The following piece is actually intended to be spoken out loud, not read. I encourage you to go in a dark room, your closet, the top of your roof, a dim library, wherever, and read it out loud in the fastest, most frenetic, most childish voice possible. Try to sound innocent. Perhaps, if things treat me well enough tonight, I’ll record myself reading it… an endeavor that will definitely provide my nasally whine of a voice a few minutes to shine.

I walked into the library trying to make it look like I was walking in on any of the other days that I walked into that library because I went there all the time. There’s the desk over there where the pretty librarian sets her books down and slams the rubber on the cover hard and fast and moves on to the next book. She looked me up and down and waggled her eyes at me. I waved “hi” to her like on any other day.
She waved back at me and when I got past her I saw one of her hands pick up the telephone and dial the first three numbers of a phone number out of the corner of my eye. Her glasses slid off of her nose and she pushed them back up so that they would match with those funny dents they had left. I could hear her speaking quickly but had no time to make out the words because I had to get to my table and my book.
The shelves of books were piled higher than my head, sometimes looking like they were going to fall over, like shelves were on shelves, like the ones that my dad had made in the garage. I had never seen the shelves of books fall on anyone but thought they might because I can remember seeing the tool shelves fall on the car when I was reaching for the wrench to hit the snake.
Did I tell you that I was listening to music? I was listening to music. I had those earphones that stuck IN your ears that always got yanked out if you made your arm move the wrong way this way or that so I was trying to keep my arms stiff and still so I could hear the whole song. I reached up and shoved them back into my head hoping that the ear wax that had built up since last week would be sticky and not slippery and that maybe I could hear a full song at some point in the day.
There was the shelf with “107.6 GRE – 109.3 STU” written on it so I walked towards it, past the windows that let in too much sunlight and past the old man who sat looking at a book but I never saw him turn a page in his life. He said that he was just taking his time and that after working for fifty years of his life, he figured he could take some time every once in a while, “why rush?” and he seemed to think that was okay, but I thought reading fast was fun. So was what I did when I read. There down the aisle next to the – déjà vu – I just had déjà vu. Here is where I’ve been before with the man behind me and the pretty librarian giving me dirty looks. I pulled out a book with a blue cover that said, “Let’s Drink To Your Health: A Self-Help Guide to Sensible Drinking” because Dad had that book and Mom said it had helped him and that I should leave it in the cabinet under the other bottles that I wasn’t allowed to touch because they would make me feel funny.
I looked back at the librarian and she was looking at me through those nice glasses and she was still on the phone looking more and more frantic. I couldn’t hear her over my music and because she was so far away but I think she was saying something important because her mouth kept opening into large “O” shapes and closing quickly as she stamped her fist on the desk rather than her rubber stamp on a page. I did not like the look of that because Dad had made that same motion a few times a while ago and not so long ago too, except there wasn’t a book or a desk there was a “whore” and a “skank” but I liked to call her “Mom” more. That name always seemed nicer but he had insisted that day that she wasn’t “Mom” and I don’t know what confused me more, that he was doing the librarian dance without the nice glasses or books or because I had to start calling mom “whore” since what dad said was right.
The book had pictures and words but I liked the pictures more. I tried to read the words like mom said I should because she said reading would make me smart but they moved too slowly and the pictures were of the men with no beards and buttoned up shirts going to work and coming home and smiling with teeth that looked too white. There were pictures of the men and women hugging and smiling and patting Johnny on the head while he played with his toy truck and not a wrench to hit the snake with. I never saw a librarian in the book, but I think that if she were there she would be pretty like mine but not so angry-looking when she picked up the phone when I came in.
There weren’t any pictures of the men holding the mommies down either. The pictures never showed shut doors down the hall where I could hear the screams until mommy brought me the nice discman that I could put Cds into. There was the nice dad taking his family out for brunch – I remembered when I did read the book that one time it said that it was Sunday and after church they went to “the club.” I never went to the club, but I think my dad did because he wasn’t around much during breakfast and not at all for church. I understood why though, because on mornings that he did stay home I knocked tools off and dented the car and scratched the paint and got black eyes from “what would have to happen.”
