Michael Guillebeau - MAD Librarian - You Gotta Fight for Your Right to Library

Serenity slid in across from her. “I’m doing my best to keep him off track. Remember when a big day for us was deciding whether Fifty Shades of Gray belonged in best sellers or pornography or the trash?”

“Yeah.”

The door opened and Doom came in. A couple of old men stuck their heads out of the back and stared.

“Back,” Joy said to them.

They disappeared.

Doom slid in and Jerry set down rum and glasses, and a plate of red-orange wings. He paused for a minute to stare at Doom.

“You, too,” Joy said.

Serenity pulled a notebook out of her bag and opened it on the rough wooden tabletop. “Let’s get down to business. I’m sure we’ve all got other things to do.”

She paused and looked at Doom. Looked at her for the dead eyes of Billy the Kid. Looked at her to see if she was scared. Or guilty.

All she saw was eagerness.

What the hell is wrong with you, child?

She put her head down and focused on the page.

“We—I—shot off my mouth and got us this seven-story monster. I keep acting like I have it under control and that we desperately need every square foot. But I don’t know what the hell I’m doing.”

Joy cracked open the bottle. “One floor of books, six floors of bars.”

“Yeah. Believe me, I thought about it. Even I don’t know if we need all of it.”

Joy poured a glass, slid it across the table. Serenity took that long first taste that usually brought back white sand and hot sun and no worries.

Not tonight. “If we don’t have a real need for every square foot, every librarian who ever asks for an extra dollar for a new table will have a harder struggle when people say, ‘just another boondoggle like Maddington.’ We have more money pouring in than we’ve ever imagined. But if every dollar we spend doesn’t bring two dollars back to Maddington, it will all be a waste.”

Doom said, “I claim one floor. My brother makes a living writing books that help people start micro-businesses. How to start a business on a hundred dollars, that sort of thing. How to set goals. How to navigate bureaucracy, and banking, and a million other things. I asked him what he’s going to do when he runs out of books and he laughed. Said ‘Once you get that one great idea that can change the world, there are still a million ways to fail, and nobody to help you.’ He said he could write a book a year and still be writing when he’s a hundred. What you need, he said, is not books but communities.

“My brother means business incubators and help centers, but I want more. One place. A place where guys with ideas can come in and say, ‘I’ve got an idea’ or ‘I’ve got a problem’ and talk to people who know how to connect to knowledge. Call it ‘Maddington Works.’ The businesses we grow will pay for all seven floors by themselves.”

Serenity scratched in the notebook. “You got it. Part of that floor’s also going to be a jobs center. We spend enough time helping people write resumes and find jobs as it is. Now we’re going to do it right, not separate from the businesses, but right there, on the same floor, people looking for jobs and businesses looking for people. Next.”

Joy said, “Probably one whole floor of day care by day, with shelter for the well-behaved by night.”

“Some people will say we’ve already got day care centers and homeless shelters,” Serenity said.

“Yet there are dozens, maybe hundreds, of women in Maddington who can’t hold onto jobs because they don’t have day care they can count on and afford.” Joy nodded at Doom. “And start-ups going out of business because they can’t find people like these women.”

“People already drop kids off at the library for hours at a time and hope that we and the kids don’t notice,” Doom said,

Joy waved a wing at Serenity. “We’re already doing the job. But because we’re so hit-and-miss at it, women can’t count on it, and can’t hold onto jobs. And, because nobody recognizes it as our job, we don’t have the funding or skills to do it right. I bet that, if we do this right, the money saved by women having jobs, and businesses having workers they can count on, will pay for this one.”

Serenity looked at Joy. “Okay, but how do you justify a shelter? I know we’re doing that now, but how come we need to go big?”

“Because the current shelters have gaps,” Joy said. “They have to handle the mentally ill, and those with drug problems. They can’t really help people who have just fallen into the life and need help getting out. But we can. We’ll have the resources. By night, our folks will have a bed. By day, they’ll have educational opportunities—something we need to talk about next—and the best connections to jobs in the state of Alabama. Can you imagine how much the city and the state would save for every person who moves out of homelessness and becomes a tax-paying citizen?”

“All right. That’s in.”

Doom said, “You already hit the next one: boosting education. Portland did a study last year and found that improving a student’s SAT score one hundred points gave them an average of eight thousand dollars more in scholarship money. We can do that for every student in Maddington. And that can make parents willing to pay more for houses here, and make businesses fight to locate here.”

And so it went. Areas for medical/legal advice, a TV/movie studio to ensure Maddington students had the skills to compete for entertainment and communication jobs, and maybe even bring movie production to Maddington. On and on. Each idea spawned four more.

Joy said, “Once the dam of ‘can’t do’ is broken, and we raise our vision of what a library could be, we’ve got a flood of ideas. Are you sure seven floors are going to be enough?”

Serenity looked at her and smiled. “Where did Miss Sunshine come from?”

Joy raised the glass in a toast. “Got cause for sunshine. To paraphrase old Ben Franklin, ‘A library, sir. If you can keep it.’”

“That may be the hard part,” said Serenity. “We’ve got somebody who wants their money back, and people who will try to stop us.”

Doom said, “So let’s get ahead of them. Let’s take some of their money and hire a PR firm to get articles in regional press, ‘Maddington: The City Built on Books.’ We can feature success stories about businesses coming here because of the library. Kids getting scholarships. And, lots of pictures of local and state politicians at groundbreakings and fundraisers.”

“We’re also going to have to start finding quiet ways to make contributions to those same politicians,” said Joy. “At the very least, we need the mayor and the district attorney in our pockets.”

“I don’t know if I want to get in bed with some of those guys,” said Serenity.

“That’s the way I saw it done when I was a cop in DC. Big dogs run together.” Joy shoved her glass back at Serenity for a refill. “We’re big dogs now. We may have to cross some lines we don’t want to.”

Doom raised her glass. “By any means necessary.”

Serenity set her glass down and put her finger in Doom’s face.

“I’ve had enough of listening to that shit. A man is dead. Dead! And now I’ve got to carry that to my grave, and even protect the killer, which makes me a part of this. Fine. I’ll do it. But no more damned bragging and pretending.”

Doom sat up straight. “I’m glad he’s dead. He was a Bentley worm trying destroy our library and… wait! You were part of it?”

The door opened with a crack and they turned to look.

“Hello, ladies,” said Joe.

“I THINK we’re done here,” said Serenity.

Doom hesitated, and Serenity said, “Go.” Doom and Joy quickly stood up and cleared out.