Another girl asks me what is wrong with Hate. And a third. I tell them that he is angry at them for not being better looking. A guy talks shit about Hate within my earshot. I offer to thump his skull. Guy apologizes. Hate continues undeterred. Little nuggets of wisdom he drops include:
“Hey, Heeeeeyyyyyy, (waves hand) oh fuck it, people with the … lawyers and who doesn’t want to be that; but HEEEEEEYYYYYY, hi … I’M TALKING HERE. That’s an ass, likes it in the pooper awwwww yeah.”
Some guy has the autistic psychic teacher on his lap. Hate sees this and comes over and begins pounding on his shoulders, and shouting at the top of his lungs:
“YEEEEEEEEAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHH!”
He then awkwardly tries to tackle the seated guy, almost knocking him out of his chair. When this doesn’t work, he begins shouting:
“THAT’S OKAY, YOU GO HOME WITH HER. YEAH THAT’S COOL. GO HOME WITH HER! NO PROBLEM!!”
He then proceeds to sit next to them, continuously giving them the evil eye. The guy finally has enough of this, and leaves, realizing that the girl is not attractive enough to fight an angry Hate over. Hate then makes his move, and begins dancing with the autistic psychic teacher. Well, he begins grinding his crotch on her.
And on the desk.
And on a lamp.
It’s like the strip scene in American Pie, except with a real-life girl who is not nearly as attractive as Shannon Elizabeth, and is not laughing. He then grabs a table and proceeds to wobble-dee shake it and drop it like it’s hot. It breaks. Chelsea is staring in absolute disbelief. She says to me, “Hate is out of control. Something needs to be done. He is breaking my apartment!”
I assume by “something needs to be done” that she wants me to go instigate, so that’s what I did. Hate is now grabbing the girl’s ass, and grinding with her. She is so scared, she goes to Tucker for help.
Chelsea “Tucker, you have GOT to do something about Hate. He broke my Pottery Barn table!”
Tucker “I don’t understand why people say alcohol is a depressant. That’s not really how it works for us.”
Tucker tells Hate that he really needs to “step it up a notch” and takes Skeletor into the other room. They start “dancing.” Tucker is basically trying to have sex with her as she gyrates to the music. He loses ten points for dancing with Skeletor, and another ten for dancing at all.
Score, Round 4
Hate: 40
SlingBlade: 30
Tucker: -46
Tucker’s friend shows up with a delightful little Japanese girl who sounds like a Chihuahua on amphetamines. She is a 2. Hate is smitten. She is retarded drunk. Cupid has spoken.
Somehow I’m stuck talking to a hideous girl. She tells me that she never looks good in pictures. I try to be helpful, “You know what it means when someone says you don’t look good in a picture? If you said ‘it means you’re ugly’ you’re the big winner. What have you won? A lifetime of loneliness and Star Trek conventions. Welcome to the club.”
I end up talking to her cute friend about my favorite subject—myself. For an hour. She’s in love. I realize my work is done so I stop speaking to her and walk away mid-sentence.
Somehow Hate pissed off the annoying Japanese girl, who lets him know she isn’t going to be sleeping with him by angrily spitting at him like a camel. At this point Megan and Chelsea demand that I escort Hate off the premises. Hate thinks that “leaving” means he should go lie down in Megan’s bed and berate me for screwing him out of a hook up. I find Tucker, who has apparently had sex with Skeletor already, and we drag Hate into a cab.
Hate completely loses his shit. Here is a verbatim transcript of the 20-minute cab ride home:
Hate “Jimminy Christmas ASSHOLES. Call 1–800-821–33 … something. They’ll give us a free cab. GODDAMIT IM NOT PAYING FOR THIS FUCKING CAB MOTHERFUCKERS. I was going to hook up fucking SlingBlade you asshole. Goddamit why did you screw me. Jesus H Christ Jimminy Christmas Dammit. SlingBlade call our girls, where are the girls goddamit.”
