by Josh Lieb
The Motivator stops smiling. He nods and exits.
Pinckney stares at the empty doorway, still not sure he didn’t hallucinate the whole thing. Then the phone receiver, which he’s still holding, starts buzzing with a dial tone. The movie flickers to a stop.
This is going to be a little more difficult than I’d hoped.
I’ve run up against this Boba Fett doll before. In 1979, the company that made Star Wars toys made a special offer to fans: Send in four proofs of purchase and get a free dolly of Boba Fett the bounty hunter that fires actual rockets out of its backpack (see plate 8). Yes, real, actual, cheap crummy plastic “rockets” that flew about six inches when you released the cheap crummy spring they were loaded into.
Naturally, the children of the world went nuts with excitement for this thing. Because the children of the world are brilliant.
PLATE 8: Send in four proofs of purchase,
and get a free dolly of Boba Fett the bounty hunter
that fires actual rockets out of its backpack.
Unfortunately, after a few prototypes were made, the company realized that all those brilliant children would choke to death trying to swallow the plastic rockets.
So the Rocket-Firing Boba Fett doll was never released. This led to considerable disappointment. In fact, for science geeks of a certain age, this doll represents the Holy Grail of Star Wars memorabilia. It is the toy they’ve always wanted—the toy they were promised—but never got. This is the toy that will make their lives complete.
Only two dozen prototypes were made. Less than half of those survive. Only one is finished enough—painted, with working spring and original rocket—to count as an actual Rocket-Firing Boba Fett Doll.
It’s owned by the dictator of a certain African nation, who, I happen to know, won’t sell it for any price.43 Which says something, because otherwise he’ll do anything for money.
I sit on the toilet and munch Milk Duds until the bell rings. I have some more heavy thinking to do. I’ll tell Sheldrake to gas up the blimp.
Chapter 10:
BOYS ARE IDIOTS
Girls are idiots, too, of course, but boys are a special kind of idiot.
A girl, for instance, will vote for a boy in an election, or go to a movie that’s about a boy, or buy a book that features a boy hero.44 Boys are much less likely to return the favor. They can’t wrap their feeble minds around the idea that this girl might have anything in common with them. It’s like they can’t recognize girls as human beings.
Which puts Liz Twombley at a distinct disadvantage in this election, even though she is the Most Popular Girl in School.
Liz is a sweet dimwit with mediocre good looks and a friendly smile. She’s much nicer than most Most Popular Girls in School tend to be, so she probably won’t last long. She owes her status to the fact that 1) she’s rich—her father is the world’s leading manufacturer of those giant blow-up gorillas you see on top of car dealerships (see plate 9), and 2) she developed early. That is to say, she’s got boobs.
Now, developing early can be a double-edged (though strangely soft and pillowy) sword. Girls who develop early are either the Most Popular Girl in School or sluts. That is to say, they’re not really sluts. Everyone just calls them sluts because they have boobs. This is what passes for logic among my peers.45
Liz has escaped the unfair labeling by growing boobs without noticing she’s got them. Completely free of self-consciousness, she plows through the world oblivious to the twin heralds that announce her presence. You can’t call someone a slut when they’re clearly so naive. It’s a tricky move that requires a dangerous level of stupidity to pull off. Generally, late puberty is a much less risky play. Though, in my own personal case, I am thoroughly sick of it.
“Representing Mr. Moorhead’s homeroom, Elizabeth Twombley.”
Liz bobs to the front of the auditorium, artlessly slapping her flat feet down the aisle like a scuba diver in a beauty contest. Once onstage, it’s hard to tell what’s bigger, her smile or her—Actually, I regret starting that sentence. The point is, she’s there, and the crowd gives up a tepid round of applause.
PLATE 9: She’s rich—her father is the world’s leading
manufacturer of those giant blow-up gorillas you see
on top of car dealerships.
Liz’s friends jump up in their seats and start chanting, “Go Twombley! You’re the bomb-ley! Go Twombley! Go Twombley!” A few of the Not Quite Popular Girls jump up and join in, peeking out of the corners of their eyes to see if the Popular Girls notice (they don’t).
Everyone else is busy whispering, poking, giggling, napping. I’m seated near the back, middle of the row, and feeling very crowded. Normally, there would be empty seats around me, but today the auditorium is packed; the entire school is at this assembly. Every red-velvet seat is filled. Some people are sitting Indian style in the aisles. I am sitting between the Chinese Exchange Student, who’s snoring,46 and Randy Sparks, the Most Pathetic Boy in School, who’s trying to smell his breath by blowing into his hand.
