Born during the Roosevelt administration, roughly at the exact moment the bloated General Douglas MacArthur made his promise of return (interested actuarians can now calculate via their god-like tables the most probable year of my death) I was named Eustacia Juanita Limon. My Brazillian born father dropped the diacritical mark in his last name some years prior to his similar disinheritance of any paternal responsibility a few days after I was conceived. Eustacia after an uncle, named Eustace, and I've always been called the latter, an act which may have been influenced by or been the influence of, my many "boyish" early habits: stickball with the Fleischmann twins, Detective comics, Robinson Crusoe, and the early and frequent use of the rejoinder "douche bag".
After a guilt soaked but otherwise happy childhood in various ethnic ghettos in Queens, I went to Hunter College where I did a double major in Russian literature and cell biology. The former for Tolstoi and the latter because, by dictate, I was to be a pharmacist.
Fate had different plans however and I did a stint as a genuine spook in the USSR in the midst of the cold war. Well, the "mission" wasn't very glamourous. As an MLS student who spoke Russian I had been picked to do an exchange program at the _____ Biblioteka in, then, Leningrad. One day, a week before my departure, two federal agents came by and asked me to pass along an envelope to Piotr V______ who would contact me upon my arrival. It all went off without a hitch but that, dear diary, is how one can become a government pawn. I was twenty three!
Well, I've already said enough, but let it just be confessed that if I'd known what was in that envelope I would have flung it back in those smooth-shaven G-boys' faces and, yes, I do believe my dear Illyona would still now be alive... That incident has haunted my entire life, and ever since, I've vagabonded across this country from library to media center, a wandering cataloger with often but a worn copy of the Anglo-American Cataloging Rules to my name.
However, as Borges noted upon going blind and simultaneously being given the post of National Library Director -- shit happens. And I've amused myself interloaning only the finest in contemporary literature, of which, some, I hope to advertise and sing praises to here (as well as making my own personal Sisyphian effort to correct the abysmal and shrinking coverage by the NYTimes books review).
In recent, more arthritic years, even my demons have grown a little travel weary and I've rented an underground bunker in the backyard of a retired paranoid's house in a suburb of Durham (a man who now figures if the nuclear weapons come, he'd rather go with his cable television than without).
So. May my remaining days be more frisky than not.
Love,
Eustace
P.S. I should also mention that, in kindness to conspiracists, I am, though real, of a reality akin to Pessoan heteronyms and other like minded fables and esoterica. Shalom!
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posted by ranganathan 7:25 PM