I remember the day I first made the connection with perfect clarity: I was on one of the elevators with a brunette from another company on a floor above mine. The elevator stopped, the door opened and the brunette started to step off. She paused, gasped then got back in, laughing. Nobody was waiting to get on… the elevator just stopped there for whatever reason.
“You remember an old kid’s show called Land of the Lost?” I asked.
She thought a moment, “Oh yeah!”
“Do you remember the episode where Holly gets in one of the pylons and it goes crazy and takes her to all these random places? She just stays in the pylon and the door opens and shows some different weird landscape…”
She thought again, “Yes!”
“I think of that every time these elevators do that…”
I work on the third of about twelve floors, all accessible from six different elevators. These elevators lead from the lobby to the office levels. You can walk north in the lobby and eventually hit another set of four elevators that go to the parking areas. I find this setup offensively inefficient, especially for chain-smoking. It took a while to sink into my thick skull, but there is a shortcut. I discovered that at certain times of the day my chances of getting the service elevator are pretty good and if I can’t get it on the third floor, I can always get it from the lobby. The service elevator goes down beneath the lobby to the B level parking garage. Don’t worry if you’re completely confused by my description of the property. I’ve worked there over two years and I still haven’t gotten my head around the layout. I think it extends into hyperspace.
So I can mainline my ass straight from the third floor to my car on B by using the service elevator, thus avoiding annoying physical exertion and abuse of precious time that could be used for smoking. This system usually works pretty well. Unfortunately, the elevators don’t. I’d even heard stories of coworkers getting trapped in the set of four elevators to the parking areas.
Today, I went out for a smoke and hit the down button. After a short wait, I heard the tone behind me… I didn’t get the service elevator. Oh well, I’d catch it on the first floor. I went on down and hit the down button in the lobby and the service elevator immediately opened. I got in, hit the down button and the door closed. That’s when all hell broke loose. The elevator went up.
“Great,” I thought. I’d seen it happen before. I’d get on the elevator after pressing the down button, but it would go up a floor or two to collect someone above me before going down. I guess it covers for the other five elevators when they’re slacking off smoking or something.
But it didn’t go up one floor… or two… or three. It went up to ten, then eleven. “What is this stupid thing doing?”
Twelve, thirteen… “thirteen? How many floors does this building have?”
fourteen, fifteen… there was shaking and noise.
It occurred to me that I was very high up now. I could rationalize the third floor—if the elevator cable suddenly broke, a miracle could intervene and save me from a third floor fall, but now… I was a goner. That thing would drop, faster and faster until I reached critical mass and the elements that composed my very self would vaporize in a mushroom cloud of bone and tissue on impact. I hit buttons on the control panel randomly in panic. My legs started feeling weak.
Sixteen.
The elevator stopped, leaving me standing there with nothing but my rapid pulse. I waited for the door to open, but I didn’t want to look. I didn’t even know that the building had a sixteenth floor. I expected the door to open and reveal something sinister. Maybe a secret lab filled with expressionless government scientists working on something I—as a mere mortal lacking the psychological profile of a lump of lead—didn’t want to see.
Whatever. At that point, all I wanted was to get off of that elevator. I pushed the open button… and the elevator lurched into motion… down.
I leaned against the wall. More shaking and sounds of scraping metal. I watched the numbers decrement slowly… nine, eight… Maybe the elevator would just dump me back on three. Nervous seconds drifted by and my life had just completed flashing before my eyes, “What the hell is the point of existence anyway?”
Four, three, two, one and, finally, B.
I pushed the open button repeatedly and, after a short pause, the doors slid open. Then jammed, six inches apart.
“For the love of God…”
I pushed close. The doors balked. Open… nothing.
Finally, I grabbed one door in each hand and pulled them apart with a sharp crack of metal.
I made my way to my car, shaking, and had a couple of cigarettes. I decided not to take the service elevator back upstairs. I walked toward the other end of the parking garage. Halfway there, a figure appeared—it was the brunette from upstairs. I waved at her and smiled.
“You don’t like going down there either?”
“What?” I had no idea what she was talking about. I was still contemplating the meaning of my existence.
“The smoking area on C… I hate going down there.”
“Oh yeah. It’s nasty. I think they do some sort of weird government research there.”
Pass this around like a nasty virus:
February 5th, 2010 in
Short Stories |
1 Comment
I’ve gotten this question a few times so I’ll break my habit of not ever updating and post it here:
So the demise of Rudius left me on my own. My OCD would have it no other way. This means White Dwarf will get published, with one caveat… I’ll have to do it myself. I have some money saved up for just such a purpose. I will be using an on-demand publishing service called Create Space.
I don’t really expect to recoup the money I sink into publishing it (probably about 4k) and the book will be priced cheap. I don’t have the time or inclination to do any sort of marketing other than maybe buying ads on facebook (I tried just advertising this site on it for two days and was quite shocked by the amount of traffic I received… just for a stupid blog!).
Anyway. I’m shooting for Spring 2010. If I just submitted what I have now, I could probably have it out by the end of the month, but I’m doing a significant cleanup. If you divide the 42 chapters into 3 equal parts, nearly half the story is in part 1. I’m going to significantly fill out the last two parts. Right now, it’s about 83000 words. I’m guessing it will end up being between 100000 and 120000.
I had already completed significant work on the first 14 chapters in the past month… all of which I lost a week ago due to a hard drive issue. The only thing I managed to salvage was the rewritten first chapter which I’d emailed to someone.
I’ve re-completed that work (it was still fresh enough in my head) and will continue revising everything until I’m satisfied (or at least someone I trust tells me I should be satisfied)…
I’ll leave the original story as-is on the site and the new stuff will only be available in print.
Pass this around like a nasty virus:
December 5th, 2009 in
Site Notes |
13 Comments
Since, unfortunately, Rudius is closing down, I have imported all of the content–including comments–from devilmonkey.net to here. I wish everyone from Rudius the best of luck and want to thank Tucker Max, Erin Tyler and particularly Donika Miller who painstakingly edited all of my crap and dealt with my many psychoses.
Pass this around like a nasty virus:
November 4th, 2009 in
Site Notes |
1 Comment
I was twenty-five, a college drop-out working a nowhere job, without a care in the world. I was head-over-heels for a cute, blue-eyed natural blonde, a few months into her 18th year. It was the night of her prom; she would be graduating in a couple of months. She had her dad’s Mazda that night. I don’t remember what model, but it was big and maroon and quiet. Her dad was a psychiatrist and he didn’t exactly approve of our relationship. He said the age difference bothered him, but the fact I was going nowhere in life and happy as a lark about it probably had something to do with it. Anyway, her mom liked me and if mom’s on your side, you’re cool.
