Assholes by Ina Disguise - HTML preview

When he leaves you for a circus millionairess who has bought him a hotel, he asks you to move in because his nerves are so bad that he cannot work.  The woman he left you for has become ninety percent disabled with ME through the stress he has caused, kicking in door panels and scratching the plaster in the hotel she bought him with his fingernails.  You find this out when you go there to try and get the money he still owes you.  Robert is a now a pig farmer, still funded by the same woman.  And he is an asshole who still owes you money.

Joan is sleeping with Robert whilst you are living with him.  She is an asshole because she phones you up to complain that her husband is beating her.  ‘When are you moving in with us?’ you ask, and she sounds rather shocked.  ‘I’ve been in a violent relationship and if you aren’t ready to move out you should just shut up, because you’re agreeing to be a punchbag.’  As you are only twenty four, she is quite shocked by this rather harsh but realistic response.

Her husband is notorious in the local hunting fraternity for his particularly brutal treatment of a stag they had run to ground.  Everyone is disapproving, but so scared of him after the ‘murder’ that they daren’t say anything to him.  He wants to kill Robert for sleeping with his wife.  You are 100lb when he tries to assault him, but manage to hold him off.  He almost blurts it out, but you interrupt him with ‘He’s not worth doing the time for, don’t bother.’  Muttered quietly as you push him back from his attempts to throttle Robert, but he hears you and relents.

Rose is an asshole.  She is an asshole because she made you repeatedly clean the same hotel room in your one hour off in the afternoon, because she is jealous that the hotel owner let you stay in it for a fortnight because he had no accommodation for you, and she thinks it might ‘give you airs.’  You are so exhausted that you can barely stand up because you have been working 19 hours a day for weeks, so you go and do it as many times as it takes for her to shut up.  She continues to complain, and you tell her to go and see her boss then, because you are due back in the kitchen to work. She is also jealous because she is the only person Robert has not tried to sleep with in the entire hotel.

Paul is an asshole because his dad is a paedophile, and he is so confused by this that he still takes his young daughters to visit him.  He has been told by a psychiatrist that his father genuinely believes he is the head of a pack, and has the right to deflower any female member of his family. Paul cannot cope with this, and this is why, despite being an immensely talented chef, he cannot now make decisions and has to be told what to do throughout the day.  You visit him at home, and find out his wife was his officer in the army catering corps, and does not allow him to make decisions at home, so his lack of initiative is not entirely due to his being upset about his dad.  You feel very sorry for Paul.

Ann is an asshole because she came from a very rich German family, and does not understand money.  When she tries to keep two horses on a hotel chef salary, she finds she cannot and starts to rob the entire village to feed them. 

Gyllen is her boyfriend, and he is an asshole because he is a compulsive gambler.  He steals to fund it. Robert gives him money, thinking he is being very kind.  You think this is hilarious because Robert likes taking money from people too, and has no idea that he will never see this money again.

Gareth is an asshole because he is addicted to cocaine, a hangover from his days as a merchant banker. He sunk all his money in the run down bar you cook in for him.  He used up all his spare cash after this, including the takings, in supplying the entire staff with cocaine, and so they are all very odd to work with.  You are thankful that you missed this particularly lengthy ‘party’ as they are not particularly nice people and you have never been in the slightest bit attracted to cocaine. He tells everyone your personal business and speaks in abstract epithets – ‘when the fireman is late, you don’t turn off the water supply’.  He takes a jackhammer and knocks down the ground floor wall in his bar when you request a window.  He narrowly avoids killing the kitchen porter. The building is listed, and is five stories tall, and he has not asked for planning permission.  He does not return the money he owes you when you leave, and instead has his ugly wife write you a disgusting letter.

Alden is an asshole.  He speaks with a mid-Atlantic accent despite never having lived in America.  He remembers his chauffeur being shot in the face as he drove him to school as a small child.  His very rich parents then sent him from Africa to a Scottish boarding school at the age of six and he feels abandoned.  He has been provided with funding until he is twenty seven to do whatever he likes, but he is still a sponger and expects you to pay for everything.  You fired him and slept with him the same day, which might have something to do with this. 

He likes to tell you he can score drugs in any city in the world, and that he once participated in gang banging a prostitute in India, whom he paid two pounds fifty to afterwards.  He does ecstasy with a group of people led by a young Asian man who scores for the whole lot.  He is in love with this man’s girlfriend but can’t admit it because she is the alpha female of the group and he is a delta male, and admitting it means he would have to address his own inadequacy. 

