Asshole

by Martin Kihn

  Don’t worry—I did it for you. From various sources, including my own vague memories from high school, I pieced together a brief time line of the world from prehistory to the present. And guess what I found out?

  The world has always been owned and operated by a bunch of total Assholes, who were defeated by even bigger dickheads and schmuckleberries, and so on, until we end up with Survivor: Marquesas.

  Here’s what I mean:

  THE ASSHOLE’S HISTORY OF THE WORLD

  B.C.

  1.6 million Fire invented. Many years later, used to attack defenseless marshmallows.

  10,000 Humans domesticate plants and animals—commence destruction of every living thing.

  900 Aptly named Assyrians of northern Mesopotamia begin conquering nearby, sweeter tribes.

  550 Confucius and Buddha develop their philosophies, which have kept non-Assholes serenely confused for centuries.

  327 Alexander the Great celebrates his marriage to Roxana, daughter of Oxyartes, by invading India and, later, Roxana’s pants.

  A.D.

  30 Jesus, possible Son of God and really nice guy, is killed.

  1100 Feudal system adopted throughout Europe, leading to numerous feuds, which they really should have seen coming.

  1206–27 Reign of Genghis Khan, legendary Mongol fucktard.

  1291 The final Crusade ends. Victory party is muted because most of the participants are dead or getting the shit tortured out of them.

  1513 Machiavelli’s The Prince published.

  1900’s World Wars I and II, Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, et cetera point to world not getting nicer anytime soon.

  1989 Berlin Wall falls. United Germany wins title of Biggest Asshole Nation, unseating momentarily mellower U$A.

  2000 Survivor debuts.

  2008 A$$hole erupts.

  All this musing on history got me wondering if there was anything I could learn from great thinkers of the past. The philosophers of Assholism. Who were they, anyway? Turns out there are four.

  The first was the legendary Sun Tzu, author of the classic The Art of War. This practical guide to dickdom has been studied and handed down through generations of Hollywood talent agents since the late 1980’s. Master Sun’s observations have a timeless quality that is as true today as when he wrote them more than twenty centuries ago:

  •“One with great skill appears inept”

  •“If you take on too much … you will eventually be drained”

  •“In a chariot battle, reward the first to capture at least ten chariots”

  The next great Asshole philosopher was, of course, Niccolò Machiavelli, author of that flawless guide to office politics, The Prince. Machiavelli, writing in the early 1500’s, understood that people are fundamentally “ungrateful, fickle, pretenders and dissemblers, evaders of danger, eager for gain.” And those are the good things.

  As he said:

  •“It is much safer to be feared than loved”

  •“Always be out hunting”

  The next great jerk-thought-leader was the German Friedrich Nietzsche, who was a lifelong atheist, which accounted for his limp. Nietzsche felt we should all aspire to be “supermen” who are “beyond good and evil.” And he summed up his vision for humanity with the inspiring words: “Entertain the hope that life may one day become more evil and more full of suffering than it has ever been.”

  It was hard for me to believe this power trio of Sun Tzu, Machiavelli, and Nietzsche could be improved upon as the intellectual rock stars of my new life, but—amazingly—it could. The greatest of Asshole philosophers turned out to be a woman whose name I’d first heard mentioned in reverent whispers by members of the Math Club back in high school. And, more recently, by the Nemesis.

  That sacred name was Ayn Rand.

  What did Rand believe? In The Virtue of Selfishness she said people should never accept “unearned guilt” by realizing that “man must live for his own sake” and not “sacrific[e] himself to others.” And she totally hated losers (like, say, the Dalai Lama) who “advise [man] to turn himself into a totally selfless ‘schmoo’ that seeks to be eaten by others.”

  A horrible thought occurred to me—that I was just such a “schmoo”—and I didn’t even know what one was. It was sad being a schmoo. It was lonely in schmoo-land. People danced all over me singing their happy songs—why?—because I was, at the end of the day, just fundamentally a schmoo … probably with some vague “altruistic motives.”

