by Tucker Max
Credit was dating this one girl in law school, “Rachel.” Both she and Credit are Jewish, so it was a match made in haggling, self-loathing heaven. One night she and a bunch of her female friends from their temple or Hillel or whatever decided to throw a dinner party at the one nice Italian restaurant in Durham. She told Credit to bring his male friends. He doesn’t have any friends, so he brought me and Hate.
This was one of those dinner parties young girls have and pretend to enjoy, in order to show each other how sophisticated they are. Translation: it was really fucking boring. Plus, all these girls were in the same social circle, so all they did was gossip and talk about girls who weren’t there. Since they were Jewish, I was at least hoping to hear details of their Zionist plots against Palestinians or stories about how they have their horns and tails cut off at birth, but no dice.
Normally, mixing me with alcohol and boredom is a recipe for disaster. The only known antidote is the possibility of immediate sexual contact. Fortunately for everyone not interested in hearing the harsh truth about the state of Israel, there was a pretty cute Jewish girl next to me at the table. And once she realized I was a naughty goyim she could secretly have forbidden sex with, I had my entertainment for the evening. As usual, Rachel was a bitch to Credit and he fawned over her, because they’re a typical Jewish couple.
Hate was seated between me and this quiet, mousey girl. When Rachel introduced her to Hate, she perked up right away—Hate is not Jewish at all, but his last name is VERY Jewish-sounding. She talked to him for a few minutes, thinking she’d found a nice Jewish lawyer-to-be. And then he told her he didn’t go to any temple because he was Protestant, and she had no use for him. This one was looking for a husband; non-Jews needed not apply.
Credit had sold Hate on coming to this thing by promising Rachel would sit him next to a cute girl who would be shorter than him and would be into him. He rushed home from rugby practice and quickly showered, all so this snotty little J.A.P. could immediately brush him off, just because he wasn’t a Christ-killer. And he still had to pay for his lousy meal.
Compounding all of this for Hate was the fact that he was really hungry. This restaurant was supposed to be one of the best in Durham. If you know anything about restaurants, you know that small towns like Durham in southern states like North Carolina are lucky if any of the “nice” restaurants are better than Macaroni Grill. This place wasn’t. Not only that, but they had awful service too. Everything took forever to get there. Hate is never late, ever, and because he’d just come from rugby practice and rushed to get to dinner on time, he hadn’t eaten anything for several hours.
When the bread came, like ten minutes after we’d been seated, the waiter put it across the table from Hate. He asked Rachel to pass the bread, so she did what anyone would do, she took a roll and passed it from person to person. By the time it got to Hate, all the bread was gone. Remember that scene from Office Space when they’re celebrating a birthday and everyone gets a piece of cake but Milton? Yeah, it was like that. There was nothing left in the basket but a pack of saltines. Which Hate ripped open and ate like we’d just picked him up off a lifeboat. He even dipped them into the butter. As buttery crumbs spilled from his mouth, the mousey girl shot him the most repulsed look I’ve ever seen. It was like she was watching the fine dining equivalent of “Two Girls, One Cup”.
Ten minutes go by and still, no one has come to refill the breadbasket. Hate is frustrated. Finally the waiter comes by to take our drink order.
Hate “Can we get more bread please?”
Waiter “Of course.”
Five minutes go by. Nothing. Hate is peeved. The waiter brings our drinks.
Hate “Did you get the bread?”
Waiter “Oh sorry!”
Ten excruciatingly grain-free minutes go by. Hate is getting visibly annoyed. The waiter comes to take our dinner order.
Hate “Do you have the bread?”
Waiter “Oh my God! I’ll get that as soon as I take your order! So sorry.”
The girl who had suggested the restaurant tells everyone that she has to leave, because she had plans to eat somewhere else. This girl also went to law school with us, and was possibly Hate’s least favorite person in the school. Normally, her leaving would have made Hate happy, but 1. She suggested the spot that was sucking on every level, 2. She was now going off to eat, while he had to keep waiting for his food, and 3. She had taken the last two rolls right before the basket had gotten to Hate, and both were sitting there, with the only the soft middles eaten out.
