by Martin Kihn
Gloria and Hola were at home watching TV.
“Sit!” I yelled, like an Asshole, at my dog.
She jumped on me and started humping my leg, an ecstatic look on her muzzle.
“I said sit!”
She reared up on her hind legs and placed her paws on my chest. Then she stuck her tongue out. We went for a walk, and after she’d pulled me around the building at a trot I sat on the couch with my wife, watching a nature documentary on the National Geographic Channel. This was a series about meerkats, which turned out to be mischievous little mammals who live in the Kalahari Desert in Africa and have pointy ears. I really could not have had less interest in this type of creature, but my wife controlled the remote, so we always watched whatever she wanted. Always.
Now I stepped onto dangerous ground. I had tried to think “What would an Asshole do?” as I went about my life—and here I was, watching TV with my wife, certainly part of my life. So I asked myself: “What would an Asshole do now?”
I said: “Can you change the channel?”
“No.”
“What about the SciFi Channel? I think Battlestar Galact—”
“No.”
“But I want to—”
“Shhh—the meerkats are emerging.”
We watched them poke their pointy ears out of their little holes for a minute.
I said: “Give me the remote.”
“Why?”
“I don’t wanna watch this. It’s stupid.”
She ignored me, so I grabbed the remote from her hand and started scrolling through the channels.
“What the—oh,” she said, intuitively realizing what was going on, “you’re being more assertive now? Right?”
You see, she didn’t know about my secret project to transform myself, about the coaches and so on. I was thinking maybe I could reveal the new me organically, so smoothly she might assume I’d always been that cool. I had forgotten that she is smarter than I am.
“Maybe,” I whispered.
Then she patted me gently on the leg closest to her, and said, “Keep trying.”
She took the remote back, and we watched the meerkats cause many kinds of mischief for the next couple hours.
Back when Al and I were going up the escalator to the street after our Alpha-watching session at the Time Warner Center, I had thanked him and said, honestly, “I really learned something. How is it you know so much about body language?”
“Oh,” he said, “it’s my job.”
I nodded. “You mean as an actor. You have to be able to—”
“Fuck no,” he snorted, like I’d just launched off some howler. “Like I’d ever get a fuckin’ part in anything but a used car commercial! With this face! Hah! No, I’m a psychologist, a jury selection consultant.”
“But that house you have,” I blurted without thinking, “how can you afford that?”
“That’s not my house, dude. I’m cat-sitting.”
It explained a lot. He was still laughing at what I’d said before. “An actor! Haha! Like that’s even a real career.”
“Well,” I said, “you’re a good teacher. I’m getting a lot out of—”
“Good,” he interrupted, “I’m happy for you. Now I’m gonna miss Grey’s Fuckin’ Anatomy. That’s two-fifty, check’s okay.”
“What?!” I asked, surprised.
“My fee—two-fifty, American.”
As I was writing the check, there on Columbus Circle where all the cars hurtle past like they hate somebody, Al said, “My fee’s one twenty, by the way.”
“But you said—”
“Two things, Marty. And I say this for your benefit. One, Alpha woulda known the price up front, okay? Two, Asshole never pays the quote, he chisels down.”
“Ah—like a test.”
“Yeah,” he grinned, taking the $250 check from me. “Lucky for me you ain’t there yet.”
STEP FOUR
Think Win-Lose
“It is better to be impetuous than cautious.”
—Niccolò Machiavelli,
The Prince
Now that you can walk the walk, you’re ready for a stroll into a scary place: your own mind. You can’t be an assmaster unless you’re ugly on the inside as well as on the outside. Right now you still suffer from a crippling disability—you actually care what other people think. This comes from the false assumption they even know you’re alive. They don’t. You’re too nice to be noticed. This Step is about getting over ourselves, so we can get over on others.
More faulty thinking: There’s enough to go around. Hah! If there were enough of anything to go around, we all wouldn’t feel so damn deprived. As you’ll learn for yourself after you’ve mastered these Steps, even wealthy people don’t feel like they have enough. How could they? “Enough” comes from an ancient Anglo-Saxon word meaning “Hah!,” I think.
The incident with Al and his fee made me realize I wasn’t where I needed to be. There were many things I was still doing wrong. This insight got even more pitifully obvious when my boss called me into her office one morning to “talk about something.”
It was only after she closed the door and seemed to waffle before speaking that I began to wonder.
“So,” she said, sitting and steepling her fingers in a brazen display of femme masculinity, “how’s it going?”
“Okay.”
She smiled but not with her eyes. You can tell a real smile from tension in the eye muscles.
“Good, good,” she said. “Okay.”
We waited. For rain.
“So,” she said, “there’s something I’m wondering, right?”
I smiled, with my teeth.
“We need a lot of types here—not just races, but all kinds of people, too. That’s what I mean by diversity. So there’s people who are really going for it and then there’s … there’s others. Diversity.”
What?
“What I’m wondering,” she continued, “when we talked about this before …”
She let it hang there; she seemed to be having trouble, so I said, “About the selling?”