He gets you to help him move into his new flat and then dumps you.  You meet him later in life, on facebook, and he says he has a girlfriend.  You ask what that has to do with it, and besides you are seeing someone too?  He blocks you because ‘you haven’t changed’.  What does that even mean?  He is a chiropractor now, and clearly thinks he is of a superior social class, despite lacking the super-rich family upbringing he is so fond of reminding you of.  Alden is a major asshole.

Alan came back from the New Age hippy camp a junkie asshole, although it is not at all obvious.  He shows you how high he can kick, which confuses you sufficiently to ask Ed why he would do this?  ‘Because he can do it, it is something he can actually do,’ says Ed.  This is apparently supposed to earn him a cup of tea. 

Alan takes you out with his father and friends to the local pub.  His father spends every conversation complaining about how demented Alan is until you break into the conversation to tell the crowd of old men exactly what you think of their behaviour. You were never that keen on Alan, but for him to worship his father, a formerly famous rock musician, and have to listen to this list of complaints is beyond the pale. A few years later, his father taps you on the shoulder as you are trimming the hedge and then accuses you of bad work because you turn around.  ‘I’m working’ you say, ‘Do you know what that is?’

He suddenly realises through his drunken haze, that you know exactly who he is, and that he has managed to bring up four sons without working thanks to his years with the very famous psychedelic rock band.  He backs off.

Kieren doesn’t mean to be an asshole, but his parents have recently died.  He has two friends, and has never previously spent time with you, but you realise that he has no one else to talk to about this as his friends are assholes.  They are assholes because despite the fact they have all been friends for years, they have spent this time reminding each other that they are assholes, and so cannot discuss their feelings at all. 

Kieren comes to your house almost daily for weeks after the deaths and then suddenly stops. A few years later he is homeless, and announces this on facebook. You offer to pick him up from wherever he is and let him sleep at yours for the night in the spare room.  He is alarmed.  ‘Why would you do that?’ he messages. You are more confused than ever about what your relationship with this guy is supposed to be, and you’ve known him since you were both kids.

The Duchess is a bit of an asshole because she tells you not to break some glassware in her house, and naturally one item gets broken.  You advise her of this and reduce your bill, whereupon she complains to the agency you are using that you reduced the bill by too little.  You are unaware of the fact you have effectively valued a priceless seventeenth century glass at a tenner, and are left somewhat confused by this, and by the fact you were not allowed to set the table because the retainer had to do it to justify her free house on the estate.

Dalia is an asshole because she is fifty three and wants to be friends with the girls that work for her even as she underpays them for imprisoning themselves on a shooting estate which is several miles from the nearest town.  The lords and ladies complain about how much the girls eat when told that the estate needs to cut costs. 

She is very bitchy about your relationship with the gamekeeper, an attractive but weak man who lives in a cottage at the estate gates.  You tell her that she really needs a mother figure, someone who can mother a 53 year old in addition to the girls, as you leave because you have crashed your Audi. You had a choice between a cliff face and the sea, and you took the cliff.

David is the gamekeeper in question, and he is an asshole because he is an alcoholic. You spend lots of time watching TV with him and talking about his life, because you think he is very lonely. When you stay with him for a few days after finishing up work at the estate because you have no car, he uses it as an excuse to get so horrifically drunk that he ends up sleeping on a hillside with his nightsight and shotgun. Dalia sends her husband to blame you for this.  You are 25 but sufficiently savvy to tell this man to get stuffed and that you need a vehicle to move your stuff off the island.

After the experience on the shooting estate, you go to college and meet Aldous for the first time.  You are both in a class with a mixed bunch of people, none of whom you would normally spend time with at all.  Your assigned enemies are Big Jeannie and the nurses.  The nurses are aging goths who now listen to Radiohead and think themselves very grown up.  They are particularly admiring of Big Jeannie, a rather bull-dyke looking hardnut from the other side of the city, who you later learn is fond of handing out used knickers and sleeping with weaker male members of the class when very drunk, a fact you are surprised about given her tough unappealing exterior.  Because both you and Aldous are very clever, the rest of the class are not sure whether to like you or not so you are forced to be friends even though Aldous doesn’t seem to like you very much.  You used to go out with his brother Harry.  You pretend not to notice the aggression from the nurses and Big Jeannie, although it escalates when Aldous quits college due to depression.  He has become depressed because his mother is particularly bad at hanging pictures, and this costs him his college course.

