Beauty is Imperfection

(Originally posted Tuesday, October 30, 2007)

“Chad The Dictator,”
A Novella, by Eric R. Rasmussen

My frat brother Chad is a great guy. Has a pool table. Likes snowboarding. He always pays for drinks at Hootenany’s, our favorite off-campus bar. If you were a member, he’d do anything for you-loan you his car, take you to rehab, or give you money for your girlfriend’s abortion. A stand-up guy.

And he just happens to be the son of a dictator of a small country in Central Asia called Krazikstan. It’s a family dynasty, and Chad is heir apparent to take over someday. It has been expected of him since age 3 when his older brother died after being blow-up in his covette stingray by a mixed terrorist force of ethnic Pashtuns and militant capitalists. That’s why they sent Chad to the U.S. To be safe and to be educated.

He doesn’t talk about it much. Knucklers (that’s what we call ourselves in our fraternity) are supposed to be able to tell each other anything. But nobody ever asked Chad about his country, and if you did he’d kind of shrug.

“Yeah, I’m going to be president and caliph and Ceasar of Krazikstan. Pretty stupid, huh?”

He does drop strange items into conversation. Like once we were banging these two blow-up dolls, Chad and I, in the game room of The Tomb, as we call the house. When we were finished, he looked bemusedly up at the ceiling, cleaning himself up with a Boston Red Sox snow hat that belonged to one of our frat brothers. He sat there in beautiful Endymion repose and exhaled these words: “Spice exports. My bete noire.”

“What in the hell did you just say?” I asked him, getting up off my blow-up doll. I call her Dot.

“Export/Import problems. It’s nothing. Don’t worry about it.” Then he finished wiping his cock and barked out loud, “David’s going to shit bricks when he sees how I spooed in his hat, you think?”

Chad didn’t even really have an accent. He looked only vaguely Slavic-the cobalt blue eyes gave him away, and the high wrinkled forehead. He used to have bad teeth, but he had spent months at the orthodontist and had came out with perfect choppers.

When we were all drunk, sometimes we’d get bold and ask him more.

“So, are you, like, going to wear an armband and military garb,” one of our frat brothers asked.

“Well, naturally for parade dress,” Chad said. “What, you think you can come out in your underwear for something like that? It’s my sovereign nation we’re talking about for Chrissakes.”

“So you wear it all the time?”

“No! Not when I’m in business deals. Sheeesh!”

“What do you wear then?”

“Something Saville Row. You got anymore questions douchebag?”

“Do you got an army?”

“Natch.”

“What do you do with it?”

“Keep order, dude! Shit, these are baby questions.”

Of course, everybody wanted to be Chad’s wing man when we were out looking for honeys. Barney’s was the bar next to our fraternity, where fine-lookin’ debs would come out and sip champagne and pretend they were bad girls. Chad liked them okay. But he’d fuck a townie too. He was just like that. No pretension. What a guy! We went out one night to a sports bar and found these two locals who worked at the bottlecap factory up river.

“So, girls,” I’d ask. “You read any books lately?”

“Like what?”

“You know, like Norman Mailer.”

“What, like a novel?”

“Yeah.”

“Oooo,” said her friend, feigning interest. “They’re talkin’ about litera-chewer!” She made the jerk-off sign.

“You know,” I said, “My friend Chad here’s got his own country.”

He stabbed his thumb hard between my eleventh and twelfth ribs.

“It’s nothing,” he said.

“Which country?” said the “literature” girl. “I’d love to see another country.”

“You ain’t heard of it,” he said. “It’s not even a tit on the map.”

“Well, I’d like to go there.”

“Me, too,” said her friend.

“No, no, no. They don’t have places like Barney’s in my country, because of the dry laws.”

“But if you were, like, president, you could let people drink all damn night.”

“What, and make the mullahs turn against me?”

“Well, you could just kill them.”

He shook his head.

“Then who’s going to keep the god damned charities running? I’d be risking the breakdown of the basic social organizational themes of the country, girl! Don’t you know that? There’d be panic in the streets, and I’d have to get the Republican Guard to come out with hoses and … oh, never mind, you don’t understand.”

“Well, sorr-ee” she said. “Poor guy. Can’t even hose down your own mullahs.”

