A Public Airing of Pryvett

Pryvett is an improbable personage. At first glance, he resembles a melted snowman, a shapeshifter stuck between two ambitious shapes, but he is not to be underestimated. Watching him dig through a palmful of change to pay for his coffee -- glasses on the table, his nose nearly touching the coins, he is seemingly unable to distinguish between dimes and dollar coins, dropping pennies and quarters and nickels onto the restraunt floor -- one must never forget that Pryvett has fired automatic weapons, has taken automatic weapon fire, survived hand-to-hand combat with skinheads and militia members, frequented Detroit movie theatres and endured more than six years working for the fiercest freight shipping company in the region, PHC, where he has been busted down in rank three times.

Two decades ago when he was at college, Pryvett found himself in a Physical Anthropology class taught by a certifiable nut. He can't remember the prof's name, but vividly recalls the prof's pleas to the class: "Bring me roadkill!" The prof was all about fondling the denuded bones of the recently deceased. At one point during the semester the prof entered the classroom and spent the period raving about the injustice of the Kinesiology department receiving delivery of ten ape carcasses with not a one being designated to the Physical Anthropology department. The prof was rendered nearly wordless with the outrage. But he was not to be outdone.

That night the Physical Anthropology prof used his faculty keys to let himself into the Kinesiology department after hours -- long after hours. In the dead of night, he made off with two ape carcasses and returned to his rural home with them. There he boiled and flayed them, setting the skins out to dry and the bones to grow accustomed to the air. One or two nights later a couple of youths, high and seeking easy access to someone's liquor cabinet, broke into the prof's remote abode. When they came upon the ape skeletons and drying skins, all thoughts of booze and altered consciousness abandoned them. Suddenly sobered, they fled the house and alerted police. The authorities arrived on the scene and at first thought they had some sort of ritualistic murderer on their hands; a Hannibal Lechter of rural Ontario. But soon the prof arrived home and provided them with his incredible explanation. Tests verified the skins and bones belonged to apes, not humans, and the college chose not to press charges, feeling it best to keep the episode quiet.

Pryvett is an avid film buff. He speaks of a time when he brought a girl on a first date over to a film theatre in Detroit to view Cannibal Holacaust, an Italian film so graphic that upon completion the filmmaker was hauled into an Italian courtroom and told to prove that he had not actually murdered human beings to make the film. Pryvett's date had no idea what awaited her. As Pryvett parked the car he borrowed from his father, he noticed a car slowly approaching directly ahead. The person at the wheel appeared to be unconscious, and there was a man running alongside the car, with his arm in the window, shouting at Pryvett and his date, "Get out the way! Get out the way!" Just before they were to collide with Pryvett's father's car, the driver suddenly awoke from his stupor and cranked the steering wheel, sending the car into a lamp post. When Pryvett and his date got into the movie theatre, they found that Cannibal Holacaust had been taken off the bill and replaced with Fright Night. Having come all that way across the border, they stayed. Twenty minutes into the film there was a commotion off to one side of the theatre. Suddenly some booming music erupted. In the flickering light of the film, amid audience members shouting at actors on the screen, an impromptu breakdancing competition started up in a corner of the theatre.

During a bachelor party when Pryvett was in his twenties, he had gotten so drunk that he cut one of his hands quite badly while mishandling a set of darts. His unbandaged hand continued to bleed throughout the pasta dinner, during which Pryvett got most of the red pasta sauce all over his shirt. By the end of the night his hair and face were streaked red with blood and tomato sauce -- he looked like a Medieval warrior after battle; crazed, drunk, lusting for tacos, shouting obscenities, sweating profusely.

Pryvett is the unfortunate man whom I know that works at a package handling company: PHC. During the heat wave this week, he was telling me that it has been murder laboring away in the warehouse, where there is no air conditioning; not even fans to relieve the disabused hourly-waged workers. One day the load of packages that are set aside for inspection by Customs agents was piling up with no indication that they were being dealt with. My buddy asked what was going on, why the Customs agents hadn't come in with their drug- and bomb-sniffing dogs.

The answer: It was too hot in the warehouse for the dogs. And Prvyett was told to get back to work.

There was one day when Pryvett was inexplicably allowed to annouce breaktime over PHC's public address system: "All right, fellow slaves," he intoned, "you can't stop sweating your bags off for ten minutes and take a breather -- all except for Corky --" Corky is lumbering behemoth automaton in his early twenties who walks around the warehouse in elephantine jogging pants with a Big Mac stuffed into one pocket and fries into the other "-- Corky, you dogfucker, stay at your station, you don't get a break." To which Corky, a very tall hulk, as well as fat, let out an inarticulate shout and jumped up onto the conveyor belt in an effort to lunge into the office where Pryvett made his announcement. Corky was restrained before he could cause bodily harm to Pryvett -- but Pryvett was written up for his insult.

As young Pryvett, in his teen years, flush with a black pompador and a chrome polished liver, he was once a part of the military. Once, while on the rifle range being shown the finer points of automatic gunfire, Pryvett noticed something odd when he and his troop were finally allowed to fire their weapons: the grass in front of him was being torn up by automatic gunfire. When Pryvett looked up to see what was happening, he was met with the vision of one of his cohorts grinning maniacally, pointing his weapon down the line of privates, firing not at the target ahead, but over the other guys' heads. This lunatic was immediately tackled by a master sargeant and duly pummelled for his outrage.

A hearing was called to punish the miscreant private and Pryvett and his troop were made to attend. Any illusions Pryvett had about military tribunals was quashed when he entered the tiny windowless room in which an improbable number of people had been crammed. To add further to the black comedy, after the private was drummed out of the corp, the other privates -- of whom Pryvett was one -- were then ordered to march out of the room in "double quick time!" Which led to Pryvett and the privates comedically -- albeit unintentionally -- running into one another like a horde of directionless robots, as they tried exiting the tiny room.