Rugby

I was three when Dad held my hand as we walked into this branch, a storefront on Utica Avenue near Snyder, four blocks from our apartment. He went to the desk and said to the librarian, "He wants to get a library card."

The librarian was not amused. "Son," she said, "take your baby brother and get out of here. I'm not in the mood for jokes today."

I didn't understand. Nobody had told a joke.

"He's my son," Dad said. In his early twenties, Dad probably could pass for sixteen the way I would be able to. "And he wants to get a library card."

The librarian frowned. "He has to be able to write his name in order to get one."

"I can write my name," I said.

"He can," my father said.

The librarian gave us the piece of paper that had the form to fill out and a little round pencil, not like the bigger hexagon-shaped ones with erasers that I was used to.

I put my tongue at the right corner of my mouth and wrote my name as best I could. I misjudged the amount of space I had, and my first name was too big and I had to squish the "son" at the end of Grayson as basically one letter. We gave it back to the librarian, who nodded.

They gave me the temporary card and said I could take out just a couple of books this time. I went to the children's section and had a hard time making up my mind. I'd never had a library book before. I was used to my little Golden books like The Tawny, Scrawny Lion, and The Poky Little Puppy, which I could recite by heart after so many readings.

After we handed the librarian the books I'd picked out, she put my card and the books' cards under a little lamp. When the flash went off, the machine made a boing-y sound, one that I would always love to hear.

I heard it a lot at the Rugby branch for a couple of years. When I was six, the library moved to its current location, a one-story building at 1000 Utica Avenue, just off the corner of Tilden Avenue.

The Rochelle Tenner Reading Garden was installed in 1997, in the last of several renovations to the building. The Rugby branch has an extensive collection of books in Haitian Creole.

Flatlands

Built in 1955, this two-story library on Flatbush Avenue at Avenue P seemed new the first time I went there on a school field trip, just a few months after we moved from our old apartment to a big house on East 56th Street. Miss Gura, the teacher of 2-1, made us select partners for the long walk from P.S. 203, and I got to hold hands with Linda.

Flatlands became my second-favorite library branch. I'd take the B41 bus and sit in the teen reading area even before I had my bar mitzvah, trying not to look like a baby and hoping nobody would make me move. I loved the scuffed-up wood of the card catalog and the typed entries on the little cards.

Sometimes I'd just sit with The Reader's Guide to Periodical Literature and look at the entries and try to guess what magazine the listed articles came from when I couldn't immediately recognize the abbreviation for the title. Other times I'd go over to the shelf of New Books, which you could take out only for two weeks, and pick out one even though I had a lot of schoolwork to do and not much time to read it. Luckily, I was a very fast reader.

The New Books shelf was where I found Erica Jong's Fear of Flying, so good I stayed up an entire night to finish it despite a 9 a.m. Biology and Society class at Brooklyn College. At lunch, I lent it to Linda only because she promised she would finish it before it was overdue.

Linda had the book with her the next Friday night when she and David went to Little Italy for dinner. On Mulberry Street she recognized Erica Jong and her Chinese husband. Linda told Erica Jong how great Fear of Flying was and asked her to autograph the book.

When I saw Erica Jong's signature, I worried that the Brooklyn Public Library wouldn't believe it was actually the author's.

"They'll think I defaced the book!" I said.

Linda said she'd just put it in the overnight book drop and hope nobody would notice. The library never contacted me to complain, so I guess they either didn't notice or didn't care.

For a while I looked for the autographed copy of Fear of Flying on the shelves, always withou success. Linda wondered if maybe one of the Flatlands librarians had sent it to a special collection at the main library at Grand Army Plaza. But I told Linda it was a bestseller and it made sense for it to be borrowed a lot.

Six years later, the shelves of the Flatlands branch would hold both our first books – although Linda's Roller Fever would get taken out a lot more than my short story collection.

