I Was A Teenage Security Guard

MH Rowe's Account of a Wasted and Yet Strangely Lyrical Time of Life

Dear Republic,

‘Gatekeeping Week’ continues in an unexpected form with ‘Learnings’ contest winner MH Rowe’s tale of actually being a gatekeeper! — as a teenage security guard at a small Pennsylvania museum. We continue to accept contest submissions for the Flesh book club — i.e. discussions of David Szalay’s Flesh — and for summer reading suggestions, real or hallucinated. Submissions to be sent to republic.of.letters.substack@gmail.com. More contests to be announced this weekend.

-ROL

I WAS A TEENAGE SECURITY GUARD

I was 17 when I was hired at the Everhart Museum, where I worked part-time as a “security guard” for a year. The Everhart sits in Nay Aug Park on the east side of Scranton, Pennsylvania, which is where both Joe Biden and the President Joe Biden Expressway were born. The Everhart features rocks and minerals, folk art, a complete cast of a stegosaurus fossil, and a large number of taxidermy birds. The museum’s founder, Isaiah Everhart, worked as a doctor and on the side as an enthusiastic taxidermist—or so I assume. If he had no enthusiasm for taxidermy, the museum collection becomes notably more upsetting. The Everhart also showcases paintings, prints, and sculpture. As one of its crown jewels during the era of my employment, the museum owned a late-period Andy Warhol silkscreen print that was medically impossible to get excited about, because it was an unremarkable image of one (1) liquor bottle.

Not that the print’s stature in art history had a great impact on its desirability. In 2005, several years after the end of my career as a security guard, the Warhol was stolen in a smash-and-grab heist by someone(s) who broke into the museum at night, took the print off the wall, and literally ran away before the police arrived. A fitting crime for an institution that would count untrained 17-year-olds among their security department alumni. The thieves committed similar acts of burglary for years in Pennsylvania, New York, and New Jersey. They stole a bunch of Yogi Berra’s World Series rings, which they melted down and sold as precious metal. The Warhol has never been recovered, though the thieves were caught.

No one provided me with much training for the job. As if to complement this fact, hardly anyone visited the Everhart at all. The tasks I performed on a typical day might include mopping a floor, which wasn’t especially dirty, since no one had been there. If the museum did have visitors, I followed them from gallery to gallery at what could never be construed to be polite distance—I was quite openly watching them—and usually had to ask at least one member of the party not to touch something. Thus I ensured the security of the museum and established a pretext to continue mopping the floors. An average shift would find me sitting at the front desk with the other security guards or patrolling the galleries on the second floor, where I could pace and read a book. Mostly the job was my initiation into the boredom of shit-talking and the labor of hanging around to earn a paycheck.

Probably I was the exact right age for it. While at that job, I was accepted by the college I wanted to attend, graduated high school, dated my first girlfriend, spent the summer reading, and was serially harassed by my co-workers, who wanted to take me to a strip club. Harassed is a strong word, but they certainly brought it up a lot while I laughed along, said no, and wished they would stop. Sitting at the front desk, we would talk shit all day. Then someone would bring up, as if to complete a checklist, that I had never been to a strip club, which I had admitted innocently enough because one of them asked. Not sure why that question came up at work. Probably it’s in the nature of the security profession to get around to it eventually. Also, I’d turned 18.

Strip clubs still seemed to me like off-putting places. More to the point, if I were going to a strip club, it would be with actual friends, not security guards from the local natural history museum. They were all older than me. Tim told stories about cheating on his girlfriend, then said he was kidding. Clark told me a story about his girlfriend cheating on him. He apparently responded by destroying his telephone, bashing it to pieces with the receiver. The tallest of my co-workers, Jeremy, marched up to me one day and said, “Tell me the truth, are you a queer?” He seemed both curious and hostile, as if he were trying to be delicate in the only way he knew how (restrained menace). I stammered that I was straight and felt awkward having to affirm it, as if I’d accidentally voted homophobia for president without any objection.

Jeremy once marched up to Jennifer, Clark’s friend and the one woman on security staff, and asked her if she wanted to see “it,” meaning his penis. She declined. I don’t remember how she described his reaction to that. Jeremy always wore big boots, the kind that were then called “shit kickers,” and a camouflage baseball cap. He did indeed “march” rather than walk. I’m not using the real names of these people. Which is especially easy given that I forget the names of more than half of them.

Clark was the friendliest. While he introduced me to an incredible amount of music, he also had an endless appetite for talking about music. He recommended obscure singles, suggested albums to buy. He gave me a cassette tape of Bee Thousand by Guided by Voices. He told me about Jandek and My Bloody Valentine. He gave me a copy of his album, which was an impenetrably noisy little EP with one song that had a clear-headed minute of super catchy pop.

Another friendly presence was the Ukrainian woman who ran part of the janitorial operations. Rumor had it that she had once managed a factory in Poland, which seemed mysterious and brave. She cooked up at home and brought to the museum the surface cleaner we used, a sweet-smelling, blue concoction made, I think, with vinegar.

Someone at the Everhart told me that the curator at the time was mentally ill. I saw the man drunk at an evening reception and remember the look on his face as if it were proof. I’m pretty sure he was just a tippling staff member at an underfunded regional museum. He wore thigh-high, lace-up moccasin boots, like the singer of a 70s cover band. That evening was the first time I’d seen an adult skip in my entire life. Either that evening or another, I pilfered a bottle of gin for me and my friends from a box sitting by the back entry. Someone brought them for an event, but they hadn’t been needed. I had stayed late to mop the floor, which was dirty at last.

When the more serious but still essentially comical thieves struck in 2005, they took the Warhol and a small Jackson Pollock. Though news articles refer to them as a “ring,” suggesting slick organization and multiple hideouts, these thieves seem more accurately understood as “garage-based.” Hobbyist burglars mystified at their own success. I read recently that one of the individuals involved was accused of adding stolen gems to a homemade scepter. In the alternate world where I am a crack security official, the criminal mastermind who constitutes my opposite number—a true nemesis—is definitely a guy who steals gems for a scepter. “Time forks into innumerable futures,” Borges wrote, “and in one of them you are my enemy.” I think I’m only half a timeline over from that reality. When I think about my co-workers now, I imagine them as the thieves or as part of the same circle: melting rings, asking me if I’m gay, wanting to take off for the Diamond Club. Checking to make sure I’m a man, and that they are. I remember those dudes with strange affection.

MH Rowe writes the newsletter, Notes from the Neogene. His writing has appeared in Barrelhouse, Missouri Review, Florida Review, and McSweeney's Internet Tendency, as well as been reprinted in Junior Great Books 8.