Courtney Badwood, or, The Furnace, a History of a Damn Mean Girl
Acknowledgments: for the mean girls and bitchy women who were either made mean by the world or born it—you’re very attractive and sympathetic, to me; I rooted for you in every movie, book, and tv show in which you were ever depicted
Author’s Note: It goes without saying, I’m very very very happy with Israel’s operation “Rising Lion.” Destroy the Islamic Republic. Destroy it. Destroy that evil regime. Do it for us, because America has never had the balls to take Iran seriously. Or maybe it’s because Iran is so fucking stupid and impotent, it’s hard for a superpower—the greatest ever— like America, to take it seriously; well, let Israel figure it out for us and do the dirty work. But we better be ready to step in there if and when we have to, when push comes to shove, oil prices be damned. We should all be all for it. Goddamn Iran. Long Live Us in the civilized part of the world! Long Live humanistic Civilized People even in uncivilized countries!
“When I hold you in my arms, and I feel my finger on your trigger, I know that no one can do me no harm!”— The Beatles, “Happiness is a Warm Gun”
“What the hammer? what the chain,
In what furnace was thy brain?
What the anvil? what dread gasp.
Dare its deadly terrors clasp?
When the stars threw down their spears
And water’d heaven with their tears: did he smile his work to see?
Did he who made the Lamb make thee?
Tyger Tiger burning bright,
In the forests of the night: what immortal hand or eye,
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?”—William Blake, “The Tyger”
“Early this mornin while makin’ the rounds I took a shot of cocaine and I shot my woman down, I went right home and I went to bed, I stuck that lovin’ 44 beneath my head”—Johnny Cash, “Cocaine Blues”
“The world hates us when we bleed, and hates us when we fight back.—” Golda Meir, Israeli Prime Minister in the seventies
“I will not serve.”—James Joyce A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
“My English teacher wanted to flunk me in junior high, thanks a lot, next semester I’ll be thirty five”— Eminem “My Name Is”
“People want to be told what to do so badly that they’ll listen to anything,” John Hamm in “Mad Men”
“Lord Byron” by Richard Westall
Courtney Badwood, or The Furnace, a History of a Damn Mean Girl
by Jay Burkett
—I always find curiously and to my great amusement and chagrin that everyone who calls me “arrogant” or “haughty” has a higher opinion of themselves than I even do of myself, a way higher opinion. They say of a mean girl that we’re “Not Happy” like it made any difference. No one’s mom can or will ever comfort a homely or poor otherwise inferior girl though with this belief, because no one desires to be merely happy rather than wealthy beautiful or powerful, No One Worth a Damn. And who in their right mind would rather be homely and/or poor, but “happy”—compared with Wealthy and Hot as Hell, but perhaps “miserable,” “mean,” “manipulative,” spiteful?
People don’t want to be happy. They want to have it all.
Courtney Badwood alone while class was in stupid session liked to lean with her back up against everyone’s lockers and provocatively as possible suck on mint candies, snap gum, smoke, sip something clear that wasn’t water either from a water bottle or a tin container, and Glory in how Bored she was. She never had to even sit for a stupid second in class because she sexually bought all her teachers off. Even the female ones. She always wore a tight plaid dress that hearkened to and totally brought back the sixties, and clappy snappy clacky Mary Jane black pumps and tall white soft cotton knee socks and looked ridiculous—that was her style—but she looked damned good.
