I have returned to my plan to read the classics in the Western literary tradition (with a few forays into non-Western literature like, eventually, Tale of Genji and some Russian writers). So I started Vergil’s Aeneid today. If I were in a hotel room, this would mean that I would be writing epic blog posts. Instead, since I’m recuperating (gracefully) at home from fundoplication, and I’ve cached a number of novels in a non-classic vein in the bathroom, I’ll probably be taking long baths and claiming stomach irritation to escape duty-bound Aeneus. Maybe. Since I recently managed to put together most of Anne Rice’s vampire oeuvre from eBay, I thought I might read them, too. But in my recent re-read, I wasn’t as enamored of Interview as I had been in the 9th grade when I first read it. But I was much more romantic and had never been to New Orleans or Europe as a high school freshman. I liked Emily Dickinson then, too. Something happened: Joan Didion, Joyce Carol Oates, and Sartre, I think.
So it’ll be The Aeneid, the new China Miéville (which I’d been saving for a trip), and Scissor Sisters’s new album, which I’m loving. It’s what anyone who spent his childhood in the 70’s would love (especially if he’s gay): Bee Gees, Elton John, some Peaches & Herb funky-lite keyboarding, and Pink Floyd rolled into the mix. Not to mention lyrics about cosmetology, coming out (or something), and turning tricks. (It’s the particularly Honky Chateau-esq “Take Your Mama” that the title of this post comes from.) What I like so much about it is that it is a mix of everything the “classic” rock stations tend to ignore in their endless rehashing of AOR rock. Sometimes I go off on baby-boomers as if they are my worst enemy, but I realize they aren’t—I have truffle oil in my own cabinets—but I really hate they way they took over radio stations in the 90s and forced us all to listen to “Space Cowboy” over and over and over. How can they aspire to have lasting meaning when they think, never having looked it up, that “pompatous of love” really means something? (Because librarians and geeks read this website, I will foreclose any argument re: me being a boomer by referring you to the defining document, Generation X by Douglas Coupland. Also, I will point out to you that Jeanine Garafolo and Courtney Love were born in the same year as I—Courtney is 10 days older.)
On to other matters: I’ve one other filthy library & sex related anecdote to share with you. (If you have some that you would like to share, send them to me at gay.librarian@gmail.com, and I promise that I will consider putting them in this blog provided that they meet the very minimal levels of taste that I require. I also promise that I will correct your grammar as best I am able, but not publicly; no one will be the wiser.)
My Last Filthy Library & Sex Anecdote
This incident took place when I was working as an Interlibrary Loan Lending Clerk at a large Midwestern university library which will remain nameless since I want this to remain risible rather than litigable—because, face it, sex is funny, particularly when it’s disgusting and you get caught, but it stops being funny if you get sued for talking about it. Anyway, this large library system had a humanities collection locked away in the attic. Librarians with an ounce of public-service orientation will find it curious that there was no indication in the catalog that a given item was stored in the attic. The Public Services librarian in charge of the collection when the catalog went online decided that if a patron wanted an attic item badly enough, the patron would have a search placed on it, and the item would then be “found” and made available for check-out; there was no need to confuse them with the fact that we didn’t trust our patrons not to steal art books, “art” books, travel books, or books from Black Swallow Press, which have sex scenes in them. Well, and many other categories, too, since the collection up there was very large.
So this is what would happen: I would receive a request from another school, asking for a book. My student worker would check the shelves and bring the books back or would bring back the request slip with “NOS” (not on shelf) marked on it. I would then check the shelf again, and, if I thought it was an attic item, take it to Circulation who would put a search on the book. They did this a fixed number of times a day. Perhaps twice. So I decided that, if I thought it to be in the attic, if it could possibly have naked pictures or a sex scene or travelogue, I would go into the attic myself. It saved time.
The attic was, in fact, an attic. Lots of free-standing shelving. Dark. Dank. Etc. I always tried to get in and out quickly because I was sure that, because dark places make me paranoid (I refer you to August Derleth’s short story, “The Dark Place” for an explanation), Library Monkey Boy would swing down out of the darkness near the ceiling and quietly follow me along the tops of the shelves. So I spent quite a bit of time looking up. Besides, there were bats, too.
Someone, though, spent lots of time there. During my first trip, I noticed that someone had pulled a chair to the shelves holding the “art” photo books. A 5 gallon bucket had been turned upside down there, too. “Gross,” I thought. Mostly because I’m sure that someone had sat there thinking heterosexual thoughts.
So as time passed, I’d go into the attic and find actual books laid out on the bucket. A collection of photos of Alice Liddell in the altogether. Double gross. So all this while, I’m looking up for the Library Monkey Boy whom I know is creeping around over my head, and I see that there’s a huge pile of wadded tissue on top of the shelving unit near the chair. Other people may have said, “Huh, I wonder what that is?” I, on the other hand, who have given considerable consideration to the wickedness that men do when they are by themselves, knew instantly. It was a clean-up pile. “Groooooossssss!” I said, laughing and ducking lest LMB pounce on me.
On other trips, I noticed other paraphernalia: latex gloves, a soft plastic jar with a hole cut into it, a pile of “literature” downloaded from the internet. And the pile of tissues was becoming improbably high. I still saw it as harmless and funny. In fact, I sort of hoped that I would catch him doing the nasty to himself. It never happened. What happened was this: I was walking along, looking for a Kunst Werke and looking out for LMB or a bat, when I stepped on something that gave way and nearly landed me on the floor: A piece of cheesecloth leaving a slime trail behind it.
I was no longer amused. I could have fallen and put my hands in that. So I told the head librarian, pretending, of course, that I’d only just noticed.
So the head librarian suited up w/ latex gloves and went into the attic himself and cleaned up the splooge tissues, the porn, etc.
The perv didn’t quit, though. A tissue pile started almost instantly.
Weeks later, there was mention in the police beat of the school paper that a staff member had been questioned re: exposing himself in the library, and a staff member was disappeared immediately. We weren’t allowed to talk about it. The pile stopped growing and disappeared completely at one point.
So that’s the last library sex story. Except for this one coda: months later I was in the government document area of the attic, an area that was visited nearly as often as the public government documents area—once or twice in a human lifetime. At the end of an aisle, I found an ankle-deep pile of “used” latex gloves. Now that’s funny.
