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jackfollmanwriter-blog · 6 years ago

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Revenge

I had never seen so much of that fake bronzer smeared all over a human being in my entire life. Shit. This wasn’t going to be easy. I thought about backing out, giving the client his money back, but I just couldn’t.

The reason I was so glum was that disgusting fake bronzer was slapped all over the comically-muscular body of a man who was posing in front of a modest crowd in a purple Speedo.. The orange douche’s name was Anthony Verano and it was my job to kick his ass after a regional bodybuilding qualifier Northeast New Jersey.

The service I offered was simple. You wanted a guy beaten up, I was your guy. I caught the guy at just the right time, picked a fight with him, and won, always won.

It wasn’t honest work, but it was money. Good money for a high school dropout whose lightly-burgeoning MMA career was swamped by ejections for biting and amphetamines. I was lucky to have the gig.

The customers usually found me through the grapevine. Word of mouth, the bars I bounced at from time to time and a Reddit free porn forum where I talked about what I did. They paid me a fair fee and I did their dirty work. My only stipulation was documented proof or third-party testimony which confirmed the poor sucker I was rolling in-fact deserved it.

I had always been a tough guy. When I was 18 one of my victims was named Tyler and he made the grave mistake of laughing at me picking my nose at a stop light.

Long story short. I followed Tyler to the parking lot of the Subway where he was a “sandwich artist,” dragged him out of his car and took him behind the mall and beat the ever loving shit out of him. Broken nose, broken jaw, several broken teeth, broken ribs and a collapsed lung later, Tyler went to the hospital and almost fucking died and I went to jail for nine months (thank you overcrowding and good behavior).

I genuinely regretted what I did to Tyler. I tried to apologize to him and his family, but they rightfully wanted none of it. They told me to get lost, which I did, until I sideways stumbled into this profession and felt I was absolving myself for the sins I laid upon Tyler with every big, bad bully that I brutalized.

Anthony Verano was a typical case. He got drunk and picked a fight with a 140-pound Best Buy cashier at a bar and wrestled him to the ground in front of his online date over a spilled Red Bull-vodka.

Now Anthony had it coming.

I was concerned by Anthony’s guido hero name before I even saw him. The fact that I was told I could find him at a bodybuilding event made things even worse. I wasn’t entirely scared off though. Most of time these bodybuilders were show ponies. Impressive in the stable, but slow and soft on the track.

I followed Anthony to a 90s Accord he was probably borrowing from his mom based on the amount of stuffed animals suck to the dashboard and stalked his car until it pulled into a watering hole called The Vapor Lounge. Oh God. I was going to have to go into some kind of vaping circle jerk or hookah lounge. Kill me.

I painfully paid the $10 cover and tried to avoid eye contact with the bouncer in case we knew each other. The good news was I could tell by the almost complete lack of sound I heard coming from inside the place that it was likely dead. Which was good. It would be much easier to start a fight with Anthony if he was by himself.

The spark started easily. I stared down Anthony from across the room while he vaped something that I imagined smelled like cotton candy. The pink kind. The blue was too hardcore for this puss.

It only took 45 seconds of gazing for Anthony to respond with a defiant “sup.” Too easy. Foolish Anthony.

“Wanna step outside?” I set it all up with just those three little magical words.

Within just a few minutes, Anthony and I were face-to-face in the parking lot trading mean mugs.

“I know you from somewhere?” Anthony got things started when we were still a couple yards away from each other.

“I don’t know. I think I’ve maybe seen your orange Jack-o-Lantern glow somewhere,” I said as we moved closer to each other.

I admit I’m thoroughly embarrassed about using the world’s lamest language, but I had to keep it authentic with the parking lot tough guy talk. Not seem too deliberate. No time for Shakespeare.

Neither of us needed to keep throwing out appetizers before the full meal. We were ready.

Anthony and I charged each other like bull elks in a nature documentary. Our bulky arms locked like the great antlers of those masculine beasts.