SlingBlade “I don’t know any girls to booty call.”
Tucker “You can have a go at the one I just fucked if you want, but we have to go back to the party and get her. I bet she’d be down.”
Hate “JESUS CHRIST TUCKER WHAT THE FUCK IS … OKAY FUCKING FINE ITS TIME TO GET WHORES. Cabbie we need some whores.” [Hate grabs the seat in front of him, in which the cab driver is seated, and begins shaking the hell out of it]
Cabbie “HEY! WHAT IS GO ON?!?”
Hate “What the fuck God? What the fuck? All I want is to hook up is that too much to ask. Instead I have these motherfuckers who fucked me. Goddamit. TAKE US TO GET SOME WHORES ASSHOLE” [Hate leans in close to the cabbie’s ear] “do dooo doo dooo do do, doo doo. STEP ON IT ASSHOLE, STEP ON IT SHOW US WHAT YOU GOT.”
Cabbie “We are near airport, cops everywhere.”
Hate “GODDAMNED PUSSY IS THAT ALL YOU GOT YOU ASSHOLE, STEP ON IT, PUT IT ON THE GODDAM FLOOR. WHAT THE FLYING FUCK.”
I wrestle him back into his seat, so our very patient immigrant cab driver will refrain from shooting Hate in the face with pepper spray.
Hate “Well SlingBlade which one is it going to be?”
SlingBlade “Excuse Me?”
Hate “WHICH ONE IS IT GOING TO BE ASSHOLE?”
SlingBlade “Which one what?
Hate “Are we going to go get food, or are we going to go get food and then beat the shit out of three or four people?”
SlingBlade “Umm, neither. You’re going home to pass out.”
There is then ten seconds of complete silence, followed by Hate speaking in a low crazy guy voice:
Hate “Go fuck yourself SlingBlade … LET ME OUT RIGHT HERE GODDAMN IT!!”
We are in the middle of an interstate at this point and Hate is trying to pry the door handle off because the cabbie has kiddie locked the back doors at my request.
Hate “GODDAMN IT JESUS H MOTHERFUCKER WHAT THE GODDAMN FUCK LET ME THE FUCK OUT SO I CAN FUCK WHORES AND THEN EAT AND BEAT THE SHIT OUT OF PEOPLE. YOU’RE FIRST SLINGBLADE. LET ME THE FUCK OUT. JIMMINEY FUCKING CHRISTMAS WHAT THE FLYING FUCK GODDAMN IT. I WILL FUCKING FUCK ALL OF YOU. HONESTLY LET ME THE FUCK Out you assho—”
Hate passes out midsentence.
We drag him inside and throw him on his bed. The last thing I hear before drifting off to sleep is Hate through the floor yelling about me and my Zionist plot to destroy him.
Final Score
Hate: 145
SlingBlade: 30
Tucker: -50
Mission Accomplished.”
TUCKER’S ACCOUNT
Unfortunately for me, the night did not stop once we got home, because of something SlingBlade was fortunate enough to have missed while attending to Hate and firebombing the self-esteem of the various female party-goers:
After Skeletor and I finished our post-dancing quickie, I got really hungry, so we went looking for food. As is typically the case when it comes to 20-something career-first women with under-developed nurturing instincts, Megan and Chelsea’s fridge had nothing but condiments and alcohol. Skeletor tells me that her friend brought brownies, so we go find him.
I don’t remember the dude’s name, but I do remember that he was the exact type of person your parents warned you not to take candy from. He was straight out of a D.A.R.E. lesson. Fortunately he had the brownies on him, because there was no way I was hopping into his windowless panel van to “barter” for them. It was already bad enough that I would have to take the brownies directly from his hand. I was afraid if I touched him, I’d be greasy for the rest of my life.
Greaser “Now, you know these are pot brownies, right?”
