I want to start this writing by saying that there will be some swearing along with some crude language and possibly disturbing details included. I’m not sure if this will attract or repel you, but I thought you should know. Also, I wish I could share this man’s name with you, but I shouldn’t. I haven’t talked to him in many years and I have no idea where he is and what he’s doing with his life or if he’s even still alive, but I know that he probably wouldn’t like me writing about him or at least he wouldn’t like some of the personal items and observations/opinions that I intend to share about him. That said, I also want to be clear that I like him. We probably couldn’t be more different in most ways, but there is a connection that we developed over the time we knew each other and a mutual respect that developed between us that I’m proud of cultivating. His name is part of what makes him an interesting character, but you’ll have to ask me privately if you really want to know it. I’ll call him Victor.
I started working at a printing company in one of the southern suburbs of the Twin Cities toward the end of the last century. That’s where I met Victor. I was a Pressroom Helper and he was hired for the same position a short time later. At the time, I was dabbling in starting my own construction company and I was flipping houses poorly and learning hard and expensive lessons in Scott County. I took a job at a small printing company for the health insurance for my wife and I and our toddling daughter and I was working three 12 hour shifts/week and doing carpentry work on the other days. Victor started shortly after I did and we worked together for almost eight years. We learned a lot about each other and a lot about ourselves during that time. It was a good place for us to be even though neither one of us realized it. I learned how to work harder and be more responsible as I worked alongside people with great integrity and drive like Paul, Eric, Robert, and Rob. Victor softened and healed a lot too both from his upbringing and from his failed marriage. I would never have thought that possible when I first met him, but it gives me hope for all of the damaged people that I’ve come across and for myself.
I was walking across the print shop floor on an errand and Victor was sweeping. I made eye contact with him and he almost instantly said “You got some kind of problem, man?” I smiled and said no as I kept walking. “What’s so funny?” I stopped and looked at him and said “I just smiled and I don’t have a problem.” He seemed a little uncertain for a moment and then went back into the standard tough guy routine that most of us have encountered many times by saying “I didn’t think so” with a sideways glance. Most of these types of encounters happened in Middle School and some continued on into High School, but we were beyond those ages in this case. Just like a physical injury or trauma, sometimes a person has some major trauma or series of traumas in their life and their emotional development stops right there or it gets stunted. That’s what psychologists tell us, anyway. And, I think Victor had more traumas than most people and he was still carrying a lot of them on his back when I met him. They were heavy ones. Consequently, he had built a wall, a considerable fortress actually, to keep people from getting close. He had let someone get close and he was hurt badly and now he was protecting himself from getting hurt again.
Victor scared people. He was big, angry, and severe looking and he projected a threat of violence with the way he looked at you and the way he moved. His eyes and hair were dark and sharp and wild and made him look dangerous and unpredictable. When he looked at people, they looked away. When he walked toward people, they altered their course. Victor was originally from at tough area of Detroit and after his marriage failed he moved to Minnesota. His ex-wife and her family were Christians and now all Christians and Christianity in general had become his enemy/scapegoat. His brother, interestingly, had become a minister. This all makes his choice of employment curious to me since the printing company where we both worked presented itself as a Christian company complete with the fish symbol on its ads and business cards.
Victor’s tattoos also scared people. He said that he was a Satanist and he had a 666 on one bicep and a swastika on the other. He had barbed wire inked like bracelets around both wrists. One of his forearms held the words “Cop Killer” on the bottom. When he shaved his head one time, another tattoo of a zipper was revealed. I asked him about that and he told me that his original intention was to have the zipper partially unzipped with some brains popping out but that “…it just hurt too God damned bad, so I told the guy to just finish the zipper.” The four digits of his fingers closest to both palms each held a letter to spell out the word HATE. The battlements around his fortress were strong and worked well.
Over the years, Victor and I had many strange encounters and we got to know each other in the way that only longtime coworkers can. And, as he started to relax a little, his interactions with all of us became less hostile and more bizarre or entertaining depending on how you took them. For example, one day, out of nowhere, he started calling me Big Bird like the Sesame Street character. I didn’t acknowledge the change, but he mostly stopped calling me Thomas and switched exclusively to Big Bird for the rest of the time we worked together. I don’t ever remember him calling me David or Dave although he may have. After many months of this, I asked him why he called me Big Bird and he said “Because you fucking look like Big Bird, why do you think?”
A few years into this nickname, I came across a Big Bird Christmas ornament and I wrapped it up in a nice decorative box and gave it to Victor for a joke around Christmas time. Satanists obviously do not get many Christmas gifts and he was surprised when I set the box down in front of him. Victor said “What the fuck is this?” when I gave him the box. “Open it.” I said. He looked disgusted and ripped the paper off the box and pulled the top off. When he pulled the ornament out of the tissue paper, he laughed hard and long at his new Big Bird. I had written “Big Bird says REPENT!” on his little yellow chest in bold black letters. He thanked me for it and told me it was awesome. The ornament hung by his desk for a few years until he came back to work after one weekend to find it missing. The scary Victor came back for a while that day and he marched around the shop asking people where his Big Bird was and letting everyone clearly know what would happen if he found out who took it. Sadly, little Big Bird was never seen again.
We had another coworker who was fairly overweight at the time. (He’s another success story from that crew who has gotten an education and built a successful family, career, and life along with losing the weight.) Victor’s nickname for him was a sarcastic “Slim Shady” after Eminem’s nickname. So much creativity coming out of Detroit.