Lilly and her friend, Cassandra, went to the dance with a couple of friends. There was no way I was going to that—I never went to school when I was supposed to, I wasn’t about to start now. So, I waited at the apartment smoking a joint with my 19-year-old pixie cousin.
It was still early in the evening—still light—when they knocked on the door. Lilly came in and I hugged her happily and greeted Cassandra with her long, thick, curly hair. They had another friend, Raene, she was younger—sixteen—and had moved to St. Joe. I’d heard a lot about her, but wasn’t prepared for the full package: thin, long brown hair all braided up and gorgeous green eyes; even her teeth were pretty. I had to look away. I was crazy about Lilly and didn’t want to admit—even to myself—that Raene had floored me. She’d brought an even younger friend of hers with her and we all sat in the living room while Justin rolled another joint.
We were both in heaven, getting high with four pretty teenagers in that dimly-lit living room. We talked and laughed and watched a crazy, psychedelic computer-animation video. I’d been trying to get Justin to hook up with Cassandra. I’d decided he needed a chick to get him off the meth. He dug her, but wouldn’t make a move, no matter how hard I pushed. He didn’t make a move on Raene or her friend either. Damn pixie.
We all hung around a while planning a night of glorious debauchery. The pot would just be the start. I would buy gallons of alcohol and we’d drive to St. Joseph, where Raene and her friend would deliver us into a world of decadent anarchy. Justin left us, having to do his pixie thing. I piled in the Mazda with Lilly driving and the other three sitting in the back. I could smell spring in the air; it added to my excitement. We sped north on 29. I have no idea how fast we were driving and didn’t care. The roadside went by in a blur, like the past 25 years of my life. It had gotten dark and I liked it. When it was dark, you could fill the world ahead with whatever you wanted. I smoked and talked—to Lilly and Cassandra and Raene and the other girl. Raene didn’t say much. She didn’t have to. She was in my head.
Eventually, the conversation turned to high school.
“It’s really sad. We’ve spent all these years with these people and now it’s over,” Lilly was clearly melancholy about the situation.
I couldn’t fathom it. If her appearance hadn’t been so melancholy, I would have thought she was joking. Even if I had followed the normal route through high school, I’m sure that seven years later, I would be embarrassed to have the conversation I’d found myself in.
“Well, you know nothing really ever ends,” I said, taking a drag off my cigarette, “things just change.”
“Still, it’s sad.”
A fog had settled in as we reached further north. We cut through it, no big deal—until a deer jumped onto the highway. There was a thud, screams, swerving off the road. It happened that fast. We all got out, shaking. I held Lilly. The girls held each other. The front of the Mazda was mangled. I lit up another in an endless chain of cigarettes—I had learned to inhale them long ago.
Raene looked at me, shivering, “Can I have one of those?”
I handed her a cigarette and lit it. The flame lit up her face in the darkness there on the side of the highway and glinted from her green eyes. Shades of that cemetary a decade ago fell over the night.
We all smoked a cigarette and calmed down before getting back in the car. All momentum for the evening had been lost. I decided to go home and the girls decided to go to Cassandra’s house.
I was still up at 3am when Justin buzzed in. He came in the living room and we watched some shitty late-night television.
“So why don’t you ask Cassandra out, man?”
“Ahh. She doesn’t want to hang out with a pixie.”
“Cassandra’s like one of the coolest chicks I know. She doesn’t judge people.”
“Man, that other chick was hot too! What is it with Lilly and her friends?”
I knew immediately which other chick he was talking about, “I don’t know. Those young ones…”
Justin nodded enthusiastically, “I think it’s because we never got laid in high school.”
“I don’t know. There’s probably more to it. I mean it’s not just you and me. On the one hand society says it’s a no-no. But on the other, those same people send their teenage daughters out in bikinis to wash cars for the cheerleader team. What the fuck is that?”
Justin packed a bowl, took a hit and passed it to me. Criticizing society always seemed to go better with the help of pot.
“Our culture is all about putting us at odds with our own biology,” I let go my breath, everything suddenly clarifying out of the ghostly exhalant, “it’s kind of sick. Actually, it’s like the very definition of insanity. You keep trying to fight your nature over and over, generation after generation and expect some sort of utopia and instead everyone just comes out of it all neurotic and fucked-up.”
Justin’s eyes lit up, “Man, I need some pixie.” He scurried off to the bedroom to do another in an endless stream of lines. He had deeper issues to nurse: an obsession with a local weather man and his pet dog.
I fell silent, sitting there trying to figure it all out.
Pass this around like a nasty virus:
“Who is the artist?” Mongoloid stood at the front of the bus like some sort of inbred Tennessee prosecutor and lifted the drawing so everyone could see. He pinched the evidence like it was a flattened squirrel carcass he’d peeled off the highway. His voice sounded like that of someone straining on the toilet.
“Who is the artist?” Billy and I gave each other a sly look from either side of the back of the bus, where we ruled with an iron grip. Mongoloid never seemed to get the fact that this was the exact sort of public spectacle we strove for.
All of the other kids were completely silent. Of course, the artist was either me or Billy, but nobody would rat us out—whether it was because of their loathing of Mongoloid or fear of our swift and terrible retribution, I couldn’t be certain.
“Who. Is. The. Artist?” Mongoloid quivered. His moustache twitched. He threw off his sunglasses, revealing wild, cloudy blue eyes. He wadded the paper and threw it on the floor. “I just want you all to know, this ain’t true. I will find out who the responsible parties are,” Mongoloid cast a piercing gaze toward Billy and me, “and they will be dealt with!”
Mongoloid returned to his seat and, still shaking, resumed the route.
The drawing was as completely tasteless as two out-of-control 15-year-old delinquents could imagine. And after spending every weekend for the past two years analyzing Billy’s dad’s endless porn collection, our imaginations had warped exponentially to unexplored levels of depravity. It depicted Mongoloid’s son and daughter in the midst of some sex act while Mongoloid hovered over instructing them with a whip. Billy had worked on it during science class the day before and intentionally left it on the bus where Mongoloid would find it during his nightly cleaning.
It was toward the end of the school year and these random stops along the side of the road to and from school were a daily occurence—at least on the days either Billy or I decided to show up, which were few.
“Warren, we’re going to be ‘dealt with’!” Billy said gleefully, breaking the silence.
There were some quiet giggles from the young girls who sat near us—they seemed to enjoy the field of chaos that we naturally generated, but not enough to sit too close. We always offered them candy to sit with us, but they would vehemently refuse, then blush and giggle. I found the dichotomy between their rational minds and basic nature to be fascinating.
