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.

“Do you know where he gets those?” Ashley asked.

“Ummm.  Nope.”

“They’re from a calendar his wife got him for his birthday.”

“Ah.”

“Ghar-rhon,” Lazar would wave his hands from side to side, palms up and slightly tilted toward Ashley, “what issss….?”

I don’t know why he always wanted me to translate everyone else’s English into Lazar-speak.   But I always did.  After a few months, I even found myself affecting a pseudo-Russian accent when I did it.

“She speak, ” I pointed at the sign, “Mr. Tom, big dogshit!”

“Ahhh!  Ha-Ha!”  Lazar would walk back to his bench, nodding and laughing and relishing my nuanced translation.

All during this, Judd would be staring intently at some affiliate porn site/link farm he was working on, leg vibrating like the wings of a hummingbird on meth.  Probably oblivious even to his fifteen-millionth playing of that god-damned John Mellencamp CD I hated even more than Lazar did: “Ghar-rhon, big fuckinuh dogshit!” and he’d spit on the floor, pointing at the speakers.  There was one lyric in particular, that went “honey, honey… something… something”  Lazar would always sing over it in a tone of disdain, “honey, honey… money, money…”

It took me a while, but I eventually figured out the significance of this.  It seems Lazar had picked up the American capitalist system far better than he had picked up the language.  The longer I worked there, the more often he would come to me throughout the day with some memory card, expansion card, gadget or dvd.  “Ghar-rhon, what iss…?”

I’d carefully look over the component and give my assessment:  either, “dogshit” or “ahhhhh, vey-y nice!”

If it was “dogshit,” Lazar would scoff, “gahhh!” and toss the component on the floor.  If it was “vey-y nice,” then he would grin, a twinkle in his eye, and the object would never be seen again.

The one exception to the “dogshit,” “vey-y nice” categorizations was when Lazar brought me an odd-looking hand-sized keyboard.  I instantly recognized it as the same remote control Mr. Tom used to program the LED sign, it was from an identical contraption except the display for this one was beyond repair.  “Holy shit!  Lazar, me keep!” I said, in hushed, excited tones, pointing at the LED sign.

Lazar’s eyes lit up, “aahhh!  yaaaaa!!”

I hid the remote away in the bottom of a dirt-encrusted box under my bench.

Much later, I learned Lazar’s enterprise wasn’t limited to small gadgets.  Every week, Lazar would present a collection of televisions, dvd players, cd players, synthesizers, drum machines, esoteric scientific equipment–virtually any electronic product one could imagine–to Mr. Tom:  “Dogshit!  Me buy!”

And, intimidated by Lazar’s volatile temperament and the prospect of losing a brilliant technician who was making less than the janitor, Mr. Tom would sell it to him at scrap price.  As soon as Lazar got the stuff home, he would magically be able to repair it and sell it to various mysterious contacts.  I discovered all of this when I helped him close on a new house (translating between the banker’s English and Lazar-speak, “intelest rate dogshit!”) and went to help him move.  Lazar pointed at the astonishing collection of items in his garage, “Ghar-rhon, you no speak!”

I chuckled and shook my head, “me no speak.”

As for his volatile temper, this was demonstrated for all of us (except Judd, who was, as usual, obsessing over the internet).  It was an open auction day, when anyone could come through the cave and look at all of the junk we had piled up and could then negotiate a price with  Mr. Tom, or the manager of whatever department was handling the crap in which they were interested.  There were several regulars–musical instrument dealers, computer dealers, car dealers–who came by every week and bought large volumes of garbage.

Lazar despised Bob, the musical instrument dealer.  Lazar loved musical instruments.  One day, Lazar had a violin laying on his bench and Bob casually walked over to it and picked it up.  Lazar leapt from his chair, grabbed the instrument and carefully put it back on his desk then, with all of us watching by now, he grabbed Bob by the throat and pushed him against the wall, “no Bob!”

Mr. Tom stuttered and trembled, Ashley stood with her mouth agape in shock and I giggled to myself.