On this point, I am fully behind Hate. What kind of greedy, selfish, entitled bitch takes not just two, but THE LAST TWO rolls from the roll basket when it’s clear not everyone has gotten one, and then just eats the center out of both?? I could tell you what kind, but I’m tired of getting emails from the Anti-Defamation League.
This was a turning point in the night. Hate passed all his preliminary stages of anger, and sat ready to blow. He was so hungry, he’d eaten all the ice out of his vodka soda. But he’s so polite that he wouldn’t make a big deal out of it, or go get some bread himself. He just sat there, steaming at the indignity of being ignored and dismissed. The waiter comes by with our second round of drinks.
Hate “I asked for more bread, it never came.”
Waiter “Oh sorry … we just ran out.”
At that point, we’d been in the restaurant about an hour. Hate was trying to hold it together, but he addressed the waiter in a voice that was equal parts desperation and frustration, and just a bit too loud for the situation.
Hate “Well, can I get an appetizer or something?? I’m starving!”
Waiter “Your entrees will be out in no time. If I order an app now, it’ll just come out with them.”
He let out a huge sigh and threw his hands up in the air, then sat there, staring off at nothing and muttering to himself, with his jaws locked in angry tension, like two tectonic plates on the verge of slippage. He reacted like a Celtics fan does when Kobe Bryant gets a bailout call—they want to get pissed at the unfairness of it, but they can’t muster anything but resigned exasperation, because they knew it was coming. The girls, of course, were aghast at his embarrassing display. Every good Jewish girl knows that the appropriate response in this situation is excessive eye-rolling and withering passive-aggressiveness. Credit and me? We started giggling, hoping against hope to see the Hate Volcano blow.
Five minutes have passed since the waiter said the food will be “out in no time.” Hate’s nostrils are now flared like the bulging magma vents of Mount Kilhuea. Credit and I are periodically checking him for signs of seismic activity.
Ten more minutes pass. Hate has completely abandoned any pretense of socialization, retreating into his cocoon of rage. Credit and I are now flicking our eyes back and forth between our conversations and Hate so much, we look like we’re watching the Chinese National Ping-Pong Championships.
Fifteen minutes pass. Hate has firmly grasped his knife and fork, and has begun staring a hole through his plate. It’s becoming hard for me to contain my excitement. Christmas is so close!
Twenty minutes. Hate is white-knuckling his utensils. The veins on his head throb and pulsate. In a disaster movie, this would be the part where Morgan Freeman comes on to tell us a comet is headed for earth, and it can’t be stopped.
At some point between the twenty and twenty-five minute mark, it happens:
With his knife and fork still in his hands, Hate violently gorilla slams both fists down into the table. All the plates on the table jump up, the glasses clink and fall over, and he yells at the top of his lungs:
“CRIMINY!”
The mousey girl next to him yelps in surprise, and a look of true primal fear fills her face. For a second, I think she was honestly scared for her life. All the other girls sat wide-eyed and speechless, like they’d just seen a shooting. Credit and I, too, were speechless. But we couldn’t talk because we were laughing. And I could NOT stop. I’m sitting here
at my computer, over ten years later, still laughing my ass off as I fucking write this.
I mean … who says “criminy”??? What’s next, “fiddlesticks”??? “Jiminy Cricket”???
Here’s the thing: After he’d hammer-fisted the table so hard it almost broke, it’s not like he started laughing. Hate wasn’t doing this to be funny. He was VERY serious. He sat there, just as angry as before his out burst, hands still death-clutching his utensils, staring a hole into his plate, waiting for the food, like a guy who takes his role as the king at Medieval Times a little too seriously.
