Asshole Read online

  One man in particular stood out, a tall handsome athletic guy with a couple of German Shepherds, who looked up at him with a mix of wonder and awe that was almost religious. He was on his phone. Then he looked at his dogs a certain way, and they both—I kid you not—lay down on the ground and awaited further instructions.

  I watched this, mouth agape, as the seconds ticked into minutes. The dogs watched their master. Their master screamed at someone on the phone, then switched over to another caller, with whom he was equally firm. I couldn’t hear what he said, but it sounded very masculine.

  On the bench behind him, for humans, sat a long Scandinavian type with tanned legs, a pressed summery yellow short-sleeved shirt, a cute little nose, and tresses of blond hair tied back in a casual ponytail. She smiled at me and stood up.

  I could not believe this—she was walking over to me—I was actually thinking how I would tell her I was married … when, of course, she slid one of her buttery arms around the tall man’s back and he shrugged her off, indicating the phone.

  Still, the dogs waited.

  The woman bent down to pet the dogs, and the man—he’d finished his call—said something to her and she stood. They kissed. The dogs watched. He gave her (the woman, that is) another command and she retrieved an expensive leather document case that was no doubt his, and very heavy, and slung it over her shoulder. Then the man nodded to his dogs, and they jumped up, following this impossibly good-looking couple as they went for the exit, right next to where I was standing.

  The woman opened the gate.

  The man—who was two or three inches taller than me, but not much younger—looked down at my reddened eyes and said, “Are you okay?”

  He had a British accent, a slight tan.

  “How do you do it?” I asked him.

  “I’m sorry?”

  “What’s your secret?” I nodded at the dogs, but also the woman, who was closing the gate behind them. I don’t usually respond to strangers, but my review had made me desperate.

  “It’s simple,” he said. “I’m a bastard.” He pronounced this, bahhh-stahd.

  I watched them walk away, this foursome in a dream. The Universe was most definitely telling me something, loud and static-free.

  It was saying, “Fuck you.”

  Envy is power, and my envy of that guy and his life gave me the power to make a start as an Asshole. You’ll find that it’s harder than it looks. But if Richard Hatch could do it on the first season of Survivor, and he made even me look good naked, then I could do it. Or not. I went home feeling overwhelmed, and Gloria proceeded to stoke me right into the game.

  She was working part-time at her cooking school, but tonight she was off, watching Project Runway reruns on Bravo. When I got back with Hola she asked me how my review had gone.

  “Okay,” I lied.

  I settled on the sofa next to the cat, who never seemed to notice me unless she had something insulting to say.

  But Gloria was too smart for my own good. She put the TV on mute. This was something I did all the time—in fact, I greatly preferred all my TV shows with no sound, so I could imagine they were better than they were—but not Gloria. She never muted.

  “What happened?” she asked.

  On the TV, Heidi Klum was miming her harsh Germanic verdicts to the terrified designers.

  “Well,” I began, and told Gloria everything. Except the part about the dog park; that was a private man-moment.

  My story didn’t get the response I expected. Sure, she looked disappointed. But it wasn’t like I’d been leaping from triumph to triumph since I’d met her. We had acted in this scene before.

  What she said was: “So you’re still in the running.”

  “For what?”

  “The promotion. Your boss said they hadn’t decided yet.”

  “Yes, but—”

  “But nothing,” she interrupted. “You could still get it.”

  “That’s true,” I admitted.

  “So what if you get this promotion?”

  “I dunno,” I shrugged. “I’d probably get a window. I’d work more. A bonus.”

  Gloria sat up straight, which wasn’t easy on the chair-and-a-half lounger. “Bonus?!”

  “In July—end of the fiscal year,” I said.

  “Okay, so hold on. There’s the promotion. How much is that?”

  “Just one level—to—”

  “No—I don’t mean the level, haw much more money?”

  “Oh.” I thought. “Not much. Maybe ten or fifteen thousand.”

  “You can push for more, though?”

  “I guess.”

  “What’s the highest?”

  “I don’t really—”

  “Work with me, Marty,” she said, swinging her legs off the chair-and-a-half and planting her feet firmly on the sisal rug, facing me. “What’s the upper limit—if you yell and scream—I’ll coach you on that.”

  “Maybe twenty thousand,” I said.

  “Which is how much a month? Less than two? Five hundred a week?”

  “Before tax,” I pointed out.

  “What’s the bonus?” she asked, coming over to the sofa and sitting on my right side. The cat jumped off and retreated under the sofa, where things were less intense.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Guess. More or less than twenty?”

  “It depends. It’s twenty per cent usually, but it can go to thirty-five.” I thought of Lucifer, the project I was trying to get off the ground. “More if I get this big project sold.”

  “Oh my God,” giggled Gloria, “that’s—it’s twenty for the raise and thirty-five per cent—”

  “At most—”

  “How much is that, total? The raise and the bonus?”

  I did the math, and said, “Maybe seventy thousand before tax.”

  “Jesus, how much a month?”

  “Six or so—”

  “After tax?”

  “Maybe a thousand a week.”

  “Cash in hand? For me to like spend?”

