Last night I stood in the kitchen, waiting in grim
anticipation. In my left hand I clutched a freshly sharpened
butcher knife that was wet and gleaming in the ambient light. I was waiting in the shadows, full of dark determination and patience. At last, a key was inserted into the lock, the doorknob turned. A
hellish grimace contorted my face into something demonic and wicked as I ran towards the figure standing in the doorway, my knife held over my head in the classic assault pose.
"Hi E.C.," my target said nonchalantly, noticing me, his would-be assassin, "What's cooking?"
My eyes flashed angrily as the blade of the knife glinted. Macarthur Parker squinted, smiled and said, "Ah, I see you've finished stabbing the dishes. Good work."
He didn't run. He didn't shout in terror. He didn't even
cringe, not even a little. There's something about me that just fails to inspire fear.
Maybe it was the Elmo t-shirt I was wearing.
I've always had this problem. In High School I was sharp-tongued and bitter, but everyone signed my Yearbook "to a nice and witty guy..." all the same. I remember this one guy, we'll call him "Arnie", who wasn't wrapped too tight. He would take anything, any teasing comment made about him very seriously, get insulted and try to pick a fight. Any insulting comment made by anyone but me, that is. I tried unsuccesfully for three years to piss him off. I would say the nastiest, most vicious things to him to see if I could get him to scream, and he never would. I recall one particular phone conversation where I spent 45 minutes coldly pointing out reasons why Arnie was an idiot and yet another 15 minutes making fun of his academic pretensions (He had the second highest GPA in our class, mostly because of cheating) but instead of calling me a string of four-letter-words, Arnie laughed. I spent nearly an hour deprecating him, and Arnie just laughed at every barbed comment and chuckled at every vitriolic remark. My entire purpose was defeated because Arnie thought I was witty instead of mean.
And now, even children and small animals are blatantly unafraid of me. I used to babysit a precocious three-year-old frequently, and I'd always try to be a stern authoritarian. It never once worked. I'd yell, Joshua would laugh, hug my legs and insist that I was Buzz Lightyear from Toy Story. Buzz Lightyear? That's not very evil. I want children to think of me as Darth Vader, and somehow I rank only slightly above one of the Care Bears on the childhood menace scale. And no matter how much I scowl or glare, puppies and kittens always seem to find their way into my lap.
I'm fed up. What do I have to do to be taken seriously as a villain? Create a giant death ray? Front for a military coup in a small South American country? Clone that demonseed that stars in those obnoxious Pepsi commercials? It just seems that no matter how mean, cold-hearted, cruel, calculating and downright cantankerous I am, people just end up thinking of me as cuddly. Evil is not cuddly, dammit!