The Poet : Chapter 23

 

TWENTY-THREE

 

I had a hangover but there I was at a fucking manager’s training meeting, trapped in a stifling room full of librarians. My debt to society and an effort to keep HR off of my back. There must’ve been fifty people in the room. They were talking shop, which meant gossip. Some of them were sucking on coffee and eating stale pastries. Everyone had their gadgets out. I hardly knew any of my so-called colleagues. Almost a decade between my two tenures and I was still a stranger. The ones I did know I didn’t want to talk to. They generally felt the same about me. Our mutual indifference had turned into a subtle dislike.

Most of these masters of library science were fanning themselves. It was now mid-January and it was still fifty degrees out. The room was pumping the heat like the climate wasn’t breaking down before our eyes. Yesterday it had been sixty-five. They were predicting a blizzard for the weekend, which basically made Oleg Nostradamus in Hazel’s eyes. People walked around in sunny stupors talking about how great the weather was. Fifty degrees outside and damned near eighty in this room. No one thought to shut the heat off. People did as they expected to do in the past. It was easy to see how our elected leaders took us all for a ride, or manipulated the masses with empty platitudes like the good old orange-faced billionaire was doing. We were bound to drown at some point down the line.

I took my usual seat in the back against the wall. The front of the room had a laptop and wires connected to a projector screen that was casting shadows all over its blue light. “Okay, okay…” The voice belonged to a fine-looking woman in a tight black skirt that showed off her legs. Leticia Vazquez. She was some newbie in HR trying to make a name for herself. Her emails were ubiquitous in my work mailbox. They were senseless. They were business jargon Newspeak. Phrases like: touch base offline; blue sky thinking; thought shower…I had no clue what she talking about. “Can anybody answer for me: what is a good manager?”

            Like clockwork the hands went up. Leticia had her pick of the liter. It astounded me how participatory people were at meetings. I shut my eyes and started thinking about my book. Fidel had not delivered beyond that PDF as he so promised. Another manana was all he’d had left me in my Gmail as of yesterday morning.

            “A good manager is someone who inspires,” someone said.  I didn’t bother to look at who’d said it. Looking at them would only raise my ire.

            “Good,” Leticia said.

            “A good manager is caring.”

            “A good manager is bold.”

            “A good manager is fair.”

            “Good, good, and good,” Leticia said. “What about you?”

            Holy Christ, she was pointing at me. The whole room turned. Every face was lit up like a dim bulb waiting to see what I had to say. “A good manager leaves people alone to do their job,” I finally mumbled.

            “Or doesn’t vomit in front of children,” came the soft voice of some rando who thought they had me pegged. People laughed. I’d failed the responsible adult test again.

            We were all managers in that room. We were all caring and bold and fair. Like hell. Yeah, I might’ve puked in front of a pack of little brats, but I knew for a fact that some of these people were Hitler-like autocrats hated by their subordinates with a passion unparalleled. At least one had been attacked.  Two or three had standing lawsuits filed against them. One was being sued by his whole staff. Some were so corrupt they could’ve run for public office or president. There was no such thing as a good manager. Someone always hated the boss. Just ask Willy Abelman. I still hated bosses even though I kind of was one.

            This good manager business went on for another ten minutes. I sat there and suffered it. Occasionally I glanced at the big shots in the room. What a cackling band of bloated doughnut shovelers! The big shits were whispering and laughing. We were their fools. We were their amusement for the day. I was already done with this. I wanted out and I was needed elsewhere. I was damned near certain Willy had called off again.

“Okay,” Leticia said.  “I’m going to break you all up into five groups. When I point at you count off 1,2,3…”

            Leticia started pointing and we started counting. We were no longer people. We were 1’s or 2’s, or 3’s, 4’s, and 5’s. I was a 1. If I hated ice breakers, I hated group activities even more. When we were done counting, we had to meet with our group in our designated area of the room. It was bedlam. Librarians got up and chit-chatted.  Some wandered off for more coffee and pastries. Others stumbled around asking each other the ubiquitous question: is this where I’m supposed to go? Leticia had to clap her hands to get people on the correct path. Corralling librarians was like corralling the drooling and meandering insane. But with each clap her tight ass shook. Leticia could’ve clapped all day.

I had at least two people in my group whom I loathed; Edith Allen and Felicia Collins. Edith had the appearance of a burdened toad and the personality to match. She called Sheldon up to five or six times a day, complaining about people at her branch. Rumor had it they were having an affair. The very idea of picturing those two copulating had the bile rising in my stomach as quickly as if I were in a room full of impressionable children. As for Felicia, it seemed that in each and every one of these management training meetings, the ones that I went to anyway, we called the same number and inevitably ended up in the same group. We were cosmically linked by the unfortunate power of numbers. Felicia looked just like a newly hatched chick with glasses that were too big for her face.

            “I want you all to pick a team leader,” Leticia shouted over the cacophony of displaced library managers. Edith was voted ours. I hadn’t voted. My apathy and the hangover had caused me to abstain from the process of voting for perturbed toads. It was one of the few moments where I wished that I had one of those smart phones. I could check and see if Larissa had written me back. Maybe I could chat with her. Discuss yoga. Make new memories. Keep pretending that I hadn’t told Carolina I loved her. What an out-of-control old rummy I’d become.

            “I’m surprised you’re actually at this meeting,” Felicia said to me.

            “I couldn’t bear to be without you a second longer.”

            “Don’t be fresh, Rand Wintchell!”

            “Okay then I’ll be honest, this meeting is one of the most blatant acts of self-flatulence that I’ve ever seen in my life,” I said. “I should’ve called in sick. At the very least I should still be down on the first-floor flirting with Sargent Thomas at the Information Desk.

            “But isn’t she Black?”

            “As Black as a moonless sky, baby,” I said “And she’s got an ass that I could ride all the way to the west coast. Plus, she’s a Rhodes Scholar, not that you’d care you judgmental bride of white supremacy.”

            “Maybe we should get you a garbage can,” she said. “In case…you know…”

            Felicia sat there grinning. She was a dim bulb if ever I saw one, and I was a public librarian. I’d seen the full range of idiots from book researchers to Oleg and Willy all the way down to Joe Q. Public masturbating to porn with his hands down his pants at the public computer. But this system had promoted Felicia again and again because they had nothing else to do with her. She refused to retire. One day they’d cart her out dead on a stretcher. Two weeks later no one would remember her name.

            Leticia pulled a big, blue plastic box up from under a table. That was nice. I was able to steal a second or two watching her ass at work. Her ass quelled the pain of existence. It tempered all my failures for the moment. “I need the team leaders to come over here and grab as many Legos as you can.”

            Legos?  Had Leticia’s ass said Legos?  It sure had. Every team leader got up to get their pile of the colored blocks. They looked like a pack of shuffling elephants. 

Edith came back with our Legos in a dirty plastic sack. She held them because she didn’t know what to do with them. We had a five-minute conversation about the fact that Edith didn’t know what to do with the Legos. Should she pass them out amongst the group? Put them on the carpet in front of us like we were five-year-olds waiting to dig-in and create. Why hadn’t Leticia given us any instruction from the start? Our group wanted to know. We were hungry for instruction; our brains were sweltering in the manufactured heat.

            “The reason you have Legos,” Leticia began, as Edith breathed a sigh of relief, “is because I want you to build something.” The crowd roared. Leticia was a Moses leading us out of our dusty, bedbug riddled Egypt. She was Jesus Christ with hot legs. “I’m going to give you twenty minutes for your team to build something together. And when we’re all done, we’re going to regroup, and everyone will have a chance to guess what you built before you tell us all about it.”

