Sloppy Seconds: The Tucker Max Leftovers (45 page)

I eventually started talking to a very attractive girl about Marley, and his defining characteristic quickly came up:

He likes to hump male dogs.”

Cute Girl “No, he’s not gay—it’s a dominance thing.”

Tucker “It’s not a dominance thing. He does other homosexual stuff too.

He gossips endlessly about other dogs, watches ‘Queer Eye For The Straight Guy’, always frets about being skinny enough, and licks his penis constantly. Now you tell me he’s not gay.”

She thought this was hilarious and introduced me to all her friends. She and all her friends were very attractive, and very cool…and very much with their boyfriends, who were all sitting with them. Normally, this would anger me, but the boyfriends thought I was hilarious and kept buying me beers. One of the boyfriends bought a round of shots, and wanted a toast. I don’t know why, maybe because I had the dog, maybe because I hadn’t paid for shit and they expected something out of me, maybe because I had been entertaining them all night, everyone in this group turned to me to give the toast.

Guy #1 “Hey, Dog Boy, give us a toast!” This statement was met with cheers from the table.

Tucker “Uhhh…OK…umm…To Marley?”

Booing and hissing rose up through the dozen or so toast participants.

Tucker “I don’t know, what kind of toast do you want?”

Guy #2 “A toast. A real toast, something funny.”

Guy #1 “Yeah, come on, Dog Boy! You can do it!”

I realize that the boyfriends were trying to make fun of me, setting me up for ridicule to make themselves look better in the eyes of their hot girlfriends. That’s fine. I’d have done the same thing. But they obviously didn’t know who they were dealing with.

I got up on a chair, and prepared to address the crowd.

Guy #1 “Everyone look, Dog Boy and his mutt are gonna give a toast!”

The room got quiet, I paused for dramatic effect, and gave the only funny toast I know:

“Here’s to the women we’ve met, and to the women we’ve fucked, And to those amongst us who’ve had no such luck.

Here’s to beer in the glass, and vodka in the cup,

Here’s to pokin’ her in the ass, so she won’t get knocked up.

Here’s to all of you, and here’s to me,

Together as friends we’ll always be,

But if we should ever disagree,

Then FUCK ALL OF YOU, HERE’S TO ME!”

Not to sound arrogant, but the fucking place erupted. I was a hero.

I wish there was a happy ending to this story, but even after a performance like that, I still went home alone. Sometimes even Jordan scores 50 and still loses.

UGLY GIRL HITS ON TUCKER, IS DUPED

I’m at the dog park today, and as usual, Marley finds a cute dog and begins humping him. No awkward approaches, no expensive dinners, no foreplay, just a few seconds of ass-sniffing and then they start going at it. Dogs have it all figured out.

The dog’s owner takes this as a cue to start talking to me. She was, in a word, unattractive. Ugly even. Her dearth of physical beauty did not stop her from aggressively engaging me in conversation. It took about five minutes for me to realize that she was 1) crazy, and 2) in love with me. My favorite quote from her pointless, disjointed ramblings:

UglyGirl “Look at them go at it…I haven’t done that in a while…the last time I got humped like that I was skinny…I should start working out again.”

I’m at a dog park, an ugly girl is shamelessly hitting on me, and I’m watching my dog ravenously ass-pillage another male dog. So I decide to do the obvious thing, and say the most ridiculous things I can think of, hoping to either entertain myself or get her away from me. The next ten minutes of conversation saw these gems pass my lips:

• “I have a really small penis. At least that’s what the priest told me.”
  
• “I like to go to the playground and give candy to children. Just to freak their parents out.”
  
• “I don’t have a job. Or even any prospects.”
  
• “I used to be very spiritual. That was until I realized that God makes fun of me behind my back.”
  
• “I’m desperately poor. Could you lend me some money?”
  
• “It’s not like I agree with the Israelis or anything, it’s just that I really like the idea of indiscriminately bombing Palestinians.”
  

The hoped-for effect—repulsed horror—was not achieved. In fact, the Gods of Irony struck, and she thought I was hilarious. Uproariously funny. In tears laughing at me. Thanks, but I only hook up with ugly girls when I’m drunk, have no other options, and my friends won’t see. Try again later tonight.

