Hurricane Randy

So you think you’ve had some pretty rough jobs, huh?

I laugh whenever I hear someone complain about work these days, at how ridiculous they sound. Why are people so unable to put things in perspective when they’re whining about career stuff? Everyone just defaults back to these hyper dramatic words, as if somehow people will think more highly of you if you’re rubbing your temples and comparing your office to a Viet Cong POW camp. Have we really gotten this soft? Just yesterday on the train, I overheard some banker-type describing his boss with words like sociopath and bully, and the whole time I’m thinking, come spend a month in my office, pal, then tell me how much of a bully your boss is.

Look, I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking, “Easy for your ass to say, Mr. Fancy Schmancy Sports Agent – what the hell would you know about a brutal workplace?” And who could blame you? In the eyes of many, I should be one of the last people to downplay someone else’s career struggles. People see big name athletes and the cachet of negotiating multi-million dollar deals on ESPN and they automatically think: Dream Job. And somehow that makes them feel even worse about their own careers, knowing that people like me exist, people who actually get paid large sums of money to do what it is they think I do. Am I right? Well, let me clue you in on a little secret: appearances can only tell you so much, especially in a business like the one I’m in.

If you want to hear about a truly brutal workplace, let me tell you about last the sports agency I worked for, McKnight and Associates.

We were beaten down at McKnight and Associates. Literally. I’m talking actual physical violence, here. So right off the bat, I can say with confidence that no one else in America ever had to deal with the kind of bullshit we did at McKnight and Associates. I can’t think of anyone else who’s had their afternoon disrupted because the boss was kicking down the door to their office while shouting “Time for your nap, bitch” and then putting them into a sleeper hold. As an aside, “sleeper hold” isn’t a metaphor- that actually used to happen quite a bit. But I digress. To work for Randy McKnight (founder and president of McKnight and Associates, and perhaps the first ever true “Super Agent”) was to work under the constant threat of being clotheslined. Have you ever worked in a place where the risk of getting clotheslined was a major concern? About a boss who stands in front of your desk at 9:30 AM on a Tuesday with his face painted like The Ultimate Warrior, screaming insults about your mother and questioning the genetic legitimacy of your father? You’ve experienced that in an office setting before? Look, I’m not trying to downplay the struggles that people face at their work, and I’m not saying that people don’t have it hard. Work’s stressful. Bosses sometime play favorites, and they can be petty and overly critical. Maybe he or she didn’t give you enough credit for all the hard work you put in, or perhaps they just didn’t like you on a personal level. Trust me, I get it, I really do. But is any of that really on the same level as having a boss who screams “Better board up those windows, brother – Hurricane Randy’s heading straight for your ass” right before he elbows you in the face? Actually, let’s back up a second.

Have you ever worked for a man who referred to himself as Hurricane Randy?

I once viewed my old job at McKnight and Associates in the same light my friends did: that being a sports agent really was too good to be true, that it was a no-hyperbole “dream job”. But for me, that view only lasted about three weeks or, better stated, the amount of time that passed between my first day in the office and that fateful morning Hurricane Randy decided to swing by and “introduce” himself. With his fists. You know, for something that took place several years ago, the memory of my first encounter with that barbarian still sits as fresh in my mind as if it had only happened days ago. I’ve heard that’s a symptom of PTSD, by the way.

Before you go assuming I’m some kind of a bitch who’ll just let another man beat up on me, you should know a couple of things. For starters, I didn’t let anything happen to me. I’m no battered wife and I’m definitely no pacifist – I fought back each and every time. And I’m not tiny, either. I played tight end at the University of Virginia, if that gives you any idea about how physical I can be. It’s just that my boss, the guy who called himself Hurricane Randy, was even bigger and stronger than I was, so ultimately, it didn’t even matter. The outcomes were always the same, no matter how hard any of us fought back at him. Randy McKnight was an unstoppable force; he was like the final boss in the most impossibly aggressive video game ever.

Now I’m sure by this point you’re wondering why we didn’t just take legal action against McKnight and Associates. Why didn’t we call the cops, or take Randy McKnight to court? I mean, it’s one thing for the owner of a company to yell and scream at his employees, but we have laws in this country that are intended to protect us from karate kicks to the face, and it doesn’t matter if it’s in an office or just out on the street. So why didn’t we do something? Well, it’s just not that simple. Trust me, I wish it had been. Let me tell you about that first day, when the wheels came off, and you’ll see what I mean.

It was a Monday morning and I’d just sat down to review my notes on a contract renegotiation I’d been helping out with (the client was a guy named Tom Brady – ever heard of him?). Suddenly, the door to my office exploded, it literally exploded into splinters. (Quick side note: you wouldn’t believe how much McKnight and Associates spent on replacement doors in a given year. You’d shit yourself, believe me) Try to imagine the mix of shock and bewilderment I was experiencing after having looked up to find my new boss, the founder of this billion dollar firm and one of the most respected businessmen in America, dressed like John Rambo’s stunt double and kicking down the door to my office. That’s not an exaggeration, either. He was dressed like Rambo. Randy had gone all-out that day, decking himself out in Vietnam-era jungle fatigues (minus the shirt, obviously), and even going so far as to tie a strip of red cloth around his head, just like in the movies. He looked absolutely preposterous, there’s really no other way to describe it. So, naturally, I laughed. How could I not have? Who in their right mind would have thought he was being serious at that point? Now, after he’d reached across my desk and yanked me up out of my chair? That’s an entirely different story.