“Right. But—I had a thought. What would you think about downshifting a little bit?”
“Downshifting?”
“Right. Slowing down.”
I had no idea what she was talking about, so I showed it.
“Maybe we could put you in a place where we don’t necessarily—don’t force you into selling mode?”
“Like how?”
“Give you a slower track. Respect that desire to keep the stress level down.”
I was beginning to get it, and it wasn’t pretty. “You mean—the ‘mommy track.’”
“Hah!” she erupted. “Funny. No, not that. Just ease the pressure some.”
“So I’d have less work?”
“Well, no. You might have more, I don’t know. But we’d respect—”
“How does more work lower my pressure?”
“By taking off the stress about promotion.”
“So, hold on,”—here I was having real trouble processing, not just being stupid—“I work more … but I—knowing I won’t get promoted means I get less stressed out?”
“See, this,” she said, nostrils flaring, “is where we have a problem here.”
I tried my new techniques—the strong eye contact above the bridge of the nose, pursed lips, head inclined slightly backward with the chin out, relaxed shoulders, and both forearms on the desk crossed directly in front of my marathon-running accuser. But even I wasn’t buying into it.
“I’d like to keep things like they are,” I said. “I’m working on some stuff.”
“Like what?”
“Certain techniques. I’m not actually using them yet.”
“‘Techniques’?”
“Yuh huh.”
“Ah,” said my boss, picking up her phone and punching in a dozen numbers.
An overt act of dominance.
As I was leaving, she said to my back—or maybe to someone o
n the phone—“Got to get into gear here.”
I desperately needed a fast-forward, so I called Al and made an appointment to meet him again in midtown. He must have been between jury selection assignments or something, because he never had any problem scheduling me. Probably it’s because I paid him whatever he told me to.
In the lobby of my building, I ran into Ramon coming in with Misty. Of course he was pounding on his BlackBerry.
“All you need in this world,” I whispered like Tony Montana, “is balls.”
“What?”
But I’d gotten to him.
At Rockefeller Center, where Al had told me to meet him, it occurred to me to wonder: Why Rockefeller Center? What was he planning? What if he had me do something weird? If only I’d listened to the little man inside …
Al came up to me and said: “You got a twenty?”
I gave him one, and he handed me a wad of twenty onedollar bills.
“Today,” he explained, “we work on your second-biggest problem. You want to know what that is?”
“What’s my biggest?”
“Well get there. You want to hear your second?”
“I’m all ears.”
“You’re oversensitive. It could be genetic. We need you to get over yourself Sweet?”
“I am not oversensitive,” I said, swallowing hard.
“Don’t worry—there’s a plan. I thought of it myself.”
What I would be doing today, he explained, was offering random people one dollar to insult me.
“What?!”
He explained the method to me again, told me I could stop when I’d given out my stack of twenty singles, and then said, “Go.”
It is not easy to describe just how awkward I felt when first let loose on Rockefeller Center to pay strangers to insult me. Since I strongly advise you to try this exercise yourself, I’m sure you’ll find out what I’m talking about. It went against every instinct I had—except, maybe, the instinct for making myself look like an idiot, which this entire project is demonstrating.
There were dozens of people within fifty yards of me. It was a weekend and coolish, so luckily there weren’t many NBC execs in evidence. Or any of New York’s Finest. There were plenty of New York’s Lamest—kids and young people, tourists, some East Village types in army surplus and discount store rejects standing alone, tired swingles trudging by with shopping bags from Saks and The Gap.
As you may know, directly in front of the “30 Rock” building there’s a skating rink surrounded by a wall, sidewalks, and—right across 49th Street—that area where people wait every weekday morning for a chance to worship Al Roker.
My Al wandered over to the wall and leaned against it, looking down at the rink.
In a moment when nobody was near me, I whispered: “I’ll give you one dollar if you insult me.”
Of course, nobody heard.
I glanced over at Al, and he was shaking his head.
A couple shoppers who looked old enough to be hard of hearing walked by, and I said, conversationally, “One dollar to insult me.”
One of them looked at me and held her purse tighter.
I went over to the sidewalk, where there were more people.
I said: “Insult me—get a dollar.”
No takers.
Louder: “Today only—a dollar to call me a dick.”
A couple tourists looked up from their subway map, confused.
Louder still: “Make a dollar real easy; all you have to do is put me down!”
They shrugged and went back to their map.
Finally, exasperated: “ANYBODY WANT A DOLLAR, JUST CALL ME A JERK!”
From somewhere, I heard, “You’re a jerk.”
I wheeled around. “Who said that?!”
Nobody confessed. A few people had looked at me, but they immediately looked away to avoid making eye contact with someone who was clearly on a lifelong bender, or worse.
I saw a group of kids around twelve or thirteen years old, with no parental units in tow. There were four of them plugged into two i-Pods and they had on those baggy leather jackets with the intricate needlework that made them look like extras in Aliens.