I took Billy’s cue and, fueled by the giggling, I shook up a plastic Coke bottle and opened it, causing it to spew all over the girls. They laughed and screamed uncontrollably, I yelled out maniacally, “YEAHHH!! WHOOO!”
The bus jerked to a stop, sending everyone lurching forward. Mongoloid walked briskly toward the back. As he neared us, I could see the tears in his eyes. His pale face had become deep red. His voice quivered along with every muscle in his body as he tried to maintain control, “Warren, I’m sick of your shit. I’m going to recommend to my superiors that you never ride this bus again.”
Billy and I looked at one another and lost all composure. That sentence said it all, we knew. “Superiors”—Mongoloid allowed himself to be an eternal slave… and he was our slave too. We laughed without control. The girls laughed. The chaos had boiled over and taken on a life of its own. All civility on the bus had rushed out the windows and everyone regressed into raving apes. All Mongoloid could do was hope for a decisive response from his Superiors. He returned to his seat, defeated and once again started the bus and drove us all to our destinations. Tomorrow morning, in the off-chance that Billy or I woke up and dragged ourselves to school, the morning announcements over the intercom system would end with their usual, “Would Warren Mann and Billy Lester please come to the office.” The teacher would roll his eyes, shake his head and motion at the door and Billy and I would smile proudly and have another chat with the principle.
But as it turned out, Mongoloid needn’t have worried. It was the last time Billy or I ever rode that bus… and the last time we ever bothered to show up for high school. After two years of complete academic neglect, skipping more than we attended and generally living as though we were in an anarchic society, we simply didn’t show up for the remainder of the school year and didn’t bother returning for the next two years. It was like breaking out of prison—how could we possibly be expected to want to go back to that lame asylum?
That episode on the bus was to be our swan song. Had we known, we probably would have planned something far more epic for our old nemesis, Mongoloid. In the end, he was spared by an unforseen indiscretion at a cemetery.
Five us had made plans to go out and get roaring drunk that night. One of our friends, Stu, had a car and already had his license. Another had a brother old enough to buy alcohol. Billy and I had enough money to buy a case of beer for everyone and the fifth of our party, Barny, came along as spiritual guidance. The plan was to get the beer and drive to a spot in the hills off of a bluff road. I knew we’d be safe there: my great-grandmother owned the hill and nobody would bother us.
Stu flashed the high-beams, “This road is a dead end, man. Where are you taking us?”
“Don’t worry,” I assured him, “I knows these bluffs like the back of my hand. There’s a path that leads through a tobacco field and to a rock quarry. It’s perfect.”
Everyone in the car was nervous. All that beer, Stu had just gotten his license, a world of shit awaited us if we got busted.
“I don’t like this,” Barny’s nervousness had gotten the better of him. “This is Pat George country!”
Pat George was a local psychotic. He’d escaped from jail and was living in the woods somewhere. He wrote insane letters to the local paper threatening to burn down such-and-such barn if some bizarre political action—the significance of which only Pat himself could comprehend—weren’t taken. Sure enough, the designated barn would be reported burned to a crisp a week or so later.
“Pat George doesn’t give a shit about us getting drunk,” Billy pointed out.
“He’s crazy,” Barny became animated, terrified, “he’ll kill us all! He loves these woods!”
“Man, my great-grandmother owns these woods! Fuck him.”
“You guys don’t understand. Pat George is fucked up!”
We listened to Barny rattle on about Pat George. My mental image of the eccentric woodsman, fueled by Barny’s paranoia, was taking on absurd proportions. I imagined this 8-foot tall, hairy, bearded freak with yellow glowing eyes and strings of bloodied white flesh snagged in the gaps of his rotting teeth, bursting from the woods with a torch and exterminating us all in an orgasm of cleansing flame.
Stu eased off the gas, though in that enormous lump of olive-green metal it was difficult to discern, “Yeah, I don’t like this. Maybe we should go someplace else.”
I opened another beer, resigned to the fact that our well-laid plans were crumbling into a chaos over which I had no control—I’d seen it happen a million times on the bus and in the acne-filled hallways of the high school. “Yeah, well, you guys figure it out,” I slurred, “we’ll just sit back here and get drunk. Stop by the Workingman’s Friend, I need some smokes.”
We drove to the gas station off of highway 92. I could see Fort Leavenworth lit up on the other side of the river. When I was much younger, I used to stand in the sliding glass door at my grandparent’s house and imagine that Santa Clause lived in that bubble of light across the river. It was a source of wonder and magic that sort of gets pushed further and further away as you get older. Until you’re left looking for it in yourself… with the help of something like beer.
It was an easier time to be delinquent back in those days. They’d sell a pack of cigarettes to a 15 year-old for 90 cents, no questions asked. I stumbled around the side of the building to use the bathroom and, much to the delight of my drunken teenage mind, there was a condom machine on the wall. I bought one, much for the same reason I bought cigarettes I didn’t inhale at the time.
When I finally managed to wobble back to the car, it had been decided we’d go to the cemetery to party. Everyone concluded there was no chance we’d be bothered there—it was well outside Pat George territory—and rumors had been circulating that a gathering was to take place that night.
I was getting a bit dizzy and spasmodic in the stomach. That cemetery had only one meaning for me, “Man, my grandmother’s buried there.”
There was a short silence, then Stu replied, “We’ll be up by the caretaker’s shack. Nobody will bother us.”
I tried to make sense of the non-sequiter as we headed for the cemetery. In the end, I could only shrug and open another can.
When we arrived at the cemetery, there was already a large bonfire burning with a cluster of kids standing around it. Billy and I were in a state of delirium at that point. All of the beer had gotten mixed together in the trunk and none of us had any clue how many we’d each drank. I have no doubt Billy and I had consumed the most. The others were at least able to stand up straight.
As we approached the fire, I began to vaguely recognize some of the faces. I didn’t know any of the people very well—I remembered maybe passing some of them in the hall at school. Except for one on the opposite side of the fire. Her name was Jackie. She had moved into town about two years ago. The first time I had ever seen her, I was waiting in the car while my mother and grandmother went into the local grocery store. A car pulled up next to us and the adults got out while someone remained in the back seat. I glanced at her through the window and gasped. She looked almost exactly like Brooke Shields, but with braces. She turned and glanced back at me and I looked away.
I’d seen her a few times since then at school. She was a grade above me, probably sixteen now. In any event, I had no doubt she was completely unaware of my existence and I swayed quietly in front of the fire. Everyone chatted and laughed and I tried to stay conscious with an unlit cigarette in my mouth.
I was roused from stupor when I felt a presence next to me. Jackie brushed my arm with her hand, “Are you going to light that thing?”
I remembered the cigarette and tried to muster a response. All that would come out was a goofy giggle. I was petrified into a state of shock.
