For the love of God, stop!
But, you know, I guess I’ll consider rescuing him?
But—but my revenge!
Like, maybe after I finish rocking out on this next chapter?
But—but he eats so much food!
Okayyyy… deleting AIM now, like I shoulda done ten years ago…
And he’s so fucking annoying!
Later, Carl the Hunchback. I mean, maybe, maybe not—who knows?
I. In this dimension, I’m the one who speaks Chinese, and Razor Frank is the one who can’t understand a word I’m saying. Boom! How’s that for a twist?
II. In two or three dimensions, Ericsson’s mobile division was eventually bought out by Sony, and that’s obviously not… Wait a second. What am I doing? Did you seriously buy this book for its scholarship? Get the fuck outta here.
CHAPTER 13
HOLLYWOOD DOMINATION—AND DOC’S DISILLUSIONMENT
LOOK, MAN. YOU KNOW ME. Hopefully not too well, because that would be creepy.
But still, you know that the Two-Time is never satisfied. So even after I assembled a Champions Club of the world’s greatest gamers in the most elite arena of all time, even after I amassed a fortune in diamonds and gold doubloons and black-on-black Lamborghini Diablos, it took, I don’t know, maybe a few months before I needed a new challenge. Or was it a few weeks? Or a few days? Who knows, it all gets a little blurry when you’re so goddamn dominant.
But there was one thing I did know, and that was that I needed something new to dominate. Something fresh, something original.
Instead I got Hollywood.
But you know—beggars can’t be choosers, right?
Hahaha, just kidding—I’ve never begged for anything in my life. NEVER! It’s just a stupid expression I decided to use. And in this case, not only did I not beg—WHICH I’VE NEVER DONE, DON’T FORGET THAT!!—but I didn’t even have to look very hard, because it landed right in my big-ass top secret backyard.
* * *
I’d just finished up my typical morning.
I’d street-raced one of my Diablos through the twists and turns of a nearby canyon, coming close to absolute destruction four times and laughing after every single one. I’d taken two multimillion-dollar business calls with industry titans on my flip phone. I’d polished both trophies from my back-to-back 1993–94 Blockbuster Video Game Championships, which took forty-seven minutes, and then I challenged—and beat—Razor Frank in hand-to-hand ninja combat, which only took six minutes.I
After that I’d returned to my studio, I’d started streaming, and I’d dominated Call of Duty: Modern Warfare. Racking up thousands of kills, leaving skinny punks dying in my wake, ruling with ferocity, terror, and intimidation.
All before 10:30 a.m. Just another day in the arena. Yawn.
So I decided to check out what was going on around my estate. Of course I had my walls and my moats and my gun turrets and my genetically engineered super-piranhas. But I also had an advanced experimental closed-circuit HD video system with audio capabilities deployed throughout the grounds of the Top Secret Command Center.
I could see everything. I could hear everything. I could guard against even the slightest intrusion by any of my thousands of bloodthirsty mortal enemies.
I could also spy on my neighbors, which helped pass the time when I was bored.
So I sat back in my custom-designed slate-black Corinthian-leather La-Z-Boy, turned on my digitally enhanced seventy-inch 4K Toshiba flat-screen security monitors, and took a peek at what was going on next door.
I gotta admit, it was a pretty classy joint. A giant mansion with wide green grounds, some big Greek columns, and a bunch of fountains with sculptures of Cupid pissing. Now, usually I would’ve just moved on to spying on my other rich neighbors, but this time I saw something different.
A big-time Hollywood shoot for a brand-new, big-budget TV show. We’re talking ten luxurious trailers for the cast and crew. We’re talking four 8K RED digital cameras, smoke machines, and pyrotechnics. We’re talking hair, makeup, wardrobe, grips, dolly grips, gaffers, best boys, assistants to the producer’s assistants, and all the other millions of mostly useless people you find on a set.
And there, right in the middle of it all, a state-of-the-art AH-64 Apache attack chopper, as black and merciless as death, its sleek metal frame gleaming like a knife edge in the sun.
That’s right, when I looked closely I realized the new TV show wasn’t a new show at all. It was a reboot of a classic. The most iconic, influential syndicated television program of all time.
