The Tackiness of Douchebags

I have a very clear memory of my childhood stepfather and his father sweating all day long over a piece of kitschy ugliness that occupied a place of honor in our homes for several years. It was a piece of butcher block, stained to resemble a bowling lane, on four cheapo legs, standing about two feet high. The dimensions were approximately 3' x 4'. Into the top had been hand-drilled 11 holes, around 2 and a half inches in diameter, at a depth of maybe half an inch. Ten of these holes were arranged in the traditional bowling-pin triangle, and set into these were 10 empty novelty whiskey bottles. Guess what shape they were in? The eleventh hole was occupied by a glass "bowling ball", the part of which was played by a Chinese fishing float, clear, slightly undersized.

This tableau was set up in a corner just around from the front hall, in a risky high-traffic area, and woe be to any awkward teenager who might ever brush up against it, or heaven forbid, cause a bottle to topple, because this rickety ode to bad taste was prized above all other things, including your pathetic human emotions.

I mention the glass bowling-alley as the most extreme example of a consistently tacky approach to home design that I had to suffer through for the duration of this dickhead's marriage to my mother (over twenty years). The nonstop emotional abuse was of course the main feature of his tenure in my mother's bed, but the terrible taste in everything was a close second or third.

A quick rundown:

His favorite food: Hamburger Helper.
His favorite music: quite storm bullshit R&B.
His favorite movies: whatever won Oscars that year.
His favorite television: sports, and the Home Shopping Network sports memorabilia show.
His favorite weekend activity: walking through the mall without buying anything.

I have this theory about douchebags, which is that they, TO A PERSON, have horrible taste in everything. If they happen to stumble upon something cool, it's probably because somebody else told them it was good. Left to their own devices, they will purchase and enjoy only the lousiest, ugliest things in life, such as the following decor items that were, I swear to god, actually in our homes at some point:

• A silver-painted plaster statue of a horse's head, which my mother knocked from its pedestal and broke, possibly with malicious intent.
• A hand-made latch-hook rug hanging on the wall.
• An entire room filled with autographed sports memorabilia (his "office" aka "the place where all the pornography was hidden").
• An honest-to-goodness velvet painting of the Pink Panther.

I'm sure I'm forgetting quite a bit, but picture a home halfway between a sitcom set and a bachelor pad, and that's where I lived for my entire schooling years.

Need I mention that when he was single he dressed like a pimp? Like a stereotypical, blaxploitation, Huggy Bear pimp? Eventually, he settled upon a new look for his off-work self: warm-up pants, sports jerseys and baseball hats (he had a collection of them!), worn every day of his life.

This was the man who had the gall to consider himself better than me and my mother.

It's amazing, when you think of it, that I have grown up to be a man who likes Coen Brothers movies and Lyrics Born and Dashiell Hammett and Philip K. Dick and Edward Gorey art and other cool shit, when this douche was the overwhelming culture influence over my entire childhood, but I guess sometimes good taste can't help but win out.

Oh, he also sketched, and was pretty good at it, but only ever sketched celebrities out of magazines. As a gift, he sketched a portrait of my mother with her head stuck onto a Playboy bunny's body.

And that's all I think I need to say about that.