“Can I have one?”
“Oh, sure.”
I gave her a cigarette and reached into my pocket for my Bic lighter. I was far too numb to make any sort of precise, coordinated movement and ended up scooping out everything in my pocket, including the unopened condom.
I picked through all of the crap in my hand, knowing I was looking for something but not being able to associate the intent in my head with the confusing shapes I was seeing. Coins fell to the ground along with wads of paper, some lint blew away in the night breeze. Jackie shook her head, smiling, and took the lighter from my hand. She lit my cigarette then her own and returned the lighter.
“What’s that?” She pointed at the condom package with her cigarette.
“Uh…”
I opened the small square package and unrolled the green contents. My fingers became slippery with lubricant. I held the condom up—I had managed to turn it inside-out—and looked at it with some degree of skepticism. I probably would have been embarrassed if my emotional machinery hadn’t been in such a degraded state at the time.
Dear God. The girl is probably wondering what manner of deranged personality she’s stumbled across.
“Jesus,” I laughed awkwardly, and threw it at the fire. Except it didn’t burn. The fire was dying and the condom had splatted against some unburned wood at the outer perimeter.
With the fire dying and the night air chilling, Jackie stood quietly next to me, huddled into herself. Neither of us spoke, because I had no idea what to say to her. I knew I couldn’t converse with her on the same level as I could with Billy. He and I were both completely anarchic. We understood one another. Our social interactions with the girls at school were limited to lewd suggestions, groping and leering. I had no doubt if I said anything to this tall, gorgeous, skinny girl she’d kick me between the legs and push my greasy ass into that sputtering bonfire where it belonged: The Bride of Pat George.
She shivered and I gave her my jacket and sat down. She smiled and thanked me and sat next to me. I blacked out immediately. It was the best response I could muster.
I have no idea how I got back home, but when I awoke, I was in my bedroom. It was Friday morning and I had missed the school bus hours ago. Mongoloid had gotten a free pass. The phone rang and I knew immediately Billy had stayed home too.
“Hey.”
“Warren, we’re in trouble!”
“What do you mean?”
“Rosie found your damn glow-in-the-dark condom at the cemetery. And your report card, you damned fool! What were you thinking!”
Rosie was a friend of Billy’s family. He worked at the cemetery, along with several other odd-jobs around town. He was sort of an outcast, as only a man with a girl’s name could be.
My head was filled with a toxic sludge of confusion, “What’s the big deal, it was all F’s anyway.”
“Your name was on it, you dumb-ass!”
“Fuck. That thing glowed in the dark?”
“Goddamn. We’d better lay low for a while. I’m not going to school.”
I hung up the phone and my mind explored every disastrous consequence. We’d left beer cans, cigarette butts, condoms… the fire… was that legal in a cemetary? Jesus, the FBI would probably be called in. It was over. Had I done something to Jackie? I was finished in this town.
Billy and I psyched ourselves out good. We had entered uncharted territory. Up until then, our debauchery had been limited to the bus or high school. It was Mongoloid’s problem, the school faculty’s problem. This latest escapade could involve the unsavory likes of the local police department. I imagined getting banished into the woods, to live a life on the edge of civilized society with nobody for company except a dangerous, meta-human pyromaniac.
We stayed holed-up for days. Both of us had it easy: when everybody in the house works while you’re supposed to be at school… well… you tend to develop a somewhat independent attitude.
Eventually, the Fear evaporated, but it was almost a case of momentum. One week turned into two and that turned into three months and…
Billy moved to Indiana that summer and I couldn’t bear the thought of returning alone to face the scorched battlefield of my academic world. I never signed any official forms or sent any letters or anything of the sort. I simply never went back to school. A stunt I would pull again later halfway through my second semester of college.
Pass this around like a nasty virus:
I decided I was going to have to hook Lazar up with a new porn tape if I was going to get some relative peace around there. The “Jerry Springer Uncensored” video was no longer doing it for him and I hadn’t seen the dentist video in ages. Lazar might get agitated without his fix. I think I was the only person in the cave who could actually discern agitation in Lazar. It was subtle.
“‘ey Ghar-rhon! Reagan strong! Comuiss fuck! Gorbachev…” then he would spit.
That was not agitation.
“‘ey Ghar-rhon! What isss… ?” He pointed to the “Jerry Springer Uncensored” video playing on a large LCD screen. There was a midget who was apparently having an affair with some well-endowed woman. “Fuck! Brother… sister” He pumped his index finger into a hole he made with the fingers of his other hand to indicate sexual intercourse. “Fuck! Russia no!”
Translation: midgets were the result of inbreeding and there were no midgets in Russia.
That was not agitation.
Lazar had been having some health problems. I considered the possibility he may have contracted ebola from Judd. The first sign came during an interlude in the shitty CD Judd used to torment the cave. I heard a low growl coming from Lazar’s direction. It wasn’t the usual “Awwwwwwwggggggghhhhhhhh” growl he made while watching porn, it was more like a distressed grunt.
I looked over and saw Lazar holding a paper towel to his nose. I wasn’t entirely surprised, the weather inside the cave encouraged all manner of spontaneous bodily protests. I shrugged and continued working.
An hour or so later, I happened to glance over and noticed Lazar still having issues with his nose. Blood was streaming out, he was bloodying one paper towel after another. I stood up and approached cautiously, yelling over the infernal Judd CD, “‘ey Lazar! What isss… ?”
“Fuck!”
I went and fetched Mr. Tom who consulted with Lazar in hushed tones before going off to retrieve the head human resources chick. They both hovered over him, jabbering back and forth.
“By the time you two figure out what you’re doing he’s going to bleed to death!” I pointed out.
“There are workman’s compensation issues to consider, ” the HR chick replied.
She went somewhere and came back with a rubber glove, which she used to collect the bloody paper towels to throw them away.
I rolled my eyes, “If one of you doesn’t take him to the emergency room within five minutes, I’ll take him myself.” There was an implied, “you dumb bitch,” at the end of that sentence that could probably be inferred from my tone of voice.
Mr. Tom stuttered, “I-I-I-I-I’ll take him. Just calm down. Come on, Lazar.”
Lazar looked at me helplessly and I waved him on, “Mr. Tom fix.”
As soon as they got to the emergency room, Lazar’s nosebleed stopped.
* * *
It was some time later. Perhaps Lazar had watched his dentist fetish video once too often. I noticed him drinking an unusual amount of vodka. A nip here and there throughout the day was normal, but now he was guzzling it. Some time after lunch, I looked over and watched him chug the last of his vodka. He rubbed his cheek and then shoved a pair of pliers into his mouth.
“No way…” I thought, watching in stunned silence.
