Asshole

by Martin Kihn

  “You’re being all Mr. Team Spirit today,” said the boss as she wrote the Nemesis’s name down on the volunteer list.

  “I love you guys,” said the Nemesis.

  Granted, it might have been my diet, but I suddenly felt like throwing up again.

  I excused myself and went into the bathroom, hovering over the porcelain savior for a few minutes until the pain went away. As I was washing my hands, the Nemesis came in and said, “You look like a turd on legs.”

  That night I quit the Warrior/Asshole Diet. And I have to say the hot fudge, butterscotch, Oreo, M&M, Aunt Jemima syrup and Froot Loops sundae I made for myself was about the yummiest three things I have ever had in my life.

  STEP NINE

  Never Surrender

  “Victory is gained by surprise.”

  —Sun Tzu,

  The Art of War

  Some sage once said pain is the touchstone of spiritual growth. Right now you’re feeling a lot of that spiritual growth. The fantasies of tailored boxers and factory-installed seat warmers that kept you going in the early days have been beaten back by the reality of surly analysts, baffled family and friends, and pocoloco clients. In this Step, you learn self-doubt is optional.

  You also learn that “Triumph” isn’t just an incredible ’80s Canadian power trio. It was also the battle cry for all the monumental jerks who came before us, the ancient Assholes who paused in their endless slaughter long enough to write the entire history of the world. And philosophy. And dating.

  Now, I’d say my marriage was traditional in the sense that I did what my wife told me to do when she told me to do it. I’m sure there are other ways to stay married—more modern ways—but I don’t know what they are. For some reason I decided to experiment with my winning formula that weekend at Fairway Market on the Upper West Side.

  To enter this Manhattan version of a gourmet superstore is to realize quickly that the biggest pricks in the world are not Wall Street BSD’s (Big Swinging Dicks)—they’re old ladies with metal sticks and prostheses. It’s like their whole life they’ve been in training to seize every advantage, jump on every sign of weakness in the aisles. They are absolute masters.

  We walked into the produce section and immediately some old lady in yellow duck boots tried to start something with me. But she clearly didn’t realize who I was.

  “Do you mind?!” she snorted, grabbing for my basket. I’m not sure why she did this, but it may have had something to do with the fact that she had selected it first.

  I pried it from her knotty hands—not an easy task.

  “That’s mine,” I said.

  “I was here first!”

  “I’d like to see you prove it—”

  “Gimme that!”

  “Martin,” my wife glared at me, getting in on the basket-pulling contest. Now we had three adults tussling over the thing, with a line of irate geriatrics rapidly piling up behind us. “Just give it to her—I’m sorry, ma’am—”

  “Talk about rude—”

  “Talkin’ about yourself,” I said, yanking the basket away from these two crazy women and stepping back.

  “As if!—” The geezer grabbed another one, snorted something I shouldn’t repeat, and trotted off throwing wicked looks behind her.

  “What’s wrong with you?” Gloria asked, handing me a sheet of paper.

  “What’s this for?” I shot back.

  “It’s the list.”

  “What do I do with it?”

  “Go,” she said patiently, “get that stuff. And don’t get the wrong parsley like last time.”

  “How did I know there’s two kinds of parsley?”

  “Read the sign, Einstein.”

  There was something about her tone. It didn’t agree with what I was thinking was the tone of the wife of a true Asshole. The wife wouldn’t necessarily be a pushover, but she certainly wouldn’t be like Gloria. All sarcastic and mouthy.

  Now gurus and thinkers tend to say that we should not look at our failures as, well, “failures,” but rather as opportunities to learn ^and improve. Let’s say that what I decided to do next was a very good set of these learning-and-improvement opportunities.

  Opportunity #1:1 studied the list in my hand and decided to comment on it.

  “What’s this for? There’s a lot of vegetables.”

  “It’s coq au vin,” said my wife. “I’ll see you at the check—”

  “What? Cock ow van? Why can’t we have something else?” Too late I remembered Alpha Males never ask questions. “We’re having something else.”

