Author’s Comment: It is absolutely VITAL that you read Alias X’s story “Psst! I don’t Love My Sister” before you read this story. This one won’t make any sense at all to you if you don’t. This is not an endorsement of his story. It is more of a response.

Alias X wrote his story, in which he created a total loser, who wanted to be a total loser, and wanted to drag his winner of a sister down to his totally losing level. He succeeded in that, resulting in a really dark and dreary story about one of the dregs of society.

Being the kind of guy who prefers happy endings, I decided to see if there was a way to engineer a total loser into a position where he was the most successful total loser on the planet. I mean, how to you bring a total loser down? He’s already there, right?

Maybe not.

Bob

My plan had worked up to my loser expectations. I was living with my sister, who was supporting me. She had progressed from giving me a blowjob every morning to repay my ‘love’ for her, to the point where she actually let me fuck her, albeit only with a condom on, and I was now subsisting completely off of her largess. I had quit my job, and now lay around at ‘home’ until my sister stopped winning for the day and came home to spend what she thought was quality time with the only man who would ever love her.

I still don’t understand completely how it happened, or why I couldn’t stop it from happening, but the truth is that something did happen that just fucked up everything.

Even a total loser can’t stay home a hundred percent of the time. I had gone out to spend a little more of my sister’s money, and with usual loser ambivalence, I couldn’t decide whether to buy a new video game, or get something to eat. As a result I found myself standing in the mall, hair unkempt, clothes wrinkled, and probably a slightly glazed look in my eye as I stood there trying to make the simplest of decisions.

A perky young woman came up to me. Why she chose me I don’t know, but she did.

“Hi!” she said in this perky voice that grated slightly on my ears. “I’m taking a poll and we’d like to hear your opinions on a few things.”

“Not my opinion.” I answered automatically.

I stared at her breasts, which were nice mounds pushing out a blouse that was some sort of pastel color and was so thin I could see the design of the bra she was wearing under it. She was holding a clipboard in the crook of one arm, so maybe she thought I was looking at that.

“Yes! Your opinion!” she said perkily. I felt a slight throbbing right behind my forehead. Perky people do that to me. “Why don’t I buy you something to eat and we can sit and talk over there.”

She pointed to an alcove beside the fountain in the mall food court. My loser tendencies floated to the surface immediately. Free food is never turned down by a loser. And I was hungry. Or at least I thought I was hungry.

“What kind of poll?” I asked. Staying around this perky person would mean that throbbing would eventually turn into a bonafied headache.

“Actually, it’s to determine if you’ll be invited to be part of a focus group.” she said happily.

As a dyed-in-the-wool loser I was intimately familiar with what focus groups did. Focus groups decided what people liked. That was a crock, of course, since people like different things. What focus groups did was tell ‘normal’ people what they were supposed to like, whether they did or not. It was all part of the marketing strategy of big companies who had some worthless product that some winner thought was cool, and they wanted to sell this worthless product to as many losers as they could.

Being a loser myself, I was quite often on the receiving end of the crap that focus groups foisted on the public. One good example is the George Forman grill. You have a piece of meat. All it takes to get it ready to eat is to heat it to x number of degrees for x amount of time. Put a frying pan on the stove, drop the meat in, and presto, you have an edible burger. But some Focus group decided that a forty dollar plastic and metal thing that’s impossible to clean, and takes up room on the shelf when you’re not using it, was way better than just using a frying pan, which everybody already has, right? So some focus group got all excited about it and George Forman, who is a hopeless winner, sold umpteen million of the damn things, making even more money that he didn’t need. You get the idea.

So, the first thing that came to my mind was that if I got onto a focus group, I could quietly fuck up the results and maybe trash some hopeless winner’s bright idea for some bigger-and-better-new-and-improved stupid thing that didn’t need to exist in the first place.

About the only thing that really motivates a hopeless loser is the possibility that he can drag a hopeless winner down to his level. That is, after all, what got me to seduce my winner sister into being the unknowing slave to a hopeless loser, right?

So I made what would turn out to be the biggest mistake of my life. I let the perky bitch buy me lunch.

We settled in and she watched while I started eating my free pizza. She started firing off questions about how I felt about this and how I felt about that. Some of it was politics, and some was about the level of violence in American society. Some of it didn’t make any sense at all, like what colors I liked the most, and what kind of shoes I thought were best.

I don’t mean brands of shoes. She asked “If you were going on a walk that was between six blocks and a mile, what kind of shoes would you want to wear?”

“I don’t go on walks.” I said, trying to be as unhelpful as I could.

She marked something on her clipboard.

“If you did go on walks, what kind of shoes?” she insisted. “Tennis shoes? Sandals? Boots?”

“Flip flops.” I said through a mouthful of pepperoni. I figured that ought to shut her up.

She made another checkmark on the clipboard.

“How often do you have sex?” she asked brightly.

“Do I look like the kind of guy who has sex at all?” I countered.

Another mark on the clipboard. She didn’t push that one, but kept asking questions that didn’t appear to have any common ground at all.

Finally my burgeoning headache got the best of me.

“These are about the stupidest questions I’ve ever heard.” I said. I hadn’t gotten a napkin with my food, so I just wiped my lips with the sleeve of my shirt.

Another damned checkmark on that damned clipboard.

“You’re hired.” she said perkily, beaming at me.

“Who said I was looking for a job?” I snarled.

“You’re just the kind of person we’re looking for for this focus group.” she said happily. She lifted the top page on her clipboard and I heard the serrated line on a piece of paper tearing. She handed me something that looked about the size of a check. “Report to this address next Monday. We pay a hundred dollars a day.” She stood up, already looking around for another victim.

“I don’t want a job.” I complained. I looked at the paper. It had an address on it and the logo of one of the major television broadcasters. “What’s this for anyway?”

That was my second mistake, after letting her buy me lunch.

She didn’t even look at me. Her head was swiveling all around as she searched for another potential focus group participant, like a hawk surveys a field full of tasty mice. She had winner stamped all over her. But that couldn’t be right. She’d picked me, after all, and I was a patented total loser.

“We’re screening new television programs.” she said as her eagle eyes lit up. “I have to go now. Thanks so much. See you Monday!”

Then she bounded off.

“When Hell freezes over.” I said. But she was already beyond my hearing.

The problem was that she had found one of the few weaknesses a total loser has. Television.

When you’re a total loser, you form an intimate relationship with whatever television you can get access to. It doesn’t matter if it has cable or not. The big three put out just as much crap as anybody else. I mean look at Rikki Lee, or Regis, or Dr. Phil or any of them. Loser Central. That’s what daytime television is. Nowhere else can you see such a collection of losers as on daytime television. I’m almost never happier than when I’m staring at some other loser whose miserable life is being splattered all over the airwaves. Sometimes I think watching TV helps make you a loser.

And prime time really isn’t any better. It’s one rehash after another, whether it’s about crime, or ‘relationships’ or what’s laughingly (ironically) called situation comedy. Even the news programs talk about nothing but losers. Who wants to hear about winners? Nobody.

And that, it turns out, is what made my whole life come undone.

I couldn’t resist going to that damn address. It wasn’t the money. I didn’t need the money. I was now sponging off my sister completely.

It wasn’t to meet women. I got to climb between my sister’s silky thighs every so often and I was working on a plan to sabotage the pile of condoms she kept in a drawer by the bed. She was already needy and dependent on me for the love I duped her into believing I was offering her.

Actually, seeing as how she wasn’t all that experienced in the sex department, she hadn’t yet tumbled to the fact that what I gave her was just enough stimulation to get her almost to an orgasm. I always managed to get off myself and stop before she actually got her cookies. It made her more needy, and that was how I wanted her. I even told her it was her fault that she couldn’t have an orgasm because she was still hung up on letting me fuck her. And, once I’d figured out how to put holes in all those condoms that she wouldn’t notice, I’d knock her up good and proper and she’d be even more needy then. There’s almost nothing more needy than a woman who has a baby out of wedlock and knows she’ll always be a single mother.

No, what made me show up to the focus group was the intense desire to try to railroad anything that even remotely looked like quality TV programs.

The problem was that I was out of my league. Well, as it turned out, I guess you could say that actually I was in my league. And not only that I was a top player in my league. I just didn’t know that. Afterwards I thought about it. What kind of people would sit and watch crap like this instead of having a real job?

Losers.

And there I was, right in the middle of them, part of my own crowd.

And I wasn’t prepared for what would turn out to be the passion that gripped me when I sat down in a nice padded theater seat and was handed freshly popped popcorn. There was another one of those perky people there who waited on us hand and foot while we watched pilot episodes of all kinds of new TV shows.

Remember how surprised I was at the level of motivation I had in making my sister into a total loser? I was even more motivated to wreck a decent TV idea. I loved loser television, and I wanted more loser television.

What they did after we watched a pilot was to ask us a bunch of questions. Sometimes they’d ask us why we felt the way we did when we answered the questions. What I did was trash anything that seemed like it actually had the potential to be relatively interesting, or realistic, or actually funny ... stuff like that.

Like they had this situation comedy where that starred one of those up-and-coming super models, who was obviously trying to break into television. She played the role of the little rich girl who falls for the young handsome guy who is her father’s assistant. There was all this flirting that went on, and she “borrows” him to take her places and stuff like that. There was the inevitable scene where her rich bitch friends catch her with the guy, and they all want to know who he is, and she lies to them because he’s actually a nobody loser and that sets up all the comedy.

After it was screened, most of the people in the room made positive comments about it. You have to understand that most of the losers in focus groups get all wrapped up in how important they are to the process. They feel powerful. They’re helping to choose what actually gets on TV, right? So naturally they like to say nice things. It endears them to the producers of all the crap they’re watching, right? They’ll get asked to come back and do it again, right? They have no idea what losers they really are.

Then came the magic question ... the one I always loved to hear.

“What didn’t you like about it the most?”

I actually stood up. That’s how motivated I was.

“It’s the stupidest thing I’ve seen in years.” I pronounced.

There was shocked silence.

“Would you please elaborate on that?” came a not-quite-as-perky voice over the intercom. There were other people behind a one way mirror who watched us while we watched TV. Producers and stuff like that I suppose.

“Sure.” I said off handedly. “We’ve seen it all before. It’s old hat. She’s gorgeous, and he’s gorgeous, and they like each other like gorgeous people are supposed to like each other, and it’s just boring.”

“So what would you suggest we do instead?” came the voice. I think it was an automatic response. Somebody had trashed their lovely idea, and they wanted to fix it.

“Well,” I started. “The supermodel is fine. Everybody loves looking at a supermodel. But the guy she falls for should be something weird, like a midget or a dwarf or something. And maybe he’s the guy who waxes her father’s big fancy cars. Then there can be this “I don’t believe how attracted I am to this little freak, but I am and I can’t help it and what am I going to do?” stuff. You can have all this interplay between them, showing how attracted she is to him, but how they can’t be together out in front of everybody, so she manages to make all these trips to the garage to see him while he washes a Mercedes, or a Bently or something. Think of how funny it would be when he tries to kiss her for the first time. There’s his mouth, right in front of her money-maker and she has to get on her hands and knees to kiss him.”

I was trying to be crude. I wanted to really piss them off and throw as big a wrench into the works as possible. I added the coup de gras.

“Now that would be something new and funny.” Then I threw in the word I knew was hot. “Think about how it would advance diversity. I mean little people don’t get squat, right? People feel sorry for them and all that crap. It would be a smash hit!”

I was waiting to be kicked out. I’d done my best to kick them in the balls, assuming they had balls. I expected to be attacked. I’d completely forgotten there was this woman in the group who stood about four feet five. She was in her forties, probably, and sat on a cushion to watch the shows.