The World’s Strongest Librarian: A Memoir of Tourette’s, Faith, Strength, and the Power of Family

by Josh Hanagarne

  We deal with these situations—which are rare, but too disturbing to forget—by wrapping ourselves in the mantle of the “public” part of “public library.” It’s for everyone. And all of their multiple personalities. There’s nothing funny about mental illness but being scared by disturbing behavior doesn’t make me insensitive, either. Until a behavior escalates to the abusive or biting or scalding-coffee level, we have little actionable information in terms of getting people that scare us out of the building. The guy who has now called me a “tall bigot” or “fucking Jew” twice in the last two years still comes in every day and asks me to find books for him.

  I don’t know if people realize that it’s nearly impossible for librarians to avoid looking at the books they check out. I was in a training session once where the instructor encouraged me to unfocus my eyes when dealing with patron’s items.

  If I started unfocusing my eyes to avoid everything I shouldn’t see here, I’d never get a clear look at anything.

  Part of my job is watching the computers, all twenty of them within thirty feet of me. I make the rounds, glancing at every screen to see if anyone is viewing something illegal. It’s against the law to view pornography—we’re not allowed to call it porn, since the Supreme Court can’t define it—in the presence of children, so you can’t be looking at gyrating nude people on the public computers. We all still call it porn. Nobody’s going to accuse someone of “viewing objectionable material” and expect to be taken seriously. This conversation is not fun. Picture yourself at your desk. A patron approaches and says, “I’m sorry, but you need to see what that guy is looking at.” So you look. Sure enough, there he is—I’ve never had to talk to a woman about her porn in the library—leaning toward his monitor. Maybe his hands are playing nice. But maybe you can’t see where they are. All you know is that your mission is to startle him out of his sexual reverie and hope that when he looks up at you with eyes that haven’t blinked in far too long, his pants will be buttoned. Then you have to get close enough to whisper—for his privacy—There’s been a complaint about what you’re looking at. No, I’m sorry, I’m not going to weigh in on how attractive she is. You need to get her off your screen. This is what you say even if your gut wants you to whisper, “Seriously, man, you’re in a library—put your cock away.”

  The first time I catch him, it’s a warning. He can stay on the computer and do whatever he wants, unless he was looking at something illegal like child pornography. In that case we call the police.

  As strange as the porn discussion is, it’s equally surreal to wake someone up who fell asleep in the middle of an Andy Griffith episode on YouTube and is snoring in the midst of twenty other people.

  How do we deal with that situation? Oh, we tip their chairs backward and blame it on someone else as they topple to the floor.

  Just kidding. We tap on their table or chair and say, “You’re not allowed to sleep in here. Please stay awake.” But I won’t stop dreaming about tipped chairs and smelling salts. But these are usually adult problems.

  I’d estimate that 80 percent of the library patrons at my branch were under sixteen years old. Of those, the majority was Hispanic, but there were several ethnicities: Vietnamese, Polynesian, Somali, Sudanese. This also makes it so hard to figure out the gang situations. There are gangs. But it’s not always obvious, like, “Oh, they have blue clothes and the others have red clothes, so they’re enemies.” And it’s not as simple as white skin versus black, or brown versus black, or whatever. I had a man run up and throw a wallet into my lap because he claimed, “That Arab bastard over there is trying to steal someone’s wallet, but I grabbed it from him!” The “Arab” was a refugee from Ethiopia who was there to attend a job-search class with the International Rescue Committee. He was done using the computer and had picked up his own wallet, which he had set on the desk while he worked.

  One day I spoke at a local elementary school. I was there to get those kids into the library. Three times I stood in a circle of fifty kids and asked them what their favorite part of the library was. Computers and comics, every time. When I gave my standard “books aren’t boring, you’ve just been reading boring books” line, many rolled their eyes.

  “Do you guys have a favorite TV show? We’ve got DVDs of TV too.”

  Jersey Shore was the clear favorite.

