Hilarity Ensues

  Tucker “No. You’re gonna need more people.”

  He got this confused look on his face, like never in his life had he considered someone NOT recognizing and bending to his baseless and preposterous authority. As if nothing more than a t-shirt made him so powerful that he forgot people could be bigger than him, and that a threat without anything to back it up doesn’t mean anything.

  Then it clicked, his eyes went from confused to wide and afraid, and he ran off. Don’t pull your gun unless you’re prepared to use it! This is going to be even more fun than throwing potatoes around the bar!

  This was not planned at all—it was just a reaction to his tone and manner. If he had been cool, I probably would have just left. But he was such a pompous little shitbird, I refused to comply. No chance. The day I let a tiny steamed dumpling in a baby tee push me around, I’ll just turn in my balls and go write for Maxim.

  A few minutes later, this tall string bean in a red security shirt that was a little better-sized came up (with the Asian dude hiding behind him), and tried the same thing on me. Except he said I had to leave “right now.”

  Tucker [dripping with mocking sarcasm] “Right now? So I can’t stay, and leave later? Well … that changes EVERYTHING! I just didn’t understand the first guy.”

  It was hard choking back the laughter. He didn’t know what to do—and he wasn’t about to enforce his implied threat with ACTUAL violence either—so he kinda stood there for a second staring at Short Round like a confused dog, and then walked off. The only thing I needed now was a mirror to hold up so they could see the “SECURITY” on their shirt, and laugh along with me!

  Then this tiny little dude—the smallest yet, but without a red baby tee—came running over, face crimson with anger, screaming at me.

  Owner “You have to leave!!!”

  Tucker “What for?”

  Owner “For throwing ice!!!”

  That pissed me off, a lot. I stuck my finger right in his face as I defended my honor:

  Tucker “I did NOT throw ice, I threw POPCHIPS!”

  Owner “Well then get out!! I own the whole building!”

  Tucker [mocking] “Oh no! He owns the building!”

  Owner “I’m calling the cops!”

  Tucker “Call them.”

  Owner “You’re going to jail!!!!”

  Tucker “Yeah, OK. Let me know when they get here.”

  Dude went ballistic. He pulled his phone out, flipped it open, put it to his face and started talking.

  Owner “911, I need the cops here ASAP!”

  Here was this tiny little man making a tiny little call into his enormous cell phone … but he didn’t dial. He didn’t hit the ‘send’ button. He didn’t do anything that would even approximate making a real phone call. It took me a second to realize, because I kinda couldn’t believe it—he was PRETENDING to call the cops. Like a parent would do to a child. I turned to everyone I was with:

  Tucker “Did he even hit send?”

  Girl “No.”

  At that point, everyone was openly laughing at him and his ridiculous charade. I thought he was going to pop a blood vessel in his face he got so angry. Poor guy—it was like high school all over again for him. And here he thought owning a bar would make him cool.

  I was actually hoping the cops would show up—I was going to try to get them to arrest the bar owner. I think I might have been able to do it. First of all, one of the girls with me was an ER nurse and knew most of the Austin cops. Second, this dude was clearly an insecure idiot, and if I could just think of the right way to frame the incident to the cops, I might be able to get the cops to arrest him. I knew I would have to leave, of course, but if I could get the cops to arrest the owner of a bar I was thrown out of, it would be worth all the trouble.

  But of course he didn’t call the cops, even after I called him out, because he knew what I knew: the cops aren’t coming, especially not on one of the busiest nights of the year, when real crimes are happening. Plus, they don’t write tickets for narcissistic injury. Sorry buddy, I can’t go to jail just because I made you feel small inside.

  Instead, he finally did something smart—he went to the club across the street, and got three REAL bouncers from there. These were big muscular dudes. I thought to myself, OK, that’s enough guys, so when they came over, I just left. Walked right out. That was it.

