The Sicilians say that revenge is a dish best served cold. Alfred Hitchcock said that, “Revenge is sweet and not fattening.” George Herbert said, “The best revenge is living well.” There are, of course, lots of quotes about how revenge is bad, but they’re not nearly as much fun.

What nobody seems to talk about is how messy and disgusting revenge often is. I’m not talking about messy and disgusting philosophically or emotionally, although it is that too. No, what I’m talking about is just full-on physical disgustingness.

You know what I’m talking about. When Joe Pesci beats that dude up for asking for a shoeshine in “Goodfellas”, there’s blood everywhere. Actually, most Mafia movies center around revenge, and it’s always a blood-bath. It’s the same with all horror movies, and really anything dramatizing revenge. It’s always a helluva mess. I always think, “Man, I pity the poor schmuck who’s gonna have to clean up after that.”

In the movies, somebody else always has to clean up the mess. In real life it’s usually you. You know when somebody really makes a mess in the bathroom at work, that whoever’s in dutch with the boss is gonna have to clean it up (at least if your company doesn’t employ a janitor). Even when it’s just a matter of making the new guy do it, there’s an aspect of revenge (I had to do it when I was the new guy, so it’s his turn. Kind of a pay-it-forward revenge).

Let’s face it, revenge is a nasty business, even when it’s accidental.

Last week, I posted about accidentally serving my wife, the lovely and currently recuperating Jess, a glass of spoiled milk for her upset stomach. Although she was pretty put out with me at the time, eventually even she had to admit it was kind of funny, and at the very least gave her ammunition to punish me with later.

Unfortunately, that incident seems to have put us on a path of accidentally assured mutual destruction.

After a week, she was getting worse rather than better, so our doctor changed her prescription to a more powerful antibiotic. The two main side-effects of this medicine are feeling nauseous, and vomiting. So, a couple of nights later, we’re getting ready for bed. I’m sitting on the john reading (it sits in it’s own secluded little cubbyhole. We’re not savages), and she decided to use her Neti-Pot (or as I call it her snot-pot) to wash out her sinuses, a practice which I personally find disgusting and singularly abhorrent.

It did not go well. While I’m not sure of the efficacy of the snot-pot to clean out her sinuses, it did an amazing job of triggering her gag reflex. Naturally, since I was firmly ensconced on the fixture normally reserved for voiding the guts, she hurled (and hurled, and hurled, and hurled some more) in the sink.

Sadly, our bathroom sink was draining slow as it was, due to the enormous amount of Jess’ bounteous hair that gets washed down it every day. The introduction into it of everything she had eaten that day did not help matters. Equally sadly, at least as far as I’m concerned anyway, I’m the family plumber, which is how I ended up wrist-deep in used Taco Bell and Oreo Blizzard the other night.

Now I love my wife, and since I’ve been telling her for 20 years that I’d do anything for her, this could be seen as a golden (actually more of a grayish-brown) opportunity to prove it. I tried to take that approach. I really did. I tried to stay cheerful and upbeat about it. I know she felt terrible before THE INCIDENT, and felt even worse after, so I tried not to make her feel even worse about it, telling her it was ok, and cracking jokes as I fished . . . insert the worst imaginable thing you can think of here. . . out of the sink.

I’ve got to admit though, the joking diminished as I worked. It had pretty much completely disappeared by the time I’d worked my way down to the drain and it was still refusing to drain. As I fumbled around trying to unscrew the drain stopper and trying to control my own involuntary gagging, my good humor became more and more forced.

By the time I was forced to go looking for a pair of needle-nosed pliers to try to reach down the drain, it had pretty much vanished. Naturally, I couldn’t find the pliers. I decided to try plunging the sink, maybe I could force the blockage through.

Nope. Thanks to the overflow channel, all plunging the sink accomplished was turning the sink into a kind of puke fountain. Not a good thing. Next, I went out to my truck to get my leatherman, hoping it would reach far enough down the drain to get it flowing. Nope. Nothing was working.

Adding hot water to dilute “things” certainly didn’t help. It just re-warmed everything and got the odor going again.

Finally, I decided that the only thing left to do was to take the drain apart below the sink. Of course, by now, both hands were too wet and slick (on a side note, I think it was probably good for my hands. Fresh stomach acid – softens your hands while it exfoliates. VOMIT – You’re soaking in it. Even Madge might have a hard time selling that one.) to get a good grip on the pipes, so the search for tools was back on.

I’ve kept a couple pairs of Channel-lock pliers in my truck for years now. Naturally, they had magically disappeared. By this time, my mood had definitely taken a darker turn. There’s really nothing like a little late-night plumbing right before bed to put you in the mood . . . for homicide.

Eventually, I found a pair of channel-locks and got the pipes apart. I’ll spare you the rest of the gory details of what it took to get the drain unstopped. Suffice to say that it was not at all pleasant, and by the time it was all over, I had to take a shower, because simply washing my hands just was not gonna do it.

By the time it was all finished up, we both agreed that it wasn’t her fault, and that however inadvertent it may have been, her vengeance for the spoiled milk incident was more than complete, that she was, in fact, way ahead on the Mullins Gross-o-Meter.

We decided that we would just call it even, and say no more about it.

Obviously, no cease-fire lasts forever. Ours lasted until the following morning.

The morning started out normal enough. I got up took the dogs out, had a smoke, took a shower, and got dressed, just my morning routine. It all went horribly wrong though, when I headed for the kitchen. I’m not a big breakfast eater, but I do have a glass of juice with my morning pills (to be honest, by the time I get all my pills down, between medicine and various supplements and what-not that Jess has me on, there’s no room for food).

I am, and always have been, a creature of habit. I’m not a neat freak or anything, but some things have a specific place where they belong, and moving them has consequences. Jess knows this and yet she still insists on moving things. Personally, I think she does it on purpose, because she thinks it’s funny to see me standing there, staring at the cabinet, wondering where the damned paper plates are. I mean, we’ve kept them in that cabinet for years, and it’s always worked perfectly well. Why mess with it? But I digress.

So, on the morning in question, I fixed my juice, and turned to the microwave to get my pill container (we keep them on top, not inside, in case you’re wondering). I dumped the a.m. side into my hand and jauntily flung them into my mouth (I hate taking pills, but if you gotta do it, you might as well do it with panache). I was just reaching for the juice, when it occurred to me, where’d that blue one come from? I don’t take any blue pills.

I looked to the pill container, and sure enough, Jess’ pill container was sitting on the left, exactly where mine should be. Well, I don’t even like taking my own pills. I’m certainly not going to take someone else’s. So naturally, I spit them back into my hand.

Well now what do I do with them? I don’t want to throw them in the trash, those things are expensive. I’ve got to act quick, because they’re really starting to stick to my hand. Well, I’ll just put them back where I got them from. I mean really, what’s the harm, it’s not like we’re strangers to the concept of swapping spit, although we normally prefer to do it on a more personal level.

Anyway, I figured I’d call her from work and warn her. Unfortunately, I got caught up in stuff at work, and forgot all about it until I got home. Fortunately, by that time, she was feeling quite a bit better and eventually was able to see the humor in it. I was also relieved to find that I had made the right decision about not just swallowing them. Although most of the stuff we’re on is pretty much identical (blood pressure, cholesterol, etc.) I’m pretty sure her estrogen pill would not have done me a bit of good.

So all’s well that ends well, I guess. I just hope we can finally break the cycle of disgusting and inadvertent revenge.