The World’s Strongest Librarian

  But man doesn’t live by mayhem alone. The darkness, and the illicit thrill of reading King, had to be tempered with books that didn’t cause nightmares. Ideally, with books that caused other, warmer sorts of dreams altogether. My girl Fern had competition. Lots of it. When I wasn’t reading horror I was spending time with the sassy new brunette and a pair of gorgeous blond twins.

  Beverly Cleary created the brunette, Ramona Quimby. My favorite was Ramona the Brave, and there was one scene in that book where I knew I was hers.

  During an argument over dinner, Ramona announces that she’s going to say a “bad word” to shut everyone up and get some respect. Her family goes quiet with anticipation. “Guts!” she yells. “Guts! Guts! Guts!” And of course they all burst out laughing. I vowed to marry Ramona.

  The public library was twelve miles away from our house, and my mom couldn’t always take me. One Friday she was sick and my dad was out of town. This was the worst possible scenario; “I will not be taking you into town this weekend,” she said before retiring to bed on Friday evening. I fought the withdrawal as long as I could, but finally decided to raid Megan’s shelves, which were filled with girls’ books.

  And that’s how I met the Wakefield Twins from Sweet Valley High. I read about ten of them that weekend. I was hooked. Boys’ books, girls’ books, it didn’t matter. They were stories (with lots of kissing) that progressed from point A to point B, and once I’d started reading, I couldn’t abide the unresolved stress that came with not finishing them. But that wasn’t something I could explain to the bookmobile driver the following week when I checked out a Special Double Issue!!! of Elizabeth and Jessica’s trip to Europe.

  “Are you sure this is what you want?” she said, holding it up for everyone to see. Jason Lawson snorted behind me. I couldn’t tell him about point A and point B and the narcotic of long-arc narrative. I couldn’t explain how worried I’d been after Enid got in the plane crash and thought she’d be in a wheelchair forever. I couldn’t tell him that the snotty rich kids Lila Fowler and Bruce Patton weren’t as bad as they seemed. I couldn’t tell him about how annoyed I was that Elizabeth stopped dating basketball player Todd, but was now with soccer-playing weenie Jeffrey French. Soccer!

  But maybe I could appeal to his sense of lust. “I think they’re cute,” I said, pointing to the book’s cover, where Elizabeth and Jessica were laughing at something in Europe. Huh? Huh? Anyone?

  Oh, boy. Wrong thing to say.

  That night I asked God to melt Jason Lawson’s head.

  It “felt” like I’d asked for the right thing.

  The next morning I was shocked to find Jason’s ugly face glaring at me. He still had his eyes, ears, teeth, and tongue, and all were functioning adequately enough for him to catch my eye and call me “sperm head” in front of the whole class. We’d had sex ed a week earlier and being called sperm head was now a hideous and trendy insult. I went home after school in a haze of embarrassment, but before going inside I got into the back of the family van and whispered, I hate God. I love the Devil.

  It was out. It was out and I couldn’t take it back. I waited to be smited, as if by Ammon’s avenging sword, exploded, imploded, burned, struck by lightning, or for the skies to open up and say, “I heard that, sperm head!”

  Instead…silence. Nothing but the sounds of wind and dogs barking and faint voices from the nearby golf course. The silence didn’t disturb me. Or encourage me. It made me wonder. Was this a test? Had I damned myself? Was Someone waiting to see if I’d have the courage to say it again? I didn’t.

  Silence and stillness were in short supply in my life. There were only three times when I could count on them: when I slept, when I read, and apparently when I blasphemed.

  By uttering those words, I’d taken a risk and stepped toward the limits. A friend would later tell me that the best way to expand your limits is to work within them. I’d put my hand out and tried to find the wall but there was nothing there.

  CHAPTER 3

  616.89075—Diagnosis, Differential

  302.3—Bullying

  During the school year at the Day-Riverside library—a branch of the Salt Lake City Public Library System—at about three in the afternoon, the doors would open and a flood of kids would spill into the stacks and over the computers. Most of them got beached on the PCs. The rest of them would wash up on the chairs, or sometimes the floor. And then, in accordance with some occult signal, they would all start jabbering like seagulls.