Kings Bay

After being housed in several storefronts on Nostrand Avenue near Avenue W, this branch got a permanent home in 1959 and was later expanded twice until it is now a four-story building.

This was quite a ways from our neighborhood, so I would usually only get to stop in when my parents drove us here. We'd eat across the street at Senior's restaurant, where I loved the red cabbage, or a few blocks down at Jahn's ice cream parlor, where they'd give you a free sundae on your birthday.

When I was in tenth grade – the one year I spent in a Manhattan private school – I walked all the way here during the winter break we got so that my rich classmates could go to Florida or the Caribbean with their parents.

By the 1970s, I could drive here on my own. The last book I took out at this branch was Philip Nobile's Intellectual Skywriting, about the writers and editors of The New York Review of Books. When I dragged the book along to our fiction-writing workshop in the Brooklyn M.F.A. program, Bruce saw it and said, "Intellectual Skywriting – man, that sounds like everything you've ever written."

Kings Highway

After I transferred from the private school to Midwood for the last two years of high school, I'd sometimes take the Ocean Avenue bus to Kings Highway and hang out at this three-story branch till it got dark.

This is where I read my first non-school book in Spanish, a novel about a young fisherman who got his girlfriend pregnant. It ended really tragically. I can't remember the title.

Now the Kings Highway branch has foreign language books not just in Spanish and Chinese, but also in Russian, Hebrew, Urdu, Turkish and Arabic.

Mill Basin (old)

This was a storefront on Avenue T between East 58th and East 59th Street. On the corner of East 58th was the luncheonette where I bought my comic books and candy. Next to that was the beauty parlor, then the Chinese laundry, then the grocery and the dry cleaners and the kosher deli. The old Mill Basin branch library was next to the Austin Pharmacy on the corner of East 59th.

Only three blocks from our house, this library was where I spent so many hours that I still dream about it, thirty years after it closed. It was an easy walk, but a lot of times I rode over and left my bike in the bike rack. I never used a lock and my bike was never stolen.

This was the library where I first looked up "homosexuality" in all the encyclopedias and dictionaries and where I watched the clock so I could go back home in time for Mom to think I'd actually been at Hebrew school, the place I was supposed to be.

Mom once asked me to stop at the pharmacy next door to the Mill Basin branch and get her a pack of Newports. As I walked back past the library, where some Italian kids were hanging out, a girl pointed to the Newports and asked if she could have a smoke. As I opened the pack and handed her a cigarette, one of the boys said, "Careful, they may be perfumed!" They started laughing, and I did too.

A few years later, Bud and I would stop in at the library just before dinner at the deli. Once he found a copy of James Kirkwood's Good Times/Bad Times, which we realized we must have borrowed at about the same time. Next door we'd get frankfurters and French fries and Dr. Brown's Cel-Ray soda. Our favorite waiter, Louis Blugerman, had a business card that read St. Louis Blugerman Shakespen, Writer & Waiter.

When the storefront library closed in 1974, the Mill Basin Kosher Deli and Art Gallery expanded and took it over. If you're in the neighborhood, you should stop by for a meal or to check out their Roy Lichtenstein paintings. If you don't ever get to Mill Basin – and most New Yorkers never do – they will ship their food overnight anywhere in the U.S.A. from what was once my favorite library.

Midwood

I always thought the Midwood branch was weird because it wasn't on a big avenue but on a side street, East 16th, alongside the el near Avenue J. I didn't go here often, because it was out of the way and for some reason this three-story building creeped me out.

The last time I stopped at this branch, I was in my thirties and temporarily living in Judd's apartment while he was in Pennsylvania directing some plays.

On the way to a Rosh Hashanah dinner at my Great-Aunt Tillie's in Rockaway, I took the D train here from Park Slope to get some kosher pastries at one of the Jewish stores on
Avenue J.

