by Martin Kihn
“Too bad,” I said.
“Yeah, for you—”
“Stop doing that.”
“Get outta there, I needa sit—”
“Stop—with the umbrella already!” I yelped.
“Don’t touch me! Somethin wrong with dis fella! He’s touchin’ my—” she was raving.
“Okay,” I said, “take the seat.”
Later, Al told me never to escalate into a street fight, and that’s what this threatened to become. Although to this day I maintain I could have taken the old lady, if the other guys in the car had helped me.
“Don’t want it no more,” she said angrily.
“Just take it,” I told her.
“Too late. It’s my stop.”
It was my stop, too, actually—157th Street. Which made for an awkward disembarkation for all involved. Except me.
After each so-called setback such as this one, I’d suggest you do a quick post-mortem. Ask yourself three simple questions, in this order:
•Where did I go wrong?
•Who is plotting to destroy me?
•Why am I so good-looking?
By the time you get to that third question, you should be back on the road from despair. You have “reframed” the picture. Remember what my Communist Uncle Francis often told me: “There are no failures, Marty, only losers. And you are a loser.”
The next day I met Al in front of the big fountain at Columbus Circle, and we ended up walking along 59th Street skirting the south end of Central Park. It was a cool Sunday in late September, the kind of day the population of the island aggressively relaxed on. AL must have very warm blood because all he wore was a muscle T-shirt ripped to show his puny guns, and I asked him why I wasn’t feeling the altitude yet. I knew I’d been at my Asshole experiment long enough to see some serious results, but I felt like I was still in the second round with sixteen to go, if I lived.
“What’s an Asshole?” he asked me.
“Huh?”
“That’s your first problem, you don’t even know. How can you be something you don’t know what it is?”
He continued after a moment: “Asshole’s someone who—Put it like this: Asshole’s someone who’s rewritten the unwritten rules. That make sense to you?”
I said no, it made absolutely no sense to me.
“There’s a lot of rules—Look at that”—he pointed to the curb where a woman was getting into a cab and another woman a couple yards along was signaling for one. “Why didn’t the second woman just grab the cab?”
“The other one was closer.”
“That’s what I mean by rules. See? That’s not a law, it’s a rule.”
“She was being polite,” I pointed out.
“You know what polite is? It’s what people do who don’t have someplace to go.”
Al said he’d been thinking about my project, and he had an idea to take it to the next level. “You ready for this?”
I said yes, I was ready.
“Yesterday I mentioned your second-biggest problem, remember?”
“Yeah—I’m oversensitive,” I choked out.
“Here’s what I think’s your biggest. It’s simple, not complicated.”
“Go ahead.”
“One word.”
“I’m listening.”
He made me wait for it. Then he whispered: “Fear.”
We walked into the park and talked about his theory. I didn’t say much—I never say much—but as he elaborated I began to get the horrible idea he might actually be right. Truth was, I was incredibly afraid—not of succeeding as an Asshole, or even of failing at it—I was afraid to really try.
“Don’t kick yourself, man,” said Al. “It’s hard to ch-chchange. Hard enough to be ourselves, right?”
“How old are you?” I asked him out of nowhere.
“Are you German?”
“What?”
“You’re really into labels, who’s the boss. I kinda thought you might be German.”
“Not at all,” I lied. Then I felt oversensitively guilty, and added, “Maybe some.” (I’m half German.)
“You’re the oldest, right?”
“What?”
“In your family? You’re the oldest girl?”
I said yes, I was the oldest.
“I could tell—the oldest does not like to get teased,” he said.
We were coming down to the road in the park where the runners and bikes were and he spun toward me and yelled: “Boo!”
I yipped, then laughed about it. He had done the same thing to me at his apartment, and it pissed me off more then. “What’s that prove? Boo!? What’re we, like ten years old?—”
“Listen,” he interrupted, “here’s what we’re gonna do. You ready to work today?”
I said yes.
“You’re gonna have to trust me, ’kay? Can you do that?”
He was beginning to scare me.
“I need you to do what I say. Everything I say. Every little thing—cool?”
I nodded, barely.
“Lets warm up.”
We were deep inside the park now, and he led me through a physical and vocal warm-up for about five minutes, ending with a sitting meditation. Breathe in. Breathe out. The grass was coolish under our butts. I was wearing jeans and a black windbreaker I used to think was stylish because it was the only thing I’d ever bought below Canal Street, but next to Al in his $200 True Religion jeans it looked like a dishrag.
“You are the Asshole,” he said.
“I am the Asshole.”
“You do not fuckin’ care!”
“I don’t care.”
“Stand up.”
I stood up and followed him deeper into the park, and so began what remains one of the strangest and—in some ways—most important days of my life.
“Walk bigger,” he said.
“What do—?”
“No questions. Just do what I say. Okay? We can stop—”
“I’ll do it.”
I enlarged my walk, swinging my arms at my sides, feeling as totally self-conscious as I always did as the Asshole. Because it was a warm Sunday, there were a lot of people in the park. We took a path back to the road and made our way alongside it under the trees.
