HOMBRE by Canton Lee. The author was a Chinese gentleman about seventy.
‘It’s a Western,’ he said. ‘About a horse thief. Reading Westerns is my hobby, so I decided to write one myself. Why not? I spent thirty years cooking in a restaurant in Phoenix.’
VIETNAM VICTORY by Edward Fox. The author was a very serious young man who said that victory could only be achieved in Vietnam by killing everybody there. He recommended that after we had killed everybody there we turn the country over to Chiang Kai-shek, so he could attack Red China, then.
‘It’s only a matter of time,’ he said.
PRINTER’S INK by Fred Sinkus. The author was a former journalist whose book was almost illegibly written in longhand with his words wrapped around whisky.
‘That’s it,’ he said, handing the book to me. ‘Twenty years.’ He left the library unevenly, barely under his own power.
I stood there looking down at twenty years in my hands.
BACON DEATH by Marsha Paterson. The author was a totally nondescript young woman except for a look of anguish on her face. She handed me this fantastically greasy book and fled the library in terror. The book actually looked like a pound of bacon. I was going to open it and see what it was about, but I changed my mind. I didn’t know whether to fry the book or put it on the shelf. Being a librarian here is sometimes a challenge.
UFO VERSUS CBS by Susan DeWitt. The author was an old woman who told me that her book, which was written in Santa Barbara at her sister’s house, was about a Martian conspiracy to take over the Columbia Broadcasting System.
‘It’s all here in my book,’ she said. ‘Remember all those flying saucers last summer?’
‘I think so,’ I said.
‘They’re all in here,’ she said. The book looked quite handsome and I’m certain they were all in there.
THE EGG LAYED TWICE by Beatrice Quinn Porter. The author said this collection of poetry summed up the wisdom she had found while living twenty-six years on a chicken ranch in San Jose.
‘It may not be poetry,’ she said. ‘I never went to college, but it’s sure as hell about chickens.’
BREAKFAST FIRST by Samuel Humber. The author said that breakfast was an absolute requisite for travelling and was overlooked in too many travel books, so he decided that he would write a book about how important breakfast was in travelling.
THE QUICK FOREST by Thomas Funnell. The author was about thirty years old and looked scientific. His hair was thinning and he seemed eager to talk about the book.
‘This forest is quicker than an ordinary forest,’ he said.
‘How long did it take you to write it?’ I said, knowing that authors seem to like that question.
‘I didn’t write it,’ he said. ‘I stole it from my mother. Serves her right, too. The God-damn bitch.’
THE NEED FOR LEGALIZED ABORTION by Doctor O. The author was doctory and very nervous in his late thirties. The book had no title on the cover. The contents were very neatly typed. about 300 pages long.
‘It’s all I can do,’ he said.
‘Do you want to put it on a shelf yourself?’ I said.
‘No,’ he said. ‘You take care of that yourself. There’s nothing else that I can do. It’s all a God-damn shame.’
It has just started to rain now outside the library. I can hear it splash against the windows and echo among the books. They seem to know it’s raining here in the beautiful darkness of lives as I wait for Vida.
Buffalo Gals, Won’t You Come Out Tonight?
I must tell you right now that most of the library isn’t here. This building is not large and couldn’t begin to hold all the books that have been brought in over the years.
The library was in existence before it came to San Francisco in the late 1870s, and the library didn’t lose a book during the earthquake and fire of 1906. While everybody else was running around like a bunch of chickens with their heads cut off, we were carefuclass="underline" no panic.
This library rests upon a sloping lot that runs all the way through the block down from Clay to Sacramento Street. We use just a small portion of the lot and the rest of it is overgrown with tall grass and bushes and flowers and wine bottles and lovers’ trysts.
There are some old cement stairs that pour through green and busy establishments down from the Clay Street side and there are ancient electric lamps, friends of Thomas Edison, mounted on tall metal asparagus stalks.
They are on what was once the second landing of the stairs. The lights don’t work any more and everything is so overgrown that it’s hard to tell why anything ever existed in the first place.
The back of the library lies almost disappearing in green at the bottom of the stairs.
The front lawn is neat, though. We don’t want this place to look totally like a jungle. It might frighten people away.
A little Negro boy comes and mows the lawn every month or so. I don’t have any money to pay him but he doesn’t mind. He does it because he likes me and he knows that I have to stay inside here, that I can’t mow the lawn myself. I always have to be in here ready to welcome a new book.
Right now the lawn has many dandelions on it and thousands of daisies sprawled here and there together like a Rorschach dress pattern designed by Rudi Gernreich.
The dandelions are loners and pretty much stay off by themselves, but those daisies! I know all this by looking out the heavy glass door.
This place is constantly bathed in the intermediate barking of dogs from early in the morning when the dogs wake up and continuing until late at night when the dogs go to sleep and sometimes they bark in between.
We are just a few doors down from a pet hospital and, though I can’t see the hospital, I am seldom without the barking of dogs and I have grown used to it.
At first I hated their damn barking. It had always been a thing with me: a dislike for dogs. But now in my third year here, I’ve grown accustomed to their barking and it doesn’t bother me any more. Actually, I like it sometimes.
There are high arched windows here in the library above the bookshelves and there are two green trees towering into the windows and they spread their branches like paste against the glass.
I love those trees.
Through the glass door and across the street is a big white garage with cars coming and going all the time in hours of sickness and need. There is a big word in blue on the front of the garage: GULF.
Before the library came to San Francisco, it was in Saint Louis for a while, then in New York for a long time. There are a lot of Dutch books somewhere.
Because this building is so small, we have been forced to store thousands of books at another place. We moved into this little brick building after the ’06 business to be on the safe side, but there just isn’t enough room here.
There are so many books being written that end up here, either by design or destiny. We have accepted 114 books on the Model T Ford, fifty-eight books on the history of the banjo and nineteen books on buffalo-skinning since the beginning of this library. We keep all the ledgers here that we use to record the acceptance of each book in, but most of the books themselves are in hermetically-sealed caves in Northern California.
I have nothing to do with the storing of the books in the caves. That’s Foster’s job. He also brings me my food because I can’t leave the library. Foster hasn’t been around for a few months, so I guess he’s off on another drunk.
Foster loves to drink and it’s always easy for him to find somebody to drink with. Foster is about forty years old and always wears a T-shirt, no matter what the weather is about, rain or shine, hot or cold, it’s all the same to his T-shirt because his T-shirt is an eternal garment that only death will rob from his body.