Something compelled me to turn up the street and go into the library. I had never realized the branch had such a big auditorium. Looking through the biographies, I found one of Yukio Mishima that looked good, but by 1985 I was a Florida resident and no longer had a Brooklyn Public Library card.

Flatbush

On Linden Boulevard, just off Flatbush Avenue, this stately three-story structure was erected in 1905. By the time I worked here in early 1975, the outside of the building was covered with graffiti tags.

An M.F.A. student at Brooklyn College, I found a posting for the minimum-wage job in the placement office. At the interview, knowing that similar workers were still in high school, I didn't mention that I already had an M.A. in English and was going for another graduate degree. Mrs. Tobey hired me on the spot.

I'd come in at 9 a.m. except on Mondays and Wednesdays, when the library opened at that hour; then I'd come in at 8:45 a.m., parking my car in one of the eight spaces in the cramped lot behind the building. I loved my morning routine.

First I'd retrieve the books we'd gotten that had to go to other branches and to Grand Army Plaza. I'd pack them into cases, tie the cases with belts, and put them on carts for the ride to the dumbwaiter that would transport the books to the basement.

Downstairs, I'd take the books from the lift and put them on the conveyer belt. Outside, the man from the Interchange truck would wait for me to send him our outgoing books. When I finished, he'd reverse the conveyer belt and send me cases of books for our branch.

I'd take these books upstairs and screen them to see if anyone had reserved the titles or reported them lost. Then I'd remove the transaction cards from the back pockets and return the books to their proper places on the shelves.

I loved seeing the virgins come in: the brand-new books in their shiny plastic covers, not yet worn from repeated borrowing.

Mrs. Higgins, who supervised part-timers, put me in charge of nonfiction books with the Dewey decimal system numbers 000-799, which were shelved on a mezzanine overlooking the first floor.

I usually took a fifteen-minute break from shelving books at 10:45 a.m., taking a current magazine to the kitchen. There I'd drink tea and eat a slice of cake or pie brought in by one of the librarians, all of whom were white women.

Although the librarians had worked together for years, they never called each other by their first names, only "Mrs. Higgins" and "Mrs. Tobey" and so forth.

They all hated the head librarian, Miss Speiss, and called her Miss Beast behind her back. Miss Speiss was very strict about everything. When Mrs. Higgins told me that Miss Speiss wanted the shelves to be of even lengths, she added, "That bitch expects perfection."

Miss Speis's hated the mentally ill white bums and the black kids who hung out in the reading room. "They're up to no good," she'd say repeatedly.

One day, when I was alone with Miss Speiss during my break, she remarked of the tea kettle, "It whistles while it works," which made me think she might not be a total monster.

At this point in my life, I was having girlfriend problems, parent problems, money problems, and writing problems.

The four hours at my job were a respite, flying by quickly even though my shelving task was Sisyphean: no matter how much I accomplished on a particular day, the next morning there were countless rows of books to be shelved all over again.

I took a certain sense of satisfaction in keeping 000-799 neat and orderly and in memorizing the most popular numbers – 796, sports; 616, health; 133, psychic phenomena – and ones I just liked to learn for fun, like 301.415, books on feminism.

So when a cute, scrawny black boy came up to me and said, "I want to find a book on weight lifting," I could direct him immediately to 613.73 and 796.41.

After working at the Flatbush branch for a month, I got an unexpected offer to teach an evening freshman composition class at Long Island University downtown. For a while I continued to work mornings for $2 an hour in the library.

It was strange to be treated like a high school kid at one job and a college professor at another, but I liked the library too much to leave – at least until the Saturday one of my students, a black woman my own age, came in to do a research paper I'd assigned.

Mrs. Higgins ordered me downstairs to fetch a book for my puzzled student.

The following Monday when I quit, Miss Speiss expressed her dismay. "One of my best shelvers," she said. "I suppose you're going to work at that new McDonald's."

