 He told me this story once, and only once. And never spoke of it again. If you like true revenge stories, you found the best place for your vengeful needs. I create them with fleaky visuals, dipped in artificial love. We start off with a rich redneck, who doesn't show of his riches, which makes him an easy target in the eyes of a new and titled community of chads and cairns. They try to sue him into submission, while being ignorant of the fact. This redneck has a protective Mima, who is madder than a wet hen. You buy a story in which a grandfather sheds light on a small town's secret, from the Peruvian town he used to live. Lastly, a kid shares the secret story of his dad, that he only told once in his life. His dad emphasized to never do what he had done. His story starts with the creation of bicycles, that were forged specifically for revenge. Before we start, make sure when you're at the like button's housewarming, you rearrange the contents of the kitchen drawers. Let's dive in. Naturally, viewer discretion is advised. These revenge acts might be disturbing to snowflakes. This is a story about my grandparents' friend. I was a young teen when I heard it, but given the outcome, this story has stuck with me. I've sat on this story for a while, but it's so satisfying to see a gaggle of cairns taken down a notch, that I figured I'd share. For the sake of this story, we will call my grandparents friend William. Now, my grandparents knew William from way back. My grandmother knew him from school and my grandfather met him after marrying my grandmother. Anyways, in the 60s, grandma was a manager at the 7-Eleven. William led a crew that went there every day. It was the only gas station and a 30-minute radius, so everyone knew everyone in that sleepy coastal town kind of way. Now, one day, William was doing a job down on the waterfront and slipped, fell, and broke his back. While he was healing from the operation and was broke as a joke, my grandma would always make sure to send him something to eat that she'd pay for. Specifically when the crew would come in to grab their snacks and gas up, knowing William would simply skip the meal to save the money for his own family. My grandpa also took him to several doctor appointments, since William couldn't drive for a while. Besides, his tiny little wife couldn't wrangle him into a car by herself, even if she tried. William never forgot that. 20 years later, when he sold off his now very successful business and was a millionaire about 20 times over, he promptly told 90% of the world to go to hell, but kept those that had always been there for him close. Meanwhile, he never moved from the house that he had since before he was rich. His only concessions to his wealth were trips with his wife to see the world and buying up quite a few acres of the forested land around him. If you weren't his friend, you'd take him for every other blue-collar worker in the town. There was absolutely nothing obvious to show that he was worth tens of millions of dollars. After his wife died in the 90s, William decided to take up a new hobby. As he lived outside of the city limits, he set up a sawmill and woodworking shop, got all the proper permits and everything. The saws were in a big old enclosed building in the middle of all that land, so in all honesty, no harm no foul, right? Wrong. The family that owned the forest behind William's land had just sold it to developers. Thus, the new luxury-gated neighborhood, the first in the area, was born. Enter a plethora of chads and carons, who were mostly from up north and had moved down south to take advantage of the better weather, and the nearby beach. It didn't take long before they decided to take a fence to his little business venture, on the other side of the 10-foot tall wall of their neighborhood because it didn't fit with the image of their community. You know, the community he was decidedly not a part of. So, they sued him. Didn't even try to start a dialogue with him, just up and sued him. William was livid. He was your typical coastal redneck and he would be damned, if those damn Yankees told him what to do on his own property, that was not within city limits nor located in Inhoa. William countered with professional noise studies that show that some of the kids in that neighborhood drove vehicles, that made more ambient noise than his little operation. Would they back off now, leave him be? Nope, the people in the neighborhood simply threw more money at the lawyers to continue on with the lawsuit. Essentially, their plan was to bleed him dry. Their lawyers, who were not locals, actually told William's lawyer that he should probably advise his client to close the shop, so that he wouldn't end up bankrupt, due to the resources being thrown at him from the homeowners. Due to the relatively modest surroundings of his home, the neighbors nor their lawyers had any idea the man, was actually richer than just about all of them put together. All they saw was an older dude, who drove a beat-up 80s model truck and wore Dickie's jeans and work shirts, that lived in what appeared to be a relatively modest home, especially compared to their McMansions. When William's lawyer told him about that conversation, William lost his mind. I clearly remember his screeching into my parents' driveway in that old work truck, cussing up a storm and ranting and raving before he even got in the house. He came to our house why? Because my grandmother, bless her heart, was known as one of the most giving people in the world. Unless, you pissed