The Library Book

by Susan Orlean

  Castro said she’d worked at the library for seventeen years. “I was all set to be a paralegal and, well, I ended up here,” she said, making a sound that landed between a laugh and a sigh.

  “It’s good to be here,” Gillette said. “I ran a homeless shelter in Glendale for eight years before this. The library is definitely more low-key than that.” She chuckled and added, “I have a wife and three kids, so I get enough drama at home.”

  At the Computer Center that morning were a few people who looked like students and a middle-aged man dressed in a fresh suit. Most of the patrons, though, looked like they were homeless or at least experiencing harsh living. “They’re good people,” Gillette said, “but we have our moments. It gets a little tough a few days before social security checks come, when they’re down to their last bits. Now, when the patrons get frisky . . .” She pointed to a security guard who was in a spread-legged police stance near the entrance. He hitched up his belt and smiled at Gillette when he saw her pointing. “We’ve got our own guard now, full-time,” she went on. “We just try to keep to the rules. Nothing extreme. But some rules they really don’t like.”

  I asked what rules were unpopular, and she said, “Like, for instance, you can’t dance or sing in here. Unfortunately, a lot of them do like to sing.”

  The Computer Center is muffled and dim, warm with whiffs of sourness, of body odor, and of the vegetal smells of dirt embedded in clothes that were advancing in the direction of compost. But it also had a pleasant, preoccupied feeling, somewhat disembodied, as each one of the fifty-five people was drawn away from the library and into whatever world he or she navigated to. I circled the room and glanced quickly at what was on the screen of each computer. Solitaire. A gossip website with a big story about Céline Dion. The Flintstones. A basketball game. A job-hunting site, Facebook, an online chess game. One man greeted me and told me he was working on his résumé. Viola Castro told me that some patrons do look at pornography, and the librarians leave them be unless it’s child pornography, which isn’t permitted. After she mentioned that, I got to thinking about a 1980 seminar for librarians I’d come across recently. Called “Sex at Central Library,” it reviewed the library’s policies on sexually related material. Included in it were books and magazines covering such topics as nude dancing, striptease, beauty competitions (filed under “Sports”), and kissing contests. The seminar couldn’t have anticipated that someday you could sit in the library and dial up any version of sex you could imagine and many you couldn’t.

  As I was walking around the Computer Center, a man at a desk in the corner suddenly yelled, “Oh God!” It caused a worried head swiveling among the rest of the people at the computers, so I headed back to the desk. Castro waved her hand and said, “That’s nothing, nothing, nothing. He does that every day.” We chatted as everyone simmered down. She told me that she’d gotten a library card for each of her kids as soon as they turned three. Just then, a jittery young man wearing an Adidas sweatshirt came up to the desk and told Castro he was having trouble printing something. Castro got up and went with him to the printer, banged it a couple of times, wiggled a few things, and got it working again. She came back to the desk and whispered, “He’s a little embarrassed. He was printing out a picture of Jessica Alba naked, and the paper jammed.”

  In the meantime, the security guard ambled over to the desk. “This is nothing,” he said. “You want drama? Come to the Hollywood branch. The other day, we had a lady there with a service wolf.”

  Gillette and I said in unison, “A wolf?” The security guard shrugged and said, “Well, maybe it was a dog. But it was as big as a wolf, I swear.”

  I rode the elevator downstairs, feeling happy. I loved the elevator; it was wallpapered with cards from the old card catalog—those stained, dog-eared two-by-five-inch paper rectangles, always typed by someone who didn’t have a firm strike on the keys, so the letters fade from black to gray, back to black. The artist who designed the elevator, David Bunn, must have had fun picking the cards to use. I was leaning against Complete Book of the Dog; Complete Book of the Cat; Complete Book of Progressive Knitting; Complete Book of Harness Racing; and Complete Book of Erotic Art.

  I was on my way to meet David Aguirre, the head of security for the library. Chief Aguirre has a kettle-drum chest and a hearty handshake and a web of crinkles around his eyes when he smiles. He used to be the chief of security for the Los Angeles Zoo. He came to the library in 2006 and has forty-six officers reporting to him. Twenty-six of them are assigned to Central Library, and the rest are at the branches. “Here’s the thing about library security,” Chief Aguirre said as we began to walk around the building. “Library users are eighty percent male, and librarians are eighty percent female, so that’s something to keep in mind.”

