I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell (7 page)

Occurred-Summer 2000 Written-September 2002

Everything I am about to tell you is true. This is the complete and unadulterated story, as I can best remember it, behind my infamous summer with Fenwick and the very famous "Tucker Max Charity Auction Debacle" email.

Let's start from the beginning: In May of 2000, my buddy SlingBlade and I drove out to Palo Alto to work as summer associates at a law firm called Fenwick & West. It was the summer between our 2nd and 3rd years of law school at Duke. The internet and tech boom was hitting its crescendo, and as we arrived in Silicon Valley, the Nasdaq was set to pass 5,000.

Remember those days?

Almost immediately upon arrival, I realized that I HATED being a lawyer. My mental picture of what being a lawyer entailed did not include spending countless hours every day sitting in a lifeless office, surrounded by boring people, doing idiotic and ultimately meaningless paperwork. Unfortunately, that is all that a corporate lawyer does. When you are a lawyer, your job is to clean up the messes of others, to rubber stamp and make legal someone else's real work, to essentially be a paper custodian for the people who actual do important things. The people at Yahoo and Cisco and Network Solutions (all our clients) actually did something; what did I do? Stupid, mindless, and utterly irrelevant bullshit. I was a junior paper-monkey, and I hated every second of it. Honestly, I wish I could say it was the firm, I wish I could blame the people or the place, but that was not the case. I hated the very nature of the job. Being a lawyer SUCKS.

When I am bored or unhappy, my behavior becomes akin to a crackaddled ADD monkey until I find something to occupy me. The law firm and the work bored me; so what did I do? Did I endure the boredom And soldier on? Or better yet, did I find a productive output for my creativity, like I did with my website in law school?

No.I got drunk and acted like an asshole. Virtually every day, and especially at firm events where the liquor was free. If being a lawyer was Not interesting, I was going to make it that way, goddamnit.

The first Friday I was there, the firm had an all-day orientation for the incoming summer associates. The night before, I got my roommate and myself into the SOMA magazine opening party in San Francisco, where I got completely shit-faced and went home with one of the models at the party (at least, she told me she was a model, but who really knows). When I woke up at 6am the next morning, in her house 'in Oakland, I realized that I had not carefully thought out the ramifications of this act. My firm is far from Oakland, and I had to be at work at 9amfor the start of summer associate orientation.

First things first: I rooted around in her purse, noting the large supply of condoms, and found her driver's license so when I woke her up, I'd know her name (it was one of those nights). She said she'd give me a ride, but she can't take me to my place because it was in Mountain View (which is even further away from Oakland than Palo Alto), and She had to be somewhere at ten. That meant I had to wear the same clothes I wore out last night to work Friday. Not really a big deal, except there was liquor, vomit, piss (and probably other fluids) all over them. Liquor is understandable, but vomit and piss? On the way to her house Thursday night, we had stopped at Jack-in-the-Box. Don't ask me how she could eat that crap and still have such a good body…. She wasn't a plus-size model, so I guess she was bulimic.

Sitting in the drive-thru, the inhuman amounts of liquor I had consumed caught up to me, so I calmly got out of her car, walked behind a bush, and proceeded to vomit and piss at the same time. It is hard enough keeping from vomiting on yourself when you're drunk; try doing it while also pissing. Whatever; I just put in a breath mint and hid the urine stains until they dried, and she still hooked up with me. Isn't alcohol great?

I show up at orientation, stumbling drunk, eyes still bloodshot, smelling like a speak-easy. I somehow made it through without incident until after lunch, when they partnered us up with another summer associate and had us tell each other all kinds of things about ourselves, and then recite to everyone else in the room what we learned. I didn't know what to say to the guy who was my partner, so I told him I was out all night and I couldn't see anything because my contacts had fallen out
when I was hooking up with some random girl. He stood up and told this to everyone. I thought it was funny; the hiring partner did not. Whatever, if he can't take a joke, fuck him.

