Look, I know how bad some of these stories are. I know that in return for my youthful behavior, fate will give me five daughters and make them all vicious sluts who sleep with guys like me and then throw it in my face. I know that in any cosmically just afterlife, I deserve to have all order of awful punishments waiting for me, but in the corporeal interim one girl gave me a little bit of my own medicine. I normally like to focus my stories on how awesome I am, but it would be intellectually dishonest to leave this story out, because it really is funny to everyone but me:
I met “Stephanie” in South Beach. She was 19 at the time, smoking hot and still in college but was spending the summer in Miami doing some modeling. Stephanie had the type of body you see on the cover of Maxim, except she was that hot in real life and not just airbrushed hot. Granted, she threw up a lot of dinners for that body, but considering that I wasn’t paying for her food, I didn’t care.
Like most super-hot girls, she was incredibly insecure. She wore too much makeup and not enough clothes, which is always a sign of despair in a woman. But she went beyond the normal female do-these-pants-make-me-look-fat insecurity, which is manageable, and graduated to full on, I-am-so-ugly-and-worthless, I-hate-myself, please-fuck-me-so-I-can-feel-close-to-someone insecurity. As a result of her severe and unquenchable insecurity, she was quite promiscuous, to the point where dating her was similar to the experience of sitting on a warm toilet seat: Even without seeing him walk out of the stall, you knew that someone else had been there only moments before you arrived.
I was 22 at the time and this sort of super-hot, super-insecure girl was right in my wheelhouse. It was my pattern at that time in my life; I would meet them, sense their insecurity, feed off it, play with it, and before I knew it the girl was in love with me. I would quickly dump her, and then there would be some sort of incident. I used to do this with pretty much every girl I met. My friends used to joke that my conversations with these girls would go like this:
Girl “Hi.”
Tucker “Hi.”
Girl “I’m lonely.”
Tucker “Me too.”
Girl “I love you.”
Tucker “I love you too.”
I honestly was NOT trying to fuck with these girls or hurt them, I was just too young to understand what I was doing, too stupid to figure it out, and too fucked up myself to stop. I have since learned how awful it was and now take pains to explain to women what I want and what I expect from them before we do anything, which is not only the right thing to do, it prevents the kind of issues that happened here from occurring later on.
So back to the story: We fucked and hung out and fucked some more, and I played the “great guy with an edge” part and let her totally fall for me. She told me she loved me, and I probably told her the same thing…but then I got bored, stopped calling, and left it at that. Another day, another hit, right? She wasn’t ready to let go so easily.
She called and called and called, and I ignored and ignored and ignored, until one day she decided that she needed to take her anger out on me in person. I was drinking at a bar with some friends when she and her ugly friend (all insecure hot girls have at least one ugly friend) came storming in.
Ugly Friend “Why haven’t you been calling her back?”
Tucker “Why haven’t you been losing weight? Same reason.”
Stephanie “SHE IS NOT FAT!”
Tucker “That’s not what you say behind her back.”
Her friend wasn’t actually fat—only by ridiculous South Beach model standards—but the point was to undermine Stephanie’s moral support, not to be factually correct.
Ugly Friend “You called me fat?”
Stephanie “NO! TUCKER, YOU ASSHOLE! WHY DIDN’T YOU CALL ME BACK?”
Tucker “I didn’t want to. Let it go, and just leave.”
Stephanie “FUCK YOU! I DON’T CARE ANYWAY, YOU HAVE A SMALL DICK AND YOU SUCK IN BED AND YOU CUM QUICKLY!”
Oh, Steph… I wish you hadn’t done that. Granted, I was a cowardly dickhead, and I should have called you, but you insulted me out in front of other people…now I have to destroy you.
Tucker “Well, if that is the case, then why did you search me down to scream like a lunatic about getting dumped? Shouldn’t you be happy about losing me instead of embarrassing yourself in public like this?”
Stephanie “I AM NOT EMBARRASSING MYSELF.”
Tucker “Then why is everyone laughing at you? You want to know why I didn’t call you back? Fine: You are insane and whorish. When you close that revolving man-door you call a vagina, come back and we’ll see if I’ve gotten any better in bed.”
Stephanie “FUCK YOU!”
Tucker “I’m sorry that you hate yourself and that no one loves you, but it’s time to end this crazy show. Take the mountain troll and leave—we are trying to meet some women who are actually dateable.”
She was utterly fucking speechless. You couldn’t have gotten a word from her if she shitted a dictionary. She turned to leave; if I was a good person I would have let it go there, but that’s just not me:
Tucker “Didn’t go as well as you thought it would, did it? I bet some random guy is getting pussy tonight! Female insecurity: It’s the gift that keeps on giving!”
The whole little crowd that had gathered was laughing, even the bartenders. I am pretty sure by the time she hit the door Stephanie was in tears. Win the crowd, and you always win the argument.
Tucker: 10
Stephanie: 0
I figured with that, it would be over, but two days later I got this voicemail:
“Tucker, it’s Stephanie. I just got tested, and I have chlamydia, and you need to get tested…jerk.”
When I was young, I was an idiot, but I wasn’t stupid enough to blindly believe something an angry woman told me. She wouldn’t give me the name of her doctor, so I demanded a copy of the test results. She mailed them to me a few days later, and well, there it was. A positive result for chlamydia. Wow. I guess I have to get tested now. That sucks.
I had to go to one of the many free clinics in Florida, because I didn’t want my father, whose insurance was covering me, to know that I might have chlamydia. After fighting off the crackheads and prostitutes in the lobby, I tell the nurse I need a chlamydia test. Do you know how they test for chlamydia? Before going in, I didn’t.
In the examination room, the nurse tells me to drop my pants and pulls out a six-inch-long thin metal rod and sticks a cotton swab on the end. No way…she can’t be thinking… I mean, that can’t go there…it won’t fit…and besides, that would be inhumanly painful…well, then what is she going to do with it?
Nurse “OK, I am going to insert this into your urethra, and then—”
Tucker “WHAT?”
Nurse “I am going to insert this into your urethra, and—”
Tucker “NOPE! NOPE! NOT GOING TO HAPPEN! There is no way you are putting that massive metal Q-tip INTO MY DICK HOLE. No way.”
Nurse “That’s how we test for chlamydia.”
Tucker “No, there has to be another way. THERE HAS TO BE ANOTHER WAY. This is the 21st fucking century, there is never a need to stick metal into my dick. I’ll pay—whatever, but THERE HAS TO BE ANOTHER WAY.”
Nurse “Not to test for chlamydia, there isn’t.”
I argued with her for 30 minutes, until she finally gave up and got a doctor. I argued with him for 20 minutes until he threatened to throw me out or call the police unless I got the test. Who knew the phrase “medieval quackery” could get someone so upset?
I wait for a week, making up bullshit reasons to turn down sex (“You can’t come over tonight, I promised my grandmother I’d watch Matlock with her”), until my test result comes back, and much to my relief it was negative.
My first thought, being a naïve 22-year-old was that she had just gotten it somewhere else, and I got lucky.
About a month later I saw her best friend out at a bar (not the ugly one, a different cute one). She saw me and starte
d giggling and waving. At first I thought she was hitting on me, which made me laugh. Females are always fucking over their friends. So I went over and started talking to her, but she and all her friends kept giggling at me and kinda mocking me:
Tucker “What the fuck is so funny? Do I have a booger hanging out or something?”
Girl “Heehehehehhehehehehehhehehe—I can’t tell you, you’ll get mad.”
Tucker “Just fucking tell me.”
Girl “Well… Stephanie’s friend is a nurse, and she took someone else’s positive test, whited out the name, put her name in there, photocopied it, and sent it to you! Heheheh!”
Tucker “What? She never had chlamydia? So there was no chance that I had chlamydia?”
Girl “Nope! Hehehhehehehehhehehe! Isn’t that funny?!?”
Tucker “I GOT THAT AWFUL FUCKING TEST FOR NOTHING?”
Girl “Hehehhehehehehhehehe!”
Tucker: 10
Stephanie: 500
Winner: Stephanie
And that marked the last time in my life I ever underestimated the resourcefulness or motivation of a woman that I had wronged. Of course, if I was smarter I would have just stopped wronging women and instead been honest with both myself and them about who I was and what I wanted, but that didn’t happen for another few years.
THE UT WEEKEND
Occurred—September 2002
Written—October 2002
Thursday
It’s a typical Thursday in my life, noonish, I’m at the laundromat washing my filthy rags, when my cell phone buzzes. It’s my cousin, The-Cousin, who goes to the University of Tennessee.
“Dude—Tucker—I’ve got tickets to the UT-Miami game this weekend, AND it’s Homecoming. You have to come down. It’s going to be awesome.”
I need no other persuasion. Check last minute flights to Knoxville: $1047. Looks like I’m driving.
The drive is no problem, until I get about 60 miles from the Kentucky-Tennessee border. I stop at some low-rent redneck place so I can pick up beer for the last hour of the drive. I want to arrive prepared.
I had heard about “dry” counties before, but they were still an abstract and foreign concept to me. I thought of them as silly anachronisms from a distant prohibitionist past, something only found in the pages of National Geographic. I was wrong. Evidently, every county along I-75 from Richmond, Kentucky, to the Tennessee border is dry. THIS INFURIATED ME. I almost got into a fight with the redneck checkout woman when she told me I have 40 more miles to go before I could buy liquor.
“HOW AM I SUPPOSED TO ARRIVE DRUNK IF YOU WON’T SELL ME LIQUOR?? WHAT KIND OF BARBARISM IS THIS??”
I stopped right across the Tennessee border, excited by the sign that said “First Place to Buy Beer.” But at the gas station, there didn’t appear to be any alcohol for sale. I inquire:
Tucker “Don’t you sell alcohol?”
Attendant “No, we’re too close to a church.”
Tucker “What? Didn’t Jesus drink wine?”
Attendant “Yeah, well, ‘round here, ya gotta go-on down da road bout’a half mile, to da bar.”
Driven by my need for libation, I “go-on down da road bout’a half mile” and find, literally, a bar with a drive-thru liquor store attached. But apparently, this wasn’t enough. They had firecrackers for sale, right there next to the beer, in the drive-thru liquor store. I’ll just pause here and let everyone make up their own redneck jokes.
I arrive at my cousin’s apartment, and it’s a TV cliché of a college apartment; beer cans piled to the ceiling, pubic hairs all over the sink, filthy underwear hanging from the lamps. I go to get a beer from his fridge, and what does he have? Cans of “Country Club Malt Liquor.” Sometimes, I really do think that God hates me.
After enduring a few cans of this ghetto swill, we head out to a line of bars that everyone in Knoxville calls “The Strip.” Typical college town with typical college bars, we pick one and start the night.
Not ten minutes later, three girls walk in—two are attractive, one is fat. My cousin tells me that one of them has been sweating him for months. Which one? “The fat one.”
I immediately walk over and point out my cousin to Fatty, and she almost knocks me and a random girl over to get to him and give him a hug. He gives me a look of, “I fucking hate you, and hope you immediately die an agonizing death.”
The rest of the night saw two dramas play out simultaneously: While my cousin tried to fend off the obvious and painful advances of Fatty, on my side the two attractive girls were battling to decide which one was going to hook up with me. It wasn’t that I was so incredibly charming. The 1st Law of Scarcity was at work; two of them plus one of me equals my desirability increasing substantially. It was awesome. They were being catty bitches to each other, each one trying to monopolize my attention and push the other one out. It was like a bad episode of Elimidate. Apparently, I didn’t have much of a say in the matter, but I was rooting for the short girl; she had the better face, and seemed somewhat intelligent. My cousin saw what was going on, knew I liked the short girl, knew I was drunk, and set the match to the gasoline:
TheCousin “Hey Tucker, you know she’s French, don’t you?”