  Ick.

  If you’ve followed my plan faithfully you’ll be experiencing mood swings right now. They won’t make sense, then they will, then they won’t. It’s like you’re spinning faster around your own life, but getting closer and closer to the center. If you’re like me you’ll feel sick, angry, nauseous, exhilarated, and scared—and that’s just before breakfast.

  Maybe it was the sobering march through history, or that glimpse at Ayn Rand. Maybe it was the hollow sound ringing in my head since I’d “won” my confrontation with the Nemesis. Maybe I was just lonely.

  Whatever the reason, there was enough pinging across my face to alarm Gloria that weekend, as we were standing in our neighborhood dog park, closely watching Hola as she nosetackled the local pit-bulls and Rottweilers.

  “Let me guess,” she said, leaning back against the fence, “it didn’t go well.”

  “What?” I really didn’t know what she was talking about.

  “The face-off with the Nemesis. You lost, right? It’s okay.”

  What I couldn’t believe was I had forgotten to tell her what had happened. What was wrong with me?

  “No,” I said, “we won.”

  She whipped her eyes away from Hola to me, not doing much to hide her surprise. “You beat him?”

  “Yup.”

  “That’s weird.”

  “Thanks a lot.”

  “Was he sick or something?”

  “It’s like he didn’t even try,” I said, luring Hola away from a couple of troublemakers with a shred of Gouda.

  “Well,” she said after a moment, “maybe you’re just better.”

  “I don’t know,” I shook my head. “I’ve seen him more on fire. He didn’t work the team that hard. Let them go early most nights. He’s acting kind of weird—like he’s a nice guy.”

  “Like you used to be.”

  “Right, like I—”

  I let Hola go and faced Gloria. Like you used to be. That hurt. But it didn’t make me mad, exactly; it was true. Her wifedar was working.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, meaning it. “I guess I—”

  “Hey,” she said, “it’s probably just stress. You know, you beat the Nemesis. Think about that! That’s amazing.”

  “Yeah,” I admitted, “it’s pretty coolio.”

  “Super-coolio,” she said. “And Hola’s doing better, you’re not walking that crazy Misty. Right? You look good for that promotion. Sweet money. Am I wrong? Life is not bad.”

  Everything she said was right. What was I all mopey about? I started to forget.

  “Yeah,” I admitted. “Life is good.”

  “Now go rescue your girl.” She pointed over to where Hola was being scouted by a very small, very horny mini-pinscher. Like me, he was having a hard time getting up the courage to finish off his evil plan.

  STEP TEN

  Life Is a Gift, So Return It

  “They have no inkling of the loneliness that comes when you reach the top.”

  —Ayn Rand,

  Atlas Shrugged

  This final Step is a taking stock of your journey and a charting of the road forward. Like the weary travelers at the end of The Wizard of Oz, you discover that your destination is not quite what you had imagined. To be an Asshole seemed a glorious thing. And it is. Sort of. Painful as it is, the message here is one of self-acceptance. Even if you re—ugh—you.

  I skipped the Nemesis’s house party, which was about as rude as his neglecting to invite me in the first place. Which brings us to the Lucife
r pitch.

  Emily and Eleanor had decided on the passive approach to office work; that is, they’d answer me when I spoke to them but offer nothing on their own. They looked terrible, despite being dressed up for a meeting with the EVP. I chose not to care. I should have seen it coming: I’d read in the International Journal of Organization Theory and Behavior that the most common reaction to a jerk in the workplace is “avoidance.”

  “Did you make the copies?” I asked.

  “Yes,” said Eleanor.

  “Twelve of them?”

  “Fifteen.”

  “Color?”

  “Only green and white, like you asked—”

  “What—?!!”

  “Marty, I’m kidding. They’re color.”

  “Where are they?”

  “On your desk.”

  “Is there a projector?”