  “How many of you speak a language other than English?” I said. Nearly everyone raised a hand. “How many of you speak Spanish?” Lots of hands. “How many of you speak Vietnamese?” Lots of hands. “What other languages do you all speak?” The only kids who didn’t answer spoke no English, and even they perked up when I mentioned Jersey Shore.

  Several times, a white woman asked me to walk her to her car because she was scared of the brown kids outside, harmless thirteen- and fourteen-year-olds that I knew well. “I always feel like they’re about to start fighting,” she said. How do we solve this conundrum?

  The short answer is: I don’t know. But while we may never find specific, actionable solutions, a good library’s existence is a potential step forward for a community. If hate and fear have ignorance at their core, maybe the library can curb their effects, if only by offering ideas and neutrality. It’s a safe place to explore, to meet with other minds, to touch other centuries, religions, races, and learn what you truly think about the world.

  One of the profession’s buzzwords is “relevant.” Libraries must stay “relevant.” I disagree. There’s nothing relevant about this place. It’s so much more. A community that doesn’t think it needs a library isn’t a community for whom a library is irrelevant. It’s a community that’s ill. It doesn’t know what it needs. Maybe that’s the librarians’ fault for not proving their worth, or maybe it’s a proverbial sign of the times in the Internet age.

  Libraries can’t be all things to all people. At the Internet Librarian Conference in 2009, I spent three days sitting in rooms of “innovative” librarians and heard only one thing that made any sense to me. Stephen Abram, past president of the Special Library Association, said, “You’re making a mistake if you’re trying to give people things that they can get somewhere else. We can’t innovate through being derivative—that’s just trying to be relevant.” I remember this when I see librarians deciding whether we need to have teen video game night. Or more public PCs. Or fewer books. A truly bizarre former director once told me, “People no longer want information from libraries. They want…transformation.” This inane homily would eventually appear on a PowerPoint slide that the entire staff sneered at. The text captioned a slide of a butterfly on a dewy leaf. The next slide was of a woman’s glaring eyes as they stabbed out through the slit of a burka. I can’t remember the caption for that one. Or the point.

  Many librarians—I’ve done this myself—lament the idea that we might simply be competitors for Netflix or iTunes. I’m past caring about that. I want people walking through the doors. I don’t care what their reasons are. That kind of makes me feel like a carnival barker*—that my job might just be to get people in a building—but I still think it’s worth it. Once they’re here, we’ll work on why they return. Once they’re here they’ve entered an institution dedicated to fighting ignorance and providing a space without ideology. Is it too lofty to hope that a library could curb the poison of racism? That it could create a reality usually expressed by treacly expressions like “a sense of community”? Even if someone believes that the library’s primary function is as an expensive homeless shelter or as a place to rent free movies, even if they believe it’s a waste of taxpayers’ money, even if they think that all of the goofy stories I’m telling in this book are the norm…well…what patrons use the library for doesn’t change what it offers. Anyone could enrich their life by spending some time here, if only they were willing to look around.

  Nothing rivals this library for its sheer variety of humanity. During one forty-eight-hour period:

  I counseled several homeless people who were fighting a bedbug outbreak at the
ir shelter. While being solicitous and keeping my distance, I found some articles about bedbugs and how to recognize their bites.

  I watched a man chew on his own ponytail with such boyish exuberance that it gagged him. Then he asked me if we had any tissue paper. Then he wiped his mouth and walked away, presumably to wring out his hair.

  I shepherded a dozen kids through their homework assignments. If they’re writing papers, homework help usually means helping them find books or other sources, but these kids wanted me to do their problems for them with a calculator on the Internet. I didn’t.

  The next morning I witnessed the immediate aftermath of a bloody suicide. Someone screamed as I walked past the phone books. More screams followed. I heard something break. From the balcony I saw a broken body, far below. I ran downstairs to see if I could help, exited the wrong door in the basement where she had landed, and nearly tripped over the first dead body I’d ever seen outside of a viewing. I went home haunted by the questions: Why at the library? How could this have been her best option?