We were walking home later and he got up my ass.

“What’d you have to bring up my country for?”

“I thought it’d impress them.”

“You’re all wet, Hunsacker. A couple of Cosmos would have gotten that girl in bed. You don’t light the whole magazine on fire for two lousy townies. Don’t you know that? What a fucko!”

We went to another bar, got drunk and put each other in headlocks, then knocked into people and got called “shit heads,” then twisted each other’s nipples until we puked into a bowl of Funyans, first him, then me. Then Chad bought drinks for everybody, went to the bathroom, and came out with his underwear on his head. He drank a Martini like that.

“So, what are you going to do? You’re going to go back and run Sowhackistan?”

“Krazikstan. Yeah, so the fuck what?”

“Well it must be hard is all I can say.”

“I know. Guy’s got to rule with an iron hand.”

“What do you mean?”

“You know. Water cannons. Tear gas. Rubber bullets. The whole schmear.”

I sat thinking about this.

“You got torture rooms, too?”

“What’s the big deal? Sometimes you gotta wet bag somebody. Kick a little ass. But you know, it’s only like for, sedition or something.”

“You got sedition there?”

“Oh yeah.”

“I don’t know, Chad. Seems not cool.”

“Hey, you go over there and be a Sultan and Eternal President and “Dear Father,” Lord of Men and All the Fish in the Sea and tell me how easy you think it is.”

“But fascist dictatorship. That’s old school. Why’s it got to be that?”

“Because it’s small!” he erupted. “And because we got mountains, and thus 40 different languages, and separatists and slanderous publishers and state-owned oil and molybdenum that people want to invade us for. So there you have it, a recipe for insurrection.”

He was nodding out, slumped over with the underwear still covering his head, breathing the jock part of it into his mouth sometimes. But he had an iron gut with liquor, and shook himself out of it, clear headed as ever, so he could go on ranting like that.

“If you’re talking about turning it into a democracy, you douche, then you’re talking about needing scale. You’re talking about capital. You’re talking about high tech. You’re talking about building a consumer base for a stable market economy with faith in the judicial system. But with the manpower I got, and the weapons I got, I got to use a little intimidation, that’s all there is to it. Fear is your friend. That and a national anthem. You don’t understand the dynamics, not living here in your bubble. You all got it easy over here, cause there’s money and technology, and everybody speaks English. And you’ve got MTV and Xbox. But not in the fucking country I inherited, where most of us pray to Mecca in mud huts and store chick peas in bags and our idea of Xbox is shooting at other people’s sheep.”

He took another drink of his martini, and then the bartender looked over, and a then this tall foxy brunette with sad, understanding eyes and a Brooks Brothers camel hair jacket. She slid over, and the sympathy was oozing out of her. Fuck, I knew he was going to score.

“When there’s civil unrest, everybody turns to you. You gotta tell them their houses won’t get burned down, that their currency is not shit–that the schools are running and the trains leaving on time.”

She nodded, almost teary-eyed, and he went on.

“Everybody’s always asking a dictator, “What have you done for me lately? “Help me, El Presidente. Help me!” Well fuck you bub. I’m the one keepin’ it all together and promoting civil security, so don’t you say shit to me about extending the power grid outside of the capital.”

“Gosh, Chad.”

“Yeah, your blues ain’t like mine. Sing it sister.”

“It sounds just so hard,” said the foxy brunette, and she ran her hand over her hair. Shit. I rolled my eyes. Fucker. He was going to do it with her. Oh, yeah, he liked to milk it-having a country and all.

“You know,” I piped up, “My dad was an alkie and never home.”

The Brunette turned to me.

“Huh?”

“I just said that my dad…”

“Yeah, yeah. Whatever. Tortured prep school kid.”

Then she turned back to Chad.

“You’re right. People don’t know what it means to be a leader. They project everything on to you. All their fears and hopes, and it’s all on your shoulders. You poor guy.”

“Yeah, you seem to really get it.”

He had taken the underwear off his head then, and lit a cigarette, which he let dangle from his bud-like lips. She bummed one, and they sat smoking. Then they left together, and as they were going out the front door, he turned to me, and winked.

“In the bag.”

Fucker.
To be continued….or not….