her off. If you hurt her or someone she cared for, she became one of the most vindictive which that could be found in that town. I am not kidding when I say that her ability for revenge served cold was legendary amongst the locals. So William had come to the house for a dose of her deviousness. Us kids weren't allowed inside during that conversation, but after he left that day, I later heard the adults talking about how he proceeded to hire quite a few private investigators, to see if there would be any dirt to dig up on them. By them, I mean the dozens of people in that neighborhood that were a part of that lawsuit. Oh and behold, there was apparently copious amounts of dirt to be had. I still remember him positively crowing about it to my grandparents, one fine summer day months later. That 60-something-year-old man, was as gleeful as the proverbial kid on Christmas morning. Why? Because after he learned what his little private army dug up, he started making some phone calls to various, acquaintances in high places. The ensuing fallout, meant that the lawsuit was dropped. There was quite a list of misdeeds that were discovered, but the ones that I heard talked about by the adults that stick out are, there were more than a handful of individuals that owed back child support. William very helpfully had the private investigators provide the mother's updated address and employment information, so that they could pursue said child support slash garnishment if they wanted to. On top of that, the IRS became very interested in several of those people as well as various other neighbors. Finally, one household ended up in prison, because the investigators realized that they were actual drug dealers. The pictures of the transactions caught by the pies were helpfully handed over to the sheriff's department, drugs or bad kids. Moral of the story, never piss off, a rich redneck. My grandfather grew up in a rural Peruvian town where only his family lived. They were very isolated from others. They lived about half an hour away from the nearest town. As one would assume, everyone was close. This story happened sometime around the 1940s. It's about one of my grandfather's many cousins, let's call her Mary, who was 20 years, and her husband, Earl, who was 25. Mary's dad went away to work in the capital for a while, taking Mary with him. There, she met Earl, fell in love, and married. They returned to town a couple of months after they wed. They rented the room at the local saloon while Earl worked with Mary's dad selling goods in neighboring towns to save money. Turns out, Earl was a prick. Not only did he cheat on Mary while he was away working, but he also severely mistreated her when he was home, even more than the standard at the time. It was really bad. Eventually, the owner of the saloon noticed. His name was Walter, and he was a distant cousin of Mary. He confronted her, and after a lot of prodding, she admitted to everything. She hadn't confessed before as her close family, especially her dad, opposed the marriage, and she was ashamed to admit how Earl really was. Well, she wouldn't have to suffer much longer, as Walter would take matters into his own hands. He always liked to play a prank on newcomers. He would take them to a field a half hour away to hunt. What he claimed was the most delicious bird he had ever tasted. Spoiler alert, that bird did not exist. It had a funny name I can't remember, so I'll just call it birdie. He would leave them in the middle of the field with the net while he went away to chase the birdies into the net. He would then walk back to town while the newcomer was kept waiting for the birdies. Eventually, newcomer would return to town and be mocked and laughed at for buying the story. Just some good old, rural town fun. He had yet to prank Earl, as he was mostly away working and working. However, not long after an opportunity presented itself, he was able to leave Earl away with the same story as always, but he didn't play the prank on him. Instead, he led him to a field 1.5 to two hours away instead, getting him drunk on the way. Letting him wait near a lake where the birdies could be found underwater. He then returned to town and claimed Earl had wanted to actually hunt the birds, not just wait, and it was hard to convince him otherwise as a way to excuse his tardiness. Earl's disappearance was noticed the next day by Mary's dad when he didn't show up to his house or work and when he wasn't in the rented room. Walter gave his excuse, the others at the saloon and his wife corroborated his story. A few days later, Earl was found in the lake, he drowned. It was concluded that while waiting for the birdies, he'd gotten drunk and when he attempted to return to town, he had gotten lost and fallen into the lake. Unlike her husband, Mary's life ended on a happy note. She remarried to a much nicer man, had eight children and bought a house in the capital where she lived until she passed of around 2003. Walter also had a happy life and passed in the late 1970s. My grandfather only knew this story because he overheard Walter tell Mary's dad the true story. Apart from him, no one else but the three of them knew. He told me one day I was asking about secrets about his small town. This isn't my story, but rather my dad's. I know the believability of this might be hard, but I believe this story to be true. Thus, I'm willing to share it. My dad was a very nice and hardworking man with some of the greatest patience for bullshit I've ever seen. But he also had a temper that could