Green Hell : Guest Post: Creepy Crawlies

By Marc "Animal" MacYoung

This piece was written by one of my dearest friends, Marc “Animal” MacYoung, who originally posted it to his Animal List. To many of you, he’ll need no introduction. For those who need one, you've got your links. I was scribbling out a similar post a day or two ago, when I checked my overflowing mailbox and found this gem. Naturally, I shitcanned my own piece, begged him for permission to post this one, and he kindly granted said.

As is the case when reading much of his writing, I found myself saying” “Ooh! Ooh! Yep! I’ve seen that a million times or more!” when going over this one. In many ways, it also reminds me of many of the “little green lizards” topics we’d discuss during our (too infrequent, these days) often odd and meandering “Calvinball” telephone conversations.

It’s a deep and perceptive look into a world -- and at a subspecies of homo sapiens -- that most people I’ve met never seem to see. Having spent nearly ten years on-and-off (four of them as night manager) in various “24-7” supermarkets, and having held other similarly “interesting” jobs, I can assure you that he’s telling the unvarnished truth. Marc’s descriptions and depictions jibe with my own experiences 100%.

Over the years, I’ve encountered innumerable specimens of the critter he’s describing. Some were co-workers, some were customers, and some were just “oddballs” who’d wander in for lack of anything better to do, as I suppose. For what I suspect are obvious reasons, I have a sort of affinity for these people. I definitley attract them, at any rate. At times, it seems as if the closest some of them ever come to interacting with another living human is when they're coming up out of the blue (or out of the darkness,if you will) and telling me their life stories.

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This is an addendum to the urban awareness class I did Friday morning pre-BBQ. For those of you who wandered through downtown Denver with me, looking at the flora and fauna of the street, you'll remember that I IDed several categories of streetlife.

1) Predators
hunting (which we didn't see)
non-hunting (which we did see)
2) Scavengers
(Of many levels which we did see)
3) The walking wounded*
Several members we did see
4) Retired
(One of whom was nice enough to talk to us)

Since my focus was on those who were dangerous I didn't really go too far in other directions. But an incident yesterday tells me that I should explain something else. Dianna and I spent yesterday running around Denver to pick up her medical records so we can take them to the Social Security/Disability
lawyer for her case. (Amazing how fast the attitudes change when they find out that is what it is for, instead of going to another doctor ... one woman who had been somewhat of an uncivil civil servant type just moments before told us about her husband being paralyzed from the neck down and getting
turned down by SS. They eventually won by doing exactly what we were doing ... a lawyer).

As we were walking out of St. Joseph's Hospital a disheveled little weird duck of a man walked in front of Dianna. "Ugh," she said. When out of ear shot she asked, "Was that a walking wounded?" I glanced at her and said, "Nah, that's just a creepy crawly. He'd be harmless unless you got involved with him." A few steps later, I said aloud, "I wonder what he's doing out in daylight?"

What ensued for the rest of the day was us talking about a certain life form that infests the cities. Creepy crawlies are individuals who live kind of in the cracks of society. You don't normally see them out in the light of day because they both shun and are shunned by normal society. They're not just weird ducks. They make up an entire flock all by themselves, they're so strange and twisted. Creepy crawlies really are like the things that you see scuttling away when you flip over a rotting log. They aren't a subculture of society, that would be far too organized and require cooperation. These folks are far too dysfunctional for that. But they definitely are a substratum.

They normally come out at night to do their jobs; they do this when the walking wounded that wandered the daylight are curled up somewhere sleeping. Most of them are marginal intelligence (fetal alcohol syndrome is common), very little education, often have slight mental problems and do menial, dirty jobs that any self-respecting scavenger would scorn. And yet, somehow they manage not only to get by, but hold a job. They're not serial killers, but they're weird enough to be. This only goes to show you that you can be that deeply twisted and not be predatory.

What dawned on me, however, is how many of the women in the group that went to Denver, asked me about someone, and I replied along the lines of "nope, that's just a guy going to work." What I also noticed was how many men just walked by the same guy without a twitch.

Are men less aware? No. I suspect they saw the guy, recognized him for what he was and went on.

I began to think more and more about why this is. I realized that very few women have the opportunity to deal with creepy crawlies on a regular basis. Fact is most normal people, much less women, are on totally different schedules than the creepy crawlies. And the jobs that most people have don't bring them in contact with them, either.

Creepy crawlies are the nameless, faceless people who get things done while the rest of the world either sleeps or goes about its business. They are at the end, the places where things go that are whisked away out of your sight. You walk through your office parking lot and see some trash, the next day it is gone ... where'd it go? Who picked it up? You see the garbage truck roll down your street picking up cans ... where does the garbage go? The higher you are in the social/professional strata the less you have to deal with
creepy crawlies.

Usually women send the men to deal with these guys OR you deal with them through their supervisors. Women look at the cleaning crew and tend to, by default, find the supervisor and tell him what they want done. And that is why I suspect that men are less sensitive about creepy crawlies, they deal with them more.

In fact, I kind of suspect that it's one of those "unconscious" concepts that I dislike so much. There is just an unspoken division of labor here, where the women don't even have to say, "Honey, you go talk to the garbage men." It's kind of the default man's job, and both sexes know it under normal circumstances. The "channels" are what keep people, especially women, from having to deal with them

If you work a job that takes you out into the night, these guys are common as cockroaches. I'm not talking working at night in an enclosed office or closing a restaurant then driving home. I'm talking about jobs that put you out into the night. The guy who is running the sweeper in the parking lot at 3am ... odds are good he's a creepy crawly. The people delivering the newspapers at 3am, creepy crawly. The janitor and window washing staff at a mall who work the graveyard shifts ... creepy crawlies. The guys working in the landfill sorting garbage ...oh yeah, big time creepy crawlies

Are these people damaged goods? Often yes. In one sense, they've sunk so low they don't just do jobs that are disgusting, but they forget that things like bathing after coming off a night of sorting garbage is standard
practice. Alcoholism is not uncommon, and many times you will walk by and see them in bars at 10am. Some of them are mean, most of them aren't. And in their own stilted and weird way, if you show them any compassion, they will try to be friendly. "Well thanks there Bob, but I'm kind of busy to look at your live bug collection right now." If you try to be polite to them, they just don't get the hint. So if you don't want to actually go to his house to see his bottle cap collection, he'll bring pictures.

