THE POET : CHAPTER 3

 

THREE

 

Stately, curvaceous Lena Alvarez was bent over a truck full of YA books, absently perusing some epic, dystopic tome that Gigi had been known to squee and boast about on social networking sites. Her blue bunny-eared cell phone was sticking out of the back pocket of a pair of dark track pants the way it always did. Lena’s hair was raven dark. I liked the way it fell river-like down her back almost to her waist. I loved the way she bent over book trucks.

            “Well, it’s about time you got to work,” Hazel said, from her little pod at the ugly yellow reference desk. She looked from me to Lena then back again.

            “The student loan people texted me the same thing just now,” I said. I looked at the reference desk; the seat next to Hazel was empty. “Where’s Captain Cannabis?”

            “No good morning? No hello?” Hazel glared at me with her beady, heavily made-up eyes but I would not capitulate. Salutations were not my forte. Casual conversation was a criminal offence. “Willy called off again.”

            “The usual malaise or did the alimony check fail to show up in the mail?”

            “You know, Rand, let me just tell you….”

Hazel ran down her litany of problems and transgressions while I watched Lena shelve books, and thought about blowing off my work day looking at Larissa Haven-St. Claire yoga pics on Facebook. Hazel De Vitis was the bane of our little library branch. There was always something wrong in her world. The library patrons smelled. Old men hit on her. Willy smelt like urine. Art films were the library peddling porn in secret. The lunch she ordered was wrong, and obviously the fault of the Latino delivery man who bore her wrath upon his return. Jill was unfair to her. Willy stared at her breasts when he addressed her. Scott was weird. Sheldon was a closet case. Lena was probably an illegal. The liberals were taking over America. So were the Mexicans and Muslims and the Chinese. She separated the good Blacks from the bad Blacks, and was never racist but….

Hazel made for good poem fodder. She said a lot of dumb shit. Sadly, she also saw everything. She knew everything. Last week I’d found a stack of my poems stuffed in the reference desk. I’d never told anyone at the branch that I wrote, but I guess I had to be crazy to think that people didn’t look each other up online. At the moment Hazel was my prime suspect. “…and because of Willy calling out again I had to open this place alone,” she said, at the end of her breathless crescendo. “And opening up alone is against union rules.”

“So is dancing alone,” I said. “Or is it just referred to as dancing with myself? I can never get that ri…”

“I tried calling and calling your cell, but you refused to answer.”

“Call it kismet or the fact that I don’t carry a cell phone.”

“You just said the student loan people texted you.”

“Did I say text? I meant fire signals.”

“What kind of person doesn’t have a cell phone these days?” But I’d reached Hazel capacity and stopped listening. My eyes gave themselves over to Lena once again. Until Hazel snapped me to attention. “Hello? And did you hear me? There are ants. Ants!”

            “Good. It looked like the cockroaches here were getting lonely,” I said.

“That’s your response to all of these problems?” she said. “Bad jokes?”

“I left my can of Raid in my other jeans.” Hazel sat back in her chair, crossed her arms over that mound of cleavage that Willy loved so much. She glared. “Fine. Where are these nefarious ants, Hazel?”

“Your office of course, Mr. Funny Man.”

She got up from her chair. Hazel was dressed in a full powder blue, crushed velvet sweat suit open just enough to the chest for the big gold and twisted cornicello to dangle there O.G. style. She had cowboy boots on for added effect. The cowboy boots sounded like horse hooves on pavement. They made patrons sitting at the computers and chairs wince. The same set of the same people every morning. Liberal newspaper guy. Conservative newspaper guy. Online Application woman who’d only recently met Twentieth Century technology. Mr. Down Low. Senior Nose-picker. Dr. Captain Your WiFi doesn’t work. The guy who would eventually go into the bathroom and sit on the toilet naked until we threatened to call the cops. The legendary Truancy Kid numbing himself on a dozen hours of video games. I felt like the hungover star of a shitty sitcom cast every single day. And today I was working on a big one.

            “Right here,” Hazel said in the office doorway. There were hundreds of ants. They were coming out of a cable-line sized hole in the wall in a long single-file trail. The fucking automatons. They marched behind my desk, across the room and over to Sheldon’s desk. The ants were making a long climb up into the many fast food bags that he had upright and scattered on the floor. For storage, he’d said. “Can you even believe this?”

