Defending The Status Quo

What went through Rawlins’ mind as he opened his locker was, Houston, we have a problem.

The crazy thing was, he had taken stock of his life that very morning as he was putting on his uniform, just before the excrement had hit the fan blades with a definite splat, in a manner of speaking. And, if he gave it any thought – which he didn’t do very often – as lives went, it wasn’t a bad one.

Rawlins, Jeremy Edward, according to the plastic photo-ID card he was issued, back when he was first hired as a part-time security guard by the museum-gallery, seven years ago. Now he was 29 years old and that thin rectangle of plastic conferred an elevated status. It was tenuous, but it confirmed that you existed as more than just a microdot on the homo sapien landscape. You were special, and that was a small comfort.

Away from officialdom, he was Jer, for short. Jer was what Laura called him most of the time, except when she snippily reverted to his last name when she was yanking his chain for some small personal lapse. Like when he accidentally left the toilet seat up or forgot to put the trash down the chute on his way out the door. But, it was all good. He loved Laura and Laura loved him. And then there was Shirl. She also called him Jer, and sometimes My Jer, a term of endearment, which, he supposed, was the way of the world with mothers and sons.

Shirl had told him, several months ago when he had been feeling dispirited about his lot in life, that, he had, she thought, finally arrived at some level of respectability, however that might be measured. Her list: A steady job. Decent pay. A promotion. The promise of a brighter future. It was a good place to be, Shirl had said. And, Rawlins had to admit, over the years, Shirl had been right, almost all of the time.

But today, that equilibrium had been upset. He hoped that the disciplinary review panel possessed a few open minds. And he worried about how Shirl would take it if everything he had worked for so far, went down the drain.

Shirl would be disappointed. He suddenly felt compelled to call her, then it struck him with some force that Shirl had died, eleven days ago. The aching loss that he had carried heavily within him had been briefly nulled by the adrenalin of today’s events. It now came back acutely; a sharp stab that went to his very core.

He had been a bona fide security staff-supervisor on salary at the gallery now, for more than two years. The personal background checks alone were enough to set you apart from the crowd. A pass provided distinction, some cachet, marked you as a solid, trustworthy person. They took a deep dive into your background, checked out your family and friends, did everything but look up your butt with a flashlight. He had been worried, what with his family’s sketchy history; everyone was into sex, drugs, rock and roll, and worse, back then, including his grand-parents, and parents, according to Shirl.

But he had aced the background check and had received the coveted security clearance. Now, there was no more begging for extra hours or scratching around for some gig work to augment his paycheck. He had, in a word, arrived. He was finally considered a solid citizen in a good comfortable place, could visualize that rosy future.

But because of those two nutters coming in to the gallery today to cause trouble, he just might lose everything.

He wondered what Shirl would have thought about the two fanatics. Zealous, reformed flower-child that she had been, probably a whole lot. Shirl, who had raised him on her own, working two jobs, clerk and bartender, and had instilled a work ethic in him that, she had emphasized many times, was the exact opposite of his father’s, the father who had already long left the picture when he was born, and hadn’t been seen since.

Shirl would probably have said that the two sad excuses for humanity wearing the matching JUST STOP OIL T-shirts who had come in to the gallery with the zip-lock bag of dog turds were privileged idiots with far too much time on their hands. And she would have been right, as always. But that wouldn’t help save Rawlins’ job now if the disciplinary review panel decided that he had used excessive force when he had stopped the two miscreants from destroying the painting.

After all, how was he to know what they had in that plastic bag? It might well have been something really dangerous or destructive. And his job at the gallery was to guard the paintings and sculptures, protect the art, wasn’t it?

He might have stopped them sooner, de-escalated the whole thing, if he had twigged to what they were actually up to, earlier. He had spotted them in passing, when he was making his first round of staff-checks. They were standing with their heads together in conversation in front of one of the big Rothkos. They had seemed harmless. Probably arts-faculty students, nothing more, nothing less.

And they were wearing the round circle-stickers on their clothes that marked them as paid-up gallery-members, financial supporters, someone potentially important, as opposed to the differently-coloured-and-marked visitor-stickers designed for the great unwashed, who were looked down upon but tolerated, by gallery management. Rawlins knew this to be true; he had overheard the snide asides and crude comments.

He reflected that the gallery was truly an upstairs-downstairs model when it came to the hierarchy, complete with ingrained condescension that many of the management and specialist staff cultivated. Rawlins had learned this early on as a security guard, when he had been on the receiving end of some particularly-biting, curatorial snark.

He’d known little about the fine arts, until he attended Carleton U. And he wasn’t an expert now, by any means, but he had learned a few things in his art-history classes, enough to distinguish a Renoir from a Rembrandt, or, for that matter, a Monet. And he had broadened that knowledge, working at the gallery.

