These past few weeks,
with Amy moving to her new store, I’ve been feeling so much grief for the
Rosemont Bookstore job. It wasn’t perfect. Amy and I fought like idiots
sometimes, the commute was too long, I sometimes got on too much of a soapbox
with our wonderful undergrad employees, (currently in the process of taking
over the world) but the job was a spate of happiness and stability in a life
where I’m not always able to be a non-roller-coaster. I took good care of that
little store with my best friend, and we turned something corporate and
anonymous into something beautiful.
It was my love and
protectiveness of the store that eventually led to me being kicked off campus,
ESCORTED off campus really, by security at the command of the
Rush-Limbaugh-listening campus liaison.
Strangely, the morning it
happened, I had a dream in which the college had gotten together in disagreement
with our #enough School Walkout poster on the door. The poster was real. (I
love how I ended up spending the walkout: http://theserotoninfactory.blogspot.com/2018/04/activist-kids-rule.html
) In the dream, I told the assembled committee something like “You don’t really
care about anything! You just want to control us.”
Really, it was a pretty
standard PMS/anxiety/America dream, but it seemed psychic after what happened
that day. I was opening the store by myself, happy that Amy was sleeping in and
looking forward to catching up on Dear Prudence and easing into the day. But
members of the maintenance staff and security team kept buzzing in and out of
the store, asking me to turn things on and off, looking worried and urgent,
presumably about something electrical. I didn’t like the vibes they were giving
off, but I got things up and running and then went back to my desk. A smell
permeated the office, an acrid, technical smell, somewhere between electricity
and smoke, and poured out towards the front of the store. I grabbed all my stuff
(poor second-breakfast half-banana! What did you ever do to anybody?!)
I called to the still-buzzing-around
maintenance guys to see if anyone had called 911 yet. They hadn’t, and they
told me not to, but that seemed nuts given the smell. I ignored them and called
the fire department.
My favorite non-Amy coworker
had arrived by then, and we sat in the lounge close to the door, waiting for
the fire department to arrive and give the all-clear. Over and over, maintenance
and security guys tried to get us to go back in, seemed urgent about it, but I
wouldn’t let us go in until the fire department came. Given my distrust of the
police and all authority in general, I’m surprised that I had this much faith
in the fire department, but Syracuse Fire Department had saved me and my
roommates from a blaze back in the Nineties, so I guess I still had gratitude
and trust.
One of the maintenance men who kept hovering around
and trying to get us to go back in the store was a twenty-something dude who’d
been banned from the store a few weeks before that, for trolling us IRL about
Star Wars. Don’t EVER tell me Rey is a Mary Sue, ASSHOLE! I swear to god. It
seemed gross that someone like that could possibly have bearing on my physical
safety, but he did.
I don’t know why I didn’t
just send us home, just go off campus for breakfast like we eventually did,and
call it a day. I was jangled with the possibility of fire and full of over-the-top
protectiveness and love for our little store. Love makes me a crazy person
sometimes. I know that’s ableist language, but I don’t have a better word.
After a long, janglesome
time, the Bryn Mawr Fire Chief came in mad as hell, because they’d sent him (or
he’d just gone) to the library instead of the bookstore. I’m a big, strong
lady, but having a six foot something fireman yelling at me when I was already
afraid from the smoke smell and generally afraid of white men, especially in
the Trump-era Pennsylvania suburbs, is a lot. It was too much.
Besides his frustration/embarrassment
about having gone to the library, the fire chief was also mad that I had called
at all. After all, he explained, “his guys” had told him there wasn’t a
problem. He repeated this a few more times until I just needed to clarify:
“So, you aren’t going to check the smoke smell for us because
men told you not to?”
“Yes,” he said, and in the right-but-maybe-not-helpful
way that I’ve had a lot lately, I said “Oh. Then you’re a sexist piece of shit.”
And he definitely was. When I finally somehow convinced
him to go into the store and check it out, he said that the only thing he
smelled was burnt food. Then he looked me up and down to indicate that I’d
clearly started the fire by being fat.
Next Time: I’m escorted off campus by security.
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