“Your library is your paradise”
Erasmus
Kees* didn’t tell his mother because she worked days cleaning other people’s houses. Plus she’d only make things worse. Her limited English skills – especially when angry – yelling and spitting in half-Dutch, advocating for her son’s welfare, would not have helped matters because it never had before. School officials simply stared with that special silent contempt perfected by administrators working jobs they did not like but had to pretend to or lose all faith.
Kees took the advice of a teacher, her palm on his shoulder, as she escorted him to the library. She introduced him to the school librarians: Mrs. Alicia Hull and Miss B. Watson. They smiled a smile that made you think of air mattresses in an aquamarine pool in Wildwood, far from all complication and calamity. And to be truthful, he had, at age 13, never before shaken the hand of an adult.
Somehow, who Kees was got under the skins of certain schoolmates: he liked doing extra credit reports for geography (brown-nose); he’s Dutch and whatever alien-ness was associated with that they sniffed out from a mile away: wearing taped-up-at-the-bridge glasses because his parents couldn’t afford a new pair every time he broke them, weird rust-colored not-quite-corduroy pants, a slightly akilter shirt collar, pronouncing the “v” as an “f,” jeans from a department store that no longer existed, all justified his status as target.
But all of these “afflictions” paled compared to being a known crybaby. The more torment, the more tears fell, the more they teased – that’s the cyclical physics of cruelty. They had access to the entire arsenal: Teasing, name-calling (faggot, foreigner, crybaby), threats, ostracism, basketball to the face, dodge ball to the crotch, punching, tripping, slagging, and knocking books from his grip.
Kees cried because he couldn’t figure out why he so incensed them and what in crying so aroused them. It did not matter that he cried less out of fear than sad bewilderment. Anyway, it’s something that can be overcome, if we understand bullies as coming from a position of weakness, frustration, abuse at home. Good to know, but knowledge did not immediately ameliorate his situation.
Mrs. Hull joked: “You’re safe here. Libraries work on these pests the way a cross works on vampires.”
And so the Haven Consolidated School District Library (grades 1-12) became his safe haven. Every day during recess and lunch he was greeted by their warm smiles and piles of suggested reading material, bookmarked with strips of colored paper in their arms.
The only others in the library were some girls who were always doing extra-credit projects, a student volunteer (Doreen?) who hummed while she reshelved books and Alfred who had been caught masturbating and was now an untouchable – except to the librarians who believed he simply had family issues. Kees didn’t interact with him because, well, masturbation rumors are contagious …
On rainy days some of the girls would read the latest Highlights out loud, secretly chew gum, play hopscotch on the green-white check linoleum in the aisle between WXYZ and TUV books.
Every day he’d grab books at random: story books, books with photos from the Depression, psychology books, books on patriotism and civic duty, a guide to careers, pamphlets on the proper way to fold the flag or choosing butcher as a career, books with drawings illustrating the ill-effects of smoking, true near-death experiences, geography books with maps, maps with trails that his forefinger could follow to new worlds.
Kees had special permission to eat lunch there as long as he did not eat over the books, leave any crumbs. To illustrate, they opened a book with pictures of silverfish with their slender tentacled bodies, attracted to sugary crumbs, glue, paper, dandruff, and starches, eating entire books from the spines outward.
“There’s a story about the Flushing Michigan Public Library,” Mrs. Hull pointed out, “silverfish, over time imperceptibly chewed through the entire aisle of 801 Philosophy through 803 Encyclopedias – millions of silverfish. Until one day, the library was totally empty and the librarians lost their jobs.” She made that last part up.
A small selection of books examined by Kees:
- Labyrinths, Jorge Luis Borges: A teacher had once used “labyrinth” in a sentence. The book had never been checked out – never!)
- The Magic Tunnel, Caroline Emerson: Two kids take the New York subway backwards in time to end up in New Amsterdam in the 1630s.
- To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee: Taken out by Leslie who once told Kees she liked him “third best in the class,” which he saw as hopeful, although he had no plans to off the other two.
- The Quality of Courage, Mickey Mantle: His favorite Yankee player, used to walk from Mid-Manhattan to Yankee Stadium to fully experience the city. Bullied by neighborhood boys as a kid. Stardom was his revenge.
- Newsweek, June 17, 1968: Robert F. Kennedy (RIP) cover
- Life, April 12, 1968: Martin Luther King (RIP) cover
- Inside South America, John Gunther
- Teen Mod Magazine, February 1967: “How to Dress Like a Mod,” “Donovan’s Real ‘Jennifer Juniper’,” “Georgy Girl’s True Adventures.” Unclear why they had a subscription to this magazine, but he was glad they did.
Kees didn’t always read. One day he counted 20 bookshelves in the main room, 12 more in the beehive-inspired alcove where most of the cubicles were located. The tops of the shelves were just beyond the slightly raised-skirt reach of either Mrs. Hull or Miss Watson standing on tiptoes. Kees made tremendous calculations: each bookshelf unit consisted of 5 shelves evenly spaced, each shelf held an average of 41 books x 5 x (20 + 12 shelves), which meant the library contained at least 6560 books. At 612 enrolled students, that was just short of 11 books per student. But which 11 were reserved for Kees?
