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.