by Martin Kihn
Unbelievable.
There was a note, on the chair where Dr. Strong had been. It read: “See you next time, “Asshole’—Me” There was also a cheaply printed color brochure titled MEDITATION & VISUALIZATION FOR GROWTH.
On this she had written with a black Sharpie pen, “TRY ME.”
At this stage in our journey, It’s important we be able to eliminate the clutter of our current lives, assumptions, parents, pets—everything that distracts us from our goal. We need to focus. One of the best ways to get your mind in shape for what is to come is the following practice:
MEDITATION FOR ASSHOLES
My method can be practiced in the morning, during your commute, at your desk, after tai chi—whenever you want. The purpose is to clear your mind of all nice, helpful, self-defeating thoughts and replace them with mean, selfish, and ass-kicking patterns that will help you get ahead (and get head).
There are four components: Breathing, Visualizing, Affirmations, and Prayer.
Breathing—Sit in a comfortable place. Close your eyes. Try to cleanse your mind of all thoughts and images that are tranquil or soothing. Breathe in, breathe out. Imagine your breath is a liquid, like a river, only full of medical waste and dead sea animals.
Alter breathing so your mouth is closed on the inhale, for a count of two, then it opens on the inhale, as it closes for the subsequent exhale. And the opposite goes for your nostrils. Make sure they are shut tight for the exhales, until the fourth exhale (counting, of course, the in-breaths as one and the outbreaths as one-and-one-half breaths).
At this point, if you’ve followed my directions, you should be trying to breathe in with both your mouth and your nostrils shut tight. You will then pass out, after seeing a flash of white light that signals your brain synapses shutting down.
See, you really are a people-pleasing putz! How hard is it to breathe, for God’s sake? You don’t need a guidebook for that.
So breathe. Now you’re ready for …
Visualizing—You need to build an “unsafe space.” This is an unsettling, fear-soaked room you can return to again and again as a base for your visualization work. Making this space as upsetting and dark as possible is important. I like to see myself, in my mind’s eye, in a very small room strewn with various sharp objects and Polaroids of my ex-girlfriends, especially the ones who dumped me. There is nowhere to sit, screeching speed metal music is playing, alternating with the greatest hits of Michael McDermott.
Affirmations—Affirmations are mean-spirited statements you can incorporate into your meditation practice, and repeat throughout the day.
What follows are a few I’ve found helpful, but you should also write your own:
•I love myself unconditionally, as long as I’m perfect
•There is nothing I set my mind on I cant accomplish through intimidation
•I constantly feel a nameless dread which inspires me
Prayer—If meditation is our act of listening to ourselves, then prayer is more about talking. Rather than to God, however, we are praying to ourselves—our own Higher Power. I repeat the following regularly at night before I go to sleep:
May my adversaries be agitated, unhappy, and hypoglycemic. May they continually encounter difficulties, self-doubt, and feelings of inadequacy May these feelings be entirely accurate and impossible to escape, even through the sweet deliverance of sleep, which shall become for them a nightmarescape of shapeless mammals and badly-lit images from Japanese horror films with little kids screaming. And may they never understand why they cant seem to get a good haircut, even at expensive places.
Meditation is like medication—a lot of fun, but not a great substitute for leaving the house. In addition to your spiritual work, you must continue to monitor your Asshole role model for nuggets of nastiness. I continued to learn more from my opponent than from the disappointing coaches I had found so far.
The division I worked for did direct marketing, which is all the advertising you actively loathe, such as junk mail, online banners and pop-up ads, and—horror of horrors—unsolicited phone calls on weekends and during dinner. This, as opposed to the advertising you merely detest, such as car commercials.
Embarrassed by the phone calls, we referred to them only by their acronym, OBTM—Outbound Telemarketing. And junk mail was called DM, for Direct Mail. All Online Advertising was OLA, like my dog, but without the “H,” for “Happily-eating-daddy’s-shoes-right-now.”
On the other hand, our sister divisions did the kind of advertising that was far sexier, such as TV spots and spreads in fashion magazines. Although we had grown rapidly during the dot-com rebound, Direct Marketing still hadn’t quite shaken off its reputation as the place where losers, nerds, and the genetically uncool went to die.
There was even a height difference. What the TV and print guys did was called Above-the-Line (ATL). What we did was Below-the-Line (BTL).
Emily and Eleanor had just finished up a project for me that had gone over well. It was about as BTL as it gets: figuring out the best place to put legalistic “fine print” on a corporate website. Glamour was not a big part of our job description. Despite their youth—or maybe because of it—these women were a lot of fun to work with. Emily’s strong feelings about everything were balanced out by Eleanor’s cool grace, and they were far from lazy.
As a reward, and because I liked their company, I asked them to tag along with me to the client’s offices. I sat between the Nemesis and our division’s Executive Vice President, a “blond,” big-boned, comically outgoing woman fighting sixty. Across the table were some clients and the “brand guys”—vaguely influential executives from the ATL side of our company. From time to time we were forced to work together, so the junk mail and spam didn’t conflict with the TV and so on. But ATL’s idea of working together generally had them doing a lot of talking, and us doing a lot of nodding.
