The Ballad of King Dumbass

I apologize for the lack of a post from last week. I got blindsided with the flu, and I am still dealing with the remnants. I hope this makes up for it.

I’m going to talk some straight shit about someone. And it’s well deserved, and if he finds out, he’ll probably sue me lol. Fuck him.

In 2002, I worked at a telemarketing company in Las Vegas that shall not be named. It paid $14.42 an hour ($30k a year base) PLUS commission. All of the people in who worked on the sales floor would mingle with each other during breaks, the vast majority outside smoking. Though I wasn’t a smoker, I’d hang out outside and also during lunch.

The atmosphere was electric. It was a hybrid of a night club, and a boiler room. There was a resident DJ, cash prizes given on the daily, and like a night club, it wasn’t hard to score for your respective addiction. I was a naive 22 year old, and I got approached by someone who worked on the sales floor about my Led Zeppelin shirt and we started talking music. This guy was 9 years older than me and he told me he served 6 years as an 0311 (infantry) in the Marine Corps. We connected over my experience with the Marine Corps also, and we started hanging out outside of work.

He lived in a modest 1 bedroom apartment, in a decent part of town. He kept it very clean, and he had a dog. A wiener dog named Voodoo. Aside from the cigarettes and the beer, I didn’t really think there was anything to be concerned about. Sometimes, we’d go and buy a case of beer, I’d bring my guitar over, and I’d try to play along to his pretty good selection of concert DVDs. Nothing out of the ordinary for me at that time.

There was a little shithole casino across the street where he had parked in a handicapped spot during work. He tells me that his car got towed and that it was his fault. He needed a ride to the impound yard, and as this minor inconvenience progressed for me, it soon started turning into an ordeal. So the rest of my evening turned into helping him get his car out of impound. I had nothing better to do, but I remember thinking this was really stupid and could have easily been avoided, as well as all the hoops the impound yard made him and me jump through.

In the following months, we decide to go to see Audioslave at the Joint inside the Hard Rock. My naive self was challenged to match him in drinking shots of patron. After 10 shots and a margarita to wash it down, we go inside to see the show. The band was already playing and I never miss the start of a show.

As soon as the show started, I lost him. And I went to the bathroom and threw up. Security pulled me out and I vaguely remember the paramedics pricking my finger and saying I needed to get to the hospital. I refused in my drunken stupor and I was made to sign a document saying I was not going. The paramedics went through my phone and called a different friend to pick me up, which he did. My car stayed behind, and I didn’t see the rest of the show. To date, it’s the drunkest I’ve ever been. I don’t know what happened to him that night.

Over the years, he’d invite me over. He had a girlfriend eventually, who was also from the same place we worked. She was Puerto Rican, and had an eight year old son from a previous marriage, and he was of color. And I would see how my “friend” would treat her son out of the corner of my eye. But I felt it wasn’t my place to get in the way unless something really fucked up were to happen. But I can tell you that that boy HATED my “friend.”

They eventually broke up. And in the day when it finally happened, he said something that I’d never forget. He said “women are stupid. If there’s anything I could ever teach you, it’s that women are stupid.”

I should have cut him off. I was around 25 by then. And I didn’t have many other friends. I just chalked it up as “locker room talk.”

Within a year, it made sense for us to become roommates. I know, right? This keeps becoming more and more of a dumpster fire. I bring this part of it up because I threatened to kick his ass multiple times to his face over his idiotic behavior and misogenistic tendencies, but he never would accept a round of fisticuffs. I wasn’t going to blindside him, I’d want him fully engaged for his asswhooping. I moved out of there almost as fast as I moved in.

Around this time, he met a 20 year old girl from Peru who was a foreign exchange student at UNLV. She was a nice girl and she and I would speak in Spanish in front of him. He hated that and I took note. They got married at a drive-thru and were divorced within 2 years. She moved to Michigan afterwards, got married, and started a family.

I started drifting away from him around this period. He started taking a huge interest in the Casey Anthony case, and would get mad at my indifference. Like “wont someone think of the children” Helen Lovejoy shit. He also started trying to convince me about chemtrails, to which I told him to bring evidence with that shit.

