So sorry, Nigel the Editor—I’ll be right back, just one sec, just gotta—
…
Whew! All right!
So yeah. As of right now, I am happy to officially report that all personal business is taken care of. I’m back in my top secret lab in front of my computer, and I am absolutely NOT currently sitting on the can typing this right now.
Of course not! How unprofessional that would be. How potentially destructive to the advanced Dell Inspiron laptop that’s totally NOT resting on my bare-naked Vaselined legs, just one false move from my entire un-backed-up book being lost, just like that!
No sir.
And now, just for Nigel the Editor, I’m back to that big, unanswered question, of what, exactly, I’m a—
Actually, hold up. While I’m definitely NOT typing this book while I sit on my black marble prototype Kohler KT-593261 with Experimental Turbo Flush™, there’s something I’ve been wanting to get off my chest. Seems like now is as good a time as any.
As every true Doc fan knows, I’m already on the record when it comes to the whole wiping-sitting-down versus wiping-standing-up debate.
I understand that this debate has torn families apart and divided our nation. I know that it’s more controversial than politics, religion, and the console wars. I get it.
But the Two-Time has never been one to shy away from controversy. I don’t flee from the shadows into the light, and I don’t hide from danger. I head right into that long, dark alleyway of fear and I keep on fighting.
So I have no problem saying to the world that I’m a wiping-sitting-down guy, and that anyone who actually thinks wiping their butt after they’re already standing up—
Sorry. It’s just such a ridiculous concept I had to laugh, and that chuckle most definitely did NOT make me squirt out another butt pee right now.
Anyway, if you wipe standing up, you’re nothing but a round-shouldered, soft-jawed, pudgy-gut loser, and that’s all there is to it.
My position on this is known, all right? I’m on the record.
But there’s something more I want to address. Something new. Something that’s come to light in a certain dimension—I won’t name names—because of a certain event called COVID-19.I
What happened is, we all got a little freaked out about the world’s running out of TP, okay?
I know that some of you—all of you—stockpiled five thousand rolls of Charmin and Cottonelle and Scott and Quilted Northern and even that weird no-brand shit that fell off a truck and cost $15 at the hardware store. And even after you got those five thousand rolls, you went onto Amazon and Walmart and Target and you tried to buy even more, except there was no more, so what did you do?
You freaked the fuck out! Then you went ahead and you bought a bidet, didn’t you?
Now every time you take your poop, instead of remaining seated and wiping your ass with TP like a red-blooded American, you let some creepy French or Japanese apparatus hose a jet of water directly into your bunghole.
I mean, have we completely lost it as a country? Have we forgotten honor, dignity, masculinity, and sacrifice? The beachheads at Normandy? The Boston Tea Party? The Declaration of Independence? Freaknik?
How can you possibly allow a foreign device to shoot water into your ass? Should we just start speaking German right now?
No, my friends, I’ll tell you how we can stay true to our school. And that’s by purchasing my brand-new, trademarked, patent-pending American bidet, SQUIRT, BY DOC.
That’s right. SQUIRT, BY DOC is the only bidet designed specially by the Nobel-winning scientists at my multimillion-dollar Top Secret Command Center to spray water into your sphincter in the most dignified, dominant, and American way possible.
I know, because I most definitely did NOT just use it to deep-cleanse my muscular, athletic butt after an insane bout of powerful, explosive diarrhea while I’m typing this at this moment.
To own your very own SQUIRT, BY DOC, go NOW to InterdimensionalChampionsClub.gg—
FUCK.
Hey, sorry, guys. I just got a ping from Nigel the Editor on AOL Instant Messenger, and I have a feeling he’s gonna be pissed. Oh man—I’m having a hard time not laughing and not butt-peeing again.
Anyway, I guess we got an official…
Real-Time Update
Yeah, so I checked my AIM, and here’s what Nigel the Editor wrote:
Doc: I am indeed sick of all this fighting and your total lack of respect for me and everything I do for you and literature in general. I’m quitting your book and going on a two-week vacation to Hong Kong. Forthwith, Simon & Schuster will connect you with a new punching bag—I mean editor. Yours never, Nigel the Editor
Well. It was just, like, a joke, dude.
