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  FUBAR

  FUBAR

  A NOVEL OF DECEPTION

  RON CARPOL

  CONNOR & JAMES BOOK PUBLISHERS

  LOS ANGELES

  PUBLISHED BY CONNOR & JAMES BOOK PUBLISHERS

  LOS ANGELES

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events, and incidents, unless otherwise noted, are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, graphic, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher.

  Book cover and design by Robert Aulicino

  ISBN 0-9742560-4-8

  Copyright ©2004 by Ron Carpol

  All rights reserved

  PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

  First Edition

  CONNOR & JAMES BOOK PUBLISHERS

  [email protected]

  www.fubarbook.com

  The author is available for speaking appearances.

  Distributed by Independent Publishers Group

  814 N. Franklin Street

  Chicago, IL 60610 USA

  Phone: 312. 337-0747

  Fax: 312. 337-5985

  www.ipgbook.com

  fubar fucked up beyond all recognition

  —U. S. SLANG, Words & Phrases

  Do unto others before they do unto you first.

  —Kurt Stafford

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  This book would never have been completed in its present form without the invaluable assistance of Nick Carpol, who tirelessly worked with me in every phase of this project.

  Thanks also to the following people whose vital contributions are gratefully appreciated: Sunghi Yoo, my meticulous proofreader for correcting my endless errors; Cathy Giblin, for her research editing; Chris Carpol and Suzie Carpol for their story ideas; Chris Martin, for some great fraternity reminiscences; Thomas B. Sawyer, the bestselling author, (www.storybase.net), for the invaluable information contained in his indispensable book, Fiction Writing DEMYSTIFIED, who was the first professional writer to endorse this book; Paul Rodriguez, the great comedian, for validating that this book really is funny; Robert Aulicino, for his cover art and interior design, (www.aulicinodesign.com), and guidance and patience.

  And in alphabetical order, the editors of these major college satirical publications: Vern Cassin, Editor-in-Chief, PRINCETON Tiger; Aryeh Cohen-Wade, Editor-in-Chief, YALE Record; Editors of GEORGETOWN Lampoon; Sammy Elhag, Editor-in-Chief, UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, SAN DIEGO Koala; Colin Kelly Jost, President, HARVARD Lampoon; Adrian Perry, Editor-in-Chief, STANFORD Chaparral; Ben Schachtman, Editor-in-Chief, RUTGERS Medium; Ken Schefler, Editor-in-Chief Emeritus, CORNELL Lunatic; Melissa Surach, Editor-in-Chief, McGill Red Herring; and Ricky Van Veem, co-founder of collegehumor.com.

  And most importantly—for her help in everything involving this project—to Elizabeth.

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  PART 1

  THE FIVE MILLION DOLLAR CHALLENGE

  1 My Goddamn Grandfather

  2 The Scheming Arab

  3 Nobody Trusts Me

  4 Even the Jews Hate Me

  5 Nineteen More Enemies

  6 The Sniper

  PART 2

  TOO UGLY TO RAPE

  7 A Bail Bondsman’s Wet Dream

  8 Dirty Harriet

  9 My Own Shyster

  10 The Usual Suspects

  11 The Snickering Cripple

  PART 3

  EVERYBODY’S GOT A PRICE

  12 The Thief

  13 Morgue Meat

  14 My Professors Hate Me Too

  15 Playing Perverted Games

  PART 4

  PENIS & PENICILLIN

  16 Her Clit Ring

  17 The Dominatrix

  18 Our Death Warrant

  PART 5

  THE VAGINAL CLUE

  19 The Traitor

  20 Kidnapped

  21 That’s Not Beer

  22 Covering My Ass

  23 Going Down South

  24 Like a 900 Sex Number

  25 Lethal Target Practice

  26 The Poon Tang Palace

  27 But She Consented

  PART 6

  THE EXTORTIONIST

  28 Autograph My What?

  29 XXX Rated Photos

  30 Faggot Hunting

  31 My Obituary

  32 A Dead Man’s Hand

  PART 7

  JUDGMENT DAY

  33 The Last Laugh

  PART 1

  THE

  FIVE MILLION

  DOLLAR

  CHALLENGE

  1

  MY GODDAMN GRANDFATHER

  Friday, August 2, 2002

  San Francisco

  THIS CHINK LAWYER, I THINK HER NAME WAS YOKO ONO or something like that, laid down the blue-backed papers on her desk and silently looked right through me with the Mona Lisa expression on her face. I puckered my lips, raised my right palm to my chin, and blew this gook a big, fucking kiss.

  My father jerked around towards me. His eyes tightened and the veins on the side of his neck puffed out like thick rope. No doubt about it. He was mad about something.

  “After today, you’re cut off. Whatever you inherit better last you a lifetime.”

  “Who cares? I’ll be worth millions in half an hour.”

  Then I’d be off to the Caribbean for the good life: beautiful beaches, smoking dope, always drunk, and lots of pussy.

  The lawyer broke the stiff silence. “Besides the charitable gifts that I already read, these are the bequests for the family members.”

  But instead of telling everybody what we got, she started spouting off a bunch of bullshit about what a great guy my grandfather was.

  I tuned out, enjoying my throbbing hard-on, thinking about Jenna Jameson, the porn star that Howard Stern interviewed this morning.

  When the slopehead paused to take a swig from an Evian bottle, my father poked me in the arm with his elbow. His facial expression looked like he was smelling dog shit.

  “Lyman’s dressed in a suit,” he snapped. “Look at you. In that disgusting shirt that reeks of marijuana.”

  Who cares if he didn’t like my wrinkled T-shirt that showed a guy with slicked-back hair from the ‘40s smoking a joint? Above the guy was the word REEFER and below him were the words AT LEAST IT’S NOT CRACK.

  “Any other complaints?”

  “Yeah. Your breath stinks of beer and it’s only ten o’clock in the morning.”

  “Anything else?”

  He pointed to Lyman who was sitting between my aunt and uncle. “Yeah. He’s only seventeen and got accepted to Stanford and Berkeley. And you haven’t amounted to shit. You’re twenty-six without a day of college.”

  “Quiet,” my mother hissed. “Let Mrs. Onoke read the will.”

  What the hell did my mother know about anything except her daily ritual: church, expensive lunches, designer stores.

  Just as the lawyer started to speak again, she suddenly stopped for a second and froze, staring at my mother’s diamond ring that was just a little smaller than a golf ball.

  “Because I only have two children,” Yoko Ono finally continued, still in that squeaky, high-pitched voice, “Mrs. Catherine Stafford and Mrs. Suzanne Pomeranz, they are to receive equal shares of my twenty-one million dollar estate with the exception of five million dollars.”

  Then for the first time, this bitch looked directly into my eyes. Two seconds later she looked over at Lyman before quickly twisting her skinny neck around and look
ing back at me again. Her eyes, which slanted much more than Lyman’s, suddenly sparkled, lighting up her round face with a smile.

  “You’re Kurt Stafford, aren’t you?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Would you like me to tell you about your five million dollar inheritance in plain English?”

  “Yeah.”

  She tossed the will down on the desk and smiled again, like she couldn’t wait to get to the punch line of a great joke.

  “OK. Within one month you must enlist in the Marines and complete boot camp.”

  Everybody except me burst out laughing; even the shyster.

  “That’s it? For five million bucks I got to join the fucking Marines? Looks like we’re going to have a war!”

  “Or,” she added, with a thinner smile that looked more sadistic, “that you enroll now in any accredited college and be sworn into your grandfather’s fraternity—Sigma Omicron Lambda—by the end of your first semester.”

  “That’s it? Only those two dead-end choices?”

  She nodded, smiling slightly. “Yes. That’s it.”

  That dead bastard did to me what pantyhose did to finger-fucking.

  “What if I start college and don’t last the semester? Can I still try the Marines?”

  “Yes, but you must enlist within a month after leaving college.”

  “What if I don’t finish either one?”

  “You get nothing.” Now, with a shit-eating grin, she looked at Lyman and pointed at him. “And your adopted cousin gets the money if he fulfills either condition.”

  “But I get first shot. Right?”

  She nodded. “That’s right.”

  My father’s ruddy face beamed and his blue eyes almost twinkled. He looked way too smug for a personal injury lawyer who settled insurance claims from staged car accidents where quack doctors provided fake medical bills and reports. Everybody has a price, he continually bragged.

  “We’ll pay for college until you flunk out,” were his words of inspiration. “Unless you decide to skateboard down the Halls of Montezuma or surf the Shores of Tripoli.”

  Again, the Chinaman bitch laughed like the rest of them, with my asshole cousin laughing the loudest before he sneered at me.

  “You’ll never see a dime, you fucker. I guarantee it.”

  2

  THE SCHEMING ARAB

  1:00 P.M.

  “WHAT’S THE DEAL?” ALI REZA ASKED, still chewing on the spongy crap he showed me between bites as we sat on the tan couch in my apartment.

  “You just graduated with honors, right?”

  He nodded and swallowed what was probably camel meat. “Second in a class of 396,” he said proudly, before rattling off the awards he received at graduation. About the only things he left out were the Pulitzer Prize and the Congressional Medal of Honor.

  I got right to the point with this naïve slob who had to work in a gas station after school for spending money. “I’ll give you five hundred bucks to take a college entrance test for me.”

  “What?” he stammered. “You must be crazy. I got a full scholarship to Dartmouth. What if I get caught?”

  “You won’t. The school I’m applying to lets you take the entrance test online. We’ll do it here. I’ll be with you to login any personal information about me.”

  He started laughing. “What college would accept you? Especially at this late date?”

  “College at the Sea. In Santa Monica.”

  He shook his head and snickered. “Never heard of it. They must take anybody.” Then his voice suddenly took on a serious tone. “Why don’t you take the test yourself?”

  “I’m kind of rusty on test-taking. It’s been eight years since high school.”

  “What’ve you been doing since?”

  “You know, a bunch of shitty waiter jobs that I kept getting fired from because the customers and the bosses were assholes.” I couldn’t tell him I was also dealing small amounts of pot and selling counterfeit concert tickets to suckers standing at the ends of long ticket lines who never knew they all bought the same seat.

