Sloppy Seconds: The Tucker Max Leftovers (39 page)

Dallas “Are you reading Harry Potter?!?”

Chevy “YOU FUCKING NERD! THAT’S WHERE YOU WENT OFF TO? TO GET THE NEW HARRY POTTER BOOK! HOLY SHIT!!!”

Tucker “Reading about Quiddich is better than going out on this shitty island!”

Suddenly, the fourth guy in our group, Ralphie, got this awful look on his face.

Ralphie “I don’t think the mussels are sitting right.”

We broke down laughing as he ran to the bathroom and started puking. But this wasn’t normal puke. The dude was like 130 decibels:

“BBLLLAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!”

He was so loud, it was ridiculous. It was like the dude was trying to scream the vomit out of him. And he was giving commentary the whole time. Like a pukey, disoriented Gus Johnson:

“OH SHIT!!! BLLLLLLLLLLAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHH!!!!!!

HERE IT COMES!!! BLLLLLLLLLLAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHH!!!!!!

WHAT THE FUCK BLLLLLLLAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHH!!”

He finally stopped, and we tried to open the door, but it was locked.

Chevy “Ralphie…you OK?”

Ralphie “Yeah. Do you have a plunger?”

Chevy “I don’t know. If we do, it’s in there.”

We hear Ralphie searching around, knocking stuff over, getting frustrated.

Ralphie “I don’t believe it! All the money your family has, and they don’t have a plunger!”

Chevy “I don’t think anyone has ever stopped up a toilet from puke before.”

This of course was high comedy. But it got better. Once Ralphie felt he had cleaned up the bathroom enough to come out…he couldn’t.

Ralphie “Chevy, why won’t the bathroom door open?”

Chevy “You’re the one who locked it!”

Ralphie “It won’t open! I can’t get the lock undone!”

What kind of idiot locks himself IN the bathroom? There is no 24-hour locksmith in Nantucket; the earliest he could come to free Ralphie was the next day.

Ralphie “I’m going to kick the door down!”

Chevy “NO! This is the original woodwork! The door is like a hundred and fifty years old! My mom will kill me!”

Ralphie “This is the guest bathroom in the guest house! She’ll never know!”

Chevy “Are you kidding? As soon as we leave she’s going through this place with a fine tooth comb.”

Ralphie “What do you want me to do Chevy, sleep in the fucking tub??”

Chevy “Hold on, lemme think!”

Ralphie “Don’t think, you’re a fucking idiot!”

They tried the lock for another hour or so, but eventually Ralphie just gave up and slept in the tub.

That was pretty much the entire weekend. No fucking, barely any drinking, no crazy antics. Just me getting in a fight…at a children’s book party. And Nantucket sucks.

FUCK THE FUCKING HEADBOARD

Occurred, April 2005

If you read my first book you probably remember “The Midland Story,” where I hung out in Midland, Texas with my friend Doug and his redneck friends. The story ends with me and Doug helping Cliff bury his dead goats.

Well, right after that incident, literally that night, I drove to Dallas because the next day I was flying out of the most inconvenient airport on earth, DFW. There was a girl in Dallas who I’d fucked a few times before, and she wanted to do it again. We met at a bar first:

Her “What’d you do today?”

Tucker “Buried some dead goats.”

Her “No you didn’t.”

Tucker “Smell my hands.”

I hadn’t washed my hands yet, and they stank like rotten animal.

Her “Oh my God, that is so disgusting. You are gross!”

Tucker “Whatever, you’re still fucking me, so quiet down.”

Her “You know, you don’t have one charming bone in your body.”

Tucker “Yes I do, it’s right here.” I pointed to my crotch.

Her “Do you know why girls sleep with you? It’s because—”

Tucker “I don’t care why. They do and that’s all that matters.”

We eventually go back to my hotel and fuck. It starts out great as usual, and in her ecstasy she grabs the headboard. This is a Hampton Inn I think, so the furniture is not real well made, and this headboard was particularly bad. Worse than Ikea, but not quite as bad as the shit people leave on their corner for poor people to pick up. It wasn’t even attached to the bed frame—it was actually mounted to the wall instead. She dislodged the headboard when she grabbed it, and then would not shut the fuck up about it. It felt like fucking a play-by-play announcer.

Her “Oh my God, it’s cracking.”

Tucker [humping]

Her “I can feel it giving way.”