He told me he met a girl of Mexican descent whose family is old school. I laughed because they probably judged the fuck out of him but he somehow made it work. One time, as guys do, I told him that the movie “Machete” starring Danny Trejo was a good movie. He thought that since she was Mexican, and I (his Mexican best friend as he liked to remind me) recommended a movie, it would be a good idea to play the movie with her family present. If you’ve seen the movie, (spoiler alert), you know the scene before the opening credits involves a scantily clad Mexican heroine taking a ringing cell phone out of her vagina. Much to the delight of her conservative old school Mexican family. I soon got a phone call with them all around him and he asking if this movie was going to be like this for the rest of it. It was quite a fit of laughter when I put it all together while he’s nervously trying to save face.

Over the next few years, I started seeing him more and more sporadically. He had a boy with the Mexican girl. He got multiple DUIs, and spent the better part of a year in the clink. He called me once for a ride so he could go to court. When I pulled up, he was visibly injured and on crutches. He then told me what happened on his way to court. He was in a single car wreck and also needed me to get his car out of impound. Just like how it was when he asked me to help him when we first met.

That’s when King Dumbass was born.

I told him that he was a complete fucking moron for doing this. he could have called me, he could have called a cab to avoid driving drunk. Just as he said he didn’t want to hear about it, he asked me to pull over to a convenience store to buy him a pack of cigarettes. So I did, and as we’re pulling away, he throws the plastic cellophane that they all come wrapped in out the passenger window of my car.

I pull over and make him realize he was close to heaven or hell.

“You’re one of them?” he asked with a punchable face on his bald head.

Yes, I am one of them as in don’t be a fucking slob and litter your garbage out in the fucking open. I laid into him so hard without touching him, and I told him that when he heals up from I should knock his ass out.

“You know what, I have a new nickname for you. It’s King Dumbass, how’s that, asshole?”

I told him to his face that he had a new name. Whenever he would call me, my phone would alert me that it was King Dumbass calling. And I would answer with a triumphant “BEHOOOOOOOOOOOLD!!!” And with a simulated symphonic timpani, I would follow it with a “DUN dun DUN dun DUN!”

(Insert trumpet fanfare)

“KIIIIIIIIING DUMBAAAAAAS”

And with another round of symphonic timpani, I would get “shut up, that’s not funny.” And I would answer the phone every time he’d call me like that, with more and more irritation from the newfound King, each time telling me it didn’t bother him with more ire than the previous time.

And to this day, I can’t not laugh every time I do it.

Even though I wrote off his dumb ass a while back, I still laugh at the moniker and accompanying “music” I made. I mean, what would someone have to do to earn the title of “King Dumbass”?

I don’t regret knowing King Dumbass. The straw that broke the camel’s back came after 23 years, when he said I was a liberal crybaby. By then, I was a married father, and I just don’t have the time or patience to deal with someone like that anymore. He really did me a favor. I simply blocked him from all communication. If that’s what makes him feel better remembering all the times I chewed his ass out for being a degenerate, that’s fine. I did know a little backstory to him in that his father was absent during his childhood. He was a degenerate himself, so like father like son. What can you do?

The gratitude with knowing someone like King Dumbass is that though I should have severed ties with him early on, I did make an effort to at least be one normal person in his trail of wrecked associations with others. He’d try and see what he could get away with and I’d check him. But that probably did hinder my meeting other people of higher caliber. Again, I was naive. And in 20 years, I’ll probably look back to nowadays me and think I’m naive still. But knowing King Dumbass implanted quick recognition of toxic bullshit that others may try to pull, whether it’s with me or someone in my close orbit. My bullshit radar is as fine-tuned as a grizzly bear’s sense of smell, and I can’t say it’s like that and not say King Dumbass didn’t have a hand in that.

But wherever life takes him, I hope he winds up in the clink again, and for a very long time. So that he doesn’t pull his brand of bullshit with anyone else. Society does not need to have King Dumbass in its ranks. He brings nothing positive nor productive or enriching to any of us. Those who feel that that’s a little harsh, yeah, it is. Fuck him. I do feel sorry for his son. But knowing his mom’s side of the family, they probably are raising him right.

So if you currently have a piece of shit like this in your orbit, it’s okay to do the worst you can possibly do - ghost them. If that’s not an option, put them in their place. And let them know that the whole world would love for you to whip their ass. Because in a functional society, we cannot allow people to try their shit and let them think they can get away with it. There is a sense of gratitude in knowing that the pieces of shit in your life do in fact get their comeuppance.