“Hey, what the fuck are you doing?” I yelled. At least, I think that’s what I yelled. There’s really no way to know for sure. The instant surge of adrenaline that shot through my body pretty much wiped out my ability to communicate or even think in a coherent manner. Though I do remember momentarily wondering why something this bizarre and jolting had to happen to me, of all people.

“Orientation day, bitch!” he growled. I don’t know if he said that in response to my question or if he was just talking crazy.

He put me into a headlock and dragged me down the hall to our floor’s main common area, the big open space where most of the junior guys in the firm worked. As he whistled the Hi-Ho Song from Snow White while dragging me around the office, I was forced to accept the reality of my situation: no matter how preposterous this scene may have appeared, I was in fact being choked by someone on Fortune’s most recent list of the 10 most powerful people in American professional sports. I needed to do something about this. So I did the first thing that popped into my head: I swung my fist into Hurricane Randy’s groin as hard as I possibly could. In hindsight, this was a very bad move on my part, because a) he was wearing a protective cup, so my blow caused no harm whatsoever, and b) a cheap shot like punching in the balls only served to piss Randy off. In my own defense, who in their right mind actually takes the time to think through what they’d do if a man started choking them at work? Anyway, to teach me a lesson, Randy put me into a different hold, the one known as “The Ball and Chain”. He spun me around and pulled my right arm back between my legs to where my hand was behind my ass. Then he yanked up on it, with the end result being that I was “racked” by my own arm. I remember the indignation quickly boiling up from within after I’d noticed that none of my fellow coworkers were coming to my defense. As a matter of fact, most of them didn’t even bother looking up from their computer screens, even after I started yelling at them. One guy (God, how I wish I could have remembered who that was) actually yawned when we stormed by his desk, as if my getting publicly choked wasn’t exciting enough to pull him away from his spreadsheets.

“Nobody’s going to do anything about this?” I shouted. “What the fuck is wrong with you people?” This made Hurricane Randy chuckle. Mistakenly thinking he’d opened up a window for communication, I tried reasoning with him. But before I could finish a simple “Why are you choking me?” Randy squeezed harder and I was forced to abandon reason and focus entirely on the task of getting air into my lungs.

We approached the main conference room, one of the many areas that they’d failed to include on my first day tour of the offices. When Randy kicked the door open (Why even have doorknobs?) I could see why. It wasn’t a conference room at all, at least not in the traditional sense. There was no long, central table, there were no chairs – hell, there wasn’t even carpeting. The whole room was covered in padding, wall-to-wall padding, the kind that school gyms sometimes had on the walls underneath the basketball goals. There was a lone bookshelf to my right, and on its shelves, I could see several thick stacks of paper. That was the extent of how much I could gather about the room, because as soon as he closed the door behind us, Hurricane Randy took me by the seat of my pants and hurled me several feet through the air. Luckily, I landed on my face.

“All right, fucknuts, like I said, this is your orientation session,” he said, taking several sets of documents from the shelf. “It’s high time someone explained to your bitch ass what working for me is really all about.”

I cannot emphasize enough just how ridiculous he looked, dressed like G.I. Joe and flipping through those pages while wearing such a serious look across his tensed brow. I recalled the many media profiles I’d read about this man, all the puff pieces on ESPN, all the suck-off jobs in Esquire. Everything that had ever been published about Randy

McKnight presented himself as this brilliant businessman who always did it the “right” way. A real class act. I compared that image of McKnight, the public one, to the sociopath who stood sweating and slobbering before me, and I was overcome by a vague, yet incredibly intense, feeling of betrayal.

“Save your little monologue for someone who’s not about to sue the shit out of this place,” I said. “When my lawyer’s done having his way with you, there’s not gonna be a company left for me to get oriented with. And your ass is most certainly bound for jail, you fucking maniac.” Once the panic had begun to subside, I found it much easier to think the situation through, to recall, for instance, that laws protecting employees from flying elbows had been in place now for well over a century. I could step back to see the big picture, to assess the situation for what it was. Here was this guy who’d apparently just snapped and gone on a rampage (though I did find the wall-to-wall padding to be a bit conspicuous- a room like that wasn’t exactly thrown together on a whim) and I’d just faced him down.

McKnight could tell exactly what was happening in my head, I’m sure of it. Looking back, I’m inclined to believe that moments like that one, when each of us had convinced ourselves of our own triumph over him, were the times Hurricane Randy truly lived for. You had to be there to fully understand why I’d believe something like that. The expression on his face as he invited me to come have a look at those documents was one of unmistakeable glee.

“Is that so?” he replied. “Well, maybe your lawyer had better take a closer look at the employment agreement you signed before coming to work here, the one you were more than eager to get out of the way in order to collect that handsome signing bonus I paid you. Maybe you, too, should give it a closer look, now that I think of it.” My heart sunk. That’s what he’d been holding, the thick set of documents I’d signed right after agreeing to leave my old job and come work for McKnight and Associates. My boss at the time tried warning me about McKnight and Associates. He told me there was something sinister about Randy McKnight, a feeling that didn’t sit well with him, but I stupidly dismissed his warnings, writing them off as a ploy to keep me on. If only I’d listened.

“Remember this thing, dildo?” Randy asked, pausing long enough to laugh at my confused expression. He flipped through a few pages. “What about this section?” I leaned in for a closer look and shuddered at the words I found at the top of the page. ”Yeah, that’s a liability waiver, which means that you can’t sue me and you can’t sue the company, no matter what happens to you while employed here. And what about this next section? Read right here, where it says you can’t quit on us either, unless you feel like writing out a check for a sum that I personally know you don’t have. Oh, and look! Whose signature is this? That’s right, it’s yours!” He looked back at the page with a frown. “Damn, son, you write like a real pansy.”

I’d thought nothing of the various liability waivers, non-disclosure agreements, and indemnification clauses back when I’d signed the contract. I mean, who in their right mind would read through all that densely convoluted legalese and think, “Hey, wait just one second! This sounds like I’m granting Randy the right to smash my face in whenever the hell he wants to!” Especially when you consider the rather large sign-on bonus McKnight and Associates offered as a means of facilitating the negotiation. Having us sign those contracts was actually a stroke of genius on the part of McKnight and Associates, you know, overlooking the fact that the sole intent of the arrangement was to be able to beat us up without fear of legal reprisals. The reveal caught every single one of us off guard. I know it did in my case.

There was one thing, though, that just didn’t make any sense, and it was the last thing I can remember thinking, right after Hurricane Randy tossed my contract over his shoulder but before he started bouncing me off the ceiling: What kind of sick son of a bitch chooses this as his business model?

So there I was. Trapped in a job that most people would have given their right arms for; strong-armed into faking my love for it, forbidden from telling anyone the truth. We all were, I soon found out. After my “orientation session”, as I was crawling back to my office, I found myself swarmed by the same coworkers who not half an hour ago had been too busy to lend me a hand.

“Hey, man, we’re so sorry about not helping back there, are you ok?”

“We couldn’t do anything to help you out back there, our contracts levy some pretty stiff penalties for interventions on behalf of another employee.”

“Yeah, like broken pinky fingers and forfeited bonuses.”

“Did the son of a bitch scissor kick you? Because that shit sucks.”

I came to learn that I shared with my coworkers a common sense of powerlessness: we couldn’t leave and yet we couldn’t tell anyone about our plight, either. That may have been the toughest part of our situation (aside from the knuckle sandwiches and being thrown through walls, etc.), this task of keeping Hurricane Randy’s secrets for him, which was made a thousand times more difficult whenever we found ourselves being questioned about the black eyes, neck braces, or other improbable injuries, especially when the questions about our injuries focused on their repetitive nature.

“You’re not going to believe this, but the feral chimps are back yet again, and this time, Animal Control’s basically washed their hands of the whole damn thing…”

“It was actually my doctor who suggested taking up rugby and, I gotta tell ya, the sleepwalking is now a thing of the past. Crazy, right? Is feeling fully rested in the morning worth a broken collar bone or two? I say yes.”

“What are the odds? Hit in the face by foul balls on four separate occasions, all within the same baseball season- I’m telling you, I oughta play the lottery or something.”

“No, I definitely would not recommend Pamplona during bull season.”

But how did we know for sure that McKnight had us over a barrel? You’ve got to be wondering that, right? Wondering if we just swallowed his threats whole, if we’d been cowed into believing that he’d sue us into oblivion for trying to breach our contracts or, say, call in a SWAT team. Did we just roll over for this man? Of course not. We’re sports agents, remember? It’s in our DNA to be distrustful, to call bullshit on anything and everything we’re told. You know, because we ourselves were so full of shit. But it turned out that none of us would have to dig too deep if we seriously wanted to fact-check McKnight. There’d been a precedent, or a test-case if you will, that clearly laid out what would happen to one of us should we ever try to cross McKnight. Here’s a hint: it wasn’t good. At some point within our first month as employees, we all were forced to take a hard look at ourselves (and our paychecks) and, to a man, each one of us concluded that rebelling was a very bad idea. Not after hearing about what happened to Grant Martin.

The name Grant Martin carried the kind of weight around our office usually reserved for religious martyrs and people who’d told the go Nazis to eat a dick. His cautionary tale was like a weird tradition we handed down from one office generation to the next. Many spoke of him in reverent whispers, if you can believe that, like the guy was some kind of a saint. As if Grant had knowingly sacrificed himself in order to save the rest of us. Strangely enough, in spite of the general sense of goodwill and appreciation we all felt for him, nearly every story about Grant Martin also seemed to contain a decent amount of insult and second guessing.

“The first time Randy knocked me out, I thought real hard about pulling a Grant Martin,” someone would say. “But it didn’t take long to realize that only a crazy person would do what he did. A crazy fuckin’ moron, that is.”

“Don’t get me wrong, I’ll always owe that hillbilly a debt of gratitude for the sacrifice he made,” someone else would say. “But seriously, how big of a retard can one person be?”

“He’s like the guy who’s always dicking around, playing grab-ass with his buddies, and yet somehow winds up taking a bullet for the president because he tripped and fell trying to slip through the crowd so he could get a selfie with the commander-in-chief .”

We weaved his name into everyday conversations, too. “Grant Martin” could be used as any article of speech, be it noun, verb, or whatever form best suited your purposes.

“You catch the second half of that Bears game? Talk about getting Grant Martin’d – thirty-five unanswered points to end the game, and it could have easily been much, much worse.”

“My idiot brother in law almost pulled a Grant Martin the other day but, luckily, I managed to talk him out of it at the last minute. But what if I hadn’t been there to stop him? That dumb son of a bitch was all set to go in after those raccoons on his own.”

