"I mean shit, I didn't even go to college and I'm doing better than my fuckin' brother who went to Suffolk Law. He's opening a bookstore somewhere and right now, just from driving the rig and collecting for numbers in the fall, I got myself a pool, a new van--with a nice paint job and shag cahpeting...

"Alright, when I was in school I had my problems. I used to fuck around in class and hang out but now I've gotten my shit together and I'm doin' awright." He was talking to a judge, trying to reverse a bad judgement on his character. No decision. We shook hands and he said goodbye and tole me to "be good."

I didn't know, with the monotonous, time-framed routine of work and school and everything else in America how long I was going to be able to "be good." After all, why make rules and regulations if you know they won't get broken anyway? This life needed a twist to make it fun.

Once I had come down from my "lunch," Buzzy and I decided to have a forklift war. Typical shit. We chased each other around the aisles while Rene was up in Bryce's office getting tomorrow's orders.

Bryce was one of the $70,000-a-year geeks I was talking about. He was one of the company owners, and he looked like a short, fat troll. Everybody hated him because he was always walking around looking like the Pope, turning off radios in the warehouse and flashing nasty frowns and making life a little tougher for everyone. You can't trust a guy who doesn't like music, even if it is top-40.

But at the moment, he was upstairs in his air-conditioned reality, and Buzzy and I were engaging in mechanical terrorism. He was chasing me most of the time, staying just an inch behind me, extending his forks to nudge me in the ass. So I decided to take him down a long aisle.

I floored the accelerator and let it run. As I put my fork down to avoid hitting an overhead girder I saw Blair walking up the perpendicular aisle, and I turned around to warn Buzzy. But it was already too late. Bryce had spotted us.

"HEEEEY!" He shouted in some deep echoe that rumbled from inside his capitalist soul. Buzzy looked around and lost sight of the girder and ploughed right into it at top speed, felling a top tier shelf that let loose several wooden crates onto Buzzy's head, mashing it against the cast-iron supports on his lift.

He slumped against the side of the lift and slid down, falling limply out of the cab and onto the hard concrete floor, half of his head caved in, bereft.

For that moment there was nothing but dripping silence--impending and forever, thoughtless and suspended.

Rene and I and Dave from BC and Bryce were gathered around like gulls, staring. Bryce watched rapt: knowing this could only lead to complications, he nevertheless absorbed the tension-rush that zipped through him the way an incinerator consumes wood.

Then we all looked up, hating each other and ourselves, and looked back at the wreck and my boss heaved a sigh. Hot rivets of hate flew through the warehouse like plumetting birds; the air was thicker than cigarette smoke, and my boss sucked it all in and walked away without saying a word.

Rene cleared us away silently and for the time being, we just joined the work noises of the construction workers who never noticed the accident through the king-cuck-a-plink mechanical tool jungle. We took up brooms, dumped trash, looked at the clock, carried boxes, made work. What, after all, was there to do but continue?