As quickly as he had jumped up, Lazar sat back down like nothing had happened.  With nobody saying a word about the incident, he bought the violin and took it home with him that night.

It was a few mornings later and I remembered the remote control hidden under my bench.  I fished it out and waited for Mr. Tom to come out and program the sign.  Lazar saw me and came over to my desk to watch.

On schedule, Mr. Tom came out of his hole and held the piece of paper where the quote was written.  He aimed the remote at the sign and started punching in the letters.  I had practiced this, so I was ready.  My plan was to replace Mr. Tom’s keystrokes with my own and have a laugh as he wondered why his words were being translated into something else.  The practical joke didn’t quite work out that way:  Mr. Tom didn’t look at the sign as he typed, he would only look at the written quote, then at the remote control as he pushed the letters.  I was somewhat disappointed, but in the end, it was just as well.

As planned, Mr. Tom would press a letter and I would erase it and replace it with my own.  When he was finished, he simply hit the save button and scurried off to his hole.  Only what he saved was what I had typed in my remote.

It was two hours before Mr. Tom realized the quote scrolling by on the sign was “D-O-G-S-H-I-T-!”

Judd had just had his long, straggled hair sculpted into one of the most disturbing mullets I’d ever beheld.  From the front, it looked like Eddie Munster’s hair, and from the back, it was a long, solid, brown sheet.  I couldn’t believe he had managed to squeeze that ridiculous style out of any self-respecting barber.

“Break time!”  I was startled as Judd popped out of his chair and quickly headed for the employee exit.  I grabbed my cigarettes and followed, happy for a change of scenery.

Outside, we were met by Bob, the rent-a-guard.  Bob was an older man, somewhere between his 40s and 50s with thin white hair and mustache.  He was assigned to a make-shift station that had been incompetently constructed next to a broken metal detector we all had to pass through on our way in and out.  Bob spent most of his time reading magazines and staring longingly out the opened mouth of the cave which served as a freight area.  He hated having to work in the cave and seemed to put effort only into avoiding securing anything.  He almost encouraged theft, it seemed.

Ashley and her boyfriend had been to Bob’s apartment for dinner.  There, she told me, they had met Bob’s boyfriend and were served leftovers reheated after the mold was scraped off the top.

I lit up a Marlboro Light, Judd lit up a Winston and Bob was smoking some long, thin brown thing.

“I signed up for another affiliate site, ” Judd began.

I rolled my eyes.  The guy never spoke of anything else.

“And it turned out to be a gay site!  I ain’t linkin’ to a bunch of fags.”

My face turned red and I glanced at Bob, trying not to let on that I knew anything about his sexuality.  My mind raced for a way to change the subject.  Anxiety began to creep in as I realized the longer I was taking to come up with another subject, the more painfully silent it was becoming, making that remarkably stupid comment all the more embarrassing.

“Uh… so… do you think they’re going to impeach Clinton?”

Bob shrugged, silently.

“The fuckin’ Republicans just want to get another Republican in office!”  Judd theorized.

“Ummm.  Well.  If Clinton gets removed, then Al Gore will be president.”

Judd stared blankly.

“He’s a Democrat.”

Judd turned, flicked his cigarette away and stomped back inside, “Don’t wanna talk about it!”

Bob and I looked at each other, brows furrowed and shook our heads.

I returned to my seat and, after some inestimable period of foggy boredom, I heard that gravelly, Russian voice, “Ghar-rhon!  Ghar-rhon!”  Lazar was most disconcerting in his excited state.  Like some sort of nuclear reaction about to go out of control.

Breathless, Lazar rushed to my bench, “Me big fuck drive!” I could tell by his gestures he had been driving.

“Big truck!”  behind a large truck.

“Uh, uh…” he searched for the word, “wheel!”  The wheel came off the truck?

“Plate… plate…” The license plate?

“Wheel!  Cover!” Ah, the hubcap flew off!

“Whooosh!  No speak Baaam!” The truck crashed.