One of the men who sleep with Big Jeannie is called Barry.  He is an asshole because he is a latent homosexual who becomes violently hysterical when Aldous mentions the words ‘brown hatter’ during a lengthy drinking session.  Aldous is particularly admiring of your ability to drink, which you gained during your years as a chef. Barry admits his leanings after knowing you for many months when you are out drinking together in your next job, at a Belgian restaurant.

The kitchen porter at the restaurant is called Fred.  He is very thin, but you like his premature wrinkles and his voice, so you fall slightly in love with him even though he has a girlfriend.  You do not admit to this until she leaves him, whereupon it turns out that he wasn’t interested in you at all, he was just a dependant male winding you up. 

You make several artworks for him, and write to him every day for over a year.  It turns out he is a dependent personality because he is a junkie and a failed artist himself, but he only went back to college to try again because you cheered him up. He will not admit this, of course, and so your efforts, including the twelve days of Christmas in cigarette papers, miniatures of alcohol, and boxes of matches, are all in vain in terms of actually speaking to him.  You probably didn’t really want to anyway.

When you finally write to his brother in an effort to find out where he is, it turns out the family role playing depends upon his being a loser. That is why Fred is an asshole.

You finally leave the job after an awkward micromanaged night with an overzealous kitchen manager and concentrate on your studies at university.

There are many assholes at university, most of them are too young to be aware that they are assholes.  One of the chefs at the restaurant has advised you not to worry about the assholes, because they have had no life.  He has just quit his own course in order to be a musician, so you take his advice as all your efforts so far are to avoid becoming a professional artist.  Your dad, who was a professional artist, has advised you of this because ‘if you really want to do it, you will do it anyway, and being forced to make art for money is no way to great art’.  Unusually, you have taken this paternal advice, which is why you have steadfastly avoided making art unless you are in love and cannot help it.

One of the lecturers on your course is a tall east coast American.  You initially quite like him, because you like the idea of studying industrial and scientific history, but it turns out that he has no understanding of philosophy or political theory at all, to the point that he slaps you out of the conversation rather than listening to what you have to say.  As you come from a monarchist mother and socialist father, from a long line of communists, you learn that your own understanding of communism is reliable, and this guy has no idea what a communist actually is, to the point that he accuses you of dyslexia when you suggest that one of the writers he recommends is very right wing for an alleged commie. The probable answer is that the commie author concerned is an American commie, who himself does not understand what a communist is because he is using it for reasons of rebellion rather than actual ideology.  You are left rather unimpressed with this class as a result, although the technology elements were very good.

Geraldine is an asshole because she cannot do the class you are doing.  It is led by a very small grumpy Jewish American.  You were initially quite crap at this class, but you improve because you adore him.  He is very clever and intolerant, and you understand exactly how he feels dealing with a crowd of rather stuck up youngsters who have been led to believe they are very clever.  When you finally submit and read every book he recommends you find him to be a somewhat punk thinker who likes to take a chainsaw to address problems in Medieval and Renaissance history, which makes him even cooler.  Geraldine uses her position as student union rep to complain that his class is too advanced, and you verbally rip her to pieces because she is a complete tool. You are now thirty two.  You make a beautiful chair for the lecturer, and give him a picture of it that he does not understand at all.

Carrie is an asshole because she makes out that you are a stalker because you like that class, and gets sexually assaulted the night before the exam to avoid having her marks taken into account.  At least you suspect so, because she made no effort at all to actually address any of the questions.  You know this because she was sitting in front of you.  Having now been attacked a few times you know that this is really no reason not to be able to do the exam, in fact it would probably make you slightly more hyper alert.

Later she is a bigger asshole because she has moved to Japan, and on one of her visits back announces this to a homeless person as a reason why she is not giving him any money. ‘Why on earth would that mean anything to him?’ you ask.  She has no answer, but never forgives you for this. 

She is convinced that you are about to die of lung cancer because her father did, and so uses your inability to find graduate work as a reason to dismiss you as a loser even though she quite liked you.  She is getting a bit wrinkly already at twenty five because of her obsession with her weight, and seems very narrow minded and stuck up suddenly. 

You tend to talk in amusing and occasionally ridiculous blanket statements to provoke discussion and she now chooses to assume you are stupid rather than play the game and challenge them, which is what you expect people to do.  You have always done this, you learned to do it when working in the kitchens to get people to start chatting, so you are not sure why she has decided on this course of action.

