Asshole

by Martin Kihn

  I won’t say I wasn’t tempted, but I’d come too far to back down now. “I hate meerkats,” I said, and left.

  Half an hour later the Asshole appeared at Bowl-Mor Lanes and bowled terribly. He also won. If you’re wondering how this is possible, you obviously haven’t been paying attention.

  The answer is simple: I kept score. And I cheated. Brad and Ben were too drunk, or depressed, to notice at the time, although there was discussion about the outcome after the two frames. The three of us regrouped in our usual booth around a pile of ’tater skins and oil-soaked calamari nubbins.

  “You added wrong,” said Brad, puzzling over the scoresheet.

  “It adds up right,” I asserted. “You can check it if you want.” (Secret #4: Never, Ever Admit to a Mistake.)

  “There’s no way you won,” he said, after he’d doublechecked my math and found a suspicious lack of errors. “You blow at bowling.”

  “Not tonight I didn’t,” I said. “Obviously.”

  I’d taken advantage of the fact that almost all night my friends had been having a surprisingly heated argument over who was hotter, Mary-Kate or Ashley Olsen. I’m not sure they realized the girls are twins. And that their feelings for them might be illegal in some states.

  “There’s something wrong with this picture,” Brad snorted, crumpling up the scoresheet and finishing up the fourth of one too many beers.

  “What are you saying?” I asked, giving the Power Stare to the triangle above his eyes. But he was looking at the shoe checkout woman, on whom he’d had a crush for months.

  “You totally cheated,” said Brad. “You lost, and you cheated.”

  “It’s a proven fact,” mumbled Ben, “that cheaters always win. It’s the law of the jungle.”

  “Whatever,” I said.

  “Why’d you have to keep score anyway?” asked Brad. “Ben keeps score.”

  “I wanted to.”

  “Yeah,” said Ben, “and what about this calamari shit? We always get shrimp dumplings, man. Why’d you make us change it up?

  “The dumplings suck ass,” I pointed out.

  “Everything here sucks. This is the House of Suck. So what? That never stopped us liking it before—”

  ‘Yeah,” said Brad, revving up from 10 to like 15 mph, which was energetic for him, “you’re being all bossy tonight.”

  “Somebody has to,” I said.

  “What’s that mean?”

  I looked at my friends, sitting side by side across from me. They were both fortyish, currently single, without even a plant or a roommate back in their rent-stabilized excuses for homes. Their careers were treading water, their shirts were an insult to hangers, and they didn’t even seem to feel the panic that was overwhelming me.

  I said: “Aren’t you guys tired of, like, waiting for stuff to happen all the time? There are people out there who are total douche bags, but they’re making waves. They don’t care so much how they come across.”

  “This’s about that review at work, right?” asked Brad. “The acting coach?”

  “Sort of,” I admitted. “But it made me see what I’ve been doing wrong.”

  “Pretty much everything,” said Ben, under his breath.

  “I’ve been thinking I’d get recognized if I just did my thing. But there’s people running around who are—they’re not even good at anything, some of them—they push harder. You know what I mean?”

  “You’re going to try No More Mister Nice Guy for a while,” said Brad.

  “Exactly.”

  “You’re doing it now,” he went on. “And it explains why you’re so freaky tonight. Even more than usual.”

  I smiled, then immediately stopped.

  “There’s one problem with this, though,” said Ben.

  “What?”

  “You weren’t that nice to begin with.”

  “Yes I am,” I said. “I’m really nice.”

  “No—you’re kind of a dick.”

  This was the sweetest thing he could have said to me. But because I was still a man, and he was a man, and we were both from the Midwest, I did not get up and hug him.

  “You’re just flattering me,” I said, swooping over and seizing the last piece of calamari from the paper plate before someone else got to it.

  “Think about it,” Ben said. “Only an asshole would even want to be an asshole.”

  STEP FIVE

  Practice Practice Practice

  “You should live every day like it’s your birthday.”

  —Paris Hilton

  Forget Carnegie Hall, the only way to get into the executive suite is to practice, practice, practice … being an Asshole. Take your new skills into every corner of your life—your marriage, commute, meetings at work, porn chat rooms, et cetera. Don’t worry about blowing at first. You will. Press on. Remember there is no such thing as failure; there are only schmucks who need to get out of your face.

  Of all the Steps, this one may be the most painful. That’s good. Those decades of niceness have turned you into a rusty-bottomed aircraft carrier: You might be able to change directions, but it’s going to take a while. Start by attacking those who are nearby, like your family. Then move on to destroying enemies in your village. If your village happens to be Manhattan or London, well, you’re just going to have to get up a little earlier in the morning.

  Like me. By now I was confident enough in my language and gestures, I knew how to swagger-walk like a pimp and purse my lips like the Queen, and where to power-stare to be a mint Asshole. But I had a problem.

  “What do Assholes wear?” I asked myself as I was thumbing through my stack of Banana Republic shirts the next morning.

  The answer: They don’t really care.

  So I’d been doing something right all along. I reached into my closet and pulled out some stuff and put it on. Olive pants don’t really go with a cerulean no-iron oxford shirt, but I didn’t care, right? As for scent, I figured the more the better, and the same went for hair gel.

  “Whoa!” said Gloria as I wafted past her on the way to the leash. “Did the bottle break?”

  “I’m rolling it out today. For real.”

  “Rolling what out? What are you talking about?”

  “If I told you,” I said, fixing her with a plaintive eye-lock, “you wouldn’t believe me.”

  “What I believe,” she said, “is there’s something weird in your hair. Or you forgot to wash it, right?”

  “Very funny.”

  “I wasn’t jok—”

  Hola needed to be walked, so I saddled her up and told her in no uncertain terms to behave herself, or else. She told me that she had no problem doing that as long as there were treats involved, and plenty of them. So I gave her a treat, and we stopped by her girlfriend Misty’s door, as usual.

  Misty’s dad, Ramón, was on the phone, of course. He didn’t even look at me as he pushed his baby out the door and pulled it shut.

  Or rather, tried to—because today, as you know, was a new day. I shoved my foot into the doors path to stop it. This got Ramóns attention.

  “We need to talk about Misty,” I said to him, executing what would have been a perfect Power Stare if Ramón hadn’t by now turned away from me to continue his critically important conversation.

  “… match the color of the wallpaper,” I heard him say, “’cause there’s a pink rose pattern in the bedroom …”

  I stepped into his apartment. Hola and Misty, sensing the gravity of the moment, sat politely out in the hallway. Oh, who am I kidding—they were engaged in a doggie deathmatch, wrestling one another into total submission. But at least they weren’t barking.

  Keeping up my momentum, I took hold of Ramón’s arm and spun him around.

  “Hey?!” he said. “Whassup?” He pointed to the cell phone nestled his shoulder. “I’m on a call.”

  I said: “I am not walking your dog anymore.”

  He looked at me like I’d just announced I was a rodent the size of the Ritz. “What?!�
��

  “I’m not walking Misty. Ever again.”

  I pulled Misty inside, wedging Hola on the other side of the door, and handed her leash to Ramón. He took it.

  “And I’d suggest you get her trained,” I said. “She’s a real bee-atch. Later.”

  I walked out and shut the door behind me. I won’t say my heart wasn’t racing—I won’t say Hola wasn’t a little disappointed—but by the time we got down to the lobby, we were both feeling liberated.

  Or something like that.

  “Well find you a better girlfriend,” I told Hola during our stroll up Riverside Drive. She only dive-bombed once, for something that looked like a fossilized pterodactyl, and later she stood up on her back legs and peered over the stone fence above the Henry Hudson Parkway, gazing out over the fudge-brown Hudson River at Fort Lee and Hoboken. She looked like a hairy little person.

