Kentucky Meat Shower #27 “Et In Golgotha Ego” is the conclusion of “A Prophet of His Own” arc, debuting on Kittysneezes. If you’re curious about what I mean by “arc” you can read more here. The first issue is here. The second issue is here. 

I didn’t go to the wake. I couldn’t show up wearing a millstone, my feet bound, wailing like Jacob Marley. His name was Easy. They did it in the parking lot of the library. It was on a Sunday; they wanted to celebrate him in the neighborhood. He spent a lot of time at the library. It was his family’s decision. My manager, no doubt wanting to prove her largesse, agreed. 

Easy died of an anabolic seizure. I wasn’t there but from what I can tell, my best guess is he started going into withdrawal. If he was going to live, his sister was going to have to approve amputating all of his limbs, leaving him wheelchair bound for the rest of his life. Instead, Easy passed away. I couldn’t figure out which was worse: death or losing the ability to take care of yourself. I still have not. 

When we first learned Easy died, there was a lot of talk about it among the staff. Every library has fixtures. I kept my feelings to myself, mostly. If anything I kept them mostly to how it affected how we would work. This is just what I remember. The most I remember my manager doing,  besides what would make her look good, was watching as Vela, the lady from our career services initiative in the city, cry in her office. She worked with Easy. At one point I wanted her help to get Easy’s ban lifted. I was a lot of things, busy being one of them. 

Easy did what he could with his ban. But a ban didn’t just mean inside the library. It meant the wall outside the library, which shielded the holly bushes. It meant the sidewalk outside the branch. Public bans are enforced by calling the police. Easy had the police called on him twice at the insistence of my manager. Each time he was too blissed out to move without the full provocation of the police. They didn’t arrest him. They just got him to move. 

Easy, on some level, knew he couldn’t come inside. But he stood outside. It was an area that was familiar to him: I would see him around all the time, even when he was banned from the library. He could sit across the street, soaking in as much shade as he could at the metal bus stop. His whole coterie of street friends with him. Easy had a house, but he spent all day out in the neighborhood. He had business to attend to, and after his business was done, he could sit in the library. When he got banned, he stayed around, unable to sit in the library to get out of the the ninety degree heat and ungodly humidity. A public institution bans a member of the public and he becomes something else, depending on what he can cling to. He was made a ghost long before he died. 

On the day of the ban, there had been another incident that day. One of our regular patrons, Mr. Lamb, started feeling pain in his chest and asked for me to call his social worker. I did. When I came back from lunch, my manager was yelling at the staff over the phone. I asked if she had an issue with how we assisted Mr. Lamb.  My co-worker confirmed. 

I exploded. “If she has a single thing to say to me about how I handled that, we can get HR down here, and hash it out. I’m not gonna be yelled at.” A co-worker told me to be careful. We had a workplace snitch named Sarah. She almost wound up my supervisor until she got busted with a copy of her interview questions. She didn’t get fired by the manager. I think the reason was simple. 

“Maybe she should hear it! I’m not fucking around.”

A few minutes later, my co-worker Robbie came back. “She’s on the phone.”

I picked it up. My manager’s voice felt serrated. She was not yelling at me. She laid out her objections to what I had done: that I should have called 911 the minute he mentioned his chest hurting. His request had nothing to do with it. I feigned listening to her and forgot everything she said and continued about my day. I knew she wouldn’t be in the branch until tomorrow. Until then, the branch would be free of her foghorn voice and her eyes, dark brown and cagey as a horse’s, prying, trying to keep her workforce in line and operating the library the way she would like for the library to be operated.

As we did our close that day, our newest security guard found Easy’s bookbag. He had left it behind. We usually put bookbags in the lost and found. We didn’t open them, usually. She did. There was an entire liter of vodka inside of the bag. 

“Isn’t that Easy’s bag?” One of us said. Not I, however. I imagined wandering the neighborhood, looking for Easy, handing him his bookbag when I found it. 

“I’ve gotta call the manager.” The security guard said. I cursed myself. I had been helping unionize my branch–everybody who remained signed a card, which made me happy– and I hadn’t gotten to the point of getting them to understand how little our manager cared about us, and at large, our community. But they learned, quickly. 

They called the manager and I watched. 

“Throw away his stuff and ban him.” 

Everyone was aghast. She was resolute. She had caught him several times, according to her, and the container was open, so clearly he was drinking. Throw away everything and ban him, she said. She was out, probably doing her business with the homeless community of Richmond, as the city’s appointed liaison to the homeless population. Her job took her all over the city. That’s why she fell, originally. After her stint recovering and she returned with her arm in a sling, she became more and more disciplined minded. But it was always there, from the moment I arrived. 

Easy came back for his bookbag. The security officer and our supervisor, the real one, not Sarah’s puppet regime, went to go speak with Easy. Easy was told of his ban. We were there late, writing his ban notice and the incident report, which I often got tasked with due to my ability to quickly type. After we were done, my supervisor told me, “Chris, as one of the men here, we’ve got a responsibility when there’s a situation with bans.” I said sure thing. Neither of us agreed with the actions taken. 