“Window!!  Window!!” No, the hubcap came at his window.

“Whoosh!” And flew over his car.

“Hand!”  Uhhh…?

“God, Ghar-rhon!  God!  Hand!”  The hand of God moved the hubcap away from his car…

A truck, I had pieced together more from the interpretive dance than from the words, had lost a hubcap ahead of Lazar.  It had flown toward him but, just in the nick of time, the Hand of God plucked it out of the way, thus saving Lazar.

“Oh, yeah…” Lazar assured me, matter-of-factly before going over to his bench and making growling noises whenever a woman would go topless on his Jerry Springer Uncensored video.

I watched him a few moments, over there leering and drooling at the bare breasts, and wondered what God had been doing with his other hand.

Eventually, he had accumulated enough money to put a down-payment on a house.  He collected several cave employees together to help him move.  I was one of those fortunate, elite few.  Initially, I had been happy to help but that sentiment quickly dissolved when I was tasked with moving some mattresses out of the basement, which served as the kids’ room.  Innocently, I entered that chamber of horrors with a coworker.  We both marvelled at the decay around us.  Exposed pipes and wiring, infestations of exotic insects, mattresses stained with… something brown… urine, I hoped, was the worst of it.

“This looks like a fucking smack den,” I pointed out to Daniel.

He could only respond with a look of shock and horror.

The smack den was the low point of the move… unfortunately it came first and put a sinister shadow over the rest of that otherwise pleasant Saturday afternoon.  The last things to go were various boxes filled with useless junk confiscated from the cave or fished out of a dumpster behind K-Mart, some Nazi paraphernalia of questionable authenticity and Judd’s cat that pissed all over the back seat of his new car.  I was given weekly updates for several months afterward on the status of ridding the car of the resultant odor.  I have no doubt cat urine could be used to manufacture an effective, madness-inducing biological weapon.

A new car, a new home:  Judd was living high on the hog.  But nothing happens in a vacuum and his vast internet empire turned out to be the impetus for his undoing.

A few weeks after moving into his new home, Judd had tracked down his estranged son from a previous marriage.  He invited his son to come live with him in exchange for wiring his house such that he could have an internet connection in every room–this was just before wireless routers became widely available.  Judd was proud of this modern addition to his house and expounded upon it at length during smoke breaks or any other time he could get some unconcerned coworker to listen.  I was amazed he could think up that much to say about the subject–day after day for weeks.

“So me and Kenny have the whole place wired now.  I can work on the internet from any room in the house!  Every room is connected to a hub in my main office.  I got it off one of the palettes.”

“Got it off one of the palettes,” was a euphemism, I recognized, for “stole it from work.”

I would stare blankly ahead at this point, losing myself in a thick, gray fog that acted as a barrier to his voice:  I wonder if he has the floors of that place reinforced against the constant jackhammering of that fucking nervous leg.

One Monday morning, I dragged myself in to my bench like a wet rat and got to work finishing off a system to be sent to the store.  Judd stirred from his meditations–which was unusual enough to notice and disappeared into a stocking area partitioned off with chicken wire and particle board.  I heard a crashing sound and a muffled, “Uhhh!”

I looked at the particle board in the direction of the noise and shook my head, “What is that damn fool doing?”

A minute later:  “Uhh!”

“Sounds like a tortured banshee back there,” I thought.

A minute later: “Warren!”

Lazar looked up from his porn tape du jour, “Bah!  Ghar-rhon, what isss…?”

“Jesus,” I exclaimed, rolling my eyes as I got up to see what all the commotion was about.

I went through the same doorway Judd had taken and found him lying on the floor surrounded by boxes.  Next to him, a short stepladder had been toppled over.

“Dude, what the fuck?”

“I fell!  I can’t move!”

Indeed, the scene looked grim.  The mullet was in complete disarray.  Using that as a measuring stick, I urgently rushed out into the darker parts of the cave to summon a supervisor.  By a stroke of pure luck, I saw one passing by.  I knew from past conversations he had worked for the fire department before coming to the cave.  Ideal.

I led the supervisor to Judd and returned to my bench, satisfied I’d managed to free myself from having to deal with the drama.

Concerned, Lazar approached, “Ghar-rhon, what iss….?” He gestured at the particle board.

“Judd climb ladder,” I mimed with my fingers two stick-legs climbing up the steps made by the fingers of my other hand, “Boom!” the stick legs toppled over and slammed on my workbench.

“Ahhhh! Tsk, Tsk.” Lazar shook his head, returning to his pornography.

After a half hour, Judd had been returned to an upright position and made it, under his own power, to his car which he drove to the emergency room.

* * *

The next day Judd looked like he had been in a severe car accident on his way to the emergency room.  His chest was wrapped in bandages, he wore a neck brace and he carried a bottle filled with painkillers.

“Lucky bastard,” I thought.

Judd told us of broken ribs, a screwed-up neck and various bruises and scrapes.  But the real horror of the accident didn’t manifest until several days later:  A lump on his elbow about the size of a lemon.

I wasn’t sure if anyone else noticed the lump or if they were just silenced by the grotesqueness of it, as I was.  I was somewhat suspicious of the entire situation.  The ladder was only a few steps high.  Was his body really that weak?

One day, Ashley rushed over to my bench, “Warren, you’ve got to see this!”

“Uhh…”  I got up and followed her over to her pricing station.  She pointed at a long smear on a box.  There was what appeared to be a small white speck of plastic glued to the box by the smear.

“I don’t get it.”

“Judd put that there,” her nose was wrinkled in disgust.

“Huh?”

“That’s from his elbow!  It’s leaking and he wiped it on that box!”

The hair on my arms stood on end, my back crawled, “Oh my god.”

The elbow soon became the object of inter-department speculation.  It threatened to dethrone the Mad Shitter as the subject of scorn, horrified amusement and enchanted wonder.

Lazar, who was dating a woman who had practiced medicine in Russia, even took part in the gossip.

“Ghar-rhon, my girlfriend see Judd at Christmas party.  She speak,” he pointed to his elbow, “Blahhh”, followed by coughing sounds and thumping on his chest and a gesture of something coming up from the esophagus.

I thought for a moment, “Ebola?”

“Ahhh!  Yahhh!”  Lazar nodded, putting far too much faith in my Lazar-speak translation abilities, which didn’t yet take into account sarcasm.

“E-boo-la,” he repeated as he returned to his bench.

A month or so later, the elbow was still swollen and draining.  The shock value had worn off somewhat, but it was still a mystery to everyone.  One day, Daniel–who had helped move Judd into his new house–came over to my bench.

“So, I was talking to Judd earlier.”

“Yeah,” I replied with minimal interest.

“Yeah.  You can’t tell anyone this.”

I turned to face him, suddenly intrigued, “Oh?”

Daniel’s mouth was turned up in an evil grin, his voice lowered to a whisper, “That whole accident in the stock room was bullshit.”

“Huh?”

“Judd had a fight with his son the night before.  That’s how his ribs got broken and everything.”

“What the fuck?”

“He staged that whole thing so he could get workman’s comp out of it.  Get the cave to pay for everything.”

“Jesus Christ.”

I glanced over at Judd.  A stream of clear fluid dribbling from his elbow, leg bouncing rapidly up and down, mullet coated with a thin film of cave dust.

Behind him, Lazar was carving off slices of cheese with a dirty knife and eating them while interacting with a “Jerry Springer Uncensored” video.

“What is it with this place?” I shook my head in futility.

“‘ey Ghar-rhon!  Reagan strong!  Comuiss fuck!  Gorbachev…” then he would spit.

That was not agitation.

“‘ey Ghar-rhon!  What isss… ?” He pointed to the “Jerry Springer Uncensored” video playing on a large LCD screen.  There was a midget who was apparently having an affair with some well-endowed woman. “Fuck!  Brother… sister” He pumped his index finger into a hole he made with the fingers of his other hand to indicate sexual intercourse.  “Fuck!  Russia no!”

