Safari Man
The reason I am writing about Safari Man is because he’s interesting and I’m an asshole, even though I fancy myself a nice asshole. I admit it; I’ve made fun of him a good amount. But at least I make fun of him when he isn’t around (supposedly that’s not a good thing). I always get a little bit of a rush too because he is so darn sneaky; you never know when your fun might turn in to something bad. You can tell just by lookin’ at him that he isn’t normal, and if you look closer it’s even more obvious that the kid’s just down right weird. But I’ve slowly started to make fun of Marcus Alexander Warriner (born May 3, 1990—got to get the boring stuff out of the way) less and less, and luckily this has been a great excuse to get to know him. It’s been insightful. It’s given me some more time to think about the way I act and my assumptions about people. But I think most of all I may have made a friend, though it’s not like any other I have or have ever had. I imagine someone reading this would ask why I wanted to do this since everyone else does. I don’t know. It just popped into my head. They say why. I say, “I don’t know man. He’s fascinating. He’s crazy.”
Basics Observations
Marcus is very soft spoken. If you can picture Garth from Wayne’s world with his pursed lips and timidly short sentences, that’s him. If you can recall Garth’s voice, that’s him too. Every word is passive and if it were not for the ridiculous things going on in his head which just pop out, each word could instantaneously blow right by you like the wind. He’s a very shy. But not in the classical sense of the person who is uneasy with people. He’s very easy-going. But he doesn’t seek out the attention of others, treating other people as alien things not as perhaps we would find ourselves among aliens, but as an alien who is quietly observing humans would. Apparently this is the way of modern Quakers.
However as soft spoken as he is, if he were a color and Jewell were a painting he would be a very loud color, because pretty much everyone here knows who Safari man is. Within a few days of being here, the kid with no name had earned the title “safari man” for his elaborate character. For the first few weeks he wore a pith helmet and brightly colored pipe cleaners on his glasses (which I thought were antennae originally, but later found out were eye brows). His clothing is very make-shift. He wears stuff the rest of us buy for fun at thrift stores. He looks like one of the environmentalist hackers from Ace Ventura: Pet Detective, or Ringo (the long haired blond Lone Gunmen from X-files), or the bug catcher from Pokémon Yellow for Game Boy, or as I said, Garth. He wears sandals with socks and sandals with this and sandals with that and sandals in other unfashionable ways that I hadn’t thought about before. He mostly wears cargo shorts (which due to his gangly frame are shorter than they should be) and a Hawaiian shirt, though he occasionally busts out some very hip silver disco pants. He has long blond hair which is loosely kept together by a tie at the bottom of his neck. He’s a goofball if I’ve ever seen one.
Marcus has some habits that assert his strange place in the world too. For one, Marcus makes weird noises. Similar to bat noises, but deeper. Nazgul. That’s what they sound like. He sounds like a Nazgul. They’re evil soundin’ either way. He goes up and down the halls just makin’ these sounds like they aren’t annoying or loud. Marcus smells bad. Really bad, and it’s a stench that lingers. He is sneaky. He doesn’t laugh at the same things normal people laugh at. And he is so introverted.
Marcus is a crappy interviewee. Most of his responses go something like, “Oh…I don’t know…. I guess so,” and it is really difficult to make him go deeper unless he naturally would. At the same time though, he is the best interview because I just laugh about it for hours. When I asked Marcus where he was born he said Denver, Colorado, “…in a city hospital…. It was a while ago…. I don’t remember which one.” Not that these ellipses mean there is stuff in between. I’m just trying to convey the long drawn out pauses. He was raised by his parents Chuck and Liz, who I guess love him, but he wouldn’t really say. Not that this was a sore point. My emotion meter was just reading zero at the time. His dad is very similar to my dad. He buys stuff cheap on the internet, and then resells it on sites like eBay and Craigslist for a profit. According to Marcus most of the business is music equipment, “painfully loud speakers”, and war models. All of this is done from the home which is filled to the bursting point with packages and things. He finds the lack of room, “quite irksome.” I can sympathize. When I asked him what his mom does, he said she gardens and packs things, but mostly gardens. She also sews sometimes. Marcus wishes she would sew more. When I asked him if he meant for himself, he said “no not really” (a common phrase of his, which notes how polite but often misunderstood he is even to me still). Apparently she “repairs” clothes for extra income. I got the sense by what he said that behind his complete lack of emotion (except when he got flustered by his mom’s lack of sewing) he loves his parents deeply and has a certain affection for home, but seemed to get frustrated a few times during this series of questions. Maybe it’s because of my background, but I thought it might be because he felt poor. Having more money was later confirmed to be something that “would be nice……………..” He has no idea where his parents met, but suspects they met at a rock concert. Apparently his dad used to go to concerts and sell guitars to the visiting bands. His dad (you could tell he wanted to call him names) makes him move stuff around the house. There is some tension in the Warriner family. Marcus let me know both Grandpa’s had died of cancer, his dad’s mom won’t talk to the family because of some fight where she ended up throwing all of his dad’s old comic books away. He doesn’t seem sad, but I guess he was maybe slightly embarrassed. His mom’s grandma lives very near and “…she’s pretty cool. [He] likes talking to her.”
