That Time I Started a Race War
[excerpt from "Will Beg for Dignity"]
[I live in Los Angeles. For those who may think otherwise, it’s a nice place. We have beaches and mountains and boba tea places and various cultural outlets, with and without Mickey Mouse. It also has crime and hatred and filthy areas and expensive districts. Find me a place that doesn’t. But there are no more riots, violence, destruction, or depraved lunacy than at a typical sports celebration in Philadelphia. (Heh. I kid. I love the Philly phans.) Overall, there’s a reason more people live here than anywhere else in the country. With such a dense population, you’re always gonna have the threat of citizens not behaving as they should in civil society. And it was back a few years ago that I found myself knee deep among several of these citizens. . . and unknowingly made it worse. Behold another TRUE entry from my essay book which—shameless plug—is available HERE. Enjoy!]
“Excuse me,” I said, “could you turn that down please?” I sat behind a woman who was playing a video on her laptop without headphones at the Brentwood Public Library. The branch was a small, two-story home for books in the upscale Los Angeles neighborhood. Upstairs, sat a selection of round tables, a couple of couches, and a row of computers running along the ledge of the stairwell — basically, the space was one communal room, with books along the perimeter.
[FOR REFERENCE: Brentwood is mostly known for its entitled assholes. . . Well, save for a well-known “Crime of the Century” involving an ex-football star, but how often do those happen?]
Laptop Lady scrambled to silence her computer, seemingly concerned that she was a disturbance. She lowered it from an 8 to about a 3. “Is that good?” she asked. It seemed stunning that she would ask that given the size of the library and the fact it was still quite audible. If she didn’t know there was a problem, I wasn’t going to be able to explain it to her. I sighed and said, “It’s still on, but if no one else has a problem, then fine.”
Going to a “3” from an “8” wasn’t ideal, but it did keep me from hitting her with the Encyclopedia Brittanica collection, one at a time, from Volumes 3 through 8. All I could do was chalk it up to “people suck.”
I had been there when she arrived and I’d already rolled my eyes as loudly as I could at this guy on the couch in front of a “Please No Cell Phone” sign positioned right in front of him on the box table. He was TALKING ON HIS CELL PHONE. Have these people never been to a library before? Is the concept of a silent space foreign or confusing to them? How do they not know how it works? After about ten minutes of yapping about his evening at the club, he walked down the hallway and wasn’t heard from again.
Then Laptop Lady showed up. She played her video another 20 minutes or so. At that point, a man who was seated at a computer station along the railing walked by her. Almost in an effort to invade her space as a warning, without saying anything, he paced by her several times. He was a tall, slender man with white hair. His face was grizzled, with eyes that looked like a fun afternoon for him was counting the number of bugs he’d collected on his windshield after a drive along the highway.
When she didn’t flinch, this man eventually stood directly over her, towering over the seated annoyance — “You need to put on some headphones,” he said softly, but pointedly.
“He said I could listen to it,” she said immediately, pointing back at me as if I had given her some official permission slip and was deputized to do so. I held up my hands innocently, my mouth agape. Okay, first of all, I didn’t say you could. I said, “IF.” And secondly, why you gotta drag me into this? I wanted to toss you off the balcony, but didn’t. You owe me, lady!
The fact she snapped at White Justice when she was the one who was out of line, was a lot to absorb. Now I was mad. But he was boiling mad. He paced faster, as if he wanted to hit someone, but had to remember his calming mantra taught to him during one of his court-mandated group therapy sessions for crimes he can’t talk about. It looked like he was hearing those darned voices again.
So White Justice goes downstairs to tell on her. (Of course, what else do you do when an adult is behaving like a child? You tell the principal.) I felt Laptop Lady deserved some comeuppance, so I decided to go with him, as a witness. Why the heck not?
The librarian (all four-foot-ten of her) was on the phone and kindly raised a wrinkled finger for him to wait. While he stood at the desk politely, I told him that I would vouch for him, that the lady was being disrespectful to the patrons, and that she was rude to him. But in the interest of making small talk, I shook my head and added, “What’s going on today? This one lady and then there was that kid on the phone before. Sucky, right?” He didn’t say anything to this, seemingly focused on getting revenge on Laptop Lady.
We get back up there, this guy over six feet tall, the septuagenarian librarian in sensible shoes, and this woman who, by now, putting her laptop away to leave. The librarian was very polite, “Excuse me, but if you are going to listen to your laptop, could you use your headphones?”
And Laptop Lady says, “I wasn’t.” I. . . wasn’t. Not “I’m sorry.” Not “I didn’t know.” And not even “I’m leaving, but next time, for sure.” But she out and out lies… to a librarian. Isn’t that a felony in some states? Maybe not, but at least there’s at least a code of ethics that forbids it. What good does lying get you? As if the librarian could have done anything to her from a legal standpoint.
At that point, I said out loud, “Why would you lie?” (not too loudly, mind you, but well within the realm of a library’s decibel limit, a hushed huff, if you will) but no one heard me because Laptop Lady was snapping at White Justice and White Justice was snapping back at Laptop Lady as she gathered her things and left. Whatever. She was gone and now I could get back to work. . . or so I thought.
Frustrated that he was unable to exact so much as an apology from Laptop Lady, White Justice now turned his attention to busting Hooded Cell Phone, who had returned to his original spot unbeknownst to me. (For if I had knownst it, I would not have mentioned anything. “And he was on the phone,” White Justice said. Hooded Cell Phone was back in his chair. The only difference was that now, he wasn’t on the phone.