So the brand guy, in a pink shirt with a yellow tie, was talking in front of a screen projecting images of adorable kittens frolicking on a green lawn, and I was nodding.
“… and what you need to keep in mind,” he said, “is that there literally is no limit to the number of kittens we can put in this spot. There’s an innate unconscious affinity that the human female has for baby felines that drives a powerful purchase response—”
“How do we know that?” challenged the Nemesis. He was sitting straight up, glaring at the brand guy, and his hand came down on the table in a chop-chop.
“Well. The research tells us—”
“What research?”
“F-focus groups in fourteen markets. But my point is—”
The Nemesis shook his head and chop-chopped again, raising his voice. “I’d have to say they’re wrong,” he said.
“What?”
“My gut tells me kittens depress the purchase cycle because they call up nurturing emotionality Now nurturing is an anti-consumerist impulse—”
“Tell that to P&G—”
“Let me finish—is anti-consumerist in the financial products market. Not consumer goods.”
He kept going for a while—but what impressed me, as usual, was that he disagreed. The Nemesis always disagreed. Here he was challenging something that was so obviously true it was a total cliché—that is, women like kittens—and saying it was false. Black was white. Nemesis was President. It was so beautifully executed, it all but took my breath away.
At the end of the meeting, the Nemesis literally grabbed the EVP’s arm and interposed himself between her and me in the car on the way back downtown. Although the ride was almost forty minutes through dense traffic, I did not exchange a single word with either of them. Demonstrating their superior intelligence, Emily and Eleanor had taken a different cab.
The Nemesis went on and on about how little baby kittens were the Antichrist, psycho-demographically speaking. What an asshole.
To help me understand my new idol better, over the next couple of days I combed through the academic literature on assertiveness and
“Machiavellianism.” The latter turned out to be a well-established workplace style characterized by “manipulative strategies of social conduct.” The prick who used this style liked to treat others, in the words of one expert, “as objects to be controlled to meet his or her self-focused goals.”
Exactly! I thought. I read on.
One study of Machiavellian salespeople in the Journal of Business Ethics showed they were more successful than nicer peers but got lower ratings from their supervisors. Despite extensive use of “ingratiation and flattery,” these jerks had a low desire for acceptance by the group.
Assholism was associated with being younger, later-born, and female (told you). So older, first-born males (like me) tehded to be nicer (like me). And there was an interesting study of accountants done in 2006, described in the International Journal of Management Practice, that indicated dingleberries had more clients even though they performed worse. Being a dickhead made you money in spite of incompetence.
Other studies showed jerkitude in the workplace was associated with being intelligent. Smarter people tended to be less easy-going, perhaps because they understood the consequences of niceness. Which garnered, according to Personnel Psychology, fewer promotions than were given more assertive colleagues.
There was also evidence that acting like an Asshole made you feel the world was a fairer place, because you felt free to speak your mind and therefore did not suffer (as I did) in silence. You felt better about life even if you didn’t get the promotion.
One particularly disturbing report in the Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology showed that Machiavellian types often do not choose to act as they do—that the Machiavellian is “a person who is unconnected to his or her own emotion” and lacks empathy. Many of them may suffer from a condition called “alexithymia,” or an inability to know what they and others are feeling. In other words, a sociopath.
Oh, to be that blessed.
And a study comparing the attitudes of Midwestern college students today with those of the 1960’s came to the conclusion that—as a society—we are definitely getting more Machiavellian.
Tell me something I don’t know.
A few nights later, I was watching Gloria cut up a chicken while I worked on my hair to go out. I’d adopted a moussing regimen that required careful comb work, which I preferred to do away from the mirror so that I didn’t have to see what it looked like.
“Where are you going?” she asked me.
“I told you this morning—bowling.”
“Well you can’t go, I’m making chicken.”
Given the quality of my wife’s chicken, I was tempted to stay home. But I’d come too far as an Asshole to cave. “I have to,” I said. “I bought a new glove.”
She seemed surprised by my tone. “What am I going to do with this chicken?”
“Wrap it up,” I said, and went out.
I have heard the theory that we are the company we keep. This terrifies me. Probably because the company I keep is a bunch of castrating feminists (my wife, my mom), shallow corporate shills (at work), and bitter lost souls with the nagging feeling they peaked sometime during junior year of high school, probably because they did (my friends).
In this last group were two guys I saw from time to time. I’ll call them Brad and Ben, although their names are Frank and Fred. We went bowling at one of the few bowling alleys left in Manhattan, Bowl-Mor Lanes near Union Square, which featured glow-in-the-dark singles bowling on the nights Gloria had strictly forbidden me to go. Tonight was not one of those nights. I met my friends on the street outside Bowl-Mor, and we made our way to the lane and started in on the first frame.
“I have a question for you,” I said, after I’d knocked down a pin on the end with my second ball.
“Hold on,” said Brad, who took the floor.
