Substitute Monarch

...in which Ashley transitions to The Man

In the early aughts, I got a job with the Podunk County Public Library. I thought of this hiring as a successful scam I’d pulled off, another deft subterfuge of the easily duped. This tidy, climate-controlled gig, loitering among the Koontz and Roget’s, would be good cover, I believed, for my secret life as a cultural insurrectionist, a well-scrubbed front for the juvenile delinquency I had nurtured into my early thirties. My bosses, and the gullible Podunk public, would believe I was actually a grown-up “librarian.”

Generally speaking, I’d always thought of employment as a con job, a ruse by which I hustled some retail manager with the false promise that I cared very deeply about Honey Baked Ham and the selling thereof. This was, I believed, the grift all wage slaves were executing daily in order to pay for our burrito supremes and satellite dishes. We’d told the shift supervisors that we were “self-motivated” and that we had “a passion for excellence” during our job interviews, and the little czars believed us or pretended to. This was no different, I reckoned, than promising the warden that our past lives of shivs in the shower stalls are not who we really are and that we’ll exemplify good behavior on the cell block from now on. In truth, we believe ourselves to still be the cop-hating angel dust enthusiasts we’ve always been, despite our aprons and paper hats.

Worse, we recondition our behavior patterns according to the master’s dictates. We answer the phone in the sing-song script we’ve memorized. We sermonize on company policy and promote sexy discounts and upgrades to the unsuspecting. We exhibit a can-do attitude and team spirit. We promise to think outside the box, knowing full well that the greatest jeopardy to our jobs is to think outside of the box. We wear the flair. By all appearances, we’ve converted to the company religion, cultivating the robes and rituals thereof. But inside, we all still pagans, plotting our weekend orgies and daydreaming about revolution.

I was faking my way through this particular workplace grift reasonably well, fully nametagged and neck-tied in careerist cosplay at the circulation desk. No one suspected I was an undercover operative for Slack, harboring a secret insubordination in my bosom. And so I surprised myself one day when a small, unaccompanied child came barreling into the library at top speed. “No running in here,” I impulsively yelled. The child obeyed, deferring to my demand for conformity.

And in that instant, I felt a dark transformation take place within me. As the words left my mouth, so, I feared, had my anarchist soul. That anti-authoritarian stew of Fugazi, Arendt, S. Clay, Kesey, and Flavor Flav brewing deep inside me since boyhood evaporated into a mist that left my body and dissipated somewhere over Periodicals. I had presented myself, to a vulnerable child no less, as a fully licensed and bonded agent of The Rules, as if I truly cared about the proclamations imposed by the tribal chieftains. Had I become everything I hated?

“No running in here,” was, after all, the cry of every superfluous vice-principal and cafeteria overlord who ever imposed petty authority over elementary-school spazzwads. The Enemy. Or at least this was how I understood the dynamic as a school kid. We children were unified, I assumed, in our shared understanding that those adults who commanded us to stop talking, turn to page thirty-six, spit out our gum, stand in the corner, turn in our homework, do fifty jumping jacks, and go the principal’s office, were the Chairman Maos to our pint-sized People’s Republic. Simply by virtue of their adulthood, they marked themselves as forces to be thwarted and disobeyed, yet carefully avoided for the sake of one’s essential humanity. The adults understood nothing about Ultraman or Pop Rocks; why would we take anything they said seriously?

To be an authority figure, it was clear, was the subway to Squaresville. But assuming that this belief was universal among my fellow kinder was decidedly lamebrained on my part. It later proved that some of these enslaved students – not coincidentally the ones I remembered as the most boorish and aggressive armpit farters – were more than happy to snatch the reins of power as adults. There he sits today on County Council: Hartley Morris, the kid who was suspended for setting fire to frogs in the science lab, now obstructing democratic progress at the behest of the bankers and the police in Charleston County. He couldn’t wait to pay that misery forward. He wasn’t alone; before you know it, all those schoolyard glue eaters who spit in your milk and pushed you off the jungle gym are running the goddamned country.

Meanwhile, I, a lower-order potentate, had not been given the authority to misdirect public funds to my buddies at Boeing like Hartley could, so I had to get drunk on the small sips of power my humble library post provided. “You! You have eighty-five dollars in late fees. But you! Your fines have mysteriously disappeared.” It wasn’t exactly a Capone-level of corruption, but in my own way, I made the trains circulate on time. Apart from this pissant malfeasance, my only opportunity for despotism in the library was to terrorize the children, and this was frankly too much trouble. “No running” was about as Eichmann as I had the energy to stoop. But every now and then, I was invited to inflict a real Abu Ghraib-level enforcement of authoritah.