The Second Look
The second time I interviewed Marcus we were not very productive. He spent the whole time talking about zombies (ok duh, it was most of the time. I’m just elaborating), which was my mistake. I should’ve noticed all the zombie signs on his room door (and apparently on his window, though no one can read them), especially the one that says “Zombies Are Awesome”. When I entered his room he was watching The Matrix. I asked him if he watched this movie often with a little sneer poking through my serious interviewer mask. He said he doesn’t remember the movies he watches…. Brushing this answer aside I asked him some other questions about movies. He likes Sci-Fi’s, and recommended the Tremor series to me (it’s about giant worms. It’s actually pretty enjoyable if you view it as a mockery of old bad Sci-Fi’s). This made him jump to zombies. He became very much like a soothsayer here. He has some things for us to remember.
1. We have to be ready for the Zombie Apocalypse. Zombies take over the Earth, etc.
2. The Zombie Apocalypse is a much better alternative than Nuclear Armageddon.
3. This is because with his advice and our superior human intellect we can escape the Zombies and live on. Simply follow these directions for survival. If you see a Zombie, walk quickly (oddly running wasn’t recommended and stuck in the moment I forgot to ask why) and if you can, find a ladder and climb it because Zombies can’t do that.
I tried to get some sort of idea about how serious he was being. Turns out he is just being logical and practical. He doesn’t believe in ghosts, zombies or aliens. What he does believe is that in all practicality other biological life in the universe intelligent or not, probably exists. And he is convinced that at some point some scientist is going to mess up and POOF! Zombies. Dee ner neeeeee. Neeeener neeeener duh-nuh. Mwahahahahahaha. He did this, not me.
Marcus is someone who is very focused on certain things, which in turn make him really unfocused in everything else. For example, when he would run cross country races, he had no problem just stopping in the middle when he got tired for a break. But, he really likes insects and plant life. Behind Eaton you can see him patrolling the bushes picking out what he said are natural fruits that he knows are safe but often bitter to eat. He will repeatedly eat the same thing that makes him cringe just to see if it will taste good this time. His whole life is an experiment, but he knows the rules… I assume. He is proudly an eagle scout (spending 2 minutes trying to figure out the exact date he became one) so that has to mean something. I have great respect for that. If scouting hadn’t been so lame, or I guess if the people who had stuck with scouting hadn’t been so lame I would’ve wanted to be an eagle scout like my uncles. I guess I like the outdoors, but not that much. His mom got him started a long time ago. He says cub scouting was ok. “I like camping.”
It’s a regular day when I see him, sauntering about the campus in strange places stopping frequently for a closer look at a bush where no doubt some little thing is hidden. Over the past months I have noticed he’s captured several walking sticks, a preying mantis, a very bushy horned caterpillar, and a toad, all of which he kept on the shelf in his room. He never keeps anything too long and he’s about as good of host for his captives as they could get. Marcus has no rules. I mean he does social things that all of us have learned not to do except maybe when we’re around friends. He’ll just take caterpillar up to groups of girls in the middle of conversation just to show them what he has, like a little boy would to his mother. Many here have gotten so used to him as to expect something when he comes up. Many Eaton guys capture things for him. Yet at the same time most of us think as a person he doesn’t exist or speak to him with a pitiful tone that undermines his existence. That he is just a crazy anomaly of the environment. As if Jewell brought him here just to entertain us. I am very interested too see how his life will play out here, though sadly he may not be returning next year because of costs. I am more immediately interested to see how he fares when the winter comes and so many of his joys are gone. I hope he doesn’t go “emo” on us. Halloween was scary enough.
Finally I just want to point out that the last time I interviewed him, I somehow got him into a tizzy about communication between insects and humans and he had a thirty minute conversation with me where he played the part of a preying mantis and translated for it. He bent his wrists and made eating noises and jabbed and jumped and everything. I felt like the mantis (Marcus) was mocking me for some ignorance I’d shown because the mantis (Marcus) ranted about communication for a while and it was full of sarcastic references to my stupidity. When I asked him why he was doing this, he said “Mantis are not good at communicating orally.” If this isn’t the perfect outrageous example of Marcus, I don’t know what is.
Confronting the Inner Bug
Marcus won the scariest Halloween costume contest at the Halloween dance on Friday without even entering the contest. I was surprised that this could happen, not that it did. I guess he was a write-in candidate. All he could tell me about winning was he was confused. We know Marcus, we know. Had you seen him on Halloween you would’ve been not frightened, but kind of like whoa, I know he isn’t wearing a costume, but that crap is still scary, Tim Burton weird scary as in it’ll be strange when you watch it and haunt you forever more. Basically Marcus got some make-up from somewhere, and dressed up like Marilyn Manson (though remember, he was just putting on special clothes). So now he looked like Marilyn Manson on meth (which we may or may not have seen before so double the meth effect and you’ve got it).
I had a lot of penetrating questions and I asked a good amount of them, but some of them I kept to myself for you to understand me. One thing I didn’t ask him because I thought it went too far, but I’ve mentioned a theory to a few others in my inner circle. These noises Marcus makes that I talked about earlier are what I know as “dinosaur noises.” The reason I call them that is because that’s what my friends and I called them in school. There was a really messed up kid, we knew there was something physically wrong with him but weren’t sure what, who went to school with us from 6th grade on and he made these noises. In all of our defenses, he wasn’t like Marcus. He was a little asshole street thug who liked to get in all sorts of people’s faces. So we made fun of him. Never to his face, because it isn’t right to make someone like that feel bad. But we had pokes at him from middle school and half of high school. Basically until we found out he’s a crack baby. Yup…he’s a crack baby. I’m not joking. After we all told each other and each of us had spent our time, hands in pockets, awkwardly silenced internally begging God to forgive us, we stopped and just avoided him. From then on when he’d make these noises we’d all kind of look at each other with looks of shame and pity and regret instead of snickering and making wise-ass comments. I don’t know what it is, but I’ve always made fun of people, rejected friendships with people because they weren’t cool enough or annoying, or kept my desires for friendship with them secret, because friendship is a public affair. And I know I’m not the only one who does this. Everyone does it, or I think everyone would do it if they were so frickin’ cool like me. In the end though many of these people I’ve made feel terrible have turned out to have real problems. Things God blessed me with not having. Things that make them act that way (though in many cases I think they just aren’t trying). Yes. It makes me feel good about myself to put them down. And maybe I use the excuse that I’ve got messed up shit too to convince myself I’m not sinning. But all I know is that thinking about Marcus has made me remember that every now and then these terrible things I have done come back to haunt me and make me feel terrible like a never ending last laugh.