Up onstage, Liz stands in front of the nominees for the lesser eighth-grade class offices—a collection of lurkers, butt-scratchers, and rats taking their first steps toward a glorious future as low-level bureaucrats.47
Next to Liz stands Vice Principal Hruska, a grizzled old pro one year shy of retirement, who’s stuck with the job of announcing the student council nominees. He consults the printout in his hand. “From Ms. Sokolov’s homeroom, Jack Chapman.”
Jack moves gracefully down the aisle to thunderous applause. Liz’s friends make sour faces and sit down, but they’re replaced by a hundred children who jump to their feet and cheer lustily. You’d think he was running for king. He and Liz exchange friendly smiles.
Old man Hruska looks at Jack and Liz, but it’s like he doesn’t see them. He’s got the hundred-yard stare common to long-term prison inmates or teachers who are close to getting their pensions. You’re not going to catch him getting misty-eyed over another stupid student-council election. He’s like a statue who’s given up caring if the birds poop on it or not—a statue with a perfectly brushed blue-gray crew cut and two dozen gravy stains on its tie. He just wants to wrap this farce up. He glances down at the speech, ready to see the words “Thank you all for coming, please return to class in an orderly fashion” when he sees something unexpected. His face falls. He looks confused and suddenly very, very tired.
I feel sorry for him. This is really supposed to be Principal Pinckney’s job—that’s Pinckney’s speech he’s reading. But Pinckney canceled at the last minute, handed the speech to Hruska, then closed and locked his office door. He’s spent the last three hours in there, playing with a thirty-year-old toy The Motivator hand-delivered to him this morning.
A Rocket-Firing Boba Fett doll.
Hruska coughs out the next sentence: “Also from Ms. Sokolov’s class . . . Oli . . . Oliver Watson.”
The room stops breathing. Randy Sparks chokes on the fingernail he’s chewing. I make my face a perfect blank, mumble a few polite ’scuse mes as I slide past people’s legs, and walk halfway down the aisle in complete silence.
Perfect, perfect silence.
And then the whole world is shattered by a wave of primitive shouting, laughing, screaming, giggling, yelling, clapping, stomping. My classmates have never seen anything so delightful. The room shakes with their glee.
Tatiana, who is the queen of mixed messages, smiles warmly and gives me an insulting hand gesture as I pass.
As I mount the stage, Liz and Jack stare at me with confusion. Hruska stares at me with concern. “Oliver,” he whispers, “what’s going on?”
“I want to be class president.”
He shrugs his eyebrows with a look that says, “No one better try to blame this on me.” Then he turns back to the microphone: “Your attention, please. Your attention, please. If everyone could please settle down . . .”
The animal sounds from the audience don’t get any softer. “Your attention, pl
ease. Your attention, please . . .”
More hooting. More yelling. More laughing. The sound vibrations are so intense, it’s hard to see straight—like looking through the air above a barbecue grill.
“Attention. Attention. Your attention, plea—”
A scream from the front row: “What’s he gonna do? Eat the other candidates?”
That does it for the old man. He balls up the speech, throws it at a freckled girl who’s running for class treasurer (and cackling like a hyena), and bellows with both his wrinkled old lungs: “All right, you creeps! Just shut up and go back to class already!”
It takes half an hour for the auditorium to clear.
Later that afternoon, in Mrs. Magoffin’s social studies class, we sit with our desks in a circle and discuss the big news story of the day: An evil African dictator has been overthrown by a democratic insurgency. The dictator barely escaped with his life and had to leave many of his most prized possessions—and toys—behind.
Jordie Moscowitz raises his hand and whines, “What does all this Africa stuff have to do with us?”
In Jordie’s case, not a lot. Personally, it means I’m now only the fourth-richest person on earth. Revolutions don’t come cheap.
Chapter 11:
A BRIEF DISCOURSE ON EVIL
“What is evil?” you ask.
To which I reply, “Who are you? Friedrich Nietzsche?”
To which you respond, “Duh . . . wha? Me no understand.”
Then I put you back in your cage.
I freely admit I’m evil. At least, I freely admit it when I’m alone and no one can hear me. That doesn’t mean I torture kittens or plot the genocide of entire continents of people; that’s insanity, not evil. And insanity is just what we call stupidity when it doesn’t make sense.
I am evil because I really don’t care about what’s best for the world. I care about what’s best for me. I have no particular respect for this earth or the two-legged vermin who infest it.
I suspect more people are evil than they’d admit. There’s just nothing they can do about it.
Lucky for me, I’m a genius, and I can pretty much do whatever I want. And what I want—and this is what makes me super evil—is to enforce my will on the inhabitants of this planet. I want power, control. I want things to go exactly how I want, when I want, for as long as I want.48
This puts me in good company: Napoleon, Augustus Caesar. It also puts me in with some real stinkers: Idi Amin, Stalin. But again, those last two don’t really deserve the honor of being called evil—they’re just bug-eyed, spittle-spewing, ape-turd insane.
It’s why we call one dictator Alexander the Great, and another Hitler, the little creep with the moustache.
The fact is, when I ascend to my throne—and I will ascend to my throne—life for the average person won’t be much worse than it is now. In some respects, it will probably be better. For instance, I will outlaw the song “Jingle Bell Rock,” which all scientists agree is the worst song ever created.49 With that one law, I will improve Christmas by two hundred percent!
“But what’s the point of being evil?” you ask. “Why can’t you just live and let live?”
In answer, I point to my beloved Captain Beefheart, a musician so brilliant, so evil, he drove his own band insane.50 He would not let them eat. He would not let them sleep. He would not let them leave his house. He made them wear dresses (and they were not girls). He stripped them of their very names and subjected them to hours and hours of abusive group-therapy sessions. When a dejected and desperate member of the Magic Band managed to escape the Captain’s clutches, Beefheart snatched him off the street and dragged him back to the practice studio.
It was cruel. Assuredly. Inhumane. Undoubtedly. Evil. Disgustingly so. And yet I defy you, today, to listen to Trout Mask Replica and say it was not worth it.51
But enough discourse. Let’s return to the evil at hand.
Down in my Control Center, Sheldrake and I sit in vibrating leather massage chairs as we read Research’s probes into Jack Chapman and Liz Twombley. The air around us is full of sporadic zapping noises; on the catwalk above us, my technicians are testing my latest invention—the Electrolyzer. It’s a wand I can point at anything to give it an electric charge. To put it in terms your small brain can understand: You know how sometimes when you touch a doorknob, it stings your widdle fingers? With the Electrolyzer, I can turn any doorknob in the world into one that stings, as long as I can see it. The power transfer is inefficient, but I think it will have its uses.
Liz’s file is a little thin. Jack’s file, on the other hand, is equally thin, but massively satisfying. It’ll do nicely.
“Research,” I announce, “you are all permitted to go to the movies tonight. My treat.”
From somewhere in the bowels of my lair, I hear a dozen voices make a distant “hurrah.” No one can accuse me of being stingy.
“We’re done. It works.”
I look up. One of my newest technicians, a cross-eyed wild-haired young brat (is his name Chauncey?) leans over the edge of the catwalk, supporting himself with one hand on the metal lattice work. His other hand holds “it”—the Electrolyzer.
“So soon?” I ask. “Have you gone through the testing protocol a thousand times already?”
Chauncey sniggers. He wears his lab coat unbuttoned, exposing a Jonas Brothers T-shirt.52 “No offense, boss man, but I graduated top of my class at M.I.T.” I notice that the other technicians, the ones who’ve worked for me longer, are standing as far away from him as possible. “I don’t need to test something a thousand times to know it works. It works.”
“Really?” I say. “Let me see.” I motion for him to drop the Electrolyzer to me. He tosses it, carefully, and Lolli leaps into the air like a black-and-tan rainbow and catches it in her pearly whites. She drops the foot-long rubber-and-steel wand into my lap. I examine it closely, then turn it on. It starts to hum, and my nostrils are instantly filled with the burned-aluminum smell of ozone.
“See?” says Chauncey. “It’s in perfect conditi—”
I point it at the girder he’s holding onto and squeeze the trigger. “Ow!” squawks Chauncey, who lets go of the now-electrified girder and falls fifteen feet to the floor.
“You’re right,” I say. “It works.”
Chauncey grimaces and tests his ankle, which he seems to have sprained somehow.
An amplified knocking sound resounds through the cavern. Daddy’s voice rings out over the loudspeakers.
“Oliver, get out here and come to the table. Your dinner’s getting cold.”
“I’ll be right there, Daddy,” I sing sweetly. My intercom is tuned to make it sound like I’m in my bedroom, just a few inches of plywood away from him.
“That’s what you said ten minutes ago. Don’t make me knock down this door.”53
Sheldrake turns aside and coughs into his fist. He’s embarrassed for me. My other underlings become conspicuously more interested in their work, as if they hadn’t heard a word of the preceding conversation. They all know that if I catch them giggling—or even smirking—at my plight, they’ll wake up tomorrow stuffed into a bag of crocodile chow at the Saint Louis Zoo.
My father has shamed me in front of my minions. Again.
And I’d like to say this is the last time. But as Lollipop and I sprint for the elevator (and I can positively feel Chauncey smirking behind me), I know it will happen again and again and again, until that glorious day six years from now when I can claim my kingdom.
Tonight, at any rate, I’ll get my first taste of revenge. I sit across from Daddy at the table, watching him mince his food in his thin-lipped mouth, waiting for the right moment to drop my bomb.
“Who are you supposed to be,” asks Daddy, “the Purple Phantom?”