Now, obviously Grant wasn’t the first person to ever get punched in the face at a staff meeting and think, contract or not, when the cops hear about this, Hurricane Randy’s fucked. He was, however, the first person to actually do more than just talk about it. Unfortunately, he would also be the last. If only he’d been a little more rational in his approach, perhaps things might have turned out differently. We urged him to use better judgement, to rely less on what he’d learned from buddy-cop movies and more on prudent planning and heeding the advice of others. Advice like: stop approaching this as if you’re in a goddamn buddy-cop movie. Another tip we tried to give him: instead of spending all your time coming up with cool-sounding code names, you should be figuring out a way to navigate the maze of legal loopholes that Randy has working in his favor. But Storm Shadow, as he insisted on being called, just wouldn’t listen. Rednecks seldom ever do.
“Lookie here, Hoss,” he’d explain. “When you’re out on the water and it’s just you against a Great White, you think that shark’s gonna give a flying fuck whether or not there’s logic in your plan? Hell no! All that sumbitch cares about is the fuckin’ hand grenade you just tricked his ass into swallowing.”
A few days later, he came strutting into the office, loaded down with enough hidden surveillance gear to outfit an entire counter-terrorism unit. Grant had spared no expense in equipping himself for Operation: The Wire (“Like on HBO,” he would remind us every single time it came up), boasting that he’d bought at least one of everything from the highly questionable website http://www.ucanspytoo.rus. His main cache of equipment consisted of the following:

• Three sets of hidden microphones and wireless transmitters, including one he insisted on awkwardly strapping to his groin (for the sole reason of being able to tap himself on the crotch and ask “Is this thing on?” which he must have done at least fifty times without getting as much as a single smirk in response)
• An XP-20 digital video recorder, which was basically a tiny camera embedded in a pair of eyeglasses (it should be noted that Grant had 20/20 vision and had never worn glasses a day in his life)
• An array of transponders and tracking devices – small, adhesive-backed ones that Grant planned on attaching to Hurricane Randy for reasons still unknown

It’s ironic how, beyond a certain point, hidden surveillance equipment can actually make someone look more conspicuous. It only took most of us a single glance to recognize what Grant was up to that morning. We begged him to reconsider but he just waved us off, completely self-assured of his scheme’s infallibility. Because that’s how an idiot’s mind works. Grant’s plan was to catch Hurricane Randy in the act of round-housing one of us, capture it on video, and then use it as evidence against him in both the criminal and civil lawsuits he planned on filing. If he couldn’t find a volunteer to act as the bait in his plan (he couldn’t), or if Randy wasn’t in full fighting mode that day (surprisingly enough, he wasn’t), Grant’s backup plan was simply to provoke him until he did feel like fighting. When we reminded him of the clauses in our contracts that specifically prohibited these types of shenanigans, Grant replied by making fart noises with his mouth. There was no going back.
“You only live once,” he said, and we all walked away in disgust.
Grant found McKnight in the commons area of our floor, huddled together with a few junior associates, helping them review their client schedules. You could tell right away that Randy was in full-on, business focused, I’m-the-facilitator-what-can-I-help-you-get-done Randall McKnight mode and, to make matters even worse, McKnight appeared to be in a jovial mood. If this was to be Hurricane Randy’s day of reckoning, Grant would have to be the one to get the ball rolling. A few of us had foolishly hoped that Grant would abandon his mission in favor of more suitable conditions, which would also have bought us a little more time to talk him out of such a stupid, ignorant plan.
“Hey McKnight!”
In an instant, Grant’s shout slammed a mute button on the office’s dull roar, near instantly reducing what had once been a buzzing hive of activity to little more than an empty echo chamber. Heads popped up in unison toward the direction of Grant’s voice.
“I got a question for you,” Grant barked. But before he could cough out the rest, Randy cut him off.
“Grant, I don’t have time for this,” Randy said. His voice sounded like that of a beleaguered parent, one who would have given anything for just ten minutes of uninterrupted quiet time. “So whatever it is you’re up to, I’d suggest knocking it off.”

McKnight turned back to the junior guys. Grant read McKnight’s unwillingness to engage him as a sign of vulnerability and weakness, which emboldened his approach. This was an incredibly bad choice.

“Oh, you’re gonna make time, asshole,” Grant said. “Unless you’re too scared to explain why you get off so much from tricking people into becoming your damn punching bags.”

Everyone there would later remember feeling as if the room had shrunk after Grant called McKnight an asshole. A tiny version of the wave, like in stadiums, rippled around the desks as one person after the next turned to his neighbor with a gasp and passed along the chain a series of shocked faces that all more or less said: Is this really happening?

“I’m going to give you to the count of three to get your narrow ass back in that office, Grant,” McKnight growled.

Grant held out his hands and made exaggerated trembling motions. “Ooh, I’m so scared!”

“One,” McKnight counted. He stepped forward and began loosening his tie.

“Are you seriously counting down?” Grant asked. “What are you, my mommy? Ok, mommy, how about this? How about I give you to the count of three? Only, when I’m done counting, your ass had better start coughing up some answers.”

“Two.”

Grant cocked an eyebrow and defiantly crossed his arms as to challenge McKnight. A few people rose from their desks and hurriedly made their way for the elevators, careful not to draw attention to themselves. Speed-walking on stiffened legs, they looked like children at the swimming pool who’d just been told no running.

