Finding Happiness in Los Angeles

by Oliver Markus Malloy

  But he didn't see it. Bless his heart.

  Oh, he also told me he was wounded in the war, and he was on full disability because he had a metal plate in his head. He couldn't think so good.

  What the hell is this war everyone keeps talking about?

  So anyway, Richard thought he was a stud. He was a short, fat, ugly, wrinkly old disabled guy with a metal plate in his head who couldn't think so good.

  And for the past few years he had been dating a string of impossibly hot twenty-somethings. He thought of each and every one of them as his actual, real girlfriends. Not just some young crackwhores he fucked. No, he thought he had been in real relationships with each of them. We talked for a long time, and he told me the romantic stories of how they met and how they broke up. And all the horrible things they did to him. How they broke his heart.

  The funny thing about it was, I knew most of the girls. I had dated some of them myself. Richard had dated Jasmine. And Lucy's friend Darlene. Abby's sister Tabby. Anita. And Sonya. There were more. But I don't remember the rest.

  His list of ex-girlfriends had a strong overlap with my list of ex-girlfriends.

  And that's when it finally clicked. That's when the veil was finally lifted from my mind, and the spell was broken. I could finally see clearly.

  There was Haley and Lorne, the one-armed wonder.

  Lucy and Albert, the geriatric Rambo.

  Sonya and Richard, the guy with the metal plate in his head.

  Lexus and the Hunchback of Notre Dame.

  Melissa and Bob the blob.

  And then there was Veronica and Oliver, the dumb German.

  I was quiet. I needed a minute to digest this life-changing revelation. My whole world just came into focus, like someone had given me glasses for the first time.

  This whole time I thought of myself as Richard Gere in Pretty Woman. I thought my love was helping a poor girl escape a horrible life of prostitution. I thought each girl I met was a poor little victim who never had anyone love her. And if only I loved her enough, if I showed her how wonderful it is to be loved for the first time in her life, she'd turn her life around and get clean. She wouldn't need drugs anymore. She'd have me. And we'd live happily ever after. Our love would overcome all obstacles and we'd have a big fairy tale happy ending.

  Now, for the first time, I realized I wasn't like Richard Gere. I was like Quasimodo. Like all these other lonely poor fools. I used to look down on these guys. I thought of them as selfish lowlife scumbags who exploited these poor girls for sex.

  I thought I was better than these lesser men. They just wanted to stick their dicks in a pretty young girl's pussy. But my motives were noble and pure! I fucked these pretty young girls because I was looking for true love! I was totally different than all these other guys! I thought.

  Now I realized that just like me, a lot of them thought they were in real relationships with these girls. We all thought we were Richard Gere. But we were all just a bunch of lonely guys being led around by the nose by red sparrow crackwhores. It wasn't that the girls didn't have enough love. No, they had so many lonely guys in love with them, it was ridiculous!

  Nothing deflates your ego and wipes out your last shred of self-respect like that moment when you realize you've been the butt of the joke all along.

  It took me a moment to regain my composure.

  Then I tried to explain to Richard that these beautiful young drug addicts weren't really his girlfriends. Their addiction had turned them into ruthless sociopaths who had just been manipulating and using him. He didn't believe me. He was convinced Sonya was madly in love with him.

  "She comes by almost every day," he said. "She's gonna come live with me when she gets out of the halfway house."

  Turns out that on a lot of the days when Sonya claimed she was working as a part-time waitress at an Italian Restaurant in Cape Coral, she actually had me drop her off in front of a restaurant that was right around the corner from Richard's house. I had been bringing her to Richard without even knowing it! She had been fucking him the whole time.

  Joshua and Sonya had relapsed together a while ago. She managed to pass the drug tests by using the clean urine from one of the other girls in Sonya's halfway house.

  She visited Richard regularly to have sex with him for money, and to steal his pain pills. He had a prescription for Hydromorphone. Basically legal heroin in pill form.

  I texted Sonya and told her I had just talked to Richard and that I was done with her. I never wanted to hear from her again.

  She didn't even bother to reply.

  The next day her mother called me. This time I picked up. She screamed: "Sonya told me she broke up with you because you were forcing her to have sex with you! You pig! I should cut your fucking dick off!"

  I interrupted her: "Listen, you dumb trailer trash bitch! Your piece of shit daughter is lying to you every god damn day! Are you really that fucking stupid? Every fucking word out of her mouth is a lie! Sonya didn't break up with me! I broke up with her because she's a fucking whore and she's been fucking a whole bunch of guys behind my back! Oh, and she relapsed! No wonder, with a white trash piece of shit mother like you!"

  Then I hung up.

  Ahhh, that felt good.

  I got a big dopamine kick from that. I mentioned at the beginning of the first book, that cursing has been shown to reduce stress and pain. Neuroscientists have discovered that our brain treats curse words differently than other words. When a person curses, the part of the brain that lights up is the part in charge of emotions, not the part that's in charge of higher thinking and language.

  When we curse, we don't really think about what we're saying. It's a reflex. Kinda like when you flinch, because something is about to hit your face. If you hit your thumb with a hammer, you don't go "Oh golly, that certainly is painful." No, you just scream "FUCK!" And somehow your thumb hurts a tiny little bit less. The curse word released a little bit of dopamine, and the dopamine acted as a pain killer.

  I think insults work pretty much the same way. When we scream an offensive insult at someone because they hurt or wronged us, it's really a curse word that is directed at the specific person who hurt us. That's why insulting someone is also called cursing someone out.

  When you hit your thumb and yell "FUCK!" it's really not that different than if someone else hits you with a hammer and you scream at them: "YOU FUCKING IDIOT!"

  That's why people insult others when they feel hurt or wronged. To make your own pain a little bit smaller. Cursing, or insulting the person who is the reason for your pain, makes you feel a little bit better.

  That's why racists curse out black people and Mexicans. They have been brainwashed by right-wing propaganda, just like Nazi Germans who used to believe that Jews were their enemies. Just like them, right-wing Americans honestly believe that everything that is wrong with their own lives is the fault of liberals, black people, and immigrants.

  They hold a grudge 24/7, because their life sucks, and they have been led to believe that it's because they have been wronged by black people and affirmative action, or immigrants who supposedly get all sorts of free stuff at the expense of poor white people.

  They are angry at black people and immigrants, because they honestly believe these people are hurting them. And what makes you feel better when someone hurts you? Cursing them out! And which insults work best? The forbidden ones, because they're the most potent. And that's why racists yell racial slurs. It makes them feel a little bit better about their own shitty lives.

  That's why banning racial slurs is never gonna work. It just makes these words more potent pain killers. The only way to end racism is to make poor white Republicans understand that their anger is misdirected and their life doesn't suck because of black people or immigrants, but because they're being exploited and cast away by greedy corporations.

  Until poor white Republicans understand that everything they believe about liberals, black people and immigrants is a lie, racism in America
will continue to exist. Racism is a great tool to manipulate and divide people. As long as poor whites and poor blacks fight each other, they won't unite to fight against their true enemy: greed and corruption at the highest levels of business and politics.

  Anyway, I did feel a little bit better after cursing out Sonya's mother.

  She tried to call me back, but I didn't answer. I knew it was bugging the crap out of her that I had the last word. Ha!

  A day or two later Sonya called me. I figured she was gonna yell at me for cursing out her mother. I answered, because I wanted the satisfaction of cursing her out as well.

  But when I answered the phone, Sonya acted like all this stuff never even happened.

  "Can I see you?" she asked.

  "Why? You wanna use me for something?" I guessed sarcastically.

  "I don't wanna talk about it on the phone," she said.

  "Why don't you go talk to Joshua? Or Tommy? Or Richard? Or whoever else you're fucking. I had enough of your bullshit."

  She didn't really know how to respond to that, but she was desperate to see me. Finally she told me why. More and more of the girls in the halfway house were relapsing, running away, or testing positive for drugs and getting arrested.

  Sonya had been borrowing clean pee from some of the other girls to pass her own drug tests. But now some of these other girls had relapsed themselves. She didn't know who to trust anymore. She didn't wanna use their pee and then fail her test because their pee was dirty too.

  She asked me if she could have my pee, since I don't take any drugs and I was the only sober person she knew.

  Un-fucking-believable.

  This was exactly like when Veronica and Wendy wanted to hide from the cops at my place.

  "Sure," I said.

  She had told me on her first day in the halfway house that the drug tests were so strict, she wasn't even allowed to take common over-the-counter cold medicines, because some of them contained ingredients that would cause a false positive on the drug test. There's a whole list of these cold medicines online.

  I had some of them in my medicine cabinet. I took a whole bunch. Then I went to see her and peed in a cup for her.

  She failed her drug test and violated her probation. She went back to jail. They gave her the usual check-up. Apparently she and Morty the frog-eyed bobblehead ran out of flavored condoms. She was pregnant. Yet another baby with yet another drug addicted baby daddy. Good job.

  The following week Joshua also violated his probation and went back to jail as well.

  That made me happy.

  ADDING INSULT TO INJURY

  "It is impossible to suffer without making someone pay for it. Every complaint already contains revenge."

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  I hadn't heard from Lucy in a few weeks, except for the occasional angry text about her portrayal in my book. Suddenly she texted me out of the blue: "I'm in the hospital."

  I texted back: "Why? What happened? R u ok?"

  I figured either some drug dealer beat the shit out of her, or a "customer" raped her, or she had overdosed, or she had given herself another bad infection. You know, the usual.