I don’t really even make a bidet. (If I did, it would come in slate black and Lamborghini red and would be on sale NOW for only $99.95!)
Seriously, man, I was just messing with you. I don’t even mind that you totally threw in “indeed” and “forthwith” in a fricking AIM message. Honestly, all your pompous crap was starting to grow on me.
But hey, it’s your call. If you can’t take my world-champion heat, then get out of my all-black-granite kitchen. And go on vacay to Hong Kong, I guess.
Hong Kong… Hong Kong… You know, that reminds me of another one of my never-before-told stories. And it totally coincidentally happens to be my next chapter…
By the way, that definitely was NOT the sound of a flush you just heard.
I. Yeah, with your luck it’s probably your dimension. Sucks to be you.
CHAPTER 9
THE KUMITE EXCEPT FOR VIDEO GAMES AND ALSO IT’S REAL
Part One: The Brotherhood
I’ve shared a ton of powerful stories in this book.
You, of course, have loved them all. You’ve laughed. Your heart has raced. You’ve cried at least a dozen times, and most of those times you didn’t even know why. “Am I happy? Am I angry? Maybe I’m just really confused?”
Who knows? And who really cares? Not me, that’s for damn sure.
But what I do know is that this story, the one I’m about to tell you, is the best one so far. Except maybe for that one where I did whatever it was in Dimension Whatever. Yeah, that was a great story, and this one probably isn’t as good as that one, but it’s still really fucking good.
It’s the story of Doc—that’s me—fighting the greatest enemy I’ve ever faced in my entire life: my own boredom. Also an ancient global criminal network of bloodthirsty killers run by the evil Lord Hannn, and their just-as-ancient illegal cutthroat international video game tournament called the Kumite Except for Video Games and Also It’s Real (KEFVGAAIR), filled with the top gaming champions the world had to offer, not to mention thousands of other psychos and hoodlums with knives and guns and bazookas. But really my own boredom.
All right, so it was 2001. I was sitting there in my top secret lair one night toward the end of the year, staring emptily at my massive state-of-the-art 164-inch Fujitsu plasma TV.
Fuck, that thing was big. At least eleven inches bigger than my last Fujitsu.
I had just finished playing Halo for the very first time. It had just been released—not to the public, but to superstars like me—and it was revolutionary. First-person shooter. Multiplayer. 3D. Fast, responsive, intuitive, violent. Possibly the greatest game ever created. And using my advanced prototype experimental Xbox, I’d just hosted an online showdown between myself and the fifteen best gamers in America.
And I’d dominated them all. Because of course I did.
Because I’m the Doc. Because I’m the Two-Time.
Because duh.
I couldn’t believe it. I was playing the greatest video game of all time against the greatest players in the nation, and I was fucking bored.
My campaign for Popeyes a couple years earlier, officially titled “My Name Is Dr Disrespect, and I’ll Eat This Crapola Because They’re Paying Me,” had been a huge fucking success.
A
lot of people ate fried chicken because of that ad. I saw a CDC report that said I was directly responsible for the average American adding thirteen pounds and two heart attacks that year.
After that, the sponsorships started flooding in, baby.
Ray-Ban paid me to pretend my advanced prototype Sony scopes were just normal sunglasses. Cha-ching! Hanes paid me to pretend I wear underwear. Cha-ching!
I got to star in a Ginsu knife infomercial and keep the knife, the matching carving fork, a set of six steak knives, and the spiral slicer when I was done. I got an official Dr Disrespect Chia Pet where you could grow your very own thick, green organic mullet and Slick Daddy on my terra-cotta head. I even got to meet the ShamWow guy.
CHA-CHING!
(And yeah, I know “cha-ching” was a thing like thirty years ago. But guess what? I just made it come back—and got paid for it.)
I was nineteen years old, and I was officially “rich as hell.” Seriously, that was my bracket in TurboTax.
