A Short Guide to the People Who Still Use the Library

Exhibit #1: The Bearded Wizard/Wise Old Man Archetype

Tall, bearded, slow-moving and smelling strangely of dirt, this library patron instantly reminds one of an Ent. The rotting pockets of his raincoat are full of life's cutest conspiracy theories. He has 'the shakes' at any given time of day, and wears roofing knee pads. According to my Almanac of the Charming But Useless Persistence of Past Professions In The Old And Dying, there is only a 2% chance he has done any actual roofing work in the past 25 years, but an acquaintance of mine claims to have seen the Ent straddling a roof on a side street in Bellingham. Was he there because he was hired? Was he in some sort of roofing fugue state? Either way, he is an incredible resource for terrible two-liner jokes, all of them clean, most of them having to do with talking dogs.



Exhibit #2: The Retired Community College Professor Who Is Obsessed With His Ex-Wife (May or May Not Wear A Stetson Hat)

He was once a guest professor at the U.W., and his ex-wife was an intolerable whore. These truths, clutched close to his beige-blazered breast, are the sum total of his life's accumulated wisdom, and they divide his perception of the world into two separate but equally good-for-nothin' teams: those who will never be guest professors, and those who are merely whores-in-the-making. He smells lightly of pipe tobacco in the morning, and darkly of bourbon at night.



Exhibit #3: The Happy Immigrant

The man's chronic printer problems are exacerbated by a beautiful, incomprehensible accent that fluctuates between Old World Russian and Truman Capote. Despite this, he is in a seemingly perpetual state of good humor and courtesy, the effect of which is a wild feeling of contagious happiness and a nagging sense of shame for every time you've ever been an asshole. He gestures, fairy-like, and emits a deep trollish laugh when the printer spits out a few more pages of his document. He has a beautiful wife and at least one precocious child that hides behind his wife's legs when they accompany him.



Exhibit #4: The Community Card Holder Who Smells Of Decomposing Meat (May Or May Not Have A Sidekick)

He seems like he is on the brink of death, but never dies. His biggest fan is a mustached woman, often in tow, and the sight of the two of them together presents you with the potentially nauseating possibility that they are romantically involved, but you instantly suppress this option and become certain that she is his sister and that the region of their crotches where sexual organs are normally found is occupied by a simple waste-draining tube - his made by Hasbro with a button you can press to play a machine gun sound-effect, hers made by Lisa Frank and covered in glittery horse stickers.

Postcards From Japan

When my brother was in college he used to send me long letters written on notebook paper. The letters hinted at some larger life being lived and made real the other side of the world between us. I kept them in a pile in the sliding compartment of my bed.

Now he sends postcards, fans, rice paper journals from Japan, with short notes in earthquake handwriting: "clean, nice people, cheap food - the opposite of France." Wisecracks from California, myths from Israel. The evidence in support of the existence of an outside world is slowly growing larger, graduating through years and across cluttered tables, in piles inside piano benches and tucked into books stacked in the window sills to keep them open in the summer.

Once he told me - not in a letter, but in a traffic jam, as I sat beside him in his car - about the kinds of buildings he works in when he's overseas. He told me how the scientists are led through a series of air-locked rooms by pathologically polite guides, stripping and redressing into suits of nylon armor. Once in the lab, they conduct their work like astronauts sifting through the atoms of the moon, in rooms so spotless, so meticulously clean, that there is only one particle of dirt for every hundred thousand particles of air. You have never been in a room that clean, he says. Asian maids in white suits are continuously scrubbing spotless surfaces with invisible cloths, breathing into masks, peering through plastic for the illegal dust. Should one have to cough, because science has not yet found a way to shut this function off before entering the lab, one must hunker down and cough into a floor made of silent vacuums, sucking air down into the belly of the building and expelling it through vents in the exterior walls.

He is glad to be home in Texas, he says, with the elements: with dirt and swelter and exhaust, and a son forever in need of a bath, and a wife with curly hair that catches bits of sun. He confides in me that he sometimes dreams of being a goat farmer on a patch of his father-in-law's land.

Crab Fight Drunk Gumbo Recipe, with notes from the Encyclopedia of Statistics on the More Or Less Permanently Altered Sobriety of World-Class Chefs

Ingredients:

For Crab:

2 live crabs, bagged and angry
1/2 cup sea salt
1 gallon water





For Gumbo:

2 tbsp. highly suspicious butter substitute, expired
4 small red potatoes, poorly halved
1 red onion, poorly chopped
3 cloves garlic, minced
A pinch of salt
A dash of pepper
6 cups water


For the soul:

1 album, chef's choice
1 apron, your father's
1 six pack Miller High Life tall boys, room temp





Directions:

1. Drink 3 of the tall boys in rapid succession. 87% of all chefs are at least buzzed, and the other 13% are line-cooks at Wendy's who are having a tempestuous love affair with crystal meth. (Encyclopedia of Statistics on the More Or Less Permanently Altered Sobriety of World-Class Chefs, 1997.) Set remaining tall boys aside in large bowl.

