Horrible People: Abram and the Princess

December 13, 2021March 3, 2022 RilalyLeave a comment

“How can you not hear that?” Abram asked his wife after Princess woke him from another evening nap with all of her barking, yipping, or whatever we call the sound that spirals into our thoracic vertebrae.

“I guess I hear it so often that I just don’t hear it anymore,” she said. “It’s like white noise to me.”

“It’s like nails on a chalkboard to me,” he said. “How in the world can you get used to that?”

Princess didn’t bark at anything in particular. She just enjoyed hearing herself bark. Abram was done with it. Princess just tapped his last nerve. Waking him from this evening’s nap was the straw that broke the camel’s back.

Everyone has a threshold, and Princess just met his. He couldn’t nap with her around, he couldn’t watch his shows without that sound drowning out punchlines, and he couldn’t even enjoy a pizza roll. Once he began eating one, she’d start in, and he’d throw a three-quarters full box of pizza into the waste receptacle. He couldn’t even enjoy a peaceful moment of solitude in the waste removal room without hearing that yip. “I can’t enjoy a good BM anymore,” he told his wife after a particularly obnoxious night of yipping. “How can you not hear that?” He worked hard, and the otherwise uneventful evenings were his rewards for hard work, but Princess would have none of it.

Abram had a word with them over the fence, the neighbor’s, the owners of Princess, and it was a nice word, because he was a very nice man, good man. They said they would do something about it. And they did, for about two nights.

Princess had a regular bark that she yipped throughout the night, but she let you know when someone was approaching with a more shrill and rapid yip. When that person reached a point where they were close enough to pet her, Princess stopped barking. The yip was replaced by a soft, earnest whine. The ten seconds or so that person spent petting her were the only breaks Abram had from her barking throughout the night.

Everybody loved Princess, and Princess loved everybody. She didn’t care for Abram though. Even though he never did a damned thing to her, Princess refused to let him pet her. He reached over to pet her a number of times, while speaking with her owner, because that’s what a very nice, good man does when they’re talking to a neighbor, and their dog is present. When Abram reached over to pet Princess, however, she growled her cute, little Poodle growl and backed away barking with her teeth showing. Every time she did it, and she did it every time, why her owners were just aghast. “Princess?!” the owner said with shocked dismay. “I’m sorry, she’s never done that before.” They said that every time.

Nightly evidence bolstered that characterization. Abram was seemingly the only person on the planet Princess didn’t like. It humiliated and embarrassed him. She sidled up to his wife, the kid, and every stranger who happened to pass by, but she didn’t like Abram, and he hated her all the more for it.

He was used to it though. When his manager needed to fire someone, and it happened. It happens in every business. The manager slash owner (his nickname was Slash) of the local Lube Your Lube scheduled that person to work with Abram.

“He was in on it,” Charlie “Slash” Hyde said. “Abram enjoyed being that guy. It all started when he was new, about six months into his job, and he started to get real comfortable with the fellas at Lube Your Lube. He started becoming more comfortable being himself, which we learned was the worst thing for the business. I know that sounds harsh, and I apologize to Abram if he ever reads this, but full on Abram is a disagreeable sort. He had an ability to get under people’s skin. The problem for me, as an owner slash manager was Abram outworked every single person on our staff. He was dependable and willing to sacrifice whatever it took for the business. He’d work weekends, overtime, and if someone called in sick, he’d be there for me within the half hour. No matter if it was his day off, or if he just clocked out less than thirty minutes ago. The problem I had was that if I wanted to keep a full staff, Abram couldn’t be comfortable being himself, because no one wanted to work with him. So, he and I devised a six-point plan to keep him employed. I won’t provide the details of that confidential plan, but Abram followed it to the letter for me.

“Flash forward about three months, and I had to fire someone,” Slash continued. “The problem for me was that I wanted Lube Your Lube to be a family. We all got along at The Lube and we had numerous get-togethers, holiday parties, and after work bar nights. I never had a big family, so the fellas at The Lube were my extended family. They were my brothers, cousins and nephews. I got to know their wives, their kids, and their dogs. So, when it came time to fire one of them, I pictured their kids, and a crying, desperate wife, and I just couldn’t do it. I should’ve never got that close to them to begin with. ‘Remember that six-point plan we developed months ago,’ I told Abram in a one-on-one. ‘Yeah, turn that off for about two weeks. Open the spigot, be full-on Abram with this guy I put in the pit with you.’ Long story short, I didn’t have to fire anyone for about three and a half years, thanks to Abram.”