The next week, the hiring partner, John Steele, came down to the office that I shared with three other summers, and started shooting the shit with us. All of a sudden he started in about the Infirmation.com Greedy Associate boards, how he couldn't believe that the Fenwick summer salary info got up there so fast, and how that thing has really changed the way firms do things. Let me digress here for an important and revealing subplot:

During the spring, Fenwick announced that they were going to pay summer associates only $2,100 per week, which was below the $2,400 that most big firms in New York, LA and Chicago were paying their summers. Yet, right before we arrived in Palo Alto, Fenwick, along with every other Silicon Valley firm, announced that they were going to pay summers $2,400 per week, commensurate with the big firms in other major cities.

What does this have to do with anything? Well, I was almost single handedly responsible for Fenwick, and basically every other Silicon Valley firm, raising their summer associate salary from $2,100 to $2,400. How is that possible, you ask? The beauty of the internet, and the influence of an amazing website called Infirmation.com.

Infirmation.com is a job-related website that has message boards on it, where anyone can anonymously post anything. The message boards are divided by region, one being for New York associates, one for Silicon Valley, one for Chicago, etc. These message boards, called "Greedy Associate" boards, had vaulted to fame in the preceding months as a means for associates at different firms to anonymously share information with each other about salary, benefits, work conditions, anything they chose. One of the sparking events was when Gunderson, a relatively small firm in Silicon Valley, raised their starting associate salaries from somewhere around the industry average of $100,000 to $125,000.

One of the first places this information was posted and disseminated Was the message boards on Infirmation.com, and from that event, as well as a few others like it, junior associates at all the major firms started sharing info with each other about the relative benefits and detriments of their particular firms on these Greedy Associate boards.

As a result of these developments, partners at all the majors firms monitored these message boards, looking for the latest gossip about their firms and their competing firms. They had to stay up to date, because a change in benefits in Firm A could mean a flood of associates or law students to that firm, and away from Firm B, before Firm B even knew what was going on.

How does this relate to the story? The summer salaries had already Been announced in New York at $2,400, and everyone was waiting for the Silicon Valley firms to announce their summer salaries [Fenwick had three major competitors in Silicon Valley at the time: Cooley, Wilson, and Brobeck (these are abbreviated names of law firms)].

Fenwick was the first to announce; they did so sometime around late April, and they announced at $2,100, which was below NY salaries. I was unhappy with this, so I immediately posted this info on the Infirmation.com Silicon Valley/SF Greedy Associate board, and then, using four or five different anonymous screen names, proceeded to havea thread discussion on how horrible this was, how Fenwick was insulting its summers, how no one was going to accept their offers because the firm was so cheap it wouldn't fork over the extra $300 a week, etc, et. even used one of my aliases to play the other side. It was beautiful. Of the 20 messages on this topic on the first day, I probably posted 10 of them. I kept this up, at a slightly lower output, for about three days.

About a week after Fenwick's announcement, and the resulting Infirmation.com message board "explosion," Wilson announced they were paying summers $2,400. Each of the other Silicon Valley firms quickly fell in line after that, including Fenwick.

Back to the story: So here I was, sitting with the hiring partner at a major Silicon Valley law firm, talking about the very message boards that I used to influence the summer salary structure, when he let the clincher go.

"Yeah, what kills me is that we had decided to pay $2,100. But as soon as we announced, that message board blew up, and other firms decided to pay $2,400. That thing is something else."Holy shit! The whole time I am thinking, "Ha, ha asshole, the joke's on you, I basically wrote that whole thing myself'" It took everything I had to not laugh in his face. We all bullshit a little more, when he asks to talk to me in private. He took me into a conference room, closed the door, and began talking to
me about my reputation, how I'm starting to get the reputation as the "party guy" in the summer associate class. Yeah, so? At this point, I'm really unconcerned about my reputation; yes, I liked getting paid $2,400 a week for what amounted to summer camp, but I hated this job and I hated being a lawyer. Plus, the way he phrased the conversation, I just thought he was talking about unimportant stuff-I am not very adept at picking up subtle social cues, and even though this was not a subtle one, I wasn't picking it up.

I did a couple of other stupid things in the next few days; I can't really remember, because they were things that don't even register on my radar as "events", yet others found them to be "seismic." For instance, one day, one of the recruiters came into my office, when I was on the phone. She asked who I was talking to, and I said, "Oh, I was just calling a porn line." Obviously, I was kidding; I later found out she was mortified.

The next day I get invited to sit in on a meeting with a prospective client, the managing partner, and a senior associate. The client is a girl who is an aspiring artist, a good one, and is about to graduate from Stanford. A Stanford alumni-VC (venture capitalist) in the area has told her she should orate herself, and set up what amounts to a start-up for her artwork. She came to us for legal advice about this venture. Well, I may have been the junior person in the room, but I'm sorry, she was given some serious horseshit advice, and I proceed to tell her this, point blank. Who's ever heard of this? Incorporating a new artist? Is this a joke? I'm not even talking about securitizing her future work and selling bonds, like what David Bowie did; he wanted her to literally set up some sort of corporation with herself, and pass out stock options to get people to work for her. I tell her to ignore this VC, he knows nothing about the art world, and for her to get an agent or a manager, or both, and start producing some art to sell and show, that incorporating herself would be against her interests in both the long and short term, and is completely unheard of in the art world, and for good reason-because it's idiotic. I thought the meeting went well; apparently, the managing partner did not. He was upset that I called the VC's idea, someone who is apparently very important in Silicon Valley, "idiotic."

The next day I get a call from John Steele to come see him in his office, I go up there, and he gives me ANOTHER talk about my attitude. Really, don't let anyone tell you they weren't patient with me at Fenwick, because they were. But he told me that the good news was
That the lawyers I was working with, a senior associate and a partner, thought the work I was doing was great, and that they really liked me. Of course, I took this as carte blanche to keep doing what I was doing (As long as my work was good, that's all that matters, right? Not when you act like Tucker Max). Then he says, "Oh yeah, I saw your little bachelor of the week thing on sfGirl.com. That was really funny." WHAT? How did he find out about that? He continued, "The part about The dog pound, I was in tears reading that. My wife thought it was hilarious.

Of course, I wish you hadn't mentioned Fenwick, or a fat Puerto Rican stripper, but you know, I guess that's just you." I didn't think I had told anyone at Fenwick about that. I felt like Tom Cruise in The Firm, but unlike Tom Cruise, I just willfully ignored the warning Signs and kept on being myself.

Friday rolls around, and we have a firm cocktail party at a partner's house. The liquor was free, and I was drinking, and after an hour or so, I find myself talking to two female partners, "Betty" and "Kathy." Betty is in her forties, married, a kid or two, and is one of the leading lawyers in the firm. I am my normal gregarious, boisterous self, and these two female partners are eating it up. Loving me. As the cocktail party wound down, I convinced them to join me, ten other summer associates, and a senior associates in a trip to a bar. / local Palo Alto At this point, I'm just inviting them because I want someone to pay. On the trip over to the bar, I'm in the car with Betty and the other partner, and the conversation turns to sex. At first I was a little reticent, being that Betty is married with children and an important partner, but before I know it I'm explaining the BJ rule to them, i.e., what it means to "dot someone's eyes," and why guys do such things. This was eminently interesting to Betty and the other partner. The conversation carried into the bar, and further explored such topics as whether a young man (around 24), would know what to do with an older woman (around 40 or so), whether my lips were pouty, sultry or alluring, etc, etc.

We're all sitting at a long table, and by the time the food comes, I have Betty hand-feeding me calamari. All the while, Jim, another Duke Law student, sat across the table from this scene, unable to believe what he was witnessing, and (I swear this is true), eating ribs with a fork. Needless to say, this scene was just too much for most of the other summer associates. And the look on the face of one of the junior associates was priceless when I leaned over and asked her if the woman feeding me calamari was actually a partner. Yeah, I was a little out of
control. Everyone scatters except me, Betty, Kathy, and one other summer. I'm assuming they saw the train wreck coming, and didn't want to be anywhere near when it hit. Smart decision. My car was still at the firm, so Betty offers to give me a ride to the office to get it. I accept, and then another summer, Brian, invites himself along, "Oh, I need a ride to the office too." I didn't really understand why at the time, but Betty gave him a mean look, but agreed to take him along. [Side note: The only reason I can tell you this next part is because truth is an absolute defense to libel, and this particular event had a sober witness named Brian, who went to law school at Columbia. Though it may seem libelous, this is the complete truth. I'd been drinking, but I remember this vividly. If you don't believe this, find him and ask him about it. He has no reason to lie for me.]