  On a scale of one to “getting out of a DUI in Harlem”, this story didn’t even register on my “should I write about this?” scale. Funny to me in the moment, absolutely, but it didn’t even cross my mind that I’d write about it.

  Then, the next day, TMZ emailed me asking for a comment about “getting kicked out of a SXSW party and calling some girl a greasy guido.”

  What? I couldn’t believe it. After all the ridiculous shit I’ve done in my life, THIS is what TMZ wants to do a story on? Come on Harvey Levin, where were you guys when I was doing all that awesome shit?

  I gave them my number and talked to them. The guy writing the story was really cool—the exact opposite of that long-haired surfer douche on the TV show—and much to his credit, basically got all the facts of the story right when it ran:

  TUCKER GETS INTO FIGHT, HILARITY ENSUES

  Occurred, July 2010

  I casually mentioned that I liked to drink a specific type of sweet tea vodka in my last book (Deep Eddy, which is the fucking best). The guy who owned the company, Clayton, found out and invited me to hang out with him on his boat. He told me to bring some girls and we’d spend the day water-skiing, drinking and hanging out on Lake Austin.

  [Here’s the best part: He asked ME to bring the Deep Eddy to HIS boat. I had to BUY Deep Eddy for the dude who OWNS the company. WTF??]

  We ended up having a great time, and when it got dark, we moved the party to Clayton’s lake house, with its sweet two-story dock, beer pong table, stereo, grill, etc.

  The guy who introduced me to Clayton, Taylor, came by. He was on a boat with a bunch of other people I didn’t know—two guys and three girls. One of the girls was with Taylor, and the other two were married to the two guys. The girls were pretty cute, but all three of them were bitchy.

  Normally, bitchy girls don’t fly with me, but I wasn’t fucking any of them, and I had my own girls, so whatever. It was the guys though that really rubbed me the wrong way. Almost immediately, I hated the guys, “Euro-Trash” and “DipShit.” Aside from the fact that they were born on different continents, they were mirror images of each other: spoiled trust fund kids who have been handed everything in life, soft as chewed bubble gum, and filled with the type of arrogance that comes from entitlement rather than hard work. You can’t help it if your parents were rich and ignored you, but you still get to decide how you act in the world, especially as an adult. These two apparently decided they were going to suck in every way possible.

  Just take the boat they were in for example. DipShit owned it. His daddy had bought it for him, and he told everyone it cost $200k (Taylor says it really cost $150k). He bought a nice boat, then put in $25k worth of stereo equipment, a fog machine, lasers, and a champagne bucket and a stripper pole. It was like he opened the douchebag catalog and bought every cliché, and then put them in a boat.

  Normally, I just ride these types of idiots like rented mules until they leave or cry. But this time was different—I wasn’t at a bar, I was at someone’s home. Clayton is about as different from me as one could be: into meditation, Buddhism, pacifism, etc. Super nice guy and fun to hang out with, but not the type of guy who tolerates my special kind of social aggression. And since this was Clayton’s house, and I was his guest and liked him, out of respect, I tried my best to just let everything go.

  It was hard. Aside from all the obvious problems with that type of insecure trust fund brats (the douchey boat, constant name-dropping, always comparing prices, being condescending to people, etc.), these two were also just general fucktards. It started when we were upstairs playing beer pong. DipShit kept spilling his beer all ov
er the floor, basically on purpose. I calmly told him, “Hey man, Clayton is being really nice letting us come here, don’t be a douchebag and disrespect his house like that.” After that, he actually poured more out just to spite me—but in a passive-aggressive way over in the corner, not in my face at all. It took every ounce of self-control not to directly confront him.

  I could have eventually let that pass if there hadn’t been any other provocation. The turning point occurred when the pizza guy came. Clayton’s dock is way, way down the hill from the road, and on the phone Clayton told the pizza guy we’d tip him more if he brought the pizzas all the way down to the dock. So the dude walked like 200+ yards, much of it in the dark on stairs, down to the dock. It was a very cool thing to do, and Clayton went to tip him, but ran out of cash paying for the pizza.

