Assholes Finish First (29 page)

Then she started talking about the T-shirts I sell on my site and how she wished I had one that said
I FUCKED TUCKER MAX
.

Tucker “Who would wear that?”

Jess “Are you kidding?!? I would wear that shirt with pride. The only problem is that lots of girls would buy it who haven’t fucked you, so you’d have to have a limited edition only for girls you’ve actually fucked.”

Tucker “Well, if you are really serious about wanting people to know you fucked me, you should get a tattoo. Get
I FUCKED TUCKER MAX
right above your pussy.”

Jess “I would totally get that tattoo.”

Tucker “Yeah, OK.”

Jess “I’m completely serious. I will get it right now.”

Tucker “Get out of here, there is no way you’ll get that tattoo.”

Jess “Let me close our tab. I’ll do it right now.”

This isn’t happening. This girl cannot be serious. She is just bullshitting me, trying to lie her way into my heart. I am totally going to call her on this… after she pays the tab, of course.

Tucker “Are you drunk?”

Jess “No, not at all. I’ve had like three beers. I’m a fucking bartender, I drink more than this before I even go into work.”

Tucker “All right, come on, stop fucking around. You and I both know you aren’t going to do this. Let’s go to another bar.”

Jess “I am totally serious. Come on.”

We start walking toward the tattoo place. No way… she can’t be for real.

Tucker “Are you serious about this?”

Jess “Absolutely.”

Tucker “Why do you want to do this?”

Jess “For me, this is like… it’s… this is like for a devout Catholic if Jesus were to come down from heaven and say, ‘I validate you.’ ”

Tucker “I don’t care what anyone else says, you aren’t crazy, you are prescient and way ahead of your time. Good for you.”

Jess “That, and tomorrow I am going to take a picture of this and send it to my dad and say, ‘Happy Fucking Birthday, Dad.’ ”

Tucker “No you’re not.”

Jess “Oh yes, I am completely serious. Then I am going to show it to the whole family on Thanksgiving.”

Tucker “Why do you hate your dad?”

Jess “He married my horrible bitch stepmom and basically left me on my own.”

Tucker “So let’s see… the two men you have loved the most—your fiancé and your father—abandoned you?”

Jess “Well, yeah… I hadn’t really thought of it like that.”

Tucker “And your best male friend turned gay after dating you?”

Jess “Yeah…”

Tucker “I guess this tattoo is just the logical course of events. I may leave you, but the tattoo never will. Makes sense. Let’s go!”

We get to the tattoo place. I have never actually been in a tattoo parlor before, at least not sober, and I cannot believe all the pictures everywhere. Every wall is covered with art, some of it really good, some of
it bad. The Jesus with the lazy eye was my personal favorite. The girl working there is straight out of an anti-drug commercial about the horrors of crystal meth: missing teeth, crazy eyes, twitching and dressed like an outdated Christina Aguilera.

MethGirl “What can I do for you?”

Jess “I want a tattoo. Just four words, right below the left hipbone.”

MethGirl “OK, what do you want it to say?”

Jess “I fucked Tucker Max.”

MethGirl [
at least a 5 second pause
] “Are you serious?”

Jess “Yeah.”

MethGirl “OK. It’ll be about 30 minutes until Jeff is done with the guy ahead of you.”

She walks off, and I kinda start to feel pangs of guilt. Can I really let Jess go through with this? This girl is totally fucked up, but she isn’t a bad person. I’m torn about what to do. And beyond that, once she gets this thing, she and I will be inextricably linked from this point forward, for better or worse. I need some guidance, so I turn to my higher power:

What Would Tucker Do?

I decide that Tucker would at least have to see if she is sure about her decision. I can’t make her do anything, but I can at least make sure she knows what she’s getting into:

Tucker “You know this is permanent, right?”

Jess “Yeah, of course.”

Tucker “You do realize that every dude you fuck from now on is going to see this, right?”

Jess “Yeah.”

Tucker “Look Jess, I think you are making a great decision and this is clearly the coolest thing I have ever seen. But not many other people on earth would agree with me.”

Jess “I know.”

Tucker “Because of this tattoo, you are going to have problems with every guy you fuck from now on not named ‘Tucker Max.’ I love this tattoo idea,
but we aren’t ever going to date or get married. That job is going to fall to someone else, and he might not like that tattoo. Do you understand that?”

Jess “Yes, of course.”

Tucker “And you are still cool with it?”

Jess “Tucker, I idolize you. I mean, I relate to you, you are my fucking hero, and your writing is part of me, it is part of who I am and helps me define my existence. I want everyone to know this. I want my parents to know this, I want my kids to know this, and my future husband has to be OK with this.”

I pause and actually picture that scenario: her pulling down her pants to show her children this tattoo and then trying to explain it to them in a way that would make sense to a child… then I have to push the thought out of my mind. Sometimes, the unresolved pain that seeks me out and surrounds me is too much to contemplate.

Tucker “OK, as long as you know. If I were anyone else on earth I would call you stupid, but personally, I think this is awesome.”

At that point her phone rings. It is one of the bouncers she works with, who she tells me has a crush on her. I can hear only her side of the conversation, but the rest is easily figured out.

Jess “I am at a tattoo parlor… I’m getting a new tattoo… on my hip… ‘I Fucked Tucker Max’… yes, I am totally serious… oh Jesus… yes, I am sure I want it… no I am not drunk… what?… did you just say that I am one of the greatest girls you’ve ever met?… make me fucking sick… whatever, unless you’re drinking in the city with us, then I don’t want to hear from you for the rest of the night… bye.”

We pick out the correct font for my logo—Bank Gothic—and Jess goes with the tattoo artist to work on the outline. I am in the front room waiting for them to call me back so I can watch this, and there are like six teenage trailer park idiots also waiting for tattoos. These kids are straight out of the upper deck at an Eminem concert: flat-brimmed NBA logo hats, cigarettes behind their ears, frail whispy mustaches, grimy fingernails, and cheap fake gold chains. They haven’t heard my conversation with
Jess, but they heard what the tattoo was going to be. One of them says to me:

GhettoBastard1 “She really gun get dat shit?”

Tucker “Looks like it.”

GhettoBastard1 “Hey dawg, yur name Tucker Max?”

Tucker “Yeah.”

GhettoBastard1 “Damn! Dat your girl? You datin’er?”

Tucker “No man.”

GhettoBastard1 “How long you known her?”

Tucker “I don’t know, like three hours or so.”

GhettoBastard1 “DAMN!!!! HAHHHAHAHAHA. YO DAWG, DIS GUY’S A PIMP, YO!!!!”

GhettoBastard2 “HE MUST HAVE A HUGE DICK, YO!! HAHHAHAHA!!”

These kids are cracking up laughing and in complete disbelief. I only have an average-sized dick, so I don’t think I can explain to these kids why Jess is getting this tattoo. Higher-order thinking is probably not something they excel at.

I would never have written this story had I not gotten pics of not only the final tattoo, but also of the whole process. I was there and I wouldn’t even believe it without seeing the pictures. Here are two from the set (There are only two pictures because my publisher is too cheap to publish the rest. You can find them on my site,
tuckermax.com
.):

I immediately sent the pics to my buddy (and editor), Jeremie Ruby-Strauss. His only response:

“That is some next-level shit.”

I W
ANT TO
C
UM
G
ET A
L
OAD!

I opened my MySpace account about the same time as everyone else, right when it became popular in early 2005. I put this under the “Who I’d Like to Meet” section on the front page:

“Just about any hot girl who wants to hook up with me, I want to meet. Email me and we’ll set it up.

But I’d be even more down to meet a girl who wants to do my laundry. I can find sex easily, but finding a girl who will do my wash is hard. Seriously, ladies, I am not joking about this. Bunny used to do my laundry but now that I have moved this arrangement is no longer possible. If you are down, email me and we’ll figure it out. I will repay you with witty banter, hot animal sex, a swift kick to the spine, or whatever turns you on.”

I kinda wrote that as a joke; the tongue-in-cheek tone should be pretty obvious. But at the same time, I was not completely kidding. I really do hate doing laundry, and if putting this up meant I could get girls to come over and do mine for me, awesome. You never know what you can get until you ask for it.

But I mean, c’mon, of course I can always pay someone to do my laundry. How else are the children of immigrants going to pay for college? The real reason I wrote this was because I knew it would get me laid. How the fuck does asking girls to do your laundry get you laid? Very simple:

Most of the girls who email me to hook up are pretty straightforward about it, but a large percentage of women lie to themselves about who they are and what they want. Ask them directly if they want to fuck me, and many will say no. But give them some bullshit white lie they can use to bridge
the cognitive dissonance between what they
say
they want and what they
actually
want, and they will snatch it out of the sky like a falcon. After all, emailing me for sex is whorish and unseemly. But offering to wash my dirty clothes as a thank-you for writing such a great book, and then using it as a pretext for allowing a moment of premeditated spontaneity to just “happen,” that’s completely healthy and aboveboard. Riiiiiiiiiiiiight. What it’s also called is “whore logic.”

I understood these dynamics when I put up those simple little paragraphs. But there were three things I had not accounted for:

1. It would not only work, it would work flawlessly. I did not have to do my own laundry—not even one time—from early 2005 until I took the message down in late 2008 (only because I started dating HotNurse, and she did it for me).

2. Hundreds (if not thousands) of girls would use it as an excuse to email me, and a shocking number of them would actually come over. I slept with all of them (except one). I wish I could say that it was my amazing game that won them over, but even I know that’s bullshit. They wanted to fuck me from the start, they just wouldn’t admit it to themselves and needed an excuse. The best evidence of this is that more than a few never even bothered to do my laundry after we had sex. Which is fucking bullshit, by the way—I fully expected them to clean my clothes. The sex was the optional part, not the laundry.

3. And, of course, lots of women lie to themselves about a lot more things than even I realized. These are my three favorite stories that involved the laundry/self-deception link.

P
OOPLIPS

Occurred—July 2007

When I was living in NYC, I got this email:

“Tucker Max,

I have to be honest. #1, I am blackout wasted right now and it is taking me all I have to write this email. #2, I have met you before, at a book signing, and I think you are great. #3, I live in NYC and I would love to hang out. OK, I will probably not fuck you (although I think you are hot… I am weird and think sex means something) BUT despite this, if you want I will do your laundry. Whatever, if you want to see what I look like I am on facebook. Point being, cool, sarcastic, me.”

If you know anything about women, then you are smiling right now as much as I did when I got that email. If a woman mentions something—even to tell you she’s not into it—it means she’s at least thinking about it, which is more than half the battle.

We emailed back and forth for a few days and finally she decided the best way to do two loads of whites and two loads of colors was to meet me at a bar, dressed for a night out. It took only two hours of drinking for her to gather up enough courage to admit why she was actually out with me, and of course it had nothing to do with dirty clothes.