I could tell something was very wrong as soon as my palm slid down Anthony’s well-greased bicep. I immediately knew I had finally bit off more than I could chew. Anthony Verano from Piscataway, New Jersey was not one of those fake tough guy bodybuilders pumped full of water. He was the real fucking deal.

“I told you not to fuck with me,” Anthony screamed into my ear just as he officially took hold of the upper hand.

Anthony drove me into the ground like the world’s best linebacker and wasted no time in throwing blows straight at my unprotected face. He was a pro. Within about four or five shots from his fists, I felt like I was going to black out.

“Pussy,” was the last word I heard before one last pound from Anthony’s hand put my lights out.

I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t fucking breathe. That was all I could think once I woke up. My body sat itself up before I even opened my eyes and spit out what I could tell was blood based on the taste and texture that I felt dribble off my cracked lips.

I screamed out when I felt my body heave out a thick stream of vomit to accompany the blood.

A machine gun shot of laugher just off to my left forced me to finally use all the might in the muscles in my face and open up my swollen eyes.

The first thing I saw was a wall plastered with glossy photos of a hulking man posing on a stage who I quickly recognized as Anthony, complete with the purple Speedo I saw him wearing earlier.

“Fuck,” I exhaled.

I figured I would wake up in the hospital, doped up and hooked to the sweetness of an IV, not some juice head’s childhood bedroom and personal shrine.

A laugh ripped out and I was able to track it down to the other side of the room. I laid eyes on Anthony sitting in a rickety office chair, shirtless and rippling with a bowie knife in his hand and more posters of himself flexing behind him.

“I would expect a poster of Batman or Odell Beckham Jr. in the bedroom of some kid in his mom’s house in the shitty part of Jersey, not a narcissistic art gallery,” I snarked through cracked teeth and bleeding gums.

Yeah, I couldn’t resist being a smart ass, even in this dire situation. I figured the guy was going to do whatever he planned on doing to me anyway.

Back to being fully awake, I tried to wiggle in my chair, but couldn’t budge. I felt the hard plastic of zip ties around my wrists and ankles.

“Dude, you need to understand it was nothing personal. Some dipshit in Bayone paid me to start a fight with you.”

“Oh I understand,” Anthony cut me off. “I don’t give a shit. This isn’t about you. It’s about me.”

“Well, based on your poster shrine that was pretty obvious.”

Anthony laughed and got up from his chair, revealing he was wearing just his customary purple Speedo.

“Please God man, just don’t do anything sexual to me. You can beat the shit out of me, again, I don’t care, just…

“Shut the fuck up Adam!” Anthony screamed at me.

Adam? He knew my name. How the fuck did he know my name? I carried no ID with me, or phone when I did my work.

“I have a very specific agenda for how this is going to go,” Anthony said in a calm and composed manner which didn’t quite fit the situation of a grown man in purple underwear standing in front of of a bruised and bleeding man in a childish bedroom.

“Oh I’m sure you do,” I said sarcastically. “Are you reading from the script for Taken?”

I watched Anthony bend down and pull a sheet off something which had been resting behind his chair. The disappearance of the sheet revealed a podium, about knee-high. He stepped up onto the thing, squared me up and took a very deep breath.

After his exhale, Anthony broke down into what I can only describe as a “pose down” as Anthony proceeded to bust out into just about every kind of body builder pose imaginable. I closed my eyes after about 10 seconds. It was too much to take in.

I kept my eyes closed until I felt something wet drip onto the top of my right eyelid.

“What the fuck?”

I saw Anthony’s golden bronze-smeared hand dripping Super Glue onto my upper right eyelid before I could try and move.

“Hold still, you’re only going to make it worse,” Anthony whispered as he turned his attention to my left eye and shoved the tube of glue right towards my eyeball.

I tried to blink my right eye, but the skin wouldn’t budge, just burn. It was officially glued open and my eye was locked on one of Anthony’s posters taped up on the wall.

“Just do whatever you’re going to do motherfucker. I don’t even care anymore,” I spat up at Anthony. “If I’m going to look at you posing looking like a gold figure on a trophy, I don’t care.”