I loaned Victor $20 once and he said he’d repay me after we got paid the following week. That Friday, he told me to follow him to the liquor store after work and he’d get my money out of the ATM there. I did so, and a few minutes later he came out with a $20 bill in one hand a bottle of blackberry schnapps in the other. He unscrewed the top, pitched it into the bushes next to the store, and took a big swig of the liquor. Victor walked up to my car and handed me the $20 through the window as he was taking another swig. He thanked me for the loan and said “Have a good weekend, Big Bird.” as he walked away, took another swig, and got into his car. I watched him lifting the bottle again as he drove away.
Victor regularly made his hatred for what he viewed as Christianity apparent by randomly shouting out offensive statements over the din of the shop floor. “God, I wish the Pope was here so I could RAPE HIM!!” is one of the most memorable. He said this as he walked past a group of us washing the ink off our hands one afternoon. One of the other guys said “What is wrong with that guy?” Another time, we were getting ready to head out for a long holiday weekend and as Victor walked up to wash his hands at the big sink with us, one of the guys asked him what he was going to do to celebrate President’s Day. Without missing a beat he said “I’ll probably just stay home and jack off on a picture of George Bush.” When I got to be a supervisor, I called him at home one time to ask him to come in, but I only got his answering service. There was a lengthy social and political commentary on his greeting which included the fact that “You Americans think you’re free? You only have one more choice for President than Iraq.” It was an election year.
I was heavily into natural health and cleansing during those years and I had recently told some of my coworkers about colon cleansing and how well it had worked for me. Victor heard about it through the grapevine and he asked me, loudly, as he came into the break room with his headphones on and abrasive heavy metal blaring out of them “Thomas, how do I get some of those butt pills?” Ten or fifteen people looked at him and then at me. Nice. He ended up buying a colon cleanse kit from me and about a week later he said that it didn’t work and that he wanted his money back. It was a 14 day cleanse, so I told him to finish it and bring me the empty box and bottles and that I’d refund him. A few weeks later, he came back from vacation and, again in the break room and quite loudly and in front of way too many people, he told me that the cleanse had worked and he didn’t need his money back anymore. “I normally drive straight through Wisconsin when I go back to my Dad’s place”, he said “…but I HAD to stop this time. I HAD TO.” “I was trying to hold it, but I needed to shit like RIGHT NOW, so I pulled into a McDonald’s somewhere in the middle of Wisconsin. I feel sorry for the poor bastard that had to clean that fuckin’ toilet because I filled that thing. I mean it was plum full with all different colors and textures and shit. It looked like three or four fuckin’ people shit in that thing.” He went on to clarify “I just left it. I had to. The poor bastard that cleans that thing, he ain’t never seen anything like that before, so I left it for him.” I was crying and the rest of the folks on break were staring at him wide eyed. And, as Victor grabbed his food from the refrigerator and went back to his press, he turned and smiled at me. As the years went by, I think he enjoyed making me laugh as much as he liked shocking or scaring other people.
I went from Pressroom Assistant to Press Operator to Shift Supervisor to Production Supervisor at that company and despite the fact that Victor had started about the same time as me and worked as hard as me, he was still working as a Press Operator. He was a great employee regardless of how scary people found him. He was always on time and did more than his share of the work. He didn’t complain about the work much regardless of his other complaints and he was smart. So, when a new and expensive piece of equipment came in, I made sure that Victor got promoted to work on it. The new job came with a significant pay increase also and I got to tell him about both. He was shocked. He never thought that “those Christian assholes” would allow him to be promoted. He was also thankful. From then on, if anyone had anything bad to say about me and Victor was around, he would set them straight and often threaten them and tell them what a good guy I was and what I had done for him. I became “the only Christian I know that isn’t a complete fucking asshole.” If that isn’t a compliment, I don’t know what is.
It was a while after the promotion that I learned something shocking about Victor. He loved gardening. He walked into the break room as I was eating lunch and we were alone. He looked around and said “Hey, Big Bird. You have a garden?” I said that I did and he asked me if I had tomatoes and how they were doing this year. I told him that they were pretty bad because I really didn’t know what I was doing. He went on to tell me what I needed to do to get better results and that his “fucking tomatoes are the best mother fucking tomatoes you’ll ever eat.” Later, I learned about his “God damned cucumbers”, “fucking lettuce” and a wide variety of other veggies that he grew and that he was pretty proud of. “And, they’re all organic” he said. “I don’t need any mother fucking chemicals to grow my shit.”
Like the quote at the beginning of this post says, that’s intimacy. We were/are both weird and we were both okay with each other anyway regardless of our vastly different beliefs. I’m happy to have known Victor and to see him change and, most of all, to have connected with him. He let Big Bird into the garden behind the wall of the fortress and it was nice there.
A few years after I left that place to start my restaurant, he called me and invited me to breakfast in a neighboring town to where I had moved. He had purchased some land with cash from all of his hard work and had put a small house on it and he wanted to talk about business and how to start one and organize one. He was thinking of starting a nursery, but he didn’t have a name yet. I suggested “Satanic Organics” or “The Satanic/Organic Gardner”. He got a good laugh out of that. Victor bought me breakfast and after a good discussion and a hearty handshake we parted and I haven’t seen him since. I should check my phone for his number and see if he’d like to have breakfast again sometime. I’d love to hear how his “fucking tomatoes” are doing this year. Maybe he just grows normal tomatoes now. Regardless, I still probably look like Big Bird.
DTyesthatDT 