  Well, DipShit had bragged earlier about how awesome and expensive his boat was—you know, the one that his DAD BOUGHT FOR HIM. I’d been the good boy all night long, but I just couldn’t resist this opportunity to call him out in front of everyone:

  Tucker “Hey trust fund, why don’t you help Clayton and give the pizza guy a good tip?”

  DipShit “Fuck that.”

  Tucker “You just got done bragging about all your money, show us how rich you are.”

  DipShit “I have a $200,000 boat, I could tip him anything I want, but fuck that, I’m not tipping shit!”

  Then he dramatically walked out, like this was a movie or something.

  I tipped the pizza guy all the cash I had and apologized to him for that scene. I was flabbergasted. I knew this dude sucked, but I had a hard time believing ANYONE sucked that much in real life. He was like a parody of a trust fund brat.

  The next hour or so was weird. I’d called DipShit out in front of everyone, he’d punked himself, and everyone including his friends knew it. But nothing really happened because he was too much of a coward to say anything else, and I was trying to let it go so I wouldn’t fuck up Clayton’s party. Eventually everything settled into some sort of quasi-normal party pattern, with everyone drinking and playing beer pong. The two trust fund brats pretty quickly retreated to their boat downstairs—but not before they ate a bunch of pizza.

  What I hadn’t realized right away was that I’d unintentionally drawn a clear line in the sand between DipShit and me. It’s comical now to think about the juvenile way the fight started, but this is really what happened:

  Clayton asked me to go downstairs and turn on the stereo inside his boat so we could hear music upstairs while we played beer pong. I did. Then, like two minutes later, the music went off. I went downstairs to check it out, and the A/V cord was unplugged. Weird. I put it back in, the music started, and we were all good. Then two minutes later, it went off again.

  OK, that wasn’t an accident. You see, Clayton’s boat was docked right next to DipShit’s boat, where those two were sitting (along with Taylor, who’d gone down there a few minutes earlier). It was obvious that one of them had unplugged the stereo. Mind you, they didn’t SAY anything to me about the music. And they didn’t SAY anything to me about unplugging it. They just sat there staring at their twats.

  Nothing pisses me off like passive-aggressiveness. If you have something to say, fucking say it, and deal with the consequences. If you won’t say it to a person’s face, then shut the fuck up and move on. Pretty simple.

  I was still hanging onto the last thread of non-confrontation in my body at this point, but I wasn’t not going to say something. So I walked over to their boat. Taylor was looking at me, while the two pussies sitting next to him were looking away. In the heat of the moment, this was the least confrontational thing I could think to say:

  Tucker “Taylor, you’re my friend and you know me. You tell these two fucking pussies not to touch that fucking stereo again, or they’re going to deal with me.”

  DipShit finally decided to pretend he was a man.

  DipShit “What the fuck are you going to do?”

  Tucker “Why don’t you come up here on the dock and I’ll show you what I’m going to do, you fucking BITCH.”

  That’s the best the Tucker Max School of Conflict Resolution has to offer, I guess.

  Well, apparently those two had just enough alcohol in them, and had blown each other up with just enough drunk courage, that they decided to come off the boat onto to the dock at me, and push me. Then—See, this is why I hate writing about fights. There’s almost no way to talk about this incident without sounding lame. I either come off like some wanna-be tough guy, or I go out of my way the other direction, and make it sound like I got my ass kicked, or what happened was an accident. Whatever. Here’s exactly what happened, with as little editorializing as possible:

  EuroTrash pushed me, I pushed him back, and Taylor—trying to be a peacemaker—got in between us. Then DipShit got in my face and put his hands on me, and I pushed him away, and Taylor got between me and him. Then EuroTrash came back at me and pushed me again.