            Edith dropped the Legos and everyone dug in. Grown men and women dropped to the floor in a clacking pile of colored plastic bricks. They began building. The room became noise-filled and headache inducing at the excited chatter of my colleagues. My stomach felt ill. This was what I had mountainous student loan debt for? I felt like the crusted end of a shit-covered sneaker. And had I really made up all of Carolina’s affairs in my head? 

Suddenly a vent clicked. I looked back at the higher ups. They were still laughing through doughnut filled mouths. Were they gassing us poor bastards? I wanted to tell Felicia, anyone, to run for it. But Felicia was bent over her Legos and humming. Her granny panties were on full display. I still looked. I was a delusional heathen. Everyone else was occupied with their task as well. The room started to feel cool. It was air conditioning. Blessed, sweet heavenly air conditioning. In January! The big shots had thrown us saps a bone after all. Take that climate change.

“Rand.” I pulled myself out of my air-conditioned daze. I looked down. Edith was sitting on the floor like a peevish three-year-old girl. She was holding a Lego out to me. “You need to participate.”

            “I’m here, aren’t I?”

            “That’s not a good enough excuse.”

            “It worked for the first forty-two years,” I said. “Plus, I’m depressed by the weather.”

            Edith smirked. “It’s beautiful out.”

            “Only a sadist would say that.”         

“We’re building a bridge,” this hefty Black girl said from the floor. She was decidedly not Sergeant Thomas. But once you went Black you never went back, so she and I could probably get it on too. And when had we decided on a bridge? Thanks to Carolina I had enough bridge building these days. I looked at the structure. It was a mass of color that had been built up. It could’ve been a bridge. It could’ve been the visage of the orange-faced billionaire. It could’ve been gallows at this point.

            “I’m making the boat,” Geoffrey Lodge said to me. He was in a full suit and tie, his bald head gleaming off the lights. He was lying on the ground pushing a few blue Legos back and forth. Geoffrey irked me. He’d once sat next to me in a meeting fully admitting to the fact that he was on vacation that week, but wanted to come by to take in the action. From that moment on I considered him a domestic terrorist, and avoided him whenever I could. “You wanna help with the boat?”

            “I’ve got trouble in mind, man,” I said. “I don’t have time for your seafaring bullshit.”

            “Come on, Rand,” Edith said. She held out a Lego.

            The piece was a long rectangle of green. I placed it on top of the others and half the structure fell over. The mass sighed. They eyed me. Edith wanted my blood. I shrugged and went back to staring at the wall.

            Twenty minutes later all of our Lego structures were complete. Our team leaders were lording over the erections like proud parents. Our bridge was a pile of shit. You couldn’t pay me to cross a bridge like the one we 1’s had constructed. Leticia herself could be on the other end of the bridge, nude, waiting to usher me into the promise land between her legs and I still wouldn’t cross. 

“So, what did we all build?” Leticia asked.

            We’d all built bridges. At least four of the five groups had built them. We’d all built bridges to the future. What future? Our future. The future of silver jumpsuits, global warming, protein shake lunches, sexual fluidity, glitzy internment camps, celebrity infotainment 24/7 and orange-faced authoritarian billionaires building walls across the U.S./Mexican border. The future of televised narcissism, Islamophobia, and brain chips embedded in our skulls. The future of pseudo post-racial America where little Black kids danced with little white kids, only to have the cops still beat the shit out of them and murder them for sport, and then get acquitted by a jury of their peers.

            “Was it that hard Rand?” Edith said.

            “You ever had writer’s block or had some drunk tell you the same story over and over again because you’d made the simple mistake of sitting next to him in a bar?”  Edith shook her head. “Ever had your soul sucked up by a heartless beast in a retail uniform telling you to shave? Ever had to attend a poetry reading on a Friday night?” Again, Edith shook her head. “Then you have no basis of comparison.”

            “I thought it was fun,” Geoffrey Lodge said. 

            “So’s taking a good colon clearing shit on a Sunday morning.”

The one rogue group, the number 2’s (no pun intended they said), built the library of the future. It had an atrium and a fireplace. Their library had a computer lab for the patrons, and even a special section way in the back for those sad bastards still reading books. Of course, we couldn’t see this from the structure alone. We had to use our imaginations.  Everyone else oohed and aahed at the number 2’s creation. They were all a quick study. Geoffrey Lodge stayed on the carpet pushing his Lego schooner back and forth. 

“But we have a boat,” he said to us 1’s. 

Leticia clapped her hands. Her ass shook us all to attention. “I think it’s time we took a break for lunch,” she said.

I looked at my watch. Holy shit, it was damned near noon. Where’d my time gone?  I peeled myself away from my leather seat. I was sweat-soaked and drained. How long would this training last? I took a peek at Felicia’s agenda sheet. The paper said we were going all day. All fucking day?  What horror was to come after lunch? I read. It was two hours of role-playing exercises. If I couldn’t role play sober with my naked, tattooed yoga-poetry-whatever emo-goth girlfriend for ten minutes with a neon purple strap-on, I couldn’t role play with these people for two hours. I couldn’t watch them role play for two hours. I’d murder someone during the course of this exercise. I’d be going to jail for sure if I stayed in this management training. 

Felicia caught me looking at her agenda sheet and made an exasperated sound. Then she shoved the paper in a folder. “They sent one in your email,” she said.

“You actually read your work email?” I said.

“This one is mine.”

“Imagine no possessions,” I said. 

“I’ve heard all about you and that poetry of yours, Raymond Wyndham.”

“Rand.”

“When we come back, we’re going to discuss the three main styles of managing,” Leticia said over the din of our coming freedom. Someone clapped. And what had Felicia heard? Was I getting a reputation around the library, one other than for the head-butting and vomiting? “We’ll be discussing the repressive style, the sharing style, and the submissive style of management.” What? What? And What?  “Now, I want you to spend your lunch hour unpacking what those types could mean.”

“Some people are into the whole submission style thing,” I said to Felicia. “I’ve recently found that I like the more experimental types.”

She clutched her papers to her chest and got up.  “I’ll bet you do, Ross.”

“Rand…it’s a simple fucking name.”

“All the same you try and write a poem or head-butt me and I’ll have your job.”

I laughed. Felicia curled into herself. “I’m a pacifist now. As long as there’s a wide and vast variety of internet porn, I’ll stay docile and let the government do as it will. And fuck poetry.”

Leticia freed us from our unholy bond for the hour. Felicia took off. The poor old wretch almost smacked into a hard wood door the way she was staring me down. Others were set to disband but instead they milled about the stuffy meeting room. They wanted another look at the different Lego structures. They wanted to talk about bridges and building bridges. Christ, I needed out.

“This is what it’s all about,” Geoffrey Lodge said to me.

“This and anal warts,” I said.

“You wanna grab lunch, Rand?  And talk shop.”

“I’d rather douche an angry elephant, Geoff.”

Then I split. The sun and warmth outside were sadness anew. What had we done to this earth? I felt sullen again. Watching the people jog Prospect Park in their shorts I felt hopelessness for humanity. We screwed things up like no other.

I walked along the bustling Brooklyn streets. I had no clue where I was going, but I knew for a fact that I wasn’t going back to that management training. I wanted a stiff drink, something the Felicias and Leticias and Geoffreys of the world couldn’t fathom at this hour. I wanted to enjoy my life, if only for a short time. I wanted to soak up every moment without thought, and without worrying about the details. The sky would be the limit. I’d speak nothing to anyone of the horrors I’d witnessed here that day. I’d never mention this management training again. It would be like it never happened. It never happened anyway.

