I said that because I had been tested by giants plenty of times before. With such a great size difference between us, he had to wonder why I wasn’t scared of him.

Everyone at Ryan’s basically had at least one story about why no one should mess with them. Steve, besides visibly being very strong and having eyes that were like driving with high beams on at night, told me about some of his boxing stories.

“At the gym, guys even bigger than me end up crawling on the ground like, ‘I don’t want no more!’ when I fight them.”

I once jokingly asked him if he wanted to towel box.

“What’s that gonna do?” he asked.

“He’s just worried about accidentally knocking one of your teeth loose,” Eric interjected.

“This is MY house. Don’t go running your mouth like these other guys,” Steve said.

“I’m not saying I can do this or that. I like a challenge,” I said.

Steve nodded his head, then returned with a statement of his own.

“If you ever succeed in making me mad, I’ll unleash a power you don’t even understand,” he said.

I had no doubt he could. He definitely had the most powerful presence I’ve ever felt, but over time, as I became more familiar with him, the intimidation began to wear off.

One day Steve would be making jokes with me, and a day later, he’d be making thinly veiled threats to me. He’d say things like, “People get hurt in fights.” The day after that, he would be telling me that someone liked me, like April, one of the people who worked at the dessert bar far away from the kitchen in the dining area. April was about as young as I was, was very quiet, had brown hair that was bleached, and seemed a bit backwoodsish. She also seemed like she knew how to fix a car and shoot a gun. She never said anything like that to me, so I didn’t know what Steve was talking about. Maybe another one of his tricks. Another guy who worked at the dessert bar named Nadar, actually warned me about Steve from the beginning.

“Play with a dog, he'll lick your face,” he said.

I recognized Steve as a threat from the beginning, but his brighter moments made it hard for me to be totally against him.

Nadar was the only person at Ryan’s I ever hung out with outside of work. I met him and his girlfriend at a bar called Lillian’s one night. We had drinks and danced to the music they were playing on a slow night. Nadar never treated me like most of the guys at Ryan’s did. He seemed a little paranoid about racism, but I didn’t know what kinds of experiences he had in his life to make him feel that way. I had definitely dealt with my own struggles, but they didn’t leave the same mark on me as Nadar. Aside from different experiences, we also had different personalities.

“I don’t play,” is another thing that Nadar said to me when talking about Steve and the other guys. It was like it was their job to screw with people, going beyond just being playful. Nadar wasn’t having any of that.

Back in the present moment. I was surprised when I agreed to go outside that Steve himself looked surprised by it. Why was the big, powerful bully who puts people on their tails at the boxing gym having doubts? Anyway, I could always sense the confrontation coming, despite any moments of camaraderie, and it appeared to finally arrive.

After walking out the front doors, I turned around. Instead of coming out to fight, Steve closed the door behind me and held it shut. Eric, like a dirty devil, held the other door shut. Being so used to people’s garbage behavior by now, I just went to my car and drove home. I was done working for the day anyway.

It’s strange that something like that can happen between a manager and an employee and things carry on like nothing ever happened after that. A few days later, I was working with Eric in the kitchen and he mentioned Steve, like he was somebody to be worried about.

“You didn’t see him come outside, did you?” I asked.

“He went out the BACK door!” Eric said.

What a dirtbag. He called me outside, didn’t come, then, according to Eric, tried to ambush me, even though I didn’t see him.

Not long after my incident with Steve, word spread fast around Ryan’s that Nadar had the police called on him and he was escorted off the premises. According to what Steve said, Nadar asked him to go outside, Steve went out after him, Nadar said, “I got something to show you,” and Steve ran back inside and called the cops. Nadar was fired that day.

A couple hours later, there was a group of us in the break/banquet room. Steve had at least three vehicles, a sports car, a truck, and a jeep. On this day he was driving a jeep. It was parked right outside the window from us and he got into his jeep facing directly towards us. We all saw him look all around and check his mirrors before starting his vehicle, like he was making sure Nadar wasn’t trying to sneak up on him. Everyone started laughing.

“That was all I wanted to see this afternoon,” Pokie said.

A week later, I met with Nadar far outside of Ryan’s, and he explained to me what happened.

“I wasn’t going to get a gun, I said I wanted to show him something like I was going to box with him. Funny that I got fired for the same thing that he did to you,” he said.

Bruno, one of the dishwashers, seemed to always be bothered by something.

“I’ll f****** slam his a**!” I’d hear him saying almost every single time I’d walk through the dish room. I didn’t know who he was talking about, until I finally asked him.

“Steve talks so much s***! I’ll slam his a**! he said.

“Scott wants to slam him,” I said

“Who cares about that, mon? Who cares about that?” Bruno asked as he waved his hand.

“Do you think he can do it?” I asked.

“As big as Steve is… I doubt it,” he said.

Bruno was a big guy. He was about as tall as Steve, not quite as all-around muscular, but looked equally as strong and tough. Scott said he saw Bruno at the mall one day pick someone up over his head. I wasn’t sure what that was about, but Bruno actually got in fights for money. He told me about one of them.

“One day I met somebody on the beach to fight him…a BIG joker short but wide! I picked him up and threw him across the land, and he came back and said he did not want to fight anymore.”

Scott hated everyone, but especially Steve. One afternoon in the break room, Scott was going off on him.

“I wanna knock him down on the ground and start kicking him in the ribs…” Scott said with a little demonstration.

Just at that moment, Steve walked into the break room and rolled his eyes up at the ceiling.

“Ooooooo!” I shouted.