  I took a short step back with my right foot, which helped me load my right arm, and immediately threw a tight right cross. It was a serious angry punch, and I landed it perfectly. In a flash, the space between my first and second knuckle on my hand connected perfectly with the lower left side of his chin. In MMA/boxing, it’s called “the button” because when you hit it clean, the dude goes out—and that is precisely what EuroTrash did. His head whipped around, his body followed him, he stumbled, crashed into a pole, bounced off Clayton’s boat, and crumpled onto a heap onto the dock.

  I hit that motherfucker so hard I changed his DNA. Knocked out.

  Look: I’m not trying to claim I’m some tough guy. I know real tough guys—guys in the military, MMA fighters, guys who work on oil rigs and crab boats—and I’m not one of them. None of this should be taken as me bragging about how I’m some awesome fighter. Please. There are a LOT of guys out there who can kick my ass … but those doughy trust fund cum-sniffers are not among them.

  At that point the girls came downstairs from the upper deck, and all hell broke loose. It was like a baby had stepped on a cat: screaming, hollering, pushing, crying, hair-pulling, more pushing, everything. I don’t really remember the specifics of what was said, because I never listen to what spews from the mouths of histrionic whores, but there is one thing I distinctly remember:

  DipShit comes up behind EuroTrash, takes one look at his buddy crumpled in a heap of failure, gets pissed, and takes a step towards me.

  Bad call. When someone takes a first pitch fastball and deposits it 450 feet away over the centerfield fence, the last thing you should do is throw him that same pitch in his next at-bat. I cocked my right arm again, more than ready for him, and he looked into my eyes.

  I’ve never seen a more raw, honest expression of fear in my life. He wanted no part of me. He took several steps back and let Taylor get in between us, then of course acted tough again. Good choice, DipShit.

  Seeing that my job there was done, I calmly walked back upstairs, leaving the mess for the whores to clean up. As I walked up the stairs, I could hear the girls I had come with arguing with the whores who’d come with DipShit:

  Whore1 “Who does Tucker Max think he is??”

  Whore2 “What’s wrong with him?”

  Girl “What’s wrong with your friend?”

  Whore1 “He thinks just because he wrote some book, he can do anything he wants.”

  Girl “Your friend started this acting like a douchebag.”

  Whore2 “Welcome to Austin, bitch!” [she really said that, and this one makes no sense for them to say—their friend was the one who got KTFO. Again, there is no accounting for what stupid whores say]

  And that’s when it got REALLY spooky. When I got upstairs, there was only one person still up there: EuroTrash’s wife. She was just sitting there, sipping her beer. I stared at her for a second, fully expecting the worst of the whore wrath yet.

  EuroWife “What happened?”

  Tucker “Your husband pushed me, so I hit him
in the fucking mouth, that’s what!”

  EuroWife “Why are you yelling?”

  She was right; I had raised my voice a little. And she had responded in a perfectly calm way—in fact, it was fucking spooky. Complete and utter calm. No expression on her face, no emotion in her voice. Not even disguised anger. It was as if she was asking me where the bathroom was.

  I kinda stopped and stepped back to take stock of the situation. Either this girl is about to stab me and has the greatest poker face since Phil Ivey … or she is feeling absolutely nothing right now.

  Tucker “Uh … sorry … I didn’t mean to raise my voice. But yeah, your husband got his face punched. By me. I think he’s hurt.”

  EuroWife “OK.”

  Even though I’d hit her husband so hard his arms and legs had stopped working and all he saw was an Indian with an extra horse beckoning him into the woods … she had no emotional reaction to it. Nothing.

  Wow. This girl is a psychopath. It was like talking to Dexter. Thank God I fought her pansy ass husband and not her. She’d kill me without even blinking.

  That was pretty much it for the night. After that they got in their boat and took off (and then took EuroTrash to the ER). Clayton was not too happy with me, so my girls and I left. Another night ruined (read: made awesome) by Tucker Max.

  But the story doesn’t end there. A few weeks later, I get this email: