Asshole

by Martin Kihn

  “Jacob. I live in—”

  “They didn’t toast this! Man, oh man—they always forget the fucking toasting. How hard is it to do a simple thing like that? I’m gonna have to get another guy fired.”

  By this point, the candidate was usually staring at the Nemesis wondering whether maybe he should go back to massage school.

  “So what can I tell you about this place?” asked the Nemesis.

  “Well, I—”

  “You mind if I eat? I went jogging this morning and let me tell you, It’s been a while. I’m gonna hit the marathon next year—did that before. I coulda placed higher but there were all those freakin’ fat people in my way. They should have a weight limit, at least on the bridges, right? So what job are you up for again?”

  And so on. It’s amazing he came to any conclusions about any of them. Or not amazing, because he always had the same reaction.

  “I didn’t like her,” he’d say.

  “Can you be more specific?” Dale, the HR guy, would ask during the debrief.

  “Not sharp enough. Too stupid.”

  “You say that about all of them.”

  “That’s ’cause the people you’re bringing in here are horse shit. Pardon my Uzbeki.”

  Yet another of his irritating habits: He invented this expression, “Pardon my Uzbeki.”

  I was known as an “easy interview,” respectful and quiet, probing gently into areas where they’d excelled, not too hung up on a “right answer” to the case. They could leave the interview not knowing a single thing about me beyond my name.

  And I liked them all. The Nemesis and I always negated one another. We didn’t help decide a single hire.

  Extreme self-centeredness serves to make others feel small and insecure. You can then jump into the power vacuum, and start taking names.

  Number 2. Speak Loudly, Interrupt Often

  The Nemesis liked to interrupt early and often. Think about what it does: shuts people down. It’s pure and simple dominance in the human animal kingdom. I’m talking—you talk over me. I stop. You control the frame.

  Outside skilled eye contact, interrupting may be the single biggest pellet in the Asshole’s shotgun. Much more important than what you say is when you say it.

  Consistency is also important—as in, acting like a broken record. Changing your mind, listening to reason, these are the fatal weaknesses of the Castrated Beta Male (CBM).

  One time we had a guest speaker come in to talk to us about women small business owners as consumers. She was highly prepared, with a slick slide show, young but articulate and dressed in dark blue slightly above the occasion, and her opinions were more than usually grounded in data.

  “What we see,” she said, “is women are very responsive to messages with seasonal language. Talking about Renewal and the Spring and even what seems like old-fashioned stuff—oh, Harvest-time and Back-to-School—all that really resonates with this audience. We think that’s because women are—well, they’re more seasonal or cyclical biologically if you know what I—”

  “I don’t know about that,” interrupted the Nemesis, chomping on some Cool Ranch Doritos from a little bag in his lap and almost yelling. “You’re talkin’ about cycles and stuff but actually runníng a business is a—”

  “Can we save the questions till after,” she said.

  “—It isn’t a question, it’s an answer.”

  Nervous laughter.

  “Let me tell you something about women,” he went on. “I know women. And this seasonal stuff is total shit. Pardon my Uzbeki. Women are always in a bad mood and it doesn’t even matter what part of the year we’re in. And they’re really messy. Let me tell you, my girlfriend …”

  We were treated to an oration on the Nemesis’s knowledge of women, which seemed to consist mostly of things he’d picked up in the group showers back at Delta Gamma house. This guy knew women like I knew dog training.

  What surprised me more was that he was not married. Mostly because he regularly rhapsodized about the great wit and wisdom of “my incredible wife, Mary.”

  But only when clients were in the room.

  The magic of interruption is that it puts others on the defensive, forcing them to react. You control the conversation. The person you interrupt then gets all flustered and wheezy, as our speaker did at that moment.

  Number 3. Claim Every Idea You’ve Ever Heard as Your Own

  I highly recommend this technique. It seems like it wouldn’t work, but that’s precisely why it does. Most people are afraid to make bold statements in case they’re caught in a lie, forgetting that nobody has the time or inclination to fact-check anything. Plus, people are ignorant. Say confidently that you’re a state senator and nine out of ten people will believe you, because they have no idea who the state senators are, or even what one is.

  My observations of the Nemesis suggest that good credit-gathering does require care. But as long as you’re not claiming ownership of some idea in front of the actual inventor—or saying something outrageous like you created the question mark—you’re okay.

  My week of anthropology included an office “team building” event, a scavenger hunt around mid-Manhattan and a party at a bar in South Harlem. The Nemesis helped design the hunt and competed, and his team won. Big surprise. I went up to him at the after-party to pick his brain. He was guzzling a green beverage.

  “This drink is weak,” he said. “Caipirinha. You know I was a bartender in college—I came up with the mint leaves idea. It really caught on.”

  “You invented the caipirinha?” I asked.

  He smiled. “So how’s the new card project going?”

  “Okay—”

  “I mentioned to Liz”—she was my client for the project he referred to—“it would be cool to hold an ideation workshop. I’m glad she went with it.”

  “I thought she—”

  “You know I’ve been telling them for a while now they need to streamline their merchant data clusters, and I think they’re gonna do it. We’re on the verge of a half-million-dollar sell-in with them.”

  “Who? What?”

  “You like this bar? I picked it out. Thought it would be a cool place for a work thing, you know?”

  He was relentless, and it had a cumulative effect. Some happiness gurus say the key to equanimity is to practice gratitude throughout the day for every little thing—“I’m grateful for warm water, I’m grateful for my pillow,” et cetera—and, in aggregate, you end up more joyful. The same principle was at work here: The Nemesis took credit throughout the day for every little thing, and he ended up impressing even the most cynical listener as an ass … but an important, influential ass.

  Number 4. Never, Ever Admit to a Mistake

  The Nemesis never once admitted to being wrong, mistaken, misguided, or even vaguely askew

  His brand of infallibility was most obvious during our regular VP postmortems, when we gathered as a management team to go over those frequent occasions when we’d failed to land a project or account, or we’d somehow not delivered as expected. These were occasions for frank humility and pledges to do better.

  Unless, of course, you were the Nemesis.

  One time we VPs were assembled in the corner conference room looking down on Eighth Avenue and the blinds were pulled. We were talking about a failed pitch for a project to use data about what people buy in one type of store (say, Home Depot) to predict what they might buy in another type of store (say, The Gap). Kind of like retail cross-addiction psychoanalysis.

  The Nemesis had led the team that lost to a very smart group from Digitas—not that you’d know it from what he said.

  “What was the feedback?” asked our boss, running her fingers through her hair.

  “She was incredibly impressed and, I think, totally into working with us next go-round,” said the Nemesis.

  “Anything else?”

  “Hmmm … just that it went great.”

  “So why did we lose the pitch?”


  The Nemesis started squeezing the impressive bicep bulging under his no-iron shirt. He did this, when he was angry. “Maybe they knew somebody. I think one of their guys may have gone to school with her sister—or something.”

  “She said that to you?”

  “Not exactly But you know.” He winked at the boss, or maybe something was stuck in his eye.

  “So,” pressed the boss, “there wasn’t anything about the content? Suggestions for improvement? She liked our approach?”

  “She didn’t like it,” said the Nemesis, “she loved it. Those are words she used. I’d say the meeting went as great as it could have for us.”

  “But still we lost. Amazing.”

  “Maybe we were too good,” I said, in what I hoped was a highly ironic tone of voice. “Maybe they were intimidated by our great intelligence.”

  Instead of rising to my bait, the Nemesis shrugged and took a bite from his extra-garlic bagel.

  “You could be right,” he said.

  This Secret also builds beautifully on human beings’ natural insecurity and ignorance. The simple truth is nobody knows anything, and by confidently pretending you’re better than human you’ll fool more people than you won’t. You’ll be lying, of course, but an Asshole finds truth optional.

  Number 5. Criticize in Public, Praise in Private

  We had an all-staff meeting shortly after the postmortem, and the Nemesis displayed a trait that—more than any other except, perhaps, his love of the extra-garlic bagel—made me idolize him as a pharmaceutical-grade Asshole.

  Our department of fifty-odd young people was gathered around a large conference table, going over odds and ends. After we’d introduced the new additions to the team and done announcements (“The date for the move to the nineteenth floor is finalized,” “SAS training is mandatory for managers,” et cetera), the boss went over new business and pitches that we’d lost. The Nemesis was asked, per custom, to share a few words on his cross-store promotion debacle.

  “It went great,” he said, echoing what he’d told the VPs, “and the team worked hard. But we didn’t win it—and that doesn’t make me happy. Let’s learn from this.”

  Here, he sat up straighter and made eye contact around the table, person by person. He stopped on Todd, the guy I’d seen him berating before my review.

  “Now Todd needs to check his work more carefully. Quality control—that’s what we need. You’re new here but that’s no excuse. Some of the numbers in Todd’s item list didn’t add up, and I didn’t get a chance to look it over. And Sarah’s slides were too busy on the screen.” He shifted his focus to Sarah. “It’s okay for reading, but it got in the way when it’s projected. Work at it.”

  There was an exception to the Nemesis’s policy of blaming everything on others. That was when a project went well. Then, of course, he didn’t mention a single other name. His triumphs were solo flights.

  Later that afternoon, I happened to walk past his office when he had Todd the Loser in with him.

  “I really appreciate all you’re doing,” I heard him say to Todd, sounding sincere. “You’re helping me out.”

  “But in that meeting you said—”

  “We’re not all detail people, right?”

  He noticed me lingering, so I moved on, realizing I’d found the secret to the Nemesis’s ability to keep his teams working late into the night, on weekends, and once (as rumor had it) during a close relative’s actual funeral service.

  Two words: mind games.

  Subtle psychological torture works powerfully in keeping your underlings in a perpetual state of self-doubt and fear. Total confusion softens them into the right frame of mind to be victimized.

  Number 6. Know What You Want

  I have to give the Nemesis credit for something: He knew how to focus.

  Like an elite athlete who trains for years to get to a point where not a single motion is wasted, he had calibrated his mind and body to filter out everything that didn’t directly contribute to his goal.

  Or, rather, goals. It’s obvious he wanted both money and power.

  He wouldn’t waste time with you if you could not help him on his way. And if you could, he’d give you so much attention you might consider taking out a restraining order or at least pretending you were on the phone every time you saw him coming.

  The Nemesis is like the CEO who’s paid $200 million in a bad year, a jackpot hundreds of thousands of people—even dozens of his own ex-wives—know he does not deserve. Yet he gets the money. Why? Because he’s charmed or blackmailed about five people—i.e., the Compensation Committee of the Board of Directors. In the entire world, vis-à-vis his payday, those are the people who count, and they are the only ones.

  So put yourself in any workplace situation. Think about your goal. What is it? Focus on what it takes to get there. All the rest is donkey shit. Pardon my Uzbeki.

  Sometimes others can help us when our sight grows dim. As when Gloria called me at my desk, as she did so often, and asked: “How’s olir bonus coming along, peanut?”

  • • •

  My preliminary studies of the genus Nemesis were almost complete. I’d observed him in his habitat and taken extensive mental notes on his behaviors and habits. One time I even followed him into the men’s room, but the less said about that incident the better. All that was left was for me to take him into neutral territory—somewhere outside the office, beyond It’s lusts, resentments, and kleptomaniacal vending machines.

  You may recall I invited the Nemesis out to lunch a few weeks earlier during a moment of insanity, and now I was forced to make good on my threat. Although about as much fun for me as pulling hair out of my nose with tweezers (which I do, by the way), it was a golden opportunity to see some of my role models Secrets up close.

