I haven’t lived in Rhode Island for nearly twenty years.
But I’m always from Rhode Island.
Whenever someone from Rhode Island is on reality television, they’re always the worst of the worst of the worst. They’re the people television producers cast because they know that the presence of a Rhode Islander is a shortcut to endless drama.
Rhode Island was founded in the Seventeenth Century AD by the most obnoxious people in the New World.
People like Roger Williams and Anne Hutchinson.
They had fled England because their bad personalities threw their neighbors into murderous rages. They sailed across the Atlantic and settled in bullshit Massachusetts hellholes like Salem and Boston.
And then their bad personalities promptly threw the new neighbors into murderous rages.
They were banished from Massachusetts.
And they had to go somewhere.
So they went and founded Rhode Island.
The crazy never left.
It’s still there.
Think of it like this: unlike every other colony in New England, Rhode Island never had a witch trial. But we sure as fuck dug up some old corpses, cut out their hearts, and called them vampires.
If Senior had asked me why I was suing his son, this is what I would have said: Your son made a terrible error in judgment. He thought that the limits of his own imagination were the boundaries of the universe. But he had no idea about the chaos of Rhode Island. There’s a reason why it says INRI on the cross.
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.
Chapter Nineteen
Exeunt Rusticano
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?”