  She looked at me. “Okay,” she said, “What?”

  “Meatloaf.”

  “Sorry,” she said, shaking her head.

  “What’s wrong with meatloaf?” Another question. I would really have to practice this more. “We’re having it.”

  “So you’re cooking?”

  “No—I mean, you’re the cook. You went to cooking school. I hate the way I cook—”

  “Makes two of us. Now don’t forget—flat parsley.”

  Then she went off to get the Ball & Evans chicken and nitrite-free bacon, and I was left to sift through all those identical gobs of wet green grass, kicking the geezers out of my line of sight the whole time.

  Opportunity #2 happened at the checkout and was brought on when Gloria looked into the basket I was carrying. On my way, I’d dropped in some things that weren’t on the list. Just a few things for me. Some packages of Brent & Sam’s chocolate chip and raisin pecan cookies, and also some of those Sarabeth’s pumpkin muffins that go so well with Ronnybrook Hudson Valley vanilla ice cream, which I’d also picked up.

  “Oh, no,” she said, pursing her lips, “put that back. Did you get the vegetables? I can’t see—”

  “They’re in there.” With all the transfats-and-sucrose products I’d piled on top of them, you couldn’t see the real food.

  “Put that stuff back.”

  “But,” I whimpered, “it’s organic.”

  “You don’t need that. I thought you’re trying to lose weight—”

  “I can eat what I want.”

  “No. No you can’t.”

  “Who says?”

  “I say.”

  “You are not the boss of me.”

  “Yes I am. Now put that back.”

  The lines at Fairway are legendary for both their size and the aggression of their members. Now we were moving ahead but still quite far away from the registers, crammed against dozens of seniors and sad moms with Maclaren strollers, and it seemed like just about every one of them was listening to our little scene. In fact, the ninety-year-old behind us liked Gloria’s “Yes I am” line so much he coughed out a laugh.

  “Mind yourself,” I said to him, and turned back to my wife. “I can eat what I want. You’ve got to stop bossing me.”

  “You need a boss.”

  “No I don’t. Why do I need a boss?”

  “’Cause you’re a big baby. Now put that back, line’s moving.

  “That’s a mean thing to say.”

  “You can cry later—put that stuff—”

  “Take it back.”

  “What?”

  “What you said—take it back.”

  She shook her head, turned away from me and, miraculously, the line moved so we could actually get checked out. The Asshole had also checked out, apparently. He had met his match.

  As my organic vanilla ice cream was melting on the subway ride home—reminding me why I never bought ice cream (too much time pressure)—I had mixed feelings. I had my baked goods in hand, but Gloria was buried in O magazine, which was never a good sign.

  It was here on the No. 1 train around 103rd Street that I enjoyed Opportunity #3.

  ‘You’ve got to stop treating me like a kid,” I said.

  “But you are one.”

  “See that’s—I’m not one. I’m a man.”

  “A real man?”

  “That’s right. And I can do what I want.”

&n
bsp; “Look,” said my wife, peering up finally from her O article on combating spousal abuse, “I can see you’re trying to be all assertive lately. Oooh ooh”—like a gorilla—“and all. But don’t try it at home.”

  “Why not? Don’t you think our marriage can …?” here I trailed off, because I wasn’t sure what I meant to say.

  “Nothings perfect, right? But those guys you’re so in love with—all those macho men, there’s a reason they’re all on their third or fourth wives. Women don’t like them. Not as husbands.”

  “I don’t think that’s true.”

  “I’ll put it this way,” she said, with a smile in her eyes. “You can treat me like shit—and I won’t leave you. But you’re gonna have to be making a hell of a lot more money.”

  Men are more evolved, I think. It doesn’t matter to us how much money a woman has, unless she happens not to have big tits. And for an ass man like myself, they don’t even have to be all that big.

  Anyway, Gloria may have mussed up my mojo, but she definitely cleared things up for me. I had a new resolve in my mission. I was going to make more money, no matter who I had to jump on the street to do it.