I’m usually afraid of kids because, well, they can be insulting. But under the circumstances that was a good quality. I went up to them.
“Hey—I’ll give you a dollar if you insult me,” I said.
“Like how?” one asked me, the Alpha alien.
“Any way you want.”
“Why?”
“It’s a personal thing.”
“What do we say—like, You’re ugly or something?”
“That would be fine.”
“Then you’re ugly.”
I gave him a dollar.
Because he was an Alpha he stayed calm. But his friends could not believe me. They pounced like Hola does when she sees a nice used Kleenex on the street.
“You’re ugly,” said the boy sharing his i-Pod.
“It has to be original,” I said, making this up as I went.
‘You’re … you’re tall!”
I shook my head. “Puh-leeze.”
Another one, quieter, tried: “You’re weird.”
I gave him a dollar.
‘You’re baby ass juice,” said another, who of course got a dollar. He deserved two.
‘You’re a penis,” said the Alpha, and I told him, “No seconds.”
This was getting to the point where I was afraid someone might call the Administration for Children’s Services, so I thanked the boys and jog-trotted quickly past the elevator going down to the Sea Grill, ending up across the rink from the big gold statue of Prometheus.
I found a pair of older men. I suspected they were from out of town because they wore hats with jaunty brims and colorful silk scarves. “I’ll give you a dollar if you insult me.” One said, smiling widely: “Pardon?” Definitely from out of town.
My offer did not impress a couple of business guys, who power-walked past me like they were afraid I was going to kiss them.
Most people tried to wish me away, looking anywhere else. Some told me to get lost. But they used words that did not count for my purposes.
Remember: “Fuck off” is technically a command, not an insult.
The whole exercise got easier once I fell into the motion of it, almost like it was a contest to give away the money. It occurred to me suddenly that Assholes really are more goaloriented than the rest of us. They focus on ends, not on means.
Business people—the real assholes—were not cooperating with me. Best were younger and older people. One group of three grandmotherly women who I’m pretty sure had been drinking for hours asked me: “Why would we do that?” They seemed very nice.
Al hadn’t given me any instructions about explaining myself. “It’s an acting assignment.”
“What should we say?” they asked.
“Be creative.”
“For one dollar?”
“Yup.”
“Your nose is big,” one said. A dollar for the woman with the Brillo perm.
“Do they have to be true?” asked her friend.
“Just say it,” I said, steeling myself for the worst.
“You look old.” You should talk, hitch! I thought, but said nothing. She got a dollar.
The third one couldn’t think of anything, but as I was walking away, she did: “You’ve got a big ass.” Well-earned, that dollar.
You’ll find it’s the more nearly accurate ones that hurt the most.
Weird. Nose. Old.
Not to be ungrateful, but I felt like peoples insults were not terribly creative. Jerk. Freak. Douchebag. Even—glory of glories—You’re an asshole!
If only that person had actually meant it.
It became like a game. One rather attractive woman in a blue blazer and hoop earrings, standing alone gazing wistfully at the nude Prometheus, said to me: “That’s a new one. Nice try.”
She meant: That’s a pickup line I have not encount
ered before. And I said, “Uh huh.” She smiled at me, and I couldn’t believe how easy this was. My first pickup line in my life! And I happened to be happily married. Where was she when I was twenty-two?
By the time I’d spent my wad, I almost wanted to keep going. I didn’t feel this strongly enough to actually keep going. But it was amazing to me how much self-centered fear can disappear in fifteen or twenty minutes.
“What you’re doing,” said Al, over a decaf chai at Dean & Deluca afterward, “is seeing the world for what it is.”
“Which is what?”
“A game. A kid’s game.”
I asked him if he’d ever tried that exercise with any of his other students, and how it had gone.
“To be honest,” he said, “I never found anyone stupid enough to do it.”
On the train I felt empowered to have a loud “conversation” on my cell phone.
“What the fuck are you doing to me, man,” I said. “It’s not gonna work. I need you to take that schmendrick and nail his halls to the fucking wall and then I need you to fucking pull his tongue out with some pliers. The needle-nosed kind. Yeah. And then find his family and take out their tonsils. I don’t care haw; use the same pliers—”
“Excuse me,” interrupted some slob standing next to me, and I thought, Here it is, a chance to show my Asshole skills, but I was wrong. “Who’s your carrier?” he asked me. “’Cause I can’t get no reception down here.”
I folded up my phone and looked for an old lady I could tackle for a seat.
You will notice that triumphs are often followed closely by setbacks. No matter. Always keep your eye on the finish-line tape.
I was sitting across two seats, as was my new custom, enjoying the space I’d created for myself in the ultra-crowded aftershopping rush. People glared at me, as usual, but I ignored them and started clipping my nails.
Then an old woman, oozing a desperate smell of dental failure, actually decided to poke me with her umbrella. (It wasn’t raining out.)
“Hey!” she said. “Can you move?”
I didn’t even bother to answer her.
Another poke. “Move it! I needa sit!”