The Poet : Chapter 16

 

SIXTEEN

 

“Oh, mother flip it!” Sheldon shouted, as another book shelf crashed.

My beleaguered boss began climbing the mound of books as if he were Sir. Edmond Hillary Scott, slipping and sliding on thousands of yellowing pages of best sellers. No one bothered to get up and help him, but Hazel pushed her phone closer just in case the union or the bored folks in HR were needed. The day was a mouse wheel. Work life was a bad sitcom on repeat. It could’ve been any other day at the branch with shelves falling and Sheldon rolling all over the floor, and patrons telling me that their tax dollars paid my salary. I was surprised more people didn’t commit suicide after working a hard eight in the same mundane circumstances they’d left only the day before.  Only Scott stood quietly shelving his picture books.

“Just mother effing flip it!”

            “You damned milquetoast,” Jill shouted into the vacuous room. “Some people you just have to take out and shoot!”

            Or maybe I was just bitter. A shitty writing morning and I was usually toasted for the rest of the day. That is to say I’d been burned a lot these days. That is to say I hadn’t stopped thinking about Carolina ever since she and God-boy had come strolling into Needful Things. It was like she infested me. Christ, even in bed with Larissa all tattooed and sweat-glistened in the afterglow, and I had Carolina on my mind. I needed drink. I needed sweet release. I’d also come to work with another stack of my poems printed and placed right on my desk this time. Subtlety was losing out to the overt and shameless in this time of orange-faced billionaires.

            “Did Sheldon just say F-it?” Hazel asked. Her hand was now on the phone receiver, ready to strike.

            “Flip it,” I said. “He said effing flip it…which I’m now thinking might be a good title for my memoir.”

            “But he meant F-it,” Hazel said. “I’ll call HR. Because I don’t have to work around vulgarities. I won’t tolerate vulgarities.”

            “Yet you support that orange-faced billionaire.”

            “I’m very political. And I’m very active in my community.”

            “Going through your upstairs neighbor’s garbage and calling the cops on them because their three-year-old daughter walks too loudly isn’t being civic minded.”

            “You don’t know the horrors I live with, Rand Wyndham.”

            “Yet I’m well-versed in the joy you spread.”

            I looked at Sheldon on his hands and knees picking up books; Santa Claus boxer shorts poking out of his corduroy floods for all to see. Thirty years as a public servant and he was still suffering common indignities. I should’ve gone over to help for how hapless he looked. But I’d made it a lifelong point never to assist my masters. We all had our merciless lot in life. Sheldon’s was Jill and bad shelving, a lack of storage space and the cruel passage of time. Mine was Carolina and someone printing my poems. They weren’t even good poems. I couldn’t stop producing bad writing if I tried.

“Good morning, good morning, goooood morning,” Willy said, coming in the front door, speaking of a merciless lot. He leaped over Sheldon and the pile of books with the grace of a young Baryshnikov. Higher than a kite, he was over an hour late for work. Willy went to Hazel and rubbed her shoulders. You could get a contact high from the sweet stink emanating from him.  “Hello, hello, hello.”

“You touch me again I’m calling HR,” she said, shaking Willy off and tucking in her cleavage to stop his gaze. Hazel looked at me mouth-opened. “Not that I call HR for each and every little thing.”

“You loom large in their legend,” I said.

“HR, H-Shmar,” Willy said. “And there you two are again sitting at this desk together!”

“And there you are again being late for work,” I said.

He took a crumpled piece of paper out of his wrinkled tweed coat and waved it in front of me. “My list of demands for the coming New Year.”

“I’ve never really responded to demands very well” I said. “I’d have to say I’m virulently anti-demand.”

Willy wrinkled his stained moustache. “Mmmm, fine, not demands, so much as things I require to continue working here in peaceful and quiet manner. Like taking doctor’s appointments without warning and criticism, unscheduled days off, things I no longer want to do here.”

“Like showing up on time or being proficient at your job?”

“Time is relative to a guy like me,” he said. “I’ve been on the clock longer than you’ve been alive and, to tell you the truth, I’m sick of it. I’ve been putting up with people like you forever. Bosses; ex-wives; the whole buncha you. I’m done.”

“You must be getting some grand slam alimony checks too.”

“I present to you my note.” Willy took his note and tossed it on the desk in front of me.

I opened it. Why not? Yours truly needed a good laugh. The note was mostly chicken scratch, the stoned ravings of a lunatic. I couldn’t make out most of it other than the words written in all-caps and underlined. Doughnut showed up at least three times. “You’re done working your Tuesday nights?”

Willy shrugged. “Or any nights,” he said, his red eyes deep into the valley of Hazel’s bosom. “I was sitting a home playing guitar last night thinking about my life and all of the Tuesday nights I’ve lost over the years being here. They must number in the thousands. If I would’ve had all of those Tuesday night at my disposal just imagine what I could’ve become.”

“Mediocre in a wide range of fields?” I tossed Willy’s note back on the desk. “You know you work like one Tuesday night a month to my three. I’m going to site either a lack of ambition or a lack of raw talent in terms of your thwarted dreams.”

“Um a little help over here,” Sheldon called over to us. He started to get up but immediately went sliding back into the pile of books. Oleg went to help and promptly went slipping and sliding too. Then there were two idiots rolling around in the mess of books.

“Pa-thetic,” Jill said, poking her head out of the office.

“Our dreams are all we have,” Hazel said, as if letting everyone into her secret world.

“The number of nights that I work is irrelevant.” Willy took an empty bag of chocolate chip cookies out of a plastic bag. He shook the crumbs down his throat. He had bits of cookie and chip in that moustache of his. “Point is I’m sick of being a slave to this organization. I’m sick of helping angry patrons. I’m sick of taking orders. And I don’t want to shelve books.”

“Then why don’t you just retire?” I asked. “Retire and let the library hire someone new and young and into Jean Rhys novels, who maybe has a penchant for older drunks who smell vaguely of vodka.”

“I seek action and adventure,” Willy said.

I looked off toward the ceiling where now four tiles were missing. “Got any roofing experience?” I asked. It had to be either Hazel or Willy who was printing all the poems. Which one was it? There was a reason I hated mysteries. And a Jean Rhys fanatic had to be out there somewhere.

“Books are heavy,” he said. Hazel concurred with a strong nod. “I don’t get paid to do physical labor.”

“Putting up with mental torture and trite demands isn’t in my job description either,” I said. “Yet the bills need to be paid.”

“And you’ve done nothing with the complaint form that Hazel and I filled out over that so-called Holiday music party.”

“You compared the performer to Adolph Hitler, and Hazel called him an agent of ISIS,”
 I said.

“I saw him talking to those Arab boys,” she added.

“If I turned that in HR would come looking for me.”

Willy crossed his arms to consider. Then he held up a finger. “You’re not a man of the people, Rand,” he said. “That’s what it ultimately is with you. I’ve finally figured it out.” He started snapping his fingers. “Oh, you talk a good game. All those jobs in the warehouse. All those miserable retail experiences. But you’ve lost touch with the working man. You know we had a name for people like you back in the sixties. What was it? What was it?”

“The man,” Hazel said.

Willy’s eyes lit up. “That’s it! You’re the man, Rand. Rand the man.”

“Rand,” Sheldon said. “Uh…Willy…Uh…Hazel…. somebody.”

“Is avalanche!” Oleg shouted.

Well, this was a first, I thought. Yours truly had been called a lot of things: drunkard, loser, fatty, moron, callous, all the way up to my current status as rummy. But never had Randall Epicurus Wyndham been accused of being the man. That one stung a little bit. It was well known in public houses and in the staff rooms of menial jobs from Pittsburgh to Buffalo to Brooklyn that I loathed the man. I was the man’s mortal enemy. Being called the man gave me instant gas pains. Willy had found my weak spot. Yet I had to show no weakness. I had to nip that shit in the bud.

“Willy,” I said, “I think you and I need to have a little talk.”

“We are talking,” he said. He laughed. Hazel cackled at his brilliance.

“In the office.” I had to stop myself after I said it. In the office. Decades of sitting face to face with miserable bosses flashed before me. Shit. Maybe Willy was right.

“Oh sure,” he said. “Now you want to play boss, but only behind closed doors where nobody can hear us. That’s Gestapo practice, Rand the Man. Gestapo!”

“I’ll have Jill and Sheldon sit in,” I said.

“Why not have Heinrich Muller sit in as well?”

“Hein…Willy what’s your deal with me, man?”

“Rand the Man,” Hazel added.

“I don’t ask you to do anything,” I continued. “I’ve never given you special projects. I basically do your jo…”

Just then another book shelf went. Each and every new fiction and non-fiction book came raining down on Sheldon and Oleg then went tumbling to the floor in a loud metallic and papery thud. “Oh flip,” Sheldon shouted in that lispy voice of his. “Oh, flip the whole flipping, flapping flip thing!”

“Is conspiracy!” Oleg said, as he flailed.

“Did he just swear?” Willy asked.

“That’s what I thought,” Hazel said. “I won’t put up with vulgarities in the workplace. Work is like a second home, and I don’t swear at home.”

“If work is like a second home to you,” I said. “You need a drink more than I do.”

“Well, it’s not like a second home the way you run things here,” Willy said to me. “Making people come to work on time, having us shelve books and listen to Christmas music.”

“I’m a real slave driver aren’t I?” I said.

“That’s racist,” Hazel said.

“Willy will you help me with these books,” Sheldon called over to us. Then he slipped again and toppled on to Oleg. The two of them looked like two turtles bound together.

“Do you want to tell him or shall I?” Willy said.

“I’m serious, man,” I said. “You and I need to have a talk.”

“I’m talking, you’re talking, Hazel is talking…even Sheldon is talking.”

“Riddle me this, Captain Cannabis,” I said. “What do I tell the other employees whom are here on time when you don’t show up for work? What do I tell Scott when he’s shelving books and helping patrons and you’re sitting in the corner playing games on your phone?”

“He already knows that I do that,” Willy said. “Just make it official by giving me your blessing, or staying out of my way.”

“How am I in your way?” I asked. “You’re the one who brought me this note.”

“I…” He shrugged. “I don’t know. You’ll think of something to tell people here. That’s why they pay you the big bucks.”

“You’ve been here twenty years longer than me,” I said. “You actually make more money than I do.”

“How do you know that?”

“Because you and Hazel shouted out all of our salaries for everyone to hear.”

“Then maybe I should be the boss if I make so much money,” Willy said. He smiled and looked around the library as if anointed king of the world. “Yeah, I’ll be the boss like you and snicker about your boss behind his back, skip meetings he wants you to go to, come in hungover, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.”

The impetus to rise and throw my nametag in his cookie-smeared face then head off into the sunset of afternoon bar vodka swilling was strong in me. “Flip it,” I said. I was done. I logged into my Gmail and there was a message from Fidel Pinochet of all people. It read: Le Masterpiece, Little Bukowski. Attached was another fucking updated PDF of my book. Had I not been involved in the theater of the grotesque and ridiculous I would’ve been pissed at being stuck, yet again, in the same place in manana-land.

“So does your silence mean that my demands have been met?” Willy finally said.

“Tell you what,” I said. “We’ll discuss it next Tuesday afternoon when you show up for your night shift.”

Willy threw his hands up. “Unreal.” He backed away from the desk in head shaking shock, as if I’d scolded him, as if I’d told him he was fired or not giving him a raise. I looked at my book cover for courage. I never wanted to go down the boss rabbit hole but that asshole was forcing my hand. Christ, was this how all of my old bosses felt? “Maybe I just won’t come to work on Tuesday night, like you don’t go to the meetings that Sheldon tells you to go to, or to those community board meetings that he asks you to be at each month.” The three of us looked over to the mess of Sheldon and Oleg and books.

“All right, all right,” Jill said, coming back out of the office. “What in the hell is going on here? I got three of you loitering around like this is some damned salon, while idiots one and two are fumbling all over the place.”

“Willy was just going over to help them,” I said. Fuck him

“What?” he said. But Hazel was up and out of her seat as fast as I’d ever seen the woman move.

“My job is like my family,” she said. “I take care of my own.” She pulled Willy away from the reference desk and over to the book mass. But they didn’t help. Instead, she had him in a corner trying to calm the old pot head down.

“Two more I’d like to take out and shoot,” Jill said, before thumping her way back to the office. Eventually Willy and Hazel started picking up books.

I looked at my book again. Satisfaction, I guess, instead of rage. Something tangible. Something that said, I am, in this cruel and crazy world. Maybe that was all it took. Maybe Willy’s clumsy and ill-thought list of demands was his way of marking some territory; a final grasping of some light. I didn’t know what it was like to be him, pushing past retirement age, out one wife and an estranged son, and still harboring rock and roll daydreams that never came to life. I’d managed to get through so far without as many entanglements and ambitions. Maybe that was just me being afraid of living. But that winter of discontent was coming for me one day down the line. It was already growing cold in the world of Rand Wyndham, despite the climate change.

“Um,” came a voice. I nearly jumped from my seat. I turned and there was Scott blinking at me. “Rand…I can work Willy’s Tuesday night.”

“You’re already working all the Thursday nights.”

“Um…I can do both.”

Why in the hell would you want to do that?”

“To help?”

“Scott, you’re probably the only person here who does his job.” Another shelf of books collapsed. The place was turning into a building-sized version of dominos. I probably should’ve helped, but I couldn’t have cared less, in that moment, if the whole place burned. I had visions of one day turning in my own list of demands to a supervisor half my age. Christ, I started to feel claustrophobic

“Whatever you need, Rand,” he said.

“Look, can you take my desk now?” I asked. I could feel the sweat building. The walls closing in.

“Sure,” Scott said. I got up and he slid into the ref desk chair with the expertise of a seasoned pilot. “Rand, are you feeling okay?”

“No,” I said. Then I hobbled away toward the office.

“Where’s he going? Where’s he going?” Willy shouted after me.

I slammed the office door shut. Today had just been declared a sick day and who cared if the library was busy, or if books started falling down from the sky, or if Willy took note. I needed to wash the taste of being a boss out of my mouth, and only vodka would be able to do it. There was a liquor store around the corner, and I wasn’t above having a few drinks on the B4 bus. I was taking my wounded ego home to forget about everyone, save some naked starlet on the internet. I was saying fuck you to the American workday because I could. And I was saying fuck you to the American Dream too. Nothing made life better than a bottle of vodka and some starlet spread eagle. My Gmail was still up on my office computer. A little gray box at the bottom told me that Larissa was typing something in chat. A little chat box told me that she’d been having a one-sided conversation with me for at least five minutes. Oh well, I guess. I logged off.