Tucker [humping]

Her “I think it’s going to break.”

Tucker [humping]

Her “Oh my God, it’s breaking right now!”

Tucker [humping]

Her “It’s broken off! The headboard is broken off the wall! What do we do now!?!”

Tucker “Are we not fucking? Seriously, I have my dick in you, and you are worried about the FUCKING HEADBOARD???”

It didn’t even fucking hit us; it just fell on the bed. To make sure she’d shut up and fuck, I pull out, drag her across the bed so we’re two feet away and parallel to the head board—which is now sitting on the bed, propped against the wall—and start fucking there. Now she has to shut the fuck up about the fucking headboard, right?

Nope. We get back to fucking, full on coitus, not touching the headboard, the headboard not moving, and STILL she wouldn’t stop. Over the course of their entire careers, I don’t think headboard manufacturers talk about headboards as much as this girl did during five minutes of sex.

Her “Do you think I broke the headboard?”

Tucker [humping]

Her “Are we going to have to pay to fix the headboard if it’s broken?”

Tucker [humping]

Her “Why do you think the headboard fell?”

Tucker [humping]

Her “I wonder what kind of wood it is? What do you think? Cherry? Teak?”

Tucker [humping]

Her “Do you think Headboard would make a good name for a child?”

Tucker [humping]

Her “Headboard! Headboard! Headboard! Headboard! Headboard!”

Tucker [humping]

Her “You can take my life, but you can never take, my HEEEEAAAAAD BOOOOOAAAAARRRRRRRRRRDD!”

OK, I made up those last few. It’s not like I was listening to her, I was busy trying to get the white goo to shoot out of my dick. All I know is she was definitely babbling incessantly about the headboard for a preposterous and unreasonable amount of time. It was worse than listening to Dick Vitale fawn over a Duke/UNC game.

There I was, lying on top of her, penis inside her vagina, trying to fuck, and I can’t because this girl will not shut up about the headboard. I didn’t know what else I could do, so I bit her on the nose. Not hard or anything, but enough to get her attention.

Her “OWW! Why did you bite my nose?”

Tucker “BECAUSE YOU WON’T SHUT THE FUCK UP ABOUT THE FUCKING HEADBOARD!”

Her “What if it breaks or falls again?!”

Tucker “IT’S SITTING ON THE BED! WHERE IS IT GOING TO FALL FROM?!”

Her “I DON’T KNOW!”

I got up and went into the bathroom to cool off. I can’t recall any time in my life that a girl has ever made me so angry as I was having sex. Really, I can’t. Girls have made me happy, anguished, terrorized, affectionate, and depressed during sex, but never angry. Think about it—how can someone even piss you off AS YOU ARE FUCKING?

I come back from the bathroom, relatively calm and settled and ready to try again…to find her balled up on the bed, crying her eyes out. No really, she was in hysterical tears.

Tucker “Why are you crying?”

Her “You bit me on the nose and the headboard is broken!!”

If Ashton Kutcher had busted into the room with cameras and told me I was Punk’d, it would have made more sense than what was actually happening. Her actions were just not a reasonable or rational response to the events of the night. I was flummoxed. I had no idea how to deal with a girl who was inconsolably bawling because the headboard fell off the wall at a cheap hotel. This is just not part of any reality I understand.

I didn’t know what to do, so I just started laughing. This only made her more upset, and she started screaming at me.

Her “OH!! YOU ARE SO COOL, YOU ARE TUCKER MAX THE FUCKING ASSHOLE!”

Tucker “That is the first thing you’ve said in 30 minutes that hasn’t been about the headboard.”

Her “FUCK YOU!”

Tucker “And that would be the second thing.”

Her “Yeah, you are so cool.”

She starts putting on her clothes, still crying.

Tucker “I mean seriously—is this happening right now? You are crying because I got mad that you wouldn’t stop talking about the headboard during sex. When does this start making sense?”

She collects her things and goes to the door.

Tucker “You want to take the headboard with you? You can have it if you want.”

Her “FUCK YOU AND FUCK THE FUCKING HEADBOARD!!”