I sat next to Ben, who was keeping score using a random method he invented that nonetheless always had him losing. He was about the most negative person I’d ever met, so negative he looped all the way past being a downer and turned into a kind of uplifting comic character. One time I’d told him I was disappointed by one of the people who worked for me, and he said, “What does it matter, Manhattan’s going to be completely underwater soon anyway.”
See what I mean?
“Are you happy?” I asked Ben.
He didn’t look up. Tonight he was wearing a blue bowling shirt with the name RANDOLPH stitched on a pocket. “I’m losing again,” he said, “I’m not happy.”
“No—I mean, with your life?”
Now he looked up, alarm in his orbs. “What the fuck? Are you going Jehovah’s Witness on us?”
“You think you’ll ever make money? Real money?”
“Not a chance of that, dude. Fuck!—you’re on fire big man!” he yelled at Brad, who was a strong bowler and often hit at least a spare. “Watch me completely miss the pins,” Ben said, and got up to fulfill his own prophecy.
Brad joined me at the bench. He had on the nice blue chinos he wore to work, even though he worked in his bedroom producing websites he insisted were not pornography but rather “adult modular content.”
I waited till he’d finished his second beer, then I asked him: “Do you think nice guys finish last? Is that true?”
“Depends.”
“On what?”
“Combination of things.”
“Like?”
“Well,” he mused. “The ball weight. Their follow-through. Where they place their feet.”
Brad was a man of few words, and beer made, him even less talkative. He was like the two most boring people you will ever meet. And like many very dull people, he was good-looking.
“Do you think I’m too nice?” I asked him.
“It’d be nice if you took your turn now.”
Ben’s pessimism combined with his strange score-keeping ensured he always lost, as I’ve said, so this nice guy (i.e., me) invariably came in second. Brad always won, but this gave him little satisfaction.
We sat in an orange booth near the floor and ate ’tater skins and shrimp dumplings.
“What’s wrong, Marty?” Brad asked.
“What isn’t?” said Ben.
I told them about my evaluation at work and how I was trying to get more aggressive. Then I mentioned Tina and Dr. Strong, as well as my researches into the Nemesis and his archetype.
By the time I was done, my two friends had stopped eating, had each pounded like six beers for strength, and were staring at me like I had just told them I was the real Princess Anastasia.
After I reassured them I was still the lovable CBM they’d always known, Ben shook his head. “It’s a worthy goal,” he acknowledged, “but I don’t think it’s gonna work. First off, people can’t change, not like that.”
“I’d like to change these dumplings,” chimed in Brad, “they’re like ass—”
“Also, you’re way too sensitive,” said Ben. “You don’t even like it when a girl gets kicked off America’s Next Top Model. You cried at that stupid penguin movie, for God’s sake. There’s no way you can pull this off.”
“I wasn’t crying, it was allergies,” I lied. “Look, it’s just—I’m forty now. And I feel like I’ll never have a nice apartment, and Gloria is going to lose interest in me.”
There, I’d said it. It was a tremendous relief.
“I know exactly why you feel that way,” said Ben.
“Why?”
“Because you won’t. You will never have a good apartment. That’s how it works in this city—you can go backward in real estate, but you can’t go forward. It’s too late. I only say this to help you. As for the wife, you’re on your own.”
Brad shot him a look of disapproval. It’s true nobody likes a Gloomy Gus, especially when they’re right.
“Seriously, Marty,” said Brad, “what’s wrong with your apartment?”
“It’s not just about that,” I admitted. “It’s more like—I want respect.”
Ben started singin
g: “R-E-S-P-E-C-T.”
Brad talked over him, “Maybe what you need is a different job.”
“I don’t think it’s the job,” I said. “I’m always quitting and starting something new and I’m always unhappy and—I’m beginning to think maybe it’s me that’s the problem. You know?”
“I’ve got it,” said Ben. “I have the answer: Zoloft. It really helped with my divorce.”
“What I need,” I said, “is a new personality.”
Ben squirted some more mustard onto the ’tater skins. “Finally you say something we can all agree on,” he said.
“Doesn’t it bother you guys you’re not rich yet?” I asked my friends. This is a very awkward question to put to another man. It’s almost like I’d asked if it bothered them their testicles hadn’t descended. “And what about love?” I went on. “Do you think any woman could really love a loser?”
“Probably not,” whispered Brad.
“I’ve got it!” Ben blurted out. “You’re talking about a new personality. What about taking an acting class? That’s a great way to meet women … late night rehearsals … Vagina Monologues…”
As he drifted off into his post-divorce fantasy world, I thought about what he’d said. Between Tony Montana and Ben, I’d figured out my next move.
STEP THREE
Act As If
“May I say as the world’s oldest living teacher: ‘Fuck polite!’”
—Sanford Meisner
Nobody said becoming an Asshole would be easy, and if they did they’re an Asshole. You certainly did not hear it from me. Any worthwhile change requires commitment, courage, and cash, in that order. Of course you don’t feel like being a dickhead just yet. Question: Who cares? Not me. Change your outsides and your insides follow. Act like you know. Fake it till you make it. It works. No faking.