But the several times that he had tried to engage the curatorial staff in a friendly conversation about art, he had been rudely rebuffed. Apparently there was to be a distinct separation between the lords and the help, so to speak. So, he would stay in his lane, for now.

But gallery security was his business, and he was still smarting by the decision that had been taken to elevate today’s incident to the disciplinary review panel. Why? They had hired him to keep order and protect the exhibits, and he had done just that.

There was a lot to mull over now, as he changed out of his uniform in the locker room, and got ready to go off-shift. Who would have thought that a couple of art-students, who outwardly identified themselves as gallery members, financial supporters, were anything but harmless?

But it had turned out that the member-stickers on their clothing were a ruse; the gallery memberships actually belonged to their parents, who would now hire top-drawer legal counsel to shield their wayward progeny from the punishment that they most-surely deserved, but would most-likely avoid. So someone else would have to take the blame for today’s mess. It was the way of bureaucracy. In order for management to protect their own bottoms; they always found a convenient scapegoat.

It wasn’t as if there hadn’t been warnings. That the two copycats had chosen this venue to act out their obsessions had been a surprise however, even though Rawlins, personally, had briefed his security team last week regarding similar, senseless, protest incidents ̶ cake, mashed potatoes, tomato soup, that had been flung at paintings – in other major art galleries around the world – Barcelona, Glasgow, Paris, Florence and the Vatican, as well as several galleries in London. One nut-job in The Hague had glued a hand to the gallery wall next to Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring, and another crazy even tried to paste his head to same painting. 

Despite the protests taking place elsewhere, and his taking precautions with the extra security briefings, Rawlins just hadn’t believed in his heart of hearts that it would happen here in the city that fun forgot. But he had been wrong.

The police had finally arrived following the kerfuffle, and, after handcuffing the two, had recorded a few details – one male and one female suspect, not related, both 19 years of age, locals, and both lived with parents –but that impersonal data had not captured the essence of who they were.

Owen and Mandy – Rawlins had learned their names during the disastrous encounter – were self-proclaimed ‘crusaders for change’. Owen was slightly more than six feet tall, running to chunkiness, with a thorn-bush of dusty brown hair over a narrow, pallid, waxy forehead. Mandy was maybe five-seven, with curly black hair pulled into a pony-tail, and wide-set blue eyes in a striking, heart-shaped face.

The two seemed totally disconnected from what Shirl would have called real life. They had reminded Rawlins of a couple he had seen in one of Shirl’s old VHS movies, Bonnie and Clyde. A deadly combination of adolescent arrogance, ignorance and zealotry.

Besides the T-shirt, Mandy sported designer-labeled, ripped-in-the-knees jeans that looked like they were ready for the trash bin, but that Laura had told him cost as much as the used Honda Civic that Shirl had bought last year, so that she wouldn’t have to take the bus to work.

And Owen, her sidekick-in-mayhem, had on a pair of pointy-toed, multi-coloured dyed-leather shoes that Rawlins knew for a fact couldn’t be had for less than five-hundred bills. You didn’t buy expensive threads like that, working in fast-food.

Shirl would have said that that was part of the problem. Youthful privilege, without responsibility was a recipe for trouble.

If the fates had played different cards, it might have been Donnie Bryden who would now be under the electron microscope of the disciplinary review panel. Poor, hapless Donnie, only a week into the job and green as grass in May, had been first on the scene, when the two had stripped off their outer clothes and exposed the ostensible purpose of their visit, stenciled on their T-shirts.

Green or not, Donnie knew better than to try and handle a couple of anarchists on his own, so he had radioed for backup. And it had all gone downhill from there. Rawlins recalled what had taken place then with a mixture of puzzlement and uneasiness, as if he was trying to remember a troublesome dream. How had everything gone so wrong?

With all the high-profile works that they had to choose from; Rothkos, Newmans, Sisley, Cezanne, Coleville, Gaugin, Munch, and Klimpt, to name just a few, why did they pick on Portrait of Lucien Pissarro, a little-known canvas painted in 1920 by William Strang, and hanging in a side gallery, well out of sight and away from the mainstream traffic, to smear excrement on? And then it became clear. The exhibit-label indicated that the painting by Strang, was British. Rawlins knew that the label was in error, Strang had actually been born in Scotland, but that was beside the point now.

Owen’s T-shirt, it transpired, was just an excuse that covered for his larger, hidden agenda. Owen, still just a boy, really – federal law stated that a nineteen-year-old was considered a legal adult, but that had been proven many times to be a specious presumption – had acquired a worldview that he had evidently absorbed wholesale from the Internet.

“This gallery”, he shouted, “is on indigenous land!”

At this, the girl’s eyes widened, and she turned on him, like a ferret.

“Owen!” she snapped, “This is about oil!”

“Shut up, Mandy! It’s about what I say it’s about!”

Oh ho, thought Rawlins, and from then on he focused his attention mainly on Owen, who seemed the more volatile of the two. He had thought briefly that the pair might be linked romantically, but Owen’s outburst seemed to dispel that notion.

