Mr. Blog's Tepid Ride

January 10, 2013

Marvin Ming is no stranger to this blog.

No! No, sorry, what I meant to say is that there are none stranger than Marvin Ming in this blog.

He shanghaied me on a bizarre trip to Atlantic City, and the rest of the Eastern Seaboard, with his family, none of whom got along with any other family member.

He more or less somehow pulled a Valentine’s Day prank on himself.

He pranked me with a phony phony ticket to a sci-fi convention. (No, that it is not a typo. It was a false counterfeit ticket.)

He brought me to a complete stranger’s birthday party where we were the only guests.

He worked as a general manager at a brothel.

He once, in a traffic dispute, drop-kicked a taxi.

He made his own XXX Gumby Claymation cartoons.

And I have only just scratched the surface of Marvin’s Brooklyn Public Library Underground Pornography Sharing scheme.

I’ve described him in the past:

Marvin was (and may still be) Chinese.  He also hated being Chinese because he had many very weird and bizarre family issues, mostly dealing with his mother. He also had a strange sense of honor and likened himself to a Klingon. This is true. Worf from Star Trek was his role model. He occasionally slept on a workout bench instead of his bed to remove himself from “temptation.” Being very leery of the answer I never asked him to explain further. Once, to pay off a debt, he brought his brother in to work for him in the clothing store. He just ordered his brother to do his work and for some reason the bosses let him get away with it for a while, until they realized that, insurance-wise, they were in a position of extreme liability.

Marvin had strange speech patterns and strange voices that he would put on. Imagine Ted Baxter as a short Chinese guy who is worried about appearing honorable and is in love with Star Trek and you’ll only be sort of wrong. He also speaks in a higher register.

Why must I be dragged into this?

As you may imagine, I have nothing to do with him these days.

So as you read yesterday, Audrey, whom I worked with, had a bit of a B.O. problem. I mean that in the same sense that Snoop Dogg (neé Lion) has smoked a bit of pot. About the same time, in the same department, I worked with Marvin Ming. This was quite an auspicious time in that store’s history, since also at that time, working along with myself and my friend Marc, there was a complete burnout named Eddie working there. Eddie will come along in part three of this trio of odoriferous tales, coming Tuesday, next week. The less I tell you now about him the better.

So Marvin was working the same job as Audrey- unloading trucks, cleaning bathrooms, hauling trash. The good thing about working with Audrey was that if you both worked the same shift, she had no problem doing all the smelly bathroom cleaning and trash lifting while you did the less smelly tasks of sweeping the floor and locking the gates.

I was once sitting in the break room. (Truth be told, I could often be found there during this era. Of course I made my own schedule and was my own boss so no one could say squat about it, but that was later on.) As I sat there, a group of girls who worked in the store came in looking for me.

I wasn’t the most well-liked guy in the store. I had, I admit, a bit of an attitude and just generally felt like I was better than the rest of them. To put it bluntly, I was a sort of a jerk. So normally these girls would not come in and ask me for anything, unless it was work-related. This had to be bad. And it was.

“We want you to talk to Marvin for us.”

Since this a post about smelly people you can figure this one out for yourself.

I refused. No way. How could I be expected to tell a guy who was marginally a friend that all the girls in the store think he smells like old tuna? (Yes, that was a quote.) What’s worse, and I asked for no details on this, it seemed that it was his… pants… and specifically his… crotch… that smelled the worst, though he stank all over.

Would you really want to tell anyone that?

Well somehow I did. I took him aside in the maintenance area and, with great embarrassment and shuffling of feet and completely avoiding eye contact, made it perfectly clear that I was only the messenger, that I had no clue what they were talking about, etc, and yada yada yada, he stank like old tuna.

It did not go over well.

He roared. Not screamed, roared, like a tiger would. Then he started yelling, not at me but at the world at large, that he showers every night, except last night, but it was ok since he rinsed himself in the sink that morning, and that he always changes his pants but it looks like he doesn’t because he owns a dozen pairs of the same colored pants and they all have the same stains, and his crotch does not stink any more or less than their crotches, and a bunch of stuff that had me slowly backing away from him and into a less deserted part of the store.

The rest of this I only saw in flashes as I kept looking away, and I only know remember it in bits and pieces as my mind keeps trying to erase it.

As he ranted, he yelled “I want to you tell them I did this!” and grabbed a can of Lysol. He then proceeded to give himself a thorough decontamination shower with the Lysol. His head, his shoes, and everything in-between was thoroughly drenched with Lysol. And I do mean “everything in-between” since he gave special attention to his pants and crotch, going so far as to drop his pants and, while standing in his boxers, give special, um “scrubbing” attention to his crotch, both above and below the underwear.  

This must be my blogging Viet Nam since as I type this I am having horrible, PTSD-like flashbacks to that day.

Well it was done and I staggered out and found the girls and told them “I did it.” I then went outside for some fresh air,

Of course Marvin now smelled even worse, like he was swimming in lemon-scented disinfectant and smelled so much worse that the manager first asked him what he did to himself, and them sent him home. The girls came to me later to find out what the heck happened and they were appalled.

In Marv’s defense, I do not recall thinking he smelled at all. And I wondered then, as I do now, how they knew it centered on his crotch.

TO BE CONTINUED TUESDAY: EDDIE’S LUNCHBOX

And as I did some image searches, I came across this great meme that I had to post here too:

Tags: bmj2k, decontamination, health, Lysol, Marvin Ming, Mr. Blog, Mr. BTR, personal hygiene, smelly people, stank, star trek, stink, Worf