Only in the context of its neighborhood can the store's name be read without irony.

The corner at 31st Street and Greenmount Avenue, where Charles Village gets squeamish and Waverly takes over, is home to a puzzling assortment of businesses, including the city's dusty Communist Party headquarters ("No loitering within 100 feet"), a vegetarian tearoom and "history exchange" open two days a week by appointment, the furniture workers' union, a Baptist church and a no-name bar.

Like so many rabbit holes waiting for their respective Alices, each hints at a different, unguessable subculture. Normal's Used Books and Records stands alone on the south side of 31st Street, observing the cultural circus at its doorstep with wry equanimity. This rabbit hole goes deeper than most.

The store's window dressing offers fair warning of the free-associative senses of humor that dwell within: A Boumi fez, an Amway plaque, a kewpie doll head, a shark in formaldehyde, a bottle of "Elvis" cologne, a board game called Class Struggle, several frightening clowns, a Buddha, a gargoyle and a sign reading "use on conscious persons only" constitute an elaborate joke on the notion of the norm.

The store was founded in 1990 by nine friends who decided they had had enough of the schism between their work and their Work. They were writers, artists and musicians working in laterally mobile jobs -- bicycle repair, carpentry, graphic design, foam-product quality control.

Each contributed $500 and the better part of his or her library, and Normal's was born as a used-clothing, bicycle-repair, books-and-music shop. Clothes and bikes went out early, and attrition has claimed half of the original collective, but eight years and several moves later the store is going strong enough to pay its members "almost adult wages," according Rupert Wondolowski, 37, one of the four remaining owners.

Today hardback editions of Alice Walker, Noam Chomsky and a Sinatra biography share space in the window with more self-reflexive titles: "Bedlam: the Extraordinary Story of a Young Frenchman Who Chose to Share a Life of Strange Brutality and Horrible Madness with Twenty-Nine Criminally Insane Men," "Hallucinating Foucault," "The Cosmic Puppets: An American Town Run by Galactic Invaders" and "We Neurotics."

You know as you cross the store's threshold that Normal's is not, exactly. What you might not realize until you've been back several times is that you have just walked through a main entrance to underground Baltimore.

Co-owner John Berndt, 30, describes the store's sensibility as one of "open-ended non-conformist anti-reductionism." In other words, says Wondolowski, "Norms are relative and relatives are seldom normal."

Something's going on

There are several reasons why it might take a while for your sense that something is going on around here to gel into an understanding of how much, and what. For one thing, you'll get caught up in the books. The place is the Shangri-la of bookstores. Normal's stock of books and music is broad, deep, thoughtfully organized, well-preserved and inexpensive (books are generally priced at half their cover price). Espresso is not served, but you can bring your own if you like, and browse in an atmosphere of permissive seclusion.

"It's a genuine Baltimore treasure," says Brian Simpson, 33, a local writer who frequents Normal's poetry section. "I go there first before resorting to the exorbitant prices" at larger area bookstores.

"We'll keep anything in the store that is esoteric enough so that it may take five years for the right person to walk in the door," says co-owner Alfred Merchlinsky, 37, who also works as a projectionist at the Charles Theatre. "We try not to keep five copies of 'Dr. Atkins Diet Revolution' on the shelves."

To call the staff "knowledgeable" about books and music would be a subtle form of insult -- they are what they eat, sleep and breathe. But they won't offer opinions unless invited; this is Baltimore, after all, not Berkeley.

No one will talk you up about "what he really wants to do," since they're already doing it. Normal's is a land of many talents and multi-hyphenated careers, but the entire staff observes a strict taboo on self-promotion.

The owners

All four owners -- Berndt, Wondolowski, Merchlinsky and Walter Novash, 35 -- and Courtney McCullough, 38, their one full-time employee, are musicians who play or have played in local bands, including Little Gruntpack, THUS, the Lockhorns, Diana Froley 3, and the Suffering Bastards.