Yeah. I’m talking about Airwolf.
I was intrigued. I grew up watching Airwolf, of course, because I have great taste. As a boy I’d been riveted by the awesome tech, blown away by the badass aerial battle scenes, and thunderstruck by the thespian science dropped by Ernest Borgnine and Jan-Michael Vincent.
I’d also been a little pissed off. Since I’d never met the creators of Airwolf, how had they managed to copy my look, my energy, my vibe so well? I mean, even at the age of five I was obviously cooler than Stringfellow Hawke—that’s right, that’s the main character’s actual name. But still, they were totally ripping me off. Maybe I’d sue them once I hit puberty.
But life and world domination got in the way, so I never did.
Now, all these years later, maybe this was my chance to add my own legend to the Airwolf experience. To break into the A-list entertainment industry with all its trappings. Or at the very least to sue them into oblivion—because really, can you ever have too much money?
Maybe this was the new challenge I’d been looking for, or at least a decent way to kill an afternoon.
I zoomed in my security cameras on the production’s call sheet to figure out all the deets. It was the shoot’s very first day, and the stakes couldn’t have been higher.
This was the biggest original web production in the history of Snapchat, and that includes Bringing Up Bhabie. The budget was over $20 million. It was starring megastar Mark-Paul Gosselaar as Stringfellow Hawke’s wayward son, Hardtackle. And it was being directed by George Lukas. That’s Lukas with a “K,” so not the legend who created Star Wars—but this dude still looked pretty good.
They were gearing up for their first shot of the day. The first and the biggest—a stunt with that incredible, and incredibly expensive, Apache attack chopper.
I grinned and turned up my audio. This was gonna be fun.
“Hey, Neal,” George Lukas called to the stunt pilot. “You sure you got this?”
Neal the Stunt Pilot approached the attack chopper, and any idiot could’ve spotted the hesitation in his step. He looked like a good kid, the kind of son who listened to his mommy, who ran home whenever she ding-a-linged the triangle at dinnertime.
But in his eyes you could see fear. He preferred the light places, the comfortable zones, out in the open with various people, laughing and frolicking and eating brunch. He avoided the long, dark alleyways, ran from danger, and hid from the chaos of battle.
So yeah, Neal the Stunt Pilot had no idea what the fuck he was doing.
“Um, sure, Mr. Lukas,” he said with his voice cracking, like a soda jerk. “All good!”
“Okay, fantastic,” George Lukas said. “So you’ll be taking off nice and easy, nothing too complicated—then maneuvering past that radio tower, then dodging four drones as scorching pyrotechnics erupt all around you, then doing a straight nosedive at the cold, hard earth until you finally pull up at the last second without a scratch on you.
“Oh, and be careful around those drones, those are ridiculously expensive. But they’re not nearly as pricey as the multimillion-dollar helicopter you’re about to fly. Got it?”
Neal the Stunt Pilot gulped. “Totally.”
George Lukas patted him on the back, then turned to his assistant as the pilot shuffled away.
“Hey,” he said, “do you think we should’ve spent some more money on that stunt pilot?”
“Nah,” th
e assistant said. “I found him on Craigslist. How bad could he be?”
“Shit,” George Lukas said. “People still use Craigslist?”
The assistant shrugged. “At least one, apparently.”
Neal the Stunt Pilot sat in the cockpit, about to head down that long, dark, winding alley of fear for the very first time in his life.
And I—denizen of destruction, cheater of death, master of basic helicopter safety—knew exactly what was going to happen.
* * *
Yep, just minutes after taking off, the damn thing crashed.
It was actually going pretty well at first. Then this crazed hawk came out of nowhere, forcing Neal the Stunt Pilot to swerve. The Apache collided violently with the drones, spinning out of control, plummeting out of the sky, and finally, in a giant ball of smoke and sparks and raging fire, exploding against one of those fountains with the pissing Cupids.
It was cool as fuck.
Thankfully, the crazed hawk was unharmed. Especially because it was my crazed hawk. I’d released the little bastard thirty seconds earlier from my own private aviary after telling him, “Hey, bro, let’s make shit interesting. That’s between me and you.”
Oh yeah, I guess it was also good that Neal the Stunt Pilot was pretty much okay. Lucky for him, those Cupids he crashed into peed all over everything and helped put out the fire. So Neal the Stunt Pilot was basically unharmed except for the fourth-degree burns covering 60 percent of his body, a shattered femur, an obliterated spleen, and a left eyeball that was just kind of dangling out of the socket in this really gross but also totally awesome way.
Yeah, he’d probably never fly a helicopter again—he’d be lucky if he could ride a Rascal with those injuries. But let’s be honest, the skies are much safer without him. He had no idea how to conquer his fear, no ability to embrace danger, to walk down that long, dark alleyway and never turn back.
And he also wasn’t very good at dodging crazed hawks, but mostly his problem was fear.
“What are we gonna do now?” George Lukas shouted as the medics carted away the pathetic screaming stunt pilot. “We can’t just call off the shoot! This is fucking Airwolf!”
His assistant sighed and shook his head. “Craigslist doesn’t seem to have any other—”
“Wait!” George Lukas said. “What’s that sound?”
A deep, steady rhythmic thumping echoed over the smoky field. It was the sound of ancient Native American warriors beating their sacred drums before battle. It was the sound of your enemy’s heart, still beating after you tear it from his chest. It was the sound of Dr Disrespect piloting his own personal Russian Kamov Ka-27 Helix attack chopper.
I flew low over the horizon, parting the swirling clouds and landing just inches away from the Apache’s wreckage. I was also blasting a favorite song from my prototype Bose XV-9000 sound system—
Bump-tsshhh.
Bump-tsshhh-tsshhh.
“They call him Doc!”
Because I know how to make an entrance.
“What the…?” George Lukas said.
He and his assistant stared, stunned, their mouths open, their eyes wide. They looked like a couple of idiots. It was pretty funny.
My chopper’s blades slowed. I stepped out as the smoke and flames of the wreck whirled around me, along with some extra smoke from the dry-ice machines I’d brought along. My frame was massive, my superiority obvious. My hair’s black steel caught the light of the fire and my tactical goggles gleamed as I surveyed the destruction around me.
“Looks like you’ve had some helicopter problems,” I said.
Fuck, what a line.
“That’s my Kamov Ka-27,” I continued, gesturing at my helicopter. “I had it custom-designed by the world’s tippity-top engineers. All blacked out, of course. Your stock Apache is a decent chopper, nice range, solid maneuverability. But if I get in a dogfight up there, if it’s just me and the enemy, one on one, staring each other down with blood in our eyes and hatred in our souls, I’m taking the Kamov every time. We’re talking firepower, we’re talking explosiveness. We’re talking speed, violence, and momentum. And it’s great at dodging crazed hawks.”
George Lukas looked at me funny.
“Not that I would know anything about that,” I said.
He stared at me for a long time. Like, it was getting super awkward.
Finally he spoke.
“Well,” George Lukas said, “I think we found our stunt pilot.”
I threw back my head and laughed loud and hard. And suddenly I stopped, looked at him, and said super-dramatically like a total badass:
“Stunt pilot? I don’t think so. The Two-Time is nothing less than a star.”
George Lukas arched his eyebrow, and the assistant blurted out, “What?! Sir, no—you can’t possibly make this random guy the lead of the show. Sure, he’s got the presence of a modern-day black-ops Apollo, and his mustache is sublime, but our careers are riding on this, not to mention the entire reputation of Snapchat as a creator of groundbreaking dramatic television. We cannot make this no-name the star! What will I tell Mark-Paul Gosselaar? He’s waiting in his trailer now, sipping a Coke Zero!”
George Lukas stared at me again, but not as long as the first time.
“We’re doing this,” he said quietly.
“But—”
“We’re doing this!” he shouted. “I’ll fire Mark-Paul Gosselaar myself if I have to! I don’t know much in this world. I don’t know a thing about cameras, sound, narrative structure, or television production. I have no idea how the hell I got this job, except maybe they got confused by my name.
“But,” he said, pointing at me, “I know one thing. That man standing there is a star.”
I smiled. Pointing is kind of rude, but I let it slide. “You made the right move, George Lukas,” I said. “Probably your first right move since you killed off Jar-Jar Binks in Episode II.”
“Um,” he said, “I’m not—”
“Here,” I said, tossing him a little piece of wadded-up paper. “I wrote down the number to my private flip phone. Direct line. Call me when you’re ready to roll. I’ll be up there in the clouds, blowing shit up, combing Slick Daddy before my close-up, and emailing your lawyers all of my ridiculous contract demands.”
I turned and started climbing back into the cockpit of my Kamov Ka-27 Helix.
“Wait!” George Lukas shouted. “Wait!”
I paused, barely turning my head.
“Who—who the fuck are you?”
I pulled down my 3D prototype specs, and for the first time I looked him in the eye.
“The name-ame-ame is Doctor-octor-octor Disrespect-ect-ect-ect.”
With the subtle wrigglings of a snake, I slid behind the control panel of my chopper.
George Lukas called after me, “Huh? I couldn’t understand you with all that reverb! Wait—there’s paperwork and W-9s and liability waivers! Don’t you want your script?”
Details. Maybe important to lesser men, but not to me. As my Kamov Ka-27 rose into the hot, smoky air, one sound rang out above the rumble of the engines, the whir of the blades, and the thumping bass of my own blasting theme music:
“Yayayaya!”
* * *
Anyway, I completely destroyed the shoot in two days.
Turned out these pussies wanted me to use fake ammo, fake air-to-surface missiles, fake cluster bombs, fake napalm—fake fake fake fake—for all my action scenes. I mean, the Doc doesn’t fake anything, man. And he definitely doesn’t fake high-tech mass destruction.
So I told them I’d fake it. Then I used the real stuff anyway.
All the cameras? Demolished. All the trailers? Obliterated. Mark-Paul Gosselaar? MIA. And the pissing Cupids? Pretty sure they pissed themselves in the split second before I incinerated them with my multi-warhead hypersonic missiles.
I had to pay for it all, which was fine, because I’m rich. And George Lukas was pretty pissed at me. Might’ve had something to do with the ar
m he lost, maybe. But it was all totally worth it. I had a hell of a good time. And guess what?
The few hours of footage they shot before I blew the shit out of everything ended up being the biggest hit in the history of Snapchat. Got a couple billion views. Won a dozen Webbys, whatever those are, plus five Emmys, all for special effects and hair and mustache styling. Got nominated for an Oscar but didn’t win—which I count as a win because we weren’t even a movie.
And just like that, same as in the rest of my life, I was a champion. A Hollywood megastar.
I got hired to star in the new(est) Knight Rider movie for this smash-hit new platform called Quibi. Bankrupted the whole operation when I blew up their entire fleet of advanced, talking AI Lamborghini Huracáns on the very first day.
I mean, what did they expect? Everyone knows I only drive black. So what if they were billion-dollar cars with next-gen 6G quantum-computing techno-brains that may have qualified as sentient beings and/or taken over the world like Skynet in The Terminator. They were all fucking red. They deserved to be eviscerated!
Then I got cast in—and became the only star in—The Expendables 7: Rise of the Doc. I say “the only star” because as soon as they found out I was gonna be in their little movie, Stallone, Schwarzenegger, and Statham all bailed because they knew I’d make ’em look like a bunch of skinny punks.
That one actually started out okay—it was gonna be this nice, sweet family film about the Expendables (me) overthrowing the democratically elected Nicaraguan government and installing an American puppet regime (also me). But then everyone got pissed when I really did overthrow the Nicaraguan government, not to mention Colombia’s and Peru’s, just for shits and giggles.
I’m not an unreasonable megastar, so I bought brand-new PlayStation 5s for the entire populace of each country, and that seemed to smooth things over for a sec. But then it went to shit all over again when I told the director he’d have to ditch the title The Expendables—because the Two-Time clearly is irreplaceable. Just wasn’t believable, you know?
Violence. Speed. Momentum. Page 16