2007-02-07 - 2:13 a.m.
Did I mention last time that a job at a public library is remarkably lacking in glamour?
Well, here I am, taking a break at one of the nice wooden library tables, and across from me is this homeless scoundrel who’s all but covered with his own filth. A shaggy beard bristles from his chin and he wears a plaid Goodwill shirt over baggy sex-killer blue jeans. Every so often some… thing… falls out of the top of his shaggy grey mop of hair and lands on the table in front of him. Is it dandruff? I am not quite sure, because when the thing flops off his head, he tends to reach over and squish it. So it is lice, I think.
And then, when I was just shelving books, this horrid creature came up to me and, with one eye wandering and a steady stream of mucus dribbling from his nose onto the rows of books at eye level, he croaked, “I’m looking for Hitler. Where is Hitler? Take me to Hitler!”
Now, the old Johnny Darling, who is not prone to enjoy discoursing with homeless creeps and drooling lunatics, would instantaneously have told the filthy cretin to get lost. I mean, he’s a loathsome dirty dog who sits in the library from dawn to dusk, now snoozing, now farting in the stacks, now rummaging through his big plastic baggy of old underwear and tin cans, now readjusting his tin foil hat. The old Johnny Darling would curtly tell the fellow to just take a flying leap into a bucket of Lysol or go for a roll in a bath of boiling hot cooties-dissolving solvent.
But, alas, the New Johnny Darling is now in Customer Service. And he has been told that every single person who comes into the Santa Monica Public Library is a “customer” and must be treated like one. And so, when the chap addressed me as his equal – no, he addressed me as his servant -- I gently and mildly smiled a happy grin (which my mother has seen and which she has referred to as being “the smarmiest thing I have ever seen on a human face”) and I guided the loathsome bag-lump to the Biography 921 H section of the library so he could rant and rave and sputter over the Hitler books to his heart’s content. That is my new life.
Customer Service! Do you know, until now, I don’t think that I have ever been in customer service in my whole life. All my life I have been a spoiled Jewish prince of the New York Blood! And as for being in Customer Service is concerned -- I wish that the experience had been indefinitely postponed. Why, at ten in the morning, just before the main doors open, there is this silly fellow who sits in front of a microphone by the front desk and he makes this loud announcement over the public address system.
He burbles, “Ladies and gentlemen! The library is about to open. Will everyone please go to their Work Stations and get ready for another day of giving excellent customer service!” And then you must go to your places, with your little metal cart, and putter about shoving books into various places in the stacks.
Actually, the moment right before the library opens is my very favorite part of the shift, if you must know. You see, starting at about an hour before the library opens, the glassed walls start to be surrounded by an increasingly large swarm of people, all peeping through the window and impatiently waiting to come in. The bums start to surround the building at about 8:30, while the elderly retirees start arriving at around 9:15. By 9:45, there are always about a dozen young mothers with strollers waiting to roll on into the children’s library.
And they all press against the glass walls that surround the interior of the building, blinking and making fish faces at you while you shelve books. It’s like you are a creature at the zoo looking at them looking at you – or perhaps you are in a fish tank. But then at 10 precisely, the doors swing open and there’s this legion of folks who SWARM through the doors, spreading out through the building’s two floors and the kiddies’ library. It’s like a zombie attack. Words can’t possibly describe it: It’s like an army of folks, all shuffling and intent on their free lunch.
I think you are going to find me going off on The Homeless more and more as I continue this gig. You see, there is a homeless shelter not two blocks away from the library. And, it is a well known thing that the homeless shelter tosses out all its residences at around nine in the morning. Where is one to go if one is homeless and has nothing but free time?
Why, one goes direct to the library, where one can loll around in comfy chairs, have a pleasant snooze, and bask in all the luxury provided by the taxpayers’ largesse. I admit, libraries are supposed to be for everyone, the rich, the poor, and the in between – but the rich and the in between have all be crowded out by the homeless, and are understandably too terrified to step into the place for fear of catching TB, Typhus, and the Whooping Baglady Cough.
I must confess that nothing had really prepared me for the sheer filthiness of the place and of the work. You think of libraries as being rather clean and tidy places, and certainly the Santa Monica Library, with its gleaming spires and gorgeous tables and airy views and comfy arm chairs would seem to fit the bill. But the thing is, somehow, after a shift of working at the library, one is covered from head to toe with dust and sweat and drool and that last old Russian’s weird aroma. A miasma of filthiness permeates one when one scratches below the sparkling surface. And the stink! Some of those bag creeps smell of things long since buried. The place is decidedly unwholesome when you look closely and deeply.
Anyway, what else is to be said. It is what it is, and it is my life now. Oh, don’t get me wrong, I am still doing some lovely story analysis – I get scripts all the time. And I even do an occasional review or two for the Big Paper and the New Paper. But my taking this gig seems to me to be a realization that instead of being career tracked, I am but a collection of part time jobs, sipping at many troughs and not doing anything well.
