Running the Books

by Avi Steinberg

  Meanwhile, the detail workers held court at the library’s counter. A small group of library regulars had gathered around. These inmates were fuming. Some were clamoring for revenge.

  “Motherfucker better watch his back.”

  “He better hope he don’t run into me on the outs.”

  “That ain’t right!” said a small man with a large ’fro. “Right in the middle of the fuckin’ class, man!”

  “That’s how it goes around here,” said Fat Kat, as he flipped through a Car & Driver. “Get used to it.”

  “That’s fucking disrespect, right there,” said another.

  And Dice: “I’ll tell you what that is: demeaning. Man shit on your fuckin’ head and you expected to take it? Naw. Un-uh.”

  I looked out the library’s large windows, out to the hall, where a group of officers were trying to contain their smiles, trying to stay casual. Strange that they weren’t coming into the library to help restore order.

  “Can someone explain what just happened?” I asked the inmates.

  As usual, Fat Kat was completely in the know. Without looking up from his magazine, he said, “Dude came in with one of them fart sprays you can buy. And I think you know the rest.”

  “You saw this?” I asked.

  “Yeah, man, they did it yesterday too. During Forest’s shift, when 3-3 was in here. Cleared out the whole room, same as today.”

  On one side, there were gleeful officers; on the other, furious inmates. In between, me. I was responsible for this space and for the chaos it had become. Unless I implicated myself into this situation I was teetering on the verge of irrelevance. Somehow, I had to save face with both groups, inmates and officers. In a macho environment like prison, that meant one thing. Absurd as the circumstances were, the library, its mission, and its guardian (me) had been openly disrespected. If I couldn’t restore some public dignity to the library and establish some deterrent power, the space would be undermined again and again. If the sheriff’s officers weren’t going to defend the space, I would. The spirit of Don Amato descended on me once again. The Sheriff Librarian persona bubbled up.

  I marched into the hallway, trying to maintain my calm. The corridor was busy with inmates and staff. I spotted the offending officer. He and some of his crew were roosting on a bench next to the officer’s post. When they saw me approach, they stopped talking, and again attempted to suppress their grins.

  Trying hard not to accuse him—as I lacked evidence—I asked what he had been doing in the library. His face went through its various registers: blank to constipated to smug, and back again. He didn’t make eye contact.

  “I was getting a sports book,” he said. “Forest lets us check them out.”

  The baldness of this claim, and the awkwardness of the officers’ behavior, was all the evidence I needed. He hadn’t gone into the sports section. Nor had he looked for anything. He had walked purposefully into the stacks, where he remained for less than ten seconds. And as Fat Kat had said, I knew the rest. Everybody did.

  “Well,” I said, “maybe you can explain this: there’s a pretty nasty smell in the library and you were just in and out of there. Any connection between these two facts?”

  “That smell’s been there for days. It’s got nothing to do with me, guy.”

  Now he was glaring at me. His lips fully retreated into his head. I just sighed.

  “We both know that’s not true,” I said.

  “Are you here every day?” he shouted.

  The implication of his statement was that I was a college volunteer, a notion I never quite dispelled. Now he was standing. He walked toward me, chest puffed out.

  “Yeah,” I replied, also raising my voice—hoping it wouldn’t crack—trying not to back down from a guy trained to tackle and subdue violent criminals.

  “I work here full time,” I said. “Every single day. Same department as you. Member of the union. I see you here every day, even if you don’t see me. This,” I said, indicating the library, “is my spot and my responsibility. The question here is why did you come into my space, in the middle of my class, and screw everything up?”

  “You listen to me.” He was bellowing. “Do you fu—,” he caught himself before cursing. “Do you know where you are? This isn’t the Quincy Public Library, okay? This is a prison. I got a badge. I do what I want. You don’t tell me where I go.”

  He looked over to his buddies for support. They looked away. For a moment, all of us, it seemed, paused to solemnly honor the utter and transparent stupidity of what this man was saying. I racked my brain to identify which Steven Seagal movie he had poached the line about the badge. He spoke again, this man with no lips and a badge.

  “You got absolutely no right to tell me where I go and when, you understand me?” he continued shouting. “Who’s your supervisor?”

  “Who’s my supervisor?” I said, laughing. “Who’s your supervisor? I don’t have anything to explain.”

  I had accomplished my mission: to send a message to any bad guy, inmate or officer, that I wasn’t passive when affronted and to let them know that I would make their lives unpleasant if they messed with me or tried to undermine my mission. Maybe Officer Chuzzlewit would think twice before tangling with me and my library. Nobody wants to mess with a loose cannon. This was the credo of the Sheriff Librarian.

  Within five minutes I was called into Patti’s office. I knew that some of the hallway-loitering officers had been harassing the Education Department for years. Feeling smug, I dispensed some free advice.

  “You got them right where you want them,” I told Patti. “Now you have a good excuse to have these guys banned from the Ed Department.”

  She shot me a look from behind her computer monitor.

  “Just write a report,” she said.

