Why I Hate Rudolph Crispin

We have a word for people like Rudolph Crispin. It’s asshole. Rudolph Crispin is an asshole.

I got all kinds of people that’d agree with me on that one, like Jake. I like Jake, Jake would’ve been a standup guy if Crispin hadn’t’ve gotten a hold of him when he was 17. He got Jake beaten up, badly bruised, internal bleeding, hemorages, the whole bit. The kid didn’t even get to go to the ER before he got dropped.

He started out in a bad family, so there it is, not even a happy beginning. I mean, nobody knew he had a bad family either, he was real secretive about it. He was secretive about it because he didn’t like talking about getting throttled by his dad or his mom’s drinking binges or any of that stuff, and it was all Crispin’s fault. I guess it makes sense, you know, that Jake wouldn’t talk about his bad family at all, but it just made things rougher for him. I know he wanted to.

He didn’t though, he just got abused by everyone around him all the time. Jake was pretty smart, he had that going for him, and he was going to one of those fancy k-12 schools that gives people scholarships to get an education. Only thing was he had to put up with everybody around him being all rich, and they didn’t like poor Jake, that’s why they didn’t talk to him. He didn’t reach out to anybody either, because he was afraid of all of them, since they were so much better off.

So what Crispin did was first he took Jake and threw him into a bad house, he didn’t even say why the house was bad, by the way, and then he got all the other kids at Jake’s school to ignore him, so Jake was all isolated and sad and everything, even though he was really a nice guy. Then finally Jake just couldn’t deal with it anymore, which makes a lot of sense I guess, even though it still sucks that it happened. So what happened was when Jake couldn’t take it anymore he showed up at school with his dad’s gun, which Crispin gave him, and he was going to turn Saint Francis Xavier Episcopal School into the OK Corral. Crispin made the gun jam though, and then Jake got swarmed and beaten and bruised, then nobody mentioned Jake anymore. The kids that beat him up got medals, and I guess it was ironic.

That’s not even half as bad as what he did to Daniel Sullivan though. Maybe it was worse in the beginning, because Daniel Sullivan had a pretty good family life and such, nobody really heard any details, but Daniel Sullivan fell harder, and it was all thanks to Crispin.

He built him up, made him think it was going to be ok. Crispin started him out as the golden boy in high school, then he put him all the way through Stanford with a 3.9 GPA and second team all-conference honors in golf. Sullivan kept his hot streak going after that and ended up making $133,000 as an analyst on Wall Street his first year out of college. Then Crispin kept pushing him up the ladder and got him a job as executive vice president of marketing for a company Crispin made. Then he slowly ruined Sullivan.

It started with his wife. Crispin had Sullivan’s wife meet one of his coworkers, Fred Brown, at a company dinner. Then they had sex. That got Sullivan all up in a knot, because Fred Brown had been his best friend, and his wife had been, well, his best wife. So he went to talk to Brown about it and got all angry and next thing he knows Brown’s ruining his life. It started with a call to the police where Brown said he’d been threatened, even though all Sullivan had been saying was that he was angry. Then there was an attempted murder that Sullivan got blamed for, because he was the only one with a motive to kill Fred Brown, even though there really hadn’t been any actual attempt at killing the man. Then the frame went to court and Sullivan ended up in jail.

Then his wife left him because she didn’t want to be with a murderer and his cellmate acted really understanding, and Sullivan felt happy that at least there was somebody decent left, and him and his cellmate became pretty good friends. His cellmate said he was in jail for sexual assault, even though he was in jail for identity theft. He got out two weeks before Sullivan did, and then Sullivan finally stepped out of the cell, stepped out of the jail, and breathed the fresh air. He thought about how things were going to be just fine for him and really had a good head on his shoulders until he found out nobody was going to hire an ex-con like him, and that his bank account had been drained. He lost his cool at the bank and they threw him out, literally, onto the streets.

They found his body in his old apartment with traces of cyanide in his blood. Rudolph Crispin was the one that killed him though, but they couldn’t convict him.

Arresting him would’ve seemed like a horrible idea to them if they’d known what he was going to do to the police officer. He gave the police officer a serious problem with LSD flashbacks. Just gave it to him. Didn’t even give him the fun of doing the massive amount of LSD you have to do to get it. Crispin just skipped to the good part, or the bad part, whatever you want to call it. Nobody even knows how or why the guy got a job as a police officer after doing illegal drugs and such. That’s how Crispin works.

So he got this police officer doing some police officing and just waited, because he knew the guy could have a flashback at any minute. So he just waited, and a couple of times it sort of happened but didn’t get anybody in trouble, like one time he had a flashback and he thought the coffee cup he was drinking out of was talking to him, but all that happened there was a couple of people in a diner thought he was a little crazy, and he was a little crazy, just not the same crazy they thought.

Then another time he was trying to write a speeding ticket and his pen kept melting in his hand, so he kept dropping it on the ground and picking it back up again but it kept melting, and the whole time the guy who he pulled over was just kind of staring at him, a little bit dumbfounded, and then eventually he got the clue that the police officer wasn’t even looking at him or noticing him anymore, so he just kind of drove away. When the flashback ended the officer was a little pissed off that a speeder had gotten away from him, and he was pretty sure he’d almost gotten ran over a couple of times from being so close to the road, but still, no harm done.

Then some harm got done.

The guy hadn’t been having any bad trips or any of the really freaky stuff, but then Crispin made his luck run out. He got the guy assigned duty on 18^th street on a Friday, and 18^th street was where there was some big rally that night so all kinds of people were out and about, and most of them were students from the college that was only a few minutes away. And the rally was going fine and all until, sure enough, that one cop started flashing back, and it was a bad trip he was flashing back to so he started getting paranoid and he looked up and he just saw this big, smiling fireball and it was coming towards him. Then it just kept coming towards him so he tried to get away but tripped and fell on it, so it went down to the ground. He got back up and started stomping it to try and put it out and he was yelling while he did it.

And everyone else was yelling, too, because they were watching police brutality at its worst. There he was, a man in uniform, stomping the hell out of a defenseless, African-American college student. Next thing he knows he comes to and sees what he’s done and a riot’s broken out. Glass bottles and rocks and God knows what else is flying everywhere, and I don’t even want to tell you what happens after that.

I won’t, in fact, but I can tell you what Crispin did about 1,000 years after that. I mean, this one is really bad because Rudolph Crispin created an entire world just to make it happen. I mean he just assembled the United States of the year 3022, didn’t bother putting together any of the stuff that happens between now and then, he just went ahead and started drawing up the year 3022 so he could mess with this one starship captain, they had starship captains in Crispin’s 3022, named Hutch Jackson.

Jackson got it a little better than us at least because he was a badass. He was walking around making reckless decisions with the healthy smoldering cigarette of the future sticking out of his mouth and a seriously badass futuristic gun at his side. He did things like go to bars on earth and kick the shit out of people just for looking at him funny, then he’d take their wallet and use it to pay for his drink. He never really grew or changed as a person, Hutch Jackson just always got to be a reckless, kind of jerky badass. That sure as hell didn’t give him a free pass when the war started though.

That was the other thing, Crispin set up a war in the stars, a star war really. No, wait, it wasn’t a star war because it wasn’t star wars. He just set up a war in space with some alien race that he made so that there would be a war. So he had this war going on, and this captain named Hutch Jackson that was part of the war, then he got Hutch Jackson kidnapped by aliens. He kind of flipped out at that, but since he was a badass he just started working an escape plan that would take them all by surprise.

It took him several years in solitary confinement, but he came up with one. It involved a bunch of traits of the alien race and futuristic technology that I don’t really have time to explain though, so I can’t tell you what it was, but part of it involved killing a lot of guards and aliens, so he did it. He was in a jail the aliens used for their own planets criminals, not a space POW camp, so he figured he’d have to kill any inmates that got out, too. He busted all the way out and escaped in a pod, then when he got back to earth he found out the war had been over for months. So he said that was great, and he asked who had won. They told him no one had won, and that they had established a peaceful society with aliens on earth and people on their planet. Then the aliens caught up with Hutch and arrested him for the murder of all those guards he’d killed to get out, and it was supposed to just be such a great twist that a war actually ends in workable peace for both sides and then one of the things they really agree on is killing off that badass Hutch Jackson.

I’ll still be alive when Crispin’s done I think, but I’m pretty sure things aren’t going to turn out much better for me. I’ve been getting by alright for a while now working as a bartender and drawing good stuff when I’m off work, which is weird to me, because everybody else that’s had to deal with Crispin has either had it great or awful from the get-go, and I’ve just kind of got it mediocre. Either way though I’ve been looking at what’s been going on and what people have been saying, and I can see the ending perfectly, and I think I’ve got what comes between now and then pretty much down.

I had a guy come in not too long ago who said he was an architect, and he was talking about a new building downtown, so I think something’s going to involve either that guy or that building. I looked it up last night and it said it was going to be a hospital, and that it’s going to open in two months, so I think that hospital’s going to open and someone I know is going to be in it.

I got a call earlier today where I found out my mother-in-law is sick, so I’m pretty sure that it’s going to involve my wife’s sick mom and that guy and that building, but after that I’m just kind of guessing at what I know about Crispin. The design of the building is going to be involved somehow, that’s for sure. There wouldn’t have been an architect at my bar a few days before I found out about my sick mother in law if the design wasn’t involved. If design is involved, Crispin likes making things destroy themselves, so structural integrity is going to be a problem. Whatever happens is going to involve structural integrity.

I have a kid, too, a son. I think that’s the lowest place I can get kicked, so whatever happens is going to be awful for my son, it’s probably going to happen to my son. Between my wife’s mother being sick, my having a son, which I wouldn’t have if it didn’t matter, and the new hospital being built, I’m figuring the first thing that’s going to happen is Rebecca, that’s my mother in law, is going to have to go to a hospital. From there I think the new hospital is going to open, and for some freak reason Rebecca is going to have to be transferred.

My family and I are going to go visit her, and then the awful thing involving structural integrity is going to happen. Something is going to fall or collapse or whatever on my son, because I know he’s only there to get killed, so he’s going to get killed. Then my wife and I aren’t going to be the same, we’re going to start arguing and our marriage is going to fall apart. Just for kicks I’m assuming I’m going to lose my job, and that’s where I get to the ending. I know it ends for me with “and he found himself unable to turn away from that beautiful blue sky, wondering if its creator was the same God that did this to him.”

I don’t blame God, because I don’t think he’s up in the clouds, focused entirely on making this happen to me. I think Rudolph Crispin is the one making this happen to me.