One day I'm sitting there at the security desk minding the radio, which means I am reading a book and drinking coffee for $8.50 an hour, and Owen waltzes up and starts talking to me. Now, I had heard from Michael and a few other people that Owen's weirdness extended far beyond the bounds of his strange behavior at work. Unlike other survival-oriented people whose ancestors routinely ran away at the first hint of a lion, I seem to bear the genes that pick up a stick and start poking the bushes like an idiot. This will probably result in me dying from something other than natural causes, unless by "natural causes" you include any means of dying that is a natural and wholly foreseeable outcome of certain kinds of behavior.
Behavior like prying into Owen's personal life, which was clearly the submerged 90% of an iceberg whose tip visible at work was already worthy of a 180 degree emergency turn towards the safety of the home port at flank speed. For me, that was nothing more than an irresistible scab to pick at in hopes of a gigantic river of puss and blood. I certainly got that. One day I asked Michael if he had ever talked to Owen about his private life.
Michael: I don't know what you're thinking, but don't do it.
Me: I didn't say I was doing anything. I was just curious if you knew anything about it.
Michael: I asked once. Just once. And I immediately cut that shit off and walked away.
If it was anyone else who flatly cut off an opportunity to learn something he could use to infinitely heckle Owen, I wouldn't have reflexively swallowed.
Me: Oh come one man, how bad could it be.
Michael stopped in his tracks.
Michael: Let me ask you something. Have you ever seen the movie Salo?
Me: No...what is it ab–
Michael: I will tell you. Four sexuo-psychopathic fascists in post-war Italy kidnap nine young girls and nine young boys, and lock them in a castle in the middle of nowhere. They bring in some guys with mammoth cocks, and they all spend the entirety of the two hour long movie sodomizing, shitting on, masturbating in the faces of, and generally raping and torturing the kidnapped boys and girls whom they force to participate in the most absolutely disgusting acts of human degradation in all its unedited, sexually explicit and graphic horror. People are forced to eat their own shit while daisy chained in agonizingly aggressive and painful sexual congo lines performed on the kidnapped youths who are made to walk around on all fours like dogs. As the depravities approach the depths of hell it all gives way to visceral, physical violence for the sheer curiosity and sport by the fascists. The final scene is a black mass and wedding of the youths to the monster cocks while the fascists watch calmly with binoculars from the balcony and masturbating, as the post-nuptial orgy turns into a frenzied killing spree in which people have their tongues cut out, tits sliced off, severed dicks thrown around like pool toys, finally collapsing into a shrieking nightmare of wholesale murder and human sacrifice.
Me: Jesu–
Michael: Shut up. Listen very closely to what I'm about to say. I make fun of Owen a lot, and you know this. I even talk to him at work for pure entertainment value. But. You do not—DO NOT—ask Owen about his personal life unless you are able to watch all of that and still manage to cum on the screen as the credits roll, and then run it back to the beginning and happily watch it again as your semen slowly oozes down the screen until it dries. This is not a game. Do you understand me?
Me: Come one dude.
Michael turned to me and stuck a finger in my face.
Michael: I ASKED YOU...
...if you understand the words that I am saying. You do not want to go there, because once you open Owen's Pandora's Box of refuckulousness you will never, ever, EVER get that lid back on. Ever.
Me: Fuck, fine.
Michael: Ever. It will never stop.
Me: I hear you. Fuck. Let's just forget it.
That was my big mistake. I forgot it.
Curiosity being the foundation of my nature, I took what I figured was a gentle, although strenuously ill-advised opportunity to softball in the a question about Owen's life outside the museum one day when we were both working the security desk. The obvious question was about his much trumpeted martial arts training.
This seemed particularly safe, as Michael himself had joked with me that when Owen applied for the job apparently had put down that he had "black belt equivelant" in about six different forms of martial arts. Like, actually wrote it on the application and had the balls to show up for the interview. I had a sneaking suspicion that the word 'equivalent' was much more important than any of the other words in that phrase in defining his skills, particularly after the stapler incident that nearly got him shot. Plus, I just don't know a lot of martial artists who are shaped like Violet Beuregard after chewing the gum. So he proceeds to explain how he trained in six different forms of karate at an official martial arts center with an expert certified martial arts instructor. Upon further prying, I found that Owen's definition of certain things was pretty loose. For instance:
1. "Instructor" meant, "buddy".
2. "Expert" meant, "watched more movies and Anime than Owen had".
3. "Official martial arts center" meant, "basement".
4. "Six different forms" meant, "approximations of moves we read about in comic books and watched on TV".
5. '"Karate" meant, "flailing"
6. "Training" meant, "talking about at two in the morning while eating the kind of food that became Owen's blob of a body.
Therefore, how I should have phrased that previous sentence about Owen explaining his background is something along these lines:
"So he proceeds to explain how to approximate moves he read about in comic books and watched on TV, by flailing around in his basement with his buddy whose credentials were "watched a lot more martial arts movies than him", while eating shitty junk food at 2AM as they slowly turned into walking, talking examples of Tweedledee and Tweedledouche except with more leather and sunglasses."
I'm not even remotely exaggerating that either. He told me all about how there are these people called "cord cutters" he read about in some graphic novel who can disable you by precision finger strikes to tendons and ligaments. He was very serious about all this, and maintained that there are people alive today who can do this rare and difficult form of martial arts. In a way, I suppose it's good to know that disabled people with gigantic eyeballs and ridiculous pointy green hair can still lead a relatively normal life in modern society despite being somehow animated into reality by the same guys who made Voltron, instead of tumbling out of a vagina like the 3-D universe.
But more importantly and hilariously, he had clearly deluded himself enough to actually believe he was a karate master to the point that he was willing to write it on a professional resume and tell people straight-faced that he could do all this stuff. Oh my god, I wish I was there to see the look on Rick's face when Owen explained it to him, and the level of desperation that induced Rick to hire him must have bordered on job-threatening. Rick is probably still getting radiation therapy on the malignant tumors in his stomach.
After careful examination, the only possible explanation for how Owen was able to function in this world would be to find a way to surround himself with people who would either never force him to prove his abilities—i.e. by kicking his fucking asshole inside out—or surround himself with people so bitter and anti-social that if he kept to himself he could hide in the light like that stupid bug zombie thing from the X-Files episode Folie a Deux.
Old, grumpy men fit that profile insomuch as they could be guaranteed, at the very least, never to instigate a conversation.
But work is not life; while an actual Jim Jonesian Folie a Deux spreading like a cosplay venereal disease across the face of the planet would be ideal, it would probably be serviceable enough if he could find a community of people who created their little fantasyland knowing full well it was nothing more than a gated community where they can live and play without having to worry about real life creeping in and spoiling their fun for a period of time. One might almost say, an alternate non-digital paradigm to exist in as much as practicality made possible, where the only ties they maintain to the real world was working a shit job to fund the Stargate.
Sure enough, there IS such an organization out there. It is called:
The Society
for Creative
Anachronism.
Up next, part 2: The birth of a legend