2. Get that apron on. Try it loose, then try it tied. This is the time in your life to experiment.

3. In large pot, heat 1 gallon water and 1/2 cup salt over high heat.

4. The water's boiling! It's time for a crab fight!

5. Release crabs from bag onto kitchen floor. Watch them circle each other. Root for one. From time to time, you might taunt one or both crabs with a butter knife. Be creative. This is why you dropped out of school to become a chef.

6. Put on some mood music and get the chef juices flowing. Have you ever had a meal that tasted like a gray mattress? That is the taste of a meal marinated in cold and stony silence. (A meal that tastes like shit was more than likely cooked while listening to Diana Ross. The Encyclopedia tells us, for example, that during a 1969 Chefs of Manhattan regional competition, Frankie 'Fondue' Fontane received the lowest score ever given in the history of chef's competitions for his 'Stop in the Name of Soup' chicken soup, after which he dropped to his knees in the middle of the street and screamed 'THE SUPREMES ARE NOT SUPREME!' repeatedly until he was hit and killed by a truck. Ironically, the truck-driver didn't have his eyes on the road at the time of the accident because he was looking for a cassette tape of The Marvelettes that had slipped into "that tricky no-man's land between the seat and the center console.")

7. Once bored of the crab fight, pick up crabs by their back legs and drop into boiling water. Imagine the pain of being boiled. Rejoice that you are not a crab. You are a chef. And a damn fine chef at that! Boil them for 20 minutes.

8. In separate pot, combine potatoes, garlic, onion, salt and pepper in enough water to cover the potatoes by about 2 inches. (about 4 cups.) Boil, covered, for 20 minutes.

9. This is where being drunk comes in handy. Drain crab and potato pots, using flimsy lids to barely contain the boiling hot contents as you pour the steaming water off into the sink, which is precariously stacked with all manner of unwashed cookery. If you do feel the occasional burn, think through it by imagining your parents' suffering instead. Don't be shy! 99% of world-class chefs are victims of long-term childhood trauma. (Jacques De Jacques, head chef and owner of Paris's 'Le Petite Garcon' restaurant, was once asked to explain how he came up with his famous meatball-turtle soup. He locked himself in the walk-in fridge for two days and came out with a crayon drawing of his mother's head on a turtle's body.)

10. Return pots to burners on low heat. Add butter to potatoes. There will come a point when you will feel you've added enough butter, but you haven't. Add more. You like your gumbo like you like your women: stuffed in a rusty pot, smothered in butter, and resembling mashed potatoes. <---- Editor's Note: most brilliant thing I've ever written.

11. Find and pay someone to shell and clean the crab.

12. Add crab meat to the potatoes. Drink another beer while it cools.

13. Fall asleep before eating, wake up at 3 in the morning and enjoy!

From The Bewildered Letters of an Exiled American in Russia, with notes on The Hamburgler

December 3, 1988 - Moscow, U.S.S.R.

Eligio:


To answer your question, I don't believe in hell, not even for Nazis or Saddam Hussein - although for them I wish it were true - because of the afternoon when I came upon a book of Milton in a box of folded clothes meant for donation, and which, when opened, unleashed a flood of moths into the attic. Milton and his moths say it is all a dream, and that each man when he dies, good or bad, is cast out to sea on a beautiful night under a sky of stars. They evidently have not heard the news that the Catholics have done some construction on hell and demanded the segregation of the afterlife. Thank God we modern men have our choice of hells! (And here I imagine Jesus the carpenter constructing the atheist's modest coffin, and his disciples writing the post-modern atheist's coffee-table book of coffins, while 'Little Red Corvette' by Prince plays in the background.)

All of which wouldn't even matter, except that they have opened a McDonald's across the street from the Kremlin, and I can't help but feel that somehow I am living in a weird, Gorbachev-guarded purgatory. And yesterday outside the McDonald's I saw a withered old Babushka beating her granddaughter over the head with a big plastic purse full of flowers, and there are no little red corvettes here, no corvettes of any kind -


[incomprehensible scribbling, followed by a not-bad sketch of The Hamburgler, followed by an amazing sketch of The Grimace with Gorbachev's head on it]


The other day, for instance, in an ugly moment of homesickness, I read about people who kill themselves by jumping off the Golden Gate bridge, which is the most enormous middle finger to your ancestors you can possibly extend, but which in their waterlogged hearts they probably felt was romantic. All those mamushkas and papushkas, packing up their life savings in paper bags, lugging the family history in boxes, boarding the boats, surviving the ghettos, searching for gold - a century, two centuries just spent in paying rent - and then, what’s this? Your great, great, great grandson shuffles off the Golden Gate into San Francisco Bay with only his tie to wave thanks and goodbye in his wake.


I don't carry a gun anymore, nor do I adopt dogs and cats. Does this mean I have grown old?