  “I suppose. But Gloria—”

  She was jumping up and down so much and giggling I thought she was going to have a spontaneous clitoral explosion. Maybe she did.

  “This is so great.” She hugged me. “I can take riding lessons in Van Cortlandt Park like I want to.”

  “I don’t think—”

  “Or maybe get a horse—”

  “I didn’t know—”

  “—and I wouldn’t have to work as much at the school—”

  “You hardly work at—”

  “—we could take a great vacation. We could go to Portugal! It’s like a dream come true!”

  I hated to travel. I said, “I didn’t know you wanted to—why would we go to Portugal?”

  She broke the bionic bear hug long enough to look at me like I was the stupidest person in Washington Heights. “’Cause that’s where they have the Oliveira Nuño School of Dressage!”

  “Dressage?” I was wondering when, exactly, Gloria had become so interested in stallions.

  “You really could be a winner, Marty. I can’t believe it!”

  “Thanks a lot.”

  “That would be nice, huh?” She was kissing me now, up and down my neck.

  “Yuh.”

  My wife at this point was rather physically energized, running her hands over my back and kissing my chest and collarbone.

  “You’re gonna get that promotion,” she insisted, pulling me up from the couch and leading me by the hand into the pink bedroom.

  Let’s just say neither of us got much sleep that night. Which was a happy ending to a painful day. But I couldn’t help wondering, as I lay there listening to the elevator doors banging through the wall, what would happen if she Wasn’t right.

  STEP ONE

  Keep Your Eye on

  the (Ass)Hole, Not

  the Donut

  “By my foes, sir, I profit in the knowledge of myself.”

  —William Shakespeare,r />
  Twelfth Night

  Having decided to make a start, it’s time to focus on where you want to go. There are flyboys out there, men who have polished prickhood to a glossy sheen. And there’s a name for such people: coworkers. Also: role models. Go find them. These masters of disaster can be found in almost every neighborhood, office, SUV, reality TV cooking show, and roman à clef. Look around. Whether it’s your boss, your brother, or the guy who’s sleeping with your spouse, these people have what you want. Watch them and learn.

  If you open your eyes, you will see Assholes everywhere. I guarantee this in writing. It doesn’t even matter where you are, although I understand many of them live in the South. My wife Gloria and I ran into an outstanding example at our car rental place, and he unwittingly guided me to this First Step.

  We were standing in line on a Friday afternoon. Let’s say there were eight or ten of us at a small car rental facility on the Upper West Side—a long line, for that location. There were three agents behind the counter doing what I assume they were paid to do since they did it every time I was there: stare at their screen, poke at their keyboard, say, “You gotta call the 800 number!,” disappear for an hour, make two personal calls, then say, “The system’s down.” And God help you if you were going to try to redeem frequent-renter points for your car. To do that you had to spend the night on the little couch by the water fountain.

  Tension was high. Then someone arrived who took the game to another level.

  He was a short man with an unruly, curly mop and glasses he obviously needed, holding a green carry-on bag and a tiny folded umbrella. His American Express Platinum Card was already out as he crashed the front of the line.

  “I’m running late, I’ve gotta emergency!” he growled. “President’s Circle member—name’s Scheuer.”

  One of the counter ladies—the one who had spent the last six hours looking for the “Esc” key on her keyboard, and then another two aiming for it with her twelve-inch nail—said, “How you spell that?”

  “S-C-H-E-U-E-R.”

  “Slow down,” she requested.

  Now, this was New York City. We know what to do with line crashers. Some are given a suspended sentence of immediate banishment from the building, but most are stripped naked and insulted to death. At least, in our minds.

  “There’s a line,” said the woman who was at the front of it.

  “Yeah,” added someone else.

  “I’m running late,” said Mr. Scheuer.

  “We’ve been waiting.”

  “Yeah,” whined the guy behind her, “we were here first.”

  The counter lady asked Mr. Scheuer if a midsize vehicle would be all right.

  The short answer was: no. “You get this wrong every time,” he sneered. “I can’t believe this. I need a full-size—how can you fuck that up all the time?”

  “It’s not me, sir.”

  “I don’t care,” he said. Then a thought occurred to him. “I need a free upgrade—you know how much I spend here. Look that up. You got any Jaguars in?”

  “No, sir, we sure don’t.”

  “Don’t help him,” whined some pathetic guy at the back of the line, “he cut in front.” Oh, yeah, that guy was me.

  “We have an Escalade,” said the counter lady, whistling in admiration. “Only four hundred miles. Practically brand new.”

  “Sounds okay to me,” said Mr. Scheuer. “Throw in a NeverLost with that.”

  “Already on board, sir.”

  After he had driven off in his magnificent machine, my wife and I had a couple hours left in the line to ponder what we’d just seen. Our reactions were different. Mine was that it was unfair and poopy and I would get revenge by taking my two hundred dollars of annual business to another rental company, and that would show them. I was livid, although you would never have been able to tell from anything I did.

  On the other hand, Gloria started a girl-to-girl round-robin with some people in the line about what a dick that guy was, which somehow morphed into a free mini-seminar on folding omelettes.

