Bookseller reflected in her wares

When I met Jennifer Bates, she was standing in the center of her just-opened bookstore in Fishtown, regarding me with an expression that landed somewhere between indifference and disdain.

Which was surprising. When writing about small businesses, reporters get used to warm welcomes - the owners see in you the publicity they could never afford to buy.

Not Bates.

Within five minutes, three things were apparent:

She didn't care if I wrote about her store. She didn't care if I chose not to write about her store. In fact, she didn't care if I sprouted wings and flew away into the trees.

It was completely refreshing.

Jennifer Yael Bates, who on Thursday night lost a 20-month battle with leukemia, possessed a profound and admirable skepticism for everything and everyone, including the government, big business, the news media, the official story, senior officials of every stripe and, not least of all, me and the newspaper I write for.

Her bookstore was, of course, independent. She named it Germ, inspired by the multitude of meanings contained within the word. She sold only books that she herself would want to read, on subjects she cared about: UFOs, Bigfoot, the Kennedy assassinations, ghosts, time travel, conspiracy, ESP. Bates spent her life on this planet, but made Germ a place where people who believed they'd visited other worlds would feel comfortable discussing their experience.

She hosted the work of artists with unusual themes and unusual minds, like the late Gary Bailey, who collected images of the Last Supper in mediums that ranged from embroidery to paint-by-numbers. She opened Germ for a talk by a leader of the Raelians, the religious sect that believes man was created by space aliens.

"She saw it more as fun," said musician David E. Williams, her boyfriend of nine years. "It would be fun to know the intricacies of world domination, but you can't do much about it." Bates was almost 46 when she died. She was a design-school dropout, occult scholar, punk rocker, technology junkie and Velvet Underground devotee. She liked guns. And digging in her garden. She kept a bag packed just in case the terrorists ever got around to gassing Fishtown. She dressed in black, though her dark-arts persona was belied, somewhat, by an activism in her neighborhood arts cooperative and town watch.

"There wasn't anything you could ask her that she didn't know," said Rhonda Goldfein, director of the AIDS Law Project of Pennsylvania and a friend for 30 years, "whatever the question would be - whether it was some esoteric history thing, or which shade of pink goes better with a shade of yellow."

Bates was an excellent artist, painting disquieting and often surreal artworks that combined an exquisite sense of proportion with an interest in "secret history" - that is, the difference between what was said to have happened and what actually occurred.

One painting was of Laika, the Russian dog that became the first living creature in space, launched aboard Sputnik II in 1957. A collective tear was shed when Laika was reported to have died, painlessly, a week after blastoff.

Forty-five years later scientists revealed that the peaceful portrait of the dog's last moments was an invention - the poor thing had overheated, panicked and died within the first hours of flight.

For Bates, that told her all she needed to know. If a government would lie about the small things, it would lie about the big ones, too.

Her last months were an ordeal of chemotherapy, experimental medicines and hospital stays, and a time of closeness with good friends. When I e-mailed Jennifer to tell her that her fight for life was nothing short of heroic, I could see a grin in her words:

"The only reason I'm alive," she wrote, "is that I haven't died yet."

She passed away as Germ is preparing to move to new quarters, at 2005 Frankford Ave.

"It's eerie," Williams said. "At the old Germ, part of the experience was the way you would enter and cross that 20 feet of faux marble to the riser, and there would be Jennifer, and you'd ask her the most esoteric question, and she would answer knowledgeably and direct you to the correct spot on the bookshelf. Not only is she dead, but the stage on which she worked is being dismantled."

Williams, a silent partner at Germ, will run the new store. The artists' gallery will bear Bates' name.