“Three.”

With a quickness rarely seen in ogres of his size, McKnight seized Grant by the shirt collar and, in one swift motion, hoisted him above his head. For a moment, the two of them looked like the most unlikely partners in pairs figure skating history. McKnight then literally roared as he launched poor Grant Martin into the air. We traced his body’s trajectory from the moment it left McKnight’s hands, as he floated through the air, our eyes following him all the way to the end of his majestic flight, where Grant’s head collided loudly with a supply cabinet. He landed with a disquieting thud and a squeak that onlookers described as having sounded like a dog toy. It was a brutal collision to say the least but, to Grant’s credit, he bounced right up. Though it would have probably been best if he’d just stayed down and pretended to be dead or unconscious.

Instead, Grant screamed, “I got your ass now, you fucker!” He was rage-crying like a five year old who’d been rough-housing too hard. “You saw what he just did, each and every one of you are fucking witnesses. It’s okay now, guys, we don’t have to take his shit any more! My plan’s working!” He said a lot of other things, too, but nobody could really understand him through the tears. Grant turned back to McKnight and tapped his finger on the eyeglasses that had improbably remained on his face. “Spy glasses, bitch,” he said in a triumphant voice, adding, “Get on my level, Randy! I don’t even wear glasses, you moron!” You could tell this was Grant’s finest hour, which was kind of sad and pathetic because of the crying and the wet spot that now occupied most of the front of his slacks.

Grant’s glory was cut tragically short, however, by the army of corporate lawyers that suddenly materialized, as if they’d been summoned out of the ether. There had to have been at least twenty of them, all dressed alike in their conservative charcoal suits and professionally neutral ties. One of them approached the bewildered Grant Martin and presented him with a stack of serious-looking documents.

“What’s this?” Grant asked, self-consciously wiping his nose. “I wasn’t crying, by the way.”
“It’s a summary judgement in the law suit we just filed against you for breach of contract, dumbass,” McKnight answered. “This little stunt with the spy glasses and the hidden voice recorders is in direct violation of your employment agreement, your signed employment agreement, I might add. Take a good hard look at that piece of paper, little man, and you let this sink in: life as you know it is now over.” McKnight turned to the crowd that had formed. “That goes for the rest of you, too,” he said. “Anybody else wants join dick-nose here on his mother’s couch, eating ramen noodles for the rest of his life, go right ahead and be my guest.”

Grant Martin read. Within seconds, his face began contorting as the anguish overtook him. It turned out that reality hits harder than any supply closet ever could. Grant would soon lose everything and there was nothing he could do to stop it. He continued reading, frantically turning the pages in a desperate search for something, anything that might provide him even a modicum of solace. When it dawned on him that losing everything meant the Ferrari too, he emitted a groan that will forever haunt the dreams of those who heard it. His voice was mangled by pure despair, with a tone somewhere between a screech and a howl, produced not by the vocal chords but by something much deeper within him. The sound originated from the darkest corner of his psyche, the shadowy place our primitive ancestors fled from long ago.

When Grant finally managed to look up, Hurricane Randy was there to unleash a powerful front-kick into his crotch, smashing the hidden microphone with a loud crunch that reminded me of the way my kid sister used to eat dry cereal while watching television. Grant reflexively doubled over, clutching himself with both hands, and I shit you not, his eyes literally went crossed, which was something I’d previously thought only happened in cartoons. Hurricane Randy, sparing no time, took a giant wind-up and unleashed the mother of all uppercuts, landing it squarely beneath poor Grant Martin’s chin with an unsettling thud-splack sound that once again sent him flying through the air like a rag doll shot from a cannon, with Grant’s body going in one direction and his XP-20 spy glasses spinning off in another.

In the days that followed Grant Martin’s Final Stand, we all tried in vain to get in touch with him, to see how he was holding up. We wanted to let him know he had our full support and that, if he ever needed anything, he could surely count on us.

Ok fine. You got me. We really only cared about one thing: whether or not McKnight had hired someone to pour him a pair of concrete boots or run him through a wood chipper. For a few days, everything hinged on our finding out just how bad this was going to get for him. The entire office came to a near halt as the search for answers intensified. When Pete Zuckerman pulled up the short-sale listings for not only Grant’s condo in Midtown, but also his parents’ place in Connecticut, and even his grandparents’ house in Florida, we had our answer, and it was far worse than any of us could have imagined. Details of Randy’s enforcement began pouring in, each new piece of information more chilling than its predecessor. When Barry Laidlaw found Grant’s Xbox One for sale on Craigslist, we all shared a collective shudder.

“Two hundred dollars or best offer?” read a bewildered Wes Sterchi. “Just go ahead and chop my freaking head off.”

“Someone in payroll said they saw him drive by in a Honda Civic,” Wes Bennett shared. “A Honda Civic,” he quietly repeated, as he stared vacantly out the window.

“Heard his fiancee left him. Guy didn’t even try to stop her, either,” Barry said. “He knew damn well it was for the best, what with the Ferrari being repossessed and everything.”

After a few days of this, we finally agreed to call off the snooping. Two things had become crystal clear by that point. The first was that pulling a fast one on Randy McKnight was most certainly not an option. The second was that our continued probing of Grant Martin’s beleaguered credit rating could be viewed as an incredibly insensitive thing to do, at best. At worst, our Schadenfreude could be viewed as nothing less than an act of pure sadism.

Now, if you’re really astute and you’ve been paying attention the whole time, there should be a paradox forming in your mind. If the case of Grant Martin had confirmed the impossibility of overcoming Randy McKnight’s system, how could it be that I’ve been referring to him this whole time as my former employer? If I couldn’t legally leave the company, but I wasn’t able to call the cops either, how the hell did I make it out?
I was there when Grant Martin sprung his trap on Randy McKnight, I was there when the lawyers showed up. I saw with my own two eyes look of despair on Grant Martin’s face as he contemplated his fate, when he had no other choice but to accept the dead-end road his life was traveling down. It’s impossible to put a scene like that out of one’s mind, it gets stuck there in your head like a flip book of images, photographs from the single worst day of someone else’s life.

As I watched that idiot sail through the air like a penalty flag, it came to me, the idea that if Hurricane Randy’s attacks really were unavoidable, the least I could do was put up a good fight when they happened. If I could inflict a little damage of my own, perhaps Hurricane Randy would think twice about picking me, the next time he was in the mood to dropkick someone. If I could land a few good blows, maybe he’d drop me down a few notches on his list of favorite faces to jump up and down on. I’d have to inflict some serious damage, though, not the weak little love taps that most of us defended ourselves with, half-assed punches aimed more at distracting him than anything else. If I wanted to get myself some breathing room, I was going to have to start leaving marks on the guy. And so I began to engage in the most intensive means available of training my body, of honing my power, of withstanding the force of a Hurricane.

Well into my preparations, I noticed a flyer on the bulletin board at the Mixed Martial Arts gym I’d recently joined, Stryke Force Dojo. It was promoting something called Bataan Bolt. From what I could piece together, it was one of those extreme endurance races like Warrior Dash or Tough Mudder that feature all sorts of grueling obstacles along the race course, obstacles designed to produce an extreme reaction in the runners, like forcing them to dive into a pool of ice water and swim fifty feet to dry land, or run through a gauntlet of high voltage electric cattle prods. When I asked one of the coaches at my gym about it, they described Bataan Bolt as if it had been a life-changing experience for them, going as far as calling it the ultimate form of pushing ones own limits. Coming from a guy with a giant black panther tattoo on his neck, a guy who I’d just watched head butt another man into unconsciousness, the endorsement carried enough weight for me to sign up.

On the day of Bataan Bolt, I showed up to the course and instantly regretted not having looked up what Bataan meant – I’d stupidly assumed it was just another purposely mis-spelled word, like Stryke or Xtreme, which seemed to be a hallmark of the modern fitness industry. And so, when I asked about ‘batons’ and ‘relay partners’ at the registration area, the two volunteers, who I can only describe as looking like Skateboard Marines, looked at me like I’d sung my question in Portuguese. That’s when I looked around and noticed all the people dressed in khaki fatigues with Japanese flags sewn onto the sleeves. That’s when I noticed the wooden swords and the very real looking rifles.

“I think I’ve made a mistake,” I said, but my protest fell mostly on deaf ears, save for the tattooed girl who’d suddenly appeared at my side. She wore a minimum amount of clothing, which revealed both her powerful looking physique as well as her penchant for tattoos. She wore her short black hair in pigtails that seemed at once both childish and yet insanely aggressive. She looked at me, unblinking, while shifting her weight from one unimpressed leg to the other.

“The only mistake you’ll make is not going through with this race, man,” she said, gripping me by the arm with an inappropriate level of forcefulness. “I mean, do you really want to look back on your life in twenty years and regret the time you pussed out on a potentially life-changing event?”

“Well, no,” I offered. “I just don’t want to get decapitated like the guys in World War 2 did.” I held up my phone, pointing to the screen where I’d pulled up the Wikipedia article on the Bataan Death March. She laughed and shook her head before reminding me of Bataan Bolt’s strict ‘no refunds’ policy as an angry-looking asian man in the trademark khaki fatigues loudly cocked his rifle behind me.

Needless to say, I was compelled to run the race, which turned out to be less of a race and more like me simply running for my life. Each of the runners were assigned to a different ‘soldier’ whose sole purpose was to chase us over the length of a nearly ten mile long obstacle course. Also, if the soldiers were to catch one of us, they’d been authorized to beat us with their wooden swords (Another disguised liability waiver – what the hell is this world coming to?) or to shoot us with these plastic bullets that stung like you wouldn’t believe. There was no water to drink (Did I mention that the race took place in July?) and every half mile along the course featured this voice over a loudspeaker, screaming the most discouraging phrases imaginable, like There is no point in going on, look at where your pathetic life has taken you and You are running to meet your own death. My own ‘soldier’ was a particularly nasty fellow who must have fired at least a hundred rounds into my back over the course of the day. At the halfway mark, when I paused to tie my shoelace, the guy ran up from behind and swung his rifle into my head so violently that I literally saw stars for a few seconds before getting back on my feet.

In my daze, I recalled a scene from earlier that week in which McKnight barged in to my office, unannounced. More of a flashbulb memory than anything, I recalled the strange look on his face as he closed my door behind him. He moved with jerky motions, almost tentatively, as he thought better of sitting down and instead chose to loom over me and pepper me with questions about my recent ‘fitness kick’. I, of course, played dumb, while bracing myself for what I suspected was to be a pre-emptive attack by the Hurricane, one that would probably do some damage to my shoulders and knees, and thus prevent me from any further training, training whose soul purpose, Randy and I both knew, was for me to fuck his shit up.

But to my surprise, he didn’t attack me. He just stood there, with that strange expression on his face, and asked me a few bland and benign questions about my workouts. Before I even knew what was going on, he’d slapped me on the shoulder and was on his way out of my office. I must have made some kind of noise as if meaning to say something, because right as he was closing my door, Randy looked back at me and that’s when it became clear what the look on his face had been saying: Hurricane Randy was tired.

Strangely enough, I think I actually benefitted from running the Bataan Bolt. In the final stretch of the race, when my lungs were on fire and my legs felt like concrete slabs, when my mouth had become so dry that I couldn’t keep my tongue from hanging out, I reached a level of mental clarity that I dare say I’d never before achieved in life. It was slow in arriving. More of a feeling or a mood at first, it began to slowly take shape over the course of the race, becoming clearer with every step I took until, as I sprinted down the home stretch, its message finally revealed itself in the form of the words, There’s no situation on earth in which you absolutely have to take anybody’s shit.

And before I knew what I was doing, I stopped running and turned to deliver a roundhouse kick to the face of the asshole who’d been shooting me in the back for the past hour and a half. As I watched the swarm of medical volunteers rush over to the loudly snoring ‘soldier’, I smiled to myself. A confident satisfaction warmed me like a codeine bath and I knew that I was ready to take on the Hurricane.

On the day I entered the office with intentions of injuring my boss, I remember being slightly taken aback by the way I felt. I’d leaned on my rage and hatred of him so often in my training that, when the time came to put all that work into action, I naturally assumed that rage would be what powered me. But that wasn’t the case at all. If anything, on the day that I was to hurl myself into the Hurricane, I felt very little emotion at all. This worried me. But there was no time for examining my feelings; as I stepped out of the elevator and into our main lobby, I found McKnight there waiting for me, cracking his knuckles and swaying from side to side.

“We both know what you’re planning to do, so let’s just get it over with,” he said. “I’ve got a busy day ahead of me.” I would later notice that this was the first time he’d ever been in a fighting mood and not used profanity when addressing his opponent.

Again, like the time he barged in to my office before Bataan Bolt, I caught the same hint of weariness in his eyes, though this time he must have sensed my knowing look, because he quickly wiped his face back into its familiar sneer. Nonetheless, I offered a slight nod, hoping he’d catch the acknowledgement. I threw off my jacket and removed my tie. I unbuttoned my shirt and tossed it behind me. McKnight remained in his navy blue suit and oxford tie. I wiped the sweat from my palms onto my pants legs. Time moved slowly, as if weighted down by the thick, heavy air. We began circling each other. Muscles tensed, fingers twitching. Hands out in front, ready for the onrush. A crowd gathered along the glass wall that separated the lobby from the main office area. My muscles twitched, fighting my restraint, begging to be let off the leash. Sweat blistered McKnight’s brow. The heels of our leather loafers on the marble floor. The smell of warm paper in the air. A memory of Grant Martin and the realization of what my own greed had convinced me to accept. And then, suddenly, like two great mountain rams, we collided like thunder.

It all happened in a blur.

You’d think that such an epic showdown would have lasted several hours and covered the whole office, that after pouring ourselves so thoroughly into our clash, it would have ultimately come down to who wanted it more, who could summon that final bit of willpower to push on through, to accept only triumph when everything in our exhausted bodies was scratching and clawing and screaming for us to just give in, for the love of God. That we would have fought our way into the main office area, exploding through the glass doors and throwing each other across desks and in to filing cabinets, as everything around us came to a breathless halt. That my fellow coworkers would have sensed the fact that something important was happening, that McKnight was finally meeting a worthy adversary, that things might be different after today and, in sensing this significance, they would have gathered en masse to watch and to hope. You’d think that our fight would have been one for the ages, a fight to end all fights, a cyclone of uppercuts and jump kicks, of choke slams and head butts, of single-leg takedowns and illegal full-Nelsons; that our brawl would have induced a state of mass priapism across octagons, wrestling rings, and underground basements alike. That after such a long and grueling battle, one that likely saw both of us withstand a nearly inhuman level of physical punishment, I would have drawn deep on my sense of moral certainty, that my belief in the justice of what I was doing would have propelled me to an improbable, miraculous victory; that I would have triumphed over this man, this Hurricane Randy, the one who’d made mice of us all.

But that wasn’t exactly the case. I mean, I did beat his ass – that much is true. But the fight itself wasn’t at all like what I’d expected. To be honest, it wasn’t like what anyone had expected, save perhaps McKnight himself. And that’s all I really feel like saying about it.

What’s of greater importance is the change that took place inside of me during the course of our fight. Though, come to think of it, perhaps this change had already taken shape beforehand, and had been growing in intensity as I gained the upper hand on McKnight.

There was also McKnight in the aftermath of the conflict, after I’d forced him to give up.
I think the entire office was in a state of shock after McKnight weakly raised his hand in surrender, after he weakly asked me to put the chair down. I know it shocked the hell out of me. Before I knew what was happening, we were all of a sudden upstairs in McKnight’s private office, standing side by side, gazing out the window at the city down below. This was a different McKnight beside me, I could tell, one I’d never known of before. The tiredness in his eyes was unchecked and on full display, the tension in his body and the fervor that used to animate him was nowhere to be found.

“I just want to know one thing,” he told me. “How did you finally figure it out?”