“No!” Anthony screamed right in my glued face and then walked away towards the desktop computer set up on a rickety desk across the room.

Anthony’s momentary distance gave me some time to catch my breath and try to think of a plan. Unfortunately the best I was able to come up with was just scream as loud as I could and hope someone was around to hear me and investigate, or call the cops. It was a pretty shitty plan, especially given that I definitely had the feeling that I was in a house and not an apartment building. I could be in the woods in western New Jersey or deep Pennsylvania for all I knew.

Figuring all screaming would do is make things worse, I just kept my mouth shut and tried to figure out what Anthony was doing over by the computer. He had turned away from the electronics and was now messing with the bedsheet he took off the podium earlier. I watched him walk around me and spun myself around in the chair to see him pinning the white sheet up onto the wall on top of his self indulgent collage.

“Oh, no, how could you bare to cover up any of those wonderful pictures.”

Anthony didn’t respond, just silently tacked all four corners of the sheet up onto the wall at about eye level. It was a good strategy, the cold, barren silence would make me go mad quicker than sarcastic shots back and forth or even weird, sadomasochistic denials.

Once the sheet was fully tacked up, Anthony walked back around me and started messing with the computer again. I went to spin around, but an angry scream from Anthony stopped me.

“Eyes on the screen.”

I stopped myself in mid-swivel and turned back to the sheet, my back still fully to Anthony.

“Is that dirty sheet the screen? Man, this is the shittiest movie theater I’ve ever been to. I want my money back,” I said.

“Enough,” Anthony muttered.

Maybe I was breaking him.

“Just watch,” Anthony said just before the lights shut out and a large, square beam of light illuminated the sheet.

The beam of light was replaced with the faded image of a baby lying in a crib with a big smile and a soundtrack of morose, British heavy metal from the 70s I recognized from classic rock radio and weight rooms.

“When born, most people are already either fucked or have it made, but don’t realize it,” Anthony started in from behind me.

I tried to cue up a comment to the opening statement of Anthony’s slide show, but was interrupted by a second picture. This one of a toddler riding a tricycle.

“I didn’t realize it, but I was beyond fucked from the start. Born with a disease which weakened my heart, nothing in my body got the blood it was supposed to. I was a weakling and there was nothing I could do about it.”

The next picture that popped up was of a young boy with a bowl cut wearing a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles shirt in a first day of school photo. I judged the age to be Kindergarten or first. The boy did not look familiar, simply looked like any rail thin, blonde-haired boy you’d see on a playground.

“But I didn’t know yet. I was just a happy kid. I played in my sand box. I watched my favorite TV shows and movies. I played video games in the arcade at the mall. I picked my nose and avoided baths just like any other little boy, but it wouldn’t last.”

The picture switched to a photo of that same bowl-cutted, golden blonde-haired boy crying with a black eye, standing in a backyard next to a broken toy fire truck.

“Elementary school is when it started, back when the kids are so young and cruel and don’t even know it’s a bad thing. They simply saw the scrawniest, the weirdest, the one who wet the bed at nap time after recess and went after him like sharks.”

The grandiosity of Anthony’s delivery had washed away any sympathy I may have been able to muster up. He sounded like he thought he was doing some kind of masterpiece theatre introduction. Like that person who never stops posting about political causes on your Facebook newsfeed, he was actually hurting his own case, even if I agreed with it.

Anthony pulled up the next picture. This one was of the kid a few years older, his bony arm in a cast, his face showing a frown that looked like it hadn’t flexed a smile in years.

“When you have a disorder like that, your bones become brittle, but that still doesn’t stop the bullies and when you don’t have an older brother, a father, someone with a dick to stand up for you or even show you how to stand up, you don’t know what to do. You just hurt and cry and hope you die.”

I let out a deep, annoyed breath, hoping it would send a message. All it prompted was the next picture. This one of a teenage boy whose face started to take the shape of one I recognized.I started to figure out who this was.

In the picture, the boy had gone goth, replaced his Leonardo and Donatello green shirt with a dark black Marilyn Manson one, his rosy cheeks for a pale and gaunt face and his blonde bowl cut for a black buzz cut. The boy now stood in a snow-dusted playground in a dark trench coat with headphones stuck to his ears like ear muffs as he stared down at the hard asphalt.

“At first you cope by tuning out, turning away and trying to rebel by being like the other weirdos who you think are like you, but it doesn’t work that way. You end up just being a loner, but it’s okay, because you find your own way. Life finds a way to make your disorder not as bad as it used to be. You can finally do something to break through it and distract from the pain of the past. You start going to the gym. You start to notice girls notice you. You laugh at someone who you think you want to be some day in traffic hoping they will pick up on what you think is funny and laugh along, but then things get dark again.”

I admit I was too dense and too battered at that point to pick up on what was going until Anthony pulled up the next picture and I saw an image that already haunted me in my brain before my eyes even saw it plastered up on a jizz-stained sheet on the wall. It was of Tyler, the boy who I had beaten nearly to death all those years ago. He was smiling in a Gold’s Gym tank top, trying to show off the barely-noticeable beginnings of muscle definition on some lightly-tanned arms and an awkward smile that looked to also be in its infancy of learning how to perform.

Anthony was Tyler.

Feeling that cold, hard guilt sift back into my bloodstream from my heart, my seat suddenly started to get itchy. I started to feel like the bad guy again, despite the current situation. I wobbled in my seat, trying to test the vulnerability of hold. I started to realize that Tyler/Anthony could do almost anything to me at this point and even I would have had to think it was at least a little bit justified.

“But while setbacks might take you off your course for a brief moment...”

A picture of Tyler lying in a hospital bed, giving a thumbs up through a cast, broadcast on the sheet for a few moments.

“...They are just that, setbacks, and they can’t stop the determined.”

The picture changed to Anthony flexing in a smaller purple Speedo in the mirror of the very room we were in.

“Because you change things. You change your name. You change your identity. Boring old Tyler Richter becomes Anthony Verano and slowly, but surely, you change your body.”

The picture moved on to a much more built Anthony smiling in a pair of boardshorts, in front of a glittering ocean at sunset.

“And by a stroke of luck, through a friend-of-a-friend-of-a-friend, you find out about a business of of someone who set you back so cruelly, which would allow you to one day plan the perfect revenge on that assailant.”

“You gotta be fucking kidding me,” I finally cracked.

How fucking unlucky was the string of events that led me to this moment? I pouted to myself. That guilt almost completely gone again.

I barely looked at the next picture, I didn’t really need to. It was of the recent Anthony posing again in his beloved purple Speedo, this time on a stage, this time slathered with bronzing goop.

“So you work and work and work, until you are ready to meet with that old torturer again, the one who nearly did you in”

A picture of Anthony in a mixed martial arts uniform proudly holding a trophy popped up on the sheet and I tested my chair one more time. I felt what I thought was a point of weakness at the base where the seat of the chair met the pole which rose up from the bottom.

“And then, you use that friend-of-a-friend-of-a-friend to call upon this bully for his services, and you set him up. You set it up so he is the one who attacks you, so if the police come, he takes the blame. You set it up so if things go right, you can sneak away with him to let him know about what he did and how it didn’t stop you from not just becoming who you are, but from becoming better than him at what he does, and proving it.”

I pressed all of my 203 pounds backwards against the back of the chair and felt the plastic just below my butt begin to flex. I heard it start to splinter just under the sounds of Anthony’s self-indulgent monologue. I felt that plastic start to give out and felt the metal of the pole which kept it upright start to rip through the cushy material which was inside the seat of the chair. I could tell with just a little more pressure, that I was going to rip the entire chair apart with my weight and was going to be able to make at least a bit of a move on the floor, even though my ankles and wrists were locked together. I spied a dumbbell in the corner of the room. Maybe I could roll over there and use it to somehow break the zip ties off of either my ankles or wrists?

I had to try something. I didn’t see any way the situation was going to end without Anthony turning me into some kind of human shish kebab unless I gave something a try.

Anthony walked up behind me slowly. I could sense him because of the approaching scent of coconut which must have come from his bronzer or some kind of oil he spread all over himself.

I was able to catch a glimpse of where Anthony was because of the shadow coming off of the sheet screen in front of me. It was dark, but I could see that he was raising something long, and probably sharp over my head and pulling it back slowly, like a bow.

I planted my foot as hard as I could into the carpet and rocked back. I felt the hard back of the chair drive into Anthony’s stomach before I rolled myself and the chair sideways down onto the floor.

The first thing I saw from my new vantage point on the stained carpet was a kitana-style sword flying down towards my face. The sketchy kind you might see in a gas station or smoke shop in a small town.

The blade of the trashy sword flashed right past my eyes. I swore I felt the thing graze my nose before it landed next to me, right between Anthony’s big dumb mug and my shoulder.

Not wasting a second, I rolled myself over to the sword and pinned it between my elbows. Using all of the diminished strength I had left in my body, I slashed the sword over at Anthony as he tried to work his way to his feet.

“Chill out,” Anthony yelled just as a better idea of what to do with the sword rolled into my head.

I pulled the sword back to me, blade side up and then dropped my wrists down on it with the blade hitting the heart of the zip tie that shackled my hands.

“No!” Anthony screamed as I readied my now free hands around the handle of the sword and aimed it at him.

“Do anything and I’ll cut your shiny ass into little pieces fucker,” I yelled with what little breath I had.

I took the time Anthony used to collect his head to quickly slash down and free my ankles of his stupid, fucking zip ties. I was now a ripped monster bully again, armed with a deadly weapon.

“Please,” Anthony pleaded and threw his hands up in surrender. “We’re even now,” he finished with a bow of his shaved head. “We’re even. You can leave.”

I stared at Anthony for what had to be another 30 seconds. I couldn’t believe I had seen the guy go from pillar of strength to that boy I beat up all those years ago in a minute.

I didn’t even know where I was, but I took Anthony up on his offer and left immediately. I didn’t care if the guy had taken me all the way to Buffalo, I was going to walk all the way back home so I could get to my place and try to shower off the awful stench of horror which was all over me.

Waiting for me outside of Anthony’s bedroom door was a hallway which reminded me of my long-dead grandma’s old house on Staten Island. Lit with just dusty sconces and lined with framed photos that seemed to go all the way back to World War I, the setting also reminded me of one of those waiting halls at the Haunted Mansion ride at DisneyWorld.

I didn’t waste a single second taking in the scenery. I ran down the hall in a flash until I reached a flight of stairs which led down to the front door.

Making it out of the house and into the cover of a cold Winter’s night with the snow falling was maybe the best thing I had ever felt in my entire life. I felt like the snow gave me cover as I ran around a shitty neighborhood long enough to discover I was in Atlantic City. The lights of the sad, run down casinos off in the distance felt symbolic of my diminished manhood and confidence as I shivered in my bloody clothes.

It took months to recover. I always noticed in movies that when someone gets their ass kicked, two hours later they are fine. Couldn’t be any less true. You have to take ice baths for days to properly recover from an old fashioned ass whipping.

I could still feel pain in my nose six months later when I finally started my first real job. Making subs at Jimmy John’s wasn’t nearly as fulfilling as putting fake tough guys in their place, but it also didn’t lead to broken noses, glued open eyes and kidnappings. At least as far as I could tell.

The sandwich job was actually just starting to feel normal when things started to get weird.

The first off-kilter incident I noticed was a crispy dollar bill which showed up in the tip jar with my name on it - literally. My co-worker walked it over to me and flicked the little, yellow Post-It with Adam written on it in pen before she handed it over.

“Someone has a secret admirer,” she quipped as she stuck the bill into my front pocket and I noticed a couple of peculiar things about the dollar.

It had a bronze-tinted smear in the corner, and smelled like coconut.

First published by Thought Catalog on www.ThoughtCatalog.com.

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