  “Why’d you finally decide to go to college now? Especially at your age?”

  I told him about the will and it’s conditions.

  He smiled with crooked teeth that glistened against his dark, olive skin.

  “That’s it? That’s your only reason?”

  I nodded. “Yeah.”

  He shook his head back and forth slowly and rolled his eyes upward. “Look, I can get you into that half-assed college. No problem. But how’re you going to get into the fraternity? How do you know they’ll accept you?”

  Shit! I never thought of that. I shrugged my shoulders. “I don’t know but I’ll think of something.”

  “Another thing,” he continued, smiling. “A guy like you, how’re you going to put up with hazing from guys my age?”

  Shit! I never thought about that either.

  He continued. “I’ve got friends who rushed fraternities at different colleges. Some made it through pledging and some didn’t. But all of them took a lot of shit and embarrassment and humiliation along the way. Could you? You’re the laziest, most selfish person I ever met.”

  “I’ll get accepted somehow.”

  He started licking his yellowish tongue clean. “Five hundred isn’t much for maybe losing my scholarship if I got caught.”

  My voice got cold. “You want the deal or not?”

  “You pay me in cash?”

  “Yeah.”

  “In advance?”

  “Yeah.” I pulled out five portraits of Benny Franklin from the front pocket of my jeans and held the fanned bills in front of his face. “Here.”

  He didn’t take them. I guess I was too quick to pay.

  “I want a thousand,” he demanded greedily.

  I paused for about five seconds, wanting him to realize that I was seriously thinking about it so he wouldn’t go any higher. He didn’t know that I’d probably pay him ten grand. “OK,” I finally answered. “A thousand. But that’s it.”

  Luckily, money wasn’t a problem since my mother never bothered to check her bank statements or she’d have spotted the endless checks made out to me where I forged her name.

  He paused a little too long for my comfort.

  “This is all the cash I’ve got right now,” I said. “I’ll give you the other five hundred when you come back and take the test.”

  He stood up, grabbed the dough, and stuffed it in his shirt pocket. “OK. Call me when you want me here.”

  _____

  A week later this greedy bastard who lived down the hall from me was seated at the small table in my kitchen. My Gateway laptop was in front of him.

  “You’re lucky your father owns the building,” he said, assessing the computer like an appraising rug merchant.

  “Yeah,” I answered slowly, wondering if my father really paid somebody to burn down the old apartment building that used to be here for the insurance money like the arson investigators keep trying to prove.

  “The other five hundred first, please,” he said cheerfully.

  As soon as I forked it over, he logged on and started warming up, his hands flailing everywhere like a musical conductor.

  “Pretty impressive.”

  “Someday I’ll play Chopin at Carnegie Hall.”

  He continued gracefully on the keyboard for a few more seconds in silence before he stopped and looked over at me.

  “This computer is much better than mine.”

  I didn’t answer as he continued his elaborate finger exercises.

  When the words TEST WILL BEGIN IN THREE MINUTES came on the screen, Ali Reza reached into his shirt pocket and pulled out a cashier’s check and showed it to me. It was made out to him for twelve hundred dollars and listed as the person who paid, my fucking cousin Lyman!

  “What the hell is this?” I screamed.

  He smiled. “Lyman paid me to intentionally fail the test for you.”

  This was unbelievable
. “How’d Lyman know about it?”

  “I told him, naturally, to see if he’d outbid you. Like on eBay. And he did.”

  “Where do you know him from?”

  “High school. We’re in most of the honors classes together. Calculus, Shakespeare, advanced physics.”

  I really had it with this sand nigger. “So now what?”

  “Will you outbid him or not?”

  “Look, we agreed on a thousand and you got it. That’s enough!”

  Suddenly the screen said that the test would start in one minute.

  “I’ll sell you Lyman’s twelve hundred dollar cashier’s check for fifteen hundred right now. Take it or leave it.”

  I checked my Rolex and the second hand seemed like a spinning roulette wheel. I was running out of time.

  “OK. It’s a deal. I’ll get you the money when I get accepted.”

  “Bullshit. Now or never.”

  “Will you take a check?”

  “No.”

  “I don’t have fifteen hundred in cash on me. So now what?”

  His eyes were riveted to the computer.

  “I settle for this.”

  “What?”

  He stood up. “Otherwise I’m leaving.”

  “It cost nearly four grand,” I whined. Except I bought it for two-fifty from some Mexican busboy who said his cousin stole it.

  “Then I’m leaving.”

  Shit, what choice did I have? “OK.”

  “And I keep Lyman’s cashier’s check, too.”

  “OK, you son-of-a-bitch. But you better pass this test.”

  He smiled. “Don’t worry. I will.”

  A few seconds later the test started and the questions flashed on the screen, a minute at a time. As he answered each question, the only time he wasn’t smiling was when he was laughing. With jet-black hair, he had the beginning of an old man’s lined face with a brush mustache that made him even look older.

  As usual, he answered the question on the screen in a few seconds. But since the test was automatically timed, we had to wait the rest of the minute for the next question to appear.

  “I can’t believe this is a college entrance exam,” he said, shaking his head between questions.