There are a lot of homeless people who frequent the Bookstore — we’re a warm (or cool) dry place, and for the most part, we leave them alone: if they fall asleep, we wake them up and ask them to leave, but anyone who falls asleep in the store gets offered the choice between leaving on their own power, or having an ambulance called for them.

Our problems with homeless are usually that, let’s be honest, they smell. Not all, but some. Lately, though, the problems with the homeless have been a lot more weird: like, last week, when our magazine guy went into the customer’s bathroom and encountered a totally naked homeless guy bathing himself from the sink. Fortunately, the naked guy did not run around our store – naked – screaming “Woohoo! Wee!” which is what happened when a naked guy was confronted at one of our sister stores.

There’s this lady who lives at our store. Literally. She camps out at a corner nook outside our store during the night (there’s a vent of sorts), then camps in the store during the day. She reeks, and she is completely bat-shit out of her mind. If you walk past her (and you have to if you’re coming westbound), she’ll babble something at you. It’s not blatantly incoherent, until you actually listen to it — “Trust in the fastest way to lose weight!” or “She’ll whisper, ‘you’re the best!’” It’s like she gets her talking points from the spam that floods my Gmail.

Sunday, she was harmless for most of the day. And then. And then.

So she assembles her “stuff” — an assortment of bags, most of which are filled with other bags, and moves to our register queue, where she selects a pen from a display and begins writing on herself. So those of us watching her from the information desk are confused, because, is it stealing if she’s writing with one of these pens? I mean, okay, she can leave the pen, but that ink? Gone forever. The on-duty manager goes over to talk to her and ask her to leave.

Next thing we know:

“I’m related to Jack Nicholson! He’s my uncle!” and “I’m related to at least a 150 people in this store right now!” Funny: there were about thirty people in the store.

This woman continued screaming that we — the staff, I assume — needed to go to the basement bathroom and have group sex in the toilet bowl. I don’t know what sort of toilet bowls this woman is used to, but I’ve never seen a toilet bowl I could fit into, much less fuck someone in, much less group sex.

So finally, grabbing a few more books, from which, of course, the FBI could obtain her fingerprints, she finally left. And made her way down to the corner, which she has apparently made her home. She screamed something at me as I left — I’d like to think it was, “You should fuck me in the basement toilet!” (ewwwwwwwwwwwwww) but it was probably “I was given the last name Kelly because my father is Jack Nicholson, and that’s my uncle, too!” — but I was wearing my iPod, so I don’t know what it was.

And it’s sad, because when she tried coming into the store last night, she was stopped, and told she was not welcome on our premises. “But I want to buy something!” she protested. “We don’t want your business,” she was told.

Let me be blunt here: no one on the staff likes disruptive people. We hate the homeless people who come in and cause a fuss, and we hate the ones who come in and stink like they’ve been sleeping in pig shit. However, we also hate the well-dressed guys in three-piece suits who leave empty coffee cups on our shelves, and the well dressed office ladies who scatter magazines everywhere in their wake. We hate the dudes with the billfolds full of hundreds who bitch and moan about how we won’t let them use a non-existent coupon, and the people who are looking for that book, with the red cover, but they don’t remember the name or the author or what it’s about or where they heard of it. We hate people who get mad at us because the publisher pushed back a release date, or who refuse to leave the store after closing because it’s raining outside and they don’t have an umbrella. We especially — especially!!! — hate the people who take books off shelves and leave them scattered in their wake. If you can’t reshelve your selections on your own, seriously, drop them off at the info desks.

And for the most part? None of the people who come into the store are like this. None at all. Especially the homeless. Often, they just want a dry, temperature controlled space away from the District’s cold or heat. But we’re not a shelter.