DOG PEOPLE DON’T HAVE A SENSE OF HUMOR

At first Marley’s humping was embarrassing, but I’ve learned to live with it. Sometimes I can even have fun with it. For instance, instead of just profusely apologizing, I’ve shifted the blame to others. Conversations now go like this:

Tucker “Gosh, I’m really sorry my dog keeps trying to hump your dog. He’s normally never like this. Are you putting some kind of canine perfume on your dog?”

Tucker “Maybe your dog is teasing mine. You ever think of that? Your dog does seem to be flaunting its wares a little loosely. What does he expect, sashaying around the dog park like some sort of cheap doggy prostitute?”

Some people laugh, others don’t. You’d be surprised how defensive some dog owners get when you tell them their doggy was asking for it.

Tucker “Sometimes I’ll go down to the dog pound and pretend that I found my dog. Then I tell them to kill him anyway, because I already gave away all his stuff.”

They get really fucking lit up at that one. Dog people don’t have a very good sense of humor.

DUDE, WE ARE DRINKING TOO MUCH

Occurred, March 2009

One of the cool things about becoming famous—especially for someone in the entertainment business—is getting access to a lot of things few others get: invitations to parties, VIP treatment, gifting suites, you name it. In my case, the coolest thing has been access to sporting events. Not surprisingly, my books have become very popular with pro and college athletes, and I’ve developed friendships with a bunch of them as a result.

I’ve become especially good friends with one guy in particular and we’ve shared some crazy fucking experiences, one of which I have to write about. I promised him I’d never write about him, or even talk about anything we do in any way where he can be identified, so please understand why I’m being vague about certain details: I can’t tell you who he is, what team he plays for, or anything like that. What I can tell you is that my friend, “TheWolf,” has played big time college and professional basketball for years. He is older now, but he is still in the league. You know who he is.

It was the end of the season and TheWolf was out for the year with a nagging injury, so he could do things he wouldn’t normally be able to were he playing in the games. We started the night at his apartment that, of course, is incredible and teeming with women. I had a rental car, so Nils and I gave TheWolf a ride to the game. When we got there, we went past all the awful parking that normal people have to endure, straight into the players’ lot, and took the prime spot, literally ten feet from the Players’ Entrance.

Tucker “Wolf, you sure I can park here?”

Wolf “Yeah man, this is my spot.”

Tucker “But this is my rental car, how are they going to know not to tow it.”

Wolf “See those security cameras? They watch everything man, they see me getting out of the car. They won’t tow it. I run this place man, relax.”

TheWolf took us in the locker room, we met the team, played Madden with everyone, ate at the player buffet, watched shoot-around from the bench, everything. We sat in the incredible seats he provided, watched the game, watched his team blow out the visitor. It was fucking awesome, the type of experience you can’t even pay for.

Afterwards everyone was ready to party. The arena Wolf plays in has a restaurant/bar in the bottom that stays open long after the game. After every win, the players get the back room, and the groupies descend. Nils and I had a blast drinking, hanging out, bullshitting and, of course, fucking with all the groupies.

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: As a group, the worst women on earth are LA Girls. But the second worst is very much debatable. I think, as of right now, I may throw my vote to Basketball Groupies. They could be in the top 1% of slimiest, most despicable collection of immoral whores the world has ever known. There’s a reason the most popular of all the celebrity wives shows is “Basketball Wives,” and why none of them are actually wives anymore. The ones we met that night were so icky, so vile, that I refused to even consider fucking any of them. Not that they even wanted to fuck me—the few that could read and knew who I was, realized quickly that the only thing I’d ever buy them would be an abortion.

As the night wound down, TheWolf, Nils and I got more blitzed. I don’t specifically remember leaving the bar, but I do remember us discussing how drunk we were, and how none of us had been that fucked up in a long time. And I also very clearly remember us back in Wolf’s apartment, because we stayed up for an hour while one of the groupies made us grilled cheese sandwiches and we had an extended conversation about all the things TheWolf was thinking about doing after his playing career was over. I’m not sure what time we finally went to bed but it was probably somewhere after 3am because when we woke up the next morning to catch our flight we both felt like we’d been hit in the head with a panini press and had our eyes brushed with sandpaper.

We tried to wait for TheWolf to wake up before we left but he was up late having his needs attended to by a different groupie than the one who made us grilled cheese, so we grabbed our luggage and took a taxi over to the arena to pick up the rental car.

Since there was no game that day and the lot was closed, the driver pulled up at the curb outside the ticket plaza. I told him those rules didn’t apply to me because I was famous goddamnit, but he was having none of it. Maybe it was because I’m only 6’ tall and wearing a filthy shirt from the night before. Maybe it was because he was a filthy illiterate foreigner who didn’t know his place. Who’s to know? So I paid him and we walked our luggage into the players’ parking lot like a couple of normals.

There was no rental car.

Tucker “I fucking knew it!! I knew they were going to tow it! Fucking Wolf!!!”

We only had like two hours before our flight, nowhere near enough time to find the car, pick it up from the impound lot, and drive it back to the airport. Nils called another cab while I called TheWolf’s phone and got his voicemail:

Tucker “You stupid drunk broke-kneed motherfucker, I FUCKING TOLD YOU THEY WOULD TOW MY RENTAL CAR!! You better get your worthless fucking assistant to find my car and get it back to the rental place at the airport, I’m not paying a month of rental charges because you ‘run that place.’ Dumbshit!”

The next day, TheWolf’s assistant called the towing companies the stadium uses; none of them towed ANY cars that night. TheWolf himself called all the impound lots the two truck companies use, just in case there was a mix-up. My car wasn’t in any of them. In fact, he even went and asked security, and they said they had no record of ANY car being towed from the arena in MONTHS.

The only logical conclusion was that someone had stolen the car out of the players’ lot (something that actually happened once at that stadium, like ten years ago), so TheWolf asked the security people to go back and look at all the footage from that night to see if anything showed up, and if it did, to start the process of reporting the car stolen. The next day I got a call from TheWolf:

Wolf “Tucker, I just left the security office. It’s a good fucking thing I buy the head of security a bottle of Johnny Walker Blue every year for Christmas, because he just saved my ass from a serious embarrassment in front of the whole organization.”

Tucker “What, did someone you know steal the car?”

Wolf “No shithead. You know who drove the car off? WE DID.”

Tucker “What?”

Wolf “I just watched the tape. At about 2am, you can clearly see you, me, and Nils walk up to the car, open the doors, get in, and drive the fuck off.”

Tucker “What are you talking about?!? We took a cab home!”

Wolf “That’s what I thought too!! But we didn’t. We drove home!”

Tucker “THAT’S FUCKING IMPOSSIBLE!”

Wolf “TAPE DON’T LIE MOTHERFUCKER!!”

Tucker “Dude…we are drinking too much.”

Here’s the thing: I don’t drive drunk. Any more. I did that a few times in my youth, it was stupid and reckless, and I got lucky that nothing really bad ever happened. Then ever since the Absinthe Donuts incident and the Harlem RV incident happened within a few months of each other, I made it a point to never drive drunk again. I stopped cold (wild) turkey.

When Nils and I woke up that morning, I would have bet you $10,000 that we’d taken a taxi home. Nope. Apparently, I DROVE A FUCKING RENTAL CAR back to his place through an unfamiliar city with two or three similarly shit-housed passengers during prime, post-bar DUI hours.

I talked about this with Nils, and he was just as shocked. This whole fucking incident is still baffling to all three of us. Each of us remembers walking out of the bar and discussing who would call to get a taxi. We remember the conversation we had back at TheWolf’s place, but not one of the three of us has ANY memory of HOW the fuck we got there. In fact, we don’t remember
anything
between those points. It’s like that part of the night never happened; like a fucking X-File or something.

IT’S STILL A MYSTERY.

Well, I guess it’s not a mystery in the strictest sense, because there is VIDEO TAPE of me, Nils and TheWolf getting into the car and driving it off, and there is a record of the car being towed from out front of The Wolf’s apartment where I forgot /left it.

Like TheWolf says…tape don’t lie.

I SCORED AT THE SWAMP!

Occurred, August 2009

During the months of August, September, and October of 2009, a group of us went on a promotional tour for the movie based on my first book. We did premieres in something like 35 different cities, including many college towns. Of course there were several press things I had to do along the way, and about two weeks before the Gainesville screening, I got this email: