by Martin Kihn
“A singing cook,” she smiled. “Sounds like the perfect wife. You know, I’ve been married twice. Had to take a trial run.”
She was still smiling, and as the car went over a roadbump she bounced a little closer to me in the seat.
After a moment’s silence, she said softly: “Are you uncomfortable at all, Marty? What are you thinking about?”
“Oh, nothing,” I lied. “How long have you been with the agency?”
She said, “Is it hot in here? Are you … hot? Or do you want to … turn it up a little?”
I was facing her now, and her lips and eyes were softer, in a way I’d never seen. She had a playful smile, as an actual friend would. What an ally she could be. She could crush the Nemesis in a second …
“N-not really,” I said. “It’s fine.”
“You could go far in this business, you know. Really far. But you know what it’s gonna take?”
“What?”
“Commitment. You’ve got to want it. Do you want it?”
“Absolutely.”
“Are you sure about that?”
“Uh huh.”
“Don’t be afraid to go for it—I never was. I grabbed every opportunity that popped up”
She put her hand on my leg, lightly, and tapped it. The car stopped suddenly.
I think I bit my lip. I felt like I’d ended up in a different movie than the one I’d bought a ticket for.
“Tell you what,” she said, “you come to me when you know—this is what you want. Promise me. ’Cause I’m sensing you need to work things out for yourself.”
“I promise,” I said. I put my hand on top of hers and squeezed before drawing it back.
Here she definitely winked at me. Then she pulled out her BlackBerry and answered e-mails and made phone calls the rest of our trip. I can’t remember what I did besides stare out the window, but I’d learned something in that strange ride.
What I was doing—it was working. And I could push it even harder.
Push it I did, taking my skills into the streets and alleys of my hometown. It went better than last time—much better. You’ll find this too, as you hone your act: It starts to work. And there’s no better place to work it than at the retail level.
There was a CD Explosion on one of the streets I happened to be walking down. It wasn’t the same one where I’d bought my Josh Groban CD, but I couldn’t help but be reminded I was still carrying that cursed disc in my work bag. I went in and stormed a register. There was a surprisingly middle-aged, ratty-looking male register jockey, and he didn’t have a chance.
I flung the Groban on the counter with a thwack!
“This chomps,” I said, angry there hadn’t been anyone in line to cut off. “I need a refund.”
“Did you get it here?”
He wasn’t going to derail me with this transparent ploy. “I need,” I said, “a refund. Now.”
“What’s wrong with it?”
“It blows is what’s wrong with it,” I said, “and I need my money back.”
“Okay,” he said, “let me see the receipt.”
“I lost it,” I said, looking forward to ripping him a new one right next to where the old one was.
“That’s too bad,” he said, and gave me the list price plus tax back in cash. “This is one of his best albums.”
“Craptastic,” I sneered, and left.
As you roll it out for retailers, continue to polish and deepen your Asshole persona in the workplace. What I did was call up a woman I barely knew who worked ten floors away and told her—did not ask, but told her—to order me the DMA Statistical Fact Book, like, yesterday Five minutes later she appeared in my office with her own personal copy.
I think she was a little surprised to see mine lying open on my desk.
Later, I tried out some funny business at a jazz club in midtown. Maybe it’s because I go to jazz clubs about as often as I get my back waxed, or because it’s an art form known to tolerate a few wrong notes in the right cause, that I chose that particular place to act like a jerk. Looking back, I’d have to say there were some strikes against it.
First, it was a small venue, with little round tables in four rows of semicircles facing the stage. Second, the audience was with only one exception (i.e., me) unfailingly quiet and respectful. Also elderly. Third, the artist, when he finally doddered out, was so old he couldn’t play his Yamaha grand piano any more loudly than pianissimo. Fourth, there was a camera crew from the cable network New York 1 there to record this guy, some world-famous French fellow I’d never heard of.
Oh, and I was there with my wife. And she ran into two old friends at the bar. And her old boss happened to be sitting at the table in front of ours.
I kicked things off in style by cutting in front of the coatcheck line. This wasn’t as powerful a statement as it might have been because the man I cut off could barely see. He probably thought he was still on the Long Island Expressway. Then I had the server change our table, change it back, then change it again.
“What are you doing?” asked Gloria. “The first one was fine.”
“That’s not the point,” I snorted.
“What?”
“You wouldn’t understand.”
If a “sinking feeling” can be seen on somebody’s face, that’s what I saw. “Just sit there,” she said, “and don’t move. I’m going over to talk to Kris and Chris.”
Kris and Chris were a couple of musicians Gloria had known from a previous life. They were harmless. But standing next to them was a slimeball I’ll call Spike. This genuine Asshole was one of those supposedly handsome, lanky guitar heroes who was way too old to be wearing leather and hoop earrings but had a strange effect on women. This effect was recently enhanced by the fact that he’d played (badly) on a couple of very dull Top 10 songs. He kissed Gloria on the cheek, and I did not appreciate his enthusiasm. Or the way he snaked his arm around her waist.
I’d been given my orders to stay put, but I didn’t like it. As you live out your own version of scenes like this one, always ground yourself in the Truth of the Moment by asking: “What would an Asshole do?”
The answer I got, loud and clear, was: Go up on stage and perform some material for the people. I ignored that answer, mostly because I haven’t written anything recently. The next answers I got were: Take something, and Complain. These were my fallbacks. If you removed taking and complaining from the Asshole playbook, all you’d have left is lying and thinking about sex.
I stood up and started edging toward the camera crew.
And I couldn’t help but notice my wife peer over with growing alarm. She gestured for me to sit down, but I ignored her. Spike was boring the group with some no doubt self-obsessed rant.
As I passed a random table, I grabbed some breaded shrimp from a plate. The guy whose order it was looked up at me and smiled. “Have some more,” he said, “I don’t like shrimp.”
“Then why’d you get it?” I asked—and didn’t wait for the answer.
I went up to the camera crew from New York 1. They were two attractive young women with dark blond hair and black pantsuits. Either one could have been the on-air “talent.” I addressed both of them.
“That light is really bothering me,” I said, without a smile.
“What light?” asked the shorter one.
“Right there, on the camera.”
“It isn’t even on,” she pointed out.
“Well—it’s—it’s gonna bother me. It’s pointing right at my table. That one over there, see.”
“We won’t be taping you, sir,” she explained. “When François comes out, we’re going to aim the camera at him. Since he is the featured performer tonight.”
The women exchanged one of those “oh boy” looks I was getting to know.
“Well,” I said, fumbling around in my head for some way to score a point. “Well.”
“Well,” said the taller one. “Is that all? ’Cause we need a dry run.”
“W
ell,” I said, and wandered off.
That went… well.
Gloria and her friends were standing at the bar near the stage, close to where the crew were starting their “dry run.” I wedged myself between her and Spike, grabbed the bowl of snacks and started chowing.
“Hey,” said Spike, “hold on there!”
I swung around, eager to let the Asshole loose on this gigolo.
“Let me give you some room, man,” he said. “You look cramped.” He edged his barstool to the right, granting me some space. “Better?”
I ignored him and continued chomping on his snacks. Unfortunately, these turned out to be the extra-hot wasabi peas I hated.
“What happened to pretzels?” I said to no one in particular.
Gloria looked uneasy and said, “Hey, Marty, why don’t you make sure nobody takes our table.”
I ignored her and faced Spike, whose black leather jacket looked a lot more expensive up close. “Are you married, Spike?” I asked him.
“Not right now, dude,” he laughed.
“How do you feel about married women?”
Gloria yanked me a safe distance away by my arm and whispered, “Go back to the table. I’m networking.”
I stomped back and tried to annoy the couple at the next table, but their hearing aids were evidently turned off.
During the show, which wasn’t half bad, I made it a point to shout out suggestions to the band in between sending back everything we ordered. “Louie Louie!” I yelled. “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida, Baby!” “Stairway to Heaven!” And toward the end of the set: “Last Dance! Donna Summer!”
Gloria kicked me under the table, which I’m pretty sure she’d never done before. She was also frowning, and not at François.
I was proud when the band actually played Donna Summer’s “Last Dance” as an encore. At least I think it was “Last Dance.” They were an avant-garde free-fusion jazz trio, and they could have been playing anything, including the French national anthem.
In the cab on the way home, my wife said, “How’s it going?”
“I’m hungry,” I said. “Those shrimp were puny.”
“No, I mean whatever it is you’re trying to prove in there?”
“What are you talking about?”
“You’re acting like a jerk.”
“I don’t like Spike,” I said, getting very little satisfaction from her compliment.
It scared me when she didn’t respond. Made me wonder what she was thinking about.
“Do you think he’s handsome?” I asked her.
She shook her head slowly, but I don’t think she was answering my question.
• • •
You’ll definitely be shaken up by some of your experiments, as I was, especially if they involve jazz. You will encounter jackals like that Spike character, gearheads and first-class phonies who manage to fool smart women like your wife into thinking they’re not evil. You may start wondering why it’s so hard for a nice guy to get noticed by the world of women.
That’s what happened to me that night. I pondered the common belief out there in the guy community that women are turned on by jerks. Like most suburban legends this one is not true. In fact, my research has shown that women are not attracted to jerks. They are incredibly attracted to them.
At lunch the next day I asked Emily and Eleanor whether this myth had any validity. They were both in their mid-twenties, thoughtful and articulate, so I figured they would probably have a point of view. Also, they had never seemed sexually interested in me. This obviously meant they, inexplicably, were not into my type—that is, aging, married guys with a lot of debt and regrets.
We sat in Kosmo’s Diner on Eighth Avenue, and all three of us ordered waffles.
I posed the question: “Do women like guys who are assholes? And—if so—why?”
“Let me think,” said Emily, the more circumspect of the two.
“Me too,” said Eleanor, surprising me.
I sipped my coffee.
“Put it this way,” said Eleanor. “Definitely, you know, the Big-Man-on-Campus type gets the cheerleader usually. We like a man that seems successful.”
“What about a successful nice guy?”
She seemed dubious. “Well—if that ‘nice’ comes off as wishy-washy, It’s no good. Nice is okay but it’s—”
“It’s indecisive,” chimed in Emily.
“That’s right—”
“Guys are nice ’cause they can’t stand up for themselves. They don’t know who they are.”
“And they’re afraid—”
“Totally scared. We don’t like a guy who seems afraid—I mean, that’s our job, hah!”
They had a good laugh over that. But I was troubled. “What about jerks? You know, assholes?”
“Define asshole,” said Eleanor.
“Like a guy who doesn’t care about peoples’ feelings—does what he wants.”
“That sounds hot.”
“Put it like this,” said Emily, who at the time was six months into a doomed duo with a business-class jerk. “Women are attracted to guys who know what they want and go get it. It’s not so much the way the guy acts—”
“I still don’t get it,” I said, not getting it. “Why would you like a guy who isn’t nice?”
Emily got exasperated. “It’s not like we want to get treated like shit. But We want a provider. They need to make things happen out there. If they’re passive we’re both going down.”
“And let us,” added Eleanor, who’d added no butter because she was still on the dating scene, “worry about peoples’ feelings, right?”
“True dat.”
It was at this moment I realized that for the last forty years I’d been living in the world as—in fact—a woman.
• • •
Later I stopped by the Nemesis’s office and asked what was up. As he was grunting something, I looked around his desk and saw the automatic ammunition had been replaced by a wellthumbed paperback book.
“What happened to your bullet that was there?” I pointed.
“I was asked to put it away. In case a client saw it.” He opened up his drawer, which was filled with about twenty different types of over-the-counter sinus medication. “It’s in here.”
“Where’d you get it anyway?”
“My stepfather,” he said.
“What’s that book? The Fountainhead?”
“I’m reading it, well, re-reading it for like the hundredth time.”
“You like it?”
“I love Ayn Rand”—he pronounced her first name Ay-uhn, although I’d always assumed it was more like Ann. (He was closer.)
“What’s so great about her?”
“Have you read this book?”
“Parts of it,” I admitted, “in high school. It’s a long fellow.”
He tapped the blue-and-white cover like some people tap a pack of Luckys. “It’s all in here, man. Everything I know about things.”
For the first and last time in his life, the Nemesis appeared genuinely humbled. Then he went back to punishing his Mac.
“What things?” I asked him.
He made some noises after that, but he’d lost interest in the conversation, so I started to leave.
“Oh, by the way,” he said, stopping me at the door. “Did you hear about Lucifer?”
Lucifer, as I’ve mentioned, was an extremely lucrative opportunity that had been on hold for months now. It was the code name for a massive youth-marketing project our biggest client wanted to launch, and our agency would almost certainly be invited to pitch for the business.
“What about it?” I asked him, studying his eyes.
“Nothing,” he said, also studying me, “just wondered.”
“What did you hear? Is it on?”
He went back to his pounding. It was a very unsettling exchange, and I wasn’t quite sure why. I’d find out soon enough.
STEP SIX
Be a Fighter, Not a Lover
“
To be brutally honest, I would say that many people are in fact constipated.”
“Ori Hofmekler,
The Warrior Diet
Every Asshole has two parts: a brain and a body. So far you’ve been whittling your mind into a razor-sharp point of prickiness. You know how an Asshole thinks and acts. In this Step we turn our attention to the body. Yours may not be a temple, but it definitely deserves a sacrifice. Start boxing. Try an all-meat diet. See if you don’t start looking, and smelling, more like an Asshole.
I haven’t mentioned my cat much in the course of this story, probably because she’s so small. Also she spends most of her time under the sofa in the living room. I’ll never know what her early childhood was like, since we adopted her as an adult, but it obviously didn’t fill her with a love for wide-open spaces.
Also, she was very judgmental.
One night my wife was out at the cooking school working at a corporate “team building” event, and Ruby the Cat, Hola, and I were watching Animal Planet. Hola loved Animal Planet, especially the dog food commercials. Also the scenes of the majestic African grasslands. But mostly the dog food commercials.
Speaking of food, after I’d had my usual high-everything dinner, I settled on the big chair and Ruby emerged. Making sure the dog was distracted by the Eukanuba bags on the TV, she jumped up onto the arm of the chair and made her stealthy way along it. She kept her big gray eyes trained on the dog, in case Hola did something crazy, like move.
Usually, once Ruby boldly made it all the way to the back of the chair she stayed there, vigilantly eyeballing Hola. But this night was different. She jumped onto my shoulder.
This didn’t bother me. As I’ve said, she was very small, and I barely noticed. Also she was purring. Turns out this was an evasive counter-signal to lower my defenses before she sprang her diabolical trap.
She made her way down my chest, onto my lap. Then she turned around. And—it’s painful for me to remember this scene—she started to poke my blubber with her little paws. She was kneading my stomach like a tiny baker. It was like she was saying: “You’re fat!”
While she was humiliating me in this way, Hola decided to get in on it. She stood up, did a downward dog, and starting running around the chair like some demented pagan. The cat kept poking at my tummy, a demonic gleam of triumph in her owly eyes.