Terry was this big fat guy who shared a partition wall with me. I liked Terry. We’d be having a smoke outside, and talking, and he’d go,
	“Man, I fucking hate, the Jews, the Muslims, the Whites, the Blacks, the Chinese, I fucking hate them all,” and then he’d turn to me and go,
	“I fucking hate you too.” and we’d have a laugh.
Our job was shit; everyone knew it. We worked in an office building four stories tall. This company must have been a pretty big deal, and yet I had no idea what we did.  My job was putting numbers into a computer; I was labour in a white shirt.
No one came to make friends, you could do that on your own time outside company property. We were meant to be half-man half-machine, employed to do what our bosses wished their computers could do, and fuck it man, we’d do it so long as it puts food, and Ray-Bans on our tables. Let the lawmakers take care of our worker rights, and let HR take care of the coffee in the workroom. Living day to day was having faith that someone out there had a vision of a better human race, and worked tirelessly to make that vision a reality, so that you, a transistor in a chip, could be a 21st century peasant, and find a piece of that life. liberty, and pursuit of happiness, that someone somewhere in history, decided you and everyone else was entitled to.
That was, of course, the way I saw it. It’s just my opinion. Now Terry, he didn’t see things the way other people do. That’s why I liked Terry. He’d treat everyone like they were his friend. He’d be in the breakroom next to the watercooler talking about last night’s game. He’d be in the washroom yelling at you from the stall about primetime sitcoms. He’d blast Lupe mixtapes through his headphones loud enough for guys three rows down to hear. Terry was the man. Terry had an idea about who he was and what he wanted. The only problem was, Terry didn’t own the floor under his feet. He was just another shmuck in data entry.
He came over to my desk at lunch one day with cold spaghetti in Tupperware.
“Hey, you know the name of the CEO of this place?” I said no.
“But did you know there’s only one of them?” I said sure.
“Yeah but there’s like twenty of us here in data, and like twenty in shipping, and twenty mopping the floor, but there’s only one guy running the show.” I nodded my head.
“So how are we all supposed to get promoted to CEO if there’s only one job but a couple hundred of us out here?” He stood there smirking like the smartass he was; holding his spaghetti like it was Yorick’s skull. I just shrugged my shoulders and offered him a cig. I knew what he was getting at, but I tried hard to keep those thoughts out of my mind.
We went outside. The office had a front lawn with a granite sign on it. There was a line of trees and two benches, which is where we’d usually sit.  Terry sat down and started shoveling away the spaghetti. It was pretty amazing watching him go. His fork was like a spinning wheel; rolling the spaghetti into a spool, and sticking it in his mouth. All this without splattering himself with even a drop of spaghetti sauce.  I was on my second smoke when he joined in.
“Hey tomorrow we should go smoke on the roof,” he said. “Fucking door swings outward. Joespha showed me, you can just give it a kick and it’ll fly open.” I didn’t know what to say so I just nodded my head.
“Come on man, don’t be a fucking faggot. We’ll just go up there, swing our legs over the edge like we’re working on the Empire State building or some shit. We’ll be legendary.” I think he saw me visibly cringe so he shut up and just sucked on his smoke for a while. I liked Terry, but sometimes I had to wonder if he really was genuine, or just genuinely stupid. I asked him, if he actually meant the things he’d say about relgion, race, and stuff. Being the guy who people associated as his “friend” was starting to throw some shade on me. I knew Terry didn’t care about any of that shit. Black, white, brown or yellow, he just liked seeing how other people reacted to him saying backwards shit. He wanted to see if people knew why they were getting offended, not just that they had to get upset. Asking him if he really meant the things he said, was like me asking a comedian to explain the joke after I laughed at it. Terry just shook his head,
“’Course I don’t mean that shit. What are you, fucking stupid? Man I really thought you were smart.” I told him that I had to know. I didn’t tell them that he’d been acting moody. That thing about sneaking onto the roof at lunch was what set me off. I could tell when Terry was being real, and when he was fucking around. When he was talking about going up to the roof, he was being a hundred percent real.
I told him to forget about it, and said we should go out drinking sometime instead. I didn’t think Terry had many friends, and I didn’t have many either. Most weeks the only outside contact I would have is with my girl. We’d share dinner or go to the movies once in a while.