeed academically and fit in with the other kids at school. I was doing well at the former because I was such a bookworm, but failing abysmally at the latter because I was a dork. I was painfully shy, horrible at sports, and always had geeky, out-of-date clothes because I could never figure out what was "cool." "A Wayward Angel" was about people who did not care about conventional standards. They did not care at all. Not even a bit. For the first time I glimpsed a world outside of the snobbish neighborhood where I lived. It was a revelation to me that not everyone on the planet measured success by the school you attended and how rich your friends were.
The people documented in the book were far from upstanding citizens, most were criminals. Even at my young age then I knew that I would not seek a life of crime. I did not admire the people in the book, I just realized that I wanted to be away from the phoniness and pretentious values that I was surrounded by. My young world expanded by reading that book because I became fascinated by a culture of people who flaunted their disdain for conservative society. It gave me hope that I was not the only one who did not want to be programmed to "succeed" on the academic fast-track.
Let me say here that anyone else would be extremely hard-pressed to find any inspiration in this book. Its contents are very dark and graphic. It was simply that it was the first thing that I read that really jolted me into an awareness of life outside my circumscribed existence, and it prompted me to question a lot of what I was seeing in the behavior of my elders.
Even before that book I used to fear that I would someday grow up to be like many of the adults around me. Would I someday find myself with other adults comparing my new material possessions with theirs? Or comparing my children with theirs? Would the thrust of most of my conversation just be a subtle form of one-upsmanship? Would I seek to befriend people who could help me climb socially? And what would I be climbing for? What was the pinnacle anyways? I knew it must be sad to live like that: I saw it every day.
Reading this book as an adult brings back a flood of feelings I had as a young girl. It reminds me of how intense the pressure was to conform to everybody else's ideals. It was good that I decided to think for myself and search for what I wanted. An academic education is extremely valuable and material possessions can be fun, but there are a lot of fascinating people who have neither. I'm so glad that I expanded my world beyond the neighborhood and the prevailing attitudes of where I grew up.