A Short Guide to the People Who Still Use the Library, Part 2

Exhibit A: The John Wayne Busey (May Or May Not Wear a Clown Suit)

This terrifying library patron draws teddy bears on the little pieces of scratch paper at the circulation desk and puts hand sanitizer on his face. At some point in your brief but disturbing relationship with him you will find yourself revising his Fairhaven College application essay, in which the full extent of his manifold psychosis is described, denied, and then decorated with teddy bears. Which wouldn't be so bad, except that according to my Encyclopedia of Little Things Lonely People Mistake For Big Things, the casual revision of a personal essay is an instigating factor in 89% of all cases of murder-suicide. A full scale editing job with stylistic suggestions, depending on the color of pen used, can escalate a bipolar schizophrenic from a 'Gary Busey' to a 'John Wayne Gacy,' something known in psychology journals as the Busey-Gacy Vowel Shift. The condition is widely considered irreversible, although it is rumored that Gary Busey himself shifts between the Busey and Gacy phases several times a month, in accordance with the fullness of the moon. Eventually, of course, the John Wayne Busey terrifies one too many students and has to be escorted out of the library by campus police.



Exhibit B: The Traveling Salesman

Sporting a wrinkled trench coat and clinging to a tattered briefcase like a wet rat to a heap of garbage, this library patron calls to mind the hungry-eyed businessmen of the Great Depression. Some say he speaks five languages; some say he once rode a camel bareback through the Mongolian dessert for three elective credits and a bag of potatoes. He comes in on the heels of an autumn wind and departs with the first spring lightning storm, leaving trails of legal size paper and food crumbs in his wake. What's in the briefcase? Monopoly money? Bread? Heroin? Whatever the case, the contents of his briefcase are mere chump change in comparison to the solid Mongolian gold of his soul.



Exhibit C: The Hand Sanitizer Enthusiast

A comic miracle occurs every time this library patron approaches the desk and, unable to resist the bottle of hand sanitizer at the counter, sics himself upon it like a spring pig on a pile of truffles. He gets elbows-deep in the sweet, cool burn of alcoholic soap and seems to say with his eyes, 'If you're just going to do a couple of pumps, you might as well take a bath in your own shit. A real man needs at least ten pumps. If chickens did ten pumps, we wouldn't have bird flue. If we had dipped the 80's in ten pumps, Reagan would still be president.'



In the library, as in life, such tragedies are commonplace.

Personality Profile: Mr. Fancy Socks

"I got up one morning and couldn't find my socks, so I called Information. She said, 'Hello, Information.' I said, 'I can't find my socks.' She said, 'They're behind the couch.' And they were!" - Stephen Wright



It is a widely held notion in academic circles that the psychological prototype for Mr. Fancy Socks developed as a way to assert and maintain social status among rival males, much like the antler-clashes of elk, or the knife-fights of New England lobsters.* In every university library, for instance, there is one male staff member who is taller, better-dressed, and more learned in the fields of pop music and Greek food than any other staff member. He wears his heart on his sleeve, his sleeves unbuttoned, and his glasses on a cloth chain hand-braided by the women of a small Tibetan village. Many of the female university population harbor secret and fantastic crushes on him, and many men jealously believe him to be a homosexual. Clearly, there is only room for one Mr. Fancy Socks in this Library Town; and yet, there is always a corresponding Double in the university faculty, an English or Philosophy professor who is similarly tall and coiffed, an expert on pitas and Proust. Who is the better man? That depends.

Who wears fancier socks?

It begins with harmless show-boating: a pose struck with legs crossed, a second too long spent tying his shoes. If he is feeling saucy, which Mr. Fancy Socks almost always is, he'll click his heels together to let you know about it. He is a cashmere coyote in a pair of road runners. On warm days he wears tennis anklets that whisper passages from 'Lolita' to no one in particular. But what begins as leisure and light soon escalates into full-blown war, until eventually Mr. Fancy Socks is resting a leg on some poor unsuspecting librarian's card catalog and rolling up a pant cuff so that the full length of the sock is revealed ad infinitum, at which point the rival will 9 times out of 10 suffer devastating and irreversible heartbreak. The alpha male will make his victory known by smacking the reference librarian square on her fanny. "Bought 'em off a hobo in Prague for a bottle of mescaline," he'll say, and chuckle to himself. And you won't even bat an eye, because you just know - you just know, just looking at him - that Mr. Fancy Socks did inconceivable amounts of mescaline in Prague. His status assured, the rest of the semester will sail by like a dream inside of another dream, or like a barrel full of mescaline floating down the Vltava river in Prague. For a while, he is King.

