Paris bid a fantastic farewell to the 2024 Summer Olympics. This massive athletic event featured a broad variety of mental and physical challenges designed to test the mettle of top athletes from around the world. It got me thinking: What if we created a competition to determine the least impressive individual? How might our bottom-of-the-barrel citizens fare in such a contest?

All kinds of objectively awful people walk among us.

For my Opportunist Olympics, I’m focusing on the subsect of unscrupulous individuals who come out of the woodwork when they sense blood in the water. These villains derive satisfaction from exploiting the weak, actively seeking out people they can easily manipulate and control.

Typically, that’s our vulnerable adults. It’s usually an older person with an addiction; they are more susceptible to being scammed and are less likely to be believed if they raise concerns later.

After Dad died in 2021, I was dismayed to discover just how many booze buzzards he’d been fending off.

Dad’s last months on earth were spent with these vultures circling overhead, swooping down on him at increasing intervals to dig at his skin with razored talons—anything to get their chunk of flesh. Eventually, they abandoned him for better prospects. I can’t decide what was worse, the constant pecking at Dad by so many mouths or the one-by-one desertion that finally took place once it was clear his downward spiral could only end in one way.

By then, most of the succubi had left him alone, but there was one last holdout who was hell-bent on wringing Dad for all he was worth. No matter the cost to his health and sanity, so long as she got hers.

I know what some of you are thinking.

My dad was a grown man with 63 revolutions around the sun; he could make his own decisions. I believed the same, and that’s why I tried not to interfere with his choices while he was still breathing. It wasn’t until his life ended that I could start piecing together what had happened behind closed doors.

I realized Dad had not been himself for quite some time. My intelligent doctor-dad with wit and a sarcastic sense of humor had quietly eroded away, leaving a vacant shell of a man who only lived to drink. But to kill a functioning alcoholic like my dad, he’d need to drink steadily for months with no one being the wiser, which he did. He drank two 375-ml bottles of Tito’s vodka a day, but I find it difficult to believe that nobody around him knew about it.

By mid-April, my sister and I knew something was amiss, and we weren’t the ones allegedly living with him.

I could no longer buy into the lie that his slurred speech and newfound weepy demeanor were because of his recent stroke in March, and when he announced his engagement later that month, he all but sealed my suspicions. I asked him for some space while I considered what to do next, telling him I knew he had to be drinking again.

My confronting him with this knowledge was likely taken as a betrayal of our sacred, unspoken trust to never let things get too heavy between us. I’d let that happen once before, when I was a child, trying to rebuild our relationship back up from nothing when he returned from rehab for the first time. I’d repaired us with band-aids and duct tape, vowing to never let us fall apart so spectacularly again.

(I mention all of this only to underline why Undesirable #1 will always take first place in my Opportunist Olympics.)

The reason she’s the worst of the worst, despite her wide-eyed claims of innocence, is because she knew what was going on inside the condo she coveted above all else. She’s a former nurse, presumably with some training or knowledge of alcoholism. Yet, from the beginning of their on-and-off relationship, she’d ask him to fetch her wine on his way home from a long day at work. Mind you, she never had a job herself (or one that lasted longer than a week), so why couldn’t she just go get it herself? Why ask a known alcoholic to do such a chore?

For months, Dad woke up around 7 AM, bought a bottle of Tito’s, downed it, then got himself another. Sometimes, he would also purchase other types of alcohol with his vodka, like Merlot or Chardonnay. I can only assume who drank it, but Dad wasn’t the only heavy drinker in residence, and Undesirable was awfully fond of posting pictures of herself with a full glass of wine around the same time as these purchases. But, hey, maybe she didn’t know what was going on right under her nose. She did avoid Dad at all costs. She only came around when she needed something small and rectangular.

Regardless of who drank the wine, Undesirable #1 takes the gold.

The remaining winners—for silver and bronze—can’t be chosen individually. There are just too many of them.

Next up in our parade of predators are the PayPal pilferers. Just about every woman Dad tried to date, including his ephemeral third wife, sent him PayPal requests by the dozen. It was especially hard for me to catalog these emails because I specifically warned Dad about this type of situation.

Never in my wildest dreams could I imagine that my dad, a well-educated former cardiologist, would become one of those sad old people who fell victim to a sweetheart scam. I phrase it like that because this scenario can also happen to your loved ones. I never considered my dad old (neither did he), and I always thought he was proficient with a computer. Of course, I never factored his drinking into account, or what that would do to his brain.

Panic consumed me when Dad disclosed his involvement with yet another woman, leaving me desperate for a solution to end what I knew would be a painful situation for Dad in the long run.

I immediately recognized the “sweetheart scam” language being used, transporting me back to my high school days of studying while Dr. Phil blared in the background. Dad and I had previously discussed reputable dating sites, and despite feeling awkward, I even showed him how to create a profile. I would have done anything to ease his loneliness and help him get over She-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named (a.k.a. Undesirable #1). Finding out I had yet another woman to protect Dad from made me feel bone-tired.

I just couldn’t understand why he kept choosing these losers who only wanted him for his money when he was such a handsome guy, and until recently, he’d had a well-paying job. The money he’d saved for his retirement would set him up nicely; he just needed to find someone worthy of him.

So, sharing the second-place spot on our podium, we have the internet scammers, the conniving individuals who specialize in online fraud.

If they can’t get to their target using fake love bombing, they turn mean, hurling insults and threats. They make up vicious lies about you, threatening to tell your children and ex-wives, or stalk you where you live, all the while sending you non-stop money requests. That’s what happened with “Barbie,” the scammer who resorted to extorting Dad with threats of going to the police with false allegations. Dad had been steadily paying her money, along with several other women he’d met online, for months, until he lost his job because of his drinking. He could no longer afford to pay her daily, which he did mostly so he’d have somebody to talk to, but she didn’t care about any of that.

Last, we have third place, the bronze medal.

This award goes to all the people who watched a stumbling drunk careen from one building to the next and, instead of trying to get him help, sold him another bottle, taking advantage of his intoxicated state by tacking on a few extra bucks.

Even in March, after his stroke, my dad was difficult to deal with in the hospital. He often embarrassed me with his ungrateful behavior toward the hospital staff and his entitled attitude. But I could understand why he acted that way, and I cut him some slack. These were his former colleagues, and it shamed him to be seen as an “invalid” (his words). I can only imagine how much worse it would have been for him to be admitted to the ICU as a patient with alcoholism needing detox.

But does having a piss-poor attitude mean my dad deserved a lower standard of care, or does it mean that when he showed up stumbling at the market for yet another bottle of vodka, he should have to pay double?

For that reason, any person who takes advantage of the vulnerable, even in the most minute of ways, deserves the honor of claiming the bronze medal in my version of the Opportunistic Olympics.

Late-Stage Alcoholism: The Gruesome Reality

Navigating Grief: Unveiling the Science Behind Mourning

Why Am I Doing This?

The Search for Enlightenment

a one-sided convo w/ a sociopath’s texts

Kinsey Keys

aspiring memoirist rummaging through my noggin, stubbornly clutching the past to my chest like it’s a newborn babe starved for mother's milk.

See Full Bio