No one said a fucking word until the food came—which of course happened only one minute after Hate’s explosion. The only sounds were the girls picking up the glasses that fell over, Credit and me cackling like uncontrollable hyenas, and Rachel trying to shush us. I don’t think anyone talked as they ate, nor do I remember a thing about the food, and still this was probably the most enjoyable meal of my life.
THE ITALY TRIP
The summer between our first and second year, Credit and Hate went to Italy to do a summer session at a law school there. The first thing they did when they got back was tell me all about it. It was awesome—not because of the sights or even anything they did, but because Credit basically spent the entire time getting under Hate’s skin in the most subtle and ingenious ways.
Credit tells the story of the bus tickets:
Credit “So no one checks your tickets on the buses in Rome; they are run on the honor system. But every once in a while, a cop will get on and check everyone’s ticket, and if you don’t have it, you have to pay a huge fine. We would buy our tickets most of the time, but one night we were out drinking and we’d both lost our tickets, and you can only buy them during the day. And it was far from our place, like six miles or something. I’m not walking that, no chance. You can go ahead and fine me or whatever, but there is no way I’m walking six miles. Hate on the other hand … well, you know Hate. Breaking the law—ANY LAW—is a black and white issue to him. So he watched me get on the bus, and then started the long, SIX MILE walk home. While drunk, at 1am. It takes two hours for him to walk home. Two hours! Can you imagine? And it started raining. He was soaking wet when he got home.”
Tucker “But was there a cop checking tickets on the bus?”
Credit “Of course not! They’re Italian, they’re not working late night weekends.”
No response from Hate as Credit told this story. Just suppressed anger. Then, as if he had spent the entire time crafting his defense, he finally pipes up:
Hate “Credit, did you tell Tucker about the place we had to stay? Because of you??”
Credit can do nothing but laugh.
Hate “OK, so I organized everything for this trip. I arranged the travel, I got us registered at the school, I did EVERYTHING. The only thing I asked Credit to do was find us a place to stay in Rome. That’s it. ONE THING. That’s the ONLY thing he had to do.”
Credit [still laughing his ass off] “Hate, it was a place wasn’t it? And we stayed there, didn’t we?”
Hate “Ooohhhh—you want to play that game? Tucker, listen to this place. It looks like Section 8 housing. Building had to be 200 years old. We had a communal shower/toilet area we had to share with a bunch of other people. The entire room wasn’t even as big as one of our bedrooms here. You could stand in the middle and almost touch both walls with your arms outstretched. There was no desk or anything. We slept on cots. Cots. Actual cots, that may in fact have been left over from the American occupation during WWII. And of course, no air-conditioning. Which in the summer in Rome was awful. I would wake up every morning drenched in sweat.”
Credit “Hate, it wasn’t that bad.”
Hate “Oh no, in fact, it was worse. At first I just sucked it up and dealt with it, because I assumed that this was the only place we could get. This is Rome, it’s hard to find temporary places, OK fine, at least we’re in Rome. Then we get invited to a student thing at the apartment of another girl in our program, who goes to Georgetown Law School. Her place was amazing. Huge, totally furnished, everything; better than our place here. Well, at the very least this girl must be rich or something, so I assume her daddy paid for this or something, and we could never have afforded this anyway.”
Hate’s anger is starting to hit a crescendo, and Credit is laughing so hard, he’s almost crying.
Hate “NO!! She is paying LESS THAN WE ARE. And get this—she got the place through the service the school has for the summer students. CREDIT COULD HAVE DONE THIS!!”
Credit “Max, you don’t understand how awesome it was—he was screaming at me in this apartment, with all these law students around who didn’t know him at all. They were all nervous and freaked out.”
From the second they’d come back from Italy, Credit had repeatedly busted Hate’s balls about this “two inches on the cot,” or something. I wanted to see how this tied in, and what better time to ask than right as Hate was reaching the brink?
Tucker “But what’s the deal with the smaller cot or whatever?”
Hate “Oh, that’s just the icing on this cake of bullshit.”
