Stonehenge Mouth

Imagine if you will the stereotypical alien. You know the kind, the grey little guys that they spent years looking for on The X-Files. Now imagine that alien is a little taller than your average shorty spaceman, about 5’ 8” or so. Now imagine that instead of teeth, that alien had a mouth full of ancient and mystical stones in his mouth. Now imagine that was balding with a milk stain of a mustache, and had a whiny, nasal, southern voice much like Gomer Pyle from the Andy Griffith show. Now imagine that this weird redneck-alien hybrid had the personality of a needy, nosy 5 year old and a grumpy, constantly whining old man. Now let me introduce you to this test tube reject, meet Stonehenge Mouth.

Stonehenge Mouth gets his name from the ancient druidic ruins that lie in his mouth. His teeth resemble what can only be referred to as roughly chiseled stones. The man has somehow grown up and made it through 7 years in the military without ever having gotten within his vast spitting distance of a dentist. On top of this he has the rich and mealy breath of some Deep South swamp where generations of Louisiana mobsters have dropped off bodies for as long as anyone can remember. What makes all this worse is he likes to get in close, in your face, and talk so that you smell the smoke of 10,000 cigarettes and the decomposing bodies wafting off those rocks he calls teeth.

Now appearances alone are no reason to hate someone, so don’t think I’m that shallow. The man’s personality meets, if not exceeds, the dread that the sight of him creates. Stonehenge Mouth is a man that has seen the world. He’s been to Germany, Japan, Iraq, and all over the US in his time with the Army. For a man who has seen the wonders the world has to offer, he’s incredibly bitter about it all. He never has anything good to say about any of the places he’s been. When speaking about Germany he complains about being fined for cutting down a tree in a protected forest where he was charged not just for that tree, but a certain amount of generations of trees that the tree he cut down would have seeded. (I have no idea if this is true) When talking about Okinawa, Japan he complains about how he was treated like an outcast and a foreigner (go figure, a man of one culture in a land of another culture feeling like an outsider). Talks about Iraq inevitably lead to hateful remarks in which “rag head” is the nicest fit to print.

I had the misfortune of being the first person Stonehenge Mouth tried to make friends with. I was the one who ended up doing a lot of his training, which he felt made a bond. In one of his friendly banters in which I “jokingly” insulted the technical institute he bought his degree from he put his hands around my neck and pretended to choke me. But he has small hands and I have no neck, so he ended up actually lightly strangling me. It wasn’t enough to keep me from breathing, but it didn’t negate the fact that he was strangling me. When I told him to get his hands of me he just laughed. I got louder and told him to get his fucking hands of me. He got scared and he started squeezing harder, repeating over and over “I’m just playing, man! I’m just playing!” with a look of terror in his face. I finally had to stand up and push him back, sending him to the ground, to get him to let go. The whole time, he kept apologizing and saying he was just playing.

The bad thing about being choked on accident by an idiot is the person wants to try and make it up to you by being an even better friend. If a vile, moronic jackass can be a friend at all. Since that choking incident early in his time in the Cubes he has tried to take an interest in me and my life that borders on stalking. He gets more excited about my vacations than I do. If I mention a girl I’ve been dating or talking to he wants to know everything about her. If I get a personal call on my cell he wants to know who it is. If I have a particularly difficult call (whether it’s a difficult person or a difficult problem) he wants to make sports commentary on it like he was the one working on it. He’s one of the newest people in the Call Center and he makes comments about how things have always been this way or that, even though he hasn’t been there long enough to know what it’s always been anything at all.

This week is Stonehenge Mouth’s first week back after a month and a half off after Quintuple Bypass surgery. So obviously a lot of attention has been paid to him in regards to his recovery and he’s eating up the adoration. Whether the same sinister man lies beneath that goodwill of a second (actually it’s his 5^th heart surgery) lease on life, or if his close call with finding the limits of mortality brings a new found humbleness to the dark heart of a man is yet to be seen. This definitely won’t be the last time we heard about him though.