“Big chest,” he said.
“Big chest,” I echoed.
“Big teeth. Okay. Now say what I say but really loud. Who built this city?”
“Who built this city?”
“Louder—Who built this city?”
“Who built this city?!”
“Louder.”
“Who built this—”
“LOUDER!”
“Who built this city?!”
“Good.”
“Good!!”
People were definitely put on notice by us. Some mothers pulled their kids closer for safety. A couple joggers gave us a wider berth, though we weren’t actually on the track. Nobody really stared—they didn’t want to encourage me.
Al persisted: “I am an ugly man.”
“I am an ugly ugly man!” I repeated.
“But inside I am beautiful.”
“But inside I am bea-u-ti-ful!”
“Don’t cute it up—”
“Don’t cute it up!”
“Stop yelling.”
“STOP YELLING!!”
“I mean it—”
“I MEAN IT!!”—by now I was laughing so hard I couldn’t talk. We were down on the road again and the strange thing about my little tirade at the end was that it had stopped attracting attention. Literally no one was looking. It was pretty liberating.
“How you feel, big man?” Al asked.
“Beautiful inside,” I smiled.
“You ain’t that beautiful. Come on.”
He led me away from the road again and onto those paths I can never keep straight, and we ended up on a long open expanse of hills and trees that I knew was somewhere just south of Strawberry Fields, near where Lennon was shot. This hillsides always popular,
as it was today, with people spreading blankets out, having little cheeseball parties with their friends’ kids. It was a shallow hill leading down to the road, and there were groups of nice-looking people spaced every ten or fifteen yards.
“Everything,” said Al, “has to be real loud. Assholes are loud individuals. Got me?”
“Okay.”
He moved back a few yards—and I noticed he did that more and more as the afternoon progressed and his orders got weirder. By the end he was audible to me, but far enough so that you might think he was just as horrified as you by my behavior.
“Real loud,” he said.
“I heard you.”
“Act like a monkey.”
He’d asked me to trust him. I sort of did, I suppose. But the thought crossed my mind he was going too far. Act like a monkey?
I did it: banging, my chest, scratching my sides. Ridiculous does not begin to describe how I felt.
“Run around and screech. I said screech, dude!” he ordered.
I screeched.
“Okay—crawl. Just crawl around and say you’re a sorry fucker.”
So I was on my hands and knees in the moist grass saying I was a sorry fucker. At first I was looking around for what people might think, but I found it was easier if I ignored the blanket people. I knew some of them were staring and calling the park police, but they had their cheeses, and their kids, and those things had to be more important than me.
“Louder,” said Al.
I was a sorry fucker even louder—and I was looking forward to the end of this when I felt a squish under my right hand and looked down to see a mound of excrement that could have been human. “Shit!” I said, rubbing my hand on the grass to get it off.
Al was enjoying this enormously. “That,” he said, “was the first real thing you’ve said today.”
“Eat me.”
“That too.”
“Smoke my pole.”
“Now you’re faking it.”
Once I’d washed my hands, Al and I staked out the region between Cherry Hill and the Croquet Greens, where the roads all crisscross and there is an army of food carts.
The day was getting a little warmer, and there were sizeable lines at each of the carts, some with angry-looking families. I had a bad feeling about where this might be going.
“So,” said Al, as we surveyed the hungry hordes, “how do you feel about standing in line?”
Uh oh, I thought. “Fine.”
“And how does the Asshole feel about lines?” he asked me.
I swallowed. “What lines?”
“You are learning,” he said. “I could cry. Here’s what you need to do.” He gave me the instructions and pointed to the hotdog cart that had the biggest line, like four or five people. But no kids, thank God. I was scared of kids.
I was nervous about this but found if I focused just on the task, the goal, not the audience reaction, it got easier. So I breathed, closed my eyes, counted to two and—
Cut in line.
“Let me get a hotdog,” I said, in a low yet forceful tone of voice.
The woman at the front didn’t say anything. The others were looking at me closely.
“Did you hear—?”
“Anything else?” asked the cart guy, squirting mustard on my dog.
After I paid and stepped back I did the second thing Al had told me to do. I took a bite out of the hotdog, spit it on the ground, and screamed, “That’s shit!”
Then I marched back up to the cart, pushing the dog at the guy.
“You’re killing me,” I said, “I need my money back.”
He shook his head. “It’s fine. No complaints.”
“Well you got one from me. I need my two dollars.”
“Sorry.”
I recognized his look from my research on body language as one animals use to indicate they are not backing down—it’s basically an invitation to fight, or a call on the bluff.
I carried the partly eaten dog back to Al, who was practically wetting his pants with laughter about five yards away.
“What happened there?” I asked him, watching the cart guy move on to his other customers as though nothing had happened.
“Not bad,” he said, after he’d settled down. “Lets try it again.”
Forty years of habit just came bursting out of me: “I can’t, Al. I can’t do this. It’s wrong. Don’t make me do it!”
“Who says it’s wrong?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “People.”
“What people?”
“Other people.”
