You're Making Me Hate You (2 page)

In retrospect I can only call it a party in passing. If I can be completely frank, I’ve had crazier bowel movements. First of all, there were too many dumbasses and not enough chemicals. In other words, there wasn’t enough “happy” to go around. Second, the men and women entrenched in this place would make the world’s most brain-dead frat brothers look like Mensa members in comparison. It’s the same problem I’ve come across at other parties I’ve gone to in Hollywood: too much posing and strutting and not enough actual
partying
. You have to remember the kind of people I was used to throwing down with. I was accustomed to maniacs jumping off of roofs and setting walls on fire once they were done sniffing the gasoline fumes. This was basically a bunch of shit heels running around a two-bedroom ranch-style box on a side street in suburban California, trying like hell to look good and catch a buzz before the beer and pills ran out. It didn’t exactly move the needle on my RPMs.

I found myself sitting in the middle of a bedroom floor surrounded by atavistic morons, with a redhead on opiates who was convinced she could read my thoughts and tell me my future. That would have been simple: the future had me trying to escape this fucking awful “party.” The redhead, who we will call Janice, was equal parts pretentious, innocuous, and full of shit. Janice was an actress (an actress in LA … what were the odds?) and was trying out for a role in a health food commercial. Judging by the shape she was in, I could have told her that she had an ice cube’s chance in Cuba of making that dream a reality. She looked more like Wynonna Judd than Julianne Moore, complete with the face of a long-haired Clint Eastwood squinting into the desert sun. But being a respectful prick, I kept it to myself, kindly wished her luck in her endeavors, and made to take my leave of it all, grabbing for the front doorknob with one hand and dialing for a cab on my cell phone with the other. Unfortunately Janice wasn’t done with me, much to my chagrin. I explained to her I was leaving; she asked whether she could catch a ride back to her apartment. Knowing full well that
nothing
was going to happen with this person, I said sure.

That’s when Janice fucked up my night completely.

She said, “Great! Can my friend Charles come along?”

Charles?

It was then that Charles came stumbling up in all of his embarrassing glory. I had noticed him lurking around the fringes of the “party” like a sort of B-Movie actor trying too hard to play a rock-and-roll vampire. Picture Ed Wood meets Jim Morrison and it all starts to tragically make sense. He was dressed in black leather pants on a Thursday. Even I know that’s just not cricket—if he were trying to be ironic, I might have cut him some slack. But I don’t think Charles could have spelled “ironic.” To complete this ensemble, he’d matched these pants
up with a sleeveless Ratt T-shirt, a black suit jacket, low-top tennis shoes, and a blue bandana that was more Bret Michaels than Axl Rose. Basically he was shooting for the Izzy Stradlin outfit without being as cool as Izzy Stradlin. Now, I can’t say much when it comes to fashion; I myself have a tendency to take good clothes and make bad decisions with them. But even compared to my fashion disasters, this guy looked like a douche pickle soaked in toilet water.

His behavior wasn’t helping his Q points at all. He’d been making attempts to engage in conversation with almost everyone, but once he joined a group, he didn’t say anything. He just stood there, leaning in a little too close, staring alternately right into your eyes and directly into your chest, leaving the cluster of folks mired with uncomfortable silence and bad breath. When he did say something, all he did was try to pimp his band. But it all came out garbled in vowel sounds and hand gestures. It was as if a rookie mime wanted to hand you a demo tape. At the time I didn’t know he was on heroin; I just thought he was wasted—perhaps he’d even resorted to snorting Clorox in the bathroom when all the jubilant goodies were gone. I didn’t find out about the heroin until Janice told me later, but we’ll get to that. At that moment I just wasn’t impressed. Naturally I wasn’t very stoked about giving him a ride anywhere. But I was still buzzed enough to be talked into worse shit than that, so I said okay. The cab arrived, I ushered them into the backseat, and I jumped up front. We were all three going separate places, but I assured the cabbie I had ample funds so he would be taken care of.

We’d gone maybe a mile when Charles started to get sick.