  I wrote up a quick account of what happened, and fact-checked it. My newspaper editors from the Boston Globe would have been proud. As I printed it up on the Education Department’s shared printer, a veteran teacher summoned me into his office. The teacher was a Boston Irish, Dorchester-raised guy. Friends with a number of the officers. He later quit and joined the police force. He closed the door and seemed serious.

  “This conversation is just between you and me,” he told me.

  “Of course,” I said, still in newspaper reporter mode. “I won’t quote you, I know you’re trying to help me. I appreciate your advice: you think I overreacted—”

  He cut me off. “Listen, you got every right to hand in that report. That guy was way out of line. But you should just be aware you’re going to have a shitstorm on your hands if you do. These guys stick together, you know. They can make things very difficult for you.”

  He was kind to impart this advice, but none of this was news to me.

  “I already have a shitstorm on my hands, quite literally; and these guys, for no reason, are already making things difficult for me. That was the problem to begin with.”

  I told him that I had no intention of bringing heat onto this guy and would gladly not submit a report—but I’d have no choice if the officer submitted one first. That was protocol.

  “And anyway, the issue here,” I said, grandly, “is his behavior and the collusion of his buddies.”

  The teacher laughed and put out his palm, making the stop gesture.

  “Okay, okay,” he said, smiling. “Easy, now. Just watch yourself.”

  Above Ground

  Many people offered me their opinions on the Officer Chuzzlewit incident. The view submitted by a mysterious older inmate wasn’t particularly memorable. It did however have the happy result of bringing this man into my consciousness.

  I hadn’t met him. But the day after the Chuzzlewit incident, I saw him leaning against the library counter, giving me a knowing look.

  “Can I help you?” I asked.

  This was apparently an uproariously funny thing to say. He slapped his hand on the counter, threw his head back, and howled.

  “Can I help you?” he sai
d joyously. “I gotta remember that one. Prison customer service! I should hire you.”

  I probably looked distressed because he added, “Oh, maestro, you’re too serious. You a student?”

  “No, I—”

  “I am. I’m a student of everything. Macro, micro, the cosmos, botany, theology, you name it and I got my hands caught right up in it.”

  “Why don’t I ever see you in the library?”

  He snickered. “I’m a busy man,” he said. “Besides, y’all don’t have the books I need; I gotta buy them myself. Then I donate them to y’all. I don’t take credit for it, now, but that’s what’s happening, right here, right under your nose. Believe me. A lot stuff goes on here you don’t know about. You Irish?”

  “No, Jewish.”

  “Redstu Yiddish?”

  I tried not to act surprised. And replied in Hebrew.

  “Okay,” I said, switching back to our one common language, “now tell me how you know Yiddish.”

  “Ah man, I know the Jews,” he told me, “I used to be in the above-ground swimming pool business. As you probably know, that business is run by the Jews.”

  I indicated that this was news to me.

  “Really?” he said. “You really Jewish?”

  He told me that the above-ground swimming pool business was run not by Jews but by the Jews. A cabal of Hebrews. Not that he minded. It was fine by him, he said, because he saw plenty of the action. They welcomed him in, invited him to their homes, to their Passover Seders. To prove this, he recited a bit of the Passover Haggadah, “mah nishtanah ha-layla ha-zeh, right?”

  I asked him how he got into the above-ground swimming pool business.

  “I’m not in the above-ground swimming pool business,” he replied.

  We stared at each other for a long moment.

  “I’m also not in the carpet-cleaning business, the car scratch repair business, the star-selling business. I’m just in business. You dig? I’m an entrepreneur. I used to be a peteman. That’s the old name for guys who hit up safes. I made friends with guys who worked in warehouses. They’d disarm the alarms of the warehouse, I’d come in at night, pick the safe, and walk out and we’d have a steak dinner and divide the cash. But then one day, I was scratching up this guy’s car—long story—and I thought to myself, ‘I bet I could sell something that would repair scratches in cars.’ You see? I realized I was on the wrong side of things, man. That’s why I was always so stressed out: I wasn’t living up to my potential, I wasn’t doing what I was supposed to be doing on this planet. I should be bringing joy to my brothers.”

  I had so many questions for this man, who now introduced himself as Alonzo. Or just Al. I wasn’t certain where to begin. So I started with the obvious.

  “The star-selling business?” I asked.

  Selling stars is a lot like selling flowers, he told me. Similar business model. People buy them as gifts for special occasions, birthdays, anniversaries, etc. But it’s mostly seasonal: Mother’s Day, Valentine’s Day, and whatnot. One major difference, of course, is that people generally won’t buy stars more than once for the same person. This means slightly less volume. The good news, he assured me, was that there’s almost no overhead, and it requires only a modest initial investment of capital—and certainly less capital than constantly buying imported flowers with a very limited shelf life. Stars, as he informed me, enjoy a shelf life in the billions of years and there’s a virtual infinity of (free) supply. True, there’s no way to adequately limit competition for the vast supplies; the field will eventually get crowded. But, while the idea is still relatively fresh, the competition is slight. He’s been able to corner a niche in the market.

  I interrupted to ask him what the hell he was talking about.

  “I’m getting there, young man,” he said. “You in a big rush?”

  Actually, the officer on duty was beginning to fidget, indicating about five minutes remaining in the library period. But as I would find out, Al was never in a rush.

  If you give Al twenty-five dollars, half the price his competitors ask, he’ll sell you a star. You will be asked to name your star—usually something on the order of “Alison + Roger Forever” or “Johnny Gone But Not Forgotten” or “Baby Towanda.” He enters the name into a log, which he then copyrights. The name is thereby “enshrined into law,” as Al puts it. He sends you a certificate of authentication, an astral map that identifies which star is yours (with its new name appended, of course), and a packet of information regarding this star. When and where it might be found in the sky, when it was discovered, a bit about its natural history, what stage it’s at in its life cycle, which planets orbit it. For forty-five bucks, he’ll sell you a pair of binary stars, great for lovers, or twins, or best friends forever. He also sells planets and moons. Planets are great for kids, he told me; moons are for lovers looking for “something out of the box.”

  “Buying a star,” he said, “it’s like getting a tattoo but it’s even more permanent. It’s enshrined in law and heaven. And it’s much cheaper. That’s a good deal, brother. You’re Jewish, you know a good deal when you see it.”

  I asked him if astronomers acknowledge these new names. It was intended as an innocent question.

  “No,” he sniffed, “they don’t. But I ain’t doing it for them. My customers don’t care what a scientist calls it. He has just as much a right to name it as some dude with a damn Ph.D. The scientific community don’t own the heavens, nobody does. Maybe, maybe, the United States owns the Earth’s moon, because they went there and staked a damn flag on it. But that’s it. Unless you go to an unexplored place, you don’t have no claim to it. I’ve looked up the laws, man. Not that our laws have jurisdiction up there, anyway. I mean think about it, let’s say an alien planet with a highly advanced civilization ‘discovered’ Earth—does that mean they own us?”

  I figured it was a rhetorical question. It was not. He stared at me. “Would it?” he said.

  “No,” I said. “I guess not.”

  He went on for another minute or two about how real entrepreneurship is about democracy. The stars belong to everyone, to the people, not to governments. Above-ground pools, too: democracy, the American Dream. Every person has a right to a pool, not just rich people. Is it, he asked, strange to refer to a swimming pool as a right? No, he said, in response to his own question. It’s about basic biology. We’re part water creature. We’re really amphibians. We need to be submerged in water for periods of the day. We’re better, happier, healthier creatures when we “achieve this potential.” He knows history, he told me. He knows that the theory of rights in America is based on nature, on science. Should the natural right to achieve our full amphibious potential be granted only to the rich, or should all people be able to afford a pool of water at a reasonable rate, with the option of paying on layaway (and no interest for thirteen months)? Isn’t this the point of America?

  This time I was ready with an answer.

  “You’re damn right it is,” I said.

  I was like the idiot in Plato’s dialogues who constantly replies to Socrates’ long, convoluted arguments with statements like “Why, yes,” and “It is certainly so.”

  At this point, the officer outside was almost physically pulling Al out of the library. Alonzo turned to him and casually said, “I’ll be with you in a moment, friend.”

  I told Alonzo that he should join my writing class. He winked at me and disappeared out the door.

  The story of Alonzo in my writing class is brief. He didn’t last long. He had no interest in my writing assignments. After a couple of halfhearted efforts, he showed up to class with a pretyped sheet. This was a prepared statement, an emphatic political manifesto, containing discourses on politics, economics, science, religion, and moral philosophy—most of which baffled or simply irritated the other people in the class.

  Al was on a Marx kick, which I found odd given his romantic attachment to capitalism. After a few classes, and a few more keynote addresses, he’
d either tapped his intellectual reserves or simply gotten the message that his audience was growing less tolerant. He stopped showing up and never visited the library again. But it wasn’t the last I would see of Al, the entrepreneur.

  Memoir of a P

  Wordplay was C.C. Too Sweet’s form of optimism. He came to the library to “chop it up,” to “converse and conversate.” A new turn of phrase meant a new world, new opportunities for self-invention. Since working at prison, I learned that a hustler’s way with words was his one true possession and could never be taken away—but only if kept sharp. This is where the library came into play. If C.C. grew anxious, and this seemed often, he would make up puns and rhymes and try them out at the front counter.

  During a debate with a fellow hustler, he scored major points when he said, “With all due, and undue, respect, the difference between me and you is the following: You are nonsensical while I, my brother, am ineffable. In case you ain’t mastered your diction, I’ll break that down for you—ineffable, meaning: I can not, and will not, be effed with.”

  Meanwhile, his legal troubles were mounting. But C.C. was more confident than ever.

  “In the new millennium,” he announced one day, “there’s gonna be plenty of ’em!” He was referring to new opportunities to make some scratch. (I didn’t have the heart to tell him that we were well into the new millennium.)

  But it was with a hushed tone, and in regards to the new millennium, that C.C. first spoke to me. He was perplexed by the computer, and was shy about it.

  “I’m a twentieth-century kind of guy,” he confided, by way of explaining his preference for typewriters. I told him I was, at most, a nineteenth-century type myself. We started talking. He asked if I knew anything about writing or publishing. I revealed that indeed I knew a thing or two. He looked both ways, leaned in, and whispered, “I got something hot here.”