  While this was going on, I’d patrol and do some looming. After fifteen minutes there was always new graffiti. Most tags were what I saw in the nearby neighborhoods—Rose Park Kids, Inner City Souljas, and one prolific enigma with horrible penmanship who advertised himself as Sir Snowflake. But sometimes I’d find an act of vandalism so exceptional that I couldn’t bear to clean it up. Sometimes I didn’t even share it with anyone in the hopes that it would go unnoticed.

  Carved into a desk: I love math!

  Written on the edge of a bookshelf in permanent black magic marker: I am a shelf. I am alive!!! I liked that one so much that I almost took the shelf home.

  MC Hammer fever was at its zenith when I was in eighth grade, and so were the huge baggy pants he wore onstage. MC Hammer danced like a maniac and the sight of the students trying to mimic his athleticism in the junior high hallways must have been annoying for the teachers. Suddenly every kid was dressing like him and cutting steps into their hair. I knew kids who wanted glasses just because Hammer had them.

  I wore my best pair of Hammer pants to school one day—they were purple with enormous yellow dots. The pants hid my skinny legs, although my feet were enormous and getting bigger by the day.

  But the pants couldn’t hide a bigger problem. Ever since I’d turned thirteen, my body had betrayed me in myriad ways. From the second I opened my eyes to the time I closed them at night, I was humming with desire. I wanted every girl I saw. I was a gawky highlight reel of fantasies that I barely understood but couldn’t turn off. And it was getting worse.

  I’d fallen asleep in science class with my head on the desk. I woke to the laughter of my eighth-grade classmates. My favorite Hammer pants showcased an unfortunate erection that had reared up majestically during my nap. Everyone was looking at it.

  Wow.

  I ran—well, shuffled quickly—out of the room and hid in the restroom down the hall. I sat in a stall until my legs fell asleep. The next few weeks were predictably awful. But I learned a great truth in the last half of that school term: Kids can forget anything. Even you. Two months later they were picking on someone else.

  I fought competing impulses. I wanted to be seen—and not seen. And I wanted both on my own terms. I wanted the females to giggle and ask to feel my muscles (I was six-three and my muscles were virtually nonexistent). I wanted the males to part when I walked down the hall.

  Too bad.

  Ms. Henderson passed out the math tests. The room was quiet. To my horror, I started clearing my throat. “Hmm-hmm! Huh.” With each noise, my feet stomped the ground. “Huh! Huh!” I had never concentrated on a math test so hard. But maybe it wasn’t as bad as I thought. Maybe nobody could hear me.

  We’d been working on our tests for about five minutes when Steven, who sat in front of me, turned around and yelled, “Shut up!” into my face. Somehow the class got even quieter. Everyone looked at him, then at me.

  “Are you okay?” I asked.

  “Am I okay?” he said, eyes wide. But I didn’t know what else to say. I looked down at my desk, feeling like someone had poured lava into my hair. I cleared my throat again, louder than before. I looked at Steven again. I don’t know if I looked as scared as I felt.

  “I’ve got something in my throat,” I said. Ms. Henderson took me outside. Math class was in a metal double-wide trailer at the hill above the main school building. Each clanking step on the walkway outside triggered a new tic. “Huh huh huh!”

  “Are you okay?” Ms. Henderson asked.
br />   I didn’t know. Was I okay? I only knew that I couldn’t ever take another math test. And I had geography the next hour.

  “Huh HUH!” I covered my mouth. My stomach filled with rocks. How could this be happening? Why would this be happening? And what was it? Ms. Henderson let me call my mom, who came and took me home.

  I cried all afternoon. “Mom, what’s wrong with me?”

  “I don’t know, Josh,” she said. “But we’ll find out. You’ll be okay.”

  For the first time I could remember, nothing she said made me feel better. The urges to croak, stomp my feet, and clear my throat didn’t subside. They kept going at dinner, and as I lay in my bed that night. I was exhausted by the effort of the twitching and noises, but couldn’t sleep because of the twitching and noises.

