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!”
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