Assholes Finish First

by Tucker Max

  3:46: I am so famished, dehydrated, exhausted, and hungover I can no longer control my emotions. I sit on the curb and start crying.

  3:47: I stop crying. I start getting mad.

  3:48: I am really pissed off. I decide they are going to close. If I can’t eat, no one can eat.

  3:50: I find a brick in the alley behind the restaurant, smash the lock off the circuit breaker, and pull it down. All the lights go off. You’re closed now, Katz’s. That’ll teach you to refuse to serve drunk, dirty, disgusting clowns that don’t have any money.

  3:51: Petty vengeance makes me feel better. I wander around for a few more minutes, until I realize I don’t know where B-Ski lives. I give up on everything, find a bench, and go to sleep.

  Postscript

  I got home the next day by wandering around asking people where all the assholes lived, until I saw a building I recognized. I eventually talked to everyone and put the missing pieces of my night together. J.D. Horne filled me in on how I got arrested:

  “You want me to revisit this? Never mind the fact that you decided to kick down the door at one of the first bars completely off its hinges and I had to go back the next day and pay for it. Or, when dancing with an old lady on the street, you spun her around so many times she fell over and you just walked away from her like nothing happened, as she lay on the ground writhing in pain. Or that you offended 52 of the 54 people on the clown bus and 97% of the persons at the first 5 or 6 stops. Oh, no. The defining moment of this evening was when you were arrested after you walked dead into the middle of Sixth Street on a Saturday night, still wearing your floaties and with your bullhorn—something akin to walking on the Hollywood freeway at 6:00 pm—and ordered all traffic to stop, declaring, “I AM Tucker Max.” As I watched from the doorway of the pub, two cops approached you from the other side of the street. Your reaction? You turned the bullhorn on the rather portly male and barked, “Don’t fuck with me, tubby! I wouldn’t want a donut store to lose its best customer.” To the female officer, “Honey, you might have nice tits but I can’t tell underneath all that polyester. Let’s have sex in your patrol car and find out.” Cuffs and the clink for you—although I swear I thought I saw the female cop actually laugh.”

  I legitimately don’t remember dancing with an old lady, or any of that shit with the cops, which sucks. It’d be one of my proudest memories.

  Nils explained what happened from the time I passed out in the paddy wagon until I woke up in jail:

  “The most amazing part of our bumpy ride to Travis County Jail was the arrival, when the cops opened the back of the paddy wagon to let us out. I walked out easily. You were facedown on the corrugated metal flooring, with your feet splayed out and your hands cuffed behind you, and the cops would not help you. They just shouted at you to “get the fuck out of the wagon.”

  What you should have done was shimmy your way down the length of the floor on your stomach and basically slide out backward until your feet hung over and you could land upright. Instead, you were intent on getting to your feet INSIDE the paddy wagon but without using the benches or the wall to help. And that’s exactly what you did. You somehow used your face to balance yourself as you slowly got to your feet. It was the most amazing thing I’d ever seen, drunk or sober. Even the cops were impressed.

  After staring, then laughing at us as we made our way through booking, they had us take our clown makeup off for the mug shots. I think you used up the remainder of your cognitive ability with that Houdini paddy wagon move, because by this time the only actions you were capable of were the involuntary ones: breathing, blinking, farting. The guys behind the counter recognized this and allowed us to go into the bathroom together (apparently against policy) so I could help you remove your makeup and prevent you from faceplanting into the sink.

  This was the first opportunity I had to look at myself in the mirror. The amateur application of clown makeup always leaves something to be desired. After 8 hours of drinking, eating, laughing, sweating, and yelling, you stop looking like happy-go-lucky fun clown and start looking like live-in-the-sewer-and-gnaw-on-small-children’s-bones clown. Your makeup was equally streaked, but when I went to scrub it off, it sloughed off into the paper towel in a single layer, like the charred skin of a 3rd degree burn victim. It was remarkable.

  Once they took our mug shots, they set us down in a large, open holding area filled with rows of white plastic chairs and other nonviolent offenders. For the most part, everyone kept to themselves, and you fell over passed out on a vacant row of chairs.

  Nothing of note happened for the next 45 minutes or so. That’s when you started puking. EVERYWHERE. I’ll never forget it. It was this viscous, dirt-brown mixture that rocketed out of your mouth like someone was jumping up and down on your stomach. You never woke up, I don’t think you even made a sound, you just puked. And puked. And puked some more. It just kept coming. Watching you from across the row of seats, it felt like staring into the mouth of a sewage runoff pipe spilling toxic sludge into a white linoleum lake.

  Lake TuckerPuke. Right then the desk sergeant came over with a giant brown roll of industrial-strength paper towels.

  DeskSergeant “He’s your friend?”

  Nils “I guess.”

  DeskSergeant “Then you’re cleaning it up.”

  The desk sergeant handed me the paper towel roll and walked away. There was no way I was actually cleaning that shit up. I wasn’t the one who thought it was a good idea to deep-throat a CamelBak full of vodka.

  I did the next best thing. I unrolled nearly the entire roll and gently laid layer upon layer of towel on top of the stagnating pool of TuckerPuke. This must have satisfied the desk sergeant, or he didn’t bother to check back with me, because he didn’t call my name again until it was time for my release, sometime around 2am. You were still passed out.”

  I present to you the actual mug shots from that night:

  And the funniest police report ever written:

  The Capitol City Clown Crawl is still an annual event in Austin, and though J.D. Horne no longer runs it, he and I still attend, dressed as clowns of course. If you ever go, I would advise you not to act like I did.

  Unless, you know… you’re an asshole.

  THE DC HALLOWEEN PARTY AND THE WORST GIRL I EVER FUCKED

  Occurred—October 2001

  My friends and I graduated from Duke in May of 2001. After graduation, our jobs took us to different cities. Everyone else worked for various law firms and I worked for my dad’s restaurant business in Florida. Within a few months, we independently came to the same conclusion: Work sucks.

  The biggest difference between school and work is not free time, not responsibility, not money, not even access to college bars and parties. The biggest difference is hope. When you’re still in school, no matter what is going wrong or how bad it gets, you know it’s going to end. You know school will eventually be over and you can move on to something different. You know you have another chance, because your “real life” is still in front of you.

  It’s not like that with work. Once you are done with school and get a job, that’s it. That is real life, that is what you’ve been working toward in school… and if you hate your job or what’s going on with your life, there isn’t an obvious end to it or an obvious escape. I mean, besides alcohol. We were slowly realizing that the “real life” we’d chosen really fucking sucked. A lot.

  As a way to relieve this post-school malaise, we decided to pick a city and all travel there to celebrate Halloween as a group. PWJ suggested Washington, DC. His little sister was having a huge Halloween party at her house in Arlington (just across the Potomac in northern Virginia), and she was going to have so many girls at her party that she actually asked PWJ to invite his guy friends:

  “PWJ, please bring your friends. I’m worried that this will be like the 4th of July party I had. There were 100 girls and only 25 guys. All my single friends were bored.”

  PWJ added that his sister’s friends fe
ll into two groups:

  1. Elementary school teachers (her current occupation)

  2. Sorority girls recently graduated from Southern colleges (her previous occupation)

  Plane tickets were purchased post haste.

  I arrived in town a day before everyone else. It wasn’t for an extra day of drinking, though I can always use that. I came early to cheer up Hate and SlingBlade. As much as the rest of us were starting to hate our lives, it was WAY worse for those two, because they didn’t even have real jobs to hate. When we graduated, they were the only two of our group who didn’t have law firm jobs waiting for them. Now, six months later, they still hadn’t found permanent law firm jobs and were relegated to doing document review to survive (essentially legal temps, REALLY shitty work).

  They tried to joke about it, but you could tell it was not good. Two months before Halloween, in an email chain where we were all bitching to each other about our lives, Hate sent this email:

  From: Hate

  To: Tucker Max, PWJ, GoldenBoy, El Bingeroso, Credit, Jojo, SlingBlade

  Subject: Depression

  Ah yes, I would like to welcome all of you to the world of depression. I know it well.

  I would be happy to conduct a seminar on how to cope with depression for those of you newcomers to the scene. The price of admission will be one case of domestic beer. In the biz, we call this “medication.”

  Also outlined in the course will be proper masturbation techniques, clinically known as “a reason to get up in the morning.” And finally we will teach basic rugby techniques, also “legalized assault.”

  As for getting out of your dead-end jobs, I have no tips, as I cannot even get into one.

  That was bad, but it was this email from SlingBlade that made me book the early ticket:

  From: SlingBlade

  To: Tucker Max, PWJ, GoldenBoy, El Bingeroso, Credit, Jojo, Hate

  Subject: re: Depression

  These are actual quotes from a conversation Hate and I had last night concerning the state of our lives. You can judge for yourself how we are doing (bonus points for matching the quotes to the person):

  “The problem is I have no beacon, nothing to look forward to. Or even any hope that anything good will happen to me… ever.”

  “One of us needs to get laid.”

  “Just one of us?”

  “What are the odds of both of us getting laid?”

  “The problem with this interview is that I have to get them to like me, and at this point, I don’t even like me. They’ll ask, ‘What do you have to offer us?’ The answer, of course, will be I have nothing to offer you or anyone else.”

  “I’ve decided to compile a list of reasons why I shouldn’t kill myself. As you can see, the paper is blank.”

  “I could never kill myself. What if it doesn’t work? Then I’ll have failed at the only thing that could save me from my failures. Where do you go from there?”

  Oh yes—did I mention that Hate and I tried out for The Weakest Link last week? We were rejected. Apparently, when pitted against unemployed steelworkers in a competition of intelligence, we come up lacking.

  I pulled up to their place about 4pm on Friday. Describing the awfulness of what I found will be a struggle, but let me try:

  The apartment was in one of those shitty, beat-up complexes that was probably cool when it was built in the late ’60s but now looked like it was one drive-by shooting away from converting to Section 8. The piles of animal shit everywhere were a nice touch, but what really seemed to tie everything together for me was their apartment screen door hanging by a single hinge. With a little more artful disrepair, it could easily be used for a movie set in a postapocalyptic world. I half expected to see packs of stray dogs fighting over decomposing carcasses and feral children scurrying into sewers.

  Inside, I was momentarily impressed, because it looked like SlingBlade and Hate had painted their apartment in really cool shades and designs. Then I realized those shades and designs were not interior design—they were huge water stains in the cheap drywall.

  SlingBlade and Hate were in front of the TV, sitting in those fabric camping chairs you can buy for $15 at Walmart, playing Tetris against each other. There was no other furniture in the apartment. Unless you count SlingBlade’s action figures on all the ledges as furniture.

  As he got further and further behind in the game, Hate was becoming more and more enraged, and of course SlingBlade was talking shit to him about it: “Hate, your spatial-reasoning skills are inferior to mine” and “Do the pointless spinning geometries of Tetris remind you of anything?”

  As Hate’s bricks stacked perilously close to the top of the screen, SlingBlade got the four-block single piece and cleared his screen. This was the final straw; Hate could no longer stomach failing in both the real world he lived in and this virtual world he was trying to escape into. He threw his controller at the TV and left for rugby practice.

  SlingBlade “Beating him at Tetris is the only reason I even get up anymore. I’m not sure what keeps him going. Rugby, I guess. Or anger.”

  Tucker “You ready to start drinking?”

  SlingBlade “Whatever.”

  Tucker “What, am I interfering with your masturbation schedule? Is your 4pm jack-off session usually a good one?”

  He ignored me, as if that’s ever worked.

  Tucker “I’m curious. Do you hold the action figures in your off hand when you masturbate, or do you just stare at them from across the room?”

  SlingBlade “I masturbate in the shower. My action figures judge me. Especially the Justice League.”

  Tucker “Come on, let’s get out of this shithole and go to a bar. Alcohol helps alleviate depression.”

  SlingBlade “Go away. I’m not going to a bar.”

  Tucker “Look, I know everything is shitty right now, but if you don’t stop acting like such a bitch, someone’s gonna fuck that pussy on your face.”

  SlingBlade “Why don’t you go back to your regularly scheduled program of shame fucking retards and crying yourself to sleep, and leave me alone.”

  Tucker “Get up, you’re coming with me. There are sluts at the bar, but they aren’t going to wait for us all night. Early bird gets the worm.”

  SlingBlade “What if you’re the early worm?”

  Tucker “It means be the bird, not the worm, so then you get the worm.”

  SlingBlade “Worms are blind, brainless, dirt-eating shit tubes.”

  Tucker “You’re still coming with me.”

  We ended up at a pretty cool bar—hot girls everywhere, great vibe, everyone having fun. I go to the bar, and see this girl with an O’Doul’s. She was not just holding it—she was actively drinking it. Legitimately pouring the liquid from the bottle into her throat so she could then swallow it. I didn’t know people actually drank those things; I thought they were just for show.

  Tucker “Why would you drink a beer without alcohol? That’s like dating a woman without a vagina.”

  Girl “Do I know you? You think you can just come up to me and say ‘vagina’?”

  Tucker “Well, sorry Miss Manners. Maybe if your beer had some alcohol in it, you’d think that was funny. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go talk to the hot girls.”

  One girl charmed, rest of the bar to go.

  I eventually got two homely girls to come over and talk to us. I picked them because they seemed very nice, and since they weren’t great looking, I assumed they would be desperate to talk to us. What SlingBlade needed right now was some kind of affirmation. I should have known better than even to try.

  Girl1 “So what do you guys do?”

  SlingBlade “Oh, this is precisely what I needed, Tucker. More people who can judge and reject me.”

  Tucker “He’s a lawyer.”

  Girl2 “That’s a cool job.”

  SlingBlade “I’m a legal temp. I do document review in a windowless office in the basement. In my firm’s pecking order, I’m below the paralegals a
nd secretaries.”

  Girl2 “It’s OK. We’ve all had crappy jobs.”

  SlingBlade “When I need a pep talk from a dim-witted receptionist, I’ll be sure to look you up.”

  Tucker “Don’t pay attention to him, ladies, he’s just in a bad mood.”

  Girl1 “Well, uh, what do you do?”

  Tucker “I’m an inventor.”

  Girl2 “That’s so cool. What things have you invented? Anything I would know?”

  SlingBlade [dripping with sarcasm] “Oh, this’ll be good.”

  Tucker “Not yet, but my big invention is coming out soon, I think it’s going to do really well.”

  Girl2 “Oh, what is it?”

  Girl1 “Is it cool?”

  Tucker “You know those cones that dogs have to wear around their necks after surgery to keep them from chewing the stitches?”

  Girl1 “Yeah, of course.”

  Tucker “Well, I invented one for babies.”

  Girl1 “For babies?”

  Tucker “Yep. It’s not for surgery, obviously, that would be ridiculous. It’s a party game.”

  Girl2 “A party game? What do you mean?”

  Tucker “You put it around the baby’s neck just like with a dog, but then you fill it to the top with some sort of liquid—water or apple juice or pretty much anything drinkable—and then he has to drink it as fast as he can. It’s called: Baby Drink or Die.”

  Girl1 “Baby Drink OR DIE?!?”

  Girl2 “WHAT?!?”

  Tucker “You think Baby Drink or Drown is a better name? The investors thought it was more marketable. Should I have listened? Fuck, I should have.”

  They didn’t think that was funny, for some reason.

  I eventually quit trying to cheer up SlingBlade and started talking to a group of Georgetown undergrads, because one of them was hot and into me. SlingBlade could not have been more disgusted with them. They were self-absorbed, spoiled sorority girls who thought that because their daddies were rich and powerful they could do whatever they wanted. To SlingBlade, these girls represented everything that was wrong with the world, and he wanted nothing to do with them. To me, they represented fish in a barrel. Though their daddies may have spoiled them with material things, they also ignored them emotionally. These girls were going to find male attention somewhere, and I was more than willing to vigorously and enthusiastically hump it into them.