Beauty is Imperfection

(Originally posted Sunday, November 18, 2007)

Chad the Dictator, Part II
Chad and I were doing shots of Wild Turkey and sucking on whippets when he said, “My father is under house arrest back home.”

I hadn’t asked him too many direct questions about his father, the current leader of the reigning junta of Krazikistan, and No. 1 dear leader.

“I’m worried about him,” Chad said, right before half of his last sentence came out in a furious backwash of bile and bourbon. I handed him a napkin with the name of a titty bar we frequented called “Values and Goals.”

“Is your father sick or something?”

“He’s had a stroke once. He needs a special diet. I’m worried that they’re trying to kill him through neglect. All because he’s made the central intelligence bureau unhappy.”

“You’ve got a central intelligence bureau?”

“It’s called KrazIntelPro.”

“Ugly name.”

“It’s in a very Soviet-looking building that’s nine stories tall with no windows.”

“Ugh. That’s where they pull out fingernails and shit?”

“Nah. They do the most sinister thing of all in there. That’s where they keep papers on every individual born.”

“Even you?”

“Somebody in that agency knows when I took my first steps, when I first learned to roll over, and the first time I got drunk … and with who.”

I looked down at my drink.

“You’re lucky if they pull out your fingernails,” he went on. “That means you’re still worth something.”

“Your dad ever pull out fingernails?”

“Hey, I don’t know what he did at work. At home he was just dad. Anyway, they say that he’s a liability now, and there’s a power struggle in the junta to get rid of him.”

“So why don’t they?”

“It’s not so easy. He owns all the cars and all the oil and all the discos.”

“The discos?”

“He really likes Abba.”

“So what do you have to do now?”

Chad didn’t answer. Instead we went to Scores and got a lapdance from a girl from Brazil. She got him off first and then me, and while we were cleaning up, the girl said she needed extra because she was going to college to be a veterinarian.

“Well that’s not my problem you stupid bitch,” said Chad, and then we both started laughing and then we got thrown out on the pavement, and I got a black eye, and Chad got kicked in the face by some woman with platform shoes. As we were walking out of the parking lot, Chad asked me if he could count on me as his wing man.

“You mean count on me to help you pick up women? You don’t need my help. You the man.”

“No, you de man.”

“No you.”

“No you. But anyway, that’s not what I’m asking. I’m wondering if you’d be my wing man if I went back to Krazikstan and tried to rally the forces of my dad’s party faction.”

“Your faction?”

“The Cadre Nukus.”

“Nukus? What language do you all speak there, anyway?”

“It’s a dialect of Russian, Uzbek and Turk and Mongol. Pretty cool, actually. It shares exactly one word with English.”

“What’s that?”

“Chintz.”

“Cool.”

“So would you do it with me?”

“Do what?”

“Come back with me to fight the insurrectionists?”

“Umm… would you call them insurrectionists, really?”

“What do you mean?”

“They sound more like mutineers. Or maybe …”

“Stop fucking around Hunsacker.”

“I don’t know. Fighting for an oligarchy. Not cool. I was hoping to get into Goldman Sachs.”

“You’ll never go anywhere in life, Hunsacker until you know what you’re made of.”

“Yeah, but mercenary fighting in Central Asia for a despotic dynasty?”

“You need a trial by fire.”

“Yeah, but I was thinking more like Outward Bound or something like that. Or maybe starting a fight club.”

“You want a fight club?”

Chad took off his Andover Scrubs school tie and jacket with the bumble bees on them and threw it on the asphalt.

“You want a fight, I’ll kick your ass right now.”

We fought for 15 minutes or so, mainly by banging our fists together at the knuckles until I cried for him to stop. Then he punched one of my molars out and it went flying off into the parking lot in a spray of blood.

“Shit, dude. Look at what I did to you.”

“You didn’t do shit to me. I did shit to your mother. So fuck you in the mouth.”

“Fuck you in your mother’s mouth.”

Then we went home and did what all good brothers in the Knucklers’ fraternity did: Wrote down our beef in the “Log of Bitter Regrets,” a 400,000-page book chronicling all the fights and scuffles and spats between any two of our frat brothers ever since the fraternity was founded by German immigrants in 1856. I wrote down, in my impeccable Victorian Modern Cursive, “Tonight I fed my brother Chad a veritable can of sour whup-ass,” and he wrote, “Tonight my goodly frere Hunsacker drank at the fountain of total pain from my superior fisticuffsmanship and pugilism, as I parsimoniously and efficiently delivered blows against his bodily person until he begged for mercy like a woman suffering the agonies of labor.”

We went upstairs and nursed our wounds. I reminded him that he had not yet performed his fraternal duty, set out in the charter of the Tomb, to fuck a fat girl by year’s end.

“I can fuck as many fat girls as you want. But when will you earn your wings and become a man, Hunsacker? When?”

To read Part I of this story, go here.