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All Stories Mostly True

Steven Utley

How I Became the Asshole I am Today

Faithful readers of Bewildering Stories undoubtedly recall the account ("My Amusements, cont.") [The less faithful should quit dallying and go read it now, and then come back here — Ed.] of my tumultuous acquaintance with a well-heeled, well-connected, and highly volatile lady who often declares her intention Never To Speak To Me Again just because of some little thing I have said to or about her, or both. That she blasted off into orbit when I showed her "My Amusements" will come as no surprise, nor even that she attained warp speed on learning that the piece had been published. Where she exceeded everybody’s expectations, including the expectations of folks who have known her for decades, was in endeavoring to put me in my place with a few carefully chosen (albeit grammatically muzzy and distinctly unladylike) phrases: she became so tremendously excited at the prospect of promoting me from Asshole to Triple Asshole — in an unprecedented move, completely skipping Double Asshole — that she inadvertently e-mailed her broadside not to me, but to Bewildering's editors, who, to say the least, were impressed.

To hear her tell it, I had surpassed myself for sheer monstrousness, eclipsing even the time I had enlivened a family Christmas dinner by informing an impressionable four-year-old that the woman seated across the table from her, whom she looked upon as an aunt — who dandled her on her knee, who read Hansel and Gretel to her — was a recovering cannibal. Consequently, she Never Spoke To Me Again for longer than usual and raged about her five-acre mansion the whole while, variously expressing her pique by taking potshots at the pool boy, voting Republican, and kicking over anything that got in her way, such as her stacks of money, of which she has twenty or thirty times more than I and everybody else I know, combined.

For my part, I soon found myself missing her and reflecting on her qualities, for prize foils are hard to come by and she does in fact have qualities beyond a mindset and vocabulary skills that afford endless, exquisite traction for my inclinations in the direction of mischief. Recently, she found herself snowbound in her modest 42-room cabin at Lake Tahoe; the power went out, temperatures plunged toward freezing, and because she had neglected to bring along even one of the servants, she had to haul in firewood all by herself and at considerable peril to her nails and Guccis.

One can only admire such spunk. On being apprised of her adventure, I went out of my way to tell her so, too, and as good-humoredly as ever I could. The wilderness ordeal must have soured her on life generally, however, for she responded by promoting me to "1,000,000 x 1,000,000 Asshole,” which I believe is a record.

Happy Birthday, Lizard Back-brain

I recently put another birthday behind me and would now make the obligatory remark about feeling a little antiquated if I hadn't received the obligatory assurances — this time, it delights me to report, from two ladies who (A) do not know each other from Adam, or Eve, and (B) do not owe me money — that I don't Look My Age, however My Age is supposed to Look.

It also helps that I made out like a total bandit, defined [1] as "receiving more than your body weight in gifts." I have become the proud, albeit technologically overwhelmed, owner of an all-in-one Hewlitt Packard office machine that does everything except fancy stitching, a cordless telephone, and a DVD player.

I have thus far succeeded in hooking up the Hewlitt Packard to my laptop computer and printing out stuff in black 'n' white and color, without, I might add, losing any fingers. I haven't actually taken calls on the cordless telephone, but am secure in the knowledge that whenever some pollster or telemarketer does summon me from the far end of the house or out of a sound sleep, I won't have to worry about inadvertently garroting the cat.

Well! Suddenly I am meaningfully in the 21st Century!

Oh, and suddenly my entire collection of VHS movies is obsolete. The DVD player came with a starter DVD kit chiefly comprising fancy-dress chick flicks — including sumptuous productions of Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility, and Emma — selected by a person who is, in fact, a "chick," and crazy about Jane Austen into the bargain. The immediate consequence of this was a severe estrogen/testosterone imbalance at my house.

Any man with a molecule of honesty in him will tell you that, whatever virtues Miss Austen's stories possess, they are markedly short on memorable scenes involving gunplay, power tools, contact sports, and other matters of profound interest to grunting sweating men. I say "profound" because noise and motion tickle something far down in men's lizard-backbrain, which, as certain of the more implacable feminist writers of the 1970s kept pointing out, is naturally way more primitive and more easily stimulated than women's lizard-backbrain. This is why, for example, men derive so much enjoyment from heavy-metal music, NASCAR rallies, and riding mowers, and also how come they are, unlike women, incapable of spending twenty minutes deciding which shampoo to buy.

Anyhow, I got in touch with my own lizard-backbrain through the simple expedient of going right out and buying a DVD of The Magnificent Seven and taking it home and watching it straight through. Then and only then did I feel fully capable of appreciating the fact that Elizabeth, Emma, and those other 19th-Century heroines could make good marriages without shooting even one bandito.

Footnotes

[1] This wonderful definition comes by way of Jonathan Strahan.

Steven Utley describes himself as an "internationally unknown writer". To this end he has published a great deal of short fiction, which has been collected in Ghost Seas (Ticonderoga, 1997), The Beasts of Love (Wheatland Press, 2004) and the forthcoming Where or When (PS Publishing). He lives in Tennesee, where he reads Proust, because "somebody here in Tennesee has to."