Tell me about truly f'ed up people you know

You know, I do believe that human beings can be pretty fucked up, and that people are endlessly fascinating in their quirks and hangups, but I don’t think I can say that I’ve ever known anyone who was truly ‘fucked up’ . Call it a sheltered middle class upbringing if you want, it is probably true, but while I’ve met strange people and liars and petty thieves, I can’t say with any honesty that I’ve personally known somebody that pushes the boundaries of acceptable behaviour with any gusto.

So, I turn to you dopers for your stories and experiences. Ever known anyone with narcissistic personality disorder? Ever had an uncle take a champagne bottle to his wife at your cousin’s wedding? Go to school with someone that later firebombed a dry cleaners for ruining his shirt?

I think one of my uncles fits this description.

He’s an alcoholic. He’ll get drunk on anything from rubbing alcohol to rotgut whiskey. He’s been to jail multiple times. Charges include being drunk in public, assaulting an officer, child abuse, child molestation, petty theft, assault and battery, simple battery, breaking and entering, vandalism, failure to pay child support, destruction of public property, animal abuse, and failure to pay his taxes. Each of these were separate charges, made at separate times.

He’s had plenty of opportunities to get cleaned up and make a good life for himself. On the rare occasion that he does go straight, he makes $15 to $20 an hour, which is damned good pay for our area, and he has the know how to start his own business, which would easily allow him to bring home $2k to $4k a week, after taxes. (That’s based on what other members of our family make, who are in the same business, and have started up themselves.)

According to the doctor who treated him last week, his body is that of a 72 year old, despite him only being 42. This is from the drugs, the cigs, the booze, and the violence. He believes any insult, any wrong has to be met with violence. Just the other month he put his fist through a barrel his daughter was burning trash in, because her and her husband were fighting in front of his grand kids.

Sad to say, he’s not the worst of my family.

I’m a criminal defense attorney. Use your imagination, I probably know 'em.

My brother. He has been in trouble with the law since he was a teenager. Multiple times he has used my name when he has come in contact with the police. The worst was 7 years ago when I found out he was in jail under my name, not his. It took me the better part of a year to clear up this mess and I still have some residual effects today. Something as simple as renewing my driver’s license requires additional proof of identification. He has also stolen from virtually every family member to feed his drug habit. The last time I saw him was a few years ago when his probation officer tried to dump him at my house, he had worn out his welcome at 2 different half way houses but they didn’t have enough on him to lock him up. He has become persona non grata at family get togethers.

I had a friend in high school who always pinged on the weird meter, but no one thought that he was dangerous at all. We weren’t particularly close, so we lost contact after he graduated.

Incidentally, we met through choir, so I also had a few chances to meet his father, who was the local chief of police and seemed like a nice guy.

A few years later, I found out that he had killed his girlfriend when she tried to break up with him. IIRC, he stabbed her multiple times.

A guy who was married to a woman I know. It took me quite a while to put the whole story together:

The guy made a living by picking up prostitutes, beating them up and robbing them. One of the pimps confronted him in a bar, they took it outside, and the guy (Mr. A-for-asshole) came back in covered with blood. He insisted that, while he was in the alley with the pimp, someone else came up and stabbed him to death.

He was sentenced to 15 years in prison, where the woman I knew met and married him. When he was released, he continued his line of work. A couple of the hookers went to the police and filed charges. The guy was identified by DNA evidence, because he was also forcing them to perform oral sex.

His wife was outraged that the police and the hookers would dare to say he had been having sex with them. She felt that it was okay to beat and rob them, but everyone was lying about the sex & DNA. Several more hookers came forward and testified against the guy. He got a long jail sentence and is a registered sex offender. While he was in prison, he divorced the woman to marry someone else.

And I’m a prosecutor, we probably know the same people! heh.

But here’s a real one: a friend of my brother’s, who was an usher at his wedding. His name was “Rod.” A couple years after the wedding, he was arrested for murder. Apparently, he and two friends got a girl drunk, lured her out into the woods somewhere, and killed her. After a few years went by, one of his accomplices felt guilty, confessed (she was just a “missing person”, her body hadn’t been found), and led police to the body. I’m pretty sure he’s still in prison.

Maybe not in the same way as the other examples, but a friend of mine showed me just how far a person has to fall from functional to destitute. When I met him, he’d been divorced a couple if times, but was working a good paying job with a retirement and making ends meet with childcare.

Disparate points: he was a cross dresser. He owned several dozen cars, always tiring of them and buying the next one, perhaps to make him feel happy.

Quits job, pays off child support, squanders the rest, becomes morbidly obese, all this over the course of three years or so. I lost contact once it got too hard to watch him make stupid choice after stupid choice.

I really don’t know what drove him to the behavior, but something was very not right.

Maybe literally. If I remember right, we’re not too far apart.

I can see someone who’s really f*cked up in that story, and it isn’t the guy.

Regards,
Shodan

I think you mean there are *two fck’d up people in that story.

eta, three! I missed the woman who married him at the end.

Although I’ve lost touch with him, I knew a guy who was an on & off heroin addict. Nicest guy you’d ever wanna meet. He would use heroin until he ran out of cash. Then he would go cold turkey, clean up, and get a job.

The cycle would repeat itself, as he was constantly falling into money. He would never lie/cheat/steal, but when he would run into a small inheritance, that would be it. He would quit his job and go back to heroin. Until he was broke again.

During the time I knew him, he had 2 inheritances and a large cash settlement from a lawsuit. With each cash infusion, he would drop out until he had gone through the cash, then quit cold turkey.

I knew someone pretty well who I might classify as having narcissistic personality disorder, as the technical definition goes:

  1. She talks constantly about herself, her thoughts, her experiences, her beliefs, her expectations, etc, etc- she literally won’t shut up.
  2. Anything she thinks is a good idea, she fully expects others to share her opinion and will justify the superiority of it ad nauseam. A very mild example, but one among several that I have personally witnessed: She will request a table at a restaurant in a very obviously closed section (i.e. in another darkened room with a rope across the entrance), and argue with the hostess that there’s no possible real inconvenience for a server to just walk a few extra steps to wait on her there, and will discuss it with the hostess, the server, and the manager, until she either gets her way and then complains about the strained service, or walks out in a huff exclaiming that she will not patronize an establishment that doesn’t put the customer first. Her customer service stories are breathtaking.
  3. She has misrepresented herself in resumes, has been hired for executive positions (how did she get hired in the first place? She’s an A-1 bullshit artist with an extensive “big words” vocabulary), and has been “let go” four different times because [del]she did not measure up[/del] they did not get on board with her flawless “business metric”, and now that she has made those salaries, she requires a job paying nothing less. She’s been unemployed for over half a year now.
  4. She throws around her family name when it will get her something, and rejects it when they aren’t showing her the respect and generosity she feels she deserves from them.
  5. She passively/aggressively threatens or manipulates others in order to get something she wants- that’s also how she’s been able to [del]get everything paid for[/del] support herself without a job for so long.
  6. She has been socially disowned by one of her parents for being a thief and a liar and claims absolute innocence. But the story behind it proves it to be utterly true.

How do I know all of this? Because she talks too much- doesn’t remember what she’s said previously and gives herself away every time.

p.s. every trait I have described here she very vociferously despises in others
p.p.s. I don’t take her calls anymore. I used to find her craziness entertaining, but when she finally had a real crisis, I found I couldn’t muster up much sympathy, because her real crisis, in part, was totally begotten by her.

Oh have I got one for you! I wish it weren’t true, but it is.

I met this woman, I’ll call her Bitch, about 10 years ago. When I met her she was married with a 5 yr old boy. She and her husband were swingers and weren’t shy about letting you know. I have no problem with swingers, but propositioning people you don’t know is tacky no matter what sex you’re interested in. After only meeting her twice she shared with me that her husband’s parents were swingers too. She said that her husband never had sex with his parents, but she had sex with her father in law and that once or twice they’d hired an escort to be used by all four of them.

One evening they hired an escort with a specific purpose in mind. They put plastic on their kitchen floor then had the girl lie naked on it. They covered her with ice cream, chocolate syrup, whipped cream, etc. Then the four of them got naked and started, ahem, eating. Ok, no problem. Oh except that their 5 year old son was sleeping in the next room and he got up and was watching. Bitch put her son back to bed. She said she drew the line at having him watch or participate. Gosh, how nice.

She found out several months later that her in-laws were turned on by him watching and started “getting caught” by him numerous times while they babysat him while the parents worked. When her husband found out, they got a regular babysitter for him without saying anything to his parents “out of respect” to them.

Two months later they got a call from the babysitter who said to come get him because she’d caught him performing fellatio on another boy. The police were called and they were forced to send him to counseling. Apparently at first he wouldn’t talk about anything, but finally told the story of the ice cream escort. The therapist talked to Bitch after the session and asked if there could be any truth to this story because it sounded like a child’s fantasy. She, knowing it was true, told him no. She said that she believes he had been sexualized by a boy who used to live in their neighborhood. For some crazy reason, the therapist believed her and his next sessions were about learning the difference between lies and truths. What a fantastic mother, right? Bitch and her husband divorced and she stayed on friendly terms with his family.

People like this don’t get rewarded in life, right? WRONG! She started dating a man who worked with her own father. They’d been dating about 7 months when a group of workers went in together and bought some Powerball tickets. Yep, you guessed it. Her boyfriend and her father were in the winning group. After taxes they each received 7.5 million dollars. Last I heard she’d helped her boyfriend blow through almost half of that money. She didn’t care if he lost all of it because as an only child, she knows that when her parents die she’ll get what’s left of theirs.