  According to Chief Aguirre, there are about a hundred reports of trouble each week at Central. Many are what he called “property conflict”—that is, someone got something stolen. The epicenter of property conflict is the Genealogy Department, because people get so caught up in tracking down Great-Aunt Sally that they stop keeping an eye on their belongings. Another trouble spot is the Computer Center. Aguirre said it creates a lot of “time conflicts,” meaning that someone overstays his two-hour limit at a computer and someone else gets pissed. In Religion, he gets a lot of complaints about people talking to God in overly loud voices. Aguirre walks the building once every hour, paying special attention to the restrooms and bike rack and garden. Usually, he encounters petty issues. Sometimes security officers find big surprises. A guard at the Jefferson branch found someone living on the roof a few years ago. On the roof at the Westwood branch, a guard discovered an elaborate shrine to Marilyn Monroe. Three times in the last six years, Aguirre found a dead person while on his rounds at Central. Most often the cause of death is a heart attack or a stroke. “Five years ago, we had a gentleman, a transient, die in Religion and Philosophy,” Aguirre said. “He looked like he didn’t have a dime in the world, but when we patted him down, we found twenty thousand dollars in cash in a piece of folded paper in his pocket.”

  One of the guards told me that his position at the library feels more like that of a psychologist or a priest than a security guard. The library security employees are Los Angeles Police Department officers. The library pays the police department over $5 million a year for their services. Their effectiveness has been sharply criticized from some quarters. After going undercover at the library for three months, an NBC affiliate ran a multipart investigative series claiming that “police officers [were] spending much of their time texting on their cell phones or talking, instead of patrolling,” and as a result, Central and at least two other libraries had “rampant sex and drug use.” The series was sensational and wrongheaded. Many of the cited incidents occurred on the sidewalks outside the library, which are the responsibility of city police. One thing the television story got right was the fact that the library has to manage the complicated issues that arise any time homeless or mentally ill people gather. Some librarians I spoke to at Central felt the reporters tried to sandbag John Szabo. He didn’t let the story faze him. “The most beautiful thing about public libraries is that they’re open and free to everyone,” he emailed me when I asked him about the series. “With that promise, there are unquestionably tough challenges that our library and public libraries across the nation face every day. Of course, they’re not unique to libraries—they’re big, complicated community-wide issues. And we’re actually making a difference with programs serving the homeless and addressing health disparities.”

  Every day, many homeless people come to the library, and many hang out in the garden and around the sides of the building. Some are doing nothing that is concerning, but they look unkempt and seem erratic; the air around them can feel charged and nervous-making. I have seen people drinking and using drugs in the garden—not in the building—and if I had a young child, I would be upset to be near them. I have seen people drinking and using drugs in public thr
oughout the city, in parks, on sidewalks, at bus stops. Every problem that society has, the library has, too, because the boundary between society and the library is porous; nothing good is kept out of the library, and nothing bad. Often, at the library, society’s problems are magnified. Homelessness and drug use and mental illness are problems you see in every public place in Los Angeles. One difference is that if you see a mentally ill person on the street, you can cross to the other side. In a library, you share a smaller and more intimate space. The communal nature of a library is the very essence of the library, in the shared desks and shared books and shared restrooms.

  The library’s commitment to being open to all is an overwhelming challenge. For many people, the library may be the only place they have to be in close quarters with disturbed or profoundly dirty people, and that can be uncomfortable. But a library can’t be the institution we hope for it to be unless it is open to everyone. I attended an international conference about the future of libraries a few years ago, and everyone—librarians from Germany and Zimbabwe and Thailand and Colombia and everywhere in the world—found the challenge of homelessness and the library exasperating, intractable, unwinnable. The public can come and go, but librarians are in the library all day, and their jobs include handling difficult and sometimes violent people nearly every day. The topic is bigger than libraries; it is a topic for society to solve. All libraries can do is try their best to manage it. On a reddit discussion of the NBC investigation, no one blamed the library for being a magnet for the city’s most troubled people. The majority of the commenters blamed the police for not being more forceful and attentive. Referring to the NBC report, one person wrote, “This ‘investigative’ report just shows that homelessness is a problem. Not sure what the library has to do with it.” Another commenter wrote, “I have news for everyone: This stuff doesn’t just happen at the library. Welcome to L.A.”

  As he walked through the building, Chief Aguirre offered a crisp greeting to every single person he passed, including sad-faced men shuffling by with rickety carts full of shapeless dark things. “I love working with people,” Aguirre said as we passed a man asleep on a bench. Aguirre tapped him lightly, and the man sat up, and Aguirre said, “Hey, buddy, no sleeping.” He turned back to me. “I don’t care who it is. I don’t care if it’s the mayor or if it’s a transient. Anyone can empathize with someone else for two minutes, can’t they?” Working the library detail is generally benign, although a few years ago, an agitated man stabbed an officer with a needle. The man had HIV/AIDS, so he was charged with attempted murder. The officer never contracted the disease but will have to be tested for years.

  The one thing Chief Aguirre dislikes about his job is when he has to tell people they smell. The library has rules to determine when that becomes necessary. Aguirre knows what an affront it is, no matter how bad your circumstances are. “It’s sad, but we have to do it sometimes,” he said, grimacing. “For the comfort of the other patrons, most of all.” We rode the escalator down to the History Department and walked through. Glen Creason was at the desk and nodded at us. A woman in the Genealogy area was eating crackers, so Aguirre approached her and gave her a look. “You can’t be eating in here, ma’am,” he said.

