The guy in my Porta Potty came out. As I opened the door to go in, I recoiled in terror.
Tucker “OHH! That is AWFUL!”
He started walking away, like everything was just fine and dandy.
Tucker “Hey you, come back here. Do you know what you just did in that bathroom?”
Guy “Yeah… I uh… sorry about that, man.”
Tucker “Come here and smell this.”
Guy “What?”
Tucker “DO IT NOW!”
Thus is the power and authority of the bullhorn: The guy actually walked back to the Porta Potty and took a sniff.
Guy “Yeah, so?”
Tucker [angry astonishment] “Yeah, so? That smell is not [air quotes] ‘just went to the bathroom.’ That is felonious assault on a toilet. You have raped my olfactory senses. Apologize.”
Guy “What?”
Tucker “APOLOGIZE RIGHT NOW!”
Guy “OK, fine… whatever… I’m sorry.”
Had we not been drinking for 24 hours straight, and had I not conquered an entire city the night before, I don’t think I would have tried this. But the bullhorn had emboldened me:
Tucker “Now apologize to the toilet.”
Guy “Dude, what?”
Tucker “Repeat after me: ‘I am very sorry and greatly embarrassed that my excretory system could produce such a smell. I promise to eat more bran to prevent such things in the future. ’”
Guy “Are you nuts?”
Tucker “I SAID DO IT!”
I was pretty much joking with the guy and fully expected him either to walk off or punch me in the face. There was no legitimate reason to obey me. I was just some drunk idiot yelling at him with a bullhorn… but he gave in and basically said it. After he left, I stood there in mild shock.
Tucker “Did I really just use the bullhorn to make a dude apologize… to a Porta Potty… for taking a smelly dump?”
SlingBlade “That thing is too powerful. It’s like the One Ring that rules them all. After Campout, we have to find a volcano and throw it in.”
Tucker “Let’s make Hate do it. He hates the bullhorn, plus he’s short like a Hobbit.”
SlingBlade “Credit can go with him. He’s a Jew, like Gollum.”
We chilled the rest of the afternoon and evening, planning how we would fuck with Tent City again that night. But this time, the nerds had come prepared. They must have had spies watching us, because before we even got to the ridge to start our second assault on Tent City, they were standing there with a Duke cop. Still drunk on alcohol and the testosterone rush of the previous night, I decided to handle this the logical way, as I was Lord Tucker Max, Tent City Conqueror:
Tucker “What’s the problem, Officer?”
DukeCop “You need to stop using the bullhorn.”
Tucker “What? Why?”
DukeCop “The proper response to a lawful order is not ‘Why?’ ”
Tucker “But Officer, I don’t think you understand,” [I hold it in front of his face as if he hadn’t seen it yet] “I have a bullhorn.”
You know that look a cop gives you when he’s so confused that he doesn’t even know how to respond? If you don’t know that look, it means you haven’t had enough fun in your life. He gave me that look.
DukeCop “You have to stop using the bullhorn for the rest of Campout.”
Tucker “Officer, I can’t stop. I am the ruler of Tent City!”
It was at this point the cop realized I wasn’t crazy or stupid, just really drunk.
DukeCop “You’re not in charge, you’re not even on the Graduate Council. I am a law enforcement officer, and I am giving you a lawful command. You can obey it, or I can arrest you and confiscate the bullhorn.”
I was not prepared for this gambit. I turned to SlingBlade:
Tucker “What do we do?”
SlingBlade “Stop using the bullhorn.”
Tucker “Isn’t there some way around this?”
SlingBlade “I don’t know. I don’t take Criminal Procedure until next semester. But I don’t think so.”
Tucker “Does it matter that he’s a campus cop and not a real cop?”
SlingBlade “We’re on Duke’s campus. He also has a Taser. Taser beats bullhorn.”
Tucker “Shit.”
On Day 1, I subjugated all of Tent City. On Day 2, I was defeated by a single rent-a-cop.
To fuck with me, SlingBlade took the bullhorn from me and addressed Tent City:
SlingBlade “You are safe to go back to sleep. Tucker has been bested and the bullhorn problem is taken care of. I repeat, the bullhorn problem has been taken care of.”
DukeCop “Hey! That means you too. NO ONE gets to use it again. If I have to come back, you’re all getting arrested.”
As I started to go back to my RV, head hung low in shame, I could faintly hear someone yell out from deep within Tent City:
“I guess the man got beat! WOOO!”
Motherfucker. Even ten years later, it still upsets me that my reign as conquerer lasted only a single night. I had so many people left to insult and piss off.
It’s OK, though, I got the last laugh. In the intervening years, my notoriety has made it so that all those people who were there, when they tell other people where they went to school, invariably have to answer this question, “You went to Duke? Did you know Tucker Max?”
I may have lost the battle, but I won the war.
THE SEX STORIES, PART 2
I had a section of stories in I Hope They Serve Beer In Hell called “The Sex Stories.” This is how I introduced them:
“The pen may be mightier than the sword, but I have found that the vagina is stronger than both. No matter what happens to me, no matter how many girls vomit on me or shit on me or screw me over, I keep hooking up with all kinds of women, seemingly without regard for the repercussions.”
Pretty much every word of that still holds true. Here are some more of my funnier short stories that revolve around hooking up:
WHOREDENTIFICATION
Occurred—November 2002
One night out I get drunk and meet this girl. She seems only mildly into me, so I repeatedly tell her she shouldn’t flirt with me. Of course she takes the bait, I play even more coy, the whole time we’re drinking… you know how this ends:
With us eating each other’s faces at the bar, while everyone else gets disgusted and leaves.
The rest of the night is a standard drunk blur. I wake up in my bed, sticky and sore, with her next to me. She looked QUITE A BIT better last night. I am honestly baffled as to how a woman can put on 30 pounds in one night of sleep.
I make myself some cereal and realize I can’t remember her name at all (granted, it usually doesn’t matter to me, but for some reason at the time I really wanted to get her name right). I rack my brain and genius strikes: Check her purse.
I find it on the sofa in the living room. I pull out the wallet, casually look into the side pocket, see $80, consider stealing it, but don’t. I feel like taking her money AND her soul is not cool. One or the other.
I pull out her license. Her name is Stacey. Never would have guessed Stacey. Weight, 110? Yeah. During the Reagan administration. And goddamn, she kinda looks hot here. She’s the first person I’ve ever met who looks better in her driver’s license picture.
I put the wallet back in her purse and go back to eating my cereal and watching Springer. She eventually comes out of my room, looking like she got run over by the cum truck.
Tucker “Clearly Sleeping Beauty isn’t your favorite fairy tale.”
Stacey “You were funnier last night.”
Tucker “Well, Stacey, that is one of the main reasons people drink.”
Stacey “What? Who is Stacey?”
Tucker “Uhhh… that would be you. Stacey.”
Stacey “My name is NOT Stacey!”
Tucker “OK… and my name isn’t Tucker Max.”
Stacey “Uhhh… Yes, it is. You showed me your stupid fucking we
bsite last night, your name was all over it.”
Tucker “Well, Stacey is the name on your driver’s license.”
She looks at me with an expression that can only be described as “utter contempt.” She walks into my room and from next to my bed, picks up a completely different purse, one I had not seen, digs through it, finds her wallet, and throws a driver’s license at me. The name on the license is Jennifer, and the picture looks like the angry Yeti standing in front of me. I’m so confused.
Tucker “Well, who the fuck is Stacey?”
Jennifer “You tell me, asshole!”
I knew I shouldn’t say this. It was mean… but she is being such a bitch, I just couldn’t help it. Plus, she wasn’t very attractive.
Tucker “I don’t know, but her purse is on the sofa. Can you send her over? Because she’s a lot hotter than you.”
This might be why I always have to find new girls to fuck.
She dresses quickly. The whole situation is awkward and confusing, even for me. Well, confusing more than awkward, because I don’t actually give a fuck. But seriously, why is there another purse in my apartment, and whose driver’s license is it?