I turned my head to look at him. “Figure what out?” I asked, confused.

“I’m asking you how you figured out the succession clause,” he said, still staring out at the city.

“I think you may have given me a concussion when you bashed me over the head with Kevin’s laptop,” I said. “Because I have no idea what the shit you’re talking about, Randy.”
He then turned his head to look at me, ridges of utter confusion rising across his brow. I shook my head slowly as if to spell it out.

“The succession clause,” he repeated. “In your contract, where it outlines the process of naming my successor, the part that nobody’s ever noticed until today.” He paused. His neck and eyes suddenly spasmed like conjoined springs, and he stepped away from me in mild horror. “Wait a second,” he said. “Are you fucking shitting me? Are you saying that-“

He’d apparently run out of words and so, instead of talking, McKnight hurried over to his desk and dug out a stack of papers. He waved me over to come have a look, and I was reminded of our first encounter. He shoved the papers into my chest when I was close enough and then turned back to rifle through more files.

“Page 102,” he said without looking up. I fumbled my way there and began to read.
“You’re making what I’m about to do so much more difficult by moving your lips when you read to yourself,” he remarked. I looked up but McKnight only shrugged as if to say, just keep reading, asshole. And so I kept on, scanning through the first paragraph, then the second. When I made it to the third paragraph, that’s when the bomb went off. I slowly raised my eyes from the page.

“Is this for real?” I asked.

“You seriously didn’t know about this?” he asked, more to the room itself than to me. “But if you weren’t trying to overthrow me, why in the hell did you get so jacked up?”
It was as if my mind was on a radio delay, and my answers to his questions came after a gap of seven or so seconds.

“Because you’re an asshole,” I answered. “A major fucking asshole. And you needed your ass kicked solely on principle. Plus, I figured you’d ease up on me and let me get my work done if I made it clear that fucking with me would only result in injury for you.” This must have pleased him, because a massive grin overtook his face and he was soon throwing his entire head back in laughter, true, joyous laughter.

“Well it looks like you’re going to end up getting more than you bargained for, my man,” he finally said. “Because this is all yours now. And it’s about time, too. I’ve been ready to start my retirement for a while now – I was starting to think you guys were either too dumb to figure out my succession plan or just too chicken shit to do anything about it.”

We wordlessly took each other in. McKnight nodded slightly, his arms crossed in approval. I laid the papers back on the desk and rubbed my face. I still suspected that I’d suffered a concussion during the fight and that everything taking place was nothing more than a dream.

“You’re saying that since I beat you, I’m in charge here, and that this is now my company?” I asked. He nodded in the affirmative.

“But that’s fucking insane,” I replied.

“Probably,” he said.

The strange thing about the way things ended is that it really wasn’t all that crazy, at least it wasn’t crazy to me. See, that’s what had been slowly creeping up on me, this empathy I felt, this understanding I’d moving toward. As I focused on him during the preparations for our fight, he began making more and more sense, until finally, when I connected with decisive punch that buckled his knees and dropped his hands, I understood everything he did and why he did it. When my fist came into contact flush with his jaw, something changed inside and I was finally able to comprehend just how weary McKnight had been. He’d wanted out and I was the one he’d been counting on.

“So what are you going to do with my company?” he asked. “Tear it down? Sell it off? Change the way it runs?”

I didn’t answer him. Instead, I slowly walked back to the window and pressed my forehead to the glass so I could watch the sidewalk below. McKnight followed.

“What are you going to tell them?” he asked. “How much of this story are you going to share?”

He continued. “Have you considered what these last months have done for you? Have you gained an appreciation for the violence? Do you have a taste for it? Do you even understand why it’s here?”

I didn’t answer, I just continued staring at the dots far below. I remember thinking that it could have been me down there, that I could have been any one of those scrambling little dots. I thought about all the different paths a single life could take, and how mine had carried me there, to that office, beside that man.

“One last question, if you don’t mind,” he said. He pressed his forehead against the glass.

“What kind of fucking ‘roids you on?” he asked. “My jaw feels like it’s on the side of my face.”

So there you have it, there’s your answer for how I managed to get out of there. I didn’t cry and I didn’t give up. I didn’t run for help or try and strike a deal. I didn’t even know for sure that what I was doing would even help. But I did it anyway, I faced his ass down and I gave it everything I had. And look at me now? Not too bad, right?

But enough about me, I’ve gone on too for far too long as it is. I mean, after all, this is your orientation, this is your first week at the office. I’m sure you couldn’t care less about my past struggles at some insanely improbable office, some company straight out of sketch comedy act. Let’s talk about you, let’s talk about whatever questions you’ve got about working here, or just life in general. What is it that you’d like to know?

Really? You really want to hear more about my own stupid story and what all I did after I took over? Well, okay, I guess. But I’m warning you, it’s not all that interesting.

I say that because I didn’t actually change much of anything. You see, in dedicating myself to conquering him, I gained an insight into Randy McKnight, into the reasons why he did what he did. And I found that I understood him completely and that, more importantly, I agreed with him, I agreed with his methods, and rather wholeheartedly. I looked back on my own performance at the company, and the performances of my coworkers, and I realized that McKnight had figured it out, the way to truly motivate people.

And so, when it became my time to take control of this business, the only change I made was to the name on the letterhead. Everything else I kept exactly the same.

Everything.

Now stand up, you little shit. It’s time to learn what hard work is fucking all about.