"Guard Duty"

Bobby always tries to sell me on becoming a security guard, a broad-shouldered galoot pacing the perimeter of private company grounds with a nightstick in the dead of darkness and putting my feet up as I do my college coursework. I can't help but remind him of the fate of all those night watchmen in those Dirty Harry/Charles Bronson movies we like to watch in the 2 A.M. pall of early morning , bamboozled by armed psychopaths and their corpses stuffed in janitorial closets. And after hearing his tales about the field, I'd sooner collect comic books and leave the ignorance of the world to its own devices.

Bobby has a high tolerance for cruddy things while I am born of a higher sensibility that would have to hang my head out the window with the stench of the human condition and utter, "oh my GOD!".

He worked the graveyard shift in the early '80s for a security company that paid bottom-dollar for whomever would put up with the skull-numbing tedium and with no possible hope of advancement unless you mouldered there like a cropped-hair crumb-dumb for 25 years. Old, wheezy, chicken-necked dudes read the paper and recounted stories of mobsters and bank robbers sent to the federal penitentiary with wonder, straightening their belt-buckle and eating a ham sandwich with crusty satisfaction.

It was the manly prerogative of 1950's tease shows and "Sheena: Jungle Queen" and Frank Buck with a whip and other stilted Americana that always makes you a bit queasy. . . . . thinking that there are folks out there still trapped in that Ike Eisenhower universe.

Bettie Page, cover girl of "Look!" and "Argosy", has now become a shriveled, withered pussy that no man with sense would bother with. Or would they?! I leave that to Hayes and his "Dirty Old Grandpa" jokes, but we won't go there.

Too much idle time gets a devil's thoughts stirring, and one will soon learn in law enforcement (-- such as it is), there are two types of people-- the trickster and the stilt-minded leaning back in a chair eating a ham sandwich. There was an old dude at the job who believed everything he read. It was as if what remained of his brain had dried-out and petrified like a mummy of either/or thinking. Bobby couldn't convince this simple fellow otherwise, shaking his saltpeter gray head at the desk like a fundamentalist set in his ways, like a wattled-neck rooster cocking its head.

One time he printed up a fake newspaper that screamed the headline that the Germans and the Japanese were invading both coasts in a surprise attack. "IT'S THE NEW PEARL HARBOR!". The old guard's eyes bulged out of his skull, and he panicked into his radio-- passing on the news until Mike told him better and made his point.

50 years at the job must have conditioned him that way. You were given a set of keys and instructed to make the rounds, punching into a check point at various stations every hour across the property with a click or clack. The mind could wrap itself around that logic, like a pigeon in a B.F. Skinner box rewarded with a food pellet, namely a paycheck and a warm place to shit.

Once, dawn was breaking over the icy lake of an office park where Bobby was assigned and he saw a big man in a flannel shirt kicking around by the shore with some geese and a semi-trailer idling nearby. Our uniformed mascot went down to confront this intruder, and the man was hunched over and evasive. Mike asked what he was doing there and the character leaned back and mumbled, like someone guilty trying to act casual-- probably there "to catch fowl" in times of early '80s recession and cook 'em right there. Hayes was about to put the guy under arrest, when the flannel-shirted giant picked up a goose and threw it right at his chest with the flapping of wings and an explosion of feathers. Then he took off running.

Bobby chased him around the lake, across the ice, hollering for backup over his radio-- geese scattering every which way-- and chased the poacher over to the semi-trailer he leaped in, gunning the engine with a grunt and taking off as Bobby jerked on the door and beat on the window.

When Bobby came panting through the building, he saw his fellow guards sitting around and picking their noses. He demanded to know why they didn't come to his aid when he radioed. As it turned out, things had been so sleepy they had given him a radio with dead batteries.

Bobby was pissed.

They asked why he didn't stop the intruder.

Bobby didn't know what they meant.

He should have thrown himself in front of the vehicle and waved his hands like a police man, their either/or logic went.

Bobby was even more pissed. . . . .