  “Oh, I’m not eating,” the woman said, “I’m snacking.”

  “There’s no snacking.”

  The woman looked aghast and said, “I thought you could snack!”

  We strolled around the department, peeking down the rows of bookshelves to make sure no one was tucked away doing something untoward, reminding a few people to keep an eye on their possessions. There was nothing much of note. We were heading toward the door when a slight, high-strung, dark-skinned man buttonholed Aguirre and told him he’d seen someone sleeping in the men’s restroom.

  “Okay, thanks, we’ll take care of that,” Aguirre said to him.

  The man started quivering. “It’s actually two men, and it is homosexuality!” he said, his voice rising. “I’m willing to be a witness! It’s white culture and Hispanic culture! It’s a white male and a Mexican!” Aguirre glanced around the room. The other patrons were stirring as they heard the commotion. “Let’s step into the lobby so we can talk more,” Aguirre said, almost purring. The man followed him out but started bellowing as soon as we stopped walking. Aguirre pulled out his radio and called the senior security person on duty, Stan Molden. “Stan,” he said into the radio, “we’re going to be walking someone out. Come down to History.” He turned back to the man and tried to direct him to topics other than race wars and homosexuality until Molden appeared at the top of the escalator. Aguirre, leading with his eyes, managed to point the man toward the escalator without him realizing it. It was almost balletic. Molden reached the bottom of the stairs and completed the pirouette, and the man rode up the escalator with him.

  “No big deal,” Aguirre said to me. “He’s a regular. He’ll lose his library privileges for the day, and tomorrow he’ll come back on good behavior, especially if it’s rainy. People don’t want to lose their privileges here if it means they have to go out in the rain.”

  We finished making the rounds downstairs and rode back to the main floor. The guard at the desk handed Aguirre a report for the day, which listed six security issues, including removing the man from the History Department; a domestic dispute that erupted in the checkout line; and a stopped-up sink in the security office kitchen. “We also removed a male out of Level Four,” another guard standing at the desk told Aguirre. “He was moving really slowly—I think there’s something off with him.”

  Aguirre left for a meeting, and I began rounds again with Stan Molden. Molden is tall and lean and has a sly, sideways sense of humor. Earlier in the day, I watched as a man approached him at the security desk and rattled on in a panic for at least five minutes, describing a wallet he’d lost. Molden stared at the man impassively while he was talking, then reached under the desk and plopped down a fat brown wallet. “Would this be it?” he said as the man fell onto the wallet. “Brother, I don’t know how you lost this,” Molden said. “You’ve got everything but the kitchen sink in here.”

  Molden was born in Texas, but then he heard a song by the Beach Boys and decided he was meant to live in Southern California. As soon as he could head to Los Angeles, he did. He is well-known among the library staff for his skill on alto and soprano saxophone, which he has played occasionally at staff parties. His real passion, though, is juggling, which he taught himself by watching YouTube videos. He has worked for the city for thirty years—the first twenty, he did security at City Hall, and the last ten, he’s worked at the library. “There are street people I’ve seen throughout all of those thirty years,” he said. “It’s sad. I get to know them pretty well.” He told me that some years ago, he overheard a homeless woman tell someone she was sleeping on the street, and he decided to give her money so she could spend a few nights in a hotel. “I’m a bachelor. I had the money to spare,” he said. “Believe it or not, I saw her about seven years later, and she told me she was doing better, and she wanted to pay me back.” He shook his head in wonder. We took a turn through Art and Music. An elderly woman was at the desk, saying to the librarian, “I have nine kittens in my kitchen. Are you interested in a cat?” The librarian glanced up and waved at Molden, then turned back to the woman and said pets weren’t allowed in the library. The woman sniffed with disgust. “Why is that? Cats are so much cleaner and neater than people!”

  “I grew up in libraries,” Molden said to me. “I love reading. My New Year’s resolution is to read one hundred books this year. I just started the first one, a biography of Madame Chiang Kai-shek.”

  A man walking toward us signaled to Molden and then said, “Do you know how I can block someone on my daughter’s Facebook?” Molden shook his head, made a few good suggestions, and then we left Art and Music and headed to the Business Department. “We have a lot of knuckleheads in here,” he said, “and a lot of good people, too. And a lot of people just assume we know
everything.”

  Molden will be eligible to retire in two years. He has no family and no obligations, but he does have a plan. Not long ago, he made friends with a man from Sri Lanka, and he learned a lot about the country from him. The man and his wife ended up moving back to Sri Lanka, but he stayed in touch with Molden and sent pictures of his house and neighborhood in Sri Jayawardenepura Kotte. Molden did research on the country and liked what he learned. When he retires, he plans to move there. “You can live really well there,” he said. “It’s very cheap. And it’s beautiful.” I mentioned that it seemed like quite a leap to move across the world to another country. He shrugged and said, “But I’ve seen the pictures, and I’ve read the books.”

  25.

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