Translation: midgets were the result of inbreeding and there were no midgets in Russia.

That was not agitation.

Lazar had been having some health problems.  I considered the possibility he may have contracted ebola from Judd.  The first sign came during an interlude in the shitty CD Judd used to torment the cave.  I heard a low growl coming from Lazar’s direction.  It wasn’t the usual “Awwwwwwwggggggghhhhhhhh” growl he made while watching porn, it was more like a distressed grunt.

I looked over and saw Lazar holding a paper towel to his nose.  I wasn’t entirely surprised, the weather inside the cave encouraged all manner of spontaneous bodily protests.  I shrugged and continued working.

An hour or so later, I happened to glance over and noticed Lazar still having issues with his nose.  Blood was streaming out, he was bloodying one paper towel after another.  I stood up and approached cautiously, yelling over the infernal Judd CD, “‘ey Lazar!  What isss… ?”

“Fuck!”

I went and fetched Mr. Tom who consulted with Lazar in hushed tones before going off to retrieve the head human resources chick.  They both hovered over him, jabbering back and forth.

“By the time you two figure out what you’re doing he’s going to bleed to death!” I pointed out.

“There are workman’s compensation issues to consider, ” the HR chick replied.

She went somewhere and came back with a rubber glove, which she used to collect the bloody paper towels to throw them away.

I rolled my eyes, “If one of you doesn’t take him to the emergency room within five minutes, I’ll take him myself.” There was an implied, “you dumb bitch,” at the end of that sentence that could probably be inferred from my tone of voice.

Mr. Tom stuttered, “I-I-I-I-I’ll take him.  Just calm down.  Come on, Lazar.”

Lazar looked at me helplessly and I waved him on, “Mr. Tom fix.”

As soon as they got to the emergency room, Lazar’s nosebleed stopped.

* * *

It was some time later.  Perhaps Lazar had watched his dentist fetish video once too often.  I noticed him drinking an unusual amount of vodka.  A nip here and there throughout the day was normal, but now he was guzzling it.  Some time after lunch, I looked over and watched him chug the last of his vodka.  He rubbed his cheek and then shoved a pair of pliers into his mouth.

“No way…” I thought, watching in stunned silence.

He twisted the pliers around a bit and then pulled.  With a sudden jerk of his arm, the pliers came out, with a tooth.

“Ahhhhh!  Fuck!”  Lazar noticed me watching, “Huh!  Fuckinuh!”  He spat on the ground and threw the tooth in the garbage with utter disdain, “Dogshit!”

He produced a fresh pint of vodka and began to swallow eagerly.

* * *

Poor Lazar.  I wondered if he was going to make it through the year as I browsed a local sex shop for a truly bizarre piece of cinema.  A dentist fetish movie was hard to top.  I managed to find a DVD made in Europe.  The description on the back sounded weird enough:  A couple holed up out in the middle of nowhere with weird costumes and fetishes.  It was the best I could do.  I bought the DVD and dropped it on Lazar’s bench when he wasn’t around.

He didn’t say anything when he came back and found the movie.  He simply put the disk in a player and started it up.

“Ohhhhh!” He growled, “Nice!  ‘Ey Ghar-rhon!”

I looked as he motioned me over.  It was a chick going down on another one.

“Russia… women no like…!  Ahhhhhhh!”

“Bummer.”

Unfortunately, the video didn’t stop there.  The next scene had the women’s husbands going at it.  I turned in disgust.

“Hooooo!  Fuckinuh!  What issss…. ?”

Lazar ejected the DVD, spit on the floor and threw the movie in the dumpster, “Dogshit!”

“Ghar-rhon, where movie from?”

I shrugged innocently and pointed at Ashley, who remained completely unaware of the event.

Lazar frowned, shaking his head, “Big fuck!” he yelled, then continued in a stream of Russian.

That was agitation.