ORANGE COUNTY IN BANKRUPTCY : He Must Lay Off 9, but Granville Can’t Bear to Swing the Ax : Jobs: County’s clerk-recorder, like other department heads, has to make trims. He’s having a hard time letting go.

Gary L. Granville can’t bear to see the names.

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The county’s clerk-recorder must lay off nine people next week, a chore he dreads so much that he delegated it to supervisors in his department. Compile a list, he told them, but don’t show me the names. Names would personalize the firings more than Granville thought he could bear.

When the list was ready for Granville’s signature a few days ago, he couldn’t help himself: He peeked at the first name.

It was a man he knew well, a 56-year-old whose wife was Granville’s nurse not long ago, when he sought treatment for a back ailment. “She gave me a couple of shots in my rump,” Granville said fondly.

Granville phoned the man, chatted a while, asked about his wife, and just couldn’t swing the ax. In fact, he couldn’t lay off anyone on the list, a failure that sent him back to the drawing board and prolonged his Purgatory of sleepless nights and upset stomachs.

With loyal, longtime county employees being laid off two weeks after Christmas, few people are inclined to shed tears for Granville and his fellow department heads, ordered by the Board of Supervisors to decide by Tuesday who stays and who goes.

Still, Granville said, a heavy human toll is being taken among those who didn’t build the guillotine but now have the loathsome task of operating it.

“There’s a young woman who works in the mail room,” Granville said. “She has two children. Her life is hard . I don’t want her to be nervous this week.”

But nervous she must be, along with 140 employees in the clerk-recorder’s department, where Granville is a newcomer.

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In November, Granville was elected head of the newly merged clerk’s and recorder’s departments, after a highly praised nine-year stint as county clerk.

During his first department meeting recently, Granville faced the unenviable task of introducing himself and then announcing the layoffs. To soften the impact, he and his wife provided coffee, doughnuts, bagels and orange juice.

White-haired and grandfatherly, Granville not only feels out of place in his executioner’s role, he looks it. Rather than an imperious emperor giving thumbs up or thumbs down to cowering employees, he appears more the suspenders-clad small-town mayor who rules by intimacy and not intimidation.

Well-liked by his employees, Granville openly frets over them these days. Not just the 140 in his department, but the 300 in the clerk’s department he left last year, some of whom drop by for unannounced visits.

The last few days have found Granville circulating among the employees, trying to reassure the ones he knows will survive the cut.

Like the 56-year-old man whose wife injected Granville’s bottom.

“When I told him, I said, ‘Don’t worry, you’re going to be OK.’ I could hear him. I’ve never seen anybody breath a sigh of relief as heavy as he did.”

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Some of Granville’s friends among the county’s two dozen department heads have it worse than he. His frequent lunchtime companion, Bert Scott, laid off 72 people in the General Services Agency earlier this week.

When Granville discovered that he had officiated at the wedding of one of those employees, a wrenching week was made worse.

Another frequent lunchtime companion of Granville’s was former Treasurer-Tax Collector Robert L. Citron. Granville said he is miffed at his old friend, angry that Citron didn’t permit more oversight of investments that caused the county’s investment pool to shrink by $2 billion last year.

The last time Granville fired someone was back in the days when he was the fiery city editor of a local newspaper. The episode haunted Granville for two years, until he called the employee and begged his forgiveness.

“My mind doesn’t allow me to put aside the ache I know it’ll cause people,” he said.

Granville’s mind will allow him little peace this weekend. Having forged or rekindled friendships with the first group his staff suggested laying off, he must find other employees to let go, a task he will ponder until the Tuesday deadline.

“My heart goes out to them,” he said of the unlucky nine. “When I use that term, ‘My heart goes out,’ it really does.”