Don't You Know Who I Think I Am?: Confessions of a First-Class Asshole Read online

  PRAISE FOR JUSTIN ROSS LEE

  “Even when he’s at his ugliest, he’s beautifully dressed.”

  —New York Times

  “Car-crash ability to piss people off.” —New York Post

  “His hacks are equal parts ingenious and outrageous.”

  —Nightline, ABC News

  “Savvy travel hacker.” —Stephen Colbert

  “Travels all around the world, eating good food, staying fancy.”

  —Wendy Williams

  “Three things he never pays for: parking, publicity and pussy.”

  —New York Observer

  Don’t

  You Know

  Who I Think

  I Am?

  Don’t

  You Know

  Who I Think

  I Am?

  Confessions of a First-Class Asshole

  JUSTIN ROSS LEE

  Copyright © 2016 Justin Ross Lee

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by Inkshares, Inc., San Francisco, California

  www.inkshares.com

  Cover design by David Drummond

  © gualtiero boffi/Shutterstock, © Ivan Cholakov/Shutterstock,

  © Viorel Sima/Shutterstock, © grandboat/Shutterstock

  ISBN: 9781941758694

  e-ISBN: 9781941758700

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2015948590

  First edition

  Printed in the United States of America

  A NOTE FROM THE GENERAL

  COUNSEL OF INKSHARES

  On Inkshares, readers decide what gets published. This book, Don’t You Know Who I Think I Am? Confessions of a First-Class Asshole, contains views that may be deemed misogynistic, obscene, and reprehensible. They do not reflect the views of Inkshares or its employees. They are solely the views of Mr. Lee, the self-styled “asshole” who wrote this book.

  INTRODUCTION

  INTRODUCTION? I NEED

  NO INTRODUCTION

  I fucking hate when I’m asked, “So, what do you do?”

  I find it painful to explain my vocation. I’m not really an asshole; I just play one on TV. To someone just meeting me, it can be a risky interaction. Explaining my anti-nine-to-five lifestyle tends to border on arrogance. Is this all an act? Hardly. I think of it as more of a performance.

  Because I don’t do; I am. This glorious, repellent, beautiful train wreck of a life is my own fabulous creation and gift to the world. You’ve seen me on Bravo’s The Millionaire Matchmaker, gracing the pages of tabloids, trilled about in newspapers, featured on morning shows in Croatia, and causing American sensationalism in Sweden. Or, more likely, you haven’t.

  But that’s just the dressing, just the richly decorated yarmulke on the beautiful Jew-fro of my existence.

  So what is it I actually do?

  I’m a pioneer in the field of social media celebrity. I keep my loyal band of online followers on a tight leash, feeding them intoxicating morsels of my incredible life, just enough to keep them wet and interested. I gauge what gets their dreidels hard, then give them more. Some of them love it, even want to marry me. Most of them hate it. And those are the ones I care about most—the haters. If they fucking hate my dumb, smug, pampered face but keep coming back to the table for seconds, if they love hating me, I’ve got ’em. Right there is my key demographic. “Treat them mean to keep them keen” is a motto I adhere to.

  “So that’s what you do? You stick shit on the Internet?”

  No, again, I’ve lost you. That’s just an ingredient in my special sauce. It propagates the fan base and moves things along. But that’s not what I do. It’s what everyone does. Everyone lives their life online, and they all need a leader. Someone to look at and admire. I play that role. But again, that’s just a means to an end. Same as my fashion line.

  “Ah, right, so you’re in the fashion business?”

  Sigh. I’m prone to tell people I’m a haberdasher. First, because that sounds incredibly pretentious. Second, because of conversations like this. Trying to explain my life to someone who holds a position of authority is like trying to get a free hand job from an arthritic—that is, pointless and painful. However, this approach comprises a decent shortcut when I’m trying to conclude a tedious exchange. And it’s a slightly more diplomatic response than “Google me,” although I have resorted to that one when I’m feeling frisky.

  I run a successful company, Pretentious Pocket, that produces pocket squares rendered from the finest “Fuck You” silk. But again, it’s a smoke screen. A way to make an impression on people, a device so they’ll remember me. If you give someone a business card, they’re probably going to toss it. Give them a beautiful, garish piece of silk in a presentation box and a handwritten note. It’s something that pays dividends every time they see you. Trust me. It’s a business, and it gets me things for free.

  “Why do you need things for free when you’re so successful?”

  Because successful people get things for free anyway. It’s the fucked-up way of the world. Once you hit that level, people pay you to wear their clothes and eat their tea and crumpets. And, while some might see right through it, to others, I’m seen as a successful person. I’ve been sent $3,000 suits to wear and shirts to accompany them. I get free skin care and upgrades, and I’m comped meals and champagne. I’m sent luxury ice cubes. Ice cubes! Ten dollars a pop. And I get paid not to go certain places. I’ve been invited and uninvited a half dozen times to the same event. That’s when I feel successful, when I reach that level of polarization.

  I’m on that level because I appear to be on that level. You may have seen me at exclusive events, on the red carpet, spilling expensive drinks on Cuba Gooding Jr. I’ve made it my mission to mock celebrity in order to become a celebrity. It’s not about legitimacy; it’s the appearance of legitimacy. All the bullshit I did to get pictures taken with celebrities? People now pull that shit on me. Because, just like me, they don’t really care about meeting someone. What they really care about is possessing the evidence of having met someone, especially a celebrated someone. That evidence is worth a thousand drunken anecdotes. That’s why I’d rather leave my testicles at home than my camera.

  “So you’re a photographer?”

  No, dumbass, I make sure that my exploits are exploited, which means they have to be documented. If I’m in an Emirates A380 first-class cabin, then I want the world to know about it. I want them titillated. I want them salivating. I want them to see how much Dom I downed and caviar I spooned.

  “So you like to fly?”

  I, Justin Ross Lee, am the instigator and leading proponent of JewJetting. Allow me to explain. For generations, people have flown just to get from one place to another. With Jew-Jetting, the flight experience is the thing—tracking down and embarking on an airplane ride of such unimaginable opulence that the dummies in coach would gag with envy on their dry, chalky pretzels.

  JewJetting is the sport of flying for the sake of it; the destination is of little importance. Do you think I want to go to Kiev? Fuck no! No one wants to go to Kiev unless they’re selling Kevlar. But if some new carrier has launched a first-class cabin with ermine throw pillows, a foot massager, and a free foie gras dispenser, then I’d be the first one checking in. I love the mystery, energy, and satisfaction of luxury air travel. Besides, when I do it, it seems
to piss off a lot of the people I want to piss off.

  And now I know you’re going to ask the other fucking question I hate: “But how can you afford to do all this?”

  Sigh. There are a few common misconceptions about me. There always are when you’re dealing with a person of interest. Was I born with a silver spoon in my mouth? Yes, definitely. Did I experience privilege? Absolutely. Did that experience give me a leg up in life? Sure, why not? However, not quite in the way you might think. (And incidentally, those privileged people fucking hate me, too.)

  The well-heeled I had the unfortunate experience of growing up amongst do have money, but that’s usually all they do with it. They have it. They don’t enjoy it. In fact, it terrifies them. They simply abide by a predetermined prescription for acquiring and maintaining excess. They fear that if they stray from the tediously conventional path, they’ll be punished, or singled out. People such as these forced me to create the legend I am today—whereby I’m proud to say that I’ve circumvented my own circumcision in order to escape the bullshit. My lifestyle is the ultimate revenge. Hi, Mom!

  My current endeavors are not trust-funded. My family is as mortified as anyone by what I do. They’re not going to give me a dime. Despite appearances, I don’t give a shit about money. I think of money as I do of everything else around me: as a means to an end. If I hit Powerball tomorrow, would I carry on doing what I do? Totally. Because what I’m doing is being JRL. No amount of bullion can interfere with that. Attention is the only currency I trade in, good or bad. Preferably bad. Negative attention brings positive results.

  “So you want people to hate you?” you might inquire.

  Given my lifestyle, it can’t be helped. It does tend to piss people off. If you actually work for a living and pay for stuff, you don’t want to hear about a jerk like me who just metaphorically whips out his dick online and doesn’t have to pay for anything. So what should I do? Stop flying, drinking, and dating beautiful women? Stop appearing at exclusive nightclubs and restaurants while people pay me for the privilege? Just to keep some office drones happy? Joke’s on Jew!

  “Oh? You’re Jewish?”

  Wow, you are sharp. I’m “super Jewish” according to the New York Post. It’s another buzzy shortcut to annoying people. They see me as this overcompensated, arrogant, pretentious, spoiled little putz. Exactly what I aspire to be, and I can’t think of anything more beautiful.

  You might deem my ridiculously short workweek and general flaneurism rampant underachieving. Correction: it’s rampant overunderachieving. Minimum effort for maximum return. It’s something I’ve excelled at for most of my life, and I’m happy to share my dirty little secrets with you.

  “I don’t think I understand.”

  Good. Then I’ve won.

  CHAPTER 1

  MY JEWLOSOPHY

  April 11, 2008

  Pastis was a nauseatingly popular eating establishment located in Manhattan’s overly legendary meatpacking district. For those of you unfortunate enough to live in one of the flyover states, the meatpacking district is where (1) by day, burly men once packed meat into trucks for delivery, and (2) by night, other men packed meat into each other. In the 1990s, the bottom fell out of both markets and the area slowly gentrified into the overpriced nightmare it is today.

  At the time of my Pastis incident, I was lost. Hard to believe, I know, looking at the phenomenon I have now become. But true. Yes, I was a dick, an exemplary dick. I’d recently been fired from the only job I’d ever had. I lasted four days. (In grad school, they are very effective at teaching you how to get a job, but not necessarily how to keep one.) It seems the rest of the world understands that you don’t write defamatory things about your superiors and colleagues for all to see on Facebook. I must have slept through that class. I shot my mouth off online and got canned.

  I swiftly realized I was professionally unhireable. I’d had an inkling before that first dismissal, an assumption that I wasn’t exactly suited for the everyday world of work. However, I had, until then, lacked the opportunity to test my assumption.

