You Dumb Bastard

If you ask me, the worst thing about this economic downfall is having to look at my son's stupid face every goddamn morning.

Chip crawled back home after he lost his job and after six months it doesn't look like he'll ever move out again, which chafes my ass plenty. Eighteen years of his mopey horseshit was enough, if you ask me.

But no one ever asks me. That's why I have to tell people what's on my mind, on account of never being asked what I think. And that ain't just my opinion either, it's a goddamn fact- just ask my wife if she cares what I think about anything. Goddamn cow will roll her eyes and sigh or maybe she'll laugh, but you'll know she doesn't give a shit about me either way. I mean, just look at this house. It's a mess, I tell you. I married a goddamn slob, is what. Look. I bought this house for her and does she give a fuck? Do I get any respect?

Hell no.

Respect is a funny thing. Some guys think that respect is just another word for fear, and that they can earn respect just by being a bad-ass or even flat-out mean. That is bullshit, if you ask me. What I'm sayin' is, I am afraid of my boss, but I don't respect the fat cocksucker one damn bit. My kid Chip is afraid of me, but he damn sure don't respect his old man, not one damn bit. No amount of me hitting him is gonna change that. But it can make me feel better.

So I walk over to the kitchen table where the kid always sits, his head always in his hands, his eyes always looking at the damn floor.

"You dumb bastard!", I tell him. I smack the top of his head, just to make sure he hears me.

"Did you hear me?" Another smack.

"Ow. Geez. Pop, you don't have to hit me."

"Hell I don't. And don't tell me what to do. I'm still your father and I'll kick your ass whenever I want."

"Fine. Kick my ass. I don't care," he mumbles.

His mumble-mouth bullshit pisses me off. The dumb kid has been mumbling his whole goddamn life; we spent a fortune on speech therapy when he was in grade school and it didn't do him a damn bit of good. The goddamn quack doctor told us he had "esteem" issues. She told me my son should go to a head-shrinker. A shrink! Goddamn quack was lucky she was a woman, otherwise I'd have knocked her on her ass and kicked the shit out of her. But I have too much self-respect to go around hitting broads, so I saved the ass-kicking for Chip. No son of mine is going to be a nut-case, not if I can help it.

"You stupid turd", I said to him one afternoon after his speech therapy session. "Your therapist thinks you have some kind of fucked-up esteem issues. Like you are crazy and need to see a shrink. You know that shit pisses me off, don't you? Crazy ain't cheap, boy. You planning on being crazy your whole life?"

He mumbled some crybaby shit that I mighta paid more attention to if I'd known he was gonna shut up and stay quiet for two years. The boy just flat quit talking , wouldn't say a goddamn word no matter how much I yelled at him. I even spanked him one night when I was drunk and he didn't say jackshit. Him not talking caused some trouble at school, so we pulled a few strings and moved him into a special school for dumb kids; 'dumb' as in they can't talk, not dumb like they are stupid. Chip is plenty stupid, but he ain't really dumb in the other sense, he was just acting that way because of his esteem issues.

Anyway, after a couple years away at the dumb school, Chip started talking again and his teachers thought it was a miracle or some kinda holy-angel-halliyooha horseshit. Seems we forgot to tell them about Chip being able to talk in the first place and hell, they were so happy with their new miracle that I didn't have the heart to tell them about Chip's esteem issues.

Plus, me and the wife made a few thousand bucks telling our "story" to fat suckers on crappy TV talk-shows, so I guess it was a miracle, since it paid for our trip to Las Vegas and I always figured it would take a miracle to afford that.

But I guess our story got boring to the TV people pretty quick 'cause the TV shows called less and less often, then stopped altogether . For a while, we tried to fatten Chip up so we could make him lose a huge amount of weight and go back on TV with a new story, but Chip wound up getting sick and all we got out of it was another bill to pay.

Goddamn insulin ain't cheap, either.