You spend your whole life thinking you’re the one writing the story. You’re the hero, the villain, the goddamn author of your own beautiful, ugly, and completely fraudulent little epic. And then one day, you wake up, and you realize you’re not the author at all. You’re just a character in a much older, stranger, and a hell of a lot funnier story that’s been writing itself all along.
I remember when I was a young man, a beautiful, hungry, and completely ruthless bastard in my twenties, and I got a job at a place called TSK. It was a high-tech outfit, a Japanese company trying to plant a flag in North America. I was a drafter, a tool designer, a kid who knew how to make a machine sing on a computer screen.
And my boss, he was a man named Rick Cody.
Rick was a good man, I guess. A quiet, gentle, and completely obsolete piece of machinery. He was a mechanical engineer from the old school, the kind who still did his math on a whiteboard, a beautiful, slow, and completely useless ballet of numbers and chalk dust. He was fifty-six years old, the same age I am right now, and he had the quiet, sad, and completely defeated eyes of a man who knows the world has left him behind.
And me? I was the new world. I was a young, hungry, and completely beautiful bastard of a wolf, and he was an old, slow, and completely finished sheep. And I didn’t have to kill him. I just had to let him die of his own irrelevance.
The new manager, a sharp, old-school Japanese sonofabitch named MacDonald, he saw it right away. He and I, we connected. He didn’t speak much English, but he spoke the language of the machine, and so did I. He’d come to my desk, point at a drawing, and we’d have a whole goddamn conversation without saying a word. He gave me the keys to the kingdom, the knowledge I needed to advance. And Rick, my boss, he’d just stand off to the side, watching us with the sad, hopeful, and completely pathetic eyes of a puppy that’s about to be put down.
And I was a piece of shit. A beautiful, efficient, and completely unapologetic piece of shit. I’d take the information from MacDonald, and I’d just… keep it. I wouldn’t share it with Rick. It wasn’t intentional, not really. It was just… instinct. A quiet, primal, and completely honest act of predation.
I’d walk into a meeting, and I’d have the whole project done, the whole design finished, the whole goddamn symphony played and recorded, and Rick, my boss, he wouldn’t have even seen the sheet music. He’d just sit there, a ghost at his own funeral, while MacDonald talked to me, asked me the questions, gave me the quiet, respectful nod of a man who knows who’s really running the show. Eventually, they just took him off the projects altogether. He was in charge of cleaning the toilets, or something equally as beautiful and pathetic.
I remember my reviews. I’d sit down with Cody, my “supervisor,” and he’d just mumble some bullshit, and then MacDonald would come in and give me a twenty percent raise. It happened every quarter. A quiet, steady, and completely brutal transfer of power.
The day he resigned, we didn’t speak. He just walked past my cubicle, a long, slow, and completely defeated shuffle, and he didn’t even look at me. The hatred coming off him was so thick you could taste it. They had a going-away party for him. I wasn’t invited. I had won. I had his job. I was the king of the goddamn hill.
And that was thirty years ago. A lifetime.
And then, yesterday, I had my own little going-away party.
I’m a Senior Project Manager now. The top of the goddamn food chain. They hired me to take over this whole Tucson operation, to be the big swinging dick, the man in charge. I moved my whole goddamn life down to this beautiful, ugly, and completely honest shithole of a town, all for this job.
And right after Thanksgiving, it started. A quiet, cold, and completely familiar kind of silence. My new boss, he stopped making eye contact. The emails stopped coming. The meeting invites disappeared. I was a ghost in my own goddamn office. I’d just sit there, in the quiet, and do absolutely nothing.
And the only person who would even look at me was the assistant project manager. A kid. A young, hungry, and completely ambitious little bastard who I was supposed to be training. And I’d hear the whispers. I’d get a glimpse of a schedule he was building, without me. A cost report he was running, without me. A pay application he was processing, without me. He was having all the key conversations, making all the goddamn decisions. He was doing my job.
And it wasn’t just him. It was the whole goddamn system, squeezing me out. They didn’t even want me to tell the customer I was the project manager.
And I just had to laugh. A real, ugly, gut-shot laugh.
Because it was perfect. The universe, that old, drunk, and completely sadistic bastard of a comedian, he’d finally delivered the punchline to a joke he’d set up thirty years ago.
I had become Rick Cody.
I was the old, slow, and completely obsolete piece of machinery now, sitting on the sidelines, watching a younger, hungrier wolf eat my goddamn lunch. And it was beautiful. A perfect, ugly, and completely symmetrical piece of karmic poetry.
And you ask, what am I going to do? Get mad? Resign? Go work for some other sonofabitch?
No.
I’m fifty-six years old. I’m not a young man anymore. I’m not motivated by the same dumb, beautiful, and completely honest things. A young man, he wants to win the fight. An old man, he just wants to understand why the fight was worth a damn in the first place.
And I’m looking at this whole goddamn, beautiful, ugly, and completely hilarious situation, and I’m starting to understand. The universe isn’t trying to punish me. It’s trying to tell me something. It’s squeezing me, not to kill me, but to get me to jump.
This job, this beautiful, karmic shithole, it’s not a prison. It’s a goddamn gift. It’s the final, beautiful, and completely necessary kick in the ass I needed to stop playing this stupid, ugly, and completely rigged game for good.
I didn’t really win back then, did I? I took a man’s job, and for what? To end up right back here, in the same goddamn chair, just with a few more scars and a much bigger hangover.
The universe isn’t pushing me out the door. It’s just holding it open for me. And it’s telling me, in its own quiet, ugly, and beautiful way, that it’s finally time to leave.
And this time, I think I’m actually going to listen.
