I was born into a family of bookish alcoholic-addicts, and from a young age I began finding solace in music, books, alcohol and drugs. I grew up in a chaotic environment and things got pretty ugly sometimes but I was exposed to a lot of culture from a young age and the culture helped me get through it all. It instilled in me this lasting idea of some kind of sacred beauty among all the ugliness and profanity that I experienced and witnessed. Decades later I still count my love of culture as a saving grace that has allowed me not only to stay alive but to enjoy life and find a great deal of purpose and meaning in it after making it through decades of wandering and destruction.

Even when I was homeless and strung out, I had Beethoven, whom I’d loved since the age of 4 or 5. I had Dostoevsky, whom I’d fallen in love with at 15 while vacationing with gangsters south of the border. Went to my first Mexican whorehouse that year, which was neat. I’ve lost my taste for brothels over the years while my love of culture has grown. Where do you find a place where books and culture are prioritized, but you have no money and smell like Alabama roadkill? Well, you can go to the public library. They actually want you there. Sometimes they even have free food.

Now I’m not homeless anymore and I haven’t had a drink or a drug in 20 months or so, but after almost a decade of homelessness bouncing around on the streets and living in the wilderness, as I approach my 51st birthday, I still love my books and music and I still love the public library, because that is something of a spiritual home for me. I’ve been to libraries all over and the following are just a few of my favorites.

I have gotten free food at the library. I have copped methamphetamine and fentanyl at the library. I did both of these things at the Mission Library on Mission and Ajo on the southwest side of Tucson, where I also used to wander around collecting shell casings off the ground. Usually .223 Remington, which is a common size for small rifles. People in Arizona love guns and this library was near the edge of town on the road that led to the Tohono O’odham Nation and eventually old Mexico. A major smuggling route. Once you get out past the mountains on the southwest edge of town it gets real rootin tootin real fast. 

The Mission library had the most free food and milk (from leftover school lunches) and the atmosphere was good. I felt very at home there. That’s a big deal when you’re homeless, finding somewhere where you can feel at home. The bathrooms were always clean, though like many bathrooms in Tucson there were no mirrors. And they had signs up with rules telling you not to take off your clothes and bathe in there and stuff. That was pretty standard for Tucson bathrooms because there are a lot of homeless people there. It is warm and the drugs are very cheap. There was a little store nearby that sold meth bubbles, but you had to call them oil burners or they would dummy up. 

I used to sleep on the ground behind that library occasionally. Sleeping near libraries used to help me feel safe because I feel spiritually connected to them. This spot was also near a body of water and there were a lot of birds and I feel spiritually connected to birds too. I used to wander around Kennedy Park there quite a bit too. They often had good leftover food in the trash especially during high school graduation season. That area had public bathrooms too, though sometimes people took the main ones over and placed a guard outside and I had to head up into the hills to the bathrooms by the pond. This pond and all the birds were very special. This was Tucson, it’s a desert city, bodies of water are rare and precious.

There were fast food places nearby too and the intersection of Mission and Ajo was a big panhandling spot. Panhandlers compete for the good intersections. And sometimes people will give food instead of money and the panhandlers don’t want the food so they would leave it at the bus stop or tuck it behind the don’t walk sign. You have to know where to check. All in all I loved that neighborhood. One of my good friends worked at the gas station down the street at Ajo and 16th. That was one of my favorite libraries in Tucson, though I liked different ones for different reasons. 

I used to play guitar outside the South Tucson library, the Sam Lena branch. South Tucson is an independent municipality within the city of Tucson. It’s about 1 square mile with a population of about 5000. It is a poor area with a lot of homelessness, addiction and street crime. But I always got along with everyone and liked being part of the community. There were a lot of very friendly people. 

The Sam Lena Branch was the most homeless of all of the many libraries I have known and loved. It was not chaotic, just kind of weary and smelly. The librarians there are wonderful and the security guard Larry was an old NYC guy and had seen Jimi Hendrix, The Rolling Stones and The Velvet Underground live in NYC in the 60s and I enjoyed talking to him. That library was right around the corner from the Santa Maria soup kitchen where I often went for my daily food and it was on the 18 bus route which is the craziest bus route in Tucson in my opinion. 

It’s on South 6th Ave, and turns into the Nogales Highway at the south end of the city, and goes all the way to the border town of Nogales and Old Mexico. Nogales straddles the Arizona/Mexico border. It’s a big smuggling hub. I used to walk South 6th, gathering old straws caked with fentanyl resin and chewing the resin like gum. I have not done fentanyl in several years now, which is good.

