Steve Minutillo :: messy-78messy things

There’s two somewhat odd people who work in my building. Not for my company, but in my building.

The first guy is on crutches, and is almost always hanging around the front door of the building, smoking a big fat pipe. He is young, and very friendly looking. He wears lots of flannel. He looks like the type of guy that would say “How you doin?” to you if you made eye contact with him, so I always have to very carefully not look at him, without appearing to be actively avoiding it. He’s out there, smoking, with his crutches leaned up against the wall next to him, all the time. Whether I’m coming in, leaving for lunch, or randomly going out in the afternoon to do something, he’s almost always there. I’ve been working here for over two years, and as far as I recall, he’s always been there. My gut feel is that he’s a CIA agent or simliar.

The second guy is stranger. He’s an intense, fast moving asian guy. I’m not going to try to say exactly what nationality because it’s been shown that I score no better than chance on that question, but I will say that he looks a lot like the wrestler Tajiri, who is supposed to be Japanese, but much skinnier. The thing that makes this guy odd is that when he leaves work for the day, he emerges from the building wearing a surgical type glove on one hand. I’m not quite sure which hand it is. As he’s walking to his car, he removes the glove, and throws it on the ground. I’ve seen him do this three of four times when I happen to be leaving at the same time as him. Other days when he’s left earlier than me, I see the glove sitting on the ground out in the parking lot. This glove dropping is highly ritualized, because the glove always ends up in a very specific area of the parking lot, within a radius of not more than 5 or 10 feet. And I know I’m not just seeing the same glove over and over again because it will not be there in the morning, but appear in the afternoon, or vice versa. Why just one glove? Why not take it off and throw it away at work? These mysteries torture me.

Usually the discarded glove is quite clean, but one time it was covered with a substance of the same color and consistency as salsa.