The Seven Deadly Sins (11 page)

Vain people are really just snobs.

The other side of this shiny coin is that vanity can make people feel like shit. How does that work? Vanity makes you feel like shit when you do not feel you look as good as you should.
You may think this is a lack thereof, but I disagree. I think people with low self-esteem and terrible self-images are the most vain because they cannot love themselves for what and who they are. Damned if you are hot and damned if you are not—is that not a seriously fucked up thing to go through? I guess I am vain after all because I believe in my heart that I am ugly, misshapen, and completely unappealing. If only I were a little bit taller....

Now most people misplace their vanity by zeroing in on one thing and ignoring the whole. Vanity is self-obsession on a base level. Like envy, it is a personal competition with everything and everyone around you. Two vain people cannot inhabit the same space. It will turn into Thunderdome in seconds, leaving disparaging comments and daggerlike stares on the battlefield like the Civil War. When two people so involved in themselves face off, it makes Gettysburg look like a game of slapjack. Do yourself a favor: Avoid this confrontation like a case of crabs in a dormitory. You will walk away with claw marks, bruises, and caked with blood, resembling a survivor from a
Nightmare on Elm Street
movie.

Then again, reverse vanity makes you just as combative. How many times have you gone fishing for a compliment about a part of your appearance you knew was gorgeous? “I just wish these jeans fit better” or “Do these shoes go with this gun?” Come on, you know you look good, at least you should know you look good. In fact, vanity is not a sin until it makes people sin to satisfy the Eternal Internal Guise Fight. Not only does vanity make men capable of lying, but it also makes women force men to lie to them. If you wrote the laws of vanity on some scratchy black chalkboard in a beat-up basement research center, they would read as such:

Sometimes vanity is just plain verboten. When was the last time you asked your drinking buddies if your hair looked all right? Have you ever broached the question of weight with the guys on your bowling team? Guys are mostly oblivious to real vanity; in fact, if their pants still fit and their underwear is clean, they cannot be bothered with that girly stuff. It certainly explains the nose hair and the forests growing in the darkest regions of their crotches. If there is not too much funk coming off of it, guys will wear it. If it is neither blush, salmon, bashful, cinnamon, or any other shade of pink, straight men will pull it on and push out the door. Do not misunderstand me—we are just as vain as anybody else. We are just not that good at it. It would certainly explain why we look so uncomfortable when we actually try to dress up and look appealing.

Women, however, are devoted to the art of
silent vanity
. They are fine with the way they look and feel, but they just need you to be on the receiving end of their vocalized inner monologue for the rest of their (and your) life. Where guys can get out of bed, rinse off, fumble for some piece of clothing that is not so offensive, and head out for the day, women are like the armed forces on D-Day. They rise at dawn. They wash for hours. They spend an afternoon on their hair and an evening on their
makeup. They plan outfits like uniforms. Everything must match and everything must be perfect. If one thing does not come out the way they imagined, their day is ruined. Good luck trying to get a crumb of enthusiasm out of your significant other: All they can think about is the bang that got away from the rest of the hairdo herd. Even if the whole ensemble goes according to plan, you will be bombarded with these fateful words for at least forty-eight hours: “Do I look alright?” This will be peppered with follow-ups such as, “Are you sure?” or “Really?” It will feel like a telemarketer doing his damnedest to get you to subscribe to
Walking Weekly
, but the best you can do is spin the vanity volley back onto the court and miss on purpose. Let her win—you never had a chance to begin with.

Vanity is responsible for getting a lot of bad clothing into the national consciousness. You do not believe me? One word: bellbottoms. The most vain people are the ones who have nothing to be vain about. Supermodels look like they are made out of thin bits of driftwood. Most male models look like they could be girls if they were not forced to grow those shitty beards, and even then it is suspect. Fashion designers dress like what Timothy Leary used to see from all the acid he took. The only differences between a freak and a fashion guru are IQ and a Twitter page.

Not real enough? Okay, vanity is telling someone you love them just to gain some sort of trust because you believe you can change them and make them better. You know something, the more I think about this one, the more I think it is fun. I would love to just blame that shit on fictional characters from some Ryan Reynolds flick, but I have felt the barrel of that gun pushed against the back of my head a few more times than I am happy to admit. When a personality does not even come close to living
up to the hype of that person's internal movie trailer, you should run, not walk, to the nearest exit. Things like that are the reasons why divorce is up, romance is down, and life has a hint of shit in its aftertaste when it comes to love. But every once in a while you get proven wrong, and when you do it feels great.

Back to vanity: Is it me or do vain people look a lot like puppets? They have exaggerated movements, most have funny voices, and they really want you to keep your attention focused in their direction, but only from the neck up. That is just like old episodes of
Sesame Street
: “A is for
Asshole
! Ha ha ha!!” Yeah, I crack myself up a lot more than I crack anybody else up, but that is okay. At least I am smart enough to get my own jokes. Vain people will crib quotes from famous folks in an attempt to seem “in” and edgy without having a fucking clue what they are talking about. Half the time they only say things because it could seem sweet through the sound of their voice. Meanwhile, people with half a brain would love to choke all their air out.

Self-importance can really be a pain, but I still say it is neither a sin nor is it deadly. Sure, it is a trait that can be hazardous to your health—people always want to hurt the fuckface at the party—but vain people do not kill people unless they can look good doing it. And those are just too many things for a vainglorious brain to handle at the same time. That would be like teaching an Arabian horse to fire a rocket launcher with its teeth while it stamps out its own age with its hooves. It may work in a National Lampoon movie, but in real life, thank goodness, it is simply not the way it works. Well, shit, I take that back—I guess you could drive off the road when you are primping yourself in your car mirrors, but I doubt the scriptures had that in mind when they meant “deadly.” All they had back then were goat carts, and goat carts did not include side mirrors until 1957.

Sometimes vanity is in the eye of the beholder, and judgments like that make for bad gossip. Assuming someone is full of his or herself is just as bad as being full of yourself. I am sure there are good people out there who have these rumors following them around like paparazzi half the time. So why do people desperately try to tear people down all the time? Envy is a great reason. Jealous saps try to find any weakness in the armor so they can feel a little better than the other does. But does that not require just as much energy as building yourself to a place where you do not care about other people's statures? The mind boggles. It is like a Republican and a Democrat debating how to fight inflation and recession. One thinks you should dole out free money in tax cuts to people to encourage them to spend it on homegrown products, thereby stimulating the economy. The other one thinks you should instead use the money to start public programs, thereby creating jobs for the unemployed and filtering the money back into the economy. Who is right? Better yet, which way is easier?

I know several vain people in my line of work. I also know people who would have every right to be vain and they are not. I am only human; I have my moments of putting myself on a pedestal. But for the most part, I just try to do the best work I can with the time I have. Those others, those bodies who think the world revolves around them, they will claw halfway to make everyone under them feel like the top is impossible. They will shower themselves in praise and find new ways to reward mediocre results. They will crow on a fence until someone throws a fucking boot at them. They will never stop because if they do, what else do they have?

And there is the truth of it: the fear. It is the fear of being outrun when the bullets are flying. It is the fear of being eaten by a shark before you can reach the shallows. It is the fear of being the constant stranger: never being recognized, reconciled, or rewarded. It makes good cops dirty, thieves wealthy, and sinners worthy. We all worship at the Great Tit, hoping for an extra few seconds of suckle before the pipes run dry, before we get to feel full and happy. We might as well have blood and skin under our fingernails because we have all left our marks on the ones we held back in order to hold our own.

Fear makes us buy stupid shit advertised by paid programming. If these half-hour commercials are good at anything, it is selling us crap at 4 a.m. we never needed. But by appealing to our shoddy sense of self, we are left clamoring for things like the Ab Circle or the Power Juicer. We get conned by paid models who are too busy flexing their muscles to deliver their lines convincingly. And yet they are able to convince us. How the hell does that work? Guys with deeper tans than the soldiers of the French Foreign Legion, guys with British accents, fast-talking guys with keen N'Sync headsets who are prone to violence against prostitutes—all these “qualified” men are really wouldbe actors, shilling paraphernalia based on an infallible concept: Whether buyers know it or not, they hate themselves and it is a matter of time before they realize they don't need all this cluttered nonsense. From the Bowflex to the Thighmaster, inventive minds have dedicated themselves to making sure that if we do not think there is anything wrong with us, they will let us know. Service with a smile leads to grief with a grimace, all so the particular product that you were made to feel like “you could not live without” can now gather dust within three months.

I have also noticed that vain people with no money act differently than vain people with lots of money. The poor get in fistfights to prove their worth; the rich just marry different celebrities. But pettiness knows no tax bracket or zip code, no borders or boundaries. It could very well be the one “sin” that is communist, libertarian, and capitalist. If you have the right gear and you give great beard, you too can be the darling of the antibourgeoisie. When everybody sucks, so much for the class system. You can paint that shit any shade of Mao red you want—it is the universal qualm. All it takes to set it off is a little subtle push.

It was 2001 and I was playing a show at the L.A. Forum with Slipknot. I was wandering around the backstage area, watching how pompous people can become when they are convinced someone is watching. They were right I guess—somebody was watching. Unfortunately for them, it was me. And slowly but surely I was turning into a disgusted drunken asshole. I was cornered on all sides by braggarts, bimbos, and bastards. They were everywhere I looked. They were everywhere I was not. They were in my space and I did not like it. It was around that point that I found myself in a situation. There was a certain famous rock star trying to hold court at my show. I will not say his name because it would just be one more fucker trying to sue me and I have better things to do with my time. So we will just call him “Len.”

Len was doing his very best to call inordinate amounts of attention to himself at a show he was not playing. I think he believed
he
was a show in and of himself, you know what I am saying? So there he was, stumbling drunkenly from hallway to hallway, followed by a gaggle of dumb-ass hookers, each one looking more haggard and disastrous than the last. I think he
was truly enjoying himself, fluffing his invisible tail feathers up higher and higher until you could not even see around his entourage of pure suck. He seemed to be happy, at least as happy as this particular rascal could be, and Len made it known in the loudest voice he could muster that anyone who had a problem with the way he or “his bitches” were acting, they could say it to his face.

As luck would have it, he was standing right next to me when he was finished.

I asked him if he needed a drink and Len sneered at me, barking out booze orders for himself and his shitty harem. Then he turned around as if he were done with me. But I was not done with him. I turned him around with a calm hand and told him that if he and his rent-a-sluts wanted something to drink, he could make his way to the bar set up in the catering area. He laughed and said, “I am not going anywhere! Who are you?”