over the guys.
There’s just a lot of nastiness going around right now. Maybe it’s true what Stuntman says Rustbelt said about him. Rusty isn’t the brightest guy, and maybe he would be dumb enough to say something like that, but he also seems sweet to go along with the stupid. I mean, he doesn’t even get that we’re not only competing against the other teams, we’re competing with our teammates.
To survive you’ve got to form alliances, and then pick your moment to stab your ally in the gut. I could do the betrayal part just fine. It’s the alliance part I have trouble with. My mother says I have a dark Slavic soul. I think that’s true. It takes me a long time to get to know people and to trust them. And you can’t trust anybody on this show.
I guess I’m going to have to team up with Jetman against the girls. I don’t really like him, he’s such a dork, always going on and on about this guy back in the nineteen-forties. And it’s not like Jetboy was much of a hero. He didn’t keep the virus from being released. He screwed up and died. I mean, he got a pass for just trying, so why don’t I get a pass for trying too?
And I really did try during this challenge. I knew I could cover more ground if I split myself, so before we headed out from the Diamonds headquarters I had Bubbles smack me hard. Bubbles will only hit you if you agree to hit her, too, so while I was at full size I punched her. But it’s really hard for me to just haul off and hit a woman. They wanted to film that, but I wouldn’t let them. My mother would never forgive me, and my father would probably split me down to two or three hundred Ivans if I just hit a woman like that. Anyway, I had to hit her like five times before she said I was punching hard enough, and then she finally hit me with a bubble.
That split me into two Ivans each about five feet four inches tall. I get a little slow mentally at that size, but I thought I could risk doing one more double. So she hit one of the little Ivans, and split him in two. Those quarter-sized Ivans are sort of like Forrest Gump, but I knew I had the half-size me to sort of keep control of them. And then it was off to Rodeo Drive.
I wanted to keep it to the three Ivans, but while we were running in and out of stores, one of the quarter-size mes didn’t look when he crossed the street, and this bright yellow Ferrari came gunning down the street and hit him. The two little Ivans that created got out of the street . . . but they get dumber with every split, and the little versions of me don’t seem to have a lot of inhibitions. One of them tried to—well, let’s just call it flirting—to flirt with a pretty girl. There are a lot of pretty girls in California. Particularly in Beverly Hills. That’s one thing California has over Brighton Beach, but this little me wasn’t, well, I guess you’d say, real polite—
So, anyway, this girl swung this giant handbag and hit me—him—really hard, and now we were seven. The biggest me was trying to gather up the smaller ones to reabsorb a few, but they kept running into the street and getting hit by cars, and some of the shop owners were hitting us—them—with brooms and stuff. Eventually the big me just lost count.
And Pop-Tart, she was such a bitch. She grabbed one of the tiniest versions of me and stuffed him into a mailbox. I can’t tell you how hard it was get a mailman to come out and unlock the box so I could get him back and reabsorb him.
And the dogs. People have too many dogs in Los Angeles. And they shouldn’t be walking dogs in such a nice area of town. There was this dog walker who had seven of those Afghan hounds on a leash. When they spotted one of the smallest mes, they broke free and one of them bit the little guy. I was afraid the two that appeared were going to get eaten.
The biggest me knew I was really getting into trouble and kept trying to gather up all the little ones. The