  And so on. It was clear—if I had been into parsing situations and moods the way the old Marty had—that they’d come to some kind of understanding between them, based upon the weeks just past. So I wasn’t surprised when, as I was leaving the team room, Eleanor said, “Can I talk to you a second?”

  “I need to—”

  “I’ll walk with you.”

  Which is what she did, saying, with some nervousness, “When is this project over, do you think?”

  “Depends on what the client says.”

  “Emily and I would like—we’d like to go on a different engagement. Next week.”

  I stopped and looked at her.

  “We don’t want to do this one anymore,” she said.

  “Well that’s not up to you, is it?”

  “I guess—”

  “See you downstairs, okay?”

  The pitch itself was at the client’s tower on Long Island. I went to the bathroom and double-checked my face didn’t have anything funny on it before we headed down to the limo on Eighth Avenue.

  My team seemed a smidge nervous, which made sense when I found out what Emily planned to lay on me on the way down.

  She’d maneuvered her way onto the back seat between me and Eleanor, who spent most of the ride poking her BlackBerry with her thumbnails.

  As we turned onto the FDR and headed north, Emily said:

  “I don’t wanna bother you but some of us … have been … Let me start over. It just seems like you’ve been upset a little lately and … Are you?”

  “What?”

  “You’ve been acting weird,” said Eleanor, not looking up from her device.

  “Yeah,” said Emily, “and it’s—it seems like you’re upset at us. Are you—are you mad at me?”

  “Should I be?”

  “Then what’s going on? Do you not want to—not Want to talk about it? ’Cause that’s cool—”

  “There’s nothing to talk about.”

  “Okay, then.”

  “Let’s worry about ourselves,” I said.

  “Fine.”

  “Can you go any slower?!” I shouted over the seat at the driver, who flipped me the finger with his eyes in the rearview.

  We were early, so I had time to ensure the projector worked. It was in a nice executive meeting room on the 50th floor. Weather held sweet and clear and the smog glowed blue like a screensaver.

  About five minutes later my boss came in with the EVP. Four of the client people who’d been in the meeting last month where I’d impressed Gretchen—the one where I first stood up to the Nemesis—also came in and took spots around the large oval table. My boss grabbed a couple waters and asked if the Nemesis was coming.

  “He didn’t ride with you?” I asked.

  “Nope.”

  “Then I don’t know.” My paranoia radar beeped: What kind of a game was he playing here anyway?

  Sherry came in. She was a pleasant looking, rather suburbantype woman with a monogrammed pullover and hairsprayed blond hair. Her greeting was polite if not warm, and she ignored her colleagues.

  “Okay,” she said, poking open a Sprite Zero tab with a clearlacquered nail, “let’s start.”

  The Nemesis wasn’t there—and, to save you any suspense, I’ll reveal he didn’t show up. Later I found out he’d called Gretchen in the car to say he couldn’t make it, but for now I was just confused. I dove in.

  Standing to the side of the screen holding the Sharp remote slide-changer, I went through the material I’d rehearsed. It took about thirty-five minutes, with twenty at the end for discussion, so we ended more or less on time.

  “How do we find these influentials?” asked one of the client team, a ferret-like guy with a shiny nose.

  “Two ways,” I said. “We can use algorithms to track online behavior and build look-alike models to profile likely targets. These are based on a sample of knowns correlated to behavior. The track modeling pops out best-fit analogues and we can calibrate as we test-and-leam down the line.”

  Since nobody in the room had any idea what I meant by this—including me—the guy asked, “What’s the other way?”

  “We ask them.”

  “We just say, ‘Hey, are you influential?’”

  “There’s ways to do it better than that. We can ask people in their networks to—”

  “What about the payments?” interrupted Sherry. “I don’t know that a paid referral model works. Haven’t we s—”

  “Hold on,” I interrupted. “What’s your data point?”

  Gretchen and my boss were looking uncomfortable. They made some vague noises, but I said, “Huhn?”