Oh my God.
I call TheRoommate. I hear his cell ringing in his bedroom. He answers in a groggy voice.
TheRoommate “What’s up?”
Tucker “Dude, did you hook up last night?”
TheRoommate “Yeah.”
Tucker “Oh shit! Dude, why did you do that to me? You NEVER bring girls home.”
I explain to him what happened, but instead of laughing, his first question shows how well he knows me:
TheRoommate “Did you take any money out of her purse?”
REDUCE, RECYCLE, REUSE
Occurred—January 2003
When I first moved to Chicago, it was to be a writer, so I refused to use my law degree to get a “real” job. I knew it would pay so much that it’d make me complacent and drain my creative energy. If I was going to become a writer, I was going to do it full-time. Anything else was a distraction from my goal, and a compromise I was unwilling to make.
That’s great in theory, but in practice, not making any money means that at some point you can’t afford to buy food. That’s pretty bad. Then you don’t have enough to buy alcohol. That’s really bad. But when you don’t have enough money to even go to $1 beer night, it’s an emergency.
To solve this problem, I got a job with Princeton Review teaching the LSAT. The LSAT is the admissions test for law school, and is very difficult for most people. I on the other hand fucked that test so hard, Duke gave me an academic scholarship. Because of my high score, Princeton Review paid me $21 an hour to teach other people how to take it. I taught about 15 hours per week, which was barely enough to pay for my rent and beer, but I didn’t have to go to an office or really even have a boss, so it wasn’t a soulless job that sucked the life out of me, and it gave me time to write.
There was another benefit I hadn’t anticipated to teaching that class: girls. Lots of cute girls want to go to law school. And most of them need help on their LSAT. I can do that. I can also have sex with them.
One of these girls was in my Oak Park class. She was Chicago-girl attractive—great face, big ass—a year out of college, and was way too impressed with my law school résumé. I guess she didn’t mind the fact that I didn’t have a real job or even enough money to pay for both food AND beer in the same week. She always stayed after class for help, and one day I suggested we go to a bar for further “instruction.” Four hours later, we closed the bar, having talked about LSAT stuff for all of two minutes. Gotta love alcohol and sex hormones.
We went back to her place, pretty far out in the Chicago suburbs. It came time to fuck, I pulled a condom out of my backpack, put it on, and we went at it. It was awesome, some of the best sex I’d had in my life to that point. For whatever reason, this girl and I just clicked physically, so we both wanted to fuck again right away.
I started searching through my backpack and realized I was out of condoms. She didn’t have any either, which meant I had to go out and buy some.
As annoying as it is to get dressed and go out in the cold after you’ve had sex, that wasn’t my biggest problem. Here’s the thing: I don’t write about this very often, because it’s pretty embarrassing, but when I first started writing full-time, I was poor. Not regular I-can’t-afford-steak poor, I mean more like Bangladeshi slumdog poor. It’s not a big deal now that I’m rich—I can even laugh about it in retrospect—but when it was going on, it really sucked. There were many days in 2002 and 2003 where I ate nothing but ramen… that I had stolen from my roommate. And other days that, had I not been really good with women and always had girls around who were willing to take me out or cook me dinner or buy me food, I might not have eaten at all. Seriously, I was that poor.
The truth isn’t that I wouldn’t go get more condoms: I was too poor to buy condoms. If you’ve ever been poor, you know what it’s like to be at a 7-Eleven and swipe your debit card, not sure that a $3.25 charge will go through. I did not want to deal with that.
She was a spoiled daddy’s girl, so she wouldn’t go herself. I tried to get her to go with me, thinking I could play the I-left-my-wallet-at-your-place game, but she was too spoiled even to leave her house. I couldn’t ask her for money, because being that poor is embarrassing. Great. I looked for another solution.
Tucker “Can’t we just fuck anyway? I mean, what are the chances you’ll get pregnant?”
Girl “NO! Seriously, I had my period two weeks ago.”
Tucker “So?”
