Navel Gazing

by Michael Ian Black

  So I set my targets on the humor category’s white whale, Tucker Max. Like Sedaris, he would either never learn of our feud, or treat it like the idiocy I intended it to be. After all, if anybody knows idiocy, surely it is Tucker Max. The question: How to take him on? I’d already exhausted the literary feud idea, so I figured I needed to up the stakes. I would graduate to an actual feud. I would challenge Tucker Max to a fistfight.

  In the open letter to him I published on my blog, I acknowledged that I could probably not beat him up because I could not beat up anybody, but said I had certain advantages over him that could possibly be exploited, chief among them the distinct possibility that he would show up to the fight drunk or hungover, and that he likely had cirrhosis of the liver, which might explode if I hit him there. I concluded by stating:

  “So Tucker Max, you drunk, misogynistic motherfucker—I am calling you OUT! I am going to fist fuck every hole in your boozy little body until you crawl away like the sniveling little bitch that you are. YOU’RE DEAD!”

  Please understand that, in my mind, this passed as clever. I figured it was so over-the-top that nobody could possibly take it seriously. If Tucker even saw the posting, he would laugh and respond with some sort of good-natured taunting on his part, which we could escalate into a hilarious running account of all the ways we planned on flaying the other. Within an hour of posting my blog, I had a reply from Tucker Max that read, simply, “I accept.” He didn’t seem to be laughing.

  Oh, shit.

  “I accept”? I tried to read between the lines for the “wink-wink, this is all in good fun” subtext, but there weren’t many lines to read between and, finding none, I panicked. What was I supposed to do now? What did he actually mean, “I accept”? He couldn’t possibly want to fight me. People don’t actually fight, do they?

  As I thought about it, I realized, yes, some people do actually fight, particularly people like Tucker Max, which is to say, people who have been insulted and then publicly challenged to a fistfight for no reason whatsoever.

  I had to think long and hard about how to handle this. Maybe he didn’t understand that I’d been kidding in my original post. I thought it’d been obvious, but I could possibly see how “I’m going to fist fuck every hole in your boozy little body” could be misconstrued as a serious declaration of intent. What other explanation could there be? So, to make it evident that I had no real intention of fighting him or anybody else, I decided to clarify my position to Tucker in a follow-up post, in which I would make it abundantly clear that I’d been having a laugh. I would do this by replying in such an outrageous manner that it would be obvious to one and all that the whole thing was just a silly put-on on my part—ha, ha, no hard feelings—and let’s pretend it never happened. Here’s what I wrote:

  “So Tucker Max has officially accepted my challenge to a fight. Good. That was the easy part. The hard part? Deciding exactly how I am going to rearrange his face. Will I pluck out an eye and stuff it up his nostril? Will I make him choke down his own tongue until he throws it up and then sit on his head and force him to lap up his own puke like a bad little puppy? Or will I simply knock out his teeth and then use them as Chinese death stars that I throw into his black heart? I just do not know. But I do know this: Tucker Max is going down. How do I know? Because Tucker may have the athleticism, the muscles, the fighting skills, the experience, the guts, and the heart. But I have something he will NEVER have—I’m not sure what that is, but if I think about it long enough I will probably come up with something.”

  In retrospect, threatening to make somebody “choke down his own tongue” might not have been the best way to smooth the waters, because Tucker again wrote back, again without any humor, again saying he would be happy to fight me anytime, anywhere. For a humor writer, he didn’t seem to have a very good sense of humor. On the other hand, his responses were, at least, concise.

  Then, his fans started writing hateful and scary things. A fairly typical one follows:

  dude. you are a fucking idiot. yeah you’re on basic cable . . . but it’s VH1. I’d rather watch dead people decay than watch your stupid sorry ass on what you call “basic cable.” Tucker Max is going to drop kick the teeth out of your mouth, dumbass. and after this fight is over, and you’re frantically trying to hold together whatever manhood you have left (which I doubt you have much to start with) EVERYONE is going to be laughing at your pathetic excuse of a human being. have fun being the laughingstock of the century.