The Poet : Chapter 22

 

TWENTY-TWO

 

The woman on the stage wasn’t reading poems. She was standing there making hand gestures not unlike a flight attendant, as a voice coming out of a laptop read the poems. It might not have even been her voice. The previous poet had read his poems via Skype. And the one before him? She passed out notecards and had the audience scream back selected words at her. Hell, the very first poet of the night had turned his cell phone toward the audience so that he could record our responses to his poetry. Not a single reader had just stood on stage shakily clutching a handful of paper, simply reading words. Just another night in Brooklyn on poetry’s skid row.

            “I’d rather a cerebral hemorrhage than this,” I said.

            “Shhh,” another ardent poetry lover hissed at me.

I was at a reading at this place called Big Nick’s Poetry Barn. The space provided for the reading was a shitty, wood paneled. box-like backroom, hardly big anything, to a sports bar where you could hear the patrons playing bar trivia over the poets. I wasn’t even reading at this reading. I was attending because Larissa and everyone I knew had a slot on stage. Everyone but me. All the poets sat behind the stage like great sages while they took turns reading. At least I’d managed to get a decent amount of the bar-room trivia questions right from what I could tell. I always was a sucker for sitcom history.

“You know I thought about doing a virtual poetry reading once,” Henry Winkler said, as laptop lady finished up and the crowd went wild with poet applause and finger snaps.

“You should do one where poets duke it out on a deserted island,” I said. “Or maybe have poets tightrope walk over a shark infested tank while reciting their verse.”

“Like a poet’s circus?”

“Or a mass suicide. Honestly whatever gets some of these people off of this planet you should do. I’ll even hock my radio and chip in the cost of securing a bottle of cyanide. I’ve also been studying up on how to draw and quarter people.”

“You should promote, Ron,” Winkler said. “You might not remember to bring your poems with you, but you have good ideas.”

            “Screw this; I’m going to the bar.”

            “But none of your friends have even read yet.”

            “Friends? How dare you sir.”

“Shhhh,” someone said.

            I got up to make my escape and caught Larissa’s eye. I gave her the international sign for I need a drink and she just shook her head. But it was then that the M.C. broke in. She was this curly-headed, hot red, lipstick Tasmanian devil of a woman. She started reading a poem all about comparing her ex-boyfriend to half-caf coffee. She read the poem from a huge piece of black poster board with the words written in gold marker, like she was going to a science fair instead of some shitty reading. At least she was using paper. Then she introduced the next poet.

“Yo, yo, yo…what up?” Todd-de-de-de said prowling the stage in all his lanky doofus genius, holing out his cellphone. “My name is Todd. But I usually go by my rap name, which is Todd with three D’s. Todd-de-de-de. I’m a’goin’ get this shiznit started on point, that is, Todd-de-de-de would like to read you some of my poems…ah, just to show ya’ll what I’m all ‘bout. Poker with The Joker…”

“If only I could cyanide that poor bastard first,” I said.

“What do you think about a Caribbean-themed reading,” Winkler whispered, as Todd-de-de-de continued his jive.

“To be honest it gives me the shits,” I said. Then I left.

I was somewhere into my second boiler maker. Trivia was over, so I was listening to the bartenders talk about their big art projects and having the usual barroom debate about Goddard versus Jacques Rivet films. The orange-faced billionaire was on the television screaming in closed caption about immigrants or the so-called liberal media or something that would leave the bitter distaste of impending authoritarianism in all of our mouths come the next morning. I got up to play the digital juke. I put on that good old New Jack Swing much to the chagrin of my slender, bearded, bespectacled, ofay, organically fed, vegan, tattooed bar mates. Fuck them, I thought. Black Lives only mattered to their type because they had unread James Baldwin books on their shelves. Tonight, I was playing Bobby fucking Brown.

“Drinking alone in a bar,” Carolina said. By the grace of Allah, she sat right next to me. All those old feelings began their creep into my guts. “How predictable, Rand.”

            “I’m making America great again,” I said. I had some of the beer-whiskey mixture.

            “By playing crappy old R&B music?”

            “Honkey philistine,” I said. “Some people volunteer, others give the world the King of Stage.” Carolina rolled her eyes. I had no clue that she was going to be there that evening. I could feel my face redden like an embarrassed school boy. “And by the way you shouldn’t wear pigtails in a bar or, you know, at all at your age.”

            “What?” She shook her head back and forth, her thick, knotted hair knocking her big glasses askew. “You don’t like?”

            How in the hell could I answer a question like that when I liked everything about her form her pigtails to her glasses to the stupid Superman hoodie she was wearing, to the way she snorted when she really laughed, or had once called John-Paul Sartre, Sart-tre. I’d once even liked her morning breath. How could I get any of her back? I’d shuffalo all the way to hell. “I don’t make it a point to like anything, but you’re all right.”

            “Gee, thanks,” Carolina said.

The bartender came over. “Get her a rye neat before she gets the DTs or her literary snob boyfriend walks in.” I had some more boilermaker. “And what are you doing here?”

            “I came to hear Larissa read,” Carolina said. The bartender put the rye before her, and she had a greedy sip on the booze. “We’re Facebook friends now. She’s very bendable. I can see why you like her.”

            “I’m an admirer of intellect as well as poise,” I said. “And don’t go getting any real friend ideas. I’m not even convinced the girl likes me yet without having to deal with your influence over her.”

            “Love problems?”

            I killed most of my drink. Fucking boilermakers. I’d been off beer for months but Larissa was concerned about all the vodka. Switching off and on to beer had been our détente. What she didn’t know about the whisky shot I’d dumped in it was between me and my liver. I wondered how many boilermakers it would take to get me back in that room with all the poets, or how many ryes it would take to get Carolina to sneak off with me. I was currently on almost two and saw no signs of a willingness to budge from my seat at the bar, and Carolina probably wouldn’t sneak off with me if I were the last, greasy, aging, culturally confused white man on the planet. And I might’ve been. “I’m not of liberty to share my romantic life with you. But I will concede to your old argument that yours truly isn’t very handy where children are concerned.”

            “I saw the wiffleball video online,” Carolina said. “And it led me right to the grainy vomiting during a children’s program.” She downed the rye and I signaled for another round. “You seem to excel at certain kind of buffoonery…and what city administrator allowed you anywhere near kids?”

            “When you’re union you can shoot a man on Fifth Avenue,” I said. “What? Are you working as a double agent for my HR department as well as coming here to put ideas in my girlfriend’s head?”

“I’m here, Rand…to rebuild bridges. To be the bigger person and make amends. I figure with this reading coming up in a couple of months we’ll be seeing more of each other. Plus, I really like Larissa. She’s funny in her emails and she posts the coolest shit and…and no…we’re not having a threesome.”

“You were never much for assplay anyway and she’s a little dildo happy.”  

“TMI, Rand…TMI.”

“I have no clue who this TIM is, or why you’re spelling his fucking name, but if Killian’s worried and anxious continence is any indication, we might be holding this reading on the street, and selling books out of the back of his car. Or not having the reading at all. So, you can feel free to drop the goodwill ambassador act, and go back to ignoring my Gmails while you and Larissa play footsie and your boyfriend’s ego bankrupts my friend.”

            “I thought he was just changing venues.”

I shook my head. “Killian’s in over his head. Your boyfriend’s little hissy fit about the basement at Needful Things has caused this little save-the-store reading to balloon. By changing venues, we’re talking like a full day festival now at Modern Era. Beer and wine and food and poets ad nauseam. There’s rent to pay. So, expenses have been accrued. Compromises have been made and such. Latin American regimes have fallen and Putin’s got his hand in there somewhere.” I had some of my boilermaker and began making plans for numero tres. “The overhead alone pretty much means Killian won’t even break even. Think of this reading as a farewell party in disguise.”

“That sucks. But did you all honestly think a reading would save the store?”

“I… look, why don’t we just have God-Boy cut Killian a check for a year’s rent.”

Carolina chuckled. “He doesn’t like the place that much.” She sipped her rye then frowned. “In fact, he might be more enamored with the people who work there rather than the store itself.”

“I don’t think Jackson Urban flows that way,” I said. “And he can’t play second base for shit.”

            “Let’s just say God and his agent are really enjoying your friend’s little YA book,” she said. “Did you know that it’s about a transgendered group of high school kids who put on The Iceman Cometh?”

            “Wasn’t that a Netflix show?”

Carolina popped down half her booze. “Gigi is like a marketing department’s wet dream. She’s like covered all the bases: LGBT characters, minority characters, female centric, urban, you name it. Honestly, I was surprised she didn’t have an orphan wizard or an elf in the manuscript too.”

            “Well, there’s always room for revisions,” I said. I went for my drink but thought better of it. “And, by the way, it’s LGBTQIA…and you sound a touch jealous.”

            “I’m not,” she said. “It’s just that God gets…preoccupied with people.”

            “I’ll bet. Especially when they come wrapped in twenty-three-year-old packaging, and use memes to express deep emotions.”

            “Don’t be an asshole.” Carolina said. Like I had a choice? “I just meant that now this YA stuff is all he talks about when he’s not talking about his new project.”

            “Which one?” I asked. “World domination or modeling for an L.L. Bean Catalog?”

            “His new war novel or whatever it is.” Carolina kicked back the rest of her rye. She was on the fast track toward beating me to La La Land. She took a deep breath. “I sound like I’m complaining. But I’m not complaining. It’s just that God’s agent has my book too. And we were already working on his issues with it, and I was hopeful it was getting ready to send to publishers. And then this business with Gigi started.”

            “Kicked to the curb by a younger model,” I said. “I’ve seen it happen to many a good woman.”

            “I’m like twenty-seven.”

“Pigtails won’t hide the truth, kid,” I said. “There’s a gray hair lurking somewhere in those knotted tresses.”

“You still owe me a signed release form,” she said.

“The stuff I owe people could fill a fat man’s shorts,” I said. “Join the queue.”

Carolina’s phone buzzed. She picked it up but ignored whoever it was on the other end. In my head it was Godfrey Whitt calling to find out when she’d be home for dinner. He’d just discovered those Kimchi tacos that were all the rage, and now he was an expert. “Maybe I should be happy I’m not working on the book,” she said, shaking her cell phone at me. “It’s nothing but misery. Line edits this. Line edits that. Why is this character doing A while that character is doing B? What’s the motivation for this? I mean what the fuck? It totally takes any joy out of the act of writing.”

“You know what else takes the joy out of writing?” I said. “Talking about it over drinks in a bar where I can’t even get on stage to read my poems yet some asshole named Todd-de-de-de can prowl the stage like a hungry jaguar. Fuck writing. What pompous little shits we are for talking about it in a world that’s going to hell at our doing. It’s bad enough that I ruminate over your novel often in my shithole during another morning bout of hangovers, dog barking, 1980s fuck-and-fight-a-thon and writer’s block.”

“I see you’re still a world-class listener.” Carolina looked around. “Where is Larissa anyway?”

“Where does a light go when it goes out?”

“You’re slipping, Rand Wyndham,” she said. “You used to be wittier than that.”

I looked up at the television where the orange-faced billionaire was still waving his little baby hands around and shouting. “Dark times call for dark humor. She’s in the other room with her loquacious-on-paper ilk.”

“I like her though…Larissa”

“You date her then,” I said. “You sit there as the cloud of disappointment, jealousy and feelings of self-worthlessness descend over your third drink.”

“I’d date her. But I’m me and you’re you.”

“What does that even mean?”

“If you don’t know by now, old man,” she said

“And if you keep sitting here, I might try and fuck the whole thing up by trying to kiss you,” I said.

Carolina looked toward the back room where, once again, the angry, plodding voices of poets were bleating anew. “If you were a smart man who valued the digits on your masturbating hand you wouldn’t.”

“Bah,” I said. “I’m at a poetry reading. Smart went out the window two boilermakers ago.”

We got quiet. I looked out the window onto Fifth Avenue. The street was a neon smear in the glimmer of my booze-soaked eyes. Nail salons. Closed banks. Trendy gastro pubs and over-priced taverns. Packs of teens went by on skateboards, or walking four deep across the concrete; you would’ve thought it was the end of summer instead of the birth of the New Year. Across the street at this Mexican joint a loud group of gilded moms out on the prowl were taking group selfies and readjusting their yoga mats. Arab women were walking home alone in this detestable political climate. I looked at Carolina. She side-eyed me then frowned. But I felt like Jay Gatsby in that moment. Who said you couldn’t repeat the past? Well, I had. So, fuck them. And fuck me. Had she had any clue how much I loved her then?

The bartender brought us a new round. Carolina’s phone buzzed and blinked and tinged anew, but again she made no move for it. God-boy must really want those Kimchi tacos if he couldn’t take the hint that she was off with better company. Carolina sighed and looked me in the eye. “Rand, are you happy?”

“I’m a thesaurus worth of joy.”

“I’m serious,” she said. “I’ve known you for a long time through jobs and no jobs, the bar and no bar…and now writing and Larissa. You have your job back and you seem to be able to get out the door in the morning and put yourself back to bed at night without serious injury. I know you always had this stumbling, smirking sense about you, but it feels more and more like a mask. Like underneath it all there just seems to be this sighing…sadness.”

            I was quiet a moment. It wasn’t often in this world that someone came at you with the truth, that someone tried to unlock what was held deep inside of you and try to bring it to light. What to do with that? What to say? “Look…Carolina…that has to be the corniest, stupidest shit that any women, any human being, has ever said to me. But…”

“Well…fuck you then,” she said. “I was just being honest, you douche.”

            “You want honesty? You’re the love of my life.”

            “Oh God.” Then Carolina laughed. She had some of her drink. “You can’t be serious.”

            “I am,” I said. I was serious about very little. But this I knew was true.

            “I-I don’t even know what to say. I’m sorry? I don’t love you? Maybe get over yourself?”

            “You ruined us back then,” I said.

            “How?”

            “By cheating on me.”

            “I never cheated on you,” Carolina said. “That idea was always in your drunken, paranoid, delusional head, especially when you were drunken, paranoid and delusional.”

            “I saw you…I saw you with that one guy. Remember I confronted you.”

            “That was my acting partner from that stupid acting class that I took because I thought I wanted to be a screenwriter. We were running lines…which you interrupted.”

            “He told you he loved you.”

            “It was part of the scene! And what were you doing down on my campus anyway, Rand? Creeping around like some stalker?”

            “I…I…”

            “Right.” Carolina turned slightly away from me.

            “Look, I get you,” I said. “And I don’t get many people. We connect, you know. And like you just said you’ve known me for a long time.”

            “Yeah, well, I guess I’ve known my dentist for a long time too.”

            “I gotta account for something to you.”

“Maybe you did…once…a little bit.” Carolina got off her stool and went for her bag. I went for her arm, but she shoved me. I almost fell off my stool. She’d been working out. “Coming here was a dumb idea. I don’t know what made me think I could talk to you about being friends or anything else, because it always ends up coming back to the past. I want you and Larissa to have a good New Year.” She looked toward the door where the reading was. “I’ll just text her and say I couldn’t make it.”

“If I said I was sorry, would it help?” I asked.

            Carolina stopped her disappearing act. “I don’t think I’ve ever heard that word come out of your mouth.”

            “I’m a product of the catholic school system. I always thought my guilt and complicity were just assumed, so I never felt the need to.”

“Stop making excuses.” Carolina dropped her bag and glared at me. “Are you sorry or what?”

I made to speak. But then the door to the poetry reading opened, and out came the angry cadence of none other than Jackson Urban.

…said the orange-hued fox

to the chicken pen

i can offer you jobs, man

i can offer you salvation

if it’s freedom that you want

what have you got to lose?

I can offer you the…

            “Thought I’d find you two here,” Larissa said.

She came over and gave Carolina a hug. Larissa looked at me as I looked at them. Carolina closed her eyes and set her bag back down. We all sat in seats around the bar as poetry emanated through the walls, my R&B songs ended and another maudlin indie rock jam came on the jukebox. No one said anything. No one had to. The orange-hued billionaire was still going strong on the television. The media had given him millions and millions of dollars in free advertising. People loved a spectacle even if it meant the collapse of society. Reality TV and demagoguery were the new reality for all.

“So,” I finally said. “What are we really doing here tonight?”

The Poet : Chapters 20 and 21

 

TWENTY

 

“What’s wrong with’ya legs?”

Hazel De Vitis was hunched over a laptop when I hobbled into work my first day back after the holiday. I was horribly hungover with the worst booze shits of my life. Thankfully the vomit hadn’t come. I still had that streak. Honestly, I should’ve called in sick. I would’ve called in sick had I not been so worried Willy was going to call in sick. Such was my life. I truly had nothing better to think and/or worry about than this trivial garbage. Let a sinister orange-colored demagogue run for president. Let him win. Let the whole country get turned into one demagogue hosted reality show. America always got what it deserved. Let them all sink in the abyss, I thought. I’ll be the guy in the corner worried about the stone geriatric who didn’t come to work.

“You look like a cripple,” Hazel said, as I limped to the watercooler. She rolled her eyes. “Uh, I mean a handicapper.”

            “I lost a moonwalk battle to a culturally appropriating, doofus in a bad Christmas sweater,” I said. Then I downed a sixteen-ounce bottle of water in a matter of seconds. The bellowing noise my stomach made when the cold water sloshed in with the booze and bile sounded unnatural to say the least. “Or would you accept that I sprained my ankles during a festive holiday wiffleball game?”

            “It’s January,” Hazel said. “It finally got colder.” Her computer made this agonizing buzzing sound. She started beating on it. Two seats away Scott was sitting, picking at a mound of something that resembled bird seed. Atop a stack of picture books sat his daily yellow, waxy pepper, which he ate whole like an apple. All was right in my sick, demented work world. “They say it’s gonna snow.”

            “Who’s this they?” I asked. “Everyone always says, they said this or they said that. I want to know exactly who they are…and where’s Willy?”

Hazel looked up and smirked. “Beats me, boss-man.”

            “Will see if he gets a valentine or not this year,” I said. “Or maybe I’ll just admonish him in my next blog post.” I began hobbling out of the office

“If he doesn’t show up there’s no one to do his babies and books program,” she called after me.

I stopped in my tracks. If I truly feared anything in this world other than medically enforced sobriety it was a room full of stinking, crying, screaming toddlers…and their asshole parents. “Scott,” I said, weakly.

            “I…” Scott stammered.

            “He doesn’t want to tell you he can’t do it,” Hazel said.

            “School visit…” Scott’s face had turned red. “This morning…ten…thirty…I…”

            “I get it,” I said. My stomach tightened. My head pulsed. It would be shit rivers or bile. Maybe both. I turned to Hazel. “Do you have aspirin?”

            “Why would I have aspirin?”

“For all the migraines you claim Oleg gives you.”

Hazel clutched her head at the mention of his name. I felt my brow. I was covered in sweat. A red alert cramp hit me. The front door of the library clicked open for a brief moment. A cacophony of noise filled our vacuum: whining babies, placating mothers, loud grandmothers on cell phones…all waiting on the library to open…all waiting on me. Then Jill, followed by Sheldon, followed by Oleg, burst into the work room in a perfume swirl of coffee, cigarettes, fast food grease, and goulash that did nothing for my continence.

“I don’t wanna hear it. I don’t wanna hear it,” Jill shouted. She batted at Sheldon and Oleg, as if swatting away the gnats we still had floating around the branch.

            “But…but…” Sheldon whined. Spoken like a true boss. His quilted, blue coat incorrectly buttoned and his hair a bushman’s woolen unruliness; it was completely possible for Sheldon Mays to be more disheveled than usual. He still wouldn’t relinquish the green Santa tie. Perhaps another book shelf would fall on him. “I didn’t know it would do that.”

            Jill slammed her prison guard thick set of keys on her desk, and stared at our fearless leader with those bottleneck glasses of hers. “Let me get this straight. You didn’t think that leaving a broken, running toilet going over the New Year could lead to an overflow.”

            “It never does at home,” Sheldon said. He looked around the office for confirmation. “I just jiggle the handle and it goes away.”

            “There’s a water valve in the bathroom that we’re supposed to shut off whenever that happens.” Jill grabbed a folder and shook it. “There are instructions in here. There’s policy. I mean what the hell’s the matter with you? They let anyone off the street get a master’s in library science?”

“Is easier than DMV,” Oleg said. He cackled. Hazel covered her ears.

Jill looked at me. “And you? You look like death warmed over. I’ve seen a lot of pale white people, but Rand, you’re winning the Casper award today.”

“That’s racist,” Hazel said, quietly.

“I think I have a stomach bug,” I said. “Or this is finally how it ends for me.”

“Well, don’t die in here,” Jill said. “And don’t go near the bathroom until facilities can get here.”

            “But I didn’t know,” Sheldon said. “Honestly.”

            “Bah.” Again, Jill swatted at him. She threw off her green parka. I started hobbling out of the office to accept my fate. I figured maybe I’d vomit or shit my pants. With a room full of babies none would be the wiser. “And what happened to your ankles?”

“Wiffleball,” Hazel said.

            “It’s winter. What’re you doing playing wiffleball, Rand? I swear sometimes I don’t get white people. I just don’t.”

            “I was defending the honor of women around the world,” I said.

            “Blizzard will come this month,” Oleg said. “No driver’s license til spring.”

            “They’ll fire you before then, you milquetoast,” Jill said. “Why don’t you just pay one of your Kremlin buddies in Coney Island for a fake?”

“Speaking of,” Sheldon said, apropos of nothing. He turned to me. “I got the strangest email from HR while you were gone, Rand. Apparently, someone sent them this big envelope full of…of poems. Janice in HR said that they were written by you…Rand.”

            “I….” But I had nothing to say to that one. The game had suddenly hit home to, as Todd-de-de-de would say, next level shit. Forget about my co-workers knowing. But HR? Those swine were like the Stasi. They were always looking for a reason. Was poetry a reason? They shot Lorca. They’d locked the Marquis de Sade up in an oubliette for his prose. Did the library have an oubliette? Aside from the various drunk and fuck poems I had dozens of work-related poems. I couldn’t spend my days around the likes of my co-workers and not write poems. The lunatics who frequented the library alone were worth me getting a Pushcart nomination.

            “I didn’t even know you were a writer,” Sheldon lisped. “How exciting. You know I dabbled in the arts in college. At one point I fancied myself a singer/actor. But you dream big, you graduate and can’t afford decent headshots, you get married and then have kids and….”

            Another cramp came. I’d be shitting in a Brooklyn alleyway for sure with some feral cat eyeballing my one testicle, if facilities didn’t get here soon. “Am I in some kind of trouble, Sheldon?” I’d lost enough jobs. I wasn’t about to lose this one over fucking dick joke poems. I was forty-two and union, which meant I shaved once every two weeks and no one said shit about it. I wore Springsteen concert t-shirts on Saturday shifts and there were holes in my jeans. I had a pension for Christ’s sake. D.A. Levy I was not.

            “I don’t think so,” he said. “Janice just said to give her a call. She wanted to go over our online policy with you. Apparently, this wasn’t the first time someone sent your poems to HR.”

            “Poets were enemies of the state in Soviet Russia,” Oleg said. “I take one poet once and grab him by his scarf and I…”

            “Spare us the details, Mayakovski,” I said. Christ my head was pounding. It was almost time to start the brutal day of public servitude. “Look, I gotta go. Willy’s AWOL and I got poor, defenseless children to entertain.”

“What are you seriously gonna do about him?” Jill said. She slumped into her seat and leaned forward hand clasped together as if going to church.

            “Obviously I’ve been building a case toward ignoring his actions completely.”

            “So, this idiot just gets a free pass?”

            “Jill, I don’t have it in me to write people up. In fact, I have a deep seeded…”

            “Willy isn’t a victim here. He’s willingly, hell, joyously, being insubordinate.”

            “Is there any other way to be insubordinate?”

            “On the phone this morning Willy said you can take this job and shove it,” Hazel said.

Jill just looked at me. I shrugged. “Look, I just can’t disconnect from that boss/employee part. I still see myself in front of those puerile tyrants.”

“Am I a tyrant?” Sheldon asked.

            “You’re an idiot,” Jill said. She turned to me. “Does that make it fair? Fair that Scott is taking Willy’s desks and working his nights? Fair that you’re covering for him? Fair that programs are being cancelled? What if HR gets wind? Poems won’t be your only problem, Shakespeare, if they start in on you for not disciplining him.”

            “Disciplining,” I said. “It’s that word. It’s like we’re in perpetual childhood, like we’ve never advanced beyond high school. Instead of teachers and parents, we get bosses and spouses and bartenders with a conscience. I can’t abide that.”

            “You get used to it,” Jill said, as I made to leave,

            “And Rand,” Sheldon said. “My advice is to go to meetings…and to check the water valves.”

            It was ten o’clock on the nose. I stumbled to the muted noise behind the front doors of the library. They had greasy palm prints from a mob of five-year olds pulling on the door and smacking the glass. Babies in carriages wailed as if they had bills to pay while their mothers and few token daddies looked sullen and bored. If only I had strength that morning. If only I had any force available to me. Man, I would’ve whipped those doors open and sent some kid flying across the damned street, berated each and every one of those parents for procreating during the great decline. But I was weak. I was hungover and ill. I opened the doors and they all blew in past me. There had to be dozens of them, all waiting to be entertained. A pint-sized Henry Winkler reading with yours truly as the headliner. Rand with three D’s.

            The noise became deafening in an instant. A mixture of languages echoed into the nether-sphere of our broken ceiling tiles. Oleg came out of the office and began screaming and yelling at mothers and toddlers as only a good and keenly trained Cossack could do. I stood by the front doors with my hand still on the handle wanting to crumple into a ball from the horrific cramps. I imagined killing Willy Abelman with my bare hands and that seemed to soothe me. I let out a fart. It smelled as if something had crawled up my ass and died. Then Lena Alvarez blew past me with little more than a quick hey and not her usual, youthful jovialness. Had she smelt the fart?

            Sheldon came over to me. Together we stared at the parking lot full of baby carriages, the mothers all playing on their cell phones, as little monsters stumbled like drunks throughout the cavernous library, screaming and pulling books off of the shelf. “Well, what’ll we do now?” he asked me.

            “We corral the little bastards,” I said.

            I went into the programming room while Sheldon rounded up all of my torturers. Another shit cramp hit me and I went careening into the wall. The bile rose. The room was set up already and that was a small miracle. There was a big huge carpet with ducks and letters and numbers, and the old, crusted stains of some little crotch-dropping’s vomit or piss or stinking excrement. Looking at it I was reminded of my own perilous situation. How did the powers that be open a public building with no functioning restrooms? I let out another fart. SBD. It was a close call. I clutched my ass just to keep it all in.

            On the carpet there were these round, cushioned seats for the little monsters to sit on, even though they’d do anything but. They all looked like the big headache migraine pills of which I was in desperate need. I knew that Hazel was holding out on me. The skinflint. She popped headache medicine with the verve of opioid addicts. She couldn’t spare one? Oh, I could hear them coming. The screams. The placating, philistine mothers who thought some jackass reading picture books to their slack-jawed children would give them a head-start in America. Yeah, Dr. Suess and a hedge fund for the little fuckers. In the corner I spied the big, black toy box full of the noisy instruments of my demise; squeaking toy animals and musical instruments, and things that kids shook in menacing, slobber-mouthed fits. That toy box might as well have housed a Pear of Anguish and a Breaking Wheel for the way good ol’ Rand was feeling.

            They filed in. There had to be two-dozen of them if not more. I cursed Willy Abelman’s very existence as mothers put their children on the little mats and headed toward the chairs in the back of the room to continue updating their social networking statuses. Two kids were already crying. Another was reaching for his mother, on the verge of tears. One little girl dressed in all orange was eating a soggy banana and it made my stomach turn anew. She had bits of it smashed all over her mouth. I looked back at the parents and none of them seemed fazed. They looked haggard. I’d faced dozens of bad jobs, dozens of miserable bosses and hundreds of debilitating hangovers, but I had no clue how these people woke up each and every morning to face children.

            “Why ain’t there more white kids in here?” Hazel said from the doorway. Then she was gone.

            I pulled the toy box close to me. The kids eyed it the way I did a fresh and cold bottle of vodka coming from out of my fridge. Everyone had their drug of choice. Then I sat at the head of the room. “Okay, look here,” I said. “Obviously the regular entertainment has bailed again, and in lieu of cancelling this little shindig the powers that be suggested that maybe yours truly give it a go.”

An audible sigh. The mothers did not like me. It was a fact. I was the guy who yelled at them for playing on their cellphones while their kids wreaked havoc upon the library. They’d probably rather have the orange-faced billionaire read rather than me. Well, fuck them.

I grabbed one of the books. It was some poorly drawn escapade about a subway rat that was too afraid to get dirty. I held up the book. “You actually want me to read this tripe to your children? I mean if a rat is too scared to get dirty what’s to be said about our urban environment? Or have you just all accepted gentrification as the new norm? A one-gallon jug of maple-flavored coffee from some ubiquitous chain is worth the sky-high rents and loss of mom and pop outlets? Christ, I mean don’t we live in New York City for a reason? Sure, a guy needs a good pair of boots, not combat boots mind you, but…”

“Could you just read the story?” One of the mothers said.

“No time for lessons in civic responsibility,” I said. “I get it. It’s all business with you stay-at-home types.”

I perched the book on my knee and turned it to face the kids. At least half a dozen of them were crying now. Two were pulling books off a shelf. Their mothers made no move to stop them. Too busy playing on their phones. I felt another fart coming. Another SBD perhaps. I let rip. It wasn’t. The thing sounded like a bullhorn the way it echoed off my plastic chair. And I might’ve shit myself a touch. I thought maybe the mothers would blame one of the children. But the sound and force of passing gas like that would’ve sent one of those kids flying out a window and into the stratosphere. I was guilty as charged.

“Willy usually starts with a song and not flatulence,” the token, bearded, hipster daddy said.

“Yeah, well, Willy couldn’t get his ganja-riddled body out of bed this morning to come and do his job,” I said. “So…”

“And why are you sweating so much?” This hot Arabic mother said.

She was right. I had streams of sweat coming down my face and my hair felt matted. My stomach churned and my head pounded. “Stage fright.”

“They’re toddlers.”

“You try coming up here and reading to this unruly crowd.”

“I will,” she said.

“And I could sing the song,” bearded daddy said.

He got up and stated to sing The Wheels on the Bus go Round and Round. The mothers joined in clapping. Mutineers all of them. And the noise, the goddamned noise of it. I threw my head back and clutched my ears, as if the cacophony were mortally wounding me. The kids stopped crying and clapped along. Those two little fuckers were still pulling books off the shelf while their mothers played on their phones. It was chaos. I was powerless to coral them back in. I farted again and again. Suddenly my stomach turned. It tensed up and I felt a tremor in the force that I hadn’t felt in months. I spied a garbage can stage right. In no time I was kneeling before it vomiting up the remnants of last night’s booze bounty and this leftover vegan chili that Larissa insisted tasted just like the real thing but didn’t even come close.

“Ew,” one the mothers said.

“It’s nothing…it’s not…” my head was back in the garbage can. Gag. Hurl. Oily fart. “Something I…vegan…I…maybe food pois…” But I was gone again.

When I looked up the room was silent. Bearded daddy was in mid-clap. Even the toddlers were looking at me. Vomiting was a matter of course in their world, something brushed off without so much as a kiss from mommy. Speaking of…the whole pack of mothers was giving me the stink eye. I bent over for one last hurl for good measure. I felt a shit-ton better. Even the headache was fading. When I looked back up Hazel was in the doorway.

“Usually, Willy just sings songs and plays guitar,” she said. “But maybe I can talk him into adding that to his repertoire.”

I looked at the silent, angry room. “You gotta pay top dollar for that kind of action in Vegas,” I said to all of them. I got up. My legs were wobbly yet I was on firm ground. I picked up the vomit-filled garbage can and I bowed to the room. Then I took my leave just as The Wheels on the Bus go Round and Round started its siren song all over again.

 

 

                                                                 TWENTY-ONE

 

I hobbled into my office with the weight of my small, insignificant world on me. I set the vomit garbage can in the corner. People were dying in Syria. People were getting bombed to shit in Yemen. El Nino was raging. That orange-faced monster was tearing America down by the minute, and millions of lemmings were cheering him on to take us further down that neo-fascist rabbit hole. The world seemed like it wanted to be ruled by nothing but strongmen and racist game show hosts and I was neither of those. I just wanted Willy Abelman to show up for work, do his job, and go the fuck home like the rest of us. I didn’t want to have to sit him down and explain to him something that he already knew. The world was cruel enough between people. Bedlam reigned supreme and American flags hung everywhere like nooses. I vomited in front of a room full of children. And HR was now on my back.

I drank heavily from a stashed bottle of Scope and spit it in the offending garbage can. Then I slumped in my chair and went online. On Facebook videos of the wiffleball fiasco were making the rounds. A screen shot of yours truly writhing on the ground with Asian Dragon taking my picture was aptly labeled, The Poet. I didn’t feel like a poet in that moment. I was a joke. I was a milquetoast who couldn’t even hold the contents of his stomach in, in front of expecting toddlers and their parents. I wondered how long it would take for a video of me hunched over a black garbage can would take to make the rounds? Yours truly had the makings of a bona fide online celebrity.

I picked up the phone and dialed my captors. It was best to get the HR shit over with as quickly as possible. Janice Walker never wanted you to call her unless there was a problem. Years ago, she’d been the HR liaison for my little head-butting incident, and through the grapevine I learned that she was the one who really pushed for my firing. Ha! Wait until she saw the vomit video. Rumor had it she hated my smile. My grandma always said I had a punchable face. Thank the gods I was union.

 “Mr. Wyndham,” Janice said, in her smoky quiet storm D.J. voice.

“Ms. Walker,” I said. “I hear you folks in HR have some of my literary oeuvre at your disposal.”

“I have a stack of your writing on my desk, yes, Mr. Wyndham.”

“I want you to know it’s all copy-written. I’m not some dumb rube who posts things willy-nilly online. If you even try selling that stuff or rebranding it as your own, you’ll be answering to one Fidel Pinochet, and I can assure you the man does not procrastinate when it comes to poetry and vengeance.”

“I wanted to touch base with you about a few things, Rand,” Janice said. I loved when she got informal with me. It was a shame she hated me the way she did with that silky voice of hers, and that brown skin that made it hard to concentrate during my own disciplinary hearing. “The poems in question aren’t an immediate danger, as they don’t name specific names…and trust me we poured over these pages. That said the…poems…are rather offensive and quite base in language. It’s certainly not like any poetry I’ve come across.”

“Everyone’s a critic, Janice.”

“But considering your past history here at the library I just wanted to make sure you were aware of certain rules we had for conduct using Social Media.”

“If this is about taunting the GOP and taking those selfies of my backside…”

“Mr. Wyndham, the library encourages employees to express themselves using social media for a rich and varied life outside of their employment. We do ask that no mention of the institution be made without explicit consent from our marketing department, and that any individual comments expressed in regards to our institution be stated as your opinion only and not in the opinion of the organization.”

“Janice,” I said, farting. “Are you reading that statement off a piece of paper or do they make you memorize stuff like that?”

“What does it matter, Mr. Wyndham?”

“What does anything, Ms. Walker?”

“You know, Rand. There are a lot of library employees who use social media to promote the library and its programming.”

“I might not be the right guy at the moment to be pushing programs,” I said.

Janice Walker didn’t skip a beat. “Some work directly on library-sourced social media sites. HR is planning on having training on the proper uses of social media sometime in the next month.”

“I think I’m on vacation then.”

“This brings me to my other point,” she said. “Mr. Wyndham, as an employee in a middle management role you are required to attend all meetings and trainings for your position. I see here that you’ve either missed a number of these events and/or you have not put your name on the sign-in sheet. In the future, please remember to attend any and all required management meetings.”

            “That assessment of my attendance can’t be correct,” I said. “I’m a meeting junky. Around these parts they call me Mr. Meeting.”

I could hear Janice Walker shuffling papers. “My records indicate you’ve missed the last three middle-managers meetings.”

“You keep scheduling them on my sick days,” I said.

“Goodbye Mr. Wyndham.”

Janice Walker hung up without so much as a later hon. Good Christ. I sat there and watched a fly twitch all over Sheldon’s daily onion bagel with scallion cream cheese. Talk about vomit inducing. Yet I was on the road to recovery. Larissa’s little green light came on my Gmail and I waited for her to start entering some inane text.  She never did. She stayed on about a minute and then disappeared. For lack of a better word things had been a little bit tense since her party.

I couldn’t stand the scent of that fucking bagel or the vomit and mouthwash smell, so I limped out of the office and sat at the reference desk. You could still hear the faint sounds of story time going on behind the closed programming door. I opened drawer and there sat another stack of my fucking poems. Fucking hell. I took it out. It was one parcel the people in HR would not see.

