The Clown and the Crackpots

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This is the story of a tough, spirited individual who was verbally attack by his family. He ignored their insults and threats, and he loathed them like they were a disease he had to put up with until he was old enough to live on his own. The apex of the story is near its beginning when he's 12 years old at a family picnic and his father, who'd accidentally burned the hamburgers on the grill, screamed at him, in front of everybody in the park, "Eat the charcoal you bastard. It's good for you."
His face had flared out like a snorting bull. "A berserk jackass," David thought. The hamburgers hadn't really been the issue, since the family still had plenty of food. But his father for years had blamed David for ruining his life. "I'll kill ya, bastard," he roared, as he charged toward David while he, on his toes just before leaping out of the way, let out a loud belly laugh at his face. Then he ran down the picnic ground walkway, howling with more laughs, as the rest of the picnickers gazed in amazement -- before a couple of them also burst out laughing themselves. An hour later, David’s father sat by himself in the front seat of his old rattletrap car, having cooled off after blowing off as he usually did, pouting himself into a dumb stupor. While some of the onlooking picnickers feared for David's life, he, keenly aware of the threshold of fury to which he can push his father, returned and sat in the car's back seat undaunted, like a kid who played hopscotch,. Then they quietly left for home.
The book is the story of David's odessey through a life of adversarial adventures. He can think quickly on his feet, and he gains valuable street-experience, such as: how to overcome an opponent by countering with moves or words he doesn’t expect. He has develops insights into the stupid aspects of humanity and he'll tell you there's no such thing as fact. The entire universe is made of opinion. Everything people do is out of desperation -- no one really cares about anyone but themselves. He doesn't intend to treat people roughly. But it seems he has to be tough to protect himself. He tries to be agreeable with women but he doesn’t have relationships with any of them, or rather none of them have them with him. But since he feels women only want men because of what they can get out of them,that doesn't bother him any more than rain. Usually he doesn’t stay with any one longer than two weeks, after which he looks for and soon finds another. His perceptions help him in business, since he can perceive others' deceptive intensions, and he can think of answers before they ask the questions. He does very well in negotiations. After many years of muddling in what others would consider a quagmire of bullshit, he becomes settled in his circumstances and no longer even considers having the comforting things in life – family, friends or relationships. But he’s not actually disgruntled. He'd never expected things to be any other way than what they turned out to be, so he's quite sure of himself. He doesn't want anything he can't have and anytime he would like entertainment, he can laugh at the "meaningless" goings on everywhere around him. Over the years, he’d become financially independent, so he retires and drops out of the rat race. He gets a house on the beach with palm trees and a hammock in which he intends to spend the rest of his days laying watching the waves.
David didn’t expect to ever be “happy” with things, because he knew too much about people. However something unpredictable happened, something so unpredictable that even David, with his awareness, wouldn’t have dreamed of it if he lived to be 120. After this final episode, David wryly concluded, “Life’s so cutesy it scares me.”