The only souvenir of my stay at the Flatbush library came from the one day when Mrs. Tobey was sick and I got to sit at the checkout desk and happily use the machine that made the boing-y sound. I took a blank temporary library card from the drawer, and when I got home, I typed up a fictitious new BPL patron, Kevin Cory, named after two characters on the soap opera Another World.

In the three weeks while the card was still good, I figured I'd go to another branch and take out the two books I was limited to. I'd keep the books and no one would ever catch me.

But after "Kevin Cory" had taken out Philip Roth's My Life as a Man and Peter de Vries's Forever Panting and tore off their plastic covers and put them on the shelves of my own bedroom, I felt guilty and returned them via the book drop.

In recent years the Flatbush branch has undergone extensive renovations, including the installation of new windows, doors, and a Caribbean Literary and Cultural Center.

Canarsie

On Rockaway Parkway and Avenue J, this branch is one of the few Brooklyn libraries not to have a book drop. I learned that when I was almost thirteen, a couple of years after the building opened.

It was the Sunday before my bar mitzvah reception, and we had to go across the street to the men's formalwear shop. I figured that while my brothers were trying on their dinner jackets, I could return an overdue copy of Manhattan Transfer to the Canarsie branch. I'd pay the thirty cents fine the next time I borrowed a book.

I looked everywhere for the slot where I could drop in John Dos Passos's novel. When I gave up and ran back across Rockaway Parkway, Dad was in front of the mirror in his tuxedo and he seemed really annoyed that we'd have to stop off at another library on the way home. He told me I should have checked in advance to see if Canarsie had a book drop.

Not yet a man for another six days, I had assumed all libraries had to have one. Dad said I took too much for granted.

Paerdegat

On East 59th Street at Paerdegat Avenue South, this branch was built in 1963, replacing a temporary one in the former laundry room of the Glenwood projects, where a bunch of my friends from junior high lived.

Eugene and I once trudged here on a Saturday morning in snow about a foot high, trying to get some information for a seventh-grade social studies project on the Dutch New Amersfoort colony in the 1600's. The reference librarian wasn't much help. She said she didn't think that there'd ever been slaves in our neighborhood. It wasn't till the 1990's while living in Williamsburg that I learned that Brooklyn tobacco plantations had been filled with slaves.

When I was in grad school, I came here one evening to pick up Linda, who'd been doing research for a magazine article she was writing. At the Ram's Horn Diner a few blocks away, we cheated on our Weight Watchers diet and shared some French onion rings. I tried to order a cherry Tab, but the waiter refused to bring it to me, saying the cherry syrup defeated the purpose of the saccharin.

By the time she was thirty, Linda was the editor-in-chief of Weight Watchers Magazine.

When my first book was published, I went to the Paerdegat branch and asked the librarian on duty if he had a copy of the latest issue of Library Journal. After he gave it to me, I found the page I wanted and pointed to a review sandwiched between reviews for Barbara Chase-Riboud's Sally Hemings and Edwin Torres's After Hours, which had penciled check marks next to them.

"That's my book," I said. "I wrote it. I was wondering if maybe you could order it?"

The librarian had a handlebar mustache, mottled skin, and a big bald spot combed over. "Let me explain something to you," he said, as if talking to a three-year-old. "We have this thing called a budget. This means we can't order every book that all of you people want us to order."

"Okay," I said. "I didn't mean to bother you."

He was creepy, but I felt pretty creepy myself.

The Paerdegat branch was renovated in 2003. Its community meeting room can now seat 50 people.

Clarendon

This branch wasn't on Clarendon Road but on Nostrand Avenue, a few blocks north of Flatbush Avenue, but it did begin as an unstaffed deposit station in a Clarendon Road drug store in 1915. In 1947, it moved to its present location and achieved full branch status.

When I was in college, this library was still a storefront, but unlike the Mill Basin storefront, the Clarendon branch seemed dark and gloomy. The first time I came here, Elise told me that after she'd moved from her old neighborhood – near the Rugby branch – this became her favorite library. But I couldn't be expected to feel the same as she did towards it.