I lived in a massive top secret gated estate with mango trees and white tigers and croquet and all this other rich-person shit I didn’t care about. I let Razor Frank stay in my guesthouse and earn money as my butler sometimes, just to pay him back for all those free meals he gave me when I was still poor.I
I ate whatever I wanted, whenever I wanted. So, Mr. T cereal for every meal. I owned a dozen Lambos, all blacked out. And tech? Bro, I owned the latest Samsung LaserDisc before Samsung did. Apple came to me for the very first iPod playlist (all Bell Biv DeVoe, all the time). And Gateway—I told them to make all their boxes look like cows as a gag, and they actually did it.
I was the most successful, most dominant gaming champion in the country. I’d laid waste to all my rivals—not like you could really call them rivals. I’d embarrassed them in front of their mothers, humiliated them in front of their wives, but I pretty much made them look okay in front of their kids, because that’s crossing a line.
But it was too much of a good thing!
I thrive off competition, all right? I feed off it! It lifts me to the peaks of the highest mountains, and I seek it out at the ends of the longest, darkest alleyways. Competition, danger, violence—it’s what makes me who I am, it’s what makes the Two-Time the greatest of all time.
All that was gone, and I felt like I had nothing left to prove.
So now, instead of celebrating the utter annihilation of my foes in Halo, instead of pumping my massive fist and whipping my stunning mullet through the air and screaming “YAYAYAYA!” at the top of my lungs—for the first time in my life I was wondering if maybe, just maybe, I should retire from professional gaming.
Hold on—did you catch that? Because that was huge. Fucking HUGE.
But finally something was about to happen that not only would challenge me, it would change the course of world history.
I heard a window break! My reflexes sharp as the claws of a jungle cat, I spun and threw my bowie knife.
“AGHHHHHHH!”
There, in the shadows, cowering against the wall, was this little hunchbacked dude with big bulging eyes. My blade was jutting out of his shoulder and he was bleeding everywhere.
“Ow, that hurts!” he whined.
“Stop crying like a skinny punk baby,” I said. “That’s barely even a flesh wound.”
To be fair, I’m pretty sure I severed an artery and he was bleeding out, but still—his mewling was totally annoying.
“Now, who are you and why did you break into my top secret lair?”
“I am merely a messenger, Dr Disrespect,” he said as he slumped to the floor. “I broke in because you are known to be a man who appreciates danger and combat and your doorbell wasn’t working.”
“That’s not a doorbell,” I scoffed. “That’s part of my advanced experimental Honeywell XP-7000 alarm system with laser-powered motion detectors and multisonic trip wires. Strange that nothing went off. I’ll have to contact ADT.”
“I need medical attention,” he groaned. “I don’t want to bleed out before I give you my message.”
I tossed him a single Band-Aid. “Sorry,” he grunted as he fumbled with it. “I always struggle with peeling the little white tabs off the sticky part on the back.”
“Hurry up!” I growled.
He put the Band-Aid on top of the huge gash in his shoulder. Honestly, it didn’t do much. If that blood ruined my black wall-to-wall carpeting, I was gonna be pissed.
“Dr Disrespect, it is my honor and privilege to bring to you a message from the most ancient, most infamous, most powerful multinational criminal organization in the world. An organization so diabolical, so vile, so devious, that the very mention of its name inspires terror in the hearts of all who hear it spoken aloud.”
He paused for, like, dramatic effect or something.
“The name of that organization is… the Brotherhood.”
I stared at him. “What? That’s it?” I said.
“That’s what?”
“Like, that’s the name? The Brotherhood? It’s not, like, the Brotherhood of Evil or the Brotherhood of Hellish Criminals or the Brotherhood of Venomous Battle Cobras? Or, I don’t know, the Brotherhood of the Traveling Black-Leather Pants?”
“No!” he said. “It’s just ‘the Brotherhood.’ That’s it.”
“That sounds hella friendly. I know a few brothers who live down the street—Tom, Jason, Tony. They’re pretty nice guys, they have barbecues, put on game-watches…”
“The Brotherhood does not host game-watches!”
“Really? They might want to. Great way to meet people in the neighborhood. I mean, they usually ask you to bring something, beer or sporks, but I never remember.”
“NO!” he said. “The Brotherhood does not want to make new friends! And if the Brotherhood was invited to a potluck, it most definitely would bring a keg!”
“Well,” I said, “as long as it’s not some microbrew bullshit.”
“But,” he said, “what the Brotherhood does do is put on the greatest, most elite, most cutthroat illegal video game tournament in the entire world… the Kumite Except for Video Games and Also It’s Real. Otherwise known as ‘KEFVGAAIR.’ ”
My eyes lit up like thunderbolts on Mount Olympus. Which no one saw behind my complimentary pair of Ray-Bans.
“Well fuck,” I said. “Why didn’t you say so?”
“To be fair, I tried, but—”
“I’ve heard rumors, of course. Who hasn’t? Losers, that’s who! But I never thought KEFVGAAIR was real.”
“Oh, it’s real, Doc. The last ‘R’ is for ‘Real.’ ”
Guess what? The little hunchback dude had a PowerPoint with him to explain the whole thing. Set his portable projector up right on my onyx dining room table. He moved pretty well for a guy with a hunchback and a knife wound, and the image he projected was high-definition, must’ve been at least 5K PPI DLP LCD OPP. I was impressed.
“Eons ago,” he began, “in the year 732, a great samurai warrior known as Takeo rose to power in Japan. He was a gifted warrior from a young age, trained in the art of the katana and winning forty duels by the age of twelve. He was ruthless, cunning, and he knew no fear. He killed other men in cold blood because it made him smile.
“But his true love was Sudoku. He was the world’s first gamer.”
On the wall flashed an image of Takeo. He wore elaborate lava-red samurai armor, his kabuto was adorned with mighty horns, and his face was hidden behind a vicious, demonic black menpo.
“Badass,” I said. “But I bet that mask doesn’t have any Sony technology.”
“False,” the hunchback said. “It had the latest prototype Ibuka Clan lacquer at the time.”
He switched to the next slide, of the samurai Takeo playing Sudoku and looking really pissed.
“Seeking out new competition, Takeo traveled to Hong Kong and held the very first illegal competitive Sudoku tournament, inviting champions from all over the region to battle him. He named the tournament ‘KEFVGAAIR�
�—which at that point stood for something completely different. We don’t even know anymore.”
He clicked to the next slide, a collage of various games and puzzles.
“Over the centuries, the games played at KEFVGAAIR evolved in technology and sophistication. Sudoku gave way to checkers. Checkers to chess. Chess to an early form of Trouble, with a prototype Pop-O-Matic Bubble. There were no electronics back then, of course, no flat-screens, no consoles, not even electricity, except when they rubbed their wool socks against rugs and shocked each other for sport.”
“Makes sense,” I grunted.
The next slide was an old-timey map with all these colorful arrows everywhere.
“And as its games evolved, the infamy of KEFVGAAIR spread—through the region, the continent, and eventually the world. Most people think Marco Polo traveled east for spices and silk, but really he wanted the Scrabble crown.
“Throughout history, the globe’s most brilliant leaders, thinkers, and competitors learned of KEFVGAAIR and traveled to Hong Kong to test their skills and prove their worthiness at the highest level of gaming.”
This slide was marble busts of Caesar, Moses, Lincoln, Genghis Khan, and Captain Kirk.
“Machiavelli refined his political philosophy playing Sorry at KEFVGAAIR. Napoleon played Risk and was never the same afterward. Alexander Hamilton invented hip-hop doing ‘rhymes with’ in a game of charades.
“And then in 1943,” the hunchback said, “a revolution! The world’s first computer, ENIAC. And with it, the world’s first computer game.”
A slide popped up of a computer the size of a four-bedroom house.
Next to it, on a field of black—a single green dot.
“The game was called Dot. Pretty much all you did was, like, move that dot around the screen. It was really slow, and it only moved, like, two or three inches, and it blinked sometimes. Every now and then it would just disappear for ten or twelve minutes, and we’d think it was broken, then it would pop up again and everyone would yell, ‘DOT!’ Come to think of it, I’m not even sure it was a game. But it was a massive hit!”
Violence. Speed. Momentum. Page 10