make an angry moose turn the other way if he was pushed far enough. Well, when this happened, he was definitely pushed far enough. He told me this after I told him all of the things I did to prank evil mama bear before moving out of her house. He told me this story once and only once, about 10 years ago and never spoke of it again. I wrote it down in a journal from memory back then so I wouldn't forget. So I'll try and retell it as best I can from what I wrote in the journal a decade ago and probably explains where I got my conniving side from. This story happened in the late 70s. My dad was a young man striking out on his own for the first time. He lived alone in a really crappy part of town while attending college and working at a gas station as a steady job. But the area had lots of thugs and especially lots of violence. There was a group of guys he knew from high school that just loved to mess with him. The first thing they did was spray paint graffiti all over his car, a 68 Chevy Nova. Then they started harassing him every night he was coming home from work or class because they were always hanging around his building. The leader of the gang was a big guy dad referred to as Ted. Don't know if this was his real name or not, Ted was a relentless bully to several other kids in school. He donkey conned my dad many times over the years. But during high school in particular, he hated my dad because Ted failed and dropped out during senior year and they wouldn't let him play football with his failing grades anymore. My dad on the other hand finished with some pretty decent grades and got a partial scholarship to a local community college. So to say Ted resented my dad was putting it mildly and one day when my dad was going into his apartment, Ted and his gang ambushed him and really did a number on him in a back alley. My dad lay wounded and unconscious in that alley all night. He was found in the morning by an old lady walking her dog and she called for help. He was in the hospital for months with several broken bones and head trauma. And this caused him to lose out on a lot of his college classes and he had to retake them. Of course he told police it was Ted and his cronies that did it. But the police claimed they had no evidence that Ted did it because he and his friends all supposedly had alibis and there were no other witnesses. Well, that didn't sit well with my dad. He spent some time in physical recovery after getting out of the hospital and then moved to a new apartment with a friend as a roommate. And together they schemed and plotted to get revenge on Ted. My dad told me that back then, if police failed you, you took payback into your own hands. Now a thing of note is that my grandfather on my dad's side worked at the city dump and he was always bringing things home to collect, donate, fix, resell, et cetera. My dad helped him out with this a lot. So he learned a lot about fixing and making things. And while with his father at work, he found ways of sneaking into the dump at night. As a teenager he would sneak in there at night with friends to find stuff they used to build a hidden fort in the woods nearby. My dad said the fort was so well made that it even had a makeshift wood stove that they made out of recycled bricks and a metal barrel to use in winter to keep the fort warm. This is important later. So over a few nights, my dad and his friends snuck into the dump just like they used to in order to look around for things they could use. Bit by bit they found some old stinky clothes, shoes and some old wooden baseball bats and a few other useful things for the revenge. The dump also had an assortment of used tools the employees found in the trash and set aside to be used on site but also regularly borrowed. So no one really kept track of them. My dad and his friend kept all of the stuff they were going to use hidden at the old fort they made as teenagers near the dump. So they had a perfect place to build the tools of their revenge. Next they made sure they had as solid of an alibi as they could make. My dad and his friend were living on the top floor in an old three-story apartment building and was already well liked in the building for being handy and fixing a few things for his neighbors. The walls between apartments were kind of thin so neighbors often heard the comings and goings of people on the same floor. They'd come out to greet my dad and his friend when they came home in the evening. And apparently the building had no fire escape. So the doors were typically the only way in or out. And the main door of the building was generally locked at night with a clerk sitting watch the entire time. They came home, checked in with the clerk, said their good evenings to several neighbors and then locked themselves in their apartment. They waited till midnight and then used a knotted rope found at the dump to climb down three stores from their apartment window. Which coincidentally was right above the dumpsters in the side alley. They hid part of the hanging rope behind a gutter pipe and then hoofed it a few miles to the old fort where they'd hidden what dad referred to as revenge cycles. He told me they were bicycles that they'd pieced together from junk parts found in the dump that were built and modified using the borrowed tools to have mounts for carrying the baseball baths and a few other things they couldn't fit in backpacks that they needed at the ready without making much noise or bogging them down. They rode the revenge cycles to the bungalow in an old neighborhood where