Girl “Don’t you know anything about women? I’m at my fertility peak right now. These are the three days I am MOST likely to get pregnant. I really want to have sex again, but we CAN’T have sex without a condom.”
Tucker “What if I pull out?”
Girl “Pull and pray is not happening. I’m not on birth control, and I won’t have an abortion.”
Well, this fucking sucks. I rack my brain trying to think of something to do. I momentarily consider asking to use her car because there might be spare change in there. I ponder what it would take to steal money from her purse… when I look down and saw my used condom on the floor.
Tucker “Latex is pretty resilient, isn’t it?”
Girl “What?”
Tucker “Hold on.”
I go to the bathroom, turn on the faucet… and put the condom under it, careful to not tear the latex as I wash it out.
It was 3am, and there I was, a grown man washing out a used condom in a bathroom sink… because I was too poor to buy a new one. As I rolled up the wet condom to put it back on, I thought to myself: I had better end up making it as a writer, because this is about as bad as it gets.
She laughed at my ingenuity, inspected it, and gave it the thumbs-up, so we had sex. I pulled out as I came, just in case, but the condom was still there, unbroken, and caught my load without problem.
Apparently, this is a big no-no with a condom. From what I have been told since, the likelihood of a condom breaking on a second use is like 500% higher or something. Whoops. Oh well, to paraphrase Hunter S. Thompson talking about drugs and alcohol:
“I wouldn’t necessarily recommend it for anyone else, but it worked for me.”
THE SHITTIEST HOOKUP EVER
Occurred—June 2003
This girl emailed me because she liked my site, and once we got together, the conversation eventually turned to the two topics that all my conversations are about: me and sex.
She told me she wasn’t there to hook up—in fact, she’d been with only two guys in her life. This was not because she didn’t like hooking up but rather because she was afraid of hooking up. Apparently, she had a very weak immune system, took forever to get over a sickness, and claimed that a VD could possibly kill her. Not just something like AIDS, mind you, which can kill anyone except Magic Johnson, but shit like genital herpes or chlamydia could knock her off.
I told her
to immediately get away from me. I am almost certainly a supercarrier and she shouldn’t even touch me, much less fuck me. I went so far as to tell her that I wouldn’t hook up with her even if she wanted it, because even though every test I have ever taken has come back clean, I can’t have it on my conscience that I killed a girl by giving her some random VD that hadn’t been discovered yet.
I was kidding of course, but it worked: She ended up coming home with me. The harder you push them away, the more desperately they want in.
We started hooking up, she took off my clothes and her top, but refused to remove her jeans. Wait, what?
She said she had some injury or something, but she wouldn’t elaborate on what it was or why it precluded her from removing her pants. She did have a bandage on her hip and I could sort of see it sticking out of her jeans, so I just let it go at first.
We made out some more and she got more into it. After her initial reticence, she decided she did want to have sex with me, despite her “injury” and risk of death from HPV. OK, condoms work great, let’s get to the fucking, right?
Is it ever that easy for me? Well, yeah, most of the time it is… but I wouldn’t write a story about it if it was just normal sex.
As she took off her pants, she decided that this was the appropriate time to let me in on a little issue she had. She began by telling me that she had Crohn’s disease. I told her that a friend of mine has it so I knew what it was (FYI, a degenerative disease of the colon). Well, hers was pretty advanced. She kept dancing around the issue until, all of a sudden, it hit me:
Tucker “That’s not a bandage on your hip is it? OH. MY. GOD!”
Great Holy Mother of Jesus, this girl had a fucking colostomy bag.
A COLOSTOMY BAG. ON HER HIP.
[In case you are lost, let me introduce you to the Webster’s Medical Dictionary definition of colostomy bag: “A bag worn over an artificial anus to collect feces.”]
About three inches to the left of her belly button a tube stuck out of a small hole and emptied into a bag—about the size of a small Ziploc sandwich bag—that was bandaged to her hip. I shit you not, there was a BAG FULL OF POOP—LITERALLY HUMAN SHIT—TAPED TO HER HIP.
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