  That night my mom called Ms. Henderson and asked if I was being disruptive to the class. She had flashes of that Tourette’s book in her head and needed to know if I was telling the truth about what had happened. Had I really just been clearing my throat? Had I just been making noises? Was there anything I wasn’t telling her? Horror of horrors, had her husband been right and I was destined for the circus?

  Ms. Henderson told her that I was fine, that I wasn’t a disturbance in class, and that I didn’t need any accommodations. “If you start treating him like he’s different,” she said, “he’ll start to think he’s different. If he starts to think he’s different, he’s going to start acting like he’s different. That’s not what he needs.”

  But I was making so many involuntary noises. There was the hooting baby owl sound. And the slobbering dog just finishing a round of wind sprints. Sometimes I whistled like wind in a ghost town. Other times I had a perpetual frog in my throat that sat there even after constant throat-clearing. But thankfully, the tics were usually at their most diverse when I was alone.

  I stumbled through the rest of the year, hoping that everyone would catch a bad case of amnesia between June and August so that nobody would remember me on the first day of high school.

  Over the summer I’d only gotten noisier. I was hooting and yowling and yapping and generating weird looks every time I was in public. While school was out, this was manageable. My friends knew I had tics. Everyone at church knew, but things were mild enough that most people chalked it up to extreme fidgets. At least, that’s what I told myself, and my mom was willing to agree with any line of thought that made things easier for me. Even trips to the quiet library were doable—it wasn’t like anything would have kept me away, but the librarians knew me. I could find a book, get absorbed, and the tics would stop. Or if that didn’t work I could grab a book and run outside.

  In the fall, I tried out for the freshman basketball team. I was tall enough to make the team without any relevant skills, and I wanted the status. I didn’t know that being on the freshman team was about as prestigious as being the fat kid who swam with his T-shirt on, at least in our school’s pantheon of sports. But I’d get to dress up. On Game Day, all Elko High School athletes dressed up. If I was among the handful of students wearing a tie on a Friday, I fantasized, girls would notice me and think Oh, he’s on the team. I should probably ask him out on a date. Silk shirts were as popular as Hammer pants, so I asked for one when I made the team. A week later I had a blue silk shirt that, after an hour of wear, looked like a poorly erased chalkboard. I wore it with tight slacks that wouldn’t reveal anything, should I fall asleep in class.

  I didn’t receive the adoration I hoped for the first time I wore my silk shirt, although Anna L. told me I looked nice. I had decided to complement the new look by shaving the sides of my head and growing the top out into a bushy red Mohawk. With my thick, upright hair, I looked like one of those troll dolls, except that my haircut made me about eight feet tall.

  Making the team meant going to practice every day. As soon as my breathing quickened on the gym floor, my tics kicked in. The harder I played, the worse they got. And the harder I played, the more I got to play. The more I played, the more I was seen on the court before hostile crowds. The more I played in front of crowds that already hated our team, the more I had tics in front of people who were already looking for reasons to mock me.

  But there was a nice surprise that would’ve been completely unsurprising to anyone else—the harder I practiced, the better I got. Who knew that by repeating a task, you could improve? Our team wasn’t bad either, and I realized that I liked to win more than I hated having my tics on full display.

  Nobody hated our team more than our archenemies from Hawthorne,* Nevada. Our teams hated each other; our fans hated each other. Even our cheerleaders glared across the court during games. With its casinos and buffets and factories and scummy basketball teams, Hawthorne smelled like a huge dirty butt, waving in the wind.

  Near the end of the first quarter against Hawthorne I caught the ball in the post and jumped for an easy lay-up.

  “Don’t twitch!” a voice yelled from the crowd.

  I missed the shot. Had I heard what I thought I had? I looked at the home crowd on the other side of the gym. A sea of yellow jerseys and pom-poms. Who had yelled? Or were they all yelling it and I only heard that one voice? My feet were suddenly heavy and I felt sick. I gritted my teeth and played harder than ever. It worked. I shut my man down on defense. I made a few baskets. I forgot about the voice in the heat of joyous competition. Then I caught the ball down low again. I went up for a shot and heard more than one person yelling something about “twitch.” I got fouled. As I took my place on the free-throw line, the crowd began to chant.

  “Twitch! Twitch! Twitch!”

  I hadn’t imagined it. I made one out of two shots. Halftime followed shortly after.

  In the locker room I was dizzy with nerves and sat down unsteadily. “Are you all right?” asked a teammate.

  “Yeah,” I said. I don’t know, I thought.

  We matched each other point for point in the second half. The more the crowd yelled at me, the angrier I got. Couldn’t they see that something was wrong with me? How dare they! But at the same time I was thinking, You have to stop doing this. Of course they’re laughing at you! You’d be laughing too! Just make yourself stop!

  I could hear my dad bellowing. “Kill him! He got fouled! Pass it! Good grief, are you kidding me?” He wasn’t exactly a master at controlling himself during my games. During one legendary game against Battle Mountain, the referee actually walked into the crowd and offered my dad the whistle to shut him up. He didn’t take it, but he didn’t quiet down either.

  Down the stretch I kept getting fouled and had to shoot several sets of free throws. The crowd chanted every time. After making my final shot, I pointed at the crowd and laughed. The Hawthorne crowd howled and stomped, but we had won. That was all that mattered. When I walked out of the locker room after the game, a group of rival students saw me and immediately began twitching, jerking their elbows, heads, and contorting their faces.

  It was as visceral as being kicked in the crotch. I put my head down and hurried by. I could hear the sounds of their laughter all the way home.

  “Well, at least you won,” Dad said afterward. I hadn’t said anything yet. “Well, you did,” he repeated, while I looked out the window of our enormous red van.

  “Honey, what is it?” said my mom.

  “I think I want to see a doctor,” I said. “I want to know what’s going on with me.”

  They looked at each other. “We’ll get you an appointment with a specialist as soon as we can,” said my dad. “You know, that crowd was probably laughing at me as much as at you.”

  I laughed.

  “No ‘probably’ about it,” said my mom. “But you deserved it.”

  I turned on the light in the backseat. I’d brought a slim book that I’d grabbed at the high school library, The War Prayer by Mark Twain. In the book, the citizens of a small town gather in a church to pray for the young men of their town, who will soon leave for war. The service proceeds with a pastor singing the virtu
es of honor, and the congregation prays for victory.

  A stranger walks into the building and announces that he is God’s messenger. His job is to say out loud all of the things that the church members are thinking. He proceeds with the grisliest recounting of the horrors of war, pleading with God to shred their enemies’ bodies with their bullets and blades.

  When he’s finished, the townspeople ignore him. It was believed afterward that the man was a lunatic, because there was no sense in what he said.

  Several weeks later we traveled to Reno for another basketball game. My game had further improved and I anticipated a good fight between our teams. It was only in the fury of competition that my tics let me go. If I had time to think, I had time to twitch. But if I was shoving against someone, gritting my teeth, wanting to win just to make them lose, I had some control.

  Things were going fine in the first quarter when I began fighting for a rebound with their center, a massive kid who had surely been held back eight times. He elbowed me in the back and yelled, “You can’t box me out, you pussy!” I fell to my knees, then jumped up and turned to shove him. He leaned down into my face—yes, he was really tall—and blinked his eyes spastically. Apparently I was still having tics, even when I thought I had them under control. I was horrified. He laughed as we ran up the floor. I tried to avoid him but he was guarding me. Every time he bumped into me he laughed. I avoided his gaze until halftime when I looked back after he pushed me again. But I had nothing. We were getting killed.

  “What’s with you?” asked Coach McCabe.

  “I don’t feel good,” I said, slumping onto a bench. “I think I need to sit out the rest of the game.”

  I didn’t sit out, but I played even worse in the second half. When the game ended and we the vanquished lined up to shake the opponents’ hands, I looked at the ground. I didn’t see who slapped me on the back of the head, but I knew.

  My mom told me that I’d been the bigger man, and that turning the other cheek is always better. But turning the other cheek was all I knew how to do.