Thing is, even though they are not technically insane, these guys are so far out there that they don't even realize how far gone they are. But they just keep on plugging in the weird twilight that is their lives.

Like the walking wounded, life has usually steamrollered them over, but it's almost like they aren't smart enough to go insane. Forrest Gump is an example of someone who went through hell ... and it was the smarter people who broke and suffered going through the same. That was a movie. Usually it is people like Forrest Gump who end up being a creepy crawly. Alone and without people to care for them and not really smart enough to do a good job themselves, they end up in this strata.

I was trying to figure out a good movie representation of a creepy crawly, the rat catcher from "Split Second" came to mind, but that isn't a well known movie. Just before I started writing this Dianna called me into the bedroom and pointed to the TV, "THAT'S A CREEPY CRAWLY!" Yep, there it was. "Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkabhan" and there was Vern, the conductor of the Night Bus. He and the driver are perfect examples of some weird twisted little people who are out in the dark. Are they evil or dangerous? Nope, but they are so out of touch with "normal" -- and that is normal for even the wizarding world -- that they are well suited for being in that job.

Thing is, like the creepy crawlies that live under the things in the damp and dark, the human version is kind of squishy too. They live lives that aren't exactly "dark," but they seldom see the light. Living in this
twilight, they don't ever work their way out. They tend to slip into it deeper and deeper. So to most people they are not only physically, but also mentally, slimy. Even if they physically scrub up, they still kind of ooze.
If one sits down next to you on a bus, you start thinking about getting off at the next stop ... even if you have miles to go. There's always another bus.

In LA there was a chain of porno shops called "Le Sex Shoppe" (which, ladies, do your hubby/boyfriend a favor and DON'T ask for him to take you into one to see what they are like). These shops were open 24/7, and the amazing thing was how packed they would be at 7am on weekday mornings. A lot of the male creepy crawlies would get off their graveyard shifts and head on over (especially on payday). Needless to say most creepy crawlies are chronically single.

Now the odd thing is that not all creepy crawlies are men. I used to work as a "paper stuffer" for the LA Times when I was 18. The technical term for this is an "inserter," but, no matter what you want to call it, I was the guy who stuck in all those garbage ads and slicks that bulk up your paper. We'd go in at 9pm and start working. The paper delivery drivers would show up at 2 am. That is when I got to see firsthand, that there is a total substratum out there of people who most people will never see ... or want to.

There was one woman who would stop drinking at about midnight, sober up enough to drive and come into work. Imagine a late 50s woman who looked like she'd been pulled through a knothole sideways -- repeatedly, twice a day for 40 years in fact. Now have someone with severe palsy apply her makeup. She
didn't bathe, but constantly poured new layers of cheap perfume. Thing was she'd walk into a place, and it would reek for about 20 minutes. One night Mike, my co-worker, and I were stuffing papers. She had come in and gone out again. Mikey and I started coughing for unknown reasons. I looked over my shoulder, and she was standing there in the corner.

Now for the shocking part ... she was married ... to another creepy crawly who also delivered papers for the same station.

When we went into the Greyhound terminal in Denver, there were a lot of these kinds of people waiting for their bus to take them wherever. Years ago there was a TV sitcom called the "John Larroquette Show." It was about a recovering alcoholic who had trashed his life and career before he sobered up. Despite being a very smart man, he had to climb his way back up and the best job he could get was as the graveyard shift manager at the St. Louis Greyhound bus station. The weird shit that he had to deal with every episode was a sanitized example of the creepy crawlies. In the same vein, Brent Spinner's character in Night Court as the snack bar owner and his wife was another sanitized version of the same. What they had better than JLS was
the off -the-wall shit that these people come up with.

Like the guy in the landfill who walked up to me and said, "Ever seen what a bobcat can do to your arm?" He then showed me his arms, which were pretty well lacerated. I asked him, "How the hell did you tangle with a bobcat?" He responded, "I was cleaning its cage." I looked at him in shock and asked, "You got a bobcat for a pet?" He replied, "I got three of 'em"

I looked around at the 100-degree-plus frying pan from hell we were standing in, as D9 Cats roared by skinning mountains of garbage not 50 feet from us. As trash flew through the air, I thought to myself, "Ya know, to anyone crazy enough to work here doing what he's doing, having bobcats would make sense"

*Note: For those who may not be up on the terminology, here’s a definition of “walking wounded,” also courtesy of Marc:

The "Walking Wounded" describes the mentally disturbed people who roam the streets of all US cities. Unlike socialized countries they are released --basically onto the streets. While I have seen "street people" in Europe, their numbers are almost microscopic in comparison to the US.

Some are winos, some are Mentally Ill Chemically Addicted (MICA), some are off their meds and some are just out barking at the moon. The fact is, most of them are harmless and are far too wrapped up in their own self-damage and misery to notice what is going on around them.

These are the people that you see walking down the street talking to themselves or yelling that the aliens are after them. The thing is most normal people shy away from these people, not knowing that the movies inside their head are far more important to them than you are. Life has pretty much run over them and left them lying in the gutter of life.