Credit “OK, when we got to our place for the first time, since it was so shitty, I let Hate pick the cot he wanted, and I took the other one. Well, after a few days, Hate started to suspect that my cot was larger than his cot.”
Tucker “We’re talking about cots? Like, these are just two pieces of fabric tied between sticks?”
Credit “Oh yeah. No doubt. It was impossible for these to be more shitty. So anyway, Hate starts obsessing over the cots, every day he’s talking about the cots, and how maybe I got the larger cot, and on and on. So one day we bought a tape measure and measured them—”
Credit is laughing too hard to even continue, and Hate can’t contain himself.
Hate “HIS COT WAS TWO INCHES WIDER THAN MINE!!”
Credit “Hate, I let you pick the cot you wanted!”
Hate “It doesn’t matter—YOU GOT THE LARGER COT!! EVEN AFTER YOU FUCKED EVERYTHING UP!!”
Credit sums up his most faux-serious voice, and still laughing, says:
Credit “Hate … let’s not live in the past.”
Hate exploded with indignant fury, cursing and storming around the apartment for at least another hour.
THE APARTMENT
Those vignettes above were all from the first year of law school. Second year was when Hate, Credit, and I moved in together. Now with closer proximity to Hate, Credit and I devised dozens of little things to fuck with him. For example:
1. Chores: We’d conspire to adjust the chores so that he always had to do everything. For example, if it was Credit’s turn to take out the trash, we’d both claim it was Hate’s. His pure astonishment and righteous indignation at the thought of having to take out the trash TWICE in a week was a bouquet of hilarious.
Hate “Credit, take the trash out.”
Credit “I think it’s your turn, Hate.”
Hate “It is not, it’s yours, I took it out Monday.”
Credit “I took it out Tuesday.”
Tucker “Yep, he did. You’re up Hate.”
Hate “There was no trash on Tuesday!!”
Credit “I seem to remember taking trash out.”
Hate “FUCK BOTH OF YOU! THIS IS THE SAME TRASH FROM YESTERDAY! I EVEN REMEMBER THE CANDY BAR WRAPPERS HERE! NOW TAKE IT OUT!”
Credit “I ate a Snickers this morning.”
Tucker “I think I saw Credit take the trash out.”
Hate “WHAT THE FUCK?!??!”
2. Food: We’d always eat his food and then lie about it. You see, the three of us were at that stage in our lives just past the free-for-all of college food allocation, but not quite into the responsibility of adult food budgeting. Because we each bought our own food, but stored it together, Hate devised a complex system to divide the refrigerator and pantry up into sections for each of us. It makes sense he would do this—think of the attributes that go into making the type of p
erson who would create a fastidious and explicit system for fair and equitable storage of food. Credit and I paid lip service to following his rules … but it was only so we could break them in the most subtle and infuriating ways.
Like eating his peanut butter. We’d CONSTANTLY eat his peanut butter, making sure to leave just enough so that the next time he went to make a sandwich, there was only enough to thinly cover his bread (he liked it thick). He’d get pissed off and rant and rave, but we’d always be in the clear—because we’d eat enough of our own peanut butter that it looked like we were only using our own. Hate, being too good of a person, couldn’t conceive of someone eating double the proper amount of peanut butter just to fuck with him, so instead he blamed himself.
Sometimes we’d use his peanut butter completely up, and replace it—except with low-fat peanut butter. You haven’t lived until you’ve seen a grown man flip his shit when he goes to make a PB & J and finds low-fat Jif in his cupboard. One time we switched it up and replaced the bread of his we ate with potato bread instead of whole grain wheat.
Hate “Max, what the hell is this??”
Tucker “Bread.”
Hate “THIS IS POTATO BREAD!!”
Tucker “So?”
Hate “WHY WOULD YOU BUY THIS??”
Tucker “I replaced your bread, just like I said. Plus, I only ate about ten slices of your last loaf, and I bought you a whole new one. So … you owe me a few slices out of there.”