The Celebrities

A lot of famous people show up for my shift.

Juan Pablo Villalobos takes his tea in the upper mezzanine on Sunday afternoons. He sits at the last table, the one in front of the windows, the floor-to-ceiling windows that overlook the ancient oaks and frivolous young maples, the dogwoods and willows, with the footpaths that meander between their trunks.

His ritual consists in taking up his seat by the window, the most recondite, as if it had been waiting for him all week, as if they were old friends with a lot of catching up to do. He sets his satchel on the empty seat beside him and removes, one by one, the bare necessities: a book, his notebook, thermos, teacup, and saucer.

The thermos is the first to come out of the satchel. He places it on the tabletop and unscrews the top to let a little steam out. The saucer and teacup go next to the thermos. He serves his first cup before removing the book, different every week, which he rests next to the thermos, not directly in front of him but within hand’s reach. The notebook and pen are the last to come out. As the guests of honor, they get the best spot, the clearing, the expanse of tabletop directly in front of him.

He takes his time getting started, pouring the tea with great care. When the time comes, he opens the notebook to the first clean page and smooths out its wrinkles with the palm of his hand. The tea is still hot, and the first sips are small ones. Outside the window, the passersby are passing by. One of them is Carrie Brownstein, who is out for a walk with her nephews. The temptation to chase the squirrels up the trunks of the trees is too great for them to stick to the footpath. Little by little, the sun is extracting its rays from the treetops. It isn’t an easy task. The upper branches hold on for dear life. The result of this drama is an everchanging play of light and shadow on the lawns and footpaths. Not taking sides, the passersby step in and out of the shifting shadows, trampling their delicate designs.

Sooner or later, Villalobos takes to his notebook, like a little boat with a red sail named Rhubarb would take to the waves. He inks up the pages, meandering through its footpaths, filling the margins up with arrows and scribbles, asterisks and abbreviations, his idiolect. Sometimes he writes a word, crosses it out, writes the same word again, and crosses it out again. Oddly, this is the only way forward, crablike. When the words clog the drain and the water starts to rise, he turns off the faucet, sets down his pen, retreats from his notebook, takes a sip of tea, perhaps a little cold by now, and then reads of few pages of his book.

Invariably, his reading is interrupted: the impasse has been resolved; train of thought has been reestablished; the excess water has drained off; motion has been restored. There is the famous sound, so small and at the same time so big, of the teacup returning to its saucer. Then, it’s back to the mess, the mess that Villalobos is making with the words, the push and the pull, the strain and the ease, the dense forest and its clearings.

Only occasionally do our eyes meet. Of course, he knows who I am. I am a fixture. He recognizes me in the way that he recognizes the staircase and its banister, the tabletop and the initials carved into its surface. Besides, the uniform is a dead give-away. Perhaps, though, there is something more. Perhaps he knows that I know who he is and what he is doing. Can he recognize this recognition?

I say nothing. I would never expose him. Despite the difference in our respective stations in life, we both have too much work to do.

By last light, Villalobos abandons his post, pulls tight the drawstrings of his satchel, lifts anchors, and drifts out into the night waters and their fragrant air.

"Secondhand Reading," William Kentridge, 2013.

It isn’t until much later in my shift that the next celebrity makes an appearance.

Howe Gelb waits until the Community Center has cleared out. No more fearless children. No more nervous parents. No more teens vying desperately for each other’s attention. No more showing off. No more strutting around. No more acting out. No more ebullition. The trash has been removed. The handprints have been wiped off the glass surfaces. The cement floors have been push-broomed and mopped and buffed. It is once again possible to perceive the understatement that characterizes the building’s architecture.

Only when these conditions have been fulfilled does Howe take to the floors. From the first-floor pavilion I see him up there, behind the railing, pacing back and forth, up and down the long corridors of the top floor. Occasionally I go up there to retrieve the pushcart or the mop bucket or a spray bottle, and it is at these moments that I have closer look.

His hair is unruly, like chaparral in the flats of the valley. Over the years, adrift in the desert and its interminable expanses, his skin has taken in too much sun and his eyes have taken in too much sky. Lost in its vastness, he knocks around from canyon to canyon, scrambling across the pebbles, looking for that elusive mountain pass, always just out of reach.

It takes me well over an hour to do the floors of the pavilion. Throughout this time, Howe paces the floors, stopping occasionally to rest at the banister. Perhaps these are the moments when the melodies come to him, the chord progressions, the abrupt changes in tonality.

I lock the doors before I start the floors, which is to say the Howe is the second-to-last person in the building. This is, of course, against the rules, but there is a complicity between the homeless and the almost homeless that takes precedence over such rules.

When the floors are done, I have to go into the basement, and this is the moment when I would have to tell Howe that the daily quota of pacing has come to end. It is never necessary, however, to do so. When he hears me coming up the stairwell, he knows what it means. By the time I step through stairwell onto the top floor, I see him there at the side exit. He nods his head at me with something resembling a smile lurking at the corners of his mouth. and then he steps out into the night.

I am always a little sad to see him go, as if somehow both of us were a little worse off for the parting.