I’ve had my share of satanic moments in the backs of taxis. For all I know, there’s a flyer with my face on it tacked onto corkboard in most of the cab stations around the world. But this was distressing. Charles was all over Janice, moaning and clutching
at his belly as if we were on the way to the hospital and his water had just broken. There was a lot of thrashing around. Then he kicked the back of my seat. I glanced at the driver, who was now undeniably in the midst of second thoughts about this particular fare. He kept checking his rearview mirror and muttering under his breath about “fuckin’ junkies.” This was obviously not his first experience with heroin addicts, but it was new for me, and I refused to be subtle about it. I turned around in my seat and stared through the plastic divider that we all know and love in cabs. This was like an episode of
Cop Rock
—so bad you can’t take your eyes off of it. It was a novel sensation because normally I was the one who’d screwed the karmic pooch a little too long and was inevitably caught with his dick in the dog. But that wasn’t the case this time. I was going to enjoy it … or so I thought.

That’s when the farting started.

Initially I just laughed like a hyena. Farts make me laugh harder than a whole nation at a Carlin concert. Maybe it’s because like most men, my sense of humor stopped developing right around the time I discovered you could make bubbles in the bathwater with a burst of ass air. Whatever the reason, I started fucking HOWLING. Janice didn’t appreciate it and laid into me with some passive-aggressive hippie babble: “You know, it’s not funny to scoff at another person’s pain, Corey. He’s coming off of heroin, so his system is really messed up. You might try being a little more empathetic.” Fuck all that—this was awesome! I wasn’t giggling about the horse DTs; I was giggling at the gas. Not only was I giving a ride to two wastes of dignity, but one was also in the throes of an invisible poop onslaught. Call me a dick all you want—that shit is hilarious. Thankfully we were in California, where you can set your watch to the weather, because the driver cranked all four windows down at once, letting in fresh air to replace the acrid smell invading our territory
from the backseat. As much as I was enjoying this Broadway production of a terrible reality show, this shit was starting to get out of hand.

Charles let out a howl that sounded like, “I need to stop and be sick!” I wasn’t sure that was a good idea, however; we were deep in the trenches of suburban LA, so really there was nowhere for Charles to do his business. But between Janice’s nagging protests and Charles’s inaudible pleas, I nudged the driver to pull over on a back street in front of a clutch of one-story duplexes. It was 3 a.m. It was intensely quiet. It was dark as could be. This was the only place I thought was appropriate to take care of this situation. So we slid up to the curb. Janice asked me to go with Charles to make sure he was going to be okay. I didn’t want to. I hate people. But I agreed because I knew someday I would need the same type of help from a hapless stranger. Against everything in my fiber, everything in my cellular structure, everything in my mind and everything in my selfish capacity, I made ready to take care of this dildo so I could get back to my own bed as quickly as possible.

We got out of the car.

The following events are
absolutely true
.

I helped Charles creep through the front lawn to a shadowy patch closer to the backyard. I helped him square his stance then backed up quickly—splash back is bad for any man, but splash back from vomit is just cruel and unusual, especially when it’s not your own. So I retreated a good distance in order to help if needed but not so close that I would wear his tactical chowder. As if on cue, Charles threw up. Then he threw up and farted simultaneously. I chewed back a gut laugh so the neighbors didn’t lynch us. Thinking we were finished here, I stood up a little straighter to help this yutz back to the cab. But apparently Charles wasn’t done. With faltering hands and a complete
lack of realization for where he was or who was with him, he began to undo his leather pants.

Um, what the fuck, dude?

If you’ve ever seen someone try to take leather pants off by themselves, you will know how silly it looks. For those of you not privy to this sight, it is in fact futility in motion: it takes two to three pairs of hands, some leverage, and a little traction. Even that requires a little prayer and help from a friend who understands you’re not laughing at them, and that’s for someone who’s
sober
. But this was so far beyond asinine that I thought I was being
Punk’d
. This poor boob of a man was tugging his skin-tight leathers down in the middle of domestic paradise at an hour when most paperboys are tying their bundles together. I thought to myself, “This prick thinks he’s at home. He thinks he’s getting ready for bed.” Even this was proven to be false, however, when Charles, in a display of mammoth stupidity I had never seen up to that point, stopped pulling his leather pants off at the knees, squatted uncomfortably … and began to take a shit. I should qualify that with he was
trying
to take a shit, because it wasn’t going well. He fell three times, all of which deposited him into his own pools of sick. When he finally produced turds, the straining and the breaking of winds were almost too much to take. Then the eventual catastrophe happened. After falling in his own puke, Charles finally added masterful insult to monster injury by falling backward onto his own fresh piles of poop. Then, as if it were written in an Edgar Wright screenplay … he passed out.