I have never taken any drugs in my life. No pot, no coke, no heroin, no meth, no X, nothing. Just a lot of the drink. I have nothing against drugs per se, a bunch of my friends casually do various drugs, and like any rational person I think marijuana should be legalized. But still, I don’t do them. It’s not my thing, and I wasn’t about to
start now … except I was SO hungry.
Tucker “How strong are these? I never really had pot brownies before.”
Greaser “This is my first time making them, but I don’t think they’re very strong. I usually smoke up, but I wanted to try them, and they’re barely affecting me. You should be fine.”
I tentatively took a bite, and I gotta be honest, it was a pretty good brownie. Maybe a bit tough, like he’d baked sand into it or something, but still delicious. I ate another, and then a third.
I don’t know if it was the pot, the sugar coma, the post-sex coma, or just the placebo effect, but before I knew it, I was slouched on the sofa feeling totally relaxed. I found myself really into Pink Floyd. Up until that point in my life, I hated their music; I’d have rather listened to a small child being sexually abused, but now I really understood them. One of the girls who threw the party told me she was really pissed off at how SlingBlade and Hate had acted, but was pleased that I’d been so calm and mellow. She was happy I’d come, and I was welcome any time. In law school, this girl once described me as “worse than Satan.” It was surreal. Later that night, as I drifted off to sleep on SlingBlade’s couch, I finally understood why people liked pot.
Four hours later, around 5am, the honeymoon was over. I was shocked into consciousness by a paralyzing need to shit worse than I ever had to in my life, even worse than the time I drank tap water in Mexico. But this wasn’t diarrhea shit coming—this was going to be one of those times you pass a brown baby out of your colon. The pain shooting from my lower abdomen was so awful, my first instinct was to kill myself to make it stop.
I got up to go to the bathroom, but I couldn’t walk. The cramps were so intense, I had to slowly lower myself to the ground, and then army-crawl, arm over arm, to the bathroom. I got my pants off as I crawled, pulled myself up onto the toilet seat and let loose. The turd felt like it came out sideways. It was worse than a spinal tap. I would say it felt like I was shitting out my organs, but they’re slippery, they’d come out much easier than this boulder of excrement.
I began by swearing to any God that would listen to me, that I would commit my life to his service if he would only make the pain stop. This prayer changed in to a simple request for the sweet release of death, and ended on an angry note, highlighted by me cursing the entire concept of a higher being, and screaming at the ceiling, challenging God to a fistfight. I think that’s when I passed out.
I only know this because I remember waking up, still sitting on the toilet, and being unable to stand up because my legs were asleep. I fell to my hands and knees in front of the toilet, wiped what detritus I could from my ass, and somehow slinked into the hallway and passed back out on the floor. My pants were out of reach, so I just lay there.
I assume I passed out again, because my next memory is at about 8am. That’s when SlingBlade woke me up. By kicking me in the ribs.
SlingBlade “What are you doing? Where are your pants?”
Tucker “Pain … brownies … shitting …”
SlingBlade “Get out of the way, I have to piss.”
Such a good friend. I think I shit about three more times before I was able to recover some semblance of normalcy.
This was the summer of 2002. If you read I Hope They Serve Beer In Hell, you may remember that my appendix incident happened about six months later, in January of 2003. I have come to find out that the two incidents are almost certainly related:
Apparently, the dude who’d “never made pot brownies before” put actual pieces of marijuana plant in the brownies. It seemed like a logical way to make pot brownies to me when he explained it to me. Mark that down as the one moment in my life where I really, really wished I had done more drugs in high school: I have since been told that pot brownies are made by soaking seeds in oil or something, and then ONLY using the oil to make the brownies. Putting actual parts of the plant in the brownies is a disastrously bad idea. Why? Well, pot is made from marijuana. Otherwise known as hemp. Which is one of the best natural fibers you can use to make … ROPE.
I never put the two things together until one of my friends, who’s a doctor, read this story:
Doctor “Tucker, your appendix didn’t actually rupture, did it? It abscessed right?”
Tucker “Yeah, why?”
Doctor “Well, it’s impossible to know for sure, but I would bet that pot brownie is what caused your appendix to abscess. You see, a full rupture is when the appendix tears or explodes. No one is really sure what causes that, but it’s probably not from anything ingested. But small, slight tears in the appendix that become infected and then abscess—what yours was—are almost always caused by the patient eating something very rough on the colon. Like hemp fiber.”
Tucker “But it was six months later.”
Doctor “Abscesses, especially if they are small, take time to really get infected and create enough pus for you to feel it. Plus, didn’t you start feeling it in October, you just ignored it, right?”
Tucker “Yeah.”
Doctor “That’s three months. Timing is right. I bet that’s what caused the abscess. And of course, you ignoring it and trying to wait it out like an idiot made it 100x worse.”
Motherfucker. I had to get fucking APPENDIX SURGERY because of that shit.
Time to update the final score from the night:
Hate: 145
SlingBlade: 30
Tucker: -5000
Doofus pothead: He’s off the scoreboard. He failed at life.
SEXTING WITH TUCKER MAX
Occurred, various 2009–2011
In the movie based on my first book, we wrote a scene where one of Tucker’s friends tries to call him from jail after getting arrested. I thought it would be funny if the actor used my real phone number, so on set I had him replace the fake number with the “555” prefix you normally hear in movie phone numbers with my real phone number. In the real movie.
I guess it was funny … if you think thousands of random people calling and texting your phone every single fucking day for the rest of your life is funny. Who would’ve predicted so many people would call me if I put my real phone number in a movie? Well, pretty much everyone except me. It got so bad, I just said fuck it, gave in, and even secretly put it on the cover of my last book as well. Go look at the cover, you’ll see it if you have half a brain.
[And yes, if you’re one of the people who called, that really is my phone number, and no, I’m not going to return your call or come party with you and your friends, so you can stop leaving voicemails about that.]
Even though this outcome was totally predictable to everyone but me, one thing happened that no one anticipated:
Girls would sext me.
A LOT of them.
I don’t know how many girls in America are into sexting, but I would guess that a large portion of them have tried to get me to respond to them at some point in the past two years. At first, all these girls annoyed the fuck out of me. Sexting is fucking stupid; it’s only appropriate for repressed teenagers or attention-starved cockteases, not for grown adults who have actual sex with other adults. Look, either come over and actually fuck or stop bothering me.
Then it dawned on me: Instead of letting all these faux-whores annoy me, I should flip it on them and do what I always do when dealing with idiots: ruthlessly fuck with them.
I started responding to the sexters, and quickly realized I was in a unique position. These girls were already into me, so I didn’t have to waste any time warming them up. They knew I was an asshole, so I didn’t have to indulge any of their stupid bullshit, and yet they were STILL coming to me to sext? It was like the perfect storm of fucking-with-idiots comedy.
These are some of the funniest exchanges I had with these girls, divided into categories.
[Editing Note: For the sake of brevity and your sanity, I’ve edited these exchanges down to only the funny parts. No one wants to read the boring parts of sexting; that’s like listening to fantasy football stories. I also rem
oved some of the most obnoxious misspellings, emoticons and abbreviations, (e.g., fbgm, brb, <3, smh) to make everything more readable to educated adults who speak English.]
ABSURD
* * *
If I happen to respond to a girl’s attempt at sexting with me, most of the time it’s because I’m bored. In those cases more than any other, my responses are engineered solely to entertain myself. Her sexual gratification is so far down my list of priorities, that just typing those words out makes me laugh. At all times, my first, second, and third goal is to see how long I can get a girl to play along with the most ridiculous shit I can think up.
ABSURD #1: EVERYTHING IS BETTER WITH BACON
ABSURD #2: MARK OF THE BEAST
ABSURD #3: RACIST FUCKER
ABSURD #4: IMAGINE ALL THE POTTY MOUTH
ABSURD #5: OMG I HAVE TO PEE