Tucker “Oh hell no—you’re French?”
Girl “My parents are, but I was born here. I want to move to France after graduation.”
Tucker “You fucking cheese-eating surrender monkey. I thought someone stunk around here. So if I start speaking German can I push you around and take all your stuff? Those hairy fucking stink-bags would be speaking Kraut right now if it wasn’t for us, and they aren’t the least bit appreciative. I hope they all fucking die, and your frog-sympathizing ass with them.”
That pretty much settled it: I am going home with the tall one. The four of us head back to her apartment, and as we walk in, she tells us to be quiet, because her roommate is sleeping, and she is bipolar and will flip out. Telling me this, especially when I’m drunk, is akin to letting a starving, rabid pit bull loose in a Montessori school.
“Give me and TheCousin ten minutes with her; she’ll be trying to hang herself with her pantyhose. HEY—CRAZY! COME OUT HERE. I WANT TO POINT OUT YOUR FLAWS AND SHORTCOMINGS. I BET YOUR DAD DOESN’T LOVE YOU, DOES HE?”
The tall girl and I eventually go into the bedroom, leaving my cousin on the sofa to be devoured by Fatty. During foreplay banter, tall girl makes a request:
Girl “Massage my forearm. It’s sore.”
Tucker “Right. The only way I’m doing that is if it’s a post-coital activity.” Girl “What? I don’t speak Spanish.”
Oh boy…it’s a good thing I was drunk.
This girl had a nose job and told me that she has to use Q-tips to get the boogers out of her nose, because the surgery left her nostril holes too small for her fingers to get into. She got mad when I tested this by trying to stick my fingers into her nose. By God, she was right; I couldn’t even get my pinky in there.
Ten minutes later she told me that she was so poor growing up that there were times when she and her mom ate only potatoes and peanut butter sandwiches. My response, “I guess stripping really does pay sometimes, doesn’t it?” She got mad, but hey, if she can’t take a joke, fuck her.
Friday
I wake up the next morning and find my cousin, naked, sheets wrapped clumsily around his torso, asleep on the floor next to the sofa. Why the floor? Because Fatty was so big that both of them couldn’t fit on the sofa at the same time. I was in tears laughing at the scene. We eventually leave, telling the girls lies about how we’ll call them later. As soon as we get outside, my cousin flips.
TheCousin “I cannot believe you made me do that. It was awful. She said I was only the second person she’d ever had sex with, which I don’t doubt, because honestly—who would want to have sex with her? Except for people whose asshole cousin set them up with her, of course.”
Tucker [I can barely get this out between fits of laughter] “She had a hot face.”
&nbs
p; TheCousin “Oh yeah, asshole, she’d be hot as hell if she wasn’t fat as fuck. Eat shit and die, you cocksucker.”
Tucker “Well, at least she had big tits.”
TheCousin “Yeah, that was the best part. She thought she was hot because she had such big tits, but you didn’t notice them because they were resting on her stomach. They were like bags of oatmeal.”
I really hope his parents read this story.
TheCousin is currently finishing his undergraduate studies at the University of Tennessee because he was kicked out of the Merchant Marine Academy. Why? He was on restriction, and went off campus to get a sandwich. He’d gotten in so much trouble during his four years there, that this was enough to get him kicked out—THREE DAYS BEFORE HIS GRADUATION. Yes, he is obviously related to me.
TheCousin and I went back to his place, and he took a shower, scrubbing himself like a rape victim. He had a late English class that day, and I decided to tag along and see what it was like. I went to public school in Kentucky, and I say this now with full understanding of the meaning: That class, a 300-level class, was possibly the biggest farce of education I have ever seen. I’ve heard 14-year-old meth-addicted Thai prostitutes say more prescient things than the woman that was supposedly a “professor.” I had a hard time believing that this was a class. I wish I could give you a recap of the conversation, but that would be like trying to recount the disjointed ramblings of a senile nursing home sewing circle. That “school” is a joke. I would have learned more watching a Special Olympics spelling bee.