  Sure enough, not long after I was given a keycard and directions to the photocopier, I screwed up and was out on my ass.

  In my short tenure at my job, I learned that to succeed in the workplace, you have to conform. In fact, that’s pretty much all you have to do. (It also helps to refrain from Facebook critiques of your colleagues.) In my visits to the offices of major film studios, national newspapers, and global media outlets, I’ve seen mostly people who are carbon masses with no discernible talent except the ability to be affable and sit behind a desk without catching fire. Unsurprisingly, some of these people have the word “executive” as part of their title.

  I was not one of them. I was never going to be one of them.

  I am a grade A nonconformist. Since my diaper-shitting days, I’ve done all I can to provoke, annoy, and infuriate. While these are not valued skills in the workplace, they are essential components of my nature. The thought of me getting a job and sitting in some dinky office space for a decade, signing a card for Gloria’s birthday, or heading to Applebee’s for an end-of-the-week celebration lunch on Friday makes me want to open a vein. I’d purposefully developed special skills in my young life to avoid precisely that. During boarding school and college, I’d honed those skills. I’d designed systems and practices to subvert every establishment that tried to contain me. It was what I was good at. My one problem was how to monetize what I was good at.

  So there I stood in front of Pastis on a beautiful spring day, regretfully looking at the outside seating area, where one couldn’t get a reservation no matter how many dicks one sucked. It was one of the most exclusive restaurants in Manhattan at the time, and I felt like the lowliest schmuck on the Lower East Side. In my dire state of unemployment, that exalted level of dining was a mere fantasy for the likes of me. The whiff of failure permeated the air around me like cheap cologne on a New York cab driver with a three-syllable name.

  I approached the maître d’s podium with my two companions, both members of the elite Jew Live Crew, and resigned myself to the fate of a dingy table next to the crapper. If we were lucky. The maître d’ was already regarding me like the trash I felt like. His mouth was already forming the word “no” before I’d even opened my yapper. I very often have that effect on people. Before we even engage, they’ve established an opinion about me, usually a negative one. (It can be tiresome but, read on, also extremely beneficial.)

  Suddenly something stirred inside me. I became hyper-aware of my surroundings, instantly cognizant of certain props within my grasp that could be employed for the creation of mayhem. On the podium was a water glass. I knew right away what to do. Before identifying myself, I reached for a match-book cover and, with a sweep of my Zegna cuff, knocked the glass to the ground, where it shattered.

  Pandemonium ensued, as it tends to in this type of establishment when something goes awry and the perfectly ordered infrastructure derails. Servers appeared, brooms were brandished, and importantly, backs were turned away from the podium to attend to the disaster.

  I began to apologize profusely in the manner of a drunken guest who has accidentally shit on the seder plate. And while the staff was occupied, I seized my opportunity, leaned over the podium, and snuck a look at the reservation list. I instinctively knew two things were important: the time and party size. Anything else was irrelevant. Which is why, when order was finally restored, I found myself saying, “Yes, reservation for three. Paglieri’s the name.”

  Now, I don’t look like a Paglieri. Maybe Paglieristein or Pagliberg would be more convincing. But the management just wanted this fucking glass smasher out of their hair as quickly as possible. A flustered hostess grabbed a couple of menus and led us away.

  We were seated at an outside table. Scratch that; we were seated at the best outside table. The best fucking table at the most desirable location in New York.

  We ordered drinks in an atmosphere of mild hysteria.
My companions were completely confused, but I just told them to go with it and be sure to call me Benito within earshot of the maître d’.

  Our order arrived, and we seemed to have pulled it off. It was all going swimmingly—when out of the corner of my eye I caught the unmistakably erect posture of a restaurant general manager approaching at speed. If I could describe his gait, it would be something like a swift, panicked glide. He stood beside me at the table and hovered there as if I had just scratched his Fiat.

  “Mr. Paglieri?”

  “Yes?” I replied, possibly with the slightest hint of a Tuscan accent.

  “It seems there is a problem . . .”

  “No problems at all. The service has been excellent. Myself and my companions are highly satisfied. Thanks for stopping by.”

  I turned back to my friends and continued chatting, gesticulating in a characteristically Mediterranean way.

  The general manager held his post. “No, sir, I really must speak to you,” he said firmly.

  “Can I get some more ice when you get a chance?” I said nonchalantly.

  The bullshit just naturally flowed from me. My fellow diners looked on with openmouthed expressions that I imagine most people make when watching 2 Girls 1 Cup.

  “Sir, I was wondering if I could possibly see some identification?”

  “Well, I’m flattered, obviously. Thank you for the compliment, but this is a virgin iced tea. We were considering some wine with our meal. Is there anything you’d recommend?”

  I think I could see the real Mr. Paglieri loitering by the podium and growing increasingly frantic. He looked like a more volatile Tony Soprano, and I wondered if I should have stolen a less ethnic name.

  “Sir, you are obviously not the man you have claimed to be. I will have to insist you leave immediately.”

  “We are very comfortable here, thank you. Is Andre working today?”