Ours being a state institution, the library was a designated work farm for misdemeaning minors who had been sentenced to “community service.” This meant it was our occasional privilege to host some incorrigible young Dahmer – some neighborhood preteen, who, having been arrested for sparking a doob in Dairy Queen, was being forced to spend time among books and magazines as punishment. And the task of supplying these little cornhole champions with library-ish busy work was invariably given to me, “the man of the house.” While overseeing these future inmates, commanding them to rewind video cassettes and empty pencil sharpeners, it occurred to me that I was being given ample opportunity – indeed, generous license – to horrifically abuse them however I saw fit. In my position as tinpot Torquemada, I could make them drink toilet water or listen to Alanis Morrissette or….

Well, honestly, it’s too much work even now to think up creative ways to abuse school kids, much as their haircuts and texting lingo may justify it. Which makes me realize that those adults compelled to traumatize children are truly self-motivated and have a passion for excellence. If you really want to screw up a child for life, you have to have the Eye of the Tiger Mom.

And keep in mind that my library job was in the Deep South, a land and a people who worship authority like the second coming of Earnhardt. How often I heard the misty-eyed locals regale each other with tales of Sherrif Burkey or Officer Stokes, local cousins who crippled crackheads or pistol-whipped jaywalkers in the line of duty, praised to the heavens for their two-fisted service to the bible belt. Southerners love a good, old-fashioned abuse of power more than chicken-fried cheese grits. I could have totally made that kid drink toilet water.

As I write this, a schoolboy on the soccer court across the street is pounding loudly and ceaselessly on some sort of kettle drum, disturbing this reminiscence, and I would most assuredly like to crack his skull with a beer bottle to make him stop. But I know I wouldn’t have to do that. I know that if I went downstairs and demanded that he quit playing his drum, he would. He would assume that I, an adult, had clear authority to insist that he cut the shit, and this is what I find truly disturbing.

We all know from the infamous Milgram Experiment that people can be persuaded to do anything, including administering fatal electric shocks to fellow human beings, if someone who appears to be “in charge” tells them to. This is especially effective if you give them commands while holding a clipboard. A clipboard means you have full credentials to give orders and demand answers. I’ve often considered moving about in various public spaces with a clipboard in hand, telling people in the food court they need to “clear this area immediately” or collecting names and social security numbers from Walmart shoppers, knowing most of them would do as I said. Guy’s got a clipboard; better not piss him off.

Of course, I never did this, nor did I force any community service cretins to drop and give me twenty in the 700s. But what I did notice, to my horror, was that having been given this minor absolutism as Mack Daddy of the Cowtown Liberry, when those droolers in my jurisdiction were found to be slacking on the time-killing tasks I had assigned, I was filled with murderous fury. To defy my decree, when I had been such a thoughtful and benevolent disciplinarian, was clear justification for a night in the box. Especially Tyler – I hate that kid. And this is how I’m certain that, whenever some member of the Donut Patrol fires seventeen bullets into a street punk, this is not self-defense as the officer claims, but “I thought I told you to shut up.” The authorities are not administering justice but bitchslapping the sassmouthed.

And so I reject the mantle of authority or even the status of gainful employment. I will not speak for the company charter nor inflict punishment on the delinquent. Run all you want, and the late fees are on the house. My lurking among the normies, posing as an Upright Citizen, is still a sham, and I certainly have no desire to persecute the downtrodden, their dipstickery notwithstanding, in abuse of what little agency may be unwittingly bestowed to me. In my heart of hearts, I am a man of peace, who desires nothing more in this quiet life of Zen contemplation than to brutalize the powerful. My mission as a Podunk librarian was to corrupt the youth of America with Danielle Steel novels and to stymie our corporate masters by allowing The People to take home Kindergarten Cop free for three days. I am still, in my Kurtzmanian soul, at war with the adults.

Several years ago, I found myself in a shopping mall one afternoon, without a clipboard, when I noticed a scuffle in the doorway of a clothing store. A store manager was attempting to prevent a shoplifter, an adult woman, from leaving the store with her ill-gotten Jordache. While others were stopping to watch, I found myself, to my surprise, instinctively moving toward the altercation, as if I going to provide assistance. But at that moment, a security guard arrived and helped subdue the thief, superseding my involvement.

To this day, I am not certain which of them I intended to help.

-A.H.

(And let’s not forget Ashley’s website, jam-packed with portraits and other drawings, his highly-affordable prints and books currently available, his eagerness for your portrait commission, and his contact email, thrdgll@gmail.com, where he longs to hear from you.)