Interview with an Equipment Operator

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What about madness? Tell me about the hammer guy.

I met Glenn my first winter down there. He always acted really weird. One time Vicki and I were walking down the hall and Glenn sucked us into his room with, "Come here! Come here!" We hung out for a while and then he said, "I got this tape I want you guys to listen to."

This was in the middle of the winter.

I thought it was some tunes or something. Later when we put the tape in, it was one of those audio tapes you buy to jack off to: "Fuck me in the ass! Harder, harder, harder!" I was sitting there with little Vicki, the Memphis Belle, trying to figure out how to deal with the tape because it disgusted her right off the bat. I stormtrooped down to Glenn's room and said, "You sick motherfucker. I don't know what you're doing, man, but don't give us this shit." 'Hotlix' was the name of the tape. I gave it back to him. Anyway, that was when I first met Glenn.

I came back to McMurdo the next Winfly [when planes arrive in August, at the end of winter]. People were filling me in that there was some weird shit going on with Glenn and Tony [whom Glenn worked with in the kitchen]. One night Glenn and Tony invited me over to Tony's room to hang out. Tony started getting lit and was telling me what was going on, right in front of Glenn. "Glenn's been pulling some weird shit on me. He's a fucking fag. Blah blah blah. He wants to try and fuck me in the ass." Glenn said, "You know you like it, sweet cheeks." All of a sudden Tony went into a rage. Glenn was sitting in the windowsill. He was the size of the whole window. Tony tried to push Glenn out the fucking window. He was trying to shove him, but Glenn was just stuck there. He was wedged.

Where was this?

This was on the third floor of 207. I finally left the room because they started talking about weird, weird stuff. It got creepy even for me.

So, a couple of days later--at the time I was the steward in the galley--I was restocking the food shelves when this girl came running back weeping, "It's Glenn! It's Glenn! He's hitting everyone in the head with a hammer!" I had just got to work and I thought it was Big-Joke-On-Me day. I started laughing at her. But she was doing a good acting job, I thought. When I looked in her eyes I realized she wasn't fucking around. She was bawling. So I ran into the galley. There was Joe laying on the ground. He had blood coming from the back of his neck. Tony was laying there holding his head. There was blood all over the place. There were a couple of knocked-over chairs, and one chair completely ripped apart. Here's what happened: The galley workers were sitting at the table eating lunch. They ate lunch earlier [than other departments, so they had the galley to themselves.] Glenn had gone to the Housing office and told Chuck, "I need to borrow a hammer." Chuck gave him the hammer. Glenn took the hammer, left the Housing Office, walked up the stairs, walked into the galley, and walked up to the table where the galley workers were eating. They said hi to him and he went Whack! Whack! He hit Tony in the back of the skull twice with the hammer. Joe jumped up to stop him and he got the claw of the hammer in his neck. Dropped him instantly. Less than half an inch from his spine.

Then there was this old guy who looked like Ross Perot. In defense he picked up a chair to fight Glenn off like a big fucking grizzly bear--Glenn was about as tall as me but he weighed three hundred pounds--and Glenn just grabbed the chair and separated the cushion from the metal frame, just ripped it apart, and then the little Ross Perot guy just cowered off into the corner. You didn't even want to sneeze near that old man because you were scared that you would blow him in half. And here he was, fighting off the hammer guy.

Another person at the table was Dave. Dave had just got there. It was his first day of work. United Airlines had lost both of his bags. Everything. So he had no clothes. He wore clothes from Skua all season. ['Skua' refers to the bin-and-pile-system of scavengable goods around town.] He was struggling and it was only his first day of work, when a dude walked up with a fucking hammer and took all these people out right in front of him. There were all these other classic characters at the table.

Matt was there. It was his first day in Antarctica and he was told to clean the blood off the galley chairs!

And to pick up the little blood-soaked paper kitchen hats. It was classic.

So anyway, I went running down the hall to find Glenn. I knew him so I thought I could talk him down if he was out hammering everyone. I was walking down the hallway waiting for him to jump out. This is back when it wasn't the posh hallway. It was eery hallway. I've never been more scared in McMurdo. It was a windy storm outside. At the end of the hall, the door blew open in a swirl of snow, and I saw a big figure come in. It was Glenn, and he was walking toward me. The hair on my neck stood up. "Glenn," I said. "Everything's going to be cool. Just chill out. We need to talk. Everything's going to be okay." As he came closer I could hear that he was singing a song: "Mary Had a Little Lamb". His eyes were just gone. He was staring beyond me, walking toward me, singing, "Mar-y had a lit-tle lamb." Not fast, not too slow. "Mar-y had a lit-tle lamb." And he had blood on him.

He didn't have the hammer. After hammering them, he had taken the hammer back to Housing and gave it to Chuck, who just put it back under the desk. It still had blood on it. They might as well have had a "Hammer Return" slot.

Glenn bumped up next to me. I smelled booze. Glenn could put down a bottle of Crown [Royal whisky] before a night of drinking. The station manager ran up from behind and grabbed him. Right away the firemen come bustin' in the back door and tethered him up and took him away. They locked him in Hut 10. They built a special door. We were all laughing because the FBI was going to come to McMurdo.

You said it has changed so much on the ice. Was there a turning point?

It's just been a slow change, every time you go down there.

So now that it's safer, you want to get out?

I don't know what it is. It's too convenient. It's like back home. It's changed from what was kind of adventurous to--it just kind of wore me out. When I worked in the freezer, it was dangerous climbing around in there. I would watch shit fall and think, "I'm going to die because a thousand-pound box of butt rounds will fall on me in the freezer one day." It was that whole classic scenario. Now they have a racking system in there.

Someone ralphed all over the girls' bathroom at the beginning of last season and it became a big thing. [Management] said that if it happened again, all the people in that dorm would be responsible for cleaning those bathrooms. Because one person threw up in the bathroom! Before, you'd just get a photo of the dude who did it. It would be posted in the hallway. "Charlie threw up! Charlie threw up!" Everyone would give him a hard time forever. And he would never want to puke again.

Now art is going up all over the walls. They had a 25-foot projector that they were going to have in the galley, they have stereo speakers mounted on the wall, a big-screen TV in there. And the clock, I'm sure you heard about the clock. The two-thousand-dollar piece-of-shit clock. It's like Planet Hollywood in there.