Marlin Wells

My name’s Dave. I work as a lowly service technician for a business funding corporation called Coretex. My fellow techies and I are the type of service technicians that would pretend to be working hard when in fact we weren’t doing anything at all. At least, we wouldn’t be doing anything important for the company. Most of the time we would make small and insignificant problems seem large and extremely vital, just to give the office monkeys the illusion that, without us, their smooth operations would cease to exist.

“So what’s the deal with the new admin?” I said to my buddy Marlin. “The other day I saw him talking to the development director like they were some kind of conspiring disciples.”


Marlin vigorously nodded his head in agreement while he sucked down his giant silver thermal filled with an overload of strait espresso. “Ya, you know? Where the hell did that guy come from anyway? I didn’t even know who he was and he just materialized over my computer screen one day and started sniffing up my ass.” He sucked down some more espresso before going on in the manner of speech he’s always in. A million words a minute. “You know what? You know what, man? This guy is bad news. First it’s gonna be some little undergo of his to control the way things work around here. Next we’ll be doing everything in some sort of puppets dance meant to flatter the psychosis of his particular fucking ways. And then before you know it we’ll be permanently losing our will to sham. Our state of sham is gonna be none existant. This place is gonna suck, man. It’ll be like a real job.”

Like most of the time I felt like slapping him in the mouth for acting like a twit. But then again, he did have a point. Ether in some sort of erratic or figuratively speaking way, this guy could very well mean the end of our hippy hop care free ways. “Well, however this guy decides to run things, we’re gonna be one step ahead of him, right? I mean come on, Marlin. We’re the fucking networks backbone. You really think he’s just gonna waltz on in and start paying that much attention to detail?”

I could tell by the sharp twitching in his left eye that he did indeed. “That’s his job Dave. He’s probably gonna fire us.”

“He Can’t fire us.”

“Well he could get us fired.”

“Well then what the hell are you suggesting?”

“I’m not suggesting we do anything.” He lit up a camel and sat back with his feet up on my coffee table blowing terrible smoke rings. “It’s like it was all bound to go down some time.”

And that’s when I realized he was right. Not just about the stupid comp servers or the capillary bull shit we’ve been injecting into our fellow co-workers, or even the endless lapsing of experimental drug dabble. But about everything. Ever sense we started down this mudslide of retractable anarchy I always new in the back of my mind that it was all bound to go down some time. I guess I just thought I could start over at any point in time I wanted. As if reciting a few hail Marries and severing a few life stalling habits would magically deliver me free from the ripples of most of my adult life.

I snapped out of my thoughts when I noticed that Marlin was staring at me with an intense look of comprehension. “Why are you looking at me like that?”

“Because I can see right through you, man. You’ve got the gravity of a black hole in your head. Good God man, It’s not as if we killed someone. We’ll get a job some where else.”

Sometimes I wonder how a person of such intellect could be so spasmodic. Marlin has a way of switching from one character to another without the actual confinements of reason. Let me tell you about the meager beginnings of this severely contagious friend of mine.

Marlin Wells was a troubled teen with a dilapidated sense of social skills. His father worked in a hazardous warehouse making microwave beacon plates, and his mother was sort of like an old raisin, baking in the pleasantries of an unorthodox lifestyle. Most of the time she spent her day sipping wine until properly wasted, or poking around in church revenues to get her share of the “unintended” proceeds. I’ve only met her twice before and on both occasions she projected a state of catatonic euphoria.

His father, on the other hand, was a walking barrel of nitroglycerine. He hated anything to do with everything, and to look him in the eye meant to anticipate the savage condemning of his control. All and all, he just wasn’t a real people person.

As you would imagine any child that’s been raised under the supervision of a belligerently unsocial family, Marlin became quite an unstable teen. Smart as shit, but unstable nonetheless. He was the type of punk that enjoyed making bombs out of his junior chemistry set and then setting the local field in a blaze of morning glory. While all the other kids were riding around on bikes and skateboards, Marlin was perfecting his point of interception program on his laptop in order to manually key in the money return signal and hit the jackpot in the local ATM game. His antisocial behavior became the trademark of his personality, and before long he was spending his Saturday nights with an area phone scanner and an internet shell account. When he did care to venture from his technological hermits cave, his chaotically ticking mind would guide him through the waves of ordinary foes, into the mischievous havoc of anarchism.

