02.11.2002
I was sitting at my desk listening to my Patsy Cline greatest hits disc on low volume when my coworker – a big guy who never worked, was ten years older than me, and ostensibly my work mentor – saddled up to the desk chair next to mine to burn a little time until lunch. Kicking his feet up on my desk, and knocking various memos on the floor at the same time, he listened for a minute while I typed up a memo of my own and stared straight ahead in the vain hope that he would take my lack of interest as a clue that it was not a good time to talk.
"You know," he said. "That crazy bitch has probably been dropped by more guys."
My typing slowed from a rhythmic tapping to almost nothing before I turned slowly to look at the kind of guy who would say something like that. He looked much like I expected him to, his fat head bobbing around on top of a fat body, his face unshaven, and as sloppy in appearance as he was in mind.
"I don't think I heard you on that one Duane," I said. I knew full well what he said, but my blood boiled at the thought of it.
"I said," he said again but louder. "I think 'that crazy bitch has probably been dropped by more guys.'"
"Oh," I replied, turning back to my computer and pressing the pause button on the computer's internal CD player. Suddenly the sound stopped from the tinny little speakers on either side of my workstation. "You know that this song was written by Willie Nelson, right?"
"Whatever," he said, shaking his hand in the air with a twist of his wrist as if to show how little he cared about the real facts. He reached for his belt and hiked up his enormous slacks with a grunt. "Point is, she still sings them like she knows, you know?"
"What do you want Duane?"
I remembered my first day on the job, a fresh graduate from UMass, when my boss introduced me to Duane and said that every new employee had a mentor and that he would be mine. I was naive at the time and thought that it would actually be a great thing, that I might actually learn something from him but Duane destroyed any hope of that five minutes later when he decided that the most important thing to show me – "The thing that will save your life and make you new friends," he said – was the coffee machine. He knew a lot about the coffee machine and, from the amount of time I later saw him spend by it, had quite a friendship in the works with it. It was true, he was known for brewing a damn good cup in the office with the same grinds everyone else used, but it was also true that it was all he could do well.
Duane worked just hard enough to not get fired but not well enough to get promoted and constantly bemoaned the fact. He watched the people around him climb the ladder while he seemed stuck at the bottom rung. Because he was my mentor, people associated me closely with him and, though I tried to climb as hard as I could, I was weighed down by a three hundred and fifty pound hippo that I seemed to carry everywhere. When bonus checks were handed out, he and I always got the same amount though I did all of his work as well as my own. Whenever I tried to point it out, people joked that Duane was obviously rubbing off on me in the complaint department.
Had he taken his feet down from my desk so I could access my drawers, I would have shown him the multiple sketches and diagrams I'd made of his demise. It wouldn't have mattered though, his skull was so thick only an elephant gun could have pierced it. He just sat there smiling dumbly and I realized the flaw in modern society. Fifteen thousand years ago, someone like him would have never made it to being a man because he would have been eaten by a lion and thus the gene pool would have been spared any future iterations of him but now, with all the technology and modern medicine, even the dumbest manage to survive. A part of me wished more wild animals roamed the streets of New York.
"What do you want, Duane," I asked again.
"Nothing man," he said with a laugh. "I just wanted to come over here and make sure you weren't going queer on us."
I gave him a sideways glance and considered telling him that I was to see how he would react but thought better of it because I knew he would tell everybody the misinformation I'd given him and would soon find myself eating alone in the very male and very homophobic lunchroom. Before I could decided how to react properly, he dropped his feet to the ground and started rummaging through the desk drawers nearest him as though he were looking for something. Duane had a large smile which caused ripples on his face not unlike the ocean's waves. He had the smile of a clown without the paint or the benefit of actually being entertaining.
"What're you looking for," I demanded as I slammed the drawer closed, nearly missing his fingers and cursing myself for not being faster. I wanted to see him dance up and down through the office like a polar bear on a trampoline while clutching his wounded fingers to his chest but all I got was an irritatingly jolly laugh.
"Nothing you fag," he chuckled. "I'm just looking for your Andrew Lloyd Webber CD." He ignored my cold glare. "Where's it at? In your bag?"
"There's a reason people bring guns to the office Duane," I said slowly as though it was a threat but it flew over his head and out of the cubicle like a bird narrowly missing a windshield.
"Why's that, buddy," he said, still laughing at his joke, then giving me a friendly punch in the shoulder like a couple of soldiers sharing a joke at the bar off base.
"Because of people like you, Duane," I said. "Because of people like you."