  We went to the Gold Lion on 45th Street and walked down the steps to the subterranean entrance. Cesar Millan, the Dog Whisperer, says that in order to establish dominance over your canine you should always walk through every door in front of the dog; also, while en route you need to make sure your knees are in front of the dog’s nose.

  The Nemesis walked most of the way from the office to the Gold Lion about a hundred yards in front of me. Not only did he go through the restaurant’s door first, but he was already working on my appetizer by the time I arrived.

  I had actually tried—as an experiment—to get ahead of him on the sidewalk. When I moved up, he walked faster and faster, until both of us were sprinting down the street without acknowledging what was going on.

  Maybe he didn’t know what he was doing. Maybe it was second nature.

  After we’d ordered, I interrupted a speech he was making on the declining brand value of Lindsey Lohan with a question: “Can I ask you something?”

  “In a second—” (Secret #6)

  After many seconds, during which he outlined his inane suggestions to revitalize Lindsey’s image, I tried again: “So I wanted to ask you—”

  Louder: “Hold on—so then I—” (Secret #2)

  ME: (much later) “I like your style, man. Where did you learn how to manage people so incredibly well?” (Applying Secret #5)

  HIM: “Are you fucking with me?”

  ME: “No, really. I want to be more like you. How do you get people to do what you want? Do you give them a lot of encouragement?”

  HIM: (howling with laughter) “Ha ha ha! Ha!! That’s a good one! Now I know you’re fucking with me! Pardon my Uzbeki.”

  ME: “But seriously. Don’t you worry about hurting their feelings?”

  HIM: “Feelings? What are those?” (Secret #1)

  ME: “Things that make us laugh and cry—”

  HIM: “You know what hurts my feelings, Marty? And promise me this goes no farther than this table. Can I have that dumpling? What makes me sad—when a chick doesn’t understand a ‘one-night stand’ means just one night.”

  ME: “Ah.”

  HIM: “Anyway, I’ll tell you something my dad told me when I was a kid,
like five years ago. We were lifting weights in the basement and between sets he said to me: ‘[Nemesis], son, always remember your employees don’t have hopes and dreams. They have billable hours.’ (Misting up) I’ll always remember that.” (Secret #1)

  ME: “What did your dad do?”

  HIM: “He drove a cab. So, anyway, what did you want to talk about?”

  At this point, I really had no idea.

  So I asked him if he thought he’d get promoted this round. Suddenly, he remembered a place he had to be like ten minutes ago. The last thing he said to me before he grabbed what was left of my lunch was, “Update your résumé, ha ha.”

  Though he was always eating he was not an overweight person. All those wild mood swings no doubt strained his system. And the sessions punishing the weight stacks in the gym pulled all the blood away from his brain and deposited it directly into his sense of entitlement.

  Wending my lone way back down 45th Street past Eighth to my office, I pondered what I had learned. First, the Nemesis was paranoid. Super-paranoid. Second, he saw the world as full of incompetent people who were continually leaving a bad taste in his mouth like secondhand smoke.

  That’s probably why he forgot to leave me any money for the check.

  Not long after that lunch, I turned on the TV and happened to stumble across an even better Asshole role model than the Nemesis.

  My new hero arrived on TNT in the form of a rebroadcast of Brian De Palmas 1983 film Scarface, starring Al Pacino and Michelle Pfeiffer and written by Oliver Stone. I’d thought of Scarface before as a real touchstone of the Asshole worldview, and I’d always appreciated it’s large firearms, but the fact that it was being shown that very night seemed inspired by God.

  As you know, Scarface is the touching story of a Cuban thug named Tony Montana, played by Pacino, who lands in Miami in 1980 and gets into the cocaine trade, rising through a combination of his own ruthlessness and a total disregard for, well, for everything to a position approaching world domination.