He twisted the pliers around a bit and then pulled. With a sudden jerk of his arm, the pliers came out, with a tooth.
“Ahhhhh! Fuck!” Lazar noticed me watching, “Huh! Fuckinuh!” He spat on the ground and threw the tooth in the garbage with utter disdain, “Dogshit!”
He produced a fresh pint of vodka and began to swallow eagerly.
* * *
Poor Lazar. I wondered if he was going to make it through the year as I browsed a local sex shop for a truly bizarre piece of cinema. A dentist fetish movie was hard to top. I managed to find a DVD made in Europe. The description on the back sounded weird enough: A couple holed up out in the middle of nowhere with weird costumes and fetishes. It was the best I could do. I bought the DVD and dropped it on Lazar’s bench when he wasn’t around.
He didn’t say anything when he came back and found the movie. He simply put the disk in a player and started it up.
“Ohhhhh!” He growled, “Nice! ‘Ey Ghar-rhon!”
I looked as he motioned me over. It was a chick going down on another one.
“Russia… women no like…! Ahhhhhhh!”
“Bummer.”
Unfortunately, the video didn’t stop there. The next scene had the women’s husbands going at it. I turned in disgust.
“Hooooo! Fuckinuh! What issss…. ?”
Lazar ejected the DVD, spit on the floor and threw the movie in the dumpster, “Dogshit!”
“Ghar-rhon, where movie from?”
I shrugged innocently and pointed at Ashley, who remained completely unaware of the event.
Lazar frowned, shaking his head, “Big fuck!” he yelled, then continued in a stream of Russian.
That was agitation.
Pass this around like a nasty virus:
February 26th, 2009 in
The Cave |
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After several months, Judd had started pulling in a sizable income from his link farms/adult single affiliate sites. I now envisioned his constantly-bouncing leg as a piston, pumping money from the internet into his banking account. His income from the cave was nothing more than a supplemental welfare check. The effects of these new-found riches were quite striking. The mullet had gained a fullness and luster that was quite majestic, as far as mullets go, and he had started to put on weight after having his rotten teeth pulled and replaced with dentures.
Eventually, he had accumulated enough money to put a down-payment on a house. He collected several cave employees together to help him move. I was one of those fortunate, elite few. Initially, I had been happy to help but that sentiment quickly dissolved when I was tasked with moving some mattresses out of the basement, which served as the kids’ room. Innocently, I entered that chamber of horrors with a coworker. We both marvelled at the decay around us. Exposed pipes and wiring, infestations of exotic insects, mattresses stained with… something brown… urine, I hoped, was the worst of it.
“This looks like a fucking smack den,” I pointed out to Daniel.
He could only respond with a look of shock and horror.
The smack den was the low point of the move… unfortunately it came first and put a sinister shadow over the rest of that otherwise pleasant Saturday afternoon. The last things to go were various boxes filled with useless junk confiscated from the cave or fished out of a dumpster behind K-Mart, some Nazi paraphernalia of questionable authenticity and Judd’s cat that pissed all over the back seat of his new car. I was given weekly updates for several months afterward on the status of ridding the car of the resultant odor. I have no doubt cat urine could be used to manufacture an effective, madness-inducing biological weapon.
A new car, a new home: Judd was living high on the hog. But nothing happens in a vacuum and his vast internet empire turned out to be the impetus for his undoing.
A few weeks after moving into his new home, Judd had tracked down his estranged son from a previous marriage. He invited his son to come live with him in exchange for wiring his house such that he could have an internet connection in every room–this was just before wireless routers became widely available. Judd was proud of this modern addition to his house and expounded upon it at length during smoke breaks or any other time he could get some unconcerned coworker to listen. I was amazed he could think up that much to say about the subject–day after day for weeks.
“So me and Kenny have the whole place wired now. I can work on the internet from any room in the house! Every room is connected to a hub in my main office. I got it off one of the palettes.”
“Got it off one of the palettes,” was a euphemism, I recognized, for “stole it from work.”
I would stare blankly ahead at this point, losing myself in a thick, gray fog that acted as a barrier to his voice: I wonder if he has the floors of that place reinforced against the constant jackhammering of that fucking nervous leg.
One Monday morning, I dragged myself in to my bench like a wet rat and got to work finishing off a system to be sent to the store. Judd stirred from his meditations–which was unusual enough to notice and disappeared into a stocking area partitioned off with chicken wire and particle board. I heard a crashing sound and a muffled, “Uhhh!”
I looked at the particle board in the direction of the noise and shook my head, “What is that damn fool doing?”
A minute later: “Uhh!”
“Sounds like a tortured banshee back there,” I thought.
A minute later: “Warren!”
Lazar looked up from his porn tape du jour, “Bah! Ghar-rhon, what isss…?”
“Jesus,” I exclaimed, rolling my eyes as I got up to see what all the commotion was about.
I went through the same doorway Judd had taken and found him lying on the floor surrounded by boxes. Next to him, a short stepladder had been toppled over.
“Dude, what the fuck?”
“I fell! I can’t move!”
Indeed, the scene looked grim. The mullet was in complete disarray. Using that as a measuring stick, I urgently rushed out into the darker parts of the cave to summon a supervisor. By a stroke of pure luck, I saw one passing by. I knew from past conversations he had worked for the fire department before coming to the cave. Ideal.
I led the supervisor to Judd and returned to my bench, satisfied I’d managed to free myself from having to deal with the drama.
Concerned, Lazar approached, “Ghar-rhon, what iss….?” He gestured at the particle board.
“Judd climb ladder,” I mimed with my fingers two stick-legs climbing up the steps made by the fingers of my other hand, “Boom!” the stick legs toppled over and slammed on my workbench.
“Ahhhh! Tsk, Tsk.” Lazar shook his head, returning to his pornography.
After a half hour, Judd had been returned to an upright position and made it, under his own power, to his car which he drove to the emergency room.
* * *
The next day Judd looked like he had been in a severe car accident on his way to the emergency room. His chest was wrapped in bandages, he wore a neck brace and he carried a bottle filled with painkillers.
“Lucky bastard,” I thought.
Judd told us of broken ribs, a screwed-up neck and various bruises and scrapes. But the real horror of the accident didn’t manifest until several days later: A lump on his elbow about the size of a lemon.
I wasn’t sure if anyone else noticed the lump or if they were just silenced by the grotesqueness of it, as I was. I was somewhat suspicious of the entire situation. The ladder was only a few steps high. Was his body really that weak?
One day, Ashley rushed over to my bench, “Warren, you’ve got to see this!”
“Uhh…” I got up and followed her over to her pricing station. She pointed at a long smear on a box. There was what appeared to be a small white speck of plastic glued to the box by the smear.