“And you care why? You really care? About people you’ll never see again in your life?”
“Yes,” I whimpered.
He looked at me sadly, drenched in disappointment. “I know it’s hard,” he said, gently. ‘You’re a good boy.” He paused. “Now let’s try it again.”
Something about that “You’re a good boy” really chapped my jayhawk, as they say in New Orleans.
He took me to a different cart, where I cut in line again and demanded a hot Italian sausage. By this point I was famished so I actually said it with some conviction.
A twentyish white rapper at the front of the line, with either a sister or a girlfriend, said, “There’s a line.”
I ignored him.
“Hey, there’s a line.”
“And?”
‘You got a problem?!”
“Maybe—”
Al pulled me away from the cart. A safe distance off, he was shaking his head. “You don’t engage—that’s wrong. You do not fuckin’ escalate. You hear me? Focus on the goal!”
“What do you mean I don’t engage? Isn’t that what assholes—”
“No,” he said sharply, “they focus. What do you want? A hotdog. Go get a fuckin’ hotdog. People try to engage you, they step up, what d’ya do with that?”
“I don’t—”
“It’s noise. It doesn’t matter. You want to get shot or in a fight then listen to the noise. Asshole’s not a street fighter, Marty. You are not a street fighter. Listen to me, it’s not somewhere you want to go. Okay?”
I understood. I did hear. He cleared it up for me, in fact. The Asshole is not a thug who goes around like an idiot begging for a beating. He’s just the next generation of go-getter.
“Work on those line cuts on your own,” he said. “Now let’s go direct some traffic.”
The six-mile circuit around the park goes in one direction, so the runners and bladers and so on don’t hospitalize one another more than necessary. Al had me jog slowly against the traffic telling them they were going the wrong direction; again, he followed at a safe distance.
“You’re going the wrong way! Turn around!”
And: “Come on, guys! You’re going the wrong way!”
“Mean it,” said Al.
“You’re going the wrong way, everybody! Turn around!”
“Better, but more—”
“YOU’RE GOING THE WRONG WAY! FOLLOW ME!”
Incredibly, a couple bike riders stopped and looked around, confused. They started going the way they’d come, then realized I was a dope and turned back around. A runner stopped and gawked at me. After a couple minutes of doing this—till my voice was officially hoarse—I almost converted five bikers, two runners, and an old guy walking in the bike, path (illegal).
There were also people who told me I was mistaken. But not in exactly those words.
It felt like a session of utter goofiness, and it made me mad at Al. Until I realized that among the complicated rush of my feelings there was one I was not feeling anymore: FEAR.
“Grab that taxi!” Al yelled when we got to Broadway—pointing to a yellow cab that another guy, wearing a lovely olive peacoat, was closer to. I ran around the guy and grabbed the door.
“Hey—that’s mine,” he snapped.
Focus on the goal. I opened the door and was about to get in when I felt a hand grab my right bicep and squeeze it.
“I ha
d it first!”
“DON’T—TOUCH—ME!” Where that came from, I don’t know. I think the park stuff had upset me more than I’d realized. But the guy stepped back, and as the cab started up I was surprised to see Al sitting beside me, buckling up.
“There’s an Asshole in there already, man,” he said.
We got out near his apartment, and he walked me over to Christopher Street to my train.
“From now on,” he told me, “always be the Asshole, everywhere. It is you. I mean—it’s not you yet, but you’ve got to live it to become it.”
“I know.”
“Don t go back, man. Don’t be Marty. You’ve been dipping in and out and now you need to take it live around the clock. That’s two-fifty.”
“One twenty-five,” I said, firmly.
“Two-twenty. American.”
“Twenty-five dollars. Canadian.”
He grinned like he’d just given birth. “I’m proud of you, man.”
After that compliment it was hard to say goodbye to Al, but we agreed my time was better spent making my way outside the nest. He was always there if I needed him and had a few hundred American dollars to spare.
So I did it—I became the Asshole for better or worse from that moment on.
It wasn’t hard. What it took, like anything real, was a leap of faith.
I got onto the No. 1 train uptown to go back to my apartment, and I rode that subway like the biggest Asshole in the history of underground transit.
And nobody noticed.
That night I put together a commuting soundtrack for my Zune. It was headlined by the following timeless classics I suggest you pirate ASAP:
HOLE OF FAME—TOP 5 ASSHOLE ANTHEMS
1.“No More Mister Nice Guy”—Alice Cooper
2.“Bad to the Bone”—George Thorogood
3. “Creep”—Radiohead
4.“Take This Job and Shove It”—Johnny Paycheck
5.“What’s That Smell?”—Lynyrd Skynyrd
That night I was moussing and combing my hair and watching Gloria debone a halibut. “Where are you going?” she asked.
“I told you this morning,” I said, “bowling.”
“Well, you can’t go—I’m making your favorite, halibut.”
“My favorite is meatloaf.”
“Really,” she said, almost pleading, “you’re out all the time now. How about you stay home tonight, I’ll make a salad. Meerkat Manor’s on. It’ll be fun.”