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Walking on the Wild Side at the new library

The "Yellow Jackets" who provide private security for the new downtown Kansas City Central Library are keeping the new quarters relatively safe and quiet for everyone's enjoyment. Some of the poor and homeless regulars of the old library are afraid to come into the imposing old bank lobby of the new one. For one thing, they heard during the closure for moving the collection that they were not wanted and were being identified with criminals. And those who look into the lobby see no tables or chairs inside, which confirms to them that the new library is an unfriendly place. Of course that is not true, not at all. Some of them have been personally invited in by the Yellow Jackets who know them. I will suggest to various activists that they call the library's deputy director and organize library tours for poor and homeless people.

One regular I know has shown up and is around quite often. She likes to get in a quiet place and read, usually non-fiction. I met her at the old library where I noticed that she and another obviously poor writer were typing up a storm on the old typewriters there. Her high-speed typing amazed me, so I struck up a conversation with her and said I sure wished I had known her in the old days when I wrote manuscripts out longhand and paid a typist by the hour to type them up - one typist in Washington edited them as she went along, wherefore my writing improved considerably.

Anyway, I saw her today, reading quietly back in the stacks, so I had to say hello and exchange observations about the new library. I observed there were no typewriters for her to write on, and it would be nice if there were a couple of typewriters in the little study rooms. She said she was writing scripts out by hand now, and that she likes the new library well enough on the balance - it has no typewriters but it is quiet like a library is supposed to be.

I just had to tell her a little story about Nelson Algren, author of Walk on the Wild Side and other books once quite popular for their realism. Nelson drifted around quite a bit during the Depression, hanging out a lot with the poor and homeless, got a job selling phony beauty-parlor discount certificates, I think in New Orleans. He wrote for awhile under the good auspices of the WPA's Federal Writers Project with the likes of Saul Bellow and other impoverished writers. Nelson was a sort of American existentialist when the term was first being coined. Simone Beauvoir liked him and even took leave of Jean Paul Sartre, he significant other, to come over to the States and hang out with him.

Anyway, I told my fast-typing acquaintance how Nelson hitched rides over to El Paso, where he was jailed for vagrancy for awhile. Then he went to Alpine, and found out he could use the typewriters of a teacher's college without being noticed. When he decided to go back to Chicago, he grabbed a typewriter, mailed it to Chicago, and hopped on a freight train. But he was busted for theft before he got out of Texas and was tossed in the jail, where he stewed for a few months while waiting for the circuit judge to come around.

I don't know the details of the case, so I don't know if Nelson got to keep the typewriter or had to make restitution, but the judge set him loose and he high-tailed it back to Chicago. That experience provided him grist for his mill, not only for Walk on the Wild Side, but for Somebody in Boots, and, I think, for Neon Wilderness.

She thought that was a pretty funny writer's story. Me too. That's why I remembered it all these years. Maybe the library will get out those old typewriters for her if they were not auctioned off at the old place.

As for me, my number one writer, I write on computers. The library has free WIFI, I think its called, for rich people who can afford laptops. It is some kind of "hot spot" radio thingie where you can get onto the Internet with your laptop. Otherwise poor writers have to use the library computers and are limited to 90 minutes a day - I wrote just wrote this in fifteen minutes, but it is not so hot.

I sure wish I had taken that laptop a friend of mine wanted to get for me. I refused it, though, because she is not rich. I don't mind taking expensive gifts from rich people.

I don't know what is wrong with me, but I just cannot steal even when I know I can get away with it. I am responsible, for instance, for returning almost a half-million dollars of overpayments from the government, and I returned even more to private companies over the years. Even if I were a thief, how can one steal the Internet? I don't know.

But forget me, this is about poor and homeless regulars, including writers who write books at the Kansas City Public Library. I'm sure they will come back and feel welcome and secure now that the predators and nuisances are gone.