“I don’t get it.”
“Judd put that there,” her nose was wrinkled in disgust.
“Huh?”
“That’s from his elbow! It’s leaking and he wiped it on that box!”
The hair on my arms stood on end, my back crawled, “Oh my god.”
The elbow soon became the object of inter-department speculation. It threatened to dethrone the Mad Shitter as the subject of scorn, horrified amusement and enchanted wonder.
Lazar, who was dating a woman who had practiced medicine in Russia, even took part in the gossip.
“Ghar-rhon, my girlfriend see Judd at Christmas party. She speak,” he pointed to his elbow, “Blahhh”, followed by coughing sounds and thumping on his chest and a gesture of something coming up from the esophagus.
I thought for a moment, “Ebola?”
“Ahhh! Yahhh!” Lazar nodded, putting far too much faith in my Lazar-speak translation abilities, which didn’t yet take into account sarcasm.
“E-boo-la,” he repeated as he returned to his bench.
A month or so later, the elbow was still swollen and draining. The shock value had worn off somewhat, but it was still a mystery to everyone. One day, Daniel–who had helped move Judd into his new house–came over to my bench.
“So, I was talking to Judd earlier.”
“Yeah,” I replied with minimal interest.
“Yeah. You can’t tell anyone this.”
I turned to face him, suddenly intrigued, “Oh?”
Daniel’s mouth was turned up in an evil grin, his voice lowered to a whisper, “That whole accident in the stock room was bullshit.”
“Huh?”
“Judd had a fight with his son the night before. That’s how his ribs got broken and everything.”
“What the fuck?”
“He staged that whole thing so he could get workman’s comp out of it. Get the cave to pay for everything.”
“Jesus Christ.”
I glanced over at Judd. A stream of clear fluid dribbling from his elbow, leg bouncing rapidly up and down, mullet coated with a thin film of cave dust.
Behind him, Lazar was carving off slices of cheese with a dirty knife and eating them while interacting with a “Jerry Springer Uncensored” video.
“What is it with this place?” I shook my head in futility.
Pass this around like a nasty virus:
February 22nd, 2009 in
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I sat at my bench, covered with a thin film of dust, much like my surroundings. I had been at work an hour or so and was bored. I was also somewhat concerned as Lazar had not arrived yet. Usually he was there long before me. I looked over at Judd, who seemed completely oblivious to his environment.. even to the John Mellencamp (or was it Bob Seger… I suppressed the music at the deepest levels of my consciousness long, long ago) blaring on his CD player. He was hunched forward staring intently at his computer monitor. As usual, his leg shook like that of a dog having just the right spot on his back scratched. I wondered if it excited him sexually.
Judd had just had his long, straggled hair sculpted into one of the most disturbing mullets I’d ever beheld. From the front, it looked like Eddie Munster’s hair, and from the back, it was a long, solid, brown sheet. I couldn’t believe he had managed to squeeze that ridiculous style out of any self-respecting barber.
“Break time!” I was startled as Judd popped out of his chair and quickly headed for the employee exit. I grabbed my cigarettes and followed, happy for a change of scenery.
Outside, we were met by Bob, the rent-a-guard. Bob was an older man, somewhere between his 40s and 50s with thin white hair and mustache. He was assigned to a make-shift station that had been incompetently constructed next to a broken metal detector we all had to pass through on our way in and out. Bob spent most of his time reading magazines and staring longingly out the opened mouth of the cave which served as a freight area. He hated having to work in the cave and seemed to put effort only into avoiding securing anything. He almost encouraged theft, it seemed.
Ashley and her boyfriend had been to Bob’s apartment for dinner. There, she told me, they had met Bob’s boyfriend and were served leftovers reheated after the mold was scraped off the top.
I lit up a Marlboro Light, Judd lit up a Winston and Bob was smoking some long, thin brown thing.
“I signed up for another affiliate site, ” Judd began.
I rolled my eyes. The guy never spoke of anything else.
“And it turned out to be a gay site! I ain’t linkin’ to a bunch of fags.”
My face turned red and I glanced at Bob, trying not to let on that I knew anything about his sexuality. My mind raced for a way to change the subject. Anxiety began to creep in as I realized the longer I was taking to come up with another subject, the more painfully silent it was becoming, making that remarkably stupid comment all the more embarrassing.
“Uh… so… do you think they’re going to impeach Clinton?”
Bob shrugged, silently.
“The fuckin’ Republicans just want to get another Republican in office!” Judd theorized.
“Ummm. Well. If Clinton gets removed, then Al Gore will be president.”
Judd stared blankly.
“He’s a Democrat.”
Judd turned, flicked his cigarette away and stomped back inside, “Don’t wanna talk about it!”
Bob and I looked at each other, brows furrowed and shook our heads.
I returned to my seat and, after some inestimable period of foggy boredom, I heard that gravelly, Russian voice, “Ghar-rhon! Ghar-rhon!” Lazar was most disconcerting in his excited state. Like some sort of nuclear reaction about to go out of control.
Breathless, Lazar rushed to my bench, “Me big fuck drive!” I could tell by his gestures he had been driving.
“Big truck!” behind a large truck.
“Uh, uh…” he searched for the word, “wheel!” The wheel came off the truck?
“Plate… plate…” The license plate?
“Wheel! Cover!” Ah, the hubcap flew off!
“Whooosh! No speak Baaam!” The truck crashed.
“Window!! Window!!” No, the hubcap came at his window.
“Whoosh!” And flew over his car.
“Hand!” Uhhh…?
“God, Ghar-rhon! God! Hand!” The hand of God moved the hubcap away from his car…
A truck, I had pieced together more from the interpretive dance than from the words, had lost a hubcap ahead of Lazar. It had flown toward him but, just in the nick of time, the Hand of God plucked it out of the way, thus saving Lazar.
“Oh, yeah…” Lazar assured me, matter-of-factly before going over to his bench and making growling noises whenever a woman would go topless on his Jerry Springer Uncensored video.
I watched him a few moments, over there leering and drooling at the bare breasts, and wondered what God had been doing with his other hand.
Pass this around like a nasty virus:
February 11th, 2009 in
The Cave |
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Every morning, Mr. Tom would come out from his office–which was really just a hole in the cave–carrying a slip of paper upon which was jotted the profound inspirational quote that would guide the rest of us through the day. There was a remote-control/keypad he kept locked in his desk that he used to enter the quote into a scrolling LED ticker. He wouldn’t even notice me, Lazar and Ashley standing around, awaiting with anticipation the words that would spill out of the red display like a booming voice from God. As soon as the message was entered, he’d scurry back to his hole and lock up the remote.