Tucson librarians were kind to homeless people in general. In my experience librarians in poor areas are very kind and helpful toward the homeless population and really help counteract the terrible dehumanization that a lot of homeless people experience on the streets. The librarians at the Sam Lena Branch in South Tucson were the friendliest I’ve ever met, and it’s worth noting that the friendliest librarians worked at the “most homeless” library. 

Among the more bougie towns, I love the Ridgewood Library, in Ridgewood, New Jersey. I especially like The Ridgewood Room, which has big fancy leather seats and a lot of natural light. I need all the natural light I can get sometimes. I used to see Harlan Coben in the Ridgewood room sometimes. He writes pretty good thrillers with fun North Jersey local details. 

I had friends there, old guys who read the paper and told me about what was going on in the world. Weird drifters who came to charge their phones or maybe sneak a nap. You can’t sleep too much in the Ridgewood room, though, especially if you snore. They wake you up. A lot of libraries are that way, really, though not all of them. 

The Ridgewood Library has a nice patio with nice benches and canopies that are nice to sleep under. I used to help myself to free wine from the nearby Stop and Shop and spend days and nights on end on the patio there. I slept there a bunch of times. They have some good wooden benches. I slept overnight in the furnace room a few times. I had a little fort I made out of drywall.

The police station is right next door but the cops don’t really mess with you if you don’t make trouble. I mean, yes, I have been arrested at the Ridgewood Library, but it was for something I did somewhere else. They just knew where to find me. I’ve been arrested at two libraries in New Jersey (Ridgewood and Hawthorne) and I am a bit embarrassed by the fact that I take pride in that. I have had the police come to ask me if I was okay because I was drunkenly crying at one library (Fair Lawn.) I have gotten caught drinking by the librarian at the Ridgewood Library. I’d been snoring loudly and he woke me up and I knocked over my bag and my bottle fell out. Classic alcoholic oopsie.

Eventually, I had to stop hanging out there so much after this weird young white dude who was always high on pcp kept showing up, he would ride one of those electric scooters down from Franklin Lakes. He was pretty unstable. He used to hit on high school girls. He would get psychotic over pretty much anything. I don’t know how a weird rich whiteboy from deep in the rich parts of north NJ ends up with pcp as his drug of choice but these things happen and there is no end to strangeness in this world.

My current favorite library is the Elmora branch in Elizabeth. It is small and quiet. The clientele are mostly seniors and children. Mostly Latino. The regulars are friendly and the librarians are nice. They do Spanish language aerobics and tai chi in the back room in the mornings but they are quiet about it because it’s a library. There’s a garden in the back where I go to sit sometimes. When a library has a garden I get to experience two of my favorite things at once. Libraries and gardens are, for me, two of the best examples of what communities can do with public spaces. There’s a Shop Rite down the street where I get pastries and coffee and I know all the gardens of the houses along the way. Their flowers and their seasons. The Guadalupes and the Buddhas. You look at these things and you can see through time back to the dawn of civilization. 

In the library I am in now as I write this in Elizabeth, New Jersey, at the downtown Main Branch, there are a lot of homeless regulars who come to get out of the elements, use the computers and socialize. This library sets up facilities to shower and get hygiene supplies, and also has free clothes once a month, weather permitting. There are regular crews here with their regular sections and the security staff and librarians know and interact with most of them. I don’t think people really understand how valuable that kind of experience is to people who are otherwise very lonely and often feel damaged. 

The public library is not only a place of knowledge but a place of compassion and tender mercy. Therefore it is also that rarest of things in modern society: a place of wisdom. Wisdom is a rare and precious thing. But you can find it for free at the public library if you are open minded and willing enough to put a little time and spirit into it. In a society where there is more data than knowledge and more knowledge than wisdom, and in a society where everything is constantly being commodified and turned into a product or a brand, the public library stands out more and more as something of a spiritual oasis.

After years of homelessness and addiction followed by over a year of institutionalization and inpatient treatment, and after going about 15 years without having valid photo identification, which made it so I could not get a library card anywhere, I was able to get a library card at The Elizabeth Library Main Branch. This was a major milestone in my recovery and reintegration into society. The day that I got that library card was a happy day for me.

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Mike Brown is a middle-aged public library enthusiast living at the YMCA in Elizabeth, New Jersey. He’s written for Hell World. He also has a Patreon.

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