I stood for a second staring at this imbecile, feeling like a burned-out sentinel watching the meteor streak toward the planet, bracing himself for the lethal impact. The Devil’s Whisper—the fart that happens just before you run for the bathroom to expel your waste—still hung in the air like the Grim
Reaper blowing you a kiss as he passes by. I was too stunned to speak and too incensed to stutter. But I’m glad I was there, for as I regarded this kiddy pool of a grown child lying in a horrific amalgam of Technicolor Yawn, top soil, and literal shit, certain things started to occur to me: contemplation of my own misdeeds, realization that if I didn’t rein in my own uncontrollable urges, I might end up looking as pathetic as this pain in my ass. All of this shot through my big-ass brain in what felt like an eternity but in actuality was possibly just a millisecond. In that moment of clarity a tone was set. I also remembered how early it was in the morning. So I did what anyone with half an IQ would have done in my shabby shoes.

I fucking left him there.

You can boo me all you want. You can talk as many shades of judgmental shit as you like. There was no—
and The Rock means NO
—no fucking way I was letting that fraction of a man, covered in three-fifths of his own fluids (I think he pissed himself when I wasn’t looking) get back in the cab with me for any reason. I wasn’t going to put that nice taxi driver through it, I wasn’t going to put his
cab
through it, and I certainly wasn’t going to subject myself to the kind of olfactory assault that would present itself once all of those interesting liquids finished seeping deep into the fabric of his fabulous leather pants. Janice? Hell, I only wish I could have left her there with Captain Dipshit; it was
her
idea to bring him along in the first fucking place. I got in the cab and told the driver to hit the gas. Janice protested, but I quieted her with the knowledge that this was my fare—if she wanted to stay in this car and complain, she could pay for it herself. We dropped her off down the street from her apartment without a good-bye, and I haven’t seen her since. On a good day I wish her luck. On a bad day I have hopes that she woke up one morning with her face buried deep in Charles’s putrid leather chaos.

It was in that moment long ago, watching a grown man coat himself in excrement and grass stains like a toddler who can’t hold its own head up, that I realized something in myself that maybe I had never been asshole enough to see before: when it comes to incompetence and mental oblivion, when it comes to deep-seated stupor and offensive ignorance, my tolerance level is decidedly
low
. Being around stupid, callous people makes me feel like I have the flu: I get aches, I get anxious, I sweat, and I look for any available exit to fight my way to freedom. This is all while trying to restrain myself from lashing out at the offender. My good friend Geoffrey Elizabeth Head once imparted to me a saying that bears repeating: “Son, if you’re going to be dumb, be tough because you ain’t going to make it on your brains or your looks.” Judging by my own observations as of late, this world must be full of tough motherfuckers.

And so we come to the root of this book’s evil, bitches.

You see … I have been watching you all for a very long time. Yes, as creepy as that sounds, it is unfortunately true. Just as most of you gripping these pages have been following my actions for nearly twenty years, I have been studying your habits and your whims, your qualities and your qualms since before many of you were born. I have observed your shameless daring and your unchecked anger. I have considered your histrionics and your ridiculous gatherings. I have walked among you at event after event, marveling at your behaviors and individualities. Having done so and after all these years, I can unequivocally say that most of you are all so far off the fucking reservation that I fear for the future of our species.

Not the ones who bought this book—you have shown
exceptional
savvy! You are part of the 2 percent that gives me hope! But the other 98 percent of the population, you can simultaneously thank and blame alcohol and YouTube for that statement.
You can also throw some expletives in the directions of reality TV, atrocious drivers, Justin Bieber, Kanye, fast food, infomercials, regular commercials … basically just
people
. I’ve said it before and, Buddha forgive me, I am going to proclaim it again: if it weren’t for my family and my friends, I WOULD FuckING HATE YOU ALL, EVERY MOMENT OF EVERY DAY OF MY LIFE.