Ted was living with his friends. Though squatting may be a better word. Dad said it was a house where dealing was regularly done which was good in a way because that meant they wouldn't call the police unless they wanted to risk exposing their operation. They scouted the area for a few nights to plan their attack, then waited for the perfect opportunity. First my dad and his friend put on Halloween masks to cover their faces and took a tire iron that they'd brought and quietly removed the lug nuts from two of the wheels that were on Ted's crappy van. Then they spray painted an insignia that was used by another gang from the area on the side of the van to make it look like this was a rival gang dispute. My dad and his friend then spied on Ted and his gang for hours from the windows using homemade periscopes that were painted dull black so they wouldn't be seen. Ted and his crony spent some time getting drunk and high until Ted got so wasted he went to bed. My dad and his friend waited patiently for Ted to start snoring and quietly snuck into the house through the window of the room he was sleeping in, locked the door from the inside and bolstered it with a chair. Then in unison, they donkey bashed both of Ted's spaghetti legs on the patella drums with their drumsticks. If you get what I'm saying. And when Ted tried to cover himself, they donkey bashed on his arms too. Then they held him down and emptied a plastic bag of fresh warm doodoo. They'd both contributed to making all over his face before getting the hell out of there fast because he was yelling for his cronies. Ted's cronies couldn't get into the room before my dad and his friend were out of there. They ducked into another yard and rode off on the revenge cycles from a different street before anyone saw them. But they heard from other people in the area that Ted's cronies tried to load him into his van to take him to the hospital. But as they got going, the wheels on one side of the van came off and they had to call an ambulance. The aftermath on both of Ted's patella drums made the doctor say that he'd never fully recover and would have to walk with a cane for years. As for Ted's cronies, a few of them got arrested. Police came to the hospital to take a statement from Ted and noticed a couple of them didn't look so good. They asked them a few questions, then searched them. They ended up in the slammer for drug possession, which prompted police to search the bungalow they were living in, but some of the other guys were smart enough to move all of the narcotics to another location when they thought a rival gang was after them. So the cops didn't find much. Ted's remaining cronies later got cornered by my dad and his friend when they followed them in their disguises on the revenge cycles to a back alley where they'd been known to regularly hang out and sell their garbage. And this time, they brought a plastic toy blaster to force them to disarm them of their knives and such. Then they proceeded to Bomba drum them with their baths. After this was over, my dad and his friend claimed to be with a rival gang and told Ted's cronies that if they didn't leave town, they get something a lot worse than a simple Donkey Kong bash fest. And for some added incentive, they sprayed one of their feet with lighter fluid and dropped a lip match onto them, causing the guy to freak out and kick his flaming shoes off. This seemed to work as all of them were gone from the city not long after that. My dad and his friend hid the revenge cycles and dropped the knotted rope from the window into the dumpster below where they later retrieved it in the morning while taking the trash out and disposed of it. Dad and his roommate were questioned, but they claimed no involvement in what happened to Ted. And neighbors and apartment clerk all told them that they never left the building after getting home on those days. My dad and his roommate then let the police come into their apartment to search the place. But they didn't find anything that could be considered evidence as they had already disposed of the stuff they used by taking apart the revenge cycles and at night burned the baseball bats, masks, the shoes and clothes they wore and the knotted rope in the fort's barrel stove till there was nothing left but ash. As for the plastic toy blaster, well, my dad said it was never real but was instead could come of as such. Especially in the dark. And they got rid of it by tossing it into the dump. The cops were satisfied in the belief my dad had nothing to do with the incident and just bid them good day. Dad never told anyone else but me and his younger brother that he and his friend did all of that. As for Ted, dad said he never really bothered anyone again. And he ended up eventually leaving town some years later because he was convinced another gang was still out to get him. What happened to him after that? Dad didn't know. I could tell he felt some measure of guilt for what he did back then. But also seemed to feel fairly justified in it as well since Ted had badly hurt many people around town, just like what he'd done to my dad. So I suppose it was well deserved on some level. But my dad adamantly told me to never try anything like what he did. And I can't say I blame him. Thank you for enjoying this episode, which was made with artificial love. Subscribe to receive future episodes and tickle the like button for Good Karma. Do you have any experiences surrounding this topic? Share yours below, I'll join the conversation. And I'll be seeing you in the next one.