by Martin Kihn
A lot of people I know think Tony Montana is stupid. But he has a simple philosophy of life, one that centers around a single part of his anatomy:
•“All I have in this world are balls—and my word!” says Tony.
•“I need a guy with steel in his balls, Tony A guy like you,” says his boss.
•And most disturbingly, in Tony’s words: “The only thing in this world that gives orders is balls!”
I studied Tony’s body language. No smile, of course, but I was surprised to see his mouth is usually closed. His chin is out—what I would come to learn was basic alpha male symbology. Not only is his eye contact constant, but also he doesn’t blink. Watch him. It’s weird. Pacino’s eyeballs must have felt like sandpaper by the second day of filming.
The gaze is continuous, as I’ve said, but only when he’s talking, not when he’s listening, with one exception. He pays attention at all times when someone is pointing a gun at him.
Aggressiveness isn’t an occasional thing, either—he signals it with a pimp-like roll, leading with his prick like it’s a pet, and a thrust-out chest. “Me,” he says, “I always tell the truth. Even when I lie.” Whatever that means.
At one point Tony’s best friend pays his buddy the highest compliment one person can pay to another: ‘You’re an asshole, man!”
Not that I would advise you to emulate Tony Montana completely—he keeps a live tiger in his backyard, after all, and as his mother points out he tends to “destroy everything.” But after Tony swan dives off a balcony into a pool of his own blood and the closing credits roll, I defy you not to feel an upswell of elation … you have found your role model. The perfect Asshole.
In fact—now that I thought about it—isn’t the Asshole actually a new kind of man? The next stage in the evolution of the American male? Consider this. My father’s generation was, he frequently tells me, quite a bit more polite than mine; and kids today seemed totally debased to me. Compare Cary Grant to Johnny Knoxville. Nice guys used to run things, sometimes; now they don’t even get the key to the men’s room.
Apparently there was a time in American history when people used to share things, like needles. There were whole decades when otherwise rational men and women wasted money on terrible investments, like their church. Entire months when actual human beings said things like “make love, not war,” and “give peace a chance” without peeing in their pants laughing. Luckily, we’d moved on.
Rather than devolving into a more primitive state, maybe I was nudging the race toward some incredible future condition.
Take a look at where you are, and where you could be going:
STEP TWO
Get a Life [Coach]
“Take three months to prepare your machines.”
—Sun Tzu,
The Art of War
You don’t have a clue what you’re doing or you wouldn’t be reading this sentence. So why would you rely on your-self to mastermind the most important transformation of your life—from zero to hero, twitchy to bitchy, gawky to cocky? Find qualified professionals to help you mobilize your mission. These men and women are there to provide practical knowledge and common-sense advice that Assholes already know but you do not.
Locating the correct coach is not easy. But considering your pathetic starting point, almost anyone can help you. I mean this literally: Go out into the street, tap some-one at random, and chances are they’ve forgotten more about dickdom than you ever knew. Whoever you end up enlisting, just take their best, ignore the rest, and fire them. Remember: If they make you uncomfortable, you’re going in the right direction. Pain is prelude.
The Nemesis had set the bar dauntingly high for me. But he had a lifetime’s headstart and a steroid addiction to help him. I wasn’t sure where to turn, so I did what I always do when I’m confused: took a class. It was a seminar held in midtown called “How to Be a Bitch.”
That’s right—Bitch, not Asshole. It turns out that all of the seminars, classes, and self-help groups that have formed around making people less nice have one thing in common: They’re for women.
I didn’t understand this at all. In my experience, women are on average a lot less nice than the men I’ve known. And the worst of them wind up in Manhattan, where they assemble in covens in the dead of night to plan their takeover, of not only the men on the island, but the entire world order. Or so I imagined. Meanwhile, most of the men I’ve known are full of self-doubt and fear and don’t just think they’d be making a lot more money if they were more the big dick—they know it.
So I ended up at this Bitch workshop, and when I got there—big surprise—I was the only man. There were thirty or so plain-looking middle-aged women, me, and a couple young women from other countries sitting up front, who were probably lost. I got some double takes, but these ladies were much too nice to say anything about my gender issue.
The teacher was a short-haired Asian woman named Tina.
She said: “Being nice is just a bad habit—and habits can be changed. It’s about being dishonest, and it’s about having no passion. That’s it. You know what the word ‘nice’ meant in Middle English? It meant ‘foolish.’
“It’s a spiritual problem,” she continued. “A denial of what’s real. What wer’e doing when wer’e acting nice is denying our right to exist. This isn’t about the rational mind. That just wants the status quo. It’s about the soul—the higher self that wants to be free to be itself.”
Before we could finish writing this pearl into our notebooks, Tina heaped another problem onto us. She told us we were in fact servants “with six billion masters.”
“Why six billion?” she asked. “Because that’s the number of people in the world. That’s who we’re looking to for approval. Nice people are weird,” she chanted, preaching to the choir. “We’re like control freaks in the middle of a hurricane. Trying to manipulate things that cannot be manipulated.”
She asked us, “What are nice people trying to control? It’s their own fear. But like the Tao says—or the I Ching, I forget—you can’t lose something if it’s really yours. Think about it. You can’t lose it, if it’s yours.”
I started wondering how that rule applied to things like car keys, and I guess my mind wandered because I suddenly realized the room had become very quiet, and the entire class was staring at me. Tina had asked me something and was waiting for an answer.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “What’d you say?”
“Don’t apologize,” she told me. “I asked you what your passion is.”
There are a number of questions nobody should have to answer on the spot. What is your I.Q.? Do you think I’m gaining weight? Why don’t you have children? What’s your passion?
“Well… I… I …”
“That’s my point,” said Tina. “Were passionless people. Nice people have robbed themselves of life”
While I am delighted to help any teacher prove a point, it seemed unfair what she’d done to me. I had passion, plenty of passion. I passionately hated the Nemesis, for one thing. I passionately hated my current apartment. I passionately … maybe that was it, but it was a great start.
“Decide what you want and pursue it with vitality,” she said, looking right at me.
Nice was slavery, she said.
Nice was death.
Nice was not nice.
I was still upset about that passion crack, so I withdrew into myself—then realized I was proving just how far I was from my own goal. I still wasn’t exactly sure what an Asshole was, but I was pretty sure he wouldn’t give a shit if some skinny hippie called him passionless. I was pretty sure he’d think: Smoke my pole!
“How are you feeling now?” she asked me. Me, again. She had a fetish.
“Fine,” I said.
“No, you’re not. You’re upset with what I just said earlier. You’ve been stewing on it. Am I right?”
I said nothing.
“Tell me one thing. You’re uncomfortable right now, right?”
“I don’t—”
“Just answer me that.”
I stared at her blankly. “What’s the question again?”
One of the young women in the front row laughed.
“You’re uncomfortable? Yes or no.”
“I am now,” I admitted.
“Good. Stay with it. See—” said Tina, getting off her stool for the first time and standing slightly lopsided, as though one of her legs was a prosthesis she got on sale—“nice people have another thing in common. We’re uncomfortable being uncomfortable”
She let that sink in. I was uncomfortable. Was I uncomfortable being uncomfortable? That thought made me uncomfortable. So I was going through at least two, and maybe three, existential layers of discomfort when Tina finally broke the silence by flinging a felt-tip pen at me.
Of course she claimed it was an accident. She didn’t apologize—that would have been passionless. And I didn’t apologize when I got up and walked out of the room.
When I got home, I asked Gloria if she thought I had vitality. It was kind of hard to talk to her since she was doing her kickboxing exercises while watching Rachael Ray on the Food Network.
“Like how do you mean?” she asked, before roundhousing our bamboo plant and screaming, “Geee!”