Owen now flung out his accusation again at the gathering security staff who had converged on the scene following Donnie’s call for backup, as well as at a half-dozen or so visitor-gawkers who had buzzed in from the main exhibits like bluebottle flies to a dumpster.

Mandy, who had been glaring at her co-conspirator, suddenly decided that it was time that the T-shirts got equal attention. She raised her fist over her head, and shouted.

“And you should all just stop using oil, too!”

Owen would not be overshadowed, and dueling mantras in escalating volume began to echo back and forth off the gallery walls.

“Colonizers will be held to account!”

“Just stop oil!!”

Rawlins, who had arrived with two other security staff within a minute and a half of Donnie Bryden’s call, had been briefly dumfounded at the bizarre tableau. And then he had taken action.

When the shouting was registering about ten decibels, Rawlins saw Mandy lateral a one-gallon zip-lock bag filled with…. what?,… something dark and viscous, to her partner in crime. Owen snapped open the bag, locked eyes with Rawlins, and turned to fling the contents onto the Strang painting, his expression one of calculated triumph.

 And Rawlins simply reacted.

Looking back, he could have, maybe should have, let the two malefactors smear the full baggie of dog-dung all over Portrait of Lucien Pissarro instead of doing what he did, which was step forward and deck the smirking Owen, with a single powerful punch.

This had the effect of momentarily silencing the scene, as Owen’s eighth of a ton thudded to the floor, his eyes rolled back in his head to where only the whites were visible. But the brief quiet was immediately replaced with angry shrieks as an infuriated Mandy leaped forward, fastened herself onto Rawlins’ back like a leech, and began pummeled him fiercely, with her fists.

“He’s dead! You’ve killed him! You creep-bastard! You son of a bitch!”

All Rawlins could do to protect himself was to shield his arms over his head and crouch down, hunched over to resemble a turtle, while scrunching sideways under his flailing burden to avoid the mess that had squished out of the bag onto the floor. After about twenty seconds, Donnie Bryden and another security guard gingerly grasped the screeching Mandy’s T-shirt and lifted her off his back, like they were peeling an orange.

At the time, the drunken sense of elation when the arrogant shite had hit the floor had felt marvelous, but now Rawlins was coping with the hangover. Apparently, according to the gallery management, you weren’t actually allowed to touch someone who had entered the building under false pretenses, let alone punch them, even if they were committing a criminal act and were intent on damaging or destroying a priceless work of art that you had specifically been hired to protect. Where was the logic in that?

So, on top of Shirl’s fatal heart attack, today’s fiasco had added the weight of a gravestone to his mental state; the burden of both had fueled a downer that was so intense that it thickened the air in the small room.

Rawlins gradually realized that he had been standing in deep contemplation by his locker in a state of partial undress – one arm in, and one arm out, of his sweatshirt – for a couple of minutes, when Jenkowski shouldered through the door to take up the afternoon shift, and poked him in the ribs.

“Hey man, what’s happening?”

“You haven’t heard?”

"No, man. I just got in.”

Rawlins liked big Nick Jenkowski, so he told him.

Jenkowski was simpatico.“Hey, man. It was a bad scene, all around. You had no choice.” White teeth flashed. “I’d have probably done the same thing.”

And that seemed to be the nub of it. Common sense exonerated Rawlins. But that wouldn’t cut any ice with the bureaucracy. He sat, half-dressed and seething, engulfed in his resentment of the two troublemakers who had come slashing into his often dull but well-ordered life like a straight razor, and an illogical officialdom.

He finally hung up his uniform and began to gather his resolve. Shirl’s accumulated wisdom was now in a brass urn, waiting for when Laura and Rawlins made the trip to Shirl’s special place in Algonquin Park, to scatter the ashes. But, Shirl would have told him straight out, get over it! 

He considered his options for the future, reeling in the thoughts like shiny salmon and arranging them neatly in his mental creel. He still didn’t know what he didn’t know, so there was no point in sweating about what might happen, even though it would most likely follow a predictable path.

The disciplinary review panel would do its thing, and come up with a decision, probably to fire him. But he would grieve it with the union, and they would support him, if only to show they were sticking it to gallery management. Reasonable people knew that, surely, there was a social order, a status quo, to be maintained, and defended. If not, the world would be in total chaos.

When he was done dressing, Rawlins looked around the locker room for Donnie Bryden. He suddenly felt remiss in wallowing in his own misfortune and not giving his junior staffer the due credit he deserved in handling the protest. He caught up with Bryden out near Maman, the thirty-foot-high bronze and steel arachnid-sculpture that towered menacingly over the flagstone walkway by the gallery front entrance.

“Wait up, Donnie.” he called. “Hey, good job, today. How about we go for a beer, to celebrate? I’m buying.”

-30-