by Patton Lee Beaugus

I’ve always wanted to be really evil. Ah, ha, ha-ha ha, haaa!

This desire is not a new thing. I’ve always wanted to live on the dark side. Be the bad guy. Wear the black hat. Frighten little children just by smiling at them.

While other kids were practicing basketball, I practiced a mad laugh patterned after some mad scientist I saw in a b-movie on Shock Theater. The only person my laugh scared was my little sister, Jody Lee, who was also afraid of her Guardian Angel night light.

I was fortunate in that I was raised as a Catholic at a time where an eight year old kid could a commit mortal sin with cheese on a Friday afternoon at McDonald’s without even trying to be bad. Eternal damnation with fries. Every Friday. As long as I didn’t go to confession, I was a made guy! But alas, and even Aflack, I went to a Catholic School where we had mandatory confession every Saturday morning, which was more often than some of us bathed. Joyously damned on Friday afternoon. In the state of grace in time for Communion on Sunday. I just couldn’t win!

I’ve always identified with bad guys, starting when I was a little, little kid and watched Soupy Sales at lunchtime. There was Soupy and White Fang and Black Tooth. White Fang was “The Biggest and Meanest Dog in the USA,” so he was my favorite. “Lo ho ho!”

Then there was my favorite movie character in the Mary Martin version of Peter Pan — Captain Hook. I learned the words to all his songs… like the one about poisoning Wendy with a cake with “icing mixed with poison, ’til it turns a tempting green”. Hook made being bad so cool!

When grownups asked us rugrats what we wanted to be when we grew up, my cousins would say cowboy or nurse or fireman or astronaut. I’d say, “henchman.”

But it was not to be.

I did try. I did.

When I was a teenager I sold my soul to Satan. Well, to be honest, which I am, even though I don’t want to be, it was more like I gave my soul away, and I’m not even sure if Old Nick accepted it. You see, I’d just read George Bernard Shaw’s play, The Devil’s Disciple and like the hero, Richard Dudgeon, I decided to stand by Satan in this life, with the understanding he’d stand by me in the next. It made a man of Dudgeon, but it seemed to have no affect on me, my soul, or the growing of chest hair which I was convinced was a prerequisite for evil, and that lack may have been the prime reason I never quite reached the evil incarnate stature of Charles Manson, Idi Amin, or Microsoft.

In high school I did acquire the nickname Beelzebub. But that wasn’t earned by acts that lived up to Nazi bedtime stories. I got the nickname partially because I had bright red hair, but mostly because when the other kids took flash pictures, everybody had eyeballs but me. In my case you could only see the whites of my eyes. Eerie, but not as evil as performing operations on small woodland creatures while chanting in upside-down Latin.

I would gladly have become a vampire. The height of my high school fantasies was imagining a date with Cheryl Mary Slamkowski, our head cheerleader. In my fevered imagination, the date would end with warm, sticky, copper-flavored blood dripping down my chin onto her pure white blouse unbuttoned just enough to lay one perfect drop on her white cotton bra! What a great fantasy, huh? But it never happened. I never got the date. I never even asked Carol Mary out. I never was bitten by a vampire. I was never able to lay a wet one on Carol Mary’s neck like I was sure she would have wanted her Evil Overlord to do at the stroke of midnight on our first and last date.

I’ve always wanted to shoot somebody. I’d loved to have shot a good guy, preferably in the back. But I’d have settled for winging an innocent bystander with a ricochet. Unfortunately, I’ve never fired a gun. It just isn’t fair!

Over the long boring years of no mass murders, no human sacrifices, no parking in handicapped spots, I’ve had to face up to it. At evil, I’ve always been pretty much of a non-starter.

I know I could have been great at evil. I just didn’t know how to do it correctly. What I’ve needed all this time is a Handbook like “Evil For Dummies.” While I’ve been a Dummie all my life, I never found a Dummie’s Book that could teach me to be as nasty as I want to be. They don’t have anything like that at the Southbury Public Library. Or even on Amazon.com. Darn it, I need that damned book quickly, or pretty soon I’ll pass away and my headstone will read, “He Led A Nice Life.”

The worst I’ve ever done is to register and vote straight Republican. I’ll bet after all my disclaimers of never making it to the advanced levels of evil, you’d have thought I couldn’t have achieved such infamy. But you’d have been wrong. Ah, ha, ha, haa!

I know when I stand trembling at the edge of the fiery river that surrounds Hell, and that giant three-headed poochie asks what I’ve done to earn my place among the Evil Damned, I can proudly say, “I voted for Dick Cheney three times, once on a write-in ballot for President.”

It just might be enough.