—People will say of me that I’m “not nice” or that something I did was “not nice” or it was “mean” and therefore I shouldn’t have done it because it was “mean” or “not nice,” but why should you orient any of your actions around how they might emotionally or psychologically or otherwise affect other people or be interpreted by other people you have no control over and no obligation to? I never understood that. Like who said I had to spare someone the truth whether about me or themselves or the world or how I feel about them, and where did their authority to command me to spare people originate? Who said I had to not be mean even if I’m NOT telling them the truth or even speaking my mind— not to hurt someone’s feelings? Who even said I can’t be mean just for the pure SAKE of being mean? You know? If it hurts other people then that’s their problem. It’s not my fault. They shouldn’t have been born in a body or caught up in a situation where someone like me could blast away at them. I shouldn’t have been born the way I am either. But you don’t have a choice. No one can help how they turned out from the beginning to the very end. Sometimes I feel like society wants me to be good at the expense of being smart, but to me the only thing that is good is intellectual superiority. What’s “good” about unthinking unquestioning mercifulness? Is that not like the equivalent of saying stupid or being retarded moreover is good? People say a lot that “ignorance is bliss” but too many people say it like it’s a good thing. Why? If ignorance is bliss, then bliss is ignorance. Bliss is therefore naivete. Bliss is stupid. Bliss is retarded. Bliss is inferiority. Bliss is pampered. Bliss is infantilized. Bliss is weak. All things considered who in the hell would want it? It’s like happiness. People will say they just want to be happy. Or they just want their children to be happy. Isn’t that kind of mediocre? I would demand a lot more. Also less. I want to suffer, and I want my kids to suffer. To be happy in the sense they mean is to be content—it’s stultifying, it’s arresting, it’s boredom, it’s sickness it’s death. The only ennobling experiences I ever had where my soul really felt exalted came from the times when I felt like I was literally living in a furnace. People will also say they just want to be financially “comfortable.” They don’t want to be rich or famous. They don’t need those “vanities.” No they just want enough money to have one BMW a sailboat a two million dollar house, and not have to worry about paying for healthcare or anything. A wardrobe full of fancy clothes. God. I have no ambition to be “comfortable.” I’ll be famous and rich and crippled by the stress and attention, or living in a cardboard box and living on welfare. In my opinion it’s a very uncomfortable world. What gave you the right to be comfortable, because you can if you make enough money? That’s not good enough. I don’t want to be any more comfortable than the world and existence is—and who would disagree? How could you?—it’s a pretty damned uncomfortable place if you ask me. People tell me I’m crazy too. I hope I’m no more sane than a psychotic in a psych ward in my own way. People say I’m lazy too because I don’t get good grades, I do drugs hang out raid my parents’ liquor cheat on all my boyfriends with old men, I don’t care what college I go to or whether I ever go to college at all—because who cares? It sounds boring with all the excitement of free sex and continued school work, people in sororities and frats who would all be scared to fucking death of me; I hate people I have no respect for them—I think it’s other people who are lazy without the discipline to live every day unrepentantly and unapologetically Damned. Ever think how scared someone must have to be to work hard eat healthily go on dates need friends don’t do drugs strive to be happy see shrinks go on psychiatric drugs to feel better, comparing oneself to other people and using other people as a baseline to understand where you belong and define who you are? As you can imagine I crack myself up.
Damned great.
—I figure I bully all the Good Girls here in Salt Valley High to teach them a lesson. You won’t get far in life if you’re good looking enough. People will envy you and conspire to take you down or obstruct your advancement in some or other way, or they will love and worry about you too much and draw a circle and hang a noose around your privileges, or they’ll mistake your virtue as a good looking girl as stupidity. Because I don’t believe in virtue and could hardly believe in God, (haughty derisive laugh) I know that if the world favors anyone it favors the Intelligent and Factual in opposition to and in tension with the Good and the Wise. Funny how good, decent people think they’re going to heaven. In this life they’re in for hell. I would know. I tried being a good girl. It didn’t work out. Then hell happened. My parents divorced or my dad died when I was seven or they both killed themselves, or I was raised by an abusive mom or an abusive dog or I was mauled by one in my pretty face, or I had an abusive dad or both parents were abusive, and they were violent alcoholics. Whatever alcoholism is. I was raped by my own dad and all my brothers. That I firmly remember. I’m Done being good. I’m Done being a good girl. I’m Done being nice. I HATE virtue. I hate “kindness.” Nice people and virtuous people I want to torture for pleasure. Telling me to be nice. Telling me to do the Right Thing. Telling me not to be cute or hot and downplay it and affect an air of modesty just so as not to make other girls jealous, and pretend not to be ridiculously pretty which is what and who I am. Not to be Salt Valley’s meanest most unlikable bully. I’m in detention every single day after school and all the boys hate me.
Camren and Carolyn finally got out of class to loll around and affect boredom affectedly with Courtney when the bell shrieked its hysterical ring its toll every forty-five fucking minutes. Why wouldn’t these school bells just get cancer and die or fucking kill themselves?
