Kim Hunter - The Official Report on Human Activity

You would not think a degree in library science, especially coupled with a degree in mass communications, would lead to a desperate job. The thing is, I was better at media relations than library science and ended up with what I thought was a media job at a library. As many twists as there are to that story, it’s fairy tale-simple compared to what happened afterward: assault charges, being sued for property damage, a bit of jail time, and then things got interesting.

When it comes to jobs, I have always admired Marx, Freud, and Einstein. Don’t get me wrong. I am not really a Marxist and Marx had it pretty rough actually. Freud was a sexist pig and I am sketchy on the details of the general and specialized theories of relativity. I am not male, Jewish, German, or Austrian. What strikes me about what I call “The Big Three” is their unparalleled influence on the last century (the twentieth) and how that influence came strictly and utterly from what they wrote. It wasn’t their money. They commanded no armies, held no public office. They published what they thought and set one whole century on its ear. I’ve decided that’s the job for me. I am seriously revamping my resume.

So far, whenever someone’s taken notice of me because of what I’ve written, I’ve ended up holding the bag, the poke with the above-mentioned pig. Even friends, people seriously in my corner, wound up leading me to what turned out to be a dark alley. It wasn’t their fault. They weren’t in control, and it’s about control, trust me. This latest job I’ve lost sort of started with me trying to reduce my jail time. My only tools were my words and my library science. All things considered, I was relieved to be in an institution with virtually no physical violence and fairly professional staff. (I heard stories from inmates transferred from other facilities, tales that would put hair on your teeth, believe me.) But a relatively nice lock-up is still a lock-up.

The first thing I did was whip the library into shape. Staff told me the Dewey was too complicated for most inmates to follow. I actually used that to my advantage. I told folks the COs didn’t think inmates were smart enough to check books out of the library like everyone else. Many didn’t care, but, those that did raised enough of a stink to get the Dewey in place. Next, I needed people to work the desks. I decided to train folks with relatively little time to do. I pleaded with them to send news releases to the media when they got out. I wrote the releases. All they had to do was send them and answer the inquiries about the library with the training and verbiage I gave them: how they’d been “inspired to pursue library science as a career after incarceration” (whether they intended to or not). A couple of folks actually contacted the media. It worked. News crews were at the prison gates a few weeks after the first release went out.

I should explain something here. I don’t like being on camera, in front of the mic, or even talking to print folks (in that order of most to least egregious). Ideally, I come up with the ideas that get other people publicity and stay out of the spot. But I had to bite the bullet on that one. PR for other people was not going to get me out. The only good thing about my reticence was that I didn’t have to pretend not to want to be out front. You can check the YouTube clips (Books Behind Bars). I was not ready for prime time. My shaky, pale, deer-in-the-path-of-a-freight-train look belied the months of hard work I had put into getting my story out, but seriously added cache in terms of sincerity, not creating the library strictly for publicity, blah, blah, blah.

Even so, that wasn’t enough to get me released. In fact, one inmate told me I would be inside at least six months for every day my victim spent in the hospital. I don’t know where that formula came from but it didn’t bode well. My erstwhile boss had spent four days in the hospital after the door fell on him. I asked the woman with the formula if follow-up doctor visits counted and she said she’d have to get back to me on that.

What the library story got me were privileges. The warden allowed me to create a library newsletter both print and online. The online version could be seen by people on the outside. That’s how my friends, a former co-worker (of sorts) and her uncle, found me, and that’s what they used to eventually get me the gig that helped reduce my time.

Ironically, I despised my ex-co-worker when I first met her. Things were rocky even after we became friends. But when she stepped through the door of that visiting room, when I saw light on a face I knew from the outside and I realized no one else had come to see me, my tears streamed. I was so focused on what I had lost; I didn’t even realize my cheeks were wet until she told me. You just don’t know.

I thought I had given my unfortunate, would-be biographer the “slip” as they used to say, and the Deep Seven seemed like a chance to put the last nail in a coffin I was only too glad to see closed. I could now give up on my “story” to the extent that it was mine. It had collapsed from under me (something I had in common with the former owners of the DS), turned on me, become public and out of control.

I could have tried to invest the money I had left from my salary and, along with my options, had enough to live anonymously, that is to say alone. But that seemed a bleak fate and the Seven offered me a chance to keep my distance and to acquire friends as guests. The place would have to remain closed for a while and reopen with a new name and feel, but with no “under new management signs,” no markers of the transition. One day it would simply be what it is now, “The Whistling Swan,” and everyone would have to accept that or create his, her, or its own answers to the questions about how or why it had changed.

I don’t know how much you know about so-called real estate transactions, but they can be nefarious deals, especially if you want to avoid being part of the public record, and there is little I wanted more than to avoid the public record. You must hire a lawyer. Is there anything stranger than having a stranger handle private details and information in order to guide you through a system that is anything but private? I have had to do that twice now, once to buy the building that became the Whistling Dragon, and the second time in a vain attempt to avoid Texas’s rather active death row. In a way, I was lucky to be on the American continent and in the US, as the legal system here works fairly well. But, even in the US, it works better in some places than it does in others and better for some than it does for others. Had I not virtually run out of money (what I didn’t pour into the Dragon went to bribes, leaving relatively little for legal), and had my first crime not been in a state with, as my biographer put it, “an ironic and noxious blend of the Puritanical and the reptilian,” things may have been different.

Even so, as time goes on and the effects and affects of the experiment fade, I have become less and less bothered by the notion of death, that is to say, the human sense of legacy. The strange interplay of memory, nostalgia, and hope is leaving me. Once this is over, it is over. How a species that has been able to determine the age of the Earth, extend its lifespan, and send objects to the edges of the galaxy could fear death or regret the past—to say nothing of believing in things for which there is little or no evidence, God and the afterlife for example—will be a mystery long after I am dead, reverted, or both.

Of course, in terms of the afterlife, there was also the speculation of the Veiled Woman, yes, the very one that virtually closed the place with her arias and Bible-burning song. She’d walked into the venue a “true believer” in the aforementioned peculiarly strict form of Christianity that hails from the south. After some time though, she imagined that the afterlife may be as mysterious to “us” as this life is to a creature in the womb, that just as there is no way to convey to even the brightest fetus the complexity and enormity of the natural world or human society, what awaits humans at the other edge of life may be equally beyond our grasp.