The biggest problem you run into working with people who are hilarious because they are disturbed and/or insane is that you have to take the bad with the good. It’s like working in dog rescue. Most days at a museum everyone is a harmless little creature wearing a dorky uniform, but every now and again someone’s going to get part of their face bitten off. The only difference is that your average dog feels bad about it afterwards, whereas the best I ever got was old people laughing at me and secretly wishing they’d done it themselves.
Generally speaking I’ve always gotten off light in that department for the simple reason that I don’t do things to draw negative attention towards myself. When the anchovies are being attacked by hammerhead sharks, I’ll be the one hogging the inside of the bait ball while idiots like Owen are wandering around like Grizzly Man seeing how close they can get to their magical shark friends so they can touch their ass. I don’t do shit like that. There’s a time and a place for taking risks in life, and I’ve reserved it for things I have at least some control over.
Taylor was the second person up on the totem pole in museum security, and he almost never said anything. The story is that he was an old friend of Chad's (the boss) when they were on Parris Island together, but unlike his rotund superior Taylor had gone to Iraq for a tour of duty during the Persian Gulf War. They say he was a sniper, but based on my experiences with him I think he probably did a lot of getting fired from guard duty for being crazy. After he got back he spent a number of years working in corrections before taking Chad up on his offer for a cushier option.
I don’t think that Taylor particularly thought it through much beyond looking at the salary, but by the time I arrived he already had the glazed look of a tiger that’s living in a backyard cage slightly bigger than its body and doped to its eyeballs with illegally obtained opioids. The old guys claimed Taylor was just a lazy, vacuous troll. In fact, they hated him more than Owen, or anyone else in the museum. That includes fifteen-year-old chatty interns.
One day John and I are sitting at the desk and Taylor is laying on the museum’s equivalent of an elementary school nurse’s bed made of non-absorbent, vomit repelling vinyl. My suspicion had always been that the first aid kit next to it and defibrillator—which nobody in the building was trained to use—was expressly for meeting some sort of code. Taylor was sprawled out like his parachute had failed and that's the heap he landed in after plowing through the roof, and his shirt had pulled out of the front of his pants because gravity distributed his asymmetrical gut differently whether he was lying or standing. If he had been outside on the sidewalk like that, nobody would have ever mistaken him for a person in need of medical assistance; he looked too much like a shitty, revoltingly lazy house pig trying to sun itself under a lightbulb on principle even though it was already too warm.
I could tell from John’s little twitches that he was thinking something so hateful that his body was physically having trouble containing the thoughts. My suspicion was a festering hatred of Taylor's absolutely abhorrent slubberdegullian behavior, but realistically it could be anything when it came to John. The best way I could describe it would be to imagine a man who had eaten a dwarf alive, and was trying to pretend that there was nothing writhing around in his guts like a pelican after swallowing a giant sea bass. The enraged little fellow inside still had enough fight left in its tiny, dissolving body that it was using a stick to spitefully jab at the back of John's right eyeball in hopes that he could dislodge it and scream a torrent of obscenities at the universe through the socket hole as a final act of vengeance against the soulless fates. Not knowing what was going on, all the outsider could see was a man periodically scrunching his face up around his eyeballs and muttering the most horrific and barely audible obscenities under his breath.
Then John started maliciously looking over his shoulder now and again, as if the nurse’s table was a bad dog that had rolled in a pile of shit named Taylor and its owner was sitting with it on the patio of a nice restaurant ruining John’s glass of wine. At this point I had figured out exactly what was happening, and was desperately trying to hold the twitching corners of my mouth in check by staring at the phone and letting my eyes go out of focus. Finally John cracked.
He sat up, and spun around in his chair to glare with his most cigarette smoke-degraded stink eye at the heap of manure currently getting paid three times as much as him, including benefits and a retirement package. John looked back at me and spoke, indicating that I was now welcome to address him provided I kept it to fewer than twenty-odd syllables every five minutes, and only at times when John was neither speaking nor appearing as though he might speak before I could complete whatever mostly useless thought was wheedling its way out of my mouth hole and interrupting the airflow in his personal space.
John: Can you believe this shit? He’s just fucking splayed out there while on the clock like a piece of blubber laid out to rot in the Arctic sun by starving goddamn Eskimos! Fucking ten times the salary of anyone else in this place! I cannot—cannot believe his generation hasn't turned this country into a garbage heap by now.
Me: Er...(I’m counting syllables like shots fired out of a gun.)
John: I mean, what a fucking goddamn useless fuck! When I was in the military we’d have doubled a sock around a padlock and smashed open his fat head until we could have the world’s smallest barbecue with whatever rodent he’s got running around on that hamster wheel he passes off as a brain.
Me: Ha, ha, Jesus!
John: You know, me and the rest of the guys are working here because we served our country for thirty years, and our reward is pensions aren’t worth shit. We don’t want to be here dealing with these godawful little crotch turds running around their useless parents destroying everything, but the government fucked us over and our bitch wives still expect expensive shit they don’t have to pay for at Christmas. And fat-belly over there lays around getting a half-boner every time his direct deposit comes through.
Taylor: He, he.
That was essentially Taylor's catch phrase, if not the only thing he ever said to anyone. His teeth were really fucked up from a combination of smoking, dipping, probably meth although I can't say for sure, and more than anything kissing his hideous girlfriend. I'd seen her once, and she looked like Dee Snider from Twisted Sister if he had clown makeup applied with baseballs while standing behind the milk jug game at a particularly shitty carnival. Taylor's dismissive laugh sounded like a particularly self-satisfied bullfrog that opened its mouth just wide enough for his two favorite letters in the alphabet to escape. Maybe it was his time in the Persian Gulf getting shot at all day, but he seemed extremely indifferent to the mortar rounds of insults John was pummeling him with.
Oh, I didn’t mention that? Taylor is completely conscious. I think that fact enraged John even further.
Me: Um, John? I think he can hear you.
John: Good. You know why? Because I don't give a fuck. Taylor? Taylor! Hey asshole! If you are passing for whatever consciousness means to a slug, have the common human decency to get off your fat, pudgy ass and get the fuck out of here! You hear me boy? You are the laziest, undrainable bathtub of lard and shit I have ever seen in my life, and there's no Drano in the world strong enough to belch you out of society's sewage pipes.
Taylor: He, he.
Taylor, in what must have been the most effort he had been willing to devote to the job in some time, rolled over on his side, exposing the upper half of his butt crack that peeked out from his ill-fitting pants.
Me: Oh god, sick!
John: Look at that. What did I tell you? That boy's entire life can be reduced to plumbing some way or another. Taylor, you embarrassing fuck. You spent three years in the Corps and your pasty ass looks like a rupturing Ziplock bag stitched together from a dumpster full of foreskins behind a hospital. God! I fucking hate you!
John turns back to me and keeps talking.
John: Every day with this shit! Half the time I don’t even see him because he’s probably jerking off is the freeze dryer with one of the animals, and when I do it’s because he’s fattening himself up like a seal in the basement office with Chad to suffocate whatever he rolls over onto at night to fuck.
Taylor was so revoltingly disinterested he wasn’t even bothering to chuckle anymore. Finally, after hatefully staring Taylor down for a response, he slammed his pen down on the desk and stormed out. If his chest had been a cannon he would have double-filled it with chain shot on top of his heart and blown Taylor through the wall.
Me: Well Taylor, I think we can officially say John has had his workout for the day.
Taylor: He, he.
Oh, but this is only the beginning. Once again, and against Michael’s express and absolute forbidding, I found myself with Taylor at the desk and decided to see what was lurking inside.