  Lucy replied: "I have boils on my ass. It hurts sooo bad! I can't even sit down anymore."

  Boils?! Who the fuck has boils? That sounded like the kind of old-timey affliction an 18th Century street urchin would get.

  I googled it. And whaddaya know: Boils are still around. Highly contagious. If you don't keep the area clean, you infect other areas of your body. They spread by skin-to-skin contact. Easily transmissible during sex.

  I was never happier that I didn't have sex with Lucy in months!

  But I felt bad for her. I still cared about her. She probably texted me because she was all alone and scared in the hospital.

  "Where r u? R u alone? I'll come visit u," I texted.

  "No I'm with Norbert. He's here with me."

  What?! She was with that lowlife Norbert? He was that piece of shit I found passed out in bed with Veronica last year. And now he was fucking Lucy? Motherfucker! I was fuming!

  Isn't it funny how it's ok to call Norbert the drug dealer a "lowlife piece of shit" in my book, but if I had written that he was the "lowlife nigger" I found in bed with Veronica, the PC Police would get all offended about that? "Oh my God! He used the N-word!"

  The N-word! What a childish term! Why is everything in America being dumbed down to a childlike level? Are we children or are we grown-ups?

  What do you think in your head when you hear someone use the term "N-word?" Your brain automatically parses the term and deconstructs it into its true meaning. You automatically think "nigger." Because that's the insult the term "N-word" represents. So every time someone says "the N-word" your brain autocompletes it into "nigger." They're making you think the actual racial slur in your head, as if they had actually used it.

  When you say Gosh darnit, everyone knows that you really mean God dammit! So why not just say what you actually mean? Who are you protecting by using a word that everyone knows is not really the word you actually mean?

  That's why censorship is so ridiculous. And pointless. Counterproductive actually. Every time you forbid a word, you give it undue power. Meanwhile there are even worse insults that are not censored, so people think it's ok to use those insults.

  But the point of an insult is to insult. If people are pissed off enough at you to want to insult you, they're going to want to use the most insulting, most powerful word in their arsenal.

  And forbidden words hold more power simply because their use is rule-breaking and shocking. Forbidden words are the nuclear bombs among insults. I probably just made a whole lot of people's heads explode by using the word nigger in my little rant about the N-word.

  It's only natural and logical that people who hate your guts will use the worst word at their disposal to insult you. The word that they believe will hurt you the most. And if a word is forbidden, it must be because it's so hurtful, right? So what better insult to use than the forbidden one?

  Young parents learn early on that when their kid suddenly uses a bad word, you shouldn't encourage him by giving it a lot of attention. Because if you show a toddler that a certain word gives him a lot of attention, he'll keep using it. The same principle applies to grown-ups and insults. The more you show that a certain insult hurts you, the more the person who's trying to hurt you will keep using it against you.

  So banning a word like nigger or cunt will never ever work. Banning them just makes them the most potent insults available. If you tell people that the word "potato" is the worst insult ever, and you declare it to be highly offensive and ban it, people will start using the word potato to insult others.

  Most people who use "offensive" insults aren't even really racist or sexist. Insults are supposed to be as offensive as possible. That's the whole point of insulting someone. You're trying to hurt their feelings as much as you can, while making yourself feel better.

  And when you are angry or hurt and you need to insult someone on the spur of the moment, you usually don't have the time to write a stinging, personalized essay on their many character flaws. You need something quick. That's when you resort to off-the-shelf generic insults. Something tried and true that has proven to be effective time and time again. You look at your target and you point and shoot, without much thought. Like a reflex.

  What's the first thing you notice about the person you're trying to insult?

  Is he a little overweight? Then you call him a fat fuck.

  Is he balding? Then you call him a bald piece of shit.

  Is he older than you? Then you call him a senile old fool.

  Is he black? Then you call him a nigger.

  Is he a terrible president with a bad fake tan? Then you call him an orange.

  Is she a woman? Then you call her a cunt.

  Is she a good looking woman? Then you call her a slut.

  Does she have red hair? Then you call her a ginger.

  Tha
t's how insults work. Not a lot of thought goes into them. You don't have to hate bald people to call someone bald because you think that's the most obvious thing about him and might be the one word that'll hurt his feelings the most. You don't have to hate oranges to call someone an orange.

  But somehow the infantile political correctness fanatics in America don't grasp that simple concept. These self-righteous numbnuts think banning words is gonna make this a better world.

  At least that's what they claim their motives are.

  Personally, I think they just enjoy the power trip of telling other people what they can and cannot say.

  Some people looove to feel offended, because it makes them feel important. When your only tool is a hammer, suddenly every problem starts to look like a nail. And when the only time you feel relevant is when you claim to be offended, suddenly everything looks offensive.