Before then, there were no issues with Easy. That was why they gave him his name. As long as he had the things he needed which he kept in his book bag, he seemed sanguine. He was a bit of a mystery in that sanguinity: maybe it was the glassy look in his eyes that acted as a partition between himself and ourselves. I knew only the barest facts about him. A few days before his ban, he sat with Vela on Facebook. He was pointing to a girl in Harrisonburg he knew. “I’m trying to go see her.” He said. 

“I hope you can.” Maybe the girl’s experience of Richmond would be standing in the hot parking lot at his wake, not knowing he’d been banned and my manager at the wake not confirming. It was, after all, the lot to the manager’s library, the one where she either parked the truck or the sports car in the handicapped spots long before she had an actual injury. It was her library. It wasn’t anybody else’s. That was always clear. That’s why it never really worked with me there. I thought we were supposed to be for the community. She thought the branch was her franchise. Easy fucked with her property. That’s why he had to die. 

She would have preferred him like the first time I really met him. Across the street, at that bus stop where the humidity and sun bake the people waiting to get on the bus that takes them from uptown to down, he was laid out, etherized with vodka, passed out. A local city father stood over him, making sure he would wake up. I drove over to help them. I stood over him, watching him wake up, making sure he wouldn’t die. I could only do it once. 

I wonder if at the funeral, he was curled like he was at the bus, laying in state, a narcotic smile preserved on his face. If they buried him with airplane bottles of vodka and Steel Reserves.

I preferred to picture him another way. I had just gotten back from a vacation. I was in North Carolina, wanting to be away from the job. I was gone for three days and on the third day I woke up and cried. I didn’t want to go back. It was the first time on a vacation I thought, I need to leave Richmond. But I am a good soldier, and I did go back.

The first day I was back, I was shelving books when I heard the manager’s foghorn scream in the branch. She chewed me out for something innocuous and I stormed out. When I looked across the street, Easy was kicking his feet at the bus step, a 40 between his legs. My manager was right behind me, ready with reprimands. Nobody between the manager and Easy and me knew who would be done with who in the end, or even that we would be, but with the library as the point all lines parallel and perpendicular emerged from, everything was possible. 

And in a few months, when I finally cracked under her management–she berated me over not folding a few brochures she hadn’t told me she needed by a certain time when I was triple scheduled that morning– of all the things I told her, how I was stressed under her constant lack of communication, her way of approaching discipline, her lack of trust in her team, the one I couldn’t tell her was the one I really wanted to. You killed him! You fucking killed him!

 

When God sent his son down to the world, the death he died was the most painful death he could. It was also a public death, to make you serve as an example.  I believe we all know what a crucifixion looks like and how painful it was. What I would like to point to is that it was a decision made by an occupying government. Jesus was not the first person to die by crucifixion, and he was not the last. Jesus died an example for crimes he could not commit, among two rebels or criminals, depending on the telling. The lowest death someone could die: a defilement of the body and spirit, with two soldiers gambling on his clothes, a crowd mocking him. This was a death available to everyone, and made available to the son of God through an act of mercy few of us can comprehend. 

What we are much better at comprehending is a crucifixion as a state action, a public punishment. An action doled out by committees, by middle managers. Pilate was the governor of Judea the same way the viceroys were in India, among other examples. The crucifixion was a task like figuring out taxes on grain exports.

I did not gamble on Easy’s clothes or cover his wounds with vinegar water, but his expulsion from the library, and the events afterwards bring to mind nails being pounded into joints. After all, to give him a fighting chance he would have lost every limb. 

Jesus died an administrative death. So did Easy and a lot of others. The difference was how long it took and who came back. 

 

I eventually left the neighborhood and got work somewhere else. Somebody told me Lamb went too. It was more natural, and I imagine he was never banned from the place he loved. 

When I started writing this essay I employed a number of techniques. I wrote it forward. Then I tried to write it as an epistolary document, through a series of reports. Then a fantasia, where I saw a woman with a paper mache horse mask on the side of the road before Easy died and Egyptian imagery. It was because I couldn’t find a way to make a proper tribute to Mr. Lamb. He kept asking me to print off things about ancient Egypt and Masonic orders. All these drafts took close to a year to write, because there’s a lot of goodbyes I didn’t get to make so I tried to make them all at once. 

But you don’t get to say goodbye to everybody you’d like to. There’s still a foolish part of me that thinks I’d be okay if I did. I thought I’d be okay if I could find the best artistic way to convey everything I experience, too. I finally found it and it wasn’t. There is no method for grief. 

 

It was an evening shift. The kid in the room was troubled. His counselor didn’t tell us what was happening until I got a call about someone checking if someone had tried to hurt themselves upstairs. I told that person no and then saw the counselor waving her arms up in the air. I walked in, he was looking at the floor. He had tried to strangle himself and stick a lipstick tube in his eye. 

That’s when I had to let the police in. They were in the lobby. I walked them upstairs. Later another one came: a pink goateed man with his thumbs tucked under his security vest like he was pleased with himself. 

“They’re in D. I’m going to walk you over.” I said. His response was a curt, “I don’t know where that is.” I kept all my curses under my breath and walked them to the room. The kid was sitting forlorn, running debit cards across his wrist trying to match a scratch. 

Later I looked in the room and he was on the ground tied with his hands behind his back. They frog-marched him out, a skinny body flanked by adult men, each one holding his arms. Then I knew, watching him leave, that I was there in Golgotha, whether I wanted to be or not.