Leespeaks | Scribbles | American Studies

American Study #23

New York Public Library, 42nd Street & 5th Avenue

New York Public Library, circa 1920

The security guard at the New York Public Library asks where you’re going. He’s standing next to the coat check window and you watch him remove a pair of latex gloves. You wonder why he’s wearing latex gloves. You’ve been to the library many times and you never noticed any one wearing latex gloves.

To look for a book, you say. The guard nods dubiously and, gloves off, takes a pack of cigarettes out of his pocket and uses his fingernails to carefully remove a smooth white paper cylinder of chopped weed. The coat-check attendant (who also wears latex gloves) looks at you with pity in his large brown eyes as he takes your coat. Your scarf is stowed in one pocket and in the other your leather gloves, which now seem pathetically permeable and inadequate.

Because the library is under renovation, you travel down the hall to the temporary catalogue room where you consult a computer terminal, providing key words and phrases in hopes that some volume resting on a shelf far below you will provide you with what you need. You hope for a match and lo, there are forty three. You narrow your search and there are seventeen, of which one seems worthy of closer inspection. The terminal provides the secret code for the book you want. You write the code, the title and the author’s name on a two-part form. A woman marks the number 118 on the form and separates the two parts of the two-part form, giving you the bottom part, the canary-colored carbon chit.

You retrace your steps across the marble floors, past the coat check window and toward Room 113, the Gottesman Exhibition Hall, which is serving as the library’s temporary reading room on the ground floor while the grand soul-elevating reading room up on the third floor is renovated. Outside the temporary reading room another guard (without latex gloves) asks to see your canary chit. This guard tells you that you must check your briefcase, and gives you the impression that you should already know this and that your lack of knowledge has somehow disappointed, even offended him. You return to the coat check window with your briefcase and with a terse question for the first guard but he is gone, is probably standing outside one of the Library’s many doors smoking a cigarette with his bare hands.

Free of concealed impediments, supposedly no longer a threat to public property you hadn’t intended to deface, you enter the Gottesman Exhibition Hall’s to wait for your number to come up on the large board over the pick-up counter. You take no notice of the hall’s ornate architecture. You’re thinking about the gatekeepers, the little tyrants, the speed bumps turning New York gradually from Imperial Rome into the Rome of a summer package tour, another halting bureaucratic ruin, minus the two-hour lunch break and the superabundant high-quality espresso. You wish the coffee was as good here. You wish you weren’t so prone to vast socio-historical generalizations.

Waiting brings with it special trials in this city, this New York. Waiting is all but intolerable in a place so full of so much bustle, even if things don’t take as long here as it seems. Of course, you are not alone. No one who waits in New York ever is. Where millions are in motion, millions wait. Wait on buses, wait on trains, wait for buzzers outside of doors. You hope for the best, hope that you actually need what you’re waiting for. At the same time you can’t help feeling that precious moments of your life are going unexploited, and while you are stuck here in the library like a chump waiting for #118 to appear, someone who just moved here yesterday has snapped up your unattended moments and is optioning them to Robert De Niro’s production company.

In the temporary reading room, some stare at the numbers on their yellow chits, some sigh as they look at the lucky people at nearby tables who already have their books. Numbers appear and disappear over the pick-up counter, where almost no one was stirring. You wish #118 would rise from the subterranean stacks, wish you had left the apartment earlier, wish for a better metaphor. Your feet are tired. You wonder how long you’ll have to keep up this second-person narration. How are you doing? You’re fine.

This was also published on poetrysheet.com