“Do you know where he gets those?” Ashley asked.
“Ummm. Nope.”
“They’re from a calendar his wife got him for his birthday.”
“Ah.”
“Ghar-rhon,” Lazar would wave his hands from side to side, palms up and slightly tilted toward Ashley, “what issss….?”
I don’t know why he always wanted me to translate everyone else’s English into Lazar-speak. But I always did. After a few months, I even found myself affecting a pseudo-Russian accent when I did it.
“She speak, ” I pointed at the sign, “Mr. Tom, big dogshit!”
“Ahhh! Ha-Ha!” Lazar would walk back to his bench, nodding and laughing and relishing my nuanced translation.
All during this, Judd would be staring intently at some affiliate porn site/link farm he was working on, leg vibrating like the wings of a hummingbird on meth. Probably oblivious even to his fifteen-millionth playing of that god-damned John Mellencamp CD I hated even more than Lazar did: “Ghar-rhon, big fuckinuh dogshit!” and he’d spit on the floor, pointing at the speakers. There was one lyric in particular, that went “honey, honey… something… something” Lazar would always sing over it in a tone of disdain, “honey, honey… money, money…”
It took me a while, but I eventually figured out the significance of this. It seems Lazar had picked up the American capitalist system far better than he had picked up the language. The longer I worked there, the more often he would come to me throughout the day with some memory card, expansion card, gadget or dvd. “Ghar-rhon, what iss…?”
I’d carefully look over the component and give my assessment: either, “dogshit” or “ahhhhh, vey-y nice!”
If it was “dogshit,” Lazar would scoff, “gahhh!” and toss the component on the floor. If it was “vey-y nice,” then he would grin, a twinkle in his eye, and the object would never be seen again.
The one exception to the “dogshit,” “vey-y nice” categorizations was when Lazar brought me an odd-looking hand-sized keyboard. I instantly recognized it as the same remote control Mr. Tom used to program the LED sign, it was from an identical contraption except the display for this one was beyond repair. “Holy shit! Lazar, me keep!” I said, in hushed, excited tones, pointing at the LED sign.
Lazar’s eyes lit up, “aahhh! yaaaaa!!”
I hid the remote away in the bottom of a dirt-encrusted box under my bench.
Much later, I learned Lazar’s enterprise wasn’t limited to small gadgets. Every week, Lazar would present a collection of televisions, dvd players, cd players, synthesizers, drum machines, esoteric scientific equipment–virtually any electronic product one could imagine–to Mr. Tom: “Dogshit! Me buy!”
And, intimidated by Lazar’s volatile temperament and the prospect of losing a brilliant technician who was making less than the janitor, Mr. Tom would sell it to him at scrap price. As soon as Lazar got the stuff home, he would magically be able to repair it and sell it to various mysterious contacts. I discovered all of this when I helped him close on a new house (translating between the banker’s English and Lazar-speak, “intelest rate dogshit!”) and went to help him move. Lazar pointed at the astonishing collection of items in his garage, “Ghar-rhon, you no speak!”
I chuckled and shook my head, “me no speak.”
As for his volatile temper, this was demonstrated for all of us (except Judd, who was, as usual, obsessing over the internet). It was an open auction day, when anyone could come through the cave and look at all of the junk we had piled up and could then negotiate a price with Mr. Tom, or the manager of whatever department was handling the crap in which they were interested. There were several regulars–musical instrument dealers, computer dealers, car dealers–who came by every week and bought large volumes of garbage.
Lazar despised Bob, the musical instrument dealer. Lazar loved musical instruments. One day, Lazar had a violin laying on his bench and Bob casually walked over to it and picked it up. Lazar leapt from his chair, grabbed the instrument and carefully put it back on his desk then, with all of us watching by now, he grabbed Bob by the throat and pushed him against the wall, “no Bob!”
Mr. Tom stuttered and trembled, Ashley stood with her mouth agape in shock and I giggled to myself.
As quickly as he had jumped up, Lazar sat back down like nothing had happened. With nobody saying a word about the incident, he bought the violin and took it home with him that night.
It was a few mornings later and I remembered the remote control hidden under my bench. I fished it out and waited for Mr. Tom to come out and program the sign. Lazar saw me and came over to my desk to watch.
On schedule, Mr. Tom came out of his hole and held the piece of paper where the quote was written. He aimed the remote at the sign and started punching in the letters. I had practiced this, so I was ready. My plan was to replace Mr. Tom’s keystrokes with my own and have a laugh as he wondered why his words were being translated into something else. The practical joke didn’t quite work out that way: Mr. Tom didn’t look at the sign as he typed, he would only look at the written quote, then at the remote control as he pushed the letters. I was somewhat disappointed, but in the end, it was just as well.
As planned, Mr. Tom would press a letter and I would erase it and replace it with my own. When he was finished, he simply hit the save button and scurried off to his hole. Only what he saved was what I had typed in my remote.
It was two hours before Mr. Tom realized the quote scrolling by on the sign was “D-O-G-S-H-I-T-!”
Pass this around like a nasty virus:
February 6th, 2009 in
The Cave |
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I shuffled into the cave and made my way through the smell of mold and exhaust to my dirt-encrusted seat. My green flannel was as faded and depressing as the white painted surroundings. Thick mounds of dirt collected in the rocky texture of the walls. Chips of stone cracked from the ceiling and bombed my workbench, sending fragments of rock plopping into my glass of water. I sighed, my only comfort being the hope of seeing one of those things crack someone on the head, preferably someone in management.
There was a series of five or six openings on the east side of the cave, near my department, that would be filled all day with semis dropping off loads of lost cargo and pickup trucks carrying away garbage some idiot won in an auction. Pretty much everyone ignored the row of signs that said, “please shut off your engine!” and they left their motors running, dumping toxic fumes into the cave. I was getting bronchitis every three months.
As usual, my two fellow technicians were already well into their shift. Judd was rail-thin because he never ate due to his bad teeth. He was fixated on his computer monitor, leg vibrating like a jackhammer, powered with coffee. He always smelled like old meat and his face was wrinkled like a slab of greyed roast beef. I loathed him for getting me hired at that place.
Judd and I were computer technicians. Our duty was to thoroughly test all the computer systems and related peripherals that were vomited from the trucks amid clouds of toxic exhaust. Neither of us did our job. Every couple of days, I’d pull a computer off the incoming cart, open it up to make it look like I was working on some intimate internal organ and then spend the day surfing the net, writing, or flirting with Ashley, who priced and packaged the junk to be sold in our outlet store.
