The fault-finding light of the Costco Supercenter in Marina Del Rey illuminated all the pock-marks and acne on the face of my pubescent supervisor. His name was Tony, and he smelled like a mixture of liniment and vaginal secretions. We stood in front of a table at the endcap of the Juice aisle, like two torpid dicks pissing in the wind, pathetic and wet from mixing up the Zipfizz. For those of you not aware of Zipfizz, it’s a synthetic powdery substance that dissolves in water (much like cocaine). It’s sugarless and contains an assortment of vitamins and nutrients that will leave you with a putative “buzz.” The flavors suck and personally I’d rather drink ass sweat. After fifteen minutes of trying to convince corpulent customers to put down that 34 gallon drum of Hellman’s Mayonnaise and buy our product, I began to get sick. Not physically ill like the queasiness that precedes the shits, more like I could feel part of my soul leaving my body. I know now, the loss I felt that day was my dignity.

I had reached a new low, if standing there in a warehouse full of the country’s unhealthiest products sold in bulk quantities at reduced prices wasn’t enough, the fact that I was pushing Zipfizz on L.A.’s finest- the vain, the pretentious, the narcissistic- in a hairnet, rubber gloves, and a Zipfizz T-shirt was. Even my peers turned against me. The handheld forklift operator- the white dude with the corn rows, the belly fat, and the Fubu jeans- ogled me with contempt. I was subhuman. But in that moment of despair, I had an interesting realization: it was amazing how many free samples of an energy drink I could feed a child before their parent(s) realized it. From then on my mission was clear, disburse as many samples as possible to those greedy little mouths. In essence, I was producing an army of human time bombs. And, the thought of those wired up little mongrels going home and suddenly raising hell for their negligent parents after that “5 hour energy boost” kicked in, put an insidious grin on my face. Take that fuckers!