Sex, Lies and the Dirty (4 page)

And I’m freaking the fuck out.

Even if I don’t confirm the story for them, they might decide to run with it anyway. I talk to my advisors, explaining the situation: The Smoking Gun is ready to out me. If I’m outed, I’m fucked. All those people that said they were going to kill me can actually do it now. There’s no protection. Even if I hide out in my apartment, it only takes one pissed-off psycho to track me down and put a bullet in my brain. It only takes one.

The advisors tell me to calm down.

They say, “You need to take the mug shot and put it up. You need to make fun of yourself. And you need to do it now.”

“Are you serious?” I ask.

“Yes, you need to post yourself before they post you. Embrace it. Run with it. There’s not a lot of choice in the matter.”

The Smoking Gun emails me again saying that they’re going to publish the story with or without my consent. I do exactly what I was advised to do.

I write up the post.

I expose myself to the world.

Is Hooman Karamian (nice name) the Real Nik

Richie?

Posted in
The Dirty |
September 4th, 2008

What a tool bag… if you are going to take a mug shot with your cheese-grader face at least look sexy?

Nik Richie:
If you were gay and had to be the top for this DUI Douche Bag, Would You?

Answer: No, he has $2.00 waxed eyebrows, a taliban beard, a nose that is as large as my Greg, needs Botox, was set up by Scottsdale PD for posting a picture of the Cheif of Police’s daughter, has a homo skunk trail that only D-Nazi would be proud of and his chest hair is for the Gays! Dude what were you thinking? Shave that fern gully down! Also, I don’t bang dudes with weird names… not my style.

I beat The Smoking Gun to the punch and they’re pissed.

They even send me an e-mail calling me a coward and asking why I would out myself, which is really just another way of saying
Thanks for fucking us over on an exclusive.

They still go live with a post of their own: the mug shot, a synopsis of the DUI, a few snarky jabs, and the full police report. All of this goes up only a moment after I out myself on my own site. Then it starts spreading: first to Deadspin, and then it’s chained out over and over again down the line. Almost instantly, the world knows who I really am.

True to form, everyone has an opinion.

Everyone’s been waiting for this moment.

Traffic on the site doubles, and most of it is because the comment boards are being bombarded with opinions about me. Remarks about my appearance. This time, I’m the one on blast. I finally get a taste of my own medicine.

They say: Cheetah print collar? Come on, Nik.

And: Ha! We should be asking average-looking girls “would you” for your ugly terrorist ass.

Some people commend me for coming out. Others don’t.

For the most part, it’s insults, teasing—all the stuff I do.

“You are a tool, and your website sucks.”

“Wow, the mighty have fallen.”

“You are dead to me.”

I’m terrified and paranoid for a good day or so.
Most of the news outlets are spinning this as a karma piece. It’s Matt Leinart’s
¹²
revenge for that time I posted him with underage girls and got him benched. Or it’s just karma in general. Payback that was long overdue for all the lives I fucked with.

Every time I go out I’m worried about getting jumped, spit on, or something equally not good. I’m not even talking about the clubs. Each person I walk by at the grocery store or gas station could be a person that’s been up on the site, only now they know who I am. So I’m constantly in a state having my guard up, but then something very odd happens.

I’m getting emails saying that they’re glad I came out. I’ll go to restaurants and people are shaking my hand, smiling, telling me that they love my site. They love what I do. Nik Richie had always been popular, but now he
was tangible. People could meet him, talk to him. Suddenly, I was some kind of celebrity along the lines of a Zuckerberg or Perez Hilton. I was finally real. A public figure.

I was one step closer to the American dream.

12
NFL quarterback and Heisman trophy winner.

Origins (Part 1)

My parents immigrated to the United States with $1,000 to their name,
and they would go on to raise myself and my two brothers in a strict Iranian fashion. We never cursed. We never talked back. Our career as American-born Iranians was to chase the American dream. That meant working hard, devoting yourself to academics, and pursuing fields that generated the maximum amount of income. According to my father, you could either be a doctor, lawyer, or engineer. The plan was simple: high school would be followed by college which would be followed by a career.

My father was an engineer.

I was going to be a doctor.

My uncle, who owned multiple medical practices, was a radiologist and my personal role model. He drove a Jaguar. Owned beachfront property. He had money and everyone’s respect. People were envious, and my father never missed an opportunity to point this out to me, if only to remind me what was waiting at the end of the road.

“This is what you get when you become a doctor, Hooman,” he said.

My plan to go premed, to follow in my uncle’s footsteps, was more about materialism than it was pleasing my father. The quality of work didn’t factor in much, either. It was all about money. If I had money, I could be like my uncle and have the things he had. This goal would be instilled in me around the age of five, and over the years, would become more of an obsession. I would graduate high school, graduate college, become a radiologist, and one day take over CIG
¹³
, which was the name of my uncle’s practice. My high school friends, especially the Caucasian ones, were not nearly as regimented when it came to their future. So I took a certain amount of pride in knowing exactly what I was doing, but more importantly, that I was going to be rich.

My brother, Brian, changed all of that.

I was seventeen. Brian was seven. He was in the kitchen sawing through a baseball with a steak knife. Like most kids his age, he was curious about everything. Brian wanted to see what was under the leather and stitching. He was slicing away at this thing when his hand slipped. He screamed. Blood everywhere. The knife sliced into his wrist and he started bawling, screaming, gripping his wrist while blood crept through his fingers. My parents weren’t home. I was listening to my seven-year-old brother scream as I called 911. I told them that my brother cut himself. Cut deep. I gave my address and told them to hurry, watching my brother yell, cry, bleed. I started to get light-headed watching the blood. The blood seeped through his fingers. It pooled on our kitchen floor. I watched the blood snake down his arm in deep red lines, dripping steadily from his elbow.

The last thing I remember was blood.

I had a phobia.

If I saw blood I fainted.

This would happen two more times in the form of a soccer cleat injury and during the dissection of a small pig in anatomy class. I had dissected a frog before, expertly making incisions with the scalpel and pinning its stomach flaps to the rubber bottom of the operation basin. All major organs were correctly identified. This gave me a bit of confidence back after the baseball incident with my brother. The pig, however, proved to me once again that I had a legitimate problem. Unlike the frog, it started bleeding when I cut into it. Gushing, actually.

I woke up in the nurse’s office a few hours later.

My plan was ruined. I couldn’t be a doctor.

I graduated from Mission Viejo High School,
enrolling in Cal State Fullerton with little to no direction. I picked a major: psychology. I joined a frat. The plan I had for the last twelve years had been botched, so my approach to college was keeping to the things that conformed to standards. Everyone wanted to join a frat. Everyone was doing psychology. Although my father continued to preach the advantages of going premed, psychology seemed like a safe bet, even though I had no passion for it. Psychology let people know that I had a plan. The frat let people know I was a part of something.

The reality is that I was trying to find my way but I couldn’t. On the surface, it appeared that I knew what I was doing. Hooman had it figured out, people thought. He was on the path. Years from now, I was going to have a doctorate just like my father wanted. I would find that American dream. It even got to the point where I started setting monetary goals: first million by twenty-five. I’d be a multi-millionaire by twenty-seven. Psychology wasn’t going to allow me to do that, though. I wanted to get rich quick. I wanted to cut corners, and college seemed like the biggest corner of all. It was going to take at least seven years to earn my doctorate. The more I thought about it, the less I wanted to devote myself to something I had little interest in. I had the same problem that most people my age had: I wanted to work very little and get a lot of money for it. It wasn’t an issue of being lazy. I was impatient, so I jumped at the first opportunity that came my way.