You give up on Carrie after she storms off down the street and refuses to talk to you because you are a ‘loser’. This makes you very sad, because you know perfectly well that for once, this was not really your fault, she chose to do it, probably because of her fury at her late father’s death.  There is no other reason why she would have understood you perfectly when she was twenty and not at all when she was twenty five.

You are sent to work in a very bad area you have never heard of. When you get to the properties you are due to monitor every second floor of the high rise flats has been burnt out, and the occupied floors have single, vulnerable elderly people who are too scared to answer the door.  When one of them finally does, she tells you to abandon the job because the area is so terrifying. You do the job as best you can, and when you emerge from the block your car has four young men with knives slashing the tires, and smashing the windows.  You know there is petrol in the boot of the car, and before you have even thought about it bellow at them to ‘get to fuck.’  Fortunately you have a deep voice, so they do not even stop to notice that you are actually a tiny woman before running away or you would have been in terrible trouble.  You wait with your car for the AA to tow you away.

Willow is an asshole because she drinks too much and fails to get into honours.  She is annoyed with you because you also drink too much and do get into honours, although she chose to work rather than take a couple of months off to study as you did.  She is a musician and doesn’t give herself the time to do well.  She becomes very resentful and gets annoyed with you for studying.  All conversations after this point become very awkward. She is ten years younger than you and this situation makes you feel as if you suffer from arrested development.

Norman the nudist is an asshole because his father beat him.  He now has a thing about nudity because it attracts artists and photographers who like to take pictures of him naked.  He confides that he used to be into science fiction, but the chicks are much hotter now that he is a compulsive nude.  Your mother meets him when he is in the nude, and smiles. He is a very big boy.

Diana is an asshole because she doesn’t know how to have a relationship.  She warns you fairly early on that she is very nice, but will suddenly cut you off without a word.  As you have done this yourself in the past, you kind of understand this.  When you are having difficulties with Harry, she patiently listens to you worrying and does not communicate that she is having tremendous difficulties of a similar nature with her own boyfriend, who has been living off her and his parents for over a year. She blames you for this, as it is easier than confronting the fact that she cannot communicate at all, and tells you that she does not like Harry. 

When you tell her you aren’t too keen on her boyfriend either she tries to lie about applying for a job you recommended to her.  Since you recommended it you aren’t sure why she took this course of action, but since you weren’t suitable for it anyway, you aren’t worried about the actual job. Evidently she is just an asshole.

Dr Jim is an asshole because you are trying to write an essay and rather than encourage you, he tells you how awful you are because he is a linguistics lecturer and not a history lecturer.

Cynthia is an asshole because she is very large, and a bully.  You are invited to a postgraduate residential reading week and she tries to tell you you will be assisting her in cooking for the group.  You explain to the seminar leader that you do not feel this will go well, since you are a highly experienced chef and she is merely a very cheeky girl. This means that you miss the reading week, which is a shame.  The junior academics who are told about this think it is very funny, and as they do not know you at all, an indication of some sort of class inferiority complex.  You quietly say nothing, knowing that the entire situation is laughable and that you have spared yourself a very tiresome week.

Richard is an asshole because he is a racist.  He likes to express his racism in the form of a dominant fetish which he likes to direct at young white women.  He is a member of some black power group or other and writes books about empowering young black men, which for some reason is regarded as key to encouraging young neds in Scotland to take some pride in themselves.  He makes rather a lot of money in grants and funding out of this, whilst actually working in England with young black men, which not surprisingly is somewhat more successful. 

He claims to be unable to write emails whilst continuously looking at pornography on his laptop, which is infected with viruses as a result.  He tells you that he is taking his neighbour to court for using his credit card. He then forces you to sit in a room with the credit card whilst you work for him, although he is making you pay for all the supplies for his project which is infuriating. You eventually text him hourly to get your payment for work and money for the project supplies back, whereupon he hires someone to pretend to be a solicitor.  This man is dismayed when you ask only for the money you are owed.  Apparently this charmer was punting the line that you were a blackmailer.  You later find out he has been pulling the same stunt for some years, in several countries.  That is seriously kinky, and makes him a total asshole. It just after this that you decide not to continue with your postgraduate studies as you appear to be entirely surrounded by assholes.

When you leave university you decide to do a course in more manual stuff and go to a college.  The college is full of people from the other side of town who announce on the first day