Jarett Kobek - Only Americans Burn in Hell

After the phone call with my attorneys, Senior convinced his son to accept service.

And then they stonewalled.

Months went by.

By stonewalling, what Senior did was this: he hung his only son out to dry.

I wasn’t stopping.

I was from Rhode Island.

And my attorneys were fucking sharks.

If you’re ever sued, there’s good strategy and there’s stupid strategy, and then there’s the worst strategy.

Which is to do nothing.

And that’s what my stalker did.

Despite all of my attorneys’ phone calls, despite the constant forwarding of documents and filings related to the case.

He did nothing.

His parents would not help him.

We kept going, kept moving the case along, and we ended up filing a default motion.

When a defendant refuses to interact with the civil courts, the plaintiff enters a motion of default. When the motion is granted, the plaintiff then enters the documents for a default judgment.

If the court accepts the plaintiff’s plea for judgment, it means that the plaintiff has won the case. There is an accepted absolute veracity in the plaintiff’s filings.

The defendant agrees, tacitly, that all of the plaintiff’s claims are true. The defendant agrees, tacitly, that they are not contesting their responsibility.

My attorneys filed the proposed default judgment.

On February 11th, 2011 AD, Justice Daniel J. Buckley of the Los Angeles Superior Court signed off on the full requested amount.

$1,235,144.75.

One million two hundred thirty-five thousand one hundred forty-four dollars and seventy-five cents.

My attorneys had derived this figure as the ultra-extreme of what the law allowed.

I haven’t tried to collect on the judgment, which has compounding 10 per cent yearly interest.

As of this writing, my stalker owes me $2,406,947.70.

By the time this book is published, the amount will be more.

And that’s the last contact I ever had with my Internet stalker.

All of the comments he left about me are gone.

All of the accounts he made in my name are gone.

It’s like none of it ever happened.

But given that it did, I hope you’ll forgive me when I express discomfort with an entire society, and its decaying journalistic apparatus, orienting itself around the destruction of individuals based on things posted to the Internet.

A magical island devoid of its charm would be like feminism in a society where all the men had been expelled or murdered. Pretty fucking pointless.

Celia did the only thing that she could.

She called in the Big Dog.

She summoned Rusticano.

He’d been off Fairy Land for three hundred years.

There had been no word in a century.

But he had lived on Fairy Land for centuries and the background radiation of its magic had made him undying.

He was somewhere on Earth.

Celia cast a spell.

Rusticano was transported straight into the house on the hill.

He arrived midsentence, in a burst of light and untamed magic.

“…und deshalb empfehle ich immer einen Tampon,” he said.

In the Gray’s Inn adaptation of Tom a Lincoln , Rusticano occupies the traditional role of an Elizabethan/Jacobean clown.

He’s a lower-class brute in a fictional world where everyone else in resplendent in their finery and goes on about Fairy Queens and dragons.

Rusticano is the one who, in the middle of a speech about the redemptive blood of the Savior, can be relied upon to unleash the world’s most unholy fart.

It’s the simplest of things, but the device works.

The device always works.

Upper-class social mores, as constructed by the middle-class people who create cheap entertainments, are structured around a pretense that people with money and power believe themselves to be something more than dumb animals.

Enter Rusticano’s fart.

What greater rebuke to the pretense of non-animal man than the trumpet-like sound of stinky methane being expelled from a clown’s ass?

But that was just a play written to amuse rich kids.

There was a real Rusticano, and other than the name, he shared nothing in common with his fictional iteration.

Rusticano was a human oddity.

He was the one man who’d come to Fairy Land and escaped the hangman’s noose.

After the Red-Rose Knight was killed by Orson’s shit, the women of Fairy Land rounded up all of the Red-Rose Knight’s men.

The men died screaming.

Every single one of the men had defended themselves with weaponry and brute force.

Except Rusticano.

In the massacre, Rose Byrne had been the chief executioner, but she didn’t command the task force. Leadership fell to Celia, who stood on a chariot pulled by Fairy Land’s meanest buckskin stallions.

Her warrior women followed behind like a bridal train.

When the chariot arrived at the Babbling Brook of Sorrow, where Rusticano spent his days, Rusticano did not flee. He did not pull out his sword.

He stood and faced the women.

“Hail Rusticano,” cried Celia. “The time has come for your demise.”

“What is my crime, lady?” asked Rusticano.

“No crime, sir,” said Celia. “Only that you are a man in Fairy Land. No men shall remain on this island. Your leader is dead. Your friends are dead. You too shall join them in nevermore.”

Rusticano kneeled down and picked up a rock.

The women of Fairy Land drew back their arrows and unsheathed their swords.

Rusticano tossed the rock into the Babbling Brook.

“Are you certain,” he asked, “that I am a man?”

“What else would you be?” asked Celia.

“No one has ever told Rusticano what makes a man, so how can Rusticano judge for himself? Can you tell me?”

“A man is the opposite of a woman,” said Celia.

“Do I not have the same arms and legs as you, do I not have the same head? Should not an opposite be in direct opposition to the thing it opposes?”

“Your body is different than ours,” said Celia.

“Are your bodies so similar?” asked Rusticano. “Look at the skinny maid, holding her axe. Is her body the same as the fat one who cripples the horse? Are those differences so much less than the distance of my body from yours?”

“Too much prattle, fair Rusticano,” said Celia. “Your talk will not save you.”

“Lady,” said Rusticano. “I am happy to die if you wish it. But I have shared your salt and lived as your guest, and I have given you my own gift, and by those sacred and ancient terms, I claim certain rights. I demand to know why I should die. Tell me, then, what makes a woman and what makes me not a woman.”

“Do you bleed with the moon?” asked Celia.

“I do not,” said Rusticano. “But is that what makes a woman? I vow to you here that I shall take the sword to my flesh with every full rise and let flow as much blood as you demand.”

“Where are your breasts?” asked Celia.

“Again, lady,” said Rusticano. “I have no breasts but I see at least three women here with chests flatter than mine. Are they not women?”

“What of that prick between your legs?” asked Celia.

“Are we so certain that it is a prick?” asked Rusticano.

“What else would it be?” asked Celia.

“I would caution against defining a thing by its appearance,” said Rusticano. “How many chairs are there on this island? Each looks different from the others and yet we see them and know that they are chairs. This is because a chair is a thing for sitting upon, and as with a prick, it is defined not by its appearance but rather by its function. So tell me, lady, if this is a prick, then what is its function?”

“You piss through your prick,” said Celia. “And you put it inside a woman.”