After confronting myself about this I confronted him about the dinosaur noises just to see where it would go. “Marcus, what would you say if I told you I find the noises you make annoying?” (In a hypothetical but I’m serious way). He was very OK with this. He said “OK. Then I just won’t do it on your floor.” I asked “What if I said everyone in the whole dorm hated you making those noises?” He said, “I don’t know, I won’t do it that often.” So I said “So someone could just walk up to you right now and say stop making those noises, and you would just stop?” This brought out a different more aggressive, socially aware Marcus I hadn’t seen. He got very intense and the volume of his voice rose. He told me sternly that if someone was just going to come up and be a dick to him he’d probably do it more just to piss him off. I had only heard rumors of this aggressive Marcus. Apparently he’d gotten in a fight (which makes me chuckle inside) with his roommate (another lesser weirdo who sleeps a lot. Marcus has pushed this poor kid into the tiniest corner of their room while he takes up the rest of the space with shelves of junk). Apparently the thing Marcus hates most is when people aren’t up front with him. When people just let him annoy and piss them off and they don’t tell him, only to either go say bad things about him or be mean to him without telling him the problem. I got the sense by the conversation that Marcus not only knows he is weird and causes problems, but also wants to change. That he doesn’t like being pitied or treated like an object because then when people don’t treat him like a human they don’t tell him right or wrong and so he is not molded like the rest of us have been by society around us. He hates that people avoid him, even though he’s introverted. I felt pity for him for a while and still do. His parents seem weird, or at least certainly free-spirited. I have a hunch that Marcus feels like he is so far behind socially that he has just given up. He seeks the contact of others. He wants people to critique him, he said he just doesn’t want people “…smacking him in the head.” He wouldn’t, however, admit to wanting to change later, only that he is a little self centered sometimes. And it is a mute point because regardless of the cause of his state there is still much to learn.
I decided to go back and ask Marcus some questions that I had originally told myself would be rude to ask because I knew what they were getting at, and to be honest, I didn’t want to be asked these questions myself. I decided with help from others that these weren’t all that rude and I was just being a wussy. I asked him if he would agree that he is different, and what he thought about that. I’ll give you the answer later. I asked him why he wore different clothes and seemed not to care even though other people thought x, y, and z of him. He basically said so what? He likes patches and Hawaiian shirts. I asked him if he got picked on or if he heard others talking about him. What life was like here being different, was it difficult? I was surprised by his answer. “Not for the most part. It’s pretty cool here. Nobody really bothers me. If people bother me I just stop paying attention to them.” I asked him if he dressed this way and acted like this for attention. I was convinced by his answer that he has no interest in other people’s interests. To fill in these other blanks. He doesn’t care what others think of him. He doesn’t spend much time, though he admits he spends some, thinking about what others think. I asked him how he was with the ladies, recalling the caterpillar story. He said, “Not too good,” trying to laugh it off in the process. I asked him if he wished he was better with girls. He said, “a little sometimes, but I’m pretty used to it. I guess I wish I were a little less awkward.” Then I asked him if he were lonely. He said he feels lonely sometimes (though I noted by the way his mouth started off that he was probably going to say something more than sometimes), but that when he does he just sleeps or plays video games. I asked him if he wanted or had thought about a family in the future. He said he’d stopped thinking about it because it was so far in the future that he couldn’t know what would happen so would leave it up to chance.
But I want to finish this thought up with the actual answer he gave me when I asked him what he thought about being different. I can set this up well because I was anticipating it so much that time slowed down like it would in the movies. He took a pause for thought in his normal cool way, looking down, his hands kind of messing with each other. “Oh….Well I think everyone’s a little different.”
I still think that Marcus and I are a little more than different. But there’s also enough in common here that I have to concede he’s more than just something Jewell put here for the Eaton boy’s entertainment. Sooner or later most people’ll come around to this, I think. If they don’t it either means I’m weirder than they are, or they just aren’t growing up. Our dads and upbringings sound very similar. We share some interests in movies, enough where we could happily watch one together and enjoy each other’s company. We happen to get along well. He likes Obama. He is concerned about nuclear proliferation and the CTBT (I’d explain, but does it matter?). He likes the outdoors and has seen some cool stuff that interests me. He hates shaving. I hate shaving. He likes the ladies. I like the ladies. And I’m sure there’s a lot more. There is plenty here for anyone to share some time with Marcus if they feel the need. I hope anyone who reads this finds something they can start with. Like I said early on, it’s not like we should pity Marcus, I’m saying just the opposite. There is no reason to pity Marcus, and thus none of us should be afraid to spend a little extra time with him. Don’t do it if you don’t want to. I’m just telling my story and part of his and saying I think I’ve gained a friend here. I really do. For the past week or so since our conversation about dinosaur noises, he’s been sneakily greeting me with those noises. I know it’s him when he does it. I can turn (because he’s never in front of me) and see him smiling. He even knows MY name now and he says it when he says “hello” (he doesn’t differ in his greeting. It’s always “Hello Will” like Ernie from Sesame Street might say it). But it isn’t Ernie and it’s not Safari Man. It’s Marcus.