            “Um.” I turned and there was Lena Alvarez leaning nervously on the high gray end of the throne-like reference desk. Mere inches from me; how had I not noticed her flowery scent mingling with all my sturm und drang. I wondered if she was going to mention the fart I’d laid in her path. But how to explain alcohol abuse and diminished expectations to someone with the future right in front of them? Still, I smelt my breath for good measure. “What’s that?” she said.

I looked at the stack of poems. “The fatuous waste of about a year’s worth of mornings,” I said. “Forget this exists. I have. I’ve moved on to vodka and writer’s block. At the risk of sounding redundant, how’re classes?”

“They haven’t quite started yet,” Lena said. Then she said nothing and stood there. Conversation would be pulling teeth. And I wasn’t in the mood for prodding a phone-jacked, internet-soaked, emotionally stunted millennial toward some semblance of conversation. It wasn’t my fault most of them couldn’t speak in complete sentences. But pulling teeth it would be.

“What does quite mean? Did you even register?”

“No,” she said softly. “Semester started yesterday…to be honest.”

“Kid, half the coeds in your school probably already registered for all the good shit. You’ve beaten around the bush to your own detriment. Those psychology classes are all but gone.”

“I know but…”

“You’ll end up aimlessly wondering around campus signing up for credit cards, or worse, rocking the vote. Do they still do either of those?”

“I…”

“Or you’ll end up taking something stupid like Astronomy. Take it from good ol’ Rand, Lena. Astronomy is not all about looking at the stars, so that you can drop some knowledge on a boy you want to hit on. Or girl. Or whomever. Excuse me, I keep forgetting it’s the twenty-first century here, and you’re all pansexual and polyamorous now. No, Lena, astronomy is math. Its exponents and all of that confusing shit that makes one want to dig up Copernicus just to kill him again.”

Lena’s face was kind of red. “I wanted to register but…”

I shook my head. “Oh, you’re gonna end up in a debate class like I’m gonna end up on HR’s most wanted list. We’re both gonna have a shitty year, or end up in some leftist internment camp by the time the orange-faced monster gets his stubby-handled grip on the republic and…”

“Rand, could you be quiet a second.”

I waited for her to speak. But then Lena started crying. Not hard noisy wailing, but just this silent, welling redness in her eyes that started slow and then bubbled over onto her bottom lashes. Questions hit me. What was wrong? What had I said? Had I sounded too harsh? Had the security cameras picked this up as they had the vomiting? We were only discussing the girl’s future, I wanted to shout toward the big screen that monitored us in that Orwellian of ways. I looked up and caught Scott’s eye. He was always staring at people. But had he seen? Had I been too mean to Lena? That Janice Walker had turned me into an animal.

I motioned for her to sit. She did. “What’s going on, kid?”

“It’s…” But she still couldn’t say anything. It was just tears. Her eyes had turned this translucent pink.

Think, you jackass, think, I said to myself. But soothing words for me were as hard to come by as a morning without a hangover and the shits. “Is everything okay?” I finally asked. “And I mean that like all the way around.” Lena shrugged. Then she nodded. I couldn’t make this kid out at all. Still, I had to impart some kind of wisdom. “It’s hard I know. Being young. Taking all these classes. Spending all that money on some semblance of an education. Worrying about the future.”

“My major is all screwed up,” Lena finally said. She wiped away her tears with a hand so red because she’d been clutching it. Honestly, I couldn’t remember her major? Mathematics? Engineering? I remembered something about Calculus. Maybe she liked exponential numbers. “I’ve been taking all of these classes that I shouldn’t have been taking for like my major. I had this meeting with the department lady like a week ago, and she told me that basically I wasted two semesters.”

“At least you found out now,” I said. I looked at that stack of poems and around the job. “I’ve wasted two decades.”

Lena wiped her eyes again. “Sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean to cry like that. I just get so overwhelmed at times. Like I keep trying with school, but then stuff like this happens. Lately every time I turn on the TV that guy running for president says he’s going to round up all of the Latinos. He actually made my mom cry last night, you know, because of like my cousin not being here legally. And this morning my dad told me I should drop out of school and take this waitressing job where he works because we like need the money at home. But everyone who comes in there to eat are like these racist assholes. But my dad charges me rent now and I only work like part-time here. And I can’t like have a life paying rent from this job.” Tear welled again. “He didn’t like even ask my brother to drop out of school. Like why me?”

It was too early in the day to mansplain centuries upon centuries of the patriarchy and white supremacy in the good ol U.S. of A, the privilege that orange-faced fuck had, and the powers of preying on people’s fear, all the while navigating the prose inside of all of Lena’s likes. Also, with Janice Walker now on my tail, I wondered if there was some policy against instructing a part-timer in regards to their future. “Maybe your old man just thought you were conflicted.”

“It’s not just him. Last Friday Jill pulled me aside,” Lena said. “She told me about like this full-time clerk job that I should put in for. It was like I wasn’t even in school.”

I sighed. “Jill just knows a hard worker when she sees one,” I said. “She looks out for people. As for your old man, he’s probably scared. Deep down we all are these days. Or maybe he thinks you just need a break.”

“I need to get my degree,” Lena said. She wiped her eyes, but our girl held it together. She stood up. “He’s my dad he should like know that.”

“Sometimes we can’t see what’s good for the people we love,” I said. “We can only see the drama, the crisis of faith right before us. We confuse what we want for what they want.”

“I guess.”

“Look, screw them all. Go and talk to that guidance counselor or whatever she is. Go see her and get the classes right. Money always takes care of itself. And if it doesn’t there’s always running from debt until the grave.”

“Thanks Rand…I think.” She got up and started walking away then turned in only that Lena Alvarez manner and said, “Are you okay? You look kinda sad today too.”

“I’m a little sad,” I said. “I’ve most likely moved beyond functioning alcoholism and into strange, new and dark territory. I have crushing student loan debt and had to officially retire from my wiffleball career last week. My neighbors are trifling, ever-fornicating philistines, I think my girlfriend might hate me, I have human resources on my back, I have murderous thoughts about a canine across the street, I can’t get Willy to do his job…and I sprained my ankles.” Lena nodded like she understood all about sprained ankles. Maybe she understood HR policy or poetry.

“You’ll be fine, too,” she said. Ah, the wisdom of youth. Then she rolled her eyes and smiled. “And if not…there’s always the grave.”

Well, look at Rand Wyndham being a quotable mentor, I thought, as Lena went off to shelve graphic novels. Maybe yours truly had a future as a motivational speaker. To be honest I felt kind of good in that moment. But it was a temporary reprieve. The door to the programming room suddenly swung open and out came that horde of screaming children, and their cell phone obsessed parents. The cacophony of noise began anew. Newspaper reading seniors around me frowned. The small line of degenerates and geriatrics waiting to use the computers glared at me as if I were responsible. Hazel came out of the office with her hands over her ears. Oleg looked like he didn’t know who to attack first….so he went after some old Chinese lady clipping her toenails at a table in the back.

And in the midst of all of this madness, coming out of the programming room flanked by half a dozen parents, was Willy Abelman. When he’d shown up, I had no clue. Most likely when I was wiling away my time in Janice Walker Land. But there he was looking like an autograph-hounded celebrity. The old coot was actually wearing sunglasses indoors, and he still had his guitar strapped across his sagging belly. Hot Arab mom spied me sitting at the reference desk and she scowled. She bent her head toward Willy and whispered in his ear. He made an astonished face and his mouth dropped. Willy dipped his shades and looked at me with his pot-stained eyes. He shook his head sadly. The bastard had been told everything. What clout did I have now? A new rage burned deep inside of me. And only twenty-two more years until retirement.