The Cave | The Mad Shitter
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.
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