I sat down on the sofa and opened a cool Dr. Pepper and a package of Ring Dings. “Like in life,” I said, “do you feel like you need a passion? Or is that more optional?”
“Geee-yup! Hoo-ay-yow!”
“Come again?”
“It’s important,” she panted. “Everybody knows that. And right now we’re passionate about your promotion. How’s it going?”
The Bitch seminar was not all I had hoped it would be. I’m entirely in favor of woman power, but not for men. So I decided to try some one-on-one training, I needed help, and not the kind of specialized help a mere career advisor or corporate image consultant could give me—no, I decided I needed help with, well, with everything. My entire life.
I needed a Life Coach.
The one I hired was a clinically obese older woman named Dr. Strong, who wore a festive head scarf and had a manic laugh and ADHD. Also she was a Luddite. I know this because she spent most of our first hour abusing her portable CD player for not emitting the soothing sounds of surf and gulls.
We sat on plastic folding chairs facing one another. The CD player was in her lap, and also in the air, as she repeatedly picked it up to shake. Behind Dr. Strong, sitting on a high shelf, was one of those small Japanese rock waterfalls you can order in a catalog, but the water wasn’t running.
“So you want to be more assertive,” she said.
“No, it’s more than that,” I told her. “I want to be an Asshole.”
“You want to be asshole?”
“Yup.”
“As in, rear end of person?”
“Yup.”
“Not just assertive?”
“No—that’s not gonna do it. I want to be truly objectionable—like the kind of person people go out of their way to avoid.”
“You want to be avoided?” She turned the player upside down and hit it.
“No—I just don’t want to care anymore. I want people to listen to me—I want to—I just want to get my way in this fucking city.”
“Uh huh.”
“I know this sounds weird,” I said, “but I’m so tired of being the nicest guy in the world.”
“Why you so nice? Huh?”
Good question. Dr. Strong asked me to close my eyes and form a mental image of my ideal self.
“What you see?” she prodded.
“Myself.”
“As you are now?”
“Yes.”
“No! Not right! Think what you want to be … Mister Marty Man-Pants. Him is in your mind. Fucking motherfuck,” she whispered, banging on the CD player. “So what you see now? Goddamn this thing!—”
It’s not so easy for a guy like me to imagine what I want to be. I’m so used to framing things in the negative: I only really knew what I wanted not to be. Maybe I should try living as Opposite Marty; it had worked for George Costanza.
“You got picture yet?” she asked me.
This is what I described to Dr. Strong:
I wake up and the sun is shining—my windows no longer look out on an airshaft. Light! Glorious sunlight! I am naked, but this is not so frightening as it could be as I am in much better shape. Like a Men’s Life version of myself. I roll over and bump into my wife. We’re both so incredibly gorgeous that I can’t help but take a moment or two to admire our bodies in the large mirror mounted on the ceiling above us. Gloria’s enormously enhanced breasts are a particular treat.
Our dog, Hola, I notice, is waiting patiently by the side of the bed with a chew toy in her mouth—the quiet kind, which she now prefers. It’s clear from her eager expression she lives only to do my bidding and awaits my command. Gloria has a similar look, actually. She asks me if I’d like more sex before breakfast, and I say “Gotta run. Big meeting.”
The crushing disappointment in her face bodes well for tonight.
Our apartment is immaculate, thanks to our obsessive-compulsive maid. She also walks the dog. And is Brazilian. And beautiful. Also single. Her worship of me causes some tension in my marriage, but I’m pretty sure Gloria’s on the verge of agreeing to a three-way.
I dress entirely in black silky-smooth fabrics and mirror-shades. On my way out, the doorman not only holds the door wide open for me but actually salutes my retreating figure as I leave the building. A couple guys I pass on the street salute me also, I’m not sure why.
I pass my neighbor; Ramón, who looks terrible, like he hasn’t slept in a week and has been living on nothing but Yodels. His dog, Misty; is gnawing on his ankles like a demented gerbil.
I ignore them. At Twin Donut my order is sitting on the counter in a special Plexiglas case designed to keep the corn muffin fresh and the coffee at optimum temperature. The case has a sign: “SENOR MARTY MUFFIN, ONLY—KEEP OUT! THIS MEAN YOU!!”
As I remove my package, the entire staff of Twin Donut is bowing to me from behind the counter, their eyes averted.
I leave without paying. The manager says, “An extra large muffin—new invention!”
I get to work in no time and am greeted with a group hug by all the women who work for me. I head for the comer office, which has my name on it, ignoring the SVPs’ compliments hurled at me in the hallways, and turn to scream some orders at the man sitting in the secretary’s chair outside my office.
It’s the Nemesis. He’s wearing an apron, has lost most of his hair; weighs like three hundred pounds, is drooling, and has a little statue of me on top of his computer monitor.
“Get me my fucking schedule,” I say, and slam the door behind me.
I return calls of important people and have work meetings with colleagues who generally have a look of fear mixed with awe as I speak. I can’t remember most of their names and I don’t know if they’re any good at their jobs, because I don’t listen to a word they say.
When I want to hear a brilliant idea, I just talk.
Later, the Nemesis comes in. It’s time for his performance review. I toss away the actual performance review and say, “You’re really fucking up, Barry—”
“That’s not my na—”
“I’ve invented something I like to call the ‘Back-Track,’ since it involves a series of demotions until you’re either working in the mailroom or you kill yourself.”
“Thank you, sir.”
“I’m thinking of rolling it out office-wide.”
“You are generous to a fault.”
“Don’t I know it,” I snort.
That night I’m driven to an A-list party somewhere hot I don’t know about yet with the biggest reality TV stars and celebrity podcasters. Uma Thurman is there and—
Suddenly, in my fantasy, I notice the cool party has become warmer, and I’m sweating. Uma looks uncomfortable, then she disappears. My designer s
hirt is soaked through and—
My eyes snapped open. I was alone in the room.
Despite that unsettling beginning, I persisted in my work with Dr. Strong, meeting each Wednesday at lunchtime for two months. In my second session she introduced me to what she called “Secret Weapon.” Excited at first by the chance to own such a Weapon, I grew more skeptical in time. I mean, she had a different Secret Weapon every week. It was psychotherapeutic nuclear proliferation.
The most useful was an image I recommend you use in your journey. I’d been complaining that I was still too nice and I wasn’t making progress. About the only thing I’d done that seemed like a concrete Asshole step was buy a new ringtone for my phone. Now whenever anyone called me there was Ice-T’s voice saying: “Pick up the phone, player! Big money on the line!”
It was something, but it wouldn’t get me promoted.
The image Dr. Strong planted in my mind was this: Imagine you [that is, I] are yourself, sitting at a business meeting, or walking down the street. Now imagine getting bigger and bigger, until you’re the size of a giant. Now turn yourself into a robot, made entirely out of steel. Give yourself laser cannons under your arms and a laser site mounted on your helmet.
When that image is clear in your mind, encase yourself in a plastic bubble made of impenetrable plastic. You can see out of the bubble, but nothing can get through. Dr. Strong called this the “plastic bubble-shield,” and I conjured it up in my mind many times each day for months.
It’s harder to worry who you’re stepping on when you’re made of steel and have a head-mounted laser site. When Gloria caught me practicing this—I didn’t tell her why—she said I looked like Marty Feldman in Young Frankenstein.
Dr. Strong took me through the visualization … step by step … deeper and deeper into a state of total relaxation. I remember drifting out of the room, walking around Manhattan like a character in an old Japanese horror film. I felt the air get warmer—
Again my eyes snapped open. Dr. Strong was gone. Again. I had fallen asleep, and again she had left me. The rising temperature was due to the fact that the buildings air conditioning had been turned off, which offices usually only do when it’s late. And all the doors were locked.