Karma, where ye?

Fuck, Sleeps, that is truly messed up. But it is exactly what I am talking about. I don’t mean to imply that you are lying, but what you have described seems plain fantasy to me. It seems unreal, out of reach, like what you see in the movies, if the screenwriter wanted to portray ‘fucked up’ and layed it on thick, without subtlety.

Maybe I am fortunate in that I don’t meet these people day to day, or maybe it’s just an age thing, and that many experiences like these are yet to come. Either way, I don’t know whether to feel lucky for avoiding it or perhaps unfortunate that I haven’t had the opportunity learn life lessons from these people.

Are you sure it is? Did you get this story from her? I’m not saying I don’t think it could be true, but she sounds like the type of person who might make up stories.

This makes me suspect that the husband’s unusual sexual habits may have started in a similar way . . .

She grew up with one of my best friends. They met in kindergarten, and I met her via my friend about 10 years ago-ish.

I know the babysitter thing was true because she couldn’t leave work to pick up her son so my friend had to pick her kid up. I know the Powerball thing is true because it was all over the papers and I saw her new cars and pictures of her new house.

I admit that most of the rest I have to take her word for. My friend witnessed her fighting with her ex about a few related issues, but I did not.

I’d love to believe it isn’t true.

A person who was a good friend of mine - my best friend in high school - basically degenerated before my eyes. It was heartbreaking, because he was one of the smartest and most talented people I’ve known - an excellent artist, he could have been a major talent. He was that good, at least, in my opinion.

We used to spend literally days painting, not even stopping to sleep. We would also talk about religion, history and philosophy all night. Not healthy I’m sure, but better than what was to come.

We always drank a bit and smoked some pot, but increasingly for him that became the point - the art kinda tapered off. Eventually, at some point, it just stopped. I’d come over with the excuse that we would do some painting, we would do a few minutes, take a “break” - and soon be drinking and smoking. I was into it too, but gradually I realized that I was really more into the art.

Eventually, he moved to the country to his dad’s farm (he was also a drinker and smoker and had zero control over my friend), and things really went downhill. He started up a grow-op in his barn. He begain to distill hash oil in his kitchen. His begain to have mood swings. His place became increasingly filthy. He acquired many guns. There were scary people hanging around, buying and smoking his drugs. One day, I realized by watching that these scary people were afraid of him.

I think the last straw for me was when he acquired a sort of serf - a big, scary (but harmless) tatooed fellow who, essentially, moved onto his farm to do the heavy work of running the grow-op in return for free drugs and a place to stay. He was filthy as a pig and almost as ingnorant. Once I came up, only to find that the only pair of underwear the guy owned was soaking in a mud puddle in front of the barn. My friend talked about this poor guy, and ordered him around, as if he was a slave, or cattle - not behind his back, but openly to his face. He meekly accepted this role.

Why, may you ask, did I keep going to see him? He was my best friend, and so talented - I just could not accept he was evolving into something else. Plus, he kept up the pretense. This was just something he did for money (he said), one day we would have a studeo, make some serious art … but gradually I realized that was never happening.

I guess one visit sort of epitomized things for me. He called me asking for me to come up, we would go sketching. I went up, to find that his "harvest’ was in and what he really wanted was some help processing it - his “serf” wasn’t enough. Well, I could hardly refuse. There we were, picking through piles of pot, the buds in one place and the leaves in another … and what should I spy through the window but a line of armed men walking towards the house.

We quickly threw a sheet over the pot and walked out. I had visions of prision or worse dancing through my head, as you could well imagine. Just then, I would have given anything to be somewhere else - I nearly bolted for the woods.

As it turned out, it was just some hunters trespassing (“we were looking for the road”).

That night, we had a feast. The “serf” cooked up a big chunk of meat, which we washed down with shots of Black Russians - vegitables were unknown in this household. The place was, as usual, filthy - filthy beyond description, buzzing with flies and covered with sticky bits of pot. While we were eating, some sort of long, skinny animal with teeth and claws emerged from a hole in the floor, snagged a bone, and dragged it down into the hole - I was so high (we’d been smoking pot and boozing all day) that this almost seemed normal (it turned out it was a mink). The “serf” guffawed and reached for a nearby shotgun; my friend growled at him while chewing on a bone … I sort of saw, at that instant, just how degenerate they (I guess we) had become. Somehow, in easy stages, we had become some sort of barbarians. To an outsider it would no doubt have looked like a scene from Silence of the Lambs.

That did it. I decided to cut off contact. That was almost twenty years ago now. Last I heard, he was doing okay …

Oh man, don’t get me started…

I’d share a few anecdotes, but someone will invariably come along and fuss that I’m violating HIPAA (I wouldn’t be, I am quite aware of what constitutes a HIPAA violation) and things would turn unpleasant.

No teasing allowed.

[I wanna hear the anecdotes ;)]