Libraries. My safe place. My not so safe place. Part two of my series about why I love and feel icky at times about libraries...

My wild teen years, spent cutting school, marking time in libraries in Brooklyn and Manhattan.

The following post is part of a Seed Pod collaboration about libraries. Seed Pods are a SmallStack community project designed to help smaller publications lift each other up by publishing and cross-promoting around a common theme. We’re helping each other plant the seeds for growth

I learn how to disappear

Photo from the Brooklyn Eagle. This was the Brooklyn Heights Library. I was flagged as a truant sometime in 8th grade — we had been using a false address to attend a school my mom thought would be better academically.

I’ve written about how my mom and stepfather did not create a safe environment for us here.

Shortly after we moved into the brownstone, I learned how to take the bus to get to my old neighborhood, to go to the orthodontist. Alone. Age 11.

Clammy-handed, would I know how to pull the cord in time for my stop? Or would it slip out of my grip from nervousness? If I missed my stop… what would I do?

It was thrilling. I saw all kinds of people and made up stories about them:

Like:
Why did the lady across from me look so mean? Her shoes seemed too large, she looked like that spy lady in “From Russia With Love.” What if she followed me off the bus to my orthodontist and stabbed me with her poisoned shoe knife…

Rosa Klebb with her shoe blade out!

I thought I was prepared to meet danger… little did I know that when I started cutting school and going to libraries how dangerous they could be…

Notice, that I said, “Cut school.” Not “cut class.”

I was 14. In 8th grade at a school I hated. It was in a completely different neighborhood. I had to take the subway there.

“Goodbye, school!” I’d whisper as I passed my stop (Kings Highway on what used to be the D train).
“I have a transit pass and I know how to use it.”

So I would ride the subway to Coney Island, Stillwell Avenue. Then I would ride and change trains until 10 AM and the libraries and museums would open.

I did this almost every Monday until my mom found out. And then I’d wait a while, maybe try a different day…

I couldn’t stop myself. Every time I surrendered to the thought, “I’m not going to school today,” I felt a tingle, a little dopamine rush.

I was addicted to the ritual I’d made for myself, the library I went to, and even where I sat (surrounded by bookshelves in a desk cluster).

Sometimes I worked on something for school. Mostly I read:

Teach Yourself Esperanto (Saluton! Kiel vi fartas?) (I found Esperanto to be kind of boring)

Teach Yourself Welsh (Helo! Sut wyt ti?) (Welsh is NOT boring!)

-books about hallucinogenic drugs (didn’t take any at the time, but they were fascinating to read about)
-books about sexuality and birth control (I knew nothing about any of it, really, so this was the most important thing to read)
-books by Robert Nathan, Elizabeth Goudge, mysteries by Agatha Christie, Georges Simenon, and medical mysteries by Berton Roueché.

And I wrote in my journal. I noted the date and my location. And if I’d seen anything alarming.

I wrote about, for instance, men in the subway exposing themselves. That happened so often, I thought there was something wrong with me. Like I brought it out in them.

Did that stop me from spending a hell of a lot of the day riding subway trains? Nope.

I wasn’t flashed in the reading room of the Brooklyn Heights branch of the BPL. But there were plenty of plenty of people, who like me, had no other place to be.

And some of them were … strange

Okay, one time I sat across from what I thought would be a “normal,” i.e. “safe” person. He wore a suit, he was chubby and a little bald and he seemed genial. He smiled at me as I dumped my notebook and pen on the table, hung my jacket over the back of the chair and sat down.

Then immediately he turned back to his work. He was writing something fast. Every once in a while he would glance at a library book next to him. Then back to writing. Filling page after page of white loose leaf paper.

oooh a fellow writer! When he got up, I presume to use the rest room, I snuck a peek at his work.

He had filled his pages with squiggles, wavy lines, some longer than the rest.

No smartphones in 1970, so no exact photo. But the picture in my head —

I did this and well, captured what I remembered

Well…maybe he was practicing his signature. I don’t know. He had a whole stack of paper that looked like that.

And there was a time a younger man sat next to me, complimented my nose, saying “You have the greatest nose since Tyrone Power! Please come to my hotel room. I’d like to photograph you and your nose.”

Here’s a link to find out more about Tyrone Power. He was a handsome guy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tyrone_Power

For the record, the man who asked a 14-year old girl to his hotel room was not handsome. I was not sure who Tyrone Power was, so I couldn’t judge if this guy was sincere about taking pictures of “just your nose.”

So I said “No thanks, I’m busy.” He kept asking and finally I said, “I’m only 14.”
And that stopped him.

Libraries are always full of weird people.

Like me, for one. I wish there had been a book on the shelf:

How to deal with creeps in a public library and other public spaces.
But what if I was the creep too? What if just because I was breaking the law and not going to school, I was responsible for creepy people coming on to me. Or just sitting on the seat opposite me on the wriggling and writhing with his hand in his pants.
Maybe I belonged with them?

The first time I told my mother about the subway flashers, she laughed and said I should just laugh at them. “They just do it to get a rise out of you!” Then she laughed again.

I wondered if anyone else ever saw them, or if it was just me. I was just too ashamed.

Addicted to Not-Going-to-School »»» ADHD

So, that was 8th through 9th grade. In 10th, and 11th, I did not miss as much school, but my senior year… I was absent every day I was scheduled for P.E. And I missed a lot of other stuff.

I also attempted suicide that year. I was miserable because I did not know how to be a student anymore. I couldn’t write. I could barely read. A lot of stuff happened, like my mom divorcing my stepfather (YAY!!!), but he paid her for her half of the brownstone, so we had to leave. I still had a room of my own. But it was not the same.

Suicide attempt happened on New Years Day 1974. I wasn’t hospitalized, but I was supposed to have intensive therapy. And I did not get back to school until much later in January.

But I still cut school and almost didn’t graduate… And I no longer went to just the libraries in Brooklyn.

I spent more time in museums. And I went to the Music Library at Lincoln Center. You could check out an album and a record player, headphones and sit and listen. And it was free!!!

I have to pause here… yes I did graduate high school. And much later, I became a librarian. Which was fun some of the time, but for me, with undiagnosed ADHD, the non-fun parts got to be like high school P.E.!

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