—Here was another thing. I tried to kill myself and I ran away from home every single day when I was a kid. I had an eating disorder. I tried antidepressants and anti-anxiety medication. Meditation. Two of my brothers killed themselves. Now here I am haughty and contemptuous of happy people without the wetness of their cunts to be good fine bullies and braggarts and bitches and teases like me. I’m seventeen and it feels like I was born and raised in a category seventeen hurricane that rained molten carnal carnivorous venomous voluptuous lava. I bully Nice Guys and Good Boys too and Try Hards obsessed with their fucking grades—some to the edge of suicide. Without caring and no remorse. Like there’s this one guy named Evan. He’s a Prince all the good nice normal girls love him. And he alternates between loving and hating me. He’s very attracted to me which I find of course hilarious because how could you seriously think you hated someone that if you were honest you would have sex with immediately in a heartbeat? I don’t see how you could reasonably hate anyone you wanted to have sex with; not so badly as you wanted to with me— I gave him a good hard time for being a stubborn asskisser and I made him cry once or twice with revelation. And I only date guys from other schools as a mean expression of crude cold contempt for my own school and everyone here who hates me. Here in SV I’m the hottest girl in the school and I could never get a date! (And I made it that way) Isn’t that funny? I show up to foreign parties to which I was never invited but I manipulate my way into by leading all the guys on, then I’m like Hey I’m Court, the awfullest girl in Salt Valley you’ll ever meet and you ever heard of. And will ever hear of. You’ll throw me out after five minutes of all the hatable hell I raise.
Carolyn and Camren weren’t her friends. They were sidekicks and henchmen who were much less good looking than Courtney was of course. No one looked as good as Court if no one was as noble but unsympathetic in her honorable flattering majestic misery and despondency she kept well beneath public perception. And she wouldn’t associate herself with anyone who was even on a par with being as good looking as she was. She learned quickly that was a recipe for disaster. Or they did.
—The sad truth I love to rub in everyone's wounded pride, their envy and embarrassment is that No One is happy. How could you even have any right to be in this cruel fucked up world? It might be a fine world worth preserving and defending and conserving but it wasn’t because it was any good because it was damned fucked up and the human race was every day eating and burying and blurring and blocking and ghosting itself alive.
When an ugly girl she took to bullying too far came in with an assault rifle, Courtney Badwood wheeled right around on her heels and brushed and flipped her hair provocatively and said, “Do Me a Fucking Favor!”
—I would like to give you some idea of what I look like but I can’t. I don’t know how to describe the scariest creepiest extremely pretty girl you ever saw. I’m tall I’m long and I have soft blonde French girl type hair. I’m not complicated. People think I am but I am not. They make movies about girls like me like “Mean Girls” and “Heathers.” People mistake my arguable hubris which isn’t even hubris for “arrogance,” mistake my manifest superficiality for “shallowness,” and misidentify my severe depression with narcissistic or borderline or some other “personality disorder.” People also think I’m a “psychopath.” I’m not. I’ve just been raped my whole childhood, abused physically verbally and ignored; and now just imagine if a person suffered extreme animal cruelty and I’ll leave it to your imagine just how mad I am.
Courtney Badwood couldn’t have friends. She didn’t know why. People didn’t like her. She didn’t know why. They didn’t like to hear her talk about herself or her problems. She had no idea why. They didn’t like to hear her brag of murdering all the kittens mysteriously disappearing in her town with their genitals sliced off with felt pens. Why just because she was a dog person. No one believed Court when she proclaimed she had one hundred million German Shepherds or was currently dating but considering breaking up with Ryan Gosling, Brad Pitt and Tom Cruise—yes she was dating them all at once and considering breaking up with them all at once. She said a prayer or practiced black magic rather and resurrected Kurt Cobain and Avicci and dated or just fucked them immediately and then immediately killed them again. Why didn’t anyone believe her? Grrr… Groan…
So, No. She had sidekicks like all the bad characters in every movie you stupidly assume are absolutely evil just because they’re not stupid or perfect; they have family problems or they’re just a little or quite a bit fucked up. She was the girl mirror image of Draco Malfoy. She was an aristocrat, very privileged, and she had no friend she made sure of it who wasn’t as feared and loathed as her suicidal self-destructive family and herself—herself which because everything else failed was her religion. Like the evil queen in “Snow White,” someone else who wrought violent destruction on all the good girls in the world particularly Snow White— she looked herself in the mirror in her locker more than any other girl in school look in their own, or she ever looked in any other mirror, and she even recited and resuscitated those lines Mirror Mirror on the Wall, Who’s the Fairest of Them All? But she didn’t really have to because she wasn’t exactly a “narcissist.” She didn’t need to be. She laughed at and mocked her own reflection—she was that impressed with it. Maybe she was a narcissist.
Who cares?
—Trump’s a narcissist. He’s also a hell of a lot better than Biden, and don’t even get me started about Kamala! Don’t talk about Biden either. Tv journalists like Chris Cuomo had to be narcissists with his weirdness, and politicians. What was so bad about narcissism? Wasn’t it a good thing? Wouldn’t you be a little too thin or too overweight too sober or too depressed without at least a little bit a little tiny little dose of narcissism? I say the more the better.
When she went to a friend’s house, a friend that she didn’t have, the girl’s mom tried to hit her frightfully in the face absurdly with a laconic frying pan, all because the woman’s husband started panting around Courtney like a dog. Then to punish the woman for her jealousy she handcuffed the woman to a kitchen appliance and sucked the guy’s dick in front of her for hours or perhaps days. Her favorite thing to do was first: make people jealous then two, mock and make fun of them for their jealousy.
Insecure people she wanted to stab in the vagina with pitchforks, shoes, paperclips, paper, toothpicks, vanilla frosting, and battering rams and Crock Pots and infinite pairs of Crocs. That was another thing she did like dressing provocatively prettily or wearing tall boots in the fall and doing all kinds of performative things with them that could give a twelve-year-old boy a stroke or a wart or an anxiety attack with desirousness. She liked vanilla ice cream and vanilla everything. Why because in private she liked a guy to pull her hair and beat her up and call her names and choke her and call her names like BITCH, slut, cunt, whore, ultra MAGA, whatever… Sadists in public are all masochists in private. But she liked sadism too. She was just so sadistic all day long with such high self-esteem and such a strong sense of self, she needed the relief of the illusion of novelty in being at, and feeling on, the bottom of things in bed.
It was like stress relief.
She wasn’t very misleading, though even from a distance you could tell by the way a girl carries herself she means business, has a lot of disagreeable crusty opinions, or she’s had a lot more sex than you ever had or you’ll ever get. She didn’t walk. She sauntered and sallied and held her nose high as the sky no matter how depressed or demoralized or raped she ever felt. When she said hi or hi how are you or nice to meet you, her voice chalk thick with smoldering smoky steaming steamy hot Locust Valley irony, she gushed mockery sarcasm haughtiness contempt spite and meanness.
—When anyone has me over for dinner someone’s husband laughs his head off at all my jokes and I have my crazy mom and their wives telling me you can’t be too funny here you can’t, no one wants to hear your stories about drugs, no one needs to know you’re addicted to psilocybin Xanax adderall and alcohol and Percaset all at the same time and how good a forager and a forger hoarder you are of male emotion and anguish you are; no one wants to hear how you have an arson problem too or that you tried to drown yourself fifty or sixty times or you do every single day. I JUST SAY TELL THAT TO EVERYONE ELSE AT THE TABLE WHO LOOKS AT ME LIKE THEY CAN’T ABSOLUTELY GET ENOUGH OF ME. FUCK YOU!
She was writing many books at once. How to Be an Absolute Cold Ruthless Heartless Bitch and Why, by Courtney Badwood. How To Make Everyone Jealous and Why, by Courtney Badwood. How to Lead Any Man On and Why, by Courtney Badwood. How to Date and Dump All Your Boyfriends and Why, by Courtney Badwood. She was about to awaken all the pretty girls who hated themselves from their slumber. Girls who took abuse absorbing it like collective society demanded them to. But they weren’t going to take it anymore. Courtney was out for blood. How to Hate Being Good Looking and Why, by Courtney Badwood. How to Make Fun of Yourself and Why, by Courtney Badwood. How to Take Everyone’s Stupid Goddamned Projected Bullshit in Stride and Why, by Courtney Badwood. How to Throw Away and Discard and Repudiate All Your Fake Friends and Why, by Courtney Badwood. How to Do For Your Country What Joyce Did for Ireland and Why, by Courtney Badwood.
It was great.
She was just getting started.