  I actually saw the woman sitting on the other side of my wife light up after she said the thing about making more money. Our eyes met, and she looked away. And as I got off the train at our stop, this guy I thought was buried in his PSP the whole way gave me a thumbs-up and said: “Go get her, tiger!”

  Asshole.

  Over the next few days I persisted in calling the client, Sherry, and she was progressively less and less polite. What kept me going was that study I mentioned about how aggressive salespeople may not be popular, but they make a lot more in commissions. I printed out the abstract and taped it to the wall behind my phone. Then I did what they call in the boiler-room world “smile ’n dial.”

  “Hi, Sherry, It’s Marty again,” I’d begin.

  “Oh. So what can I do for you?”

  “Just wondered if I could get your take on something?”

  Without waiting for her to tell me she was running late for a meeting with the CFO, I launched into a quick scenario I’d preplanned for her. “Say we were to make a deal with manufacturers to use our influentials as a product testing lab, like for early versions and prototypes?”

  “Sounds interesting. Like I said, you—”

  “They’d feedback about these betas, maybe on an web-based tool.”

  “Put it in the pitch—”

  They weren’t long conversations, but I was practicing my own type of total aggression. I was not about to let the Nemesis monopolize client ear time unchallenged.

  The Nemesis, meanwhile, continued in his suspicious sweet-guy ways, getting very active in Bring Your Kids to Work and even going so far as to host an ice cream break on our floor. He wore an apron and scooped the stuff himself. Complimented us on what a “special bunch of monkeys” we all were.

  He seemed to be fooling the whole division. I heard people talk sotto voce about how he was “making an effort” and—heresy of heresies—“not so bad, really.”

  What, I wondered, does he have up his polyester sleeve?

  I was about to find out.

  • • •

  One morning I was out walking Hola, and I saw my old antagonist Ramón getting pulled along by Misty. He made a point of taking her across the street to avoid running into us head on. That seemed like an overreaction, so I shouted: “Hey, Ray! Who’s walking who over there?!”

  He put down his phone long enough to say, “Take a hike!”

  “That’s exactly what I’m doing, fella!”

  Ramón had been rude. Still—it was a pleasure to see that Hola was quantum leaps better behaved on the lead now than Misty, who was pulling her so-called master across Riverside Drive into traffic in a way that filled me with a feeling of déjà vu.

  At Twin Donut, the mop guy had been replaced by a new woman with a superhuman sweet tooth. I think she believed the words “no sugar” meant “only two sugars,” instead of the usual eight. In her world, nothing had no sugar. I thought she was a temporary sub for the mop fellow, but it turned out to be more permanent.

  “What happened to the little guy?” I asked her.

  “He get fired. How many sugar?”

  “Fired? Why?”

  “Somebody complain. Six sugar?”

  It wasn’t that I felt guilt over the small person’s fate—it’s possible his bionic lack of focus had been noticed by others, after all. It’s just that I couldn’t remember specifically aiding a service worker’s unemployment before. I’d gone into new territory.

  It felt kind of good.

  • • •

  The presentation that Friday was internal—for my boss, a few other account VPs, some of my peers, and the EVP. My team and the Nemesis’s go head to head and the EVP, Gretchen, would decide which of our approaches to take to the competitive pitch at the client’s on Monday.

  The meeting was scheduled for eleven a.m. I got there thirty minutes early to make sure the projector was working and would talk to my laptop. More presentations are ruined by lighting and cables than by any human being.

  It was at about ten to eleven that I started to wonder.

  The Nemesis and I hadn’t spoken in a while and had no co-ordinated timing. I was going to push for second, after the Nemesis, because one of my Alpha books had mentioned the last item on any agenda is the one that is most easily remembered.

  But what happened was the Nemesis’s team hadn’t showed up. At five-to I called up to his office. Nobody answered.

  People started straggling in—including Emily and Eleanor.

  At five minutes after eleven, the EVP arrived with the Nemesis.

  “Okay,” she said, sitting down and looking at me. “What have you got?”

  I wasn’t sure what to do. “You can go—”

  “It’s alright,” said the Nemesis, who’d had his head all but shaved and seemed very well rested and clean. Had I seen him in khakis before? “Age before beauty. Ha ha.”

  It took me a few minutes to get up a head of steam, but it went well. We’d done a lot of work, nothing but work lately. I’d driven the team like I was a guy who had balls of steel-plated iron with an all-weather coating.

  It was when I arrived at the paid-referral argument the EVP challenged me.

  “How open are we, do you think?” she asked. “Do we tell these kids we need a positive referral even if they hate the product?”

  “Think about it,” I said, “it’s like any job, right? We do what we’re paid to do even if we’re lying. That’s just life. I don’t really see it as a problem.”

  “What about ethically?” asked the Nemesis, which was amazing coming from a prick like him. Maybe he heard about ethics on an episode of The Apprentice.

  “I don’t see a problem,” I said. “Honestly. What is it?”

  “Well,” pushed the Nemesis, “maybe we should be encouraging kids to tell the truth. Just a thought.”

  There was an actual tee-hee from Emily.

  “Keep going,” said the EVP, so I did.

  The Nemesis went after me, but his performance was a little muted. He took about half as long as I had, and his slides were patently the result of less work. It wasn’t sloppy, just a bit underbaked.

  Afterwards I tried to buttonhole him, but he slipped out when I was packing up the projector, and I had to wait till he got back from lunch. Jaime and Roger hadn’t showed for the presentation, and it turned out they’d taken a long weekend together snowboarding at Hunter Mountain.

  I was waiting in his office.

  “Ah, nice job,” he said. He’d been drinking wine, and I noticed his black leather belt looked brand new.

  “How was lunch?” I asked.

  “An SVP took me to Pastis. Awesome broiled salmon. Truly amazing.”

  “What’s going on?” I asked him. “Lunch with senior managers—what’s—what’s going on?”

  His phone rang. He wink
ed at me while his eyeballs scanned his caller ID.

  “That’s Sherry—gotta take it—”

  It was unbelievable but I had no other choice, so I left.

  Next day the boss told me I’d won the face-off, and I said I kind of thought the Nemesis wasn’t really trying and I was confused.

  “What’re you complaining about?” she asked me. “You get a chance to pitch to the client. This is a big deal.”

  “I guess. You’re right.”

  I’d won.

  It was not what I had dreamed, somehow. But whatever. One of the articles I’d read described a study of 134 managers at a utility plant. This study seemed to show that being assertive and self-centered did not necessarily lead to job satisfaction. In fact—incredible but true fact—the managers who were happiest in this particular survey were those who actually cared about other people. That is not a misprint. So Assholes acted as they did either out of bad habit or for reasons other than enjoyment on the job.

  I stared at my phone, hoping even my crazy uncle would call. Nobody did, not even my friend Ben, who spent his life calling people. I was afraid of Gloria. I didn’t want to stay and I didn’t want to go home. My stomach felt like shit due to the lingering damage done by the Asshole Diet™, and I was hungry but afraid to eat. I couldn’t even drink anymore.

  If I’d had any feelings I’d have felt happy for myself. But the Asshole turns all feeling into rage; that is his secret. I thought: I’m getting weak.

  What I needed was encouragement. So I took out a pad of paper with the client’s logo on it and I made a list headed “Great Asshole Institutions.” It included such notorious viper dens as McKinsey & Co., the Navy SEALs, Goldman Sachs, the Walt Disney Company, and the Catholic Church.

  What a crew!

  Wasn’t it true, after all, that the greatest institutions in the world were populated by A-l Assholes? This was indisputable. Did they worry if they spent some time alone after a meeting, wishing for a friend or a kind word, waiting for a murmur of fellowship that would never, ever come?

  Of course not. The idea was laughable. They were too busy ruling the world.

  This made me feel better. Another activity that improved my resolve was a couple hours’ historical research. Research?! you ask. I can barely understand this sentence I’m reading right now! How can I do research!?