I saw the nice man with his painted teeth and his nice hair in the pictures and his not hurting and felt something in my pants get tighter. Mom said that when I feel like my belt is getting tighter but lower down than my belt that I should keep it to myself and not let anyone know because it was embarrassing. I had tried to do that, but pushing it down felt funny and good and so I pushed it down more and more faster. Even though I was sitting at my favorite table, I thought the mean old man might see, so I pushed my tight pants down and felt funny out where they were tightest and so I pushed down again. Over and over but they kept staying tight and raising up and almost touched the bottom of the table top while I sat there I turned up my music and kept trying to push my pants down and the music got louder and that’s okay because I liked that song from the CD that mom had given me.
The man was looking at me but he didn’t say anything and got up and walked away so I guess he didn’t mind me doing what mom had said was embarrassing. Mom was usually right as long as dad hadn’t said something different and he had never really ever talked about anything embarrassing, only done embarrassing things from what mom had said under her breath while she zippered up my coat from the cold and gave me a pat on my rear to push me towards school in the morning.
I looked over my shoulder with my right hand taking care of my pants the way that mommy had said pushing it out of the way and down. And up and down. I remembered the pictures of the smiling faces when those daddies hugged the mommies while I watched the librarian walk towards the door and say hello to Officer Friendly. He had been to my house and my school and he told me not to take pills like mommy did and he told me that the kids at school aren’t really mean that they are just scared like me but that whatever I do I can’t take what they give me if it looks like what mommy and daddy had in the cabinets or in the box that I found in the closet. The daddies in the pictures didn’t have boxes in the closet but they had hair that looked like plastic that never was parted on the other side but at least it was parted the way that my hair was parted and I saw that my hair was out of place and mommy would be mad if she saw it hanging over my eyes so I pushed it back and swung my head to the side and watched Officer Friendly walking over to me.
He put his hand on my shoulder and pulled the book out from under my nose and pulled my arm up and my belt was still tight but it got looser and there was a wet spot on my shirt that stuck to my belly and I pulled it off so that it wouldn’t stick but Officer touched my hand firm and said that I couldn’t move and that he would try to be nice to me but this time I had gone too far and that he had tried to warn me when I went to the library last week. He was pulling me on the arm the way that daddy does except for not quite as hard, he wasn’t twisting my skin like daddy, so I swung my left arm out and grabbed for the book and its blue cover and its pictures and Officer Friendly turned and did something that I had seen him only do to the bad kids. He pulled me hard and held my wrists behind my back and walked me over near the desk where the librarian usually sat and pushed my face down towards the desk while pulling the book from my hands and he tossed it on the place where the librarian always stamped the books down and where she did it like daddy did to me. The metal bracelets were already warm I guess because they sat against Officer Friendly’s belt all day and I wondered if his belt was like my belt. Did it get tight sometimes and did he get pulled from his favorite book with the nice daddies and mommies who didn’t have pills sometimes?
But he told me that he was being nice and that this was what he had to do and he pulled me past the old man who hadn’t really left the library but it looked like he had just gotten done in the washroom and I wondered if maybe everyone’s belts did that the way that mine did and maybe the old man had just gone in the bathroom to not be embarrassed. My headphones were still playing music and they were still sticking far into my ear when I turned around and tried to run past Officer Friendly and get the book because if I was going for a car ride like Officer Friendly said I was I wanted to still have the book with the daddies and mommies getting along with me. I got to the desk and turned around to pick up the book with my hands behind my back and Officer Friendly did another thing that he only did to the bad kids, he swung his arm from one side to the other across my head not my face my head and he said I wouldn’t bruise but that’s what I read from his lips because I stopped hearing music after he had hit me on the ears on both sides.
I was sad because Officer Friendly still wouldn’t let me bring the book with but I tried not to cry daddy said crying was for girls and I am a boy and Officer Friendly kept saying things to me but he was talking faster than I could read his lips and I didn’t hear the doors slide open in front of me when we walked into the sunlight outside that had been beaming in through the windows. Officer Friendly pushed me into the car and he drove for a while and I thought about how much I wanted to hear the music more and my shirt was still sticking to me and how the moms and dads in the book were nice to look at but I had never seen one in real life and now I wouldn’t have to listen to mom and dad yell and that seemed okay and Officer Friendly smiled when he saw that I had settled down and that seemed to make him happy and I smiled too.