Your bedridden and inevitably hellbound brother,
Angelo


P.S. With regards to your insistence that birds can't understand God:

What about willow tree-cathedrals for the gospel of sparrows?
And what about the resurrection of swans in the spring?
Many a mass in St. Basil's has been dumbstruck by doves.
The vibration of the organ shakes them from their perch in the rafters,
and the poor priest, having lost his congregation, can only watch and wait it out as they circle the ceiling for the length of an endless hymn.

P.P.S. Please refrain from calling me a faggot - I can practically hear you saying it from across the ocean. "Angy, you are a faggot. A beautiful, beautiful faggot."

P.P.P.S. What do you call a quarter pounder with cheese in Russia?....
"A fucking miracle."

return room, friday, summer shift

Early morning, the stained glass window in the north wall of Wilson library discolors beautifully a construction crane uplifting a handful of men in mismatched hard hats. They scrub seriously with spare rags the permanent spots, as if stained glass were a curable cold and not a fixed condition. Their furrowed brows, their tongues curled between their lips, their neon-taped shirts all freckle the window, which resembles a kaleidoscope wavering between arrangements. A little later, near the central bathroom, a worker glimpses the inside of a forbidden maintenance closet, with its rainbow of rags hanging to dry on the wall and the startled face of the janitor who always, no matter the time, smells of a recently smoked cigarette.


Just before lunch and just outside the elevator, the president's wife, who coincidentally resembles another more famous president's wife, stands slightly stooped over the slightly too-small desk of a coworker's crowded office, her skinny leg made shapely by the lift of a leather pump, key-lime green to match the key-lime suit and skirt she wears at least once a month, which certain library employees snidely refer to as her 'leprechaun suit.' She is like a voluptuous line-backer dipped in popsicle paint.


During the hazy hours of the day, we find a circus of commanders and coquettes from Circulation, the mysterious boss or underling who magics themselves from who-knows-what-department to push carts or pester the maintenance man, the old friend, the skinny son, the tour group parents and their pale, perplexed children; and sometimes in passing we note the way stray dreadlocks are constantly escaping from the woolly turban of the poet Frost who works upstairs.


At lunch, the ominous notes of a cello being tuned in preparation for a lawn performance sound for all the world like a distressed woman about to phone home or hospital, and the shock of sun sliding over the music library's window with the concert banner clinging to its ledge by a single piece of tape, and the woman stepping up to its ledge, in slow motion, to shout for a silent second at a bassoonist in the orchestra below – all these charms can't quite calm the nagging anger that I've just paid upwards of five dollars for a single wedge sandwich.

Letter to Walt Whitman

Walt Whitman,


You were the one at the foot of the bed in a folding chair, passing your hat back and forth from hand to hand as you told what you could remember of the daily papers and then dug inside yourself for something more to talk about with the man in the bed. You passed on the sidewalk and said nothing but saw the boy and the man throwing long passes at each other in the gravel street and heard the scuffle of heels digging in to support the momentum of the pass, the ball spinning in a more or less perfect clockwise spin all the way until it hit the calloused palms at the other end and impacted that spin into the dense smack of leather. You left your hat on the window sill as you walked around the house, leaving no thing uninspected for signs of life. Did they come to life because they had always been alive? Or was it you who touched them and made them so?

You, who stood for hours over the sink with your arms contorted into the postures of a sculptor and made your face into a mask of absolute concentration as you prepared the vegetables for soup, and you who stood over the same sink after many years had passed but not so many as to forget all the times before, weeping. You, who stood and wept, and you, who could not yet understand the loving act of weeping, but knew how empathy made the shoulders hunch toward the chest under the shared, invisible pull of the heart. You were the one who lived in the old blue trailer on the bank of the slough, and the one who died in it, and the one who hid behind it with your back tense against the rusted metal, your skin wet and sulfurous from the slough, your eyes adjusting to the sudden dark and the shock of such private knowledge. You were the one inside the toy chest when it was closed and the one who vanished when it was opened, and the cough of dust which spiraled out into the sunlight of the living.

You saw the weeds growing up and through and all around the cars which had been parked for decades in the fields behind the houses where people stayed up talking around fires, and you pulled the weeds, long vines with blossomed roots raining dirt, through the windowless driver’s side door until you had cleared a seat for yourself, and crawled in and smelled the decomposing leather and knew the story of things going back into the earth. You were the one who leaned painlessly down and reached your gloved hand out to show how the road curved back in, away from the coast, back in toward the little towns full of houses with flags in the upper story windows and porches indistinguishable from sidewalks.

How did you know they would be coming? What comfort can your clean-haired Yankee girls sew for me? And what bushels of what long-dead harvest can your slave pick for me? How did you know that the closer you listen, the less there is to say? How did you unlearn to speak? Where did you unlearn your shame? Where did you unlearn to write and what instrument is in you that you use, instead, which echoes so loudly but is still a secret? You know that all I have to give in order to be wise is my life, and my life is all I have, and it’s only mine for the length of a line or two.