Hilarity Ensues

by Tucker Max

  He cut me off. He’s never given me anything again. The supreme irony is now that I’m a #1 best-selling author and all his friends are fans of my writing, he thinks what I did was a great idea, and he loves to brag about me to his friends. Yeah, OK.

  It’s funny because my dad was doing to me exactly what Kathleen Johnson was doing to Katy: Both of them were forcing a life on us we didn’t want. They tried to make us into something we weren’t. But that doesn’t work. You can’t live a lie—not without destroying yourself. That’s probably why I took this fight so personally, why it made me so angry at the time, and why I refused to go back to being a lawyer. Both Kathleen Johnson and my father wanted to shut me up and reinforce their own lies through mine.

  But that’s not going to happen, not to me at least. I’d rather die standing than live with a boot on my neck. As I write this, it’s 2011. I did become a successful writer, my dad got his money back, and MissVermont is … well, I don’t know what she’s doing now. Hopefully for her sake, she’s figured out the things I have and found a way to live her own life.

  But the offer will always be out there: Katy Johnson, you are welcome to write your version of what happened between us, and I will publish it, unedited, either on my site or in a revised version of this book. I’m as interested to read it as everyone else is.

  There was one good thing that came out of her lawsuit. She released a whole raft of hilarious new cartoons based on me. [You can see them along with the rest at the end of this story.]

  [This part of the story isn’t all that funny, and you can skip it if you want. But I had to write it, and if you’re interested in this case, it might be worth it.]

  POSTSCRIPT: SOME SPECULATION

  You scream obscenity, but it’s publicity

  You’re all hoes, so don’t act like you don’t know

  Better fuck with somebody else before you get popped

  Because we can’t be stopped

  —Geto Boys, “We Can’t Be Stopped”

  I know I talked about how angry I was at this lawsuit and how I took it personally because it threatened not only my very existence as a writer, but my struggle to find my identity. That’s all true. And I’m still pissed about it, years later.

  But here’s the thing: At this point in my life, I don’t hold any animosity toward MissVermont (Katy Johnson). I don’t think she was the reason for the lawsuit. As the months and years went by, more and more facts got filled in and added to the things I already knew, until a clearer picture emerged of what actually caused the lawsuit:

  I think Katy was a pawn in this, and that her mom, Kathleen Johnson, was the entire cause of EVERYTHING.

  Consider these facts:

  I know it was her mom who made Katy do all the things that Katy did—pageants, charities, cartoons, law school, modeling, everything. The fact that is Katy didn’t want to do any of that, but did it because her mom made her, was a constant and recurrent theme in her life. It was like her job was being Kathleen Johnson’s daughter, not being herself.

  By the way—Katy’s full name is Katy Johnson, Jr. I shit you not. If that isn’t the perfect little piece of evidence for the existence of an evil narcissist mother, I don’t know what is.

  I know that in the month or so that Katy and I were “dating,” her mom went around and bragged to people that Katy was dating Dennis Max’s son, and that it was “serious.” The people who told me this all said the same thing I did: She didn’t say it in a caring way or say anything about what we were like as a couple. It was all about how it reflected on her narcissistic self-image and how Katy was a trophy for her to bestow.

  Re-read that press release. It should immediately be clear that wasn’t Katy talking. She can’t conjugate verbs in her own native language. Clearly that was from the pen of someone else.

  In the several years following the lawsuit, many people have emailed me and told me all kinds of information about Kathleen. One worked in the offices of Michael Santucci, the lawyer who sued me. That person told me that they never saw Katy once, but that Kathleen was constantly calling and coming into the office and was in charge of every aspect of the lawsuit—she drafted the press releases, she worded Katy’s “statements”, she did all of it. Another person who emailed me worked for Katy’s (now) husband. She must have typed 5,000 words about what a cunt Kathleen Johnson was to her, all stuff that sounded like the woman I met. And another was a girl who went to law school at Stetson with Katy, and basically confirmed all of what Katy told me about the anthrax thing—that it happened, that her mom was the target, that it was her MOM who hushed it up, etc.

  So what do these facts mean? What is the conclusion to draw? Here’s what I think:

  Not only do I believe that everything surrounding the lawsuit was orchestrated by Kathleen Johnson, Sr., I also believe she is an evil, toxic narcissist, and I’d even go so far as to bet that almost every problem in Katy’s entire life is directly attributable to her awful mom.

  Think about it: What was the purpose of Kathleen Johnson, Sr. filing this lawsuit? Was it to prevent people from talking about her daughter? Was it to prevent people from reading my story? Was it to help solve any of the obvious issues in her daughter’s life?

  Fuck no. The whole scene was manufactured by Kathleen Johnson, Sr. to protect her identity to her Palm Beach social circle. That’s the only explanation that fits the facts.

  What other purpose could her actions serve? If the purpose of the lawsuit was to prevent her daughter from being publicly embarrassed, she not only failed, she achieved the opposite result. If she only wanted to silence me, she could have done that WITHOUT calling the press. But she didn’t. After all, it was KATY’S MOM who alerted the press about this case. In fact, she went out of her way to humiliate her daughter by INTENTIONALLY having an AP reporter cover the case, splashing the story all over the front page of every newspaper in America.