***

When the yipping drowned out his favorite sitcom, he cranked the volume, when he tasted it on his pizza roll, he threw three-fourths of a box into the garbage, but when he dreamed about Princess sitting at the bottom of a tower, yipping at him while he tried to climb Rapunzel’s hair, he knew something had to be done.

“How does a cute, fluffy little dog’s bark drive someone so crazy?” was the question put to Abram by one of the Lube Your Lube fellas.

“You ever hear about how the Chinese water torture technique can drive a person insane?” he said. “It’s like that. Except Princess’s version of the insanity-inducing drip, drip, drip is yip, yip, yip.”

He knew he got a little too hot and bothered by it at times, but who wouldn’t be at least a little ticked? After the patterned barking established itself, he shared a kind word with the owners. They didn’t do anything about it. They did in the beginning, for a couple days, and then they forgot. He thought about stressing the point angrily, but he wasn’t a confrontational guy. The city had noise ordinances that specifically addressed dog barking, a three-step plan that could lead to the owners losing the dog if they didn’t address the issue properly. The problem was that noise ordinance dealt with dogs barking after 10 p.m., but Princess didn’t bark until 10 P.M. She stopped barking, or her owners brought her back in at 8 P.M. He wouldn’t have initiated that process anyway. He was no snitch.

They don’t know who they’re messing with, he thought watching Princess bark at nothing from behind the drapes. They don’t think I’ll do anything. They don’t know me. I’m fixing to do something. I’ll take matters into my own hands. It’s what a man does, he takes care of matters. He takes care of matters himself. There are extremes, of course, but a very nice, good man, doesn’t take matters involving a snowy white, ten-pound little puppy to extremes. A man handles matters in such a way that is impossible to prove or trace, and everyone knows that there will come a day when Princess will no longer able to control her bowels. It happens, maybe it’s age, and maybe she got into something. No one knows why it happens, but it happens. It even happens to cute, snowy white Poodles named Princess.

***

“We’re moving,” the neighbor told Abram’s wife over the backyard fence, weeks later.

“Are you serious?” she said. “You haven’t been here that long? You’re such nice neighbors. What happened?”

“I don’t know if something around here is making Princess sick,” the neighbor said, “but she’s such a big part of our family now, and we can’t just get rid of her for pooping. Who gets rid of a family member who can’t control her bowels?”

“She’s pooping?” his wife asked, confused.

“It’s diarrhea,” the neighbor said, “and it’s bad. Every time she barks, it comes out. She doesn’t just poop either. It’s projectile pooping.” The neighbor paused here. “You can laugh. We did, at first. We thought it was kind of cute and funny, her pooping every time she barked. We could tell she was a developing a bit of a complex about it, and that kind of made it more cute and funny, but it’s been going on for so long now, for weeks. It’s not funny to us anymore, but you can laugh if you want to. I know it’s funny to everyone else, but there’s poop stains on our carpet, in our carpet, that we’ll never be able to get out, and it’s all over our walls too. She’s so tired now that she never wants to do play anymore or do much of anything, and she’s still, technically, a puppy. And when you pick her up, you have to be careful not to touch her tummy, because she screams and tries to bite you. Whatever is wrong with her has caused stains, and a smell in that house that is so bad that the owner is probably going to have to hire professional cleaners to get it all out. It’s bad.”

“I am so sorry,” Abram’s wife told her.

“It might seem silly to move over a dog,” she said, “but we’ve tried everything. We took her to the vet, we tried to change her diet, but she’s not eating much anymore, and well, we can’t just get rid of her. We had a big blowout about it, Stan and I, but we can’t get rid of Princess. She’s part of our family now, and you can’t just put your family dog in the pound, or give her up for adoption. Who does that? Right? What kind of people would get rid of a dog because she’s sick? I’m thinking a move will do her some good. I don’t know. Plus, we’re only renters, so we’ll just rent somewhere else. The owner was kind enough to let us out of our lease, minus our deposit, so it was nice chatting with you over these last couple of months.”

When the wife told Abram about that conversation, she was broken-hearted. “Can you believe that?” she said. “It’s so bad that it’s just so sad, and it’s almost painful to me. It’s such a mystery too.”

“The only mystery to me is why anyone would go to the expense and the pain in the butt of moving over a dumb dog with diarrhea.”

“They said it’s been going on for weeks Abram,” she said, and when she went into more detail about how the dog was pooping every time she barked, and how it was projectile poop that stained their walls, and was probably deep in their floorboards now, Abram couldn’t help but giggle. When she relayed the fact that the dilemma was such that it was actually causing the couple marital strife, Abram lost it. When she looked at him with confusion and some disgust, he almost fell to the floor in laughter.

“Why is this so funny?” she said. “I don’t find this one bit funny. I think it’s kind of sad actually, really sad.”

“I’m sorry,” he said, wiping away the tears. “It’s just that, well, I may have played a bit of a role in all of this.”

“You played a ..?” she asked. “What?”

“I might have cooked up some of my delicious burgers for Princess over the last few weeks, and it could be alleged that I might have crushed some Ex-Lax in it,” he said, and he expected her to smile a little at that. If nothing else, he thought his presentation of that information might make her laugh. She didn’t. She just looked more confused.

“You might have what?” she asked. “I don’t know what you’re saying?” She mouthed the words he said when he repeated them. It was an unusual tic of hers to ask someone to repeat what she obviously heard, and she mouthed the words when person repeated them. This was her way of trying to grasp what the other party was saying.

“That dog was driving me absolutely crazy,” he said, “and you knew that. I told about my anger. I told you all about it, and you did nothing. I told you about it numerous times, for months. Hell, I even told them about it, and when they wouldn’t do anything about it, I took control of the situation. Why didn’t you do anything about it?”

“You didn’t do anything of the sort,” she said. “You’re messing with me. Tell me that you’re kidding.”

“We finally bonded Princess and I,” he said pumping his eyebrows. “Did I tell you that? Yeah, she loved these burgers so much that she actually looked forward to seeing me. You remember how she hated me, and she wouldn’t come near me, no matter what I did. Well, when I had a burger in hand, she was all hopping and yipping her excited, little yip when I approached, and her tails wagging about a hundred miles an hour. We were the best of buddies there for a while.”

He thought she might laugh at that too, but she didn’t. Her face went through so many contortions, as she tried to grapple with this information, that he began to feel bad. He thought of backtracking and saying, I’m just kidding, but it was too late now.

“You poisoned a dog, because it wouldn’t stop barking?” she asked him. “Who does that? That’s like David Berkowitz, Ted Kaczynski stuff.”

“I didn’t poison the dog,” Abram said. “I gave it Ex-Lax, and Ex-Lax is not poison.”

“Not to us,” she said, “but it could be to a dog? Plus, you caused her a severe case of diarrhea, which could cause severe dehydration. What if you permanently ruined the lining of her stomach or intestines? Dogs can’t handle our medications Abram. What if you killed that dog, Abram? Did you ever think of that?”

“I didn’t kill her.”

“You have never done anything that disgusted me before,” she said after a pause. “I’ve been disappointed with you before, and I said nothing. I’ve experienced some unhappiness with some of the decisions you’ve made, and the things you’ve done, the normal things a husband and wife go through, but I’ve never been disgusted before. This disgusts me. Those were some good people and they were good neighbors.”

“No, they weren’t,” he said. “They had a dog who barked for hours on end at nothing, at nothing, and they did nothing about it, nothing. She just barked to hear herself bark, and no one did a damn thing about it. You did nothing. If you think about it, you’re partly to blame for this.”

“They were nice people Abram,” she said, all but spitting at him. “They were nice, young, and polite people. I liked them. You liked them. Everyone liked them, and you ruined their lives so much that you caused them to move. Don’t give me this, I’m partly to blame. You did this Abram.”

“Who moves over a dog with a case of diarrhea?” he asked, trying to change the subject.

They’re Horrible People

December 11, 2021January 30, 2025 RilalyLeave a comment

Horrible people are fascinating. They confuse us, they entertain us, and fascinate us. We talk about them all the time. “Did you hear what Sandy did the other day? Ohmigosh, how could she do that? How can she sleep at night?” We love shows and movies about them doing horrible things to one another. We can’t understand them, and how they think they can get away with it. They do. They think a lot about this. They cross their T’s and dot their I’s, and they figure out the best way to do something awful to us without ramifications. It took me a while to figure out it’s not about me, and I’m here to tell you it’s not about you either, or whatever innocent victim they prey upon. It’s about them. They’re horrible people.

When we talk about horrible people doing horrible things in such discussions, we often limit our discussion to there dastardly doing dastardly things, as opposed to violent criminals committing violent acts. We talk about people who legally manage to ruin the lives of those around them. We talk about a nephew who drains an uncle’s life savings, before forcing him into a care facility; a sister who steals her mentally deficient brother’s inheritance; and a man who poisons the neighbor’s dog. We talk about little people who do little things, because they are so frustrated with their station in life that they develop a twisted logic and justification for what they do.

How many horrible people know they’re horrible. I’m sure they are out there, but I’ve never met one. The most horrible people I’ve met can’t understand why I would say that. They seem genuinely perplexed by the charge. “Well, what about the time you did this?” we ask. “I mean c’mon, even you can see that was pretty awful.”

“What was he going to do with it anyway?” they say. The only thing missing from their ability to pull justifications on us is the “Ta-dah!” punctuation. They rarely if ever address the moral turpitude of their actions. It’s dog-eat-dog to them. It’s take, take, take. They have no conscience, no guilt, and no shame. It’s about getting theirs before anyone else can.

They tell us a story of a dastardly figure doing something dastardly. “Wait a second, you did that. It wasn’t the exact same thing, but you did something so close that I can’t believe you’re calling this other person out.” They don’t see it. They don’t think the way we do.

Is it wrong to put Uncle Joe into a subpar care facility after taking all of his money? “If he goes into a care facility, the state will take his estate to help pay for his care?” they say.

“Okay, but he could’ve afforded a better facility.” They didn’t even consider that. We can see it on their face.

“What’s the difference?” they say. “He still gets his pillows propped, three square meals a day, and a couple Jell-O squares.” They don’t consider the role this man played in their maturation. They don’t think about those times their uncle bought them peanut M&M’s in the gas station, or the fishing trips he took them on when he was in his prime, and they were very young. He’s a feeble senior citizen now. He’s not the same man he was in their youth.

“But this is our Uncle Joe?” his sisters say, “and you were his favorite.”

They have answers, scripted answers that they developed long before this confrontation. It doesn’t matter what they say, because it really doesn’t matter to them what they say. They probably won’t even remember what they said five minutes after they said it, because they just don’t care. We might call them psychopaths, sociopaths, or level some charge of narcissism at them, but those are just names. Kids called them names on the playground, and it hurt back then. We’re adults now, and names are meaningless to us now. So, we back it up with detail, detailed descriptions of what they did, and the loved one to whom they did it. Pfft, it means nothing to them, and we know these people. We know some of them better than anyone else in the world, and we now know that they’re horrible people. It undercuts everything we thought we knew.

Uncle Joe wasn’t a rich man. His life’s savings proved embarrassingly paltry, but it’s theirs now, and they managed to secure the transfer of wealth in such a legal manner that the sisters’ lawyers inform them that it would be wildly expensive and ultimately foolish to challenge it.

They’re going to get theirs before you do.

The sisters could try to trap the nephew with some damning portrayals of what he did, but how do they trap someone who has no conscience, feels no guilt, and has no shame? Even if they were to corner him in a casual conversation that they could not make legally binding, they wouldn’t get anywhere, because it would basically turn into a war of words in which one party wins, and the other party loses, and he can’t lose that argument, because he doesn’t care.

I prefer to think that most people are good, and while I’ve been dealt a barrage of “you’re so naïve”, it has served me well. Having said that, I’m not blind to the fact that there are some horrible people we call friends, in our families, and those waving to us with a mower in front of them. I’ve talked to them so often I know how they tick, I’ve met their mothers and talked to that cousin who cemented that logic in their head.

When you sit down and talk to them, with mugs of beer between you, they say the most wonderful things. Some of the times, they even manage to drop a few words that expand our philosophy and rationale. Unbeknownst to us, they know right and wrong, but they obviously don’t think it applies in all situations, everywhere in life. “We all experience updrafts and downdrafts in life,” they say, “and you deal with them accordingly.

“Rome wasn’t built in a day,” they continue, “and it wasn’t built in one way, or the way they tell you.” This philosophy aligns with the narrative that some of the times you have to do things you don’t want to do to build an empire. It also aligns with the idea that most rich people got theirs by doing awful things to whomever stood in their way, and our friends want to climb that ladder by whatever means necessary.

Horrible people sell their soul for money, but when we see the jet skis sitting next to the brand new mower, we think, “You sold your soul for this?” No, they have a motor boat sitting at a dock, and next month they’re headed to Cancun. So, we’re inching toward the five figure territory for turning your back on one of the few people on the planet who actually cared about them. They don’t mind the fact that in the aftermath of their theft, they will turn their whole family against them, and they don’t mind damaging their soul. They don’t believe in all that schmuck.

Horrible people tell their family, at the last second, that they cannot attend a family dinner to honor their recently-deceased mother. “I’m sorry, I have a conflict.” Then, when the family sets out for the restaurant, she enters the family home, knowing that they will be out, and she steals all of her mother’s most valuable items. She obviously doesn’t think about how she’s disgracing her mother’s memory in some way and how that act could lead others to think she might be awful. Those thoughts don’t even enter her mind. She was just getting hers before her brother could stake a claim to one of the items. “The funny thing is if she challenged me on these items,” the brother said, “I would’ve let her have all of them.” We don’t know what happened in this situation, but anyone who knows anything about the collectible’s market knows that if she pawned everything she stole, she would probably end up enjoying one Burger King value meal.

Some people believe karma holds some kind of existential power. I don’t. I’ve seen far too many people escape awful deeds unharmed to believe that if we do bad things to people bad things will happen to us. The most successful refutation I received arrived after I had a brief, tumultuous confrontation with an unusually awful person was, “He has to live with himself.”

“You think he feels guilty?” I asked, “because I got the feeling he doesn’t feel the least bit guilty about it.”

“Oh, I don’t either,” he said. “I’m not talking about guilt. I’m talking about how he must live. A person who acts like that cannot be happy. Something drives a person to act like that. I’m guessing he either has an awful wife, or he treats her horribly. Either way, if someone was dumb enough to marry him, they probably now live a life of abject misery. And if she agreed to bring children into their world with him, imagine how miserable they must be. Most of all, think about what must be like for him to live with himself. Outbursts like that are not common. Internal misery causes people like that to unleash on the world around them. You talk about final damnation, and all that. I think it’s much simpler than that. For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. He’s living his own version of hell every day of his life.”

How do awful people live with themselves? First, they don’t consider themselves awful. They don’t think about what they’ve done as bad, or if they do, they punctuate it with bromides, such as, “It’s only bad if you get caught.” They say that as a joke, but they say it so often that we can’t help but think that they believe it. “It’s not a lie if you believe it,” is another bromide they might ask their loved ones to chisel into their gravestone, or, “It’s not stealing if you take things from those who have if you are a have-not.”

Even those of us who ascribe to some of these tenets of moral relativism must recognize that there has to be an internal accumulation of misery to be that miserable, and it manifests itself in a variety of ways.

One of my office managers was not what anyone would call an awful person. He devoted his life to his son, he laughed a lot, and he had such wonderful views that those making bullet points would insist that they absolutely prevent him from ever being on a list of horrible people. When the opportunity arose, however, he did every awful thing he could think of to me, as my manager, and within the constraints of the company handbook. I found out later that he committed suicide, and no one knew why. My best guess is that it wasn’t any one thing in particular. It probably had more to do with the accumulation.

The one thing I learned from working with this manager was that it’s never enough. He asked me questions about my current straits in the workplace. I had no idea that he was looking for some satisfaction. I now believe that he thought if he could transfer some of his misery to me, he might be a little less miserable, and it might quench a thirst of some sort. He learned that genuinely happy people can be happy no matter what type of misery we try to put them through. In the aftermath of our tenure together, I think he expected me to hate him. I didn’t. I greeted him as I had the day before we started working together. My guess is he was very disappointed by that.

Does it help us to think that horrible people lead horrible lives? Does it help us to think that the reason they hate us so much is because they hate their home, their family, their career, and themselves? We all have insecurities, and when someone develops that much animosity for us, we’re inclined to look inward. Based on my limited experience with horrible people, they think that way too. They think it’s our fault that they’re temporarily miserable, and if they can fix us, they can fix themselves. If they had the ability to acknowledge the source of the problem, they might have fixed it long ago. They don’t, so they focus their energy on fixing us in the most awful ways they can manage within corporate constraints.

How do they sleep at night? How can they do such things and think nothing of it? If it’s not entertaining, it’s a least fascinating to think that more often than not, these people get away with it, and they have no remorse. They cross their T’s and dot their I’s, and they take, take, take, and they try to make us as miserable as they are.

My advice, based on my brief experience with this type of person is try to do everything in your power to make them irrelevant in your life. This is impossible in some cases, as some of the times horrible people have the power and ability to make our lives more miserable, but in cases like these, happiness can, indeed, be the best revenge.