The second time I came here was with Eloy and one of his innumerable white girlfriends. She was majoring in early childhood education and looking for copies of Highlights in the children's section. Eloy and I acted out the Goofus and Gallant cartoons until the librarian shushed our giggling.

I went here the third and last time with Stan and Mark, who needed an issue of Psychology Today from the year before. At P.S. 203 I had been in classes with Stan, but didn't meet him again until college, when his family moved down the block. Mark had been one of my few friends in high school; he and Stan were both psych majors who took classes together.

We walked the last block to the library quickly because Stan needed to use the bathroom. At the checkout desk, they gave Stan the men's room key, which had a big block of wood attached to it.

"He's been having diarrhea every day for the past week," Mark said as he made photocopies of the magazine article. "It's because he's nervous about the wedding." The pages coming out of the machine were the old "wet" dark kind of photocopies.

"I would have thought he'd have diarrhea before the circumcision, but not now," I said. "I mean, he and Sharon love each other. They went through so much."

In the beginning they had to sneak around because Sharon's parents didn't want her to marry a non-Jewish guy. Finally they relented when Stan said he'd convert.

At the time, I offered to become a Methodist in Stan's place, to keep things even. "I'm already very methodical," I told Stan, "so it shouldn't be that hard. At least I don't have to deal with a mohel."

Stan just said, "Richie," and I let it go.

Ten days after Stan came out of the men's room at the Clarendon branch, Mark and I and four other guys were outside Leonard's catering hall in a light snow, tying ribbons and balloons and a "Just Married" sign to the back of Stan and Sharon's Pontiac.

Unlike Mark, Stan did become a psychologist. The last I heard, he and Sharon were living in Georgia and had two grandchildren.

In 1990, a new building opened on the Clarendon branch site. Its distinctive design featured a sky-lit reading room and a recreational courtyard that won the Arts Commission Award for Excellence.

Mill Basin (new)

The new Mill Basin library opened in 1974 on the corner of Ralph Avenue and Avenue N, across the street from Kings Pharmacy, where I used to buy my Pepto-Bismol tablets and Compoz sleep aids, and from Landi's Pork Store, where I felt myself starting to cry along with the women behind the counter when they informed me that Pope John XXIII had died.

This 7,500-square-foot brick building had been a vacant lot where Stan would meet Sharon when they first started dating in secret. So it would look like she was seeing a nice Jewish boy, Peter would pick up Sharon at her house. Then they'd meet Stan here and he and Sharon would go to the movies or a restaurant or just walk on the beach. Stan and Sharon would arrange with Peter to meet here again at a certain time so that Peter could take Sharon back home to Whitman Drive.

I'd had a slight off-and-on crush on Peter since junior high, but he never seemed to know I was alive. The first time I went to the new Mill Basin library, oddly enough, Peter was coming out the door with the original cast recording of Follies. Although we'd sat at the same table at Stan and Sharon's wedding six months before, Peter struggled to recall my name. We made small talk about Sondheim and he said it was nice to see me again.

As spacious and modern as it was, the new Mill Basin branch wasn't a place I wanted to spend much time in, not like the old storefront where I'd hung out as a kid. By 1974 I was trying to be a writer and too old to spend a lot of time in libraries. Mostly I went only when it was necessary, and then I'd usually go to academic libraries or to Manhattan or Grand Army Plaza.

The last time I walked into the Mill Basin library, I was close to fifty and spending the summer in a Williamsburg brownstone. It took me over an hour to get to the old neighborhood on the B48 and B41 buses.

After browsing the branch's collection of CD's and videos, I signed up for one of the six computers in the adults' reading room to check my e-mail. The card catalog has long been online, and those old checkout machines with the boing-y sound I loved disappeared twenty years before.

This library is currently closed for renovation.