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.