THE JUNIOR STORIES

I have a lot of friends with funny, ridiculous and crazy stories. SlingBlade is the funniest person I know, and Hate entertains me the most, but they don’t have the best stories. That would be Junior. If you read
IHTSBIH
, you remember him from “The Vegas Story.” That was a pretty crazy weekend in my life—but it probably wouldn’t make it into the book about
his
life. That book is up to him to write. In the meantime, I have a few good stories that involve both of us:

LA SUCKS

Occurred, Summer 2000

Here is how I described Junior in “The Vegas Story” in
IHTSBIH
:

Junior is 5’9”, well built, half-Italian half-Arabic, with light green eyes and olive skin. He’s got that ‘dark with light eyes’ look that women lose their shit over. I knew Junior from Florida, where he used to work for my father. We became friends because he is one of the few people I’ve ever met in my life who not only does better with women that I do—WAY better, actually—but simply put, he can not only keep up with me, he can exceed me at times. Not many people can.”

During the summer of 2000, between my 2L and 3L years at Duke Law School, I was fired from my first job as a lawyer at Fenwick & West in Palo Alto (that story is told in “The Infamous Charity Auction Debacle” in
IHTSBIH
). Considering that it happened only three weeks into the summer, I had quite a bit of time to kill until my final year of law school started in the fall. After a few weeks of hanging out in San Francisco and getting drunk every night with SlingBlade, I decided to go hang out with Junior, who was living in LA. He shared this shitty two-bedroom apartment in Santa Monica with his cousin Amir, but it had a huge living room and two sofas, so I just set up shop on one of them.

The very first day I get there, at 2:00 in the afternoon, Junior and I start drinking. By 2:15, we start drinking heavily. Junior has a gambling problem, and the next thing I know we’re watching some random horse races on channel 426, calling up an offshore book, trying to make bets on the races. We get through with two races left, and Junior and I make about 30 of the most idiotically complex bets possible. We’re triple boxing trifectas, double boxing exactas, I’m making stuff up about buying put options on our bets—it was sweet, drunken bedlam.

At the end of the two races, the living room walls are coated with the beer we sloshed around while cheering for our horses. Except that we have no idea who we actually bet on. Junior calls up the book—we’re up like $250!

Of course, we hoot and holler and celebrate like we’ve just won the fucking Powerball. This sets off a feeding frenzy. I pour more alcohol and Junior goes onto the book’s website so we can take the $250 and play virtual table games. We begin recklessly betting money on anything and everything possible: roulette, baseball games, blackjack. In Vegas, I would never split 10s against a 6. On the internet? We did it TWICE. AND WON! Fuck the rules! It’s not like it’s real money anyway. It’s an internet casino! We are screaming and drinking, jumping up and down, sloshing vodka all around his apartment. It’s not even six o’clock.

Tucker “Dude, look at us: we are GROWN MEN. We are ADULTS, and we have done nothing today but gamble and drink!”

Junior “I know! It’s awesome!”

The funny thing is that we consistently won; we finished up about $500 for the day. It’s a gambling truth—if you don’t care about the result and just have fun, you always do better than if you’re trying hard.

His cousin Amir comes home at some point, looks at the scene, sighs, and says, “The sad part is, he’s like this even when you aren’t here.”

This was basically my first time in LA, so Junior and Amir took me out drinking on Sunset strip. We ended up at a famous bar called Dubliner (which is now closed), and after about an hour or two there, I came to a conclusion that would basically never change, even after I lived in LA for two years: Most people in LA are soulless. I don’t mean that they are evil or bad people necessarily (though many are); I mean that with the vast majority of LA people I met that night (and since), there was no “there” in there. They were nothing more than empty shells of human beings, devoid of emotional content, empathy, or substance of any sort.

Tucker “Junior…these people are awful.”

Junior “Yeah, I know. Welcome to LA.”

This is how bad it was—the one girl I met that night who seemed to have the most human traits and maybe had a soul, was Eastern European! If you know anything about Eastern European girls, you’re laughing your ass off right now. This was 2000—pre 9/11—back when you could be reasonably sure that every girl you met in America from an ex-Soviet Bloc country had fucked at least 500 syphilitic Russians just for a spot in the shipping container bound for America.

I still could have dealt with that, maybe, if she didn’t fucking smell. No, I don’t think you understand. I’m not talking about that potent, hormonal musk you get from a race of hirsute, forest-dwelling ethnic cleansers. This bitch stank like a fucking homeless person. The sad part is, she was so hot and everyone else in this LA bar was so bad, I STILL would have hung in there. But what finally broke the straw for me was her breath. It could have melted steel. I was afraid to even let her blow me—I wasn’t about to let whatever was causing that smell to touch my penis.