Why would you rat him out now? If I’m ever going to call in the authorities, it’s going to be after I’ve appealed to the culprit first. I mean, I have exceptions to this rule like if a neighborhood meth lab is catapulting farm animals into my yard for fun, I’m gonna go straight to the cops. . . and give a phony name. . . and put my home on the market immediately. But in the event of a societal violation, I’ll propose a civil solution directly first.
The sweet librarian, now like Danny Glover in the “Lethal Weapon” movies — one day from retirement and clearly “getting too old for this shit” — went over, once again, the sweetest old lady you ever saw, with her librarian’s pension burning a hole in her bank account and said, “Excuse me, sir, there’s no using the phone up here.”
“I wasn’t using the phone,” he said. WHAT?! What is it about people lying to a librarian? I mean, I know it’s in the name, but lie-brarians do not lie. Just say, “I’m sorry, I won’t.” or “I had to take a call. It’s over now.”
“This gentleman said you were,” the librarian said, singling out White Justice. Now Hooded Cell Phone changes his tune. He turned to White Justice and said, “You told on me?” which totally incriminated himself.
At this point, I decided to put all of this behind me. Back at my table, I opened my notebook, primed to make headway on a script when White Justice turns to me, his long arm outstretched my way and said, “He said you were also.” Oh, for *****’s sake! Why is everyone dragging me into this?! I’m just trying to work over here!
Fortunately, Hooded Cell Phone was not concerned with that. His problem was that someone was telling on him, not someone telling on me. Oh, and I should mention that Hooded Cell Phone Guy is black and White Justice is white (though I’m calling him “White Justice” because of his hair and not his skin color, just for your edification). So this is pretty much a racial thing now.
Over the course of the next couple of minutes, White Justice and Hooded Cell Phone yelled at one another as children would in a schoolyard and through their rhetoric, the entire library found out both of them were armed service veterans of some kind, ready and trained to throw down as the tiny librarian kept repeating, “Could you please keep your voices down?” forgetting that it’s difficult to keep one’s voice down while shouting at each other in a library. She looked like a pygmy referee in a sumo match.
At any time, the men could have reached over her and grabbed the other’s throats. That they didn’t surprised me. I was thinking, “Ma’am, you need to run downstairs and call the police.” But then they probably drill the proper response into them at Librarian School so far be it for me to interrupt.
The librarian downstairs now got on the loud speaker (which seemed out of place in a library) and announced, “Can you gentlemen please stop shouting?” as if they didn’t realize they were doing it. The kids in the children’s section must have had quite a time with the language.
Finally, Tiny Librarian managed to guide Hooded Cell Phone down the stairs toward the exit. As she did, he did the “gotta save face” thing and yelled about waiting outside for White Justice to finish up. If that doesn’t happen at least once during every visit to a library, then it’s not really a trip to the library, I’ve always said.
On the surface, that last line seems like a joke, but there is more truth in it than anyone would believe. There’s something about libraries or maybe it’s just public places in general, but it might be the knowledge it possesses. You perhaps get to a point where you learn too much.
Two quick examples: I was once yelled at by a guy because I was sitting at a computer station I didn’t know I had to sign up for. The station was empty and there was no line. I got up right away, but that was not fast enough for him and so he started cursing out the entire Jewish religion.
Another time, I was merely outside the library. I sat down on the ledge around a planter and set my nice little salad next to me when a black guy comes running outside. A white guy followed swinging one of those yellow “Caution: Wet Floor” cones. At first, I figured they’d head past me, but it was a performance right in front of me, front row seats, with the yellow thing whizzing by my head. I gathered up my things, and scrambled far enough away to hold up the phone for the 9-1-1 dispatcher to hear all the racial slurs coming from the white guy.)
The inherent danger in visiting a library aside, the more pertinent question highlights the egregious wrong of what makes people lie in the face of a crime with literally no repercussions. Admitting you’re wrong when you’re accused of murder is one thing, but when you’re accused of keeping your volume a little too high in the library? How did we get to this point as a society?
Laptop Lady and Hooded Cell Phone could have defused the whole thing had she just said, “Sorry.” That said, I wanted to make sure Hooded Cell Phone was long gone by the time I walked out of there since the library was too small to have a second exit. And the upstairs window didn’t even open for me to leap across to a tree branch and let myself down easily.
Everything calmed down after he left. White Justice returned to his seat at the top of the stairs to cool off. Tiny Librarian went back to her desk. And I sat back relieved to finally have some peace.
Over the next few minutes, I watched as patrons walked past White Justice, down the stairs and toward the exit. They thanked him for saying something. He was a hero. Good, I’m glad he got the credit. I didn’t need it, nor did I want it.
Finally, after four or five people had walked by and praised White Justice, another man walks by and spoke to him. I assumed he, too, was congratulating our hero. But then this guy’s voice got higher and the White Justice started screaming back at him. What the hell is happening?!What could this guy possibly had done to the other guy?
“Fuck you, buddy!” one yells. “Oh, yeah? Fuck you!” (I always loved how people think that’s gonna win an argument. “Fuck me?! No! Fuck you!!! “Ooooo, burn.) At least they were both white and neither of them pointed to me to validate his case.
Before exiting the library, to get to my bike, which I parked in front, outside the only exit, I walked the perimeter and looked out the window, just to make sure Hooded Cell Phone had gone. I didn’t want to be collateral damage or worse, a hostage. “I’m keeping this writer until you apologize to me.”
Well, he was gone, and I left the library, never to return. Those places are dangerous. Whenever I want to get some work done, I go to a shanty town in Skid Row for some peace and quiet. . . and more intellectual discourse.
It’s easy to see how O.J. could gotten so enraged that he (allegedly) killed his wife. He had stopped by the library first.