He counted average words per page (309), multiplied that by the average number of pages per book (151), multiplied that by the total number of books, adding several million to cover pamphlets and newspapers to come up with c. 308 million words.
He was a slow reader, so, if every day he read for an hour at the rate of 100 words per minute, he could read 6,000 per hour. Meaning that Kees could read them all in 51,333 hours or 2,138 days or about 6 years.
That was highly unlikely. Instead, he turned to memorizing facts and figures: The average male will grow 27 feet of beard in a lifetime, population of Ohio, length of the Nile, Gallium is an element that is both solid and liquid, the melting point of LPs (600° F), 1967: Automated Teller Machine first used in England, deaths during the Astor Place Opera riots in 1849 (31), invention of paper, the depth of the impression of a typewriter key on paper (.25 mm), 2000 yodelers each in the state and nation of Georgia, annual student suicide attempt rate (9 per 100,000), total amount of time spent playing pinball annually by American minors, baseball mitts lost since 1960 …
Kees repeated these numbers and facts over and over until he had fully absorbed them.
He searched the “S” for South America in the encyclopedias and suddenly began to take reading more seriously like a driver who learns he must pay attention to the road signs to arrive at his destination.
His soft-faced librarian demigods, with sometimes a soothing smirk, could fulfill any request within minutes (e.g. Patagonia’s penguins), thumbing through the card catalog or, having internalized the entire layout of the library, float to the precise location of a certain Dewey decimal point (918.2/61502).
They brought him stacks of books on lost tribes, the Amazon, the emerging conflicts between modern development and natural habitats, the bossa nova, the beaches of Rio and Gauchos. He thanked them with a smile. Meek smiles and whispered thank yous are accepted currencies among librarians.
Mrs. Hull and Miss Watson seldom overstepped the boundary separating church from state. But they did feel it was OK to inform him that not only Christians believed in the essence of the word: “In the beginning was the Word, and that Word was God. The Hopi, Hindus, Inuits, yogis, many peoples also believe our universe was created by a fundamental sound – a word of vibration that shook the dispersed vague particles into place, creating our world. And books filled with these words read in a certain order and cadence can greatly reduce the distance between divine and human.”
Kees wrote his geography report as a travel journal full of statistics (Lima’s San Francisco Monastery Library contains 25,000 antique books and its catacombs contain the bones and skulls of 25,000 dead; Borges is buried in Geneva Switzerland, not Buenos Aires, because he loved Geneva and hated dictator Juan Peron and his wife Evita) and hand-drawn maps detailing his imaginary trip from the top of South America, following a zigzag journey that ended in Patagonia which, from the descriptions and photos, seemed as ideal an outdoors as the library was an indoors – home to the European rabbit, the albatross and the amusing penguin, no cruel classmates, and a kind of peace where your mind feels like part of the sky while you’re talking face-to-face to the rabbits and penguins.
It is not illogical to think that the world is infinite, after all, the mind (432 km/h) is faster than the wind (408). He scrawled the word “INFINITE” on a tee shirt that was to be the last morning of the mounting tensions as fate would have it. He wore it under a shirt so his mother would not see it.
Kees grabbed the page that displayed Giorgio de Chirico’s “Mystery and Melancholy of a Street” that he had furtively ripped from the book De Chirico: Immortal Art Beyond Logic, using the effective cough-rip method of stealth pilfering and slid it into the front pocket of his knock-off Indovina briefcase. He then slid a snippet of scrap paper in between the pages upon which he had written SORRY. (This was to be his one and only ever betrayal of the librarians’ trust.)
The clever Mrs. Hull and Miss Watson pulled him aside before he could depart. They gripped his arm with an urgency he had not previously felt. They had read up on football’s end-run and had disseminated the pamphlet: Book Ban Battle Strategy, issued by the Librarians Against Banning (LAB), and had, until that last day, managed to successfully divert the ire of the swelling horde of strung-out parents with their faces distorted by an anger they did not fully understand, distracted by an indignation that had been handed to them by others.
He felt honored when they asked him and Doreen to help them build a display for the book fair in the school lobby. The idea was to arrange books grabbed from the shelves in the shape of a bird’s nest under the motto: THE BOOK ROOK’S BEST NEST.
The group of maybe 19 parents (or maybe some weren’t even parents) were all members of either the Committee Promoting the RIGHT Books (CPRB) or the Right To Protect Children From Harm (RPCH) and had clearly been antagonized by the display. Many years later a poet described it in a poem as “moths burned to a crisp, flying into the bare bulb porchlight.”