But that's not the half of it. If the five of them were lumped into one, that person would be a "singer, songwriter, painter, poet, writer, editor, projectionist, engineer, musician, computer whiz, carpenter, emcee, bicycle repairman and bookseller." Follow the hyphens to connect the dots: The completed picture reveals an artistic community of the sort you don't usually hear about until much later, when its members are already famous.

One part of the picture is the realm of experimental music and film at the Red Room, Normal's in-house performance venue. Now run by a seven-person collective, the Red Room was conceived by Berndt in 1995 as "a laboratory for pure radical experimentation independent of commercial concerns" and "an alternative to the rock-club-bar scene."

All proceeds go directly to the performers, who have included a number of international as well as national and local acts. Especially popular is the monthly "crap shoot," a free improvisational jam session open to all.

Another part of the picture is the world of small presses and alternative publishing. Wondolowski edits the Shattered Wig Review, a literary 'zine of "lusty dementia and hebephrenic miserablism" published twice yearly for the last seven years; he has also published books and chapbooks by local writers under the Shattered Wig Press imprint.

Alternative magazines and independent presses, local and otherwise, enjoy a place of honor in the store.

So does one of the writers Wondolowski has published, namely, "Blaster" Al Ackerman, 58, Normal's absurdist in residence. The author of several collections of fiction, poetry and drawings, including "Let Me Eat Massive Pieces of Clay," "Meetings With Improbable Danglers" and the "Al Ackerman Omnibus," he has been called "a teller of tales Mark Twain wanted to write but was afraid to."

Easy to spot but hard to decipher in his trademark wool cap and hospital blues, the regular presence of this retired Army pilot and burn-unit worker keeps things a few degrees off-center, even on boring days. The best thing about his association with the store, he says, is "being mistaken for normal."

Wig Night

That's unlikely to happen when he reads from his work, as he sometimes does at Wig Nights, the bimonthly performance evenings Wondolowski holds to raise funds for his magazine. These take place at Maryland Art Space on Saratoga Street, under the aegis of the 14Karat Cabaret. The cabaret -- an informal, nonprofit nightclub run by local sculptor Laure Drogoul -- set the precedent for the Red Room's policy of giving all proceeds to the performers -- who have included Little Gruntpack, THUS, the Lockhorns and Diana Froley 3. Sound familiar?

It's a small town, after all, and smaller yet if you consider the virtual community. Normal's copious Web site (http: //www.normals.com/) includes links to various other cultural hot spots for books, music and art around the city. That Web site, Berndt's baby, is being expanded to include Rare Universe, a search service to find rare books, manuscripts and music.

One of the Web links leads to the Roots Cafe, a concert and dance series held at St. John's Church. Ken Delaney, one of the organizers of the series, is also a faithful customer at Normal's, where he values the "offbeat collection of cultural detritus and genuinely friendly folks on both sides of the counter" and the "sense of community."

"Normal's was intended as a cultural collective, as well as a business, from the start," says Berndt, so it's hardly surprising to find its fingers in so many pies eight years later.

More surprising is the open, inclusive feel of that collective, which makes it seem more like a daylight basement than a true underground. As a relative newcomer, Diana Froley -- the singer-songwriter-art therapist in whose band Wondolowski plays guitar -- says she feels like "part of a scene, but not a clique."

Catherine Pancake, a self-taught drummer-photographer-filmmaker-social worker and member of the Red Room Collective, attributes the store's success to the "hard-core habitual bohemian lifestyle" of its members, "which makes no compromise to the usual business people's obsession with profit and expansion." Her current project: a film adaptation of an Ackerman story about a man who sews himself a Vienna sausage suit.

The relationships at the heart of the bookstore, some of which go back to high school in Glen Burnie, are also a factor.

The most rewarding part of the Normal's experience, says Merchlinsky, is "being able to survive a consensus business situation and transform it to where the level of trust between us is so high, there is a negligible degree of tension."

"It's a rarity," says Pancake, "a crowd of people who are both truly intellectual and very supportive, artists and intellectuals who aren't academics and aren't competitive or exclusive, and are tied to the community in an unpretentious way. It's not normal."

Pub Date: 8/04/98