These men, though they appear as infallible lions in a savanna of social perfection, are inwardly the most vulnerable of meerkats. According to my Almanac of Statistics on the Use of Fancy Socks as a Psychological Defense, 87% of them have had their sexuality questioned in public, 90% of them have undergone a tempestuous love affair with pesto-flavored mayonnaise, and a whopping 96% of them have had their taste in foreign films and/or ethnic foods insulted at a dinner party.**

So next time you see one of these gentle bohemian beasts lounging book-side, remember the silent language of fancy socks: argyle spells anxious, paisley means divorce, and silk blends spell unresolved sibling rivalry issues, possibly brought about by early childhood trauma. Have compassion. Be kind. Say, "Hey, Mr. Fancy Socks. I see you. I dig your digs. I'm picking up what you're putting down, and I know you're a good man."





*Not true.

**For more on this subject, I suggest 'Barefoot In The Snow: The Souls of the Sockless, Shoeless, and Otherwise Spiritually Fried.'(Vikingman Press, 1998.)


Editor's Note: For information regarding the other type of Sock War, wherein prepubescent boys roll up their socks into balls and hurl them at each other until they physically exhaust themselves, please see "Blood, Bleach, and Masturbation: The Suburban Sock Wars of the 1990s." (Everyman Press, 2002.)

A Petition to Hate the Black Widow Spider Even More Than We Already Do, with notes from the Encyclopedia of Lies Science Told Us

Editor's Note: I wrote this for a friend who asked me to write a short piece on the Black Widow, assuming he meant the terrible, terrible spider. Later he clarified that he was referring to the Bellingham transvestite who goes by the same name - but it was too late.







Ah, the Black Widow! It is difficult to conceive of a thing more instinctively terrifying and repulsive than a Black Widow spider, barring certain names which may leap to mind in the arena of political radio. The spider's name alone is enough to inspire a shiver of disgust in the spine and a compulsive desire to be fed ice cream. It has been turned into legend at Fourth-of-July barbecues for millennia. Its picture is drawn in hieroglyphs. There are sculptures in Rome of fathers re-enacting the time a Black Widow was hiding in the toe of one of his slippers, and sculptures of their wives and children listening in gape-jawed rapture, potato chips tumbling from their mouths. The Black Widow is universally feared and hated, and this is the way it should be.


But we need to step it up.


The Black Widow has not been "misunderstood." She is not "just as afraid of you" as you of her. There is nothing going on inside her staggeringly tiny brain that deserves the misty-eyed adoration of the weird ladies who guard the Arthropod exhibits at zoos like grandmothers drifting through cat emporiums, bestowing upon tarantulas and flesh-eating beetles names like "Sir Laurence" and "Maude." In fact, there is nothing inside the Black Widow at all except a jumble of nerves, a system of glands, and a perfect replica of all the reoccurring nightmares of the entire human race.


Do you know how a black widow eats? I'll tell you how a black widow eats.


The Black Widow eats by thrusting its Nosferatu fangs into the live body of its victim, tightly bound in a straight jacket made of silk, paralyzing and saturating the body in what science magazines politely call "digestive enzymes," but which my Encyclopedia of Lies Science Told Us informs me is actually called Death Acid. The Death Acid partially dissolves the victim, and what can't be liquefied, the spider grinds into meat pudding with its enormous, H.P. Lovecraftian teeth. All of which, mind you, happens while the victim is still alive. That's how a Black Widow eats. She wraps you in cellophane, turns you into a smoothie and drinks you. The only creature that eats in a more horrific way than a Black Widow spider is a starfish - but starfish are redeemed by clinging to rocks in tide pools, being available in pastel colors, and possessing the ability to regrow their own limbs. None of which can be said for the Black Widow!


And do you know what else? The Black Widow doesn't even deserve to be called a widow. The word widow evokes a certain sympathy, a certain painful understanding of the tragedy of outliving a loved one. But how many widows do you know who are widows because they murdered and ate their own husbands after sex? According to my Almanac of Statistics On The Frequency of Post-Coital Homicide, you know almost none. There are only two such widows living in the United States, and both of them are very famous. And you, reader, probably don't know anybody famous at all. You want a widow? Jackie Kennedy. You want a black widow? Coretta Scott King. Those are real widows. And neither of them ate their husbands. Actually, both of their husbands were assassinated, and I wouldn't be surprised if Black Widow spiders were involved.


Perhaps we ought to call it what it really is: a Nazi spider. Because like the Nazis, it tortures and kills its own kind. Like the Nazis, the females are larger and more frightening than the males, and they lay eggs. And like Nazism, it's one of the worst things in history, poisoning whoever it touches and permitted only in the complete absence of a just and loving God. And so what if it kills flies. Who cares? We all kill more flies in our sleep than spiders do in a year - a year which, for humans, is filled with beautiful human things like eating takeout and shopping for sheets, but for a spider is filled with terrible, disgusting, unacceptable spider things, like murdering and eating your sex partners.