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.