Desiree the redheaded librarian sailed by the circulation desk. I tracked her with my beautiful eyes. She did not look at me. I kept looking at her, wanting to see if she'd flick an eyeball my way. Nothing. She stared over and around me every time she came near. I wasn't asking for her hand in marriage, just a nod in my general direction. A nod, a wink, some acknowlegement of my essential humanity. Instead, after talking with some of my coworkers, she went around the corner. Gone.
The gate lifted on the community plaza. They were handing out free lunches to kids for the noon hour. Desiree, however, was not handing out looks at me to me. She sat ten feet away. Not a nod. Not a murmur. Not a fuck off.
My point, dear reader(s), is that she didn't seem excited that I was back working for the library.
Here I was, rising like a phoenix from Arizona, and she didn't care. Or didn't care to care.
Nor did the guy who ran the Idea Lab. Earlier that morning we both went to the staff door with our access keys. He therefore knew I was staff. Did I get a grunt? A hi-de-ho? A yodel in my earhole? No, he brushed by me as if I were a canceled comedian who rapes a lot.
"Who wants Daddy's pudding pop? WHO WANTS"
During my lunch break, I went upstairs to aslappa de bass, mon in the music studio. Libraries, people, are different nowadays. Get to know them! And they're great for crack smoking. Once I was back at the circ desk, two security guards staked out the ladies' restroom. When a young lady emerged, they handed her a yellow card for flopping and meth. She didn't seem much to care, wandering back out on the street accompanied by the guards.
"Crazy," I said. "Does that happen a lot here?"
"Yes," said my fellow clerk, Lin, a young Vietnamese lady--or she could have been an old Jewish man, since the face was tightly concealed by a surgical mask. "We had so much meth smoke coming out of the bathrooms that we had to shoot up heroin just to cope."
"Dig it," I said.
"For a while we'd have people using in the bathrooms once every thirty minutes."
"That's hundreds a week. At least. I mean, do the meth."
Lin inhaled, her mask puckering. "Yes," she croaked as she sprayed down her desk. "But now that we have more security it's not as bad."
"If only this darn pandemic would end," I said joshily.
"What?"
"Nothing."
"Oh, and thank you for helping me with that customer last week with the Spanish. He had a lamination question, and you came in and saved me."
"Uh. That wasn't me."
"No. That was you. And your Spanish is definitely better than mine."
"No, I don't think so. I no habla Spanish-o."
"Yes, that was you. You helped me! Didn't you?"
"No. Not me."
She stared at me. "Are you pulling my leg?"
"Nope." Just as I wondered if her mask was cutting off her oxygen, Jose the lead clerk came by. I stopped him. "Hey, Jose, let me ask you something. Do I speak Spanish?"
He looked at me, amused at the thought of this gringo speaking Spanish. "No," he said carefully. "I've never heard you speak Spanish."
"See? No way says Jose. And that rhymes, Lin! You KNOW it rhymes!!"
Lin's anguished eyes blinked over her multiple masks. "But if it wasn't you, who could it have been?"
I shrugged. It was clear that I was nothing more to this young lady than a hazy, gray blob of sentient old-man matter. Then I realized who it could have been--one sentient hazy blob as good as another.
"Desiree!" I said, as she sailed by the desk. I've got you now, I thought to myself. "I think you might have helped Lin with a customer last week with lamination, in Spanish? Yes? Do you think so? I'm over here, by the way."
Desiree wildly looked about, her eyes rolling. Finally, she gazed up at God, or the ventilation.
"We have got to get that fixed!"
Okay, maybe it's time I work at that Toyota dealership instead.
No comments:
Post a Comment