  I wasn’t even listening. In a dark part of my soul, I admired that guy.

  He had something I wanted so badly I could smell it. And he reminded me of somebody. It took me a moment to connect the dots, but when I did I realized there was a cesspool of Asshole wisdom right in front of my nose: the Nemesis.

  So your first order of business is to find a good role model. If you live and work in America, this won’t be hard. It’s important to observe the schmuck closely for a period of weeks. It’s even more important that you do not let him know what you’re doing, for obvious reasons.

  I began my field work one night as I was leaving the office. Carrying my travel tote filled with important direct marketing papers, I stopped by the Nemesis’s office. He was typing furiously with two fingers and a thumb on his huge Mac computer.

  “Hey,” I said, buddy to buddy.

  He didn’t look at me and kept typing.

  “Working late, huh?” I asked.

  “It’s only eight.”

  “Oh—you’re right. Thought it was much, much later.”

  I stood there for a long time until he finally chose to stop pounding on his innocent keypad and notice me for real. “What’s up?”

  “How’re the projects going?”

  “Okay,” he said.

  “Working on any good pitches?”

  “Could be.”

  “Need any help—?”

  “I’ll let you know.”

  He started scrutinizing e-mail on his outsized flat screen. I noticed that his neck was almost bigger around than his head. That must have taken a lot of the kind of weightlifting I didn’t even know existed. Did people lift weights with their head? Also, his hands were enormous, and we all know what that means.

  On the walls in his office he had an art poster of—I’m not making this up—a credit card, and a framed photograph of an ATM. His desk had a little bobblehead of a St. Louis baseball player, a Rubik’s Cube keychain, four staplers, a black Swiss Army jackknife, a scary-looking silver letter-opener, and an unspent round of automatic ammunition.

  “Cool,” I said. “Lunch next week?”

  He looked at me like I’d just taken a dump on his rug.

  Just to make sure, I looked down.

  Over the course of a week or two, make a careful case study of your role model. Be thorough but quick; he’s always moving. Think of it like those documentaries on Animal Planet that profile a struggling species and then say it will die out in a few weeks due to an oil spill. The only difference is you are the struggling species, and the role model is the oil spill.

  Now I must confess up front that in the course of my time observing the Nemesis in action, I did not see or hear explicit evidence of a number of behaviors you might have expected. For instance, he never actually pummeled a colleague in my presence, at least not physically. He never called a woman a “skanky ho”—although he called many men that. And despite his reputation for having a mercurial temper, I did not see him pistolwhip or machine-gun another VP, at least in the office.

  Those are the things he didn’t do.

  What he gave me were priceless lessons in the ways in which an A-plus Asshole can operate in the corridors of corporate America through a combination of high volume, wild egomania, and a breathtaking lack of social skills. His techniques can usefully be divided into major themes—what we might call The Asshole’s Six Secrets of Workplace Effectiveness.

  They are, in order of importance:

  Number 1. Show No Interest in Others

  At first glance, this one may look easy. Most of us are self-centered in the extreme, and it should be no big deal to kick it up a notch or two in order to gain maximum benefit from our hobby. However, the fact is that where true selfishness is concerned, the Nemesis makes us look like Saint Francis.

  The Asshole is self-seeking and proud of it; this is America, whose motto was recently changed to “Land of the Me.” If the
re’s one more cookie left on the plate, you know who’s taking it. If it means standing up for more than ten seconds he’s not giving you his seat on the bus. The trouble with the rest of us wannabes is we don’t follow through. We fail to take this First Secret literally and show NO—that is, zip, nada, empty circle—interest in others.

  We had a regular parade of job candidates coming through our doors to replace the people who had seen the light and left, and we interviewed them in teams. That is, four or five of us at various levels would meet with these people for a half hour, one after another, and grill them on their backgrounds and present a “case,” or marketing thought experiment, so they could show us how they’d tackle it. Then after each victim had left we’d meet in the boss’s office to debrief and come to a decision.

  The Nemesis and I were often on the same interviewing team, meeting the same candidates and attending the same debriefings. And because my division was about three thousand people stuffed into an office space built for fifty, the interviews usually had to be held in semipublic places like conference rooms—even, one time, on a window ledge next to the copy machine. Thus it was very easy for me to “happen” to overhear the Nemesis “interviewing” a candidate.

  His encounters with the candidates were very different from mine. Most of the airtime was eaten up by the Nemesis, in effect, interviewing himself.

  “So, walk me through your résumé,” he’d start.

  “Well, I graduated NYU in—”

  “I applied there,” he interrupted, “got in. Sterns a good school but you know it’s the brand name that really counts. Don’t you think? That’s why I went to Bowdoin.”

  “I had a good experience,” they’d continue, “particularly in corporate fin—”

  “Amazing what’s happening east of that neighborhood,” he said, stretching wide his arms and yawning, meanwhile unwrapping a bagel he’d forgotten he’d brought with him for breakfast. “I shoulda bought down there five years ago—you know, I’ve got a building out in Phoenix, I gut rehabbed it. There’s a lot of red tape when you renovate. Still it’s the best long-term investment—even short-term. Real estate. So where do you live, Steve?”