Judd usually came in to work at some ungodly early hour, 6am or so, so he could leave between 3 and 4pm. He didn’t even bother to keep a system gutted on his workbench to make it look like he was doing something. He spent all of his time working on his internet business, which involved signing up as an affiliate for porn and dating sites and link farming. He made enough money that he was able to put a down payment on a house and buy a constant stream of Nazi paraphernalia off ebay. He hardly ever said a word, except to fight with people over his radio being too loud or some other offense one would associate with a rebellious teenager… a forty-five year old rebellious teenager. Most of the time, he just hunched into his computer monitor, leg twitching, radio blaring.
This was a particular annoyance to the other technician, Lazar. Lazar had worked at that place forever, as best I could tell, or at least since he came over from mother Russia. He barely spoke a word of English, mostly curse-words. He was a general electronics technician, and pretty good at it. He fixed broken plasma and LCD televisions, stereo equipment, DVD players and VCRs. Every day, Judd would start the morning listening to a local radio station: “101, the Fox.” After a set of songs, the announcer would say, “One-oh-one… The Fox!” and Lazar would repeat it with thick, Russian sarcasm, “One. Oh. One… The F-u-u-u-u-u-c-k-s!” I always suspected Lazar knew more English than he let on. One of his favorite movies was “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” which I thought was telling… like the Indian who feigned being deaf and mute.
Lazar, hating Judd’s music, would always come to me and complain, “Ghar-rhon,” he called me, “what is this… f-u-u-u-u-u-c-k-s?”
“Dogshit,” I explained. That was Lazar’s favorite word for describing anything that sucked.
Finally, this motley collection was managed by Tom, whose primary duties seemed to be programming inspirational quotes into the scrolling LED ticker we acquired, and confiscating the endless stream of fetish porn Lazar used to test the big-screen televisions on days we were open to the public for auctions. This infuriated Lazar, who thoroughly enjoyed sitting back in his chair and making an event out of watching his porn collection at work. One of his favorites involved a girl going to a dentist to get her tooth pulled and then the dentist ties her up and tortures her with his tools. Lazar didn’t care for the beginning where everything was set up: “Enough speak! GET TO WORK!” he would direct the actors on the television. The whole time old men and women and families would walk by and stare and Mr. Tom, as Lazar called him, would confiscate the tape with Lazar yelling, “Big fuck! Big fuck!! Fuckinuh Mr. Tom! Big Cowboy! Fuck!”
Mr. Tom would nervously skulk away with the tape and Lazar would come over to me, “Ghar-rhon, Mr. Tom big cowboy. Fuck!”
“Yeah. Big Cowboy,” I’d nod in agreement. “Fuck!” I found it best to always agree with Lazar, even if I was never quite sure with what I was agreeing.
Lazar would usually get his tape back the next morning and it would all begin again.
I reassembled the computer I’d been working on for the past couple days, boxed it up and carried it all over to Ashley. It was the most work I’d do that day, “What’s new?”
“Have you heard about the Mad Shitter?”
“What??”
“The Mad Shitter. Someone has been smearing shit all over the men’s room… the walls, the floor, the sink, everywhere!”
“Dear God.”
I can’t say it really surprised me. Outside our tech department, the only real requirement to get hired at that place was to have a pulse. Most of the people who worked there were basically glorified chimpanzees. Each of their heads, I knew from brief, simple conversations, were filled with thoughts of drunkenness, fornication and random bodily functions. One guy who worked there was fired after a couple of months when he was caught stealing. As it turned out, the social security number he had given Human Resources was fake and he was a parollee who had been imprisoned on some sort of felony.
Another worker had a habit of urinating on the cave wall inside the employee entrance, “When you gotta go, you gotta go…” he explained to me one afternoon.
I just nodded and hurried along to my car, “Yep.”
Any one of the hundred or so people in that cave could have been the Mad Shitter. Man, woman, beast… nobody there knew the difference.
I felt sorry for the janitor. In the months of the Mad Shitter’s reign, she would sit at the lunch table, shaking her head, staring at some ghost in the distance like a shell-shocked Vietnam vet.
Gossip and speculation swirled like a swollen, flooded river. Every greasy-haired, beady-eyed, overweight, leering, drooling slob was suspected. Reasons were found why so-and-so must be the Mad Shitter. Then so-and-so would revolve out of employment like everyone did after two or three months and still the men’s room would be defiled.
Things finally came to a head at a monthly meeting. These meetings were sort of pep-rallies where the upper management types would spout platitudes and raffle off some of the junk to the eager proletariat. I was always embarrassed to witness these spectacles and usually hung out as far behind the crowd as I could, never participating, always observing.
The number-two guy, the general manager, came up on the makeshift platform in front of the crowd. I always regarded him as somewhat of an absurdity: about 5′6″, blond hair greased back, blue eyes, cowboy boots. He put forward a manly air which came across as completely ridiculous when he spoke in a high-pitched voice that sounded like it belonged to a thirteen year old. He stood on the platform, holding the microphone and paused to look over the mass of collected workers. He was dramatic, silent. I looked over the crowd too, from behind. They reminded me of the collection of mutants gathered and arguing in a cave on Dr. Moreau’s Island. Everyone grew silent. I could feel the nervous tension.
“I WANT TO KNOW WHAT ANIMAL HAS BEEN SHITTING ALL OVER MY BATHROOM!”
The general manager stomped his boot, sending an echo reverberating through the cave. There was a gasp, then shocked silence. People eyed each other suspiciously, looking for the culprit. Even as far back as I was, I could see the manager’s face glowing red. I giggled to myself, man he’s pissed!
There was another lengthy pause. Everyone was squirming. The general manager composed himself.
“I promise, if you come forward, like a man, you will not be punished. We can work this out.”
Yeah, right, I thought.
The pleading alternated with ranting for a good 15 minutes before the meeting veered back onto its normal course. I slipped away and went back to the bench to surf the net.
The Mad Shitter continued, unswayed by the dramatic attention he received at the meeting. I had to admire his regularity, I guess. I knew, from some television commercials, there were elderly people who would kill to have that ability.
Another two months passed and, as suddenly as it had started, the fecal attack stopped. Nobody ever identified the Mad Shitter. A handful of workers had been rotated out around the same time and it could have been any one of them.
I myself left the place a few months after that. One day I was surfing the internet, bored with another job when I found a news item about a desperate man who held up a bank. His internet business had failed and the bank was about to foreclose on his house. He had gone into the bank carrying a toy with a blinking light and claimed it was a bomb. He also carried an unloaded Nazi pistol. He told the clerk to turn the closed sign and put all the money in a bag. He took so long, the police were waiting for him when he left. His name was Judd Owens.
“The F-u-u-u-u-u-c-k-s!” I thought, with a Russian accent.
Pass this around like a nasty virus:
January 26th, 2009 in
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