I first meant Marlin in Wall-mart about two years ago, were he was wandering around aimlessly. I ran into him in the stereo section and I couldn’t help staring as he commenced in channeling Rock105.3 into all the clock stereos, cranking their volumes to the max, and then setting them to go off in ten minutes time. I asked him what the point of that was and he only looked at me blankly as if I were a bug in a box. I then proceeded to make light of the situation by commenting on the effects it would have on the poor employee that’s sent to correct the problem and he merely nodded his head in an uninterested jester and carried on with his prank in silence. After he had completed his pointless task of anarchism, he whipped a can of beer out of his jacket pocket and cracked it open as if drinking in Wall-mart were a normal act of his daily routine. “You want one?” He asked me with only a peek of sincerity.

It was now my turn to observe him as one would a bug in a box. “You know, I could be wrong, but I don’t think you can drink beer here.”

He gave me a look as if to say, “so what,” then chugged the can before dramatically tossing it into the next isle over. The empty can made a loud clanking noise and an elderly man with a shiny baldhead peered down our isle with an overly expressed glare of disgust.

Apparently, Marlin thought that this was a rather comical seen, and to my amazement, started pointing his finger at the man while digging for something in his pocket. He then pulled out a hand full of pennies with which he began pegging the old man. The man escaped in an uproar, heading for the nearest post of authority, and I took my leave as well. I figured that if this punk wanted to cause a seen, I didn’t want to be around to witness it.

When I left the store I nearly tripped over a man sitting on a green blanket. He was waving an American flag back and forth in one hand, and in the other he held a large can with a paper label reading, “homeless vet”. I wanted to avoid him but having nearly stepped on the poor guy I felt an overwhelming obligation to improve his situation. I pulled out my wallet and he immediately rose to his feet with a fist full of pictures from which he insisted upon my seeing. Not wanting to seem rude, I took the pictures and feigned interest while shuffling through the pile of images. There were a lot of pictures, and with a veiled impatience I stopped between each one for what seemed like the proper amount of time to look sincere. He stood over my shoulder pointing out the good ones and blabbering away in my left ear with a disgustingly foul breath. “You see that one there? That’s my bird, Charlie! And that’s my dog, Spock! And that’s me sitting at the park! And…” And on... and on this went until finally I came to the very last photo. “And that’s a catfish I caught.”

I had no idea what to say. “Cool.” I said.

He peered at me with impossibly wide eyes as if I had offered him a chance to be young again. “You wanna go fishing with me?”

There was an uncomfortable moment of silence as he gawked at me with his terrible gap tooth grin. I clutched a crisp five-dollar bill and placed it in one of his oily palms. “I’m sorry, but I really got to go, bro.”

The man started to voice his appreciation, but before his words could be head I was mauled to the asphalt by the same bald man I had witnessed on the inside.
It was at this point that I had had enough. I reached back and seized that stupid expression by the grip of his fat face and he squealed in fury, kicking and clawing like a crazed animal. The old guy was a hell of a lot stronger than I had expected, and with one mighty heave he kicked me in the gut with an impact that robed me of my breath and left me in a heap of incredible pain. I shut my eyes and struggled to block out the splotches and sparkles that danced about my vision. I was in a numb state of helplessness and by that time the old bastard was on his feet again, beckoning me to get up and fight him like a man. Apparently, I hadn’t moved fast enough for his satisfaction, and with another mighty heave he nailed me in the face with his fancy snake skin boots.

Now, I don’t know if you’ve ever been kicked in the face before, but if you have then you’d know that once kicked in the face, you tend to loose that wild fighting spirit that fuels our callous rage. I collapsed onto my back and gazed at the clear blue sky, and for the first time in as long as I could remember, I realized how beautiful it was. It was one of those skies where the innocent beauty of nature seems to mock the shamefully arrogant affairs of man.

The fight in me was gone. I said a silent prayer to the big man up high to send me a savior who could keep this ass hole away long enough to let me get up and run like a fucking gazelle. I rolled over into the fetal position like a coward and prepared myself for another blow to come my way with my eyes shut tight and my brow furrowed like an excited Clingon. But the blow never came. I opened one eye and who did I see? Why, good old Marlin Wells kicking the shit out of an old bald headed man with snake skin boots.