  “That’s New Jersey,” I told her. “There’s a lot of mixed-breed dogs over there.”

  She sneezed, and I blamed New Jersey. In retrospect maybe it was my six-gallon love-bath of Halston Z-14.

  I rolled into Twin Donut imitating a man whose masculinity is so powerful he warps space-time around him. Two enormous hombres stood at the counter, staring sadly at the barren donut shelves. Of course, nobody was behind the counter.

  Fording my way through fallen napkins and dirty crumb piles, I went to the back of the store, lifted the vertical folding gate, and roamed into the kitchen area. Four men stood mid-conversation. Metal racks of fresh donuts—literally hundreds upon hundreds of the best-smelling plops of lard and Boston crème in the barrio—crowded the walls.

  One of the employees, I remember, wore a bandana. Another—my little morning antagonist—leaned against his dry mop. I directed my comments at him, pointing directly at his chest.

  “We’re waiting out here. What’s your problem? There’s people waiting.”

  “Ah?” he wondered.

  “What’s your problem? Are you dumb?—”

  He was shaking his head, saying, “What is that? Bum?”

  “Dumb.”

  “Hum?”

  “Dumb!”

  “Huh?”

  “Look—which one of you’s the manager?”

  They looked at one another, not quite antagonistic to me, like they were worried I might be some kind of city inspector.

  “I’m the morning manager,” said the guy with the bandana. “What’s your problem?”

  “Nobody’s working here, is my problem.”

  “Cool down—”

  “And this guy,” knife-pointing at the mop guy, “gets my muffin wrong every morning. I always get the same thing—corn muffin, large coffee—he can’t get it right! What’s so hard? An idiot could do it.”

  “He gets your order wrong?”

  “Every day,” I said. “It’s amazing!”

  “He’s messing with you, maybe.”

  The little mop guy started nodding furiously, almost happily, at this.

  “Yeah, I’m messing with you,” he said.

  I couldn’t believe this.

  “Why?” I asked. “What’s the point of that?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You have got to stop,” I said.

  “Okay.”

  He seemed like he meant it. This was not the Twin Donut revenge scene I had imagined. That scene had me tearing the whole store a new one, uncorking a carton or two of pure whoopass, and presiding over a ritual stripping of the little man’s Twin Donut epaulets before I ran him out onto the sidewalk in tears. But if the way it happened got me what I wanted it was a success, right?

  “I want to report you to the manager,” I said.

  “Okay,” said the guy with the bandana, “he’s reported. You shouldn’t be back here.”

  The little guy left his mop in back and got my order.

  “Have a nice day,” he said, as I left the store with my paper bag, “or not.”

  Even though there was something crunchy in it I didn’t want to think about, that was probably the most satisfying corn muffin I’ve ever had in my life.

  I couldn’t wait to unleash the Beast during the course of a client meeting in their territory.

  It was a big meeting, lasting four hours. Our client loved four-hour meetings, and really loved all-day off-sites. This mystified me, because the documented truth is that only about forty minutes of business gets conducted in any meeting, no matter how long that meeting actually runs. Forty minutes is the limit of the male attention span, unless there’s a stripper.

  But four hours it was. I suspected our client got lonely and bored and liked pushing agencies around. Another explanation was that as a company they enjoyed setting money on fire and watching it burn.

  I was there along with the Nemesis, four clients, and the EVP of our agency. The EVP was on hand, as usual, for commentary and wisdom; the content was left to the Nemesis and myself to present.

  The topic was “Marketing to Generation Z”—or, how to get even younger people into debt so they can never quite come up for air and are forced to become that most desirable of all things, a Customer for Life.

  Pointing to some digital shots of kids with gadgets, I said: “Gen Z is not only comfortable with technology. They’re not comfortable without it. To go out without their cell phone, their iPod, their PSP—is totally alien. It’s like a psychic need they have for constant connection with their tribal group.”

  “I think these gadgets are a lot of hype,” said the client, who was simultaneously typing something into her BlackBerry and watching the little screen on her motoRAZR, which squatted on the conference table. “What are you saying?”

  “I’m saying—”

  “What we’re saying,” interrupted the Nemesis, talking over me, “is that we’ve gotta push out to this demographic on the mobile platforms. Even online doesn’t reach these—”

  “That,” I stepped on him, “is the simple answer. But I think it’s wrong. They’re very attuned to marketing—so mobile platform advertising won’t work. We’ve got to get embedded in their peer group.”

  “Uh huh,” said the client, looking up. The EVP smiled at me, encouraging.

  “I think—” tried the Nemesis.

  “In fact,” I went on, “I’d say we have to give to get. There’s got to be an exchange of value here—”

  What followed won’t interest you—it didn’t really interest me—but the damage had been done. I’d practiced what John Alexander, author of How to Become an Alpha Male, called “controlling the frame.” I’d interrupted and held eye contact, kept my teeth slightly exposed and my fingers together and vertical. I’d gestured up and down, for impact.

  And exactly like my hero Tony Montana, I’d thrust my pelvis forward, ready for action.

  After the meeting we went down fifty-two floors to meet our car, which was waiting at the curb. This was unusual. Cars waited for people in other professions—investment bankers, high-rollers, Booz Allen consultants—and, on occasion, our colleagues in Above-the-Line divisions, but they rarely waited for direct marketers. I was moving upward; I was with the EVP.

  She gestured for me to get in, and as I bent to enter the long black vehicle my ass became unconsciously self-conscious, as body parts do when somebody’s looking at them but you can’t quite see them looking. That should have been my first clue. My second should have been when the EVP asked the Nemesis to sit up front next to the driver, “for room.”

  “So?” she asked me, as we pulled onto the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway heading south, back to the office. It was ten after five; it was bound to be a long, stop-and-start drive. Like. This.

  “Hmm?” I said.

  “What’d you think?”

  “It went well—”

  “We need to get…” Here she launched into a perfectly articulated to-do list only one of us would remember later. I was noticing the scarf around her neck, which was tied like it took a long time to tie. It was bright yellow and her suit, t
ypically, white. They said her husband owned a restaurant. They said he was fat.

  “… and you really did a great job in there.”

  “Thanks,” I said.

  “Really took control. You were on the spot, I know.”

  “Well—”

  “You’ve grown in the role, I’ve been noticing, hearing things. Really rising to the occasion, right?”

  Here she either winked at me, or squinted in the sunlight.

  “Thank you,” I said.

  “Like the hair, too. Really good. Shorter’s good. You losing weight at all? You’re really looking fabulous.”

  Okay—this was now officially a strange conversation. Or was I imagining things? Advertising isn’t banking, after all. And while the EVP wasn’t known for being anything other than totally professional, she was most certainly a “character.” Maybe this was how she talked.

  “Well, I—” I hesitated.

  “What’re your plans here? Been thinking about that at all?”

  “Well, I—”

  “You say ‘well’ a lot. Know who did that? Ronald Reagan did that—you think he was a good president?”

  “Not really.”

  “I hear you’re seeing a coach?”

  So far, there were three bizarre things about this dialogue. First, it wasn’t about business—rare for a woman so insanely efficient with her time she did conference calls from toilet stalls; some of them ended with a flush. Second, it was about me. And third, how the fuck did she know about the coach?

  My wife didn’t even know about the coach.

  “Uh, I—”

  “It’s hot in here.” She took off her scarf and hung it on the little plastic knob over the door. Then she put her black leather document caddy on the floor. Then she extended her arm along the backseat so her body formed a fleshy yet distinctly choreographed backward C with me in it’s mouth. “Better.”

  The limo was stopped in traffic, and I looked out at a tinted Roosevelt Island.

  “So you’re married,” she said, looking at my ring. “To a woman?”

  “Y-yes,” I said. “She’s a musician. And she cooks—she’s in cooking school.”