  I didn’t want everyone laughing at my pathetic excuse of a human being. I didn’t want that at all, but what was I going to do? This situation had all the classic hallmarks of being a major oopsy on my part. Somehow, I had accidentally/deliberately put myself in the untenable position of challenging a frat-house jock to a fistfight. How could I have been so stupid? How could I extricate myself from this predicament with grace? I couldn’t. Either I would have to fight Tucker Max or be known forevermore throughout the land as a coward.

  Aha! I had found my way out! I would be known as a coward!

  The more I thought about it, the more sense it made. First of all, I am a coward. There’s no shame in being a coward, if being a coward is defined as somebody who is afraid to get into a fistfight he cannot win. For example, I wouldn’t be afraid to fight a three-year-old, because I know I could win that fight. In a fight with a three-year-old, I would be the brave one and the kid would be the coward. Cowardice is, perhaps, just another word for knowing your chances. Besides, what consequences would I face for my cowardice? None. I wasn’t at war; I wasn’t in danger of being shot at dawn for fleeing the battle. The only bullets I would take would be from online commenters. Those are bullets I could handle. I mean, c’mon—I’m a married father of two. Guys like me don’t fight. At worst, we litigate.

  Once I accepted my own cowardice, the solution fell into place. When asked, and I was frequently asked in those days, I would tell people the truth: I could not possibly fight Tucker Max for the simple reason that, if I were to fight him, he would beat me up. People seemed pretty disappointed with this response, because they wanted to see blood. People are awful in that way. Not that I blame them. Were it not my blood we were discussing, I would have wanted to see the same.

  My book climbed no higher on the humor charts, even though I set off on a nationwide book tour to promote the thing. As part of my tour, I did a series of radio interviews. One of them was with a station in San Diego who told me they had a surprise for me. “Great,” I said, “I like surprises.” The DJs then put Tucker Max on the line, who had graciously stepped off the set of the movie adaptation of his book to threaten to beat me into unconsciousness. Tucker was soft-spoken and businesslike, telling me he couldn’t wait to hit me. He didn’t want to hurt me, he said, just knock me out, which I thought was very gracious. He was so anxious to do this, he said, he would do whatever it took to make it happen, even offering to “walk from Louisiana to San Diego” if that was what it took to get the fight done. I tried to play it all off as the joke I had intended it to be, but Mr. Max would not cooperate.

  Afterward, he e-mailed me, saying he would “help me find a graceful way out of this,” which actually made me feel worse about myself than refusing to fight him. I told him that, while I appreciated his offer, I would extricate myself in my own way, meaning I would confess my cowardice and allow the haters to, as my ex-girlfriend Taylor Swift says, hate hate hate.

  It took several months for all the hate mail to stop flowing into my inbox, and even now, once in a while, somebody will remind me that I once threatened to beat up Tucker Max and did the fight ever happen and why not and oh, I see, you’re chickenshit and have no pride in yourself, which usually ends the conversation with a series of embarrassed shrugs and sighs on both of our parts because there is no shame for a man quite like cowardice.

  Now that I have put some years between myself and that brief but embarrassing episode, I have to ask myself if I would have done anything differently given the cha
nce. Yes, I definitely learned a couple lessons. First and foremost, don’t challenge anybody to a fistfight who might actually accept. This is an important rule for authors and people in general. Second, if you do challenge somebody to a fight, have an exit plan—either fight the fight or have some sort of clever stratagem to get out of it. Contract malaria, for example, which has the dual advantages of being debilitating and highly contagious. Nobody is going to fight you if you have malaria. Finally, when engaging in a feud of any sort, only do so in a way that ensures you have the upper hand. The moral high ground, for example, is a great place upon which to stand. Or, if you are going to take the low road, you must do so in a way that incapacitates your opponent. I took neither road, and that made all the difference.