Had the parents internalized a script when they attacked their BEST NEST and ripped their display to shreds with pens, screwdrivers, scissors, and – was it? – a crowbar? And thereafter mingling, still visibly agitated, while their offspring, for whom the parents pretended to speak, were so embarrassed that they hid their heads in distant classrooms, inside their lift-lid desks or locked themselves inside toilet stalls.
These were the same students often abused by these selfsame parents, if abuse can include forced weekend labor, neglect, boredom, long-term grounding, shunning, shouting at them from the sports field sidelines, forced Bible memorization, and so forth.
The senseless cacophony of the parents, emboldened by their shared, hygienic misunderstanding of everything all around them, squabbled in the shiny narrow hallways, condemned entire shelves of unread books, threatened to strangle those responsible, light the profanest on fire, afforded Mrs. Hull and Miss Watson just enough time to pull Kees aside. In a quick-thinking, agile move, they grabbed his briefcase (it did look like real leather) and stuffed it full of a selection of targeted books that they had set aside for just such an emergency.
And through a labyrinth of back hallways he was sent, until he reached a seldom-used emergency backdoor. There he posted the de Chirico page on the door, using fresh chewing gum he’d scraped off his locker. He removed a French fry that the cruelest of the jokers had stuffed into his jacket pocket and with the ketchup he’d poured into the other, hastily painted a crude red stick figure between the girl pushing the hoop across the desolate, mysterious square and the shadowy unseen adult figure, as if ready to intercept her hoop.
Kees only then opened his shirt to expose the “INFINITE,” pushed the door with its hard, self-closing security spring, careful to squeeze out just in time to not be forced forever back inside. Once outside he ran and ran in a weird state like an escaped convict across the sport fields, past the goalposts, into the line of trees that girded the school property.
He sat along the steep incline that plunged down to the rusty, abandoned railroad tracks that led to nowhere and there inspected his stash, pulling each book out one at a time, observing that each contained a strip of paper noting the objections of the two parent committees:
- Pippi Longstocking, Astrid Lindgren: “Dangerous encouragement of insolent mouthy disrespect toward parents and authority figures.”
- Pirate Utopias, Peter L. Wilson: “Portrays anti-Christian pirates in a positive, socialist light.”
- Slaughterhouse 5, Kurt Vonnegut: (CPRB): “Reckless promotion of anti-American, anti-Christian, anti-Semitic, filthy f-word sentiments.” (RPCH): “NOT funny: people watching naked men and women in cages copulating – disgusting. Undermines religious teachings of parents, ridicules America’s holy mission.”
- Goodness Had Nothing to Do with it, Mae West: “Promotes UNChristian, lewd lifestyle detrimental to American values, promotes liquor consumption.”
- Tow Truck Pluk, Annie M.G. Schmidt: “Disapprove of her message: ‘Never do what your mother tells you to do, then everything will be all right’.”
- Black & White: Pawns & Kings, Bertrand Traven: “Tale of identity-confused teen chess champ that promotes sexual experimentation, masturbation, and Negro uppityness.”
- The Lorax, Dr. Seuss: “Blames effects of pollution and deforestation on American way of life. Makes children hate their country.”
- The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain: “Promotes interracial relations – Huck befriends the freed slave Jim. If God had wanted us to mix he wouldn’t have made the races so obviously white and black.”
- The Diary of a Young Girl, Anne Frank: “Too sexually frank and graphic. Too somber and negative.”
- Mel Blanc: The Man of Thousand Voices, Melvin R. Brooks: “Voice of Looney Tunes characters makes fun of people with speech impediments like stuttering and lisps.”
- The Socialist Speeches of Martin Luther Kings Jr.: “Misrepresents King’s legacy and makes a mockery of his message of peace.”
He glanced over her shoulder, sure the whole world was after him, stuffed the books into his briefcase, slid down the shiny, dusty coal-slag incline, and followed the rusty rails home, through a murky culvert, to avoid detection.
He hid the books in his closet under a duffle bag and began to slowly read the books one by one – “I have never tried that before, so I think I should definitely be able to do that.”** – feeling increasingly immersed in a world no longer defined in any dictionary***.
* Kees is pronounced “case” as in “case of beer.”
** Pippi Longstocking.
*** Various standard dictionaries have been banned over the years.
bart plantenga is the author of novels Beer Mystic, Radio Activity Kills, & Ocean GroOve, short story collection Wiggling Wishbone, novella Spermatagonia: The Isle of Man & wander memoirs: Paris Scratch & NY Sin Phoney in Face Flat Minor. He’s one of the founding members of the NYC agit-prankster-writer group, The Unbearables. His books YODEL-AY-EE-OOOO: The Secret History of Yodeling Around the World & Yodel in HiFi & the CD Rough Guide to Yodel have created the misunderstanding that he’s the world’s foremost yodel expert. He produces 2 monthly podcasts: Dig•Scape & iMMERSE!. He’s also a DJ & has produced Wreck This Mess in NYC, Paris, Amsterdam, Rotterdam since forever. He lives in Amsterdam.