Work as a monitor at the local library is task-oriented rather than people-: picking up trash, reshelving, shelf-reading, closing. I do get queries: ``Copy machine?'' ``Hours?'' ``Material on `Loneliness and Isolation in Modern Society'?'' (Look about you.) But at night after everyone has gone and I stand in the darkened hall with only the moon through the skylight, I feel ``This is my turf.'' No personalities involved. None of the contingencies of interpersonal relationships that muddle so many jobs.
Yet there is always the odd factor for a person to stumble over in the dark, so to speak. For instance, my responsibilities include Security, and that covers people who try to exit through the In gate, avoiding the beeper. Usually a word suffices. But last month: an incident.
``I won't go through! I broke a finger pushing those damned gates!''
``Use the Out gate and no problem.''
``See the bump?''
``Other gate, please.''
``You're the problem! I'm going around! I'm not using the gates!''
Before your eyes someone who appears normal goes Looney Tunes, becomes Mr. Hyde.
``Fascists!''
``Let's check those. . . .''
``How Hitler started!''
I clicked my heels after him and gave a Sieg Heil. No one saw. A shtick for its own sake. I felt like Chaplin in ``The Gold Rush'' when he dismisses his cabin mate's famine fantasies of Charlie as a chicken, then just to be safe buries the gun in the snow and makes a bravura gesture of scratching backwards with his feet, fowl-fashion.
Life is like that: ritual and order, interrupted by madness. If you want a little humor to separate you from it all--you're on your own.
Next day was a Jewish holiday and slow. I shelf-read till I felt like an Automatic Scanner. Just for humor's sake, I began humming.
I thought of ``Modern Times'' as Chaplin is faced with the feeding machine. I had an urge to continue my scanning onto the wall or the browsing woman in the print dress. But I exercised more self-control than Charlie with his wrenches and twitchy wrists when he spots the lady with the big buttons on her bosom.
As 8:50 rolled around, a sense of automation persisted, through closing procedures. Just then I was faced again with the Naziphobe. By the time I reached the gates, the librarian was into her routine and he his. I stood watching, though my Security button was being pressed, till the librarian looked my way. I opened my mouth, but no words came out. Yet I had to act. Laying hands on the man--one hand on his belt, the other his collar--I steered him out, then proceeded to lock up.
The librarian stood, mouth agape. Turning away, I broke into a Chaplin walk. I felt perkier than I had all day.
When I showed up for the next shift, the librarian called me over: ``Charley, tonight I'll deal with Mr. Goebel. You just go ahead and close, and don't concern yourself.''
``Iss verboten, yah?'' I winked and went to check the washrooms.
The Mad Nazi didn't show. The seat remained vacant. Its emptiness affected me like an open channel through which poured ``Be happy in your work!'' ``O, Lili Marlene...,'' ``Home by Christmas,'' ``Ve haff ways,'' ``Work makes free.''
Passing the seat, I rapped ``Two bits!'' as a clincher to ``Razor and a brushcut--.''
The next day he wasn't there again: absent with a vengeance. I was reminded of Holmes and the dog in the night, who did nothing.
My monitoring duties performed themselves, while a feeling persisted of something amiss, a personal element that had dropped out. What of task-orientation? People had always been nowhere. Yet now that nowhere seemed everywhere, in all I did.
Next closing, I came upon the back door ajar. Usually it's only the librarian who sees in a breach of security an opening for a prowler. Yet now I thought of Mr. Nazi Nowhere Man. After locking up, I went through basement, washrooms, and then methodically looked up and down the stacks. The pacing and scanning produced an illusion of a presence mirroring my every move. When eventually I called a halt and went home, sleep was disturbed by a sense of continuing roving and scanning, and ghosts.
As any rational person would have decided: once was enough.
Next day I even felt light-hearted enough to add a few touches to routine. Asked whether a washroom could also be found downstairs, I replies, ``Depends on how badly you want one.'' Find a specific poem by Frost? ```The 820s are long and dark and deep,''' before referring to Granger's. When I caught a teen with a sandwich, I shook a finger with mock severity: ``One bite and you're in big trouble.'' He quailed and the chicken fell out onto the floor. I had been alluding to the scene in ``Kramer vs Kramer'' with the ice cream. The reference went begging.
My little touches of humor, my attempts to add a human dimension to numbing routine, buoyed me along. Then at closing time I noted the back door again open. And this time in the moonlight stood a figure: ``I think I may have left. . . .''
Inspiration struck. Recall ``Body Double'': the tunnel, the protagonist suffering one of his bouts of claustrophobia while chasing a man made up as an Indian. As he sinks to the ground, the Indian leaps into the air with a war whoop. So I leapt and whooped. And the figure in the doorway vanished like a cat around a corner.
It made my day.
Next shift, the Nazi was back. I began to smile, then chuckle, and felt I could scarcely keep my spirits to myself. At his seat I stopped and beamed. He kept right on scribbling notes. ``Ach, Heinz! Der U-boat has surfaced!'' I saluted and clicked my heels. Mr. Goebel, and a few others, looked up, and I winked: ``I see her broken pinkie verks vell enough for taking notes, yah?''
A pained expression dawned: ``Why do you persecute me?''
``Because you're here. And when you're not, that's when you seem most of all.''
I way playing to an audience of one (or less), but it seemed worth it. The high spirits buoyed me through the rest of my shift.
Later I came on a couple of kids making out. This is verboten, and Marian the Librarian might object. I merely waited till the couple had gone on a bathroom break and left a note:
``How do I love thee? Let me count the ways:
1)
2)
3) Check rolls, towels, and soap.''
On return they glanced at the scrap of paper but with no reaction.
In the 820s, at ``Gertrude Stein,'' I shelved Dykes of Europe.
Next to The Holocaust I placed 100 Ways of Serving Pork.
Alongside The Open Door: a mystery called Librarian's Curse.
Little humor bombs, with delayed fuses.
If only I could just get on with my usual routines as spelled out in ``Library Monitor: Duties.'' But no. Always the personal element will crop up, eliciting responses.
One day a black kid browsing Art made an adjustment to his fly and I responded with an ad lib, thinking of ``Goodbye, Columbus'' where Richard Benjamin helps the Negro boy with Gauguin, against the neurotic librarian who assumes the kid is playing with himself to pictures of naked natives. Winking, I said ``Better keep it zipped up, a white woman may be watching,'' with a nod toward the desk.
That did it. Friday evening they locked up after me.
Some night when the moon is less than full and the back door ajar, an Indian whoop may make the day for the 20-year-old now performing my duties. Or I could steal among the stacks--perhaps under Anomie and Persecution in the Twentieth Century. I know the routine down pat and could easily mirror any move. The question remains: who is there to mirror mine?
Philip Hughes started out as an endless graduate school student, meanwhile teaching, then meanwhile teaching while looking for a way out of teaching people who a generation previous would not have even thought of going to college but would have taken over the old pizza shop when dad expired of cholesterol. ``Then I tried selling and other despair jobs, then just sat at home while baby was growing up because the only jobs I could get paid about the amount we would have to pay a baby-sitter, then took a job in a bookstore, a grocery store, a video store, a telemarketing organization a bit above the usual cut (Harvard), and currently monitor the local library while waiting for interviews resulting from my 94 on civil service exams. Sound familiar? Charles Bukowski apparently works at the post office, which is where I would be still, if they hadn't fired me because after sending me to 5 doctors they found one who put enough question marks in my report so they could recommend yes I be hired but only if I could do the job in a wheelchair (just kidding ha ha ha ha ha).''
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