When I got out of the Army, I took a job with a certain home improvement box store. It was a brainless, shit job. In no time at all, I was a supervisor.

My job entailed compelling brain dead high school-aged stoners to show up for and actually do some work. And here’s what was super about that chore: I was saddled with an assortment of society’s saddest freaks: the retarded shopping cart pusher, the three-kids-with-different-fathers-at-23 cashier, and the bitter, man-hating Scottish woman who told me she’d sooner kill herself than listen to me. As though that weren’t, ummm, interesting enough . . . amongst all the small penis power-tool compensating, mullet-wearing rednecks was my boss, who can only be described as a flaming Queen. And my immediate supervisor was a female version of 80s rock star Kip Winger, only with manlier features.

The job afforded ample people watching opportunities; the quality of which was a socio-anthropologist’s wet dream. We had homeless crack heads wander in and shit in the showroom toilets, wannabe mafioso strong arm the kids in the lumber department, and DIY dykes with frosted boy haircuts and every item in Carhartt’s Fall fashion line. Still, the worst customers –besides the thieving Grandmas– were the shit-house-rat-crazy lunatics. Every once in a while, someone went nuts. For whatever reason, the dust, the heat, or the smell of paint, the crazies always showed up in the lumber yard. Sure, we had our share of belligerent psychos at the cash registers and curtains and lighting, but nothing compared those in the lumber yard

Oh boy, story time . . .

On one summer day, the craziness rose to a fever pitch as the old folks say. I was standing on the Front End, which Box Store-talk for the aisle that runs to the front of and perpendicular to the cash register area. So I’m on the Front End and I hear yelling coming from the Customer Service area. Before we go any further, you should know that Customer Service is also the Intelligence Dead Zone. Typically staffed by cute, younger girls — it is an area devoid of both common sense and advanced reasoning capability.  So what you’re left with is the creamy center of uneducated, young America; you know, idiots.

So  I mosey on over to get a looksie and there he is, the ‘roid rage retarded redneck. He’s screaming at another supervisor and this mousey twig of a girl from customer service. When I step in, all I’m thinking about is getting the oaf to stop scaring the hell out of the customers. What I get instead is a 200-pound Mongo lookalike who, without warning or reason, whips around and wraps two banana-bunch hands around my neck and begins a Homer Simpson reenactment. He literally lifts me off my feet and shakes me like a ragdoll. In the meantime, I’m making starry-eyed eye contact with the supervisor and customer service twit, both of whom are standing there like slack jawed yokels watching pa win the big pink monkey at the carnival.

For fuck’s sake, would someone please kill this guy?

No?

Okay.

“For some reason I thought of my first fight–with Tyler.”

I kicked the guy squarely in the cajones; he immediately dropped like any CBS sitcom during the past five years. He dropped me, and subsequently fell to his knees. So I threw a fist into the side of his face and sent him completely to the floor. Know that this surprised no one more than me.  I am all of 5′ 5″ and 155 lbs. and historically not a fighter. I mean, I was in the Army, but I was on a Tank. I never had to walk up to the enemy and punch him in the nose. No, we liked to do that sort of stuff from afar, at night, at high speeds. But there I was in downtown Frederick, MD in broad daylight eyeball-to-eyeball — trying to save my life from a complete stranger at work.

File under: What. The. Fuck.

I scrambled away and ‘roid rage retarded redneck chased after, only he wasn’t looking for blood. Apparently, some time between when my douchebag coworkers stood watching the troglodyte strangle me, and said troglodyte crashing to the floor, there was an epiphany to be had. It went something like this: Ooops, I’m committing assault & battery. So then ‘roid rage retarded redneck was chasing after me to apologize. I was not so much in the mood for that and said so, by hurling a chair at him. Chair hurling is a widely accepted form of non-verbal communication.

This went on until someone who wasn’t be chased (me) by a madman (him) decided to intervene. And wouldn’t you know it, there’s my old high school friend, Pat. This guy looks like the pudgy love-child of Jack Black and Kevin Smith, only hairier and uglier. Maybe dumber too. Anyway, Pat breaks the whole thing up, sends the guy away and  takes me into his office. Pat was the Lumber Dept. manager.

After telling him what happened, Pat went and checked the security tapes. I’m very trustworthy, when backed up by video evidence.

Pat asks, “What do you want us to do about this?”

Us? Fuck, my high school friend is now a “company man” for a second-rate DIY store.

The rest of the conversation went something like this:

Me: I think I’d like you to fire every employee you see on video who stood and watched me get beaten by Mongo.

Pat: We’re not going to do that.

Me: I wasn’t finished.

Pat: Sorry. Go ahead.

Me: Then I want Mongo arrested for battery.

Pat: We really don’t need that kind of trouble. Be reasonable; isn’t there something we can do to make this, you know, go away.

Remember, this is my high school friend. We’ve known each other, I don’t know, 8 years?  He just watched a video of employees letting me get my ass kicked for no good reason by the ‘roid rage retarded redneck, and no one’s getting fired or arrested. And, oh yeah, I need to tell him how to make this go away.

Here’s where, 13 years later, I shake my head at a missed opportunity.

Me: Then I quit.

I think we all know what I should have done.

Yea, I’d be standing in a Montana stream, drinking a Fat Tire, and pulling rainbow trout until the sun went down.

The bitch of it is, because I didn’t sue the living shit out of the company, 8 years later I got strangled again…by my boss. That’s next time.