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Tour of Duty

Mark Connelly

    When I graduated from high school the job market was tight. The only employer that responded to my texts, calls, and emails was a security guard company officiously named Wisconsin Industrial Police. After a brief interview, I was issued a uniform and shown how to operate a watchclock. This was a heavy round steel mechanism encased in thick leather, which hung from a shoulder strap like a canteen. Inside, a paper ribbon slowly turned like film in a movie camera. When a key was inserted, the ribbon was punched, providing a record of a guard making rounds. Captain Sims handed me a contract to sign, then checked his schedule. “You work third shift at the phone company building on Kilbourn. Eleven to seven. Sergeant Majelic will fill you on the specifics of your first assignment. Show up half an hour early tonight for orientation. Stay awake and man the desk. You in college?”
    “Starting September.”
    “Good. Take a lot of books if you wanna. But pay attention to your rounds. And don’t fall asleep. You fall asleep, you get fired. Stay awake, study, check the doors, and punch the watchclock. Forget to punch, you get fired. Show up late you get fired. Versteh?”
    That night I rolled into the parking lot at ten-twenty sharp. Sergeant Majelic was standing atop the steps at attention. His shoes were drill instructor bright, the brass buttons on his jacket polished to gold refulgence. The three red chevrons on his sleeve entitled to him to twelve dollars and eighty-five cents an hour. Majelic was slim with a tight face and fine blond hair, reminding me of a youthful Richard Widmark. He greeted me with a tight condescending smile. I reached out to shake his hand, but he did an abrupt about face, and I scrambled to catch up.
    He marched through the building, showing me the stations of my hourly tour. There were four doors, he stated seriously. Door One was the main entrance. This was the South Entrance. Pivoting on his heels, he paced beside me to the opposite door, which he solemnly announced was the Door Two, the North Entrance. He took all this very seriously, and I followed along like a kindergartner on his first day of school. We marched down the empty corridor to Door Three, the East Entrance. He could have assumed that as a high school graduate I might surmise the identity of the last door. But he left nothing to chance. We strode down the hall, our steps echoing on the tiled floor to Door Four, the West Entrance. The doors were identical as were the watch key boxes. But at each door, he repeated the same instructions. “You arrive at the door, you test the locks.” He shook the door handles vigorously. He then removed the brass key from the steel box on the wall and placed it my watchclock. “You insert the key and turn to the right slowly but firmly until you hear a click, then you return to the key to the box and move to the next door.” He replayed these instructions at each entrance. The task, it seemed, was simple but of such vital importance – like Fail-Safe bomber crews double-checking the go-codes for nuclear war — that repetition was mandatory.
    Majelic, I later learned, was a frustrated soldier. My relief, the black day shift guard, called him Sgt. Magic. Magic, he told me, had tried to enlist in the army, the navy, the Coast Guard, even the Wisconsin National Guard. Failing each time, he applied to every suburban police department after being rejected by the Milwaukee Police Academy. Magic was dyslexic and could barely write. He signed our nightly reports in childlike print, sometimes misspelling his own name in large awkward letters with backward e’s and c’s.
    A security guard company paying minimum wage was Magic’s sole option, and promotion to sergeant only required the willingness to serve two years, outlasting the transients who returned to school, found better jobs, or were fired. He was highly meticulous about his service to the Wisconsin Industrial Police and its clients. As shift supervisor, his job was to make sure all guard stations were properly manned. Throughout the night he drove his battered Toyota from one location to another, checking logbooks, examining watchclocks, and assuring that every entrance was properly guarded. In these efforts he discarded military predictability with ruthless guerilla cunning. He rotated inspections, so that guards never knew when he would appear. He skipped a location for a week, then visited it three times in a single shift. Ever vigilant, he sought the unmanned desk, the napping guard, the employee missing a regulation tie, the guy smoking pot in his car with a drunken girlfriend. Errants were terminated, fined, or docked pay. I must have been trustworthy because Magic rarely left his Toyota. My desk was easily visible from the parking lot. His car had a bad muffler, so even through the steel doors, I could hear him approach. Looking up from the desk, I would nod, a gesture he returned with a crisp salute before heading off in search of snoozers and potsmokers.
    I welcomed these exchanges. They broke up the boredom. My assignment was to man a desk for eight hours, make hourly rounds, and sign in delivery drivers. These duties took about thirty minutes, leaving seven and half hours of nothing to do but remain awake. Each night I stuffed a vinyl briefcase with books and legal pads. The college had a reading list for freshmen, and I was determined to get a head start. I devoured books, dutifully checking them off the list, and recording notes I carefully stored in a three-ring binder. Every hour on the hour, I rose from my desk, stretched, then checked the north, south, east, and west entrances. At each door I tested the locks, opened a small steel box mounted on the wall near the fire alarm, removed the heavy brass key on a thick chain, inserted it into the watchclock, turned it until I heard the click, then returned the key to the box. Walking down the green tiled corridors I imagined myself as the last man on Earth in some Twilight Zone episode, destined like Sisyphus to eternally repeat a meaningless task, securing entrances to a building no one wanted to enter. Sometimes I imagined myself patrolling the Pentagon or the hallways of a massive underground complex where behind locked steel doors computers continued to blink and click after WWIII had vaporized everything above ground. As the lone survivor, my duty was insuring that the last repository of human intelligence endured undisturbed, gathering, processing, recording, analyzing, and disseminating data no one would ever read.
    Hour after hour, I sat at a coffee-stained gunmetal desk wedged atop a stairwell overlooking an empty parking lot. Dusty fluorescent tubes buzzed and flickered overhead as I read Pope and Dryden. Every minute, the hand on the oversized clock above my head made a loud click. It was a solitary, monastic existence. A self-imposed Paper Chase. I read books, made my rounds, and drank bad coffee.
    At six, the delivery drivers began arriving, sleepily pausing to sign a logbook without exchanging a word. They came to stock the vending machines with soda, donuts, and more bad coffee. Later the first employees began to drift in. The mailroom manager, Al Sarnowski came in at 6:55 like clockwork. A squat sour-faced man with oily hair, he always reminded me of an Irish flag, his white shoes always complemented by an assortment of orange, green, and cream ties, slacks, and jackets. At ten past seven, my relief, a retired bus driver, appeared and greeted me with a flippant two finger salute. I would hand over the watchclock and sign out then drive
    I was finishing School for Scandal the morning a pair of secretaries came in early with a sheet cake, paper plates, and a Happy 25^th banner they taped over the door. It was Al Sarnowski’s twenty-fifth anniversary with the phone company. He arrived in full technicolor, feigning surprised delight. The dun-colored mail room was temporarily transformed into party central, with company veterans strolling in for coffee and cake.
    He had spent twenty-five years in this building. He was here before I was born, before my parents were married. In twenty-five years where would I be? Where would my tour of duty take me?

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