  If anybody knows Tucker Max, please tell him I am sorry. I was wrong to call him out in a public forum, particularly since he had done nothing more to earn my ire than be successful. Furthermore, I had no business challenging him to fisticuffs if I did not intend to follow through. I was wrong to do that and I am sorry. The simple fact of the matter is, I am a coward when it comes to Tucker Max, and I deeply regret using a crass marketing stunt to sell books. That kind of talk has no place between authors of our caliber, and I deeply regret my actions. On the other hand, if anybody knows David Sedaris, please tell him I will kick his Francophile ass from here to kingdom come. That little fucker has it coming.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Dog and pony show

  I am going deaf. That is not some bit of comic exaggeration on my part. I have been to the audiologist, had my ears peered into with the ear-peering machine, taken that test where you raise your left and right hands when you hear the left and right beeps (or in my case, don’t hear the left and right beeps), and the results were definitive: My hearing is bad, likely to get worse, and I know why.

  The story of my hearing loss begins with my contempt for high school. I hated it. Everybody hated high school, and if you didn’t, then you shouldn’t be reading this book, because this book is for cool people. High school had all the mind-numbing tedium of the worst office job in the world combined with all the potential for imminent, grievous bodily harm that exists in your finer state penitentiaries. For my four years, I did what I could to endure. This meant keeping my head down, cultivating a small group of (mostly) female friends, and trying to stay out of the crosshairs of the roving bands of feral jocks that roamed the school’s hallways.

  During my junior year, a few of us started getting into punk rock, natural musical sanctuary for the righteous and unloved. My musical evolution from Wham! to the Dead Kennedys took about six months, a time when I haunted local record shops for bands with the freakiest names I could find in the hopes of discovering the aggressive hardcore punk I’d grown to love. Sometimes this worked, and sometimes I came home with a 10,000 Maniacs album. It wasn’t like today, when you can just Google “punk rock” and get a billion hits. Back then, there was no definitive source for these underground sounds. The only place to hear it was the local college radio station, WPRB, whose faint signal I could pick up if I held my radio antenna between my thumb and pointer finger while standing on my dresser. Late at night, they played an intimidating blend of scary-sounding bands like Black Flag, the Circle Jerks, and the Day-Glo Abortions. Did I like the music? Not really. In my secret heart, I still preferred Duran Duran, but I liked punk’s energy and menacing vibe. I liked their countercultural stance. In a time when Bon Jovi ruled the world, a little counterculture seemed like a very good thing, indeed. After a year or so of listening to this stuff, the thought occurred: Surely I could make music at least as terrible as this.

  My friend Tim and I decided to start our own punk band. Starting a band in high school is a simple and straightforward proposition because the options for personnel are so few. Tim played bass, so we had that covered. Some guy we kind of knew named Jeff played guitar, so we asked him to join the band, and somebody told us that Mark, the weird metalhead with the long hair and the copy of The Anarchist Cookbook, played drums, so we invited him, too. I didn’t play anything so I would sing. Or, rather, “sing.”

  That night, I remember telling Mom I was starting a punk band.

  “You didn’t ask me if you could start a punk band,” she said. I explained to her that asking permission from one’s mother to join a punk band kind of defeated the whole point.

  The first order of business for any band is to come up with a name. Should it be aggressive, like Black Flag? Jokey, like the Circle Jerks? Confrontational, like MDC, which stood either for Millions of Dead Cops or Millions of Dead Christians? We went for ironic and named our band “the Pleased.” Do you get it? Do you get the irony? Because we weren’t pleased. We were anything but pleased. We were PISSED OFF. At who? (I know it’s “whom,” but punk rockers don’t use that word.) You guessed it, motherfucker: society.

  We took the Pleased more seriously than anything else in our lives, practicing every day at Mark the drummer’s house. He had his kit set up in the family dining room; it would have looked out of place in an ordinary home, but Mark’s mother was a stay-at-home hoarder, so it fit right in among the piles of clothing, plastic housewares, and unopened Christmas presents from the previous year. If anything, Mark’s drum area was probably a little more organized than the rest of the house.

  We’d play for a couple hours most days after school, bashing out covers of simple songs, and afterward, I’d notice my ears ringing for a few minutes. Never too long and never too bad. Just like somebody was fiddling around in my ears with a Q-tip attached to a cowbell. It would fade after a little while and I would go about the rest of my day.

  Our first show was a battle of the bands at a nearby school, which we fucking won, using the prize money to buy ourselves a proper microphone. Then our own high school had a Winter Party and we played that, and we fucking kicked ass. Afterward, they had to bring in special equipment to clean up all the panties tossed at us.

  Because we were punk rock in a period when punk rock had mostly fallen off the map, we didn’t really know how to look. This is post–Sex Pistols, pre-Nirvana, so the closest role model we could find was Duckie from Pretty in Pink, who in retrospect seems less like a punk rocker and more like an adolescent struggling with his sexuality. But he dressed weird, and that was good enough for us.

  The deeper we got into the band, the more apparent certain shortcomings became. First and foremost was the fact that Tim didn’t really know how to play bass. Of all of us, Tim looked the most like a punk rocker. Beefy and occasionally Mohawked, Tim rode a skateboard and scowled a lot. He seemed to live and breathe a kind of rough punk ethos: a real live-fast, die-young kind of guy despite the fact that he lived in a comfortable suburban home with his parents, who raised championship shih tzus. What Tim didn’t do was practice the bass. He could kind of pluck his way through our songs, but his main musical skill was looking cool onstage. For a punk band, this is a not unimportant talent. After all, what did Sid Vicious contribute to the Sex Pistols other than looking cool and stabbing his girlfriend? Not much. It was Tim the girls swooned over, so much so that, the morning after one of our shows, a girl I had a crush on told me she had just seen Tim’s band play. “Have you ever seen them?” she asked me.

  After a while, we began writing our own material. The first lesson in any writing is, of course, “Write what you know.” I definitely took this to heart when I wrote my first song, “The Race,” about racial politics in apartheid-era South Africa. Obviously, nobody understood that subject better than me.

  Once we had enough songs, we decided to record an album. This is back in the days when you couldn’t just push a button on your phone and pop out a radio-ready MP3. You had to actually go to a recording studio and lay out actual money. Lots of money. We found a local studio that could do the job for five thousand dollars, a sum that would have been unobtainable were it not for the fact that Mark’s father was in the construction business. In New Jersey, “construction business” mea
ns mobbed up. Which meant it wasn’t any big thing for Mark to steal five grand in cash from his father’s sock drawer.

  Once we had our record (actually cassette), we began hawking it to our classmates and blindly sending it to record labels in the hopes that one of them was looking for a teenage punk band with a bass player who couldn’t play bass and a singer who couldn’t sing. Although we didn’t get any interest from labels, our ambitions grew. Maybe we could really be something. We started playing a few local club shows. Then somebody noticed an ad in a local alternative weekly. CBGB, the venerable punk institution, was hosting “audition nights” every Monday. We called. Could we audition? Yes, we could.

  “Okay. I got you down in three weeks,” the guy on the other end told us. “The more people you bring the more likely you are to pass the audition.”

  Well, that makes sense. If we bring more people, they are more likely to cheer for us, management is more likely to be impressed, and we are more likely to pass the audition. Good tip, guy on other end of the phone.

  Holy shit, we were going to play CB’s! Things just got real. If we were going to audition for CB’s, that was an audition we were going to pass. Our practice sessions took on a new intensity, and so did the ringing in my ears. Now, I would find myself unable to hear much for an hour or two after a rehearsal or show. Everything would sound muffled and distant, but I didn’t say anything about it to anybody. Plus, I was also blowing out my voice each day, so I had to deal with that, too. Between the two things—ears and voice—the voice seemed like the more urgent matter, since I couldn’t perform if I couldn’t sing. I suppose I wouldn’t have been able to perform if I’d gone deaf, either, but that thought never occurred to me. Nor did it occur to me to wear earplugs. Earplugs weren’t punk rock.

  The day of the CBGB show, we caravanned to New York with every single Pleased fan we could muster, which totaled about five. We pulled up to the club and unloaded our gear and inhaled for the first time that sour CB’s air: a potent brew of dank beer and BO. Record deal or no, walking into that club made me feel like we’d made it. Was there ever a more perfect time to unleash the full fury of our punk rock dystopian sonic nightmare than four-thirty on a Monday afternoon? Hell, no.