  The next day a blond woman in her late thirties said, “Yes, can you make me a computer reservation?”

  “Sure.”

  “Good, because the computers are picking on me. They know me.”

  Ah, trapped in a Philip K. Dick novel, huh? “I’m happy to make the reservation,” I told her. “Did you have trouble getting on before? Sometimes the PCs make—”

  “Whoa! Get your director down here right now.” She scowled at me.

  “Okay…what should I tell her?”

  “Young man, I’m not sure if you’re aware of how often you use the m sound, but it sounds highly sexual to me and I don’t come here to be sexually harassed by you.”

  I was flabbergasted. “By the letter m?” It’s not like I’d said, “While we’re at it, might I massage your mammaries, ma’ammmmm?”

  “Or by anyone else, no offense. Actually, you know what? Just make the reservation, but maybe this is a good time to get rid of Computer M over there as well…” Her voice dropped to a whisper: “For the same reason.”

  She fled into the stacks before I could apologize for coming on too strong with such a lurid consonant. The letter m came from a hieroglyph used to represent the word “water.” Perhaps it was the ancient etymological wetness of it that sent her pulse a-racing.

  Librarians are required to be social workers, janitors, babysitters, researchers, e-mail-account-setter-uppers, and more. We make ourselves feel better by saying that we provide an “essential service.” If we were as essential as the police or fire department, then we wouldn’t always be first up for budget cuts. Libraries are essential to people like me, but that’s my parents’ doing. And in my opinion, we deserve to be first up for budget cuts, unless we start putting out fires or arresting criminals.

  When I started taking Max to the library, he was too young to want to do anything but jump on the couches. But I’ll never forget the first time I took him in and he said, “And I can take any book, Daddy!” He quivers when we walk into the library. I was that kid. I’m still that kid at heart. That’s a definition of “essential” that works for me.

  I want people to agree with Luis Borges, who said, “I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.” Or Thomas Jefferson, who said, “I cannot live without books.” Tom Clancy, a writer who has made millions writing sentences like, “But a man had to hold his woman at a time like this,” still wins my heart by making statements like “The only way to do all the things you’d like is to read.” In Something Wicked This Way Comes, when the kids were investigating the unholy provenance of Dark’s carnival, who found the origin story? Charles Halloway, the librarian!

  Bill Gates said, “I’d be happy if I could think that the role of the library was sustained and even enhanced in the age of the computer.”

  And here’s Warren Buffett: “If past history was all there was to the game, the richest people would be librarians.”

  I think I’ve read every movie review Roger Ebert has ever written. My favorite thing he’s ever said is that “doing research on the web is like using a library assembled piecemeal by pack rats and vandalized nightly.”

  To see the value of a library, ignore the adults. Find an inquisitive child who doesn’t have an iPhone yet, take them to the library, and tell them that they can learn anything they want there.

  One Saturday when Max was about two, I awoke to see him by my bed. His hair is still blond, like mine used to be. His eyes are deep blue. He’s as skinny as Gollum from the Lord of the Rings films, has the same wiry strength, but is adorable and has healthier obsessions: puppies and kittens and mud and climbing. He held a calculator to his left ear. “Yeah, Daddy, I’m just calling to let you know that I need a graham cracker.”

  I nodded.

  He cocked his head, listening. “Oh yeah, okay, I’ll tell him.” He patted my head. “And then we’re supposed to go get some stories at the library.”

  “Says who? Who called you?”

  “Adonis.” Adonis is a dog that lives across the street.

  At least twice a week I take Max to our neighborhood library. Sometimes he wants books. I give him a basket and let him wander. Sometimes he wants books from the kids’ section. Sometimes he seems more interested in dense books on socialism. Sometimes he just wants to put the library’s chinchilla in the basket, but he’s finally getting that we can’t take it out of its cage.

  We play a game to teach him words. I point to a book’s cover: “What’s that?” It’s a horse. An airplane. A shark. That’s Snooki. It’s a truck. That’s a lady crying. I don’t know why she’s sad, but that book’s probably too big for you. Once when I asked if he was ready to go, Max gestured at his stack of books and said, “No, I have too much work to do.” One minute later, he put a book down and did a somersault on the carpet. Then he got back on his chair as if nothing had happened and kept reading, holding the book over his face. I couldn’t see his expression, but I knew from his quaking shoulders that he was laughing, wondering what I’d made of his somersault.

  My time with him has been the happiest of my life.

  Misty has been content to watch him from a distance, but she still jolts me constantly. Max has noticed.

  I inhaled, bent, and lifted the heaviest stone in our garden, a three-hundred-pound behemoth with jagged edges. I crushed it to my chest and walked. At the other end of the grass I dropped the stone and tried to catch my breath. I turned to find Max standing next to me, clutching a small stone to his chest. He looked very serious. I don’t think I’ve ever simultaneously been so moved and laughed so hard. How surreal, this little person in my backyard who was learning how to be a person by watching me.* “Okay buddy, set it down,” I said between breaths. I stopped laughing when my hand crashed into the side of my head. Misty. It didn’t knock me down, but I lost my balance and stumbled. I caught myself with one hand and lowered myself to the ground. Max was still holding the stone. He put it down. Then he put his arms around my neck and squeezed.

  “You okay, Daddy?”

  “I’m okay,” I said. “Thanks.”

  “What happened?”

  “I just fell.”

  I was chilled. Will this be his story?

  Shortly after Max’s birth, Janette asked me what I wanted for my son. The Hopes and Dreams discussion. I knew what I did not want.

  Max has my eyes. Will he inherit the broken teeth?

  He has my long fingers and toes. Will the joints hold?

  He has his entire life ahead. Will he experience his own share of squandered years? His narrow torso is barely wider than my hand. Will a hernia break it?

  He chatters and sings constantly. Will he ever submit to voicelessness so he can be out in public?

  During my lunch breaks at the library, I trained desperately in the small fitness room downstairs. I’d pound away at the weights until I was on my knees. As my breath returned, I’d try to figure out where Misty was. If she’d had enough. In th
e evenings, I trained in our backyard. Because it took enormous effort, I’d put Max in the back of the truck and literally push it around our cul-de-sac while Janette steered. Anything and everything to keep Misty at bay. I collapsed into bed at night, hoping that I’d exhausted myself enough to banish her.

  I continued with my kettlebell obsession, collecting a nice little family of them in our backyard. The largest weighs 106 pounds. The smallest belongs to Max. It weighs two pounds. It could’ve been the prize in a box of cereal.

  In 2009, in a fit of madness, I sold my set of the Oxford Mark Twain to defray the cost of attending the Russian Kettlebell Challenge, aka the RKC, a three-day certification for instructors. It was put on by Dragon Door, the publisher of Pavel Tsatsouline’s book The Naked Warrior.

  Twenty-nine volumes of Mark Twain. My favorite author. More than fourteen thousand pages, not all of it great, but great enough. Each volume contained an introduction by a noted author. Kurt Vonnegut wrote the introduction to Connecticut Yankee. That intro alone was almost worth the price of the books. My mom got them for my college graduation present for three hundred dollars on eBay, but I would’ve paid more. I smiled at those books every time I saw them on my shelves. In many ways I still felt like an incomplete person, but at least I had those books; I was more complete than anyone unlucky enough not to have them.

  So, yeah, it was madness to sell them. Why did I want to go to the RKC? As I’ve said, I’m susceptible to both advertising and challenges to my ego, so there was that. But also, I was enjoying the online kettlebell community. I went to the Dragon Door forum every day and wrote and read about training with kettlebells with other people doing the same thing. It was fun to belong. It also gave me a chance to get friendlier with Adam T. Glass, an ever-present and domineering force on the message boards.