With as good a temper as I could manage, I took part in the chores my employer gave me like cleaning the bottoms of sinks and cleaning the bottoms of pickling cartons. The whole shop floor was what you might call rugged. I don’t know, I’m not a high-falutin’ guy, just a guy trying to sound high-falutin’ because you all seem smart. I hate coming here. Why is it three therapists this time, and not just you? Who am I supposed to address? All three of you? Okay. Whatever. But let’s make out like it’s not a little weird for me. I’ll tell you later why I hated all of them but for now can we just get to know each other. You know that is how I like it. Otherwise it’s just hard to manage. I could really care less what anyone thinks, but I also like to be natural. Schadenfreude is what they call the feeling I feel, if you want one word. Schadenfreude.

Okay, you know how I like to go to the bathroom. We’ve talked about it at sessions over and over again. I won’t make them listen to me talk about how it’s like orgasmic, for me. But I had to go take a bathroom break one day and there I was waiting to release and I heard knocking on the door. So I’m like, who the fuck is it? It turns out it’s the assistant manager, seeing where I was, telling me I need to get back to the floor. I tell him it’ll be a minute and I take a minute and when I come out he's standing right there. He tells me I’m stealing company time and I tell him if you gotta go you gotta go. You know from before that I don’t fuck around with my digestion. It’s sacred. To me, at least. Well, apparently this assistant manager — Jacques was his name — didn’t appreciate the “gotta go” theory of excretion and he docked my pay an hour saying I took an extra break. I look in my bank account the end of the week and see my check was short and ask him. We start arguing and I say some line like “I won’t clean the shit off these machines if I can’t take a shit myself” and people started watching us yelling at each other but I don’t give a fuck because I know they all hate Jacques too. Who did he think he was? Some big shot? Some big player? Assistant floor manager for a pickling processing and bottling factory? Get the fuck out. He told me to go home. I did. He told me to wait for a call from HR. So I waited.

It wasn’t like I wanted to affect everyone in the whole factory with my decision to make revenge but I think sometimes there’s collateral damage when you are carrying out an act of righteousness. And that is what I call it. Righteous. Whether you like it or not, this is our lot in life. This is our time to spare. We need to do everything we can to bring balance and justice to the world. If you had worked there, if you had seen the floating ponds of cucumber slices just sitting in that sweaty vinegar in that sticky air of that stuffy fieldhouse-turned-factory, you would have had the same feeling in your stomach that I had. It was almost like I had to make sure there was a comeuppance for this motherfucker because he was the worst manifestation of the whole fucking thing. I organized a protest once at a shipping facility where I worked when I was younger. It was okay. We did a sit-in. We made demands. They called in the cops, they beat the shit out of us, we each got 15K in a lawsuit, then we were out on the streets, unemployed. Most severance pay I ever got, but also the most painful. So I knew that wouldn’t work here. But you would have wanted to take a 16-ounce Snapple bottle of Strychnine and dump it into the pickling container, the same one you knew this asshole Jacques tasted from every morning, even though he wasn’t supposed to – they had the sampling team assistant come and grab a small bucket full for the taste tasters on the sampling team. He wasn’t supposed to be eating them, but he did because he thought the rest of us had germs, so he wanted the one with the least germs, from that marinating pool of vinegar and cucumbers and spices. Well, I added a spice. And my plan was to just do it right before he did and watch him spasm and die in front of everyone, then drain that container before anyone else could eat out of it. I didn’t know that he was getting pickles from there for all the other managers, too. So they’re dead. What do you want me to say?