BY LANCE DOILY The day started off abruptly enough when I was awakened by the crash of the dumpster being slammed back down to the pavement by the garbage truck, but at least I knew it was still morning. The last thing I remembered before passing out under the stairwell last night was fighting a much older man for a cinderblock, which I ended up using for a pillow. I found him snoozing behind a stack of tires using a sun-bloated possum carcass to rest his head. I checked for a pulse, quickly ran his pockets for valuables (book of struck matches and a half-smoked Winston butt), and headed out to look for my truck. Out in the parking lot I was immediately assaulted by the nauseating stench of burning rubber and hair. I turned the corner and there was Rex, cookin’ up a rat over a crude fire built inside an old Chevy donut. Turns out he, too, ended up making the cold concrete his bed last night after getting thrown out on his ass by the old lady without enough dough to pony up for a motel. Me and Rex are like that: It’s always all or nothin’ and the consequences be damned. But the closer I got the clearer it was that Rex was workin’ with a full pantload, and Rex workin’ with a full pantload can only mean one thing: we had a company picnic to attend.
The company throws a yearly picnic to encourage camaraderie between the front office and the back warehouse, and Rex has taken to soiling himself thoroughly beforehand to ensure he’s left alone. It seems to work well for him. As for the rest of us, tempers usually flare early and a truce has to be called by Kris the Sales Manager — this usually holds for a couple drinks before hostilities break out and disputes are mediated with brute force. In fact, we have a good time pretending to like the people we work with until the dizzying amount of pollutants we’ve consumed renders the ruse unsustainable. But to be honest with you, there’s no one really even worth mentioning on the sales force, unless you want to know more about suck-ups like Heath Issacs and Ty Sanders — wannabe corporate sword swallowers one and all. I do, however, get along swimmingly with Steve, the designated sales rep on my route and a fellow purveyor of some good, hard livin’. He was in the habit of leaving various combos of pills inside the beer coolers at a lot of my accounts, which gave a nice treasure hunt feel to an otherwise shitty day (although admittedly things tended to get out of hand if I reached in a cooler and came up empty). But enough of that shit, the only real reason to go to these things was to see what kind of torment Royce was going to unleash on the sales department, and this time out he did not disappoint.
Royce is one of us. Even though his education easily dwarfs the rest of the employees put together, he never gets on his high horse around the guys.This dude practiced criminal law for years, traveled the world 10 times over and speaks seven dead languages fluently, but he traded it all in for his first love: taking boxes off a truck, stacking them in a pile, then wheeling the pile to another place. He’s saved our asses on many occasions and promised us a good show. What he had set up looked at first glance like your standard company pig roast, but Royce took us aside and warned us to keep our lunches liquid. Seems he stuffed 20 pounds of Habaneros up the poor pig’s ass, then had them damn near driven to Dallas with a fireplace bellows by some overeager warehouse temp. But Royce had hatched an even more diabolical plan. He showed us his secret weapon, an eyedropper of nuclear-strength hot sauce he got directly from an unincorporated tribe in Papua New Guinea while away on (admittedly questionable) business.They say a dab no bigger than the head of a pin dropped into an oil drum’s worth of chili will have your asshole whistlin’ Davy Crockett for a month.
The whole shithouse went up in flames seconds after the first sandwiches were served, but no one said a word. We weren’t sure if it was out of fear or respect, but they all chowed down and never once piped up that the pig was a “little on the spicy side.” Royce likes to think they’re afraid of him because of a supposed “fire oath” his great-grandfather made with Eberhard Anheuser, but we’re pretty sure they’re just plain shit-scared of us. I must admit the whole thing had kind of a nasty ending: four people had to go to the hospital, and Regina from A/R almost went completely blind after getting splashed by a stray shot of hell-hot pig juice. Well, at least it had a nasty ending for the suit and tie folk. As for us, we followed Royce to the back garage where the sneaky bastard had a couple more pigs on spits, slow-roasting under the supervision of our buddy Boot from repack. We all agreed one would have been more than enough, no one was in the mood to haul back 40 pounds of fuckin’ leftovers, but it wasn’t my place to complain. I had a few beers and headed out to find my truck when I passed Steve gnawing on a loaf of bread to keep the swelling down. I shook his hand and grabbed him a glass of warm milk, but there really wasn’t much else I could do. Poor bastard should have been a driver.
PREVIOUSLY: The Auspicious Debut Of BLOTTO
PREVIOUSLY: The Second Installment Of BLOTTO
PREVIOUSLY: The Third Installment Of BLOTTO
PREVIOUSLY: The Fourth Installment Of BLOTTO
PREVIOUSLY: The Fifth Installment Of BLOTTO
PREVIOUSLY: The Sixth Installment Of BLOTTO
PREVIOUSLY: The Seventh Installment Of Blotto
PREVIOUSLY: How I Came To Know Lance Doily