Applying Myself in Sucktown

By the time we’d been in Sucktown for 3 of the 5 years (and two weeks) we lived there, I had reached bottom. We had been involved with many things in the town, each one more dysfunctional and delusional than the last. I hated the place with every fibre of my being.

There were many reasons for this, but the final straw was being asked at the last minute to organise a monthly art event that ran through the summer. The crap we had to deal with, from selfish and greedy business owners to obstruction from the previous organiser, who left at the last minute and wouldn’t give us any information, to the people who just felt like they were entitled to claim space that belonged to someone else, made me hate it even more. At one point during that summer, after dealing with a business owner who somehow thought it was our job to force people to go into her store and buy things, I told Bill, ‘This is it. I am done. I will finish this because I said I would do it and then I will not do one more thing in this hellhole.’ And I didn’t. From then on whenever anyone asked me to get involved with something, I replied that I had a personal policy of not engaging in any way with any groups in Sucktown. This usually left them speechless, standing there blinking at me. I didn’t care. At that point, I was just trying to protect myself and hang on, because things were really bad for me in terms of mental health and I was sinking deeper and deeper into a serious depression. Then, after we got through that summer, one of our dogs unexpectedly died. I spent days sitting in a chair and crying before I could manage to function again, albeit at a very minimal level.

I had applied for a crappy part-time job in the circulation department of the local library. At this point, we had very little income and even though I was wildly overqualified for the job, and it would bring in very little money, I applied. I knew enough by then to not talk about my education, skills, and knowledge, because those sorts of thing were frowned upon there. Many jobs of all sorts were filled with people who bragged about how they were completely unqualified for them, but got the job because no qualified person wanted to live there. This happened again and again. I totally understood why people would not want to live there, but I was always puzzled at the pride the locals took in proclaiming that they didn’t know what the hell they were doing, but they’d put one over on someone (or something).

In any case, when I got a phone call asking me to come in for an interview, I went through the motions and agreed to a time. I didn’t care. I was just on autopilot and trying to get through each day and, at night before going to sleep, wishing that I wouldn’t wake up in the morning. But wake up I did, so when the day came, I went to my interview, thinking that at least it was a library—a comfortable and familiar place for me. I sat at a table, across from three people who were going to interview me. One was the circulation department supervisor, one was the assistant director, I think, and I’m not sure what the guy did.

They asked me some weird questions and some that seemed reasonable. Then they passed me a piece of paper with an addition problem and a subtraction problem on it—three digits each! Through my fog of indifference, I was thinking that this said a lot about the kinds of people they are used to dealing with. I wrote down my answers and passed the paper back. They checked it and nodded.

Then they directed me to a cart with books on it, placed in random order, some fiction and some nonfiction. I was to shelve them in the correct order. I did. They checked my work and nodded. Then there were more questions. I only remember one, because it made the guy so uncomfortable and he turned beet red when asking it. They were taking turns asking the questions and it fell to him to do the sex question. I was informed that it was library policy to check out any book to any person, so if a 10-year old came to the desk with The Joy of Sex, for example, I was to check it out to them. Then I was asked what I would do if a 10-year-old came up to the desk to check out The Joy of Sex. I suppose my patience was wearing a bit thin, because I replied, ‘You’ve just told me that library policy is to check it out to them, so I would check it out to them.’ They nodded.

A week or so later, Bill and I were in the library checking out books when the guy asked me if I’d heard from HR yet. I shook my head, turned to Bill, and said, ‘I guess I got the job.’ I didn’t actually care, but was just making the observation. Then the director came over and asked, ‘did you hear from HR yet?’ I said I hadn’t and he swore, saying something about lighting a fire under their butts. I soon heard from HR and went in to do the paperwork. I had to watch a video about workplace safety as well. The following day, I went into the library for my first shift. The supervisor asked if I’d done all the paperwork. I said I had. She asked if I’d watched the video. I said I had. ‘And you peed in a cup?’ she asked. I shook my head, saying no one had given me a cup or asked me to pee in it. She freaked out. Finally, she asked if I’d gotten my name badge with photo. I said I had and showed it to her. She heaved a sigh of relief and said, ‘Well, that’s OK then.’ And I started my work.

She was actually a very nice person who cared about the people she worked with and stood up for us. If I was doing something when my shift ended, she would tell me to leave it and go. She wasn’t into having any of us work one minute longer than we were getting paid for. The guy at the interview was the one who did the scheduling and after I’d been there for a few weeks, he knew that I didn’t like working when story hour was happening and there were a lot of children around the place (I don’t like being around kids), so he always gave me those times off.

I was still depressed and would go home after each shift, climb into bed, stare at the ceiling, and cry. But after a while, I found myself doing the anthropology of the library from the perspective of someone who was ‘inside’ instead of as a patron alone—such an interesting class structure there. On that day, I knew I was starting to heal.

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