            “I’m against zealotry in any forms,” I said. Ants or no ants all I wanted to do was sit down in my seat and beg another day away. I still had those yoga pics to view. But thanks to Willy I’d be desk jockeying it as soon as I got my bearings. Thank goodness his kid’s program wasn’t going on that day.

            Hazel grabbed a broom that she’d had lying in wait. She began sweeping the ants from behind my desk into the center of the room. They rolled and shook in small black mounds. Hazel stepped on them with her boots. Once the first wave of the genocide was over, she went to Sheldon’s desk. Hazel grabbed the fast food bags and crunched them killing legions more. Every ant had paid for trespassing with its life. I sat down at my desk and waited for the carnage to end.

            “He’s a pig,” Hazel said. Then she stormed out of the office with the fast food bags.

            Sheldon Mays was, in fact, a pig. Our office was littered with food scraps from various take-out establishments. His desk top was a haven for used napkins, used floss and stained plastic utensils. The random dried leaf of fast food burger lettuce littered the landscape. The ants were right to charge forth here. So were the roaches and flies. So were the mice. So was the rumored rat. In harder times the office would’ve had a Hooverville of hungry men huddling over a campfire sucking on his forgotten ketchup packets.

But Sheldon was also the library branch manager. He was my boss. It really wasn’t my place to say shit about the mess or bring up his hygiene. I knew how the hierarchical American work system ran, even within the safe haven of a non-profit with a union. Plus, at forty-two I still picked my daily wardrobe up off my bedroom floor, so who in the hell was I to judge? Plus, Sheldon left yours truly the fuck alone. He was a shit-ton eccentric, but in the two years I’d shared this grimy cell with him I’d never once Googled I want to kill my boss. A new record for me. I could’ve had it worse in terms of supervisors than one who ate anchovies out of tin and collected paper clips hued in strange and unusual colors. I had done worse.

            “Ants,” I heard Hazel shout out in the library proper.

            I didn’t want to be at the job. Being a librarian wasn’t hard; I just didn’t want to work at all. But due to my finances I couldn’t retire until I was pushing seventy. That meant almost another thirty years doing this or something else. Shit, Willy was probably right to call out so often. He was sixty-whatever, and because of his own fucked financial situation, the retirement light was still dim in the distance for him. If his absence hadn’t constantly fucked me over, I’d find the old codger’s tenacity admirable.

“I don’t see any goddamned ants,” I looked up from my PC. Jill and Hazel were camped in my doorway.

            “I told you I already killed them all,” Hazel said.

            “Then what are you telling me about this for?”

            “She gets some kind of penalty from the ghosts of Romulus and Remus if she doesn’t speak every other minute,” I said.

            “Don’t make fun of my heritage,” Hazel said. She clutched her cornicello.

Jill looked at me and rolled her eyes. She was the clerical head at the library branch. For all of Hazel’s bitching about her she treated Jill like a surrogate mother, even though there was maybe ten years between the two of them, plus Hazel’s nagging racism toward black people. Jill wasn’t the mothering type. Squat with gray hair and bottle cap glasses, she was as Brooklyn as it got. I’d once watched her muscle two big dudes out of the library with her elbows. The brothers didn’t know what hit them. They stared in shock as they kept backing up toward the door; Jill coming at them like a pulling football guard. She took no bullshit. But we got along pretty good. Jill knew I’d been kicked around.

            “I’m telling you because something has to be done about him,’ Hazel said, gesturing to Sheldon’s desk.

            “Why not trample him to death too,” I said.  “Take him out and shoot him.”

            “It’s an idea,” Hazel said. She would’ve fit in well during Mussolini’s reign.

            “And you?” Jill hit my shoulder. “Aren’t you supposed to be at a meeting?”

            “Meetings are for the bored and listless,” I said. I closed out the Facebook. No Larissa doing yoga for me. “Some people need dull things like meetings and the National Football League to justify their existence and fill up their time. I already have vodka and my enemies list, so I’m skipping it.”

            “Rand, you skipped the last three,” Hazel said.