  “I don’t have—”

  “Look,” I said, “this isn’t altruism here. We’re like Ayn Rand. Somebody does something for us, we pay them. If the kids don’t feel they can—recommend the product, why should they benefit? What’s in it for us?”

  “Who’s Ayn Rand?” somebody asked.

  It was around then that my cell phone chose to ring: “Pick up the phone, playa! This is Ice-T! Pick up the phone!!”

  Someone said, “Wow.”

  We had a few more back-and-forths and Sherry stood and said, “Thanks, guys, that was great,” and left the room, rapidly followed by her duckling-like colleagues.

  I had Eleanor dismantle the projector and Emily gather the leftover copies as I went to where my boss and Gretchen were whispering.

  “What’d you think?”

  “Nice ring tone,” said my boss.

  “Oh my God,” said Gretchen, “look how late—I’ve got another—”

  And how did I feel? Remember that I’d done dozens of pitches in the past and will no doubt do many more in the future. And all I really know is that you never know. Sometimes they’re wizardly and you wait months to not get the call; other times, you stumble through a bunch of shit and end up with a big whopping bag of loot.

  You never know.

  I was doped with fatigue when I got into work the next morning.

  “Gretchen was looking for you,” said my office-mate as I punched my code into the phone.

  There were four messages. One from my boxing coach Carlos, telling me not to get all flabby (too late). Two from my boss, telling me to call her when I got in. And one from Gretchen, saying, “Come see me when you get this.”

  I’d never been summoned to the EVP’s office first thing like that before. Also, she’d never come looking for me personally, as Bartholomew seemed to be saying. I was definitely moving up in the world.

  Although very tired as I climbed the round staircase to the floor above, where Gretchen’s office was, I felt better. My insides were healing and I knew the worst was past. I was even wondering what kind of a car I Could get with my huge bonus.

  I loved life, and it loved me.

  Until I opened the door to Gretchen’s office, saw my boss sitting on the little designer couch, caught the EVP herself scowling at the yellow cabs down on Eighth Avenue, and the red light on the speaker phone indicating a caller.

  Gretchen swung around as I came in and said, “Amit, we’ll call you back. Marty just walked in.”

 
“Okay,” said Amit, who was the head of our Saskatchewan operation, and rang off.

  “So,” said Gretchen, “how’re you feeling?”

  “Okay.”

  “Have a seat. Got a message from Sherry this morning to call her, so there’s probably some news. Let’s do it”—she opened the door and screamed out for her assistant, Ambrose, to get Sherry on the speaker, which Ambrose rapidly did.

  Then Gretchen closed the door and we hovered around the phone, talking to the disembodied voice.

  Sherry was the one with the budget. And I could tell from her “Hello, guys” she wasn’t going to make my day. My Mercedes CLS550 evaporated.

  “I just want to thank you guys for coming in to pitch,” said Sherry. “I know it was late notice, and you did a great job considering.”

  That considering stung.

  “But,” she continued, “we’re gonna go with someone else. A smaller agency. We liked your approach, but it just didn’t seem like where we wanted to go right now. So thanks again so much. We appreciate the work you put into it. Thanks.”

  If she thanked us again for failing her I was going to emote.

  “Okay, of course,” said Gretchen, who’d been through this a million times in her career, “we respect that. Do you have any feedback for us? On the pitch, or the team, whatever? So that next time—”

  “Well, I wasn’t gonna bring this up,” said Sherry, so quietly Gretchen had to ramp up the volume on the phone, “but since you asked. Is Marty there?”

  “I’m here,” I said.

  “Marty, we haven’t worked together before,” she said. “And I thought you were very prepared. But I just wasn’t comfortable with your reaching out to me before the proposal.”

  Both my boss and Gretchen looked at me with new eyes.

  “I was pretty clear about not talking to any of the teams involved, and I didn’t appreciate that you, you know, broke the silence. No big deal, really But it just gave me a sense it would be harder to work with you.”

  “But,” I said, “I wasn’t the only one who reached out—”