Mr. Fantastic Bastard (eBook)

The Sickness

I awoke from the sickness at age 46, looking and feeling worse for wear. I’d long lost count of how many partners I’d had, but it was somewhere around 120. I had evaded herpes but I was almost certainly infected with the asymptomatic in men strain of HPV that results in elevated cancer risks in females.

Somehow though, I had never exhibited symptoms of genital herpes, despite almost assuredly having rawdogged a few people who had it. It was a minor victory in an otherwise bombed out emotional and moral wasteland, where I had ended up after 20 years of being an asshole.

By the sickness, I mean the illnesses of sex addiction and its impact upon people. It’s not as fun as it looks in Californication. Sex addiction results in some truly emotional destruction. I didn’t realize I was a sex addict until I was 47 years of age. I’m also a liar, a hypocrite, and a total son of a bitch.

I wasn’t born an asshole, but I was shaped into one pretty quickly. I came into this world spoiled and entitled, the progeny of adoptive parents who believed in spoiling kids rotten in exchange for complete obedience. When I was 6 years old, my assholism manifested itself in the form of going up to Joshua Del Pozzo and punching him in the back as hard as I could. Joshua’s sin? Being too loud. Joshua was the loudest, brashest, most hyper kid on the playground of Ojai Valley Christian School. Growing up in a house that allowed for no extravagant behavior or loud voices, I was a deeply frustrated kid, bubbling over with anger and energy. Only Mom and Dad were allowed to raise their voices in the Webber household. The truth is, I was deeply jealous of Joshua and expressed that frustration via a suckerpunch, for which I was rewarded with a spanking from the kindergarten teacher, who was apparently filling in for Mr. Van, the principal.

That night when Dad got home, there was the expected grilling and interrogation by the parental team. Why had I punched a kid who hadn’t done anything to me? But I couldn’t articulate it. And if I had been brave enough to tell my parents about the gnawing anger I felt within myself, it would have only resulted in Dad going off on one of his religious rants. Has Satan got a hold of you? You need to ask for forgiveness. You know who’s watching you. Just like Santa Claus, he sees you when you’re sleeping, he knows when you’re awake, he knows if you’ve been bad or good, so be good for goodness sake.

Being good. That’s what life was all about. Never rocking the boat. Doing exactly what you were supposed to do at all times. Never embarrass Mom and Dad. Never talk back. Be good or be slapped or spanked. The end.

I remember at 17 listening to Meat Loaf’s “Bat Out of Hell II” album over and over and over again and soaking up Jim Steinman’s overstretched, melodramatic lyrics as pure gospel. There was a line in the song “Good Girls Go to Heaven, Bad Girls Go Everywhere” that went “When you’ve been nothing but an angel every day of your life, then you wonder what it’s like to be damned.”

I had been so sheltered from my parents about literally every facet of my life. I only saw Black people in movies and despite living in southern California, I rarely even saw Mexicans. Our suburban street was exclusively white and middle class and I saw Dad exhaust himself trying to craft the perfect middle class existence for his mixed race adoptive family. Meet the Webbers. Your nice white neighbors who do nice white things and who attend a nice white church, all under the hot Golden State sun, which baked my parents’ emptiness and shallow American dream fantasies.

The sickness was the foundation upon which my notions of masculinity, power, gender roles, sex, and basically every other facet of my baneful existence had been built. One brick at a time. Dad started me early in the whole masculine indoctrination bit. We used to play “tackle.” Dad would stand on one side of the room and I’d get on the other side and then run and try to tackle him. I was given plenty of military style toys as a kid, though I preferred Star Wars.

I wasn’t born bad. Rather, I turned into a Bastard slowly over the course of several years. I first became aware of my Bastard potential when I was about four years old. My friend Keith was over playing and he was on my little scooter called an Ollie. He wouldn’t give me a turn on Ollie, and I saw red and I pushed him off. Keith went tumbling to the sidewalk and cut his chin so bad he had to have stitches. I also developed a ridiculous sense of entitlement by the time I hit double-digits in age. I was a deeply spoiled little boy who pretty much always got what he wanted. But I also wasn’t afraid to work at something in order to get what I wanted. If I wanted something, a new toy, video game, etc., I would strategize, rehearse, plot, and plan my course of action to getting what I wanted, even if it was just something as mundane as my own copy of “The Legend of Zelda” or the latest G.I. Joe action figure. I’d make sure I did my chores on time without being told, I would butter up Mom and Dad to a truly sickening degree, do whatever it took to get what I wanted.

