Chapter Text
I didn’t find out about it until after the fact, and can you blame me? Honestly, I don’t pay much attention to journals and magazines, never have. I’m not a philistine, but I’ve never held a camera in my life, and I was barely aware of any artistic capability Cartman, of all people in Hashem’s Earth, may possess. Before this whole catastrophe went down, I didn’t even know what Aperture was, for fuck’s sake. Listen, my mother (my poor mother!) called to tell me about it, she saw me —that is, the picture he took of me— at the magazine aisle at Barnes & Noble. I can’t overstate that it completely escaped me that you could just grab a camera, snap a quick picture, gain ownership of a person’s image, and spread it to the masses like a common cold; let alone make money with it. If only I hadn’t been so stupid, so painfully naive, I would’ve prevented it. I swear by the moon and the stars in the sky, and I’ll repeat these words until the day that I die, it’s not what it looks like.
Let me describe the picture to you—at this point, I simply ought to. It looks like this: I’m sitting down, slightly hunched over, on a twin mattress, the bed is unmade, and I’m beaming at the camera (or, more precisely, at the photographer). There are a couple of posters behind me: The Terrance & Phillip Movie, Mel Gibson, a cut-out of Britney Spears (courtesy of Rolling Stone), a vintage KFC advertisement featuring Colonel Sanders, a Polaroid of a gray cat. (Anyone who’s been in my room would know that this is not what my bedroom looks like; and anyone who knows Cartman at all can tell it’s actually his.) However, the most scandalous aspect of the photograph, I’ve purposefully omitted so far, and not without reason. As it turns out, in this particular image, I’m featured presumably butt-naked (I wasn’t, but I’ll get to that later).
As someone who’s ignorant about portraiture, and photography as a whole, I can’t say much about the quality of the picture —it totally escapes me why it would be considered good or worth anyone’s time or attention; I’ll leave any such analysis to the publishers of Aperture— but I don’t hate it. I hate the fact that it made it to the front cover, that should be self-evident at this point, but the image itself is fine. In fact, I think I look quite nice. What really gets to me is what’s implied, the things people —my friends, my family— have assumed about the nature of my relationship with Cartman and, to some extent, my own nature per se.
When I called him to ask about it, he laughed the entire time and dismissed any and all points I tried to make. Nothing I said mattered to him whatsoever. It made me feel so insignificant.
“Why are you so pissy?” Why, he asked me. The nerve of this insufferable moron is as boundless as Hashem's grace.
“Because it looks like we fucked, why else!”
“C’est la vie!”
And then he laughed again! Told me he didn’t care (I don’t give a Jew’s ass about it, was his exact phrasing) and that I was too much of a dim-witted hick to “get” his craft. Then he hung up before I could even reply to his ridiculous claims. Cartman is one of those people who lacks any self-awareness, and it’s only gotten worse since he got a merit scholarship at Boulder (through the use of my image, mind you). It’s like he thinks he’s some erudite who’s blessing us, peasants, with his superb genius and aesthetic sensibilities.
Now, the picture itself isn’t pornographic, ipso facto, the image doesn’t meet the statutory definition of unauthorized disclosure, i.e. revenge porn (according to my father, that is.)
This is the point where a normal person might have given up, take their losses and move on, surrender to the impeding force of Eric Cartman’s cruelty. I get it, and I applaud those who’ve found the strength to walk away from him, but if there’s something I will not allow is for that retarded fat piece of shit to walk all over me and make himself a pretty buck with my likeness. So, naturally, after he hung up the phone on me, I doubled down and decided to drive to Eric’s place to give him a piece of my mind.