            “And thank you for keeping tabs on me.” I could smell that anonymous union phone call. A mediocre poet and a meeting skipper! Rand Wyndham: Public Fucking Enemy Number One.

            “I see that geriatric pot-head isn’t at his desk,” Jill said. “Are you gonna talk to him or am I going to have to do it for you?”

            “I want to discuss Willy’s behavior with him about as much as I want anal warts,” I said.

            “You’re his boss, Rand.”

            “What does that even mean?” I asked. “I’m Willy’s boss and I’m Scott’s boss. But Sheldon is my boss…and Willy’s boss…and Scott’s boss. If you ask me there are too many bosses here. We’re top heavy. This is how coups begin.”

Jill shrugged. Hazel nudged her. “Still you gotta show him,” she said.

“Show me what?” I said. “What could possibly top Willy’s absence and ants?”

            “No…it’s…it’s nothing,” Jill said. She had a yellow Post-it Note in her hand. She handed it to me. There was a drawing of a dude with a beard and glasses. I recognized it as my own work. I’d done it only last week while stuck on the reference desk. Willy’s reference desk.

            “Guess I should cancel the drawing lessons,” I said. I tossed the Post-it on my desk. “Call the MoMA and postpone the career retrospective.”

            “It’s Scott,” Hazel said. She crossed her arms and glared at me as if I’d shit on her daily bowl of macaroni. Where did one find a powder blue, crushed velvet jumpsuit these days?

            “It’s not Scott,” I said.

            “It looks just like him, Rand.”

            “Maybe it’s an abstract interpretation of you,” I said.

            “I’ll call the union.”

“Stop creating problems, Hazel,” Jill said.

            The hands went to her hips. The mouth opened wide. Hazel was appalled. Her fragile Italian sensibilities had been hurt. “I didn’t do anything,” she said. “Willy showed Scott this picture last week when they were changing places at the reference desk. He asked me who drew it and I said maybe Rand. Then he says, Hazel, this looks like me. I didn’t know what to say, so I says, yeah, a little bit. It does. Even Willy thought so.”

            “I’m glad the whole bloody salon agreed,” I said. ‘Still you could’ve said nothing.”

            “I’m an honest person…and he was upset. You know Scott. He’s so quiet. I just felt bad for him.”

            “Except for when he’s in the bathroom for too long. Or when he breathes too loudly or sits at his desk, or basically when he just acts like a human being.” I looked at Jill. “So now Scott is upset I take it.”

            “He’s a milquetoast just like the other two here,” she said. “But you need to talk to him anyway just to clear this all up.”

            I checked my watch. “Is he here?” Calming the already comatose Scott Miller far outweighed going to that meeting.

            “No,” Hazel said. “You have him working late…again.”

            Then there was a crash out in the main library proper. Lena screamed. The three of us left the office to a scene of three ceiling tiles having crashed to the floor. Lena stood there her hand over her chest, a few feet away from the carnage. She looked ready to cry but when she saw Jill she let out a nervous laugh. This wasn’t our first tile crash. We had empty spaces of ceiling all over. We had bookshelves coming off their hinges. We had black mold in certain, secret spaces. There was Asbestos rumored to be underneath the floor tiles. Ants. Roaches. Medieval Orcs. Hell, we were lucky the a/c and the heat worked. If only there was a city council rep to call.

            “Son-of-a…” Jill said. Then she charged into the scene. Hazel followed after her. 

            I went back into the office. Fuck ceiling tiles. The mess could stay on the floor until I retired or won the inevitable class-action lawsuit against the city of New York for all I cared. I checked my email. To my absolute shock and surprise there was a message from Carolina. All it said was lunch with a question mark. A loaded question if ever there was one. But there’d be no lunch for Rand Wyndham today thanks to Willy not showing for the job. I hoped he drowned in the bathtub, after smoking a tainted J. I looked out of the office at the calamity of Jill waving her hands at Hazel, and Hazel waving her hands back at Jill. Lena continued to stand there as if she’d witnessed a major crime. Patrons went back to the lull of newspapers and the internet. I wrote back to Carolina, drinks, also with a question mark. Then I grabbed my shit and went to take my place on desk.