Dr. Defacto entered the zoo.
It was straight to the House of Reptiles this morning, to inspire yet another day of evil. He waved to the alligators and crocodiles lounging in the mud. He walked to the indoor exhibits, past the lizards whose saurian tongues flicked behind the heavy glass, and made his way to his favorites, the snakes. He giggled godlessly as a python sat completely still, his mid-section thick with the bulge of some unfortunate rodent. With utter delight he contemplated pushing an employee into the crocodile exhibit or at the very least wasting napkins in the overpriced cafeteria.
After a good dose of the darkest creatures in the zoo, Dr. Defacto walked back to his dull black station wagon to find a $230 ticket on his windshield. For a man with no discernible income, this was a bit excessive. A large cloud passed over the sun and a single burning thought took hold of his mind: “I am an evil Mastermind.” This “ticket” did not belong to his world. He attempted to rip it but the plastic coating made this impossible. He bent and twisted a corner lamely which did nothing. He made a mental note to work on it later.
Upon entering his sad, American-made vehicle, a 1983 Plymouth station wagon painted with regular black house paint, he did what he always did. He popped in a self-help cassette. Today happened to be tape #3 side two; the subject was, “Prioritizing”. He had been quite surprised when he realized how well these tapes applied to doing evil, then wondered if everyone from every profession felt that way. Perhaps.
“Success is based on pinpointing the specific information one needs to confidently take the necessary steps to achieve your goal. Do you know what your goal is? Have you pinpointed the most logical first step? Having all the steps mapped out is great but remember there will always be new factors one must adapt to. And please, don't let yourself be intimidated from doing research. Use all the resources available to you. Remember, every successful person once knew absolutely nothing about the field they eventually mastered. And don't hesitate to get out there and ask questions either!”
Dr. Defacto hit stop on his tape player. Eureka, the library! He drove the rest of the way in perfect silence.
He was too nervous to ask the librarian what books on evil they had so he gave his name and after a short wait was seated in front of a computer already logged on to the Internet. After fumbling around and coming up with a bunch of movie reviews and gratuitous homepages, he knew where to go. He hoped this would prove to be “that first critical step towards achieving your goal”. He headed for the biography section. H, M, B, D, S, L, G. Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, Napoleon Bonaparte, Jeffrey Dahmer, Joseph Stalin, Bin Laden, and Mahatma Gandhi. He figured that reading about Gandhi would give him insight into the opposition's mindset. He headed towards the checkout desk then remembered he still hadn't applied for a card. He made his way to the furthest cubicle and flipped furiously through pages filled with man's atrocities against man. Poetry, he thought. After hours of hardcore research he opened the book on the peace-loving Gandhi. Much to his chagrin, he found some of his philosophies fascinating. All that starving though. It made him...hungry.
Dr. Defacto pulled up to an old diner, a silver trailer called Ray's Place. He threw an old, chewed-up cigar on the floor and counted out change from his ashtray. The coins had been lifted a few days ago from a local fountain. High from digesting mankind's evils he rudely demanded the best table, making a grand sweeping gesture with his arm. A burnt-out waitress with tied-back light brown hair imitated his gesture then pointed out his choice of three available booths. She assumed that a guy dressed in gray sweatpants, a dirty t-shirt, bright yellow fishing boots, and a White Sox cap was probably not a huge tipper. The locals chuckled and sipped their coffee. Halfway through his blueberry danish, dreading the shame of paying for his meal in mostly pennies and nickels, he thought for the millionth time how the greatest obstacle to his goal of spreading mass evil and destruction to every corner of the Earth was money. Money is the root of all evil; everyone knew that.
Disgusted with himself he went into the cramped restaurant bathroom and threw a few rolls of toilet paper in the toilet bowl. Minor evil, but hey at least it was something. Some Mastermind, even this didn't alleviate his mood. It only reminded him how truly low he had sunk. The symbolism did not escape him. He slapped some change down on his table, dropped his half-eaten blueberry danish into his pocket and headed for his car.
Damn. Damn damn damn damn damn damn damn damn. Turning the key and pumping the gas pedal he realized the fumes he had been riding on had at last reached absolute zero. The area above his left eye throbbed and his nose tickled. He sneezed and a wet band of snot hung from his nostril like a thin snake. He grabbed for a napkin and while wiping this mess was struck as surely as if he had been hit by lightning. He felt rather than thought the words of perhaps his greatest idea, ever. Holy serendipity. Step 1: Find some homeless people. (Ha, throw a stone and hit three of them). Step 2: Explain to them that they have a ground floor opportunity to strike out against the very people that have pushed them down their whole lives. Step 3: Amass an army of these people to collect and redeem cans to finance his evil. On the other side of the napkin (gross!) he scribbled various vague mathematical computations.
He locked the station wagon and headed for a soup kitchen. He could barely contain himself as he envisioned a real evil fortress, radar equipment, secret CIA death rays. He sipped his canned soup, surmising that his people would be in better moods with full stomachs. Outside he began his crusade, carefully explaining that the earnings were not for himself per se but....that's about as far as he got before a guy in his mid-thirties, about a decade his junior, slugged him in the nose. He had been so blind to even the possibility of this happening that he barely had time to turn his head. The others cheered at this real-life free pay-per-view. Clearly he had skipped some of the crucial building steps between him and his goal. He crawled pathetically to the nearest fire hydrant and resting against it, fell asleep.
In his dream he was walking through the aisles of a Sam's Club as everyone in the store cheered him on. “Go Doctor!” They smiled not realizing that some of them were in fact the very same people who he would later reign evil upon. Fools! Wait! Which people would he do evil to? Surely it was more evil to do evil to good people? Something about that didn't quite sit right in his dream-hazy mind. He admitted that he wanted most to do evil to people who had done him wrong. OH NO! He wanted to do evil to evil people! Wasn't that on some level (yuck!) good? These questions seriously hurt. He looked down at the cart he was pushing, noticing it had no wheels, then upon further investigation realized he had no feet. This Sam's Club was filled with all kinds of futuristic electronic equipment yet for some reason he was filling his cart with huge boxes of cupcakes, diet soda, Hamburger Helper, canned green beans. None of this stuff was evil! How unfair! He was blowing his big chance. And the people were clapping louder than ever, clapping loudly, so loudly...
“What a dork!” said a young, pretty blond teen, laughing and pointing, stating the obvious. A small group had gathered around him as he realized, yes, a dog had just pissed on him. The insults came fast and furious: ”He looks pissed!” “Probably the first shower he's had in weeks.” “The dog got bored!” It was at this point and time that the great Dr. Defacto had what is commonly referred to as a nervous breakdown.
After a shower at the men's shelter and two more bowls of soup, he was more himself again. He decided that tomorrow he would return to the zoo, the one place that had never failed to inspire him.
It was during this particular visit that he hatched his greatest idea. It was evil. It was very evil. Yet it was practical too. He ran from the zoo to the closest subway station and jumped the turnstile with a vigor he hadn't felt in years. Four stops later he got off and walked to a hardware store where he knew the owner to be an ancient old man barely capable of standing, much less policing his store. There he stole a small tube of Krazy Glue. Not wanting to push his luck as far as breaking the law, he trudged back to the library (as opposed to jumping another subway turnstile). He wished he could tell all the villains he had read about what he was up to, but that was of course impossible; many of them were dead. He knew in his heart they would be proud though. With great stealth and the coincidence of a very unhappy patron making a scene over God knows what, he was able to get to about half the computers and pull up pornography sites on their screens. Then, he merely squeezed glue between all the keys so that the only way to rid the machines of these offensive images would be to disconnect them. He left the library hastily after the disturbance at the front desk died down.
From here on, his mission was clear. He went on to glue the buttons in pay phones, windshield wipers and door handles of cars, and working up a good dose of mania was even able to convince himself he was "shutting down the city".
Now he had a system. That was one of the most crucial steps according to the self-help tapes he so coveted and loved. He would steal a tube of Krazy Glue at the beginning of each week, and then browse through phone books for new ideas on what and where to glue. And of course there was always an endless supply of cars and bicycles to be rendered unusable by simply squeezing glue into their locks. After a couple months of this routine you can imagine his joy when one day, while taking the subway back uptown after stealing not one but two tubes of glue, he found a discarded local newspaper. Only a few pages in he read the dark, bold letters:
"Krazy Vandal Terrorizing City".
His lips barely moved as he mumbled to nobody, "My, how evil". He adjusted his posture and ran his fingers lovingly over the tubes of glue in his pocket. Winking at a teenaged pregnant mother who immediately scowled and turned her head, he thought yes, yes, today will be a good day.