  Why would she do this? What is the motive here? These are not the actions of someone who cares about truth, or even cares about her daughter. These are the actions of a narcissist when she’s suffered a narcissistic injury. She ruthlessly attacks and then makes sure that everyone she cares about SEES that she’s attacked the truth she doesn’t want to face. It’s not about reality to a narcissist; it’s about perception. That’s all she cares about, and that’s why the press reporting the lawsuit was more important that the lawsuit itself.

  Why do you think Katy did not respond when she saw the story, but the minute that my MTV special came on, and Katy’s MOM found out what I had written, she freaked? And look at the way she approached the situation: She didn’t email me or call me to try and discern the truth of the accusations. Nope. She convinced Judge Diana Lewis—who incidentally is a personal friend of Kathleen Johnson, Sr.—to issue a prior restraint ruling that was called things like “unprecedented” and “kooky” by every legal scholar who saw it.

  Had I never written anything, no one would know any of this negative stuff about Katy. But I did. And I used her real name, because she was a public figure. And though not many people were reading my site at the time, nothing like that stays anonymous for long on the Internet. And once Kathleen, Sr. saw it, I can promise you she had a meltdown—just like she did when she found my boxers in Katy’s Explorer.

  But this was worse—with the boxers, she was the only one who saw them, so she could hide that. Same with the fake anthrax thing—she could hush that up and hide it. But this story was public. She couldn’t hide it. ALL of her friends would see it. That meant that the mom’s entire false identity was on the line—I was inflicting a massive narcissistic injury NOT on Katy, but on Kathleen, Sr. If all her friends knew the truth, that Katy was not the trophy that Kathleen claimed she was, Kathleen could no longer maintain her constructed identity of perfect mother to a perfect child.

  Katy’s mom did not treat Katy like a daughter; she used Katy as an extension of her ego. She dealt with her not as an individual human with her own wants and needs and p
ersonality, but as a doll or accessory for her to dress up and display in front of others, whose successes and failures were not her own, but were an extension of Kathleen’s. Katy wasn’t a person to her mom; she was an employee. That is abuse, plain and simple. Katy may be fucked up, but how can you blame her?

  Within the context of having a mom like this, Katy’s actions regarding the fake anthrax make perfect sense. I mean, don’t get me wrong—it was profoundly fucking stupid to fake a terrorist attack—but can you understand why she subconsciously hates her mom so much? And why she would do something like that, tell me she did it, but not be able to explain why she did it?

  The saddest thing is that I think the true victim here is Katy. Katy was a young and confused girl, caught between an evil, controlling narcissist mother and a fucking asshole guy (that would be me). Don’t get me wrong, she lied to everyone in her life and did some fucked up shit, but like most of us, she was very much a victim of forces beyond her control, and she was too young and inexperienced to understand any of it. And with a mom like that, she didn’t have a chance.

  Of course I didn’t understand ANY of this as it was going on either. Come on—I was 25 years old and at the height of my youthful, drunken, whorish idiocy. I was doing nothing more than reacting to the things in front of me like any 25-year-old guy would. As I write this now, I’m 35. Ten years of experience helps you see a lot of things.

  I’m going to end this story with a special message for Kathleen Johnson:

  I know you found those boxer-briefs in Katy’s car. I know you looked up the citation record and found the tickets in North and South Carolina (I have friends, too). You knew my story was the truth. But you filed that lawsuit anyway. You thought you could use your connections to bully me. You thought I would fold and disappear. You thought that because I was a poor, powerless nobody at the time, you could bury the truth I was exposing and save your bullshit reputation.

  Your first lawsuit was so unethical and borderline illegal that I could have come after you in 2003. But I didn’t have the resources then. It took everything I had just to win. The last time you came at me, you did it when I was least able to defend myself, and you did it by making your daughter the battleground.

  Not this time. I just printed a lot of stuff about YOU. I think it’s all true, but some of it might not be. I don’t care. I’m printing it anyway. Now you have the chance to come at me again—except this time, you can leave your daughter out of it. Just you versus me. And this time, I’m neither poor nor powerless. Now it’ll be a fair fight.

  But as you sit there, fuming and raging, fantasizing about how you’ll crush me with the lawsuit you’re about to file … remember the advice of Omar:

  “You come at the king, you best not miss.”

  Because this time, you won’t be able to avoid discovery … you fucking cunt.

  TUCKER MAX, KNEE ABUSER

  Occurred, August 2009

  I was in NYC for a bunch of business meetings, nothing special. About halfway through one of them, this female lawyer started giving me the most ridiculous “fuck me” vibes I’ve ever gotten in a business setting. This was a real meeting with a bunch of other people in it, so she wasn’t being inappropriate or forward at all—but there was no doubt about what she was doing. She kept shooting me those sly sideways glances while she stroked her hair, she would give genuine smiles to me when we locked eyes—the kind you can’t fake, when the eyes smile with the face—and when I was talking, she would either stroke her pen or her arm and stare intently at me.

  When a woman goes out of her way to send signals like that, there is only ONE conclusion to draw: She wants to fuck. And not subconsciously—she’s hoping you come talk to her. People ask me all the time how I get myself into the situations I write about. Well, how many times have you been in a bar or at a party and you thought someone was shooting you glances like this, but you did nothing, either because you thought it meant nothing or because you were afraid of rejection? I am afraid of riding on motorcycles and angry Persian women holding knives, but when it comes to rejection, I’m fresh out of fucks to give.

  As soon as the meeting was over and I’d finished the worthless chitchat with people who wanted to feel important, I casually pulled her aside:

  Tucker “Am I off base, or were you giving me serious ‘fuck me’ eyes in that meeting?”

  I didn’t really ask it as a question. She turned bright red. We both knew. I don’t know why she was so shocked—I guess no one had ever directly called her out like that before—but after a second I could see in her eyes that she’d mentally switched from “high-powered attorney” mode to “naughty vixen” mode. We were still in an office during business hours, so she maintained decorum.

  Vixen “I think this is an issue that merits further discussion. Here’s my card, gimme a call. On my cell.”

  The best part is that she rubbed her finger against my wrist when she handed her business card to me. Come on. I wouldn’t have needed this many hints if we were playing Clue. I got it honey: It’s the Colonel, with the pipe, in your ass.

  We met for drinks later that night. It was a worthless formality; she was barely done with her martini before we were out the door looking for a place to fuck. We were on the Upper West Side, and my hotel was all the way in Soho. She had a good suggestion:

  Vixen “I have a key to the Midtown office. Let’s go there.”

  It was a late Friday night, so the place was empty. Law firms are sterile and spooky enough when the cubicle zombies are there, but when they’re all gone, they’re almost like crypts.

  She pulled me into the huge conference room we’d been in earlier.

  Vixen “I’ve always wanted to fuck in here. Now every time I do a deal I can think of your cock inside me.”

  I had to stop myself from making a lawyers-are-always-fucking-people joke. Too easy.

  I take her clothes off, push her on the table on her back and thrust into her. When you see office sex in the movies, it always looks so erotic. That’s Hollywood for you. In real life, office sex is uncomfortable and annoying:

  The conference table is just high enough that I have to stand on my tiptoes to get my dick inside her, which is a fucking hassle, but nothing I haven’t dealt with before. I’m a professional; I can make it work.

  Except I can’t, because my calves start to cramp from being on my tiptoes so long. And not little periodic cramps either—these are bad. So bad, that after a few minutes, my legs start to seize up and shake. From the waist down, I look like Michael J. Fox.

  So I flip her over onto her hands and knees and climb up on the table to fuck her from behind. OK, this is working …

  For like thirty seconds. The table is hard oak, and my knees are hurting like a motherfucker. I flip her back over and we go at missionary style. This works great for me, but she starts grimacing in pain. The lacquer on the table is giving her friction burns on her back. So THAT’S where that squeaking noise was coming from.

  So we stand up, ON THE CONFERENCE TABLE, and I bend her over and fuck her from behind as she holds onto the PowerPoint projector for balance.

  FINALLY, this position works for both of us. It starts getting intense. She doesn’t want me to whisper sweet nothings in her ear—no, she’s all about me calling her a “filthy whore” and “dirty lawyer slut” and all that type of shit people who repress themselves are into. Whatever.

  I’m calling her a tort slut and getting close to cumming, so I start humping really hard. I move to get better leverage and set a wider, sturdier base. I put my right foot to the outside of hers and I’m maneuvering to do the same thing with my left foot when it hits a slick spot of sweat left over from when she was on her back. Everything happened so fast.

  My left foot slipped, my right knee buckled, I heard an audible ‘pop’ and fell off the table in pain, landing on my face. Thankfully their expensive carpet was well padded, but I knew immediately:

  I tore my ACL.

  I could feel t
he instability in the joint. And it fucking hurt.

  FUUUUUUCK!!

  Vixen “Are you OK?”

  Tucker [wincing in pain] “Not really.”

  Vixen “Oh.” There was a long pause, and I felt it coming before she even said it, “Are you going to be able to finish? I was so close.”

  If I hadn’t been in so much pain, I think I might have grabbed the stapler and beat her unconscious with it.

  I could just fucking gag on the poetic justice of it all:

  At 24, I had an opportunity to fuck a senior partner at a prominent Silicon Valley law firm on her conference table. For some inexplicable reason, I turned it down. I wrote an email to my friends about it, got fired from that job as a result, and the email ended up launching me onto the path that led me to writing, and now ten years later at 34, here I am on this senior partner’s conference table; this time not as an employee but as a high-profile client. And this time, I took the opportunity fuck her, only to tear my ACL in the process.

  You think maybe fate is telling me something?

  I limped back to LA and went to see my orthopedist. I already had an orthopedist because two months earlier I’d hurt my knee at the gym. At the time he did an exam and an MRI and gave me these instructions: