Once upon a time, a couple threw a dinner party to which an asshole had showed up. Neither of the hosts remembered ever inviting him and wondered how he even heard about it, especially after all the other guests categorically denied that he was their plus-one. But, in accordance with contemporary etiquette, they decided to let him stay. Maybe he had turned over a new leaf, the hosts thought, and was rather a reformed or apostate asshole.
There was some evidence that validated their hypothesis. The asshole was, at minimum, convivial. He did not do assholish things like eat hors d’oeuvres without a plate or double-dip. He didn’t interrupt a conversation or speak or behave lewdly toward other guests. He did not tell deliberately unfunny or sinister jokes, among other such behaviors typical of assholes. The hosts felt secure in bringing a mismatching chair from the kitchen to give the asshole a place at the dining room table.
Here the optimism had reached its limit. In the course of the dinner, the asshole stood up from his chair, and with a placid expression and calmly deliberate manner, placed both hands under the edge of the table and overturned it completely. It sent everything—wine glasses, beer bottles, green beans, caramelized Brussels sprouts—flying. The asshole stood statuesque amid the surrounding bewilderment. When one of the hosts asked the asshole in a far less polite tone than when he was received what his problem was, he merely laughed and flipped everyone off before leaving.
It turned out that the asshole did turn over a new leaf of a kind. Rather than reject being an asshole he had honed his asshole-ish nature. He had become a table-flipper—and he was only getting started.
While the victims at the dinner party were still trying to come to terms with their encounter, the asshole did not waste time with a new target. He’d gone to a Super Bowl party, where a table with plastic utensils, Solo cups, chips, pretzels, mozzarella sticks, hot wings, guac, blue cheese, and deconstructed casserole dishes like French onion mac and cheese and “fully loaded” nachos grande was practically waiting for his disruption. No one recalled an argument taking place. One minute the table was upright, the next it was not. The smearing on the bathroom wall of “JETS! JETS! JETS!” (who were not playing in that year’s Super Bowl) in dripping spicy buffalo sauce was also inconclusively, perhaps a little conveniently, attributed to the asshole.
It was evident from then on that these were not spontaneous eruptions of rage. The arguments were but faint pretexts to some more nefarious design on the asshole’s part. And no party that couldn’t function without a table was exempt from it. Barbecues, block parties, bar mitzvahs, quinceaneras, office Christmas parties, weddings, anniversary dinners, kids’ birthday parties at Dave and Buster’s, bachelorette parties in Nashville. Even closely guarded surprise parties fell victim to this asshole. In fact some started to wonder if the asshole had gained sympathizers. People who, whether out of personal cowardice or sheer nihilism, egged the asshole on. Dual waves of distrust and apprehension washed over the land. Some people (event planners mostly) worried that no one would want to have parties ever again. At least not until the asshole and his shitty enablers were safely ostracized.
If any of that concerned the asshole he hid it well. He had other things on his mind. Deep down, the asshole wanted his asshole-ishness to about more than just literally flipping tables. There was meaning behind it. Deep meaning. But people didn’t seem to understand it. Some people took him for a purely mercenary saboteur and wanted to hire him out to ruin potentially bad dates or get-togethers. Others simply didn’t appreciate his care and crafting. Once when he attended a woman’s surprise 80th birthday party, he’d considered prefacing his flip by putting shrimp scampi in the octogenarian grandmother’s hair. But he demurred, thinking it would spoil the anarchic precariousness he most wanted to cultivate. Sometimes the asshole appended his flips with a diatribe about an abstract concept like “complacency” or “justice,” though they seemed only to confuse people already fairly unsettled and pissed off.
He could still find a vague sort of satisfaction that he was making an impact anyway. One time he had gone to a girl’s backyard birthday party, where his flip sent the Frozen-themed cake down on the celebrants like a rectangular asteroid. He never forgot the moment when the mother of the girl approached him, face striped with running mascara, and embraced him like a long-lost half-sibling, making nonverbal gestures that implied, to him at least, that she’d orgasmed. He could think of this and find more than enough reason to persist. He even thought it was possible to encourage others to take up flipping, at least as long as he could maintain his own purity of intent. A whole league of assholes in his asshole image.
Before pursuing these higher ambitions, the asshole decided to take a hiatus. He did not want to risk overextending himself and wanted to foster a false sense of security for this more intense wave.
When he deemed his hiatus to be of sufficient length, he made an audacious reentry to the home of the original dinner party, which, if carried off successfully, would carry immense symbolic profit.
Things went well. The asshole gained access as easily as the first time and was received no less politely than before. It was actually a little strange. Surely he had not been away for that long. But that concern proved trivial compared to the subsequent discovery. When he went up to the dining room, he noticed that the table he’d originally flipped was not only been replaced but it was already upside down. Yes, the top was on the floor and the legs were facing the ceiling; while everything else—the chairs, the dishes, the silverware—were unchanged. And it was not limited to that one table. Every flat four-legged surface was overturned: the kitchen table, the patio table, the coffee table, end tables in the bedroom—all the same.
The asshole confronted the hosts as politely as he could manage. “What the fuck is with the table?”
The wife of the house returned a warm but halfhearted smile that one might give a tourist asking for directions. “It’s from Ikea,” she said with a proud chirp. “Isn’t it fab?”
“I don’t think people say ‘fab’ anymore, sweetheart,” the husband said, putting his arm around her waist.
“I haven’t been called ‘sweetheart’ since high school!”
They chuckled to each other having virtually forgotten the asshole was standing in front of them. The husband looked over the table with fondness, as if it was a precocious child.
“Pain in the ass to assemble. But a pretty sweet bargain for that quality.”
The asshole felt a sharp flutter in his chest. He’d stored up so much energy he had to flip something, which ended up being a footrest in the den. But he’d so over-calculated his force that he rotated it a full 360 degrees. In any other context that probably would have been cool, and the couple making out in the sofa beside the chair gave him some light applause. But the asshole was not sated. His exit was more abrupt than his first, so much so that he nearly tripped over the curved leg of the coffee table.
“Jesus Christ, does anyone not see how dangerous that is?”
There were faint chuckles and someone turned up the music.
The asshole was beside himself. He’d never been so blindsided. It was a prank, he thought. That’s the only way it makes sense. Someone tipped them off. He could rationalize that this meant he was really getting to them. He kept on rationalizing when the next few house parties had the same setups of overturned tables. His inquiries wrought the same casual answers. “Good quality,” they said. “Fairly priced with easy installment.” “Ideal for a new family or for making new friends.”
The rationalization became harder to maintain when he went out into the public. Restaurants and bars followed suit. Picnic tables in public parks were overturned. Flea markets and garage sales did the same. Pretty soon it had reached office and school desks.
The asshole revised his rationalization. He took credit for this change. He told anyone who would listen that, actually, he had planned for this to happen the entire time. Not that many did and those few who did listen were skeptical. “I heard it was from Denmark or Slovakia or Moldova or wherever.” One person said he could trace it back to Baudrillard and the asshole very nearly knocked his teeth out.
But soon it had spread to a scope that he had to admit was far beyond his reach. Instagram influencers posted their overturned tables with DIY decorative leg cozies with googly eyes and with text like “BE KIND” and some such. n+1 ran essays on “counter-interiors” and “spatial reflexivity.” The front windows of Pottery Barn and Pottery Barn Kids, the Restoration Hardware catalog, and even Architectural Digest further normalized the shift.
The fate of the asshole thereafter remains unclear. Some say he drove off a cliff. Others say he suffocated himself with an issue of Kinfolk. Still others think he just deleted all his social media accounts and rented out a trailer where he sits outside all day flipping a domino table he found on the freeway, laughing in the darkness to the displeasure of everyone around him. Most people don’t really give a shit. He was, after all, an asshole and a new world had emerged with no room for his type.
No table was ever flipped again, and in time no one knew what the hell that meant.