But then I got drunk again and moved on.
THE EX-GIRLFRIEND THREESOME FALLOUT
Occurred, Summer 2009
The last story in Assholes Finish First is called “Good Game, Great Game, and No Game,” and was about one of the most unusual, ridiculous nights of my life. To get the full effect, you kinda have to read the story, but basically the only two ex-girlfriends from the last five years of my life (Alexa and HotNurse) randomly met each other at a party, became fast friends, and decided—with neither input nor permission from me—that we were all going to have a threesome.
And we did. And it was really fucking awesome. And they left the next morning without any drama, any bullshit, nothing. It was one of those rare moments in life where everything worked out and something amazing happened.
That night and that threesome were perfect. When you reach that kind of perfection, you can’t try to hold on to it. Any sort of perfection is fleeting, and if you try to hold on to it, if you try to control the uncontrollable, you destroy it. Better to relish the moment, then let go of it and move on. I basked in the glow of my awesomeness for a day or two, bragged to my buddies, took down all the notes so I could write a little story about it, and that was it.
Two days later, I got a text from HotNurse.
HotNurse “Alexa and I are at a club. It kinda sucks. See you after?”
Tucker “Just you, sure.”
HotNurse “Can both of us come?”
I thought temptation might come. I was prepared. Be strong. Don’t be an idiot:
Tucker “I can’t stand her.”
HotNurse “I know. But she’s fun. And it’ll be even better than last time :)”
FUCK. Intellectually, I know that there is really only one way for this to end: disaster. I should say no. The smart move is to say no. I want to say no.
But HOW do I do that? In the moment, how do I say no to two really hot girls asking to come over and have a threesome with you? I even tried to say no a few times, but it was a pitiful effort and HotNurse plowed right through it. She knew, and I knew—I couldn’t say no.
They came back over, we fucked all night again, and it was almost as awesome the second time. But the next morning, I started to see the cracks in the dam:
Alexa “Come on, take us to breakfast! I want pancakes!!”
Tucker “Shut the fuck up. This was a perfect night. If we don’t end it now, it’ll turn into a shit storm. Go home, both of you.”
That was a Friday night. On Saturday night, I already had plans with a different girl, so when HotNurse started texting me about her and Alexa coming back over, I basically just put her off by telling her I was at a business dinner and couldn’t deal with it. That didn’t work, so I silenced my phone and ignored her texts.
The other girl and I ended up back at my place. Then, about 2:30am, I hear this ridiculously loud, obnoxious banging on my door.
Girl “What is that?”
Tucker “Oh God … I hope it’s the cops.”
Girl “You hope it’s the cops?? Why?”
Tucker “Because there’s only one other option, and it’s way worse.”
Then, almost as if they heard me, I hear a severely drunken Alexa and HotNurse start yelling.
“TUUUUUUUUUUUCCCCCCCCCCCCKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKEEEEERRRRRRRR!!!”
Fuck. I picked up my phone and looked at it for the first time in three hours. There were probably 30 texts and 10 missed calls. All from HotNurse. All the while, there is constant banging and kicking of my door, and drunken whore screaming.
Girl “Who is that? Are you going to answer it?”
Tucker “I don’t even know how to explain this. Just ignore them and they’ll get tired and go away.”
Girl “Ignore them? They’re going to kick the door down!”
Tucker “Let’s hope not.”
As I lay in bed with this random girl, I tried to pretend like it was no big deal. Watching my phone light up with calls and texts, listening to two drunken girls try to kick