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
