Fuckface

We have a real relaxed friendly kind of workplace.  It takes a little while for new guys, sometimes, when they first come in, to get used to the atmosphere, because it's not like what they're used to.  Guys'll really get on you.  Fun, teasing stuff, finding stuff to make fun of you for.  Like I've got this nose that's bigger than your average nose, and it's sort of bent to one side because of a time when I was a teenager and I fell off a bridge and landed on a sharp part of a log.  So they'll call me Honker and Jew-Nose, stuff like that.  Wipe their rears with rags and then a couple of them hold me down and shove the rag under my nose and tell me to take a big sniff with my big "Jew-Honker."  Stuff like that.  Funny friend stuff.  Good pranks like that.

It's fun because everyone gets their equal or close-to-equal share of the pranks.  This guy Mike, for example, he's a real bad driver, so he gets teased about that sometimes, the guys call him a bad driver and stuff like that.  This other guy Jim is bald, so people make cracks about his bald dome.  Other stuff, too.  Like one time, they got this locksmith buddy of theirs to change all the locks at my home while I was at work.  And then they told the locksmith not to return my calls so I couldn't get inside that night.  So I had to sleep on a pile of leaves on a night when the temperature dipped below 30 degrees.

Pretty much anything goes with us.  Wives and girlfriends especially.  Like, some guy will hear, "how's the dog" or "how's the filthy pig" if he's not exactly dating a pageant queen or anything, and let's face it, who of us is.  My Rachel comes in for a lot of that, may she rest in peace.  Or the guys will say "I saw your girl yesterday, she looked prettier than ever" and show me a picture of a moldering corpse (not Rachel's, of course, but another one).  It's true she wasn't the prettiest flower (except for in my heart) so it's fair game for them to call her very ugly.  That's just part of being "one of the guys."

There's always a lot of that stuff happening at lunch.  A guy will swipe another guy's dessert treat, or someone will come up from behind me and put a knife to my throat and tell me he's going to kill me, and then everyone will bust out laughing because of how scared I look.  Or the other day, Nick spilled his milk and everyone had a good laugh at him about that.

And then after that, to really make Nick feel foolish, they stripped me naked against my will and threw me in Nick's office and leaned up against the door so I couldn't get out, and Nick had no choice but to see the meager gifts God gave me.  He sure didn't like that!  Well, Nick, sorry, but if you're going to spill your milk at lunch like a goof in front of everyone, that's just the kind of friendly teasing you're going to have to expect to come in for!

Although, I admit I did say to the guys that maybe we should go easier on each other sometimes, when all Nick did was spill a little milk at lunchtime.  They said maybe I was right, and then the next day they printed out a lot of signs that said "KILL YOURSELF" and taped them up all over my work station, along with a noose they hung from the ceiling and some other implements of destruction scattered around.  Well, checkmate, guys!  I guess they were trying to teach me about not always having an appropriate sense of humor about things, and, guilty as charged, unfortunately.  But I definitely didn't complain about that, because I know I can take it.

Just some other funny pranks.  They turned the air way up in my work station and put some ice down on the floor and I slipped on it and concussed myself.  They sprinkled some prescription laxatives on my food one day when our district supervisor was in town and I got reprimanded and fined for using the bathroom so much, even though one time I didn't quite make it to the toilet in time.  Guys would call my phone at late hours of night and early hours of morning until I started taking the phone off the hook when I went to sleep, and that's how I missed the news of my Rachel's worsening and, later, fatal condition.  They ordered me a bunch of pizzas I couldn't pay for, and a big pile of several thousand square feet of gravel that they had delivered to my apartment complex in my name, which caused my landlord to threaten to kick me out until I agreed to a 300 percent rent hike, because nobody could get in or out the one entrance, such was the height and girth of the gravel pile -- everyone had to jump the curb and drive up onto the grass and one elderly woman's car got stuck in a shrub.  They throw sodas at me whenever they see me waiting at the bus stop.  They write sexually explicit and embarrassing notes to women at restaurants and such places and sign them with my name and attach pictures of me so the women behave frightened around me when I come in.  Sometimes when I'm washing my hands in the bathroom, one of them will come up from behind me and slam my head into the mirror until it breaks.

My buddy Greg, I stole one of his pens, and hid it inside his chair, so it would poke his bottom.  That was funny.  Then he pinned me to the ground and pulled my pants down and entered me with a flashlight.  Turnabout being fair play.

Someone killed my dog.  I don't know if that was a "prank," per se, or just an unrelated accident, but the guys at work all knew about it before I told them.

Lots of other stuff.  I'm afraid to go into work every day.  Ha ha.

I asked Pastor Chet for counsel, because I was worried that I was reaching the limits of my ability to cope with some of the pranks in a Christian manner.  He told me to suck it up and made fun of me for being a virgin, which I no longer am, and which he should know, since he was the one who buried Rachel.  It was March and the sunlight was hard and annoyed like a naked fluorescent bulb.  The machine they had there to dig the grave had broken off part-way through because the ground was too cold and hard so the hole had an angle of about 30 degrees at the bottom, but it was deep enough, so they just lowered her in.  I heard her slide down the incline to the foot of her coffin.  I told Pastor Chet, but he said that dead is dead, and as soon as they piled the dirt on her, it wasn't going to make a damn difference anyway.  The guys had rented a little plane with a banner flying behind it that read "FUCKFACE," and it flew over at this point in the service.  I watched it do a few circles around the cemetery.  From down on the ground, its engines sounded like the massage cushion I bought myself for my chair, so I closed my eyes and pretended I was back at home and the little pads were kneading my shoulders.