Film Industry

I've bounced around through a lot of jobs and met a lot of people. Some of them are still my good friends. Some turned out to be enemies.

Clarence had been fired from the machine shop. It'd been a couple of weeks and I continued to work there with Kenny and the other guys. We spent our days fixing machines, slopping on thick layers of caustic grease on to their moving parts and making dirty jokes. Kenny was a good guy, a survivalist, with a passion for guns and women. He also had a hard head and wouldn't roll over for anybody.

We were having a pretty typical day. Fix some heavy machines, work on the hydraulic press, CNC mill some new small parts that needed replacing. I was putting anti-seize on a handful of bolts when Clarence showed up.

It was five minutes after closing, so Clarence was probably back to pick up his last paycheck. He got fired in a huff when the boss found his perverted stash of bestial pornography. This job is dangerous enough without sick fucks like that and I can't say that I was sad to see him go.

I looked at Clarence as he walked in and then went back to work. I looked away just in time to miss seeing Clarence take a chrome revolver out of the brown paper lunch sack that he had with him.

Before Kenny and I could react he had the pistol trained on us and demanded for us to get down on the floor. Clarence shut and bolted the machine shop door. Kenny and I exchanged looks of fear, silently trying to figure out what was coming next.

Clarence was a small man, with a weasel's face and cantankerous demeanor. He weighed 140 lbs and sported a tattered lumberjack's coat over loose coveralls. Most importantly, though, he had a gun.

"Strip," Clarence shouted. He backed up across the machine shop, with his gun still aimed at the two of us. I added a few filthy, oily handprints to my coveralls trying to take them off. One rule of dealing with the man with the gun is to try to not make him more angry than he already is. If you can cause a lull in the action you might be able to talk him out of it.

They say when you're in a life and death situation that your life flashes before your eyes. It didn't. The embarrassing realization that I was going to die naked with Kenny in the machine shop overwhelmed any contrived nostalgia that I might have had.

The worst of my suspicions was confirmed. Clarence didn't want revenge. He wanted to have his way with us and then suicide in this greasy pit. He had already stripped out of his outfit and his disgusting figure looked like a mountain of mash potatoes adorned with a hot dog flagpole. He crept forward, being sure to use the gun to submit us to his will.

Our genuflect position made us vulnerable. He tried to force Kenny to do something revolting, grabbing his head with one hand and waving the gun. Kenny struggled to not be humiliated.

I grabbed Clarence's gun. I jammed it into his bare ass and Kenny fell away as I fired round after round into Clarence's degenerate body.

The exit wounds left Clarence's penis looking like an overripe banana peeled by a cotton gin.

Kenny and I don't talk about it.