I carried that attitude with me throughout my life. A sense of entitlement combined with an unstoppable hatred of authority and boundaries and being told what to do, while at the same time being a spoiled rotten know-it-all brat.

The thing about us assholes is that we know what we’re doing. The Asshole may be dumb but he knows full well of how he’s treating people. Most of the time, there’s a certain “I’m only trying to help you” quality to the excuses for the abuse. That’s what I used to do. I’d act like a prick and then gaslight the fuck out of a woman.

Grownups lie. And every kid knows it. I knew my parents were lying about Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny and all that shit when I was 8 years old. I wasn’t sad, just angry and I felt like a sucker. And if people lie about one thing, they’ll certainly lie about other things. I knew my parents in particular and adults in general were lying about God and Jesus. I knew from age 6 that something was up. If you could speak in tongues at church, you were held in higher esteem than those lesser Christians who couldn’t jabber nonsensibly on command.

I noticed a dark psychology was at work in the church and at home when it came to basing the foundation of our family code on Christianity. God and Jesus were taught to us like bogeymen. “God sees what you’re doing all the time! God knows what’s in your heart!” Just as Santa Claus was used against me and my siblings as a means to be obedient around Christmas-time–”He sees you when you’re sleeping! He knows when you’re awake!”— God was used to scare the shit out of us with the threat of eternal damnation.

I spent my whole childhood in a state of panic and fear. If I let on to my parents that the jig was up and there wasn’t any grand magical force behind the illusion, they would withhold love from me. And love was the number one currency in our house. It was not given freely, it was done at a cost and a price. Did you get perfect grades? OK, we’ll give you love because you make us look like good parents. We’ll even buy you stuff to show our love for you.

Here’s the truth about The Asshole. He is the weakest man in the room. This is a man who read American Psycho and missed the point. In fact, The Asshole misses the point about a lot of art, including but not limited to, Fight Club, Taxi Driver, A Clockwork Orange, Falling Down, The King of Comedy, The Catcher in the Rye, and your other standard edgelord starter kit night at the movies.

The Asshole gets by on his natural charisma. He’s done everything possible to increase his charisma. On the Dungeons and Dragons scale of things, he is putting all of his player points into his Charisma characteristic. But as anyone who’s ever played D&D will tell you, having a character with high Charisma in the party is both a blessing and a curse. If you make a Charisma check and your number is like 16, chances are you’re going to make the roll. But players with high charisma are noticeably lacking in other characteristics that matter, like Strength, Intelligence, Wisdom, and the all important Constitution. Players with high Charisma are often a pain in the ass to a Dungeons and Dragons game. I say this as someone who played many-an-intense game of D&D with my one time best friends Chris and Mark.

And so The Asshole is a pain in the ass. He is the ex-boyfriend that is straight out of a Sam Kinison routine—which, by the way, Kinison is an Asshole saint—”There was every other ex-boyfriend and then there was HIM!” “Be the darkest chapter in her sexual history, guys. ‘Cause the next guy who comes after you, well, you’ve made his life a hell of a lot more interesting.” The Asshole likely grew up idolizing Sam Kinison, Andrew Dice Clay, and every other major comedian who got away with being a Charming Asshole in the ‘80s. You wouldn’t want to date them, but oh how they made me laugh.

The Asshole is the kind of man who studied the routines of Frank TJ Mackey in Magnolia, Neil Strauss from The Game and of The Truth, the Mystery Method of that guy who wore that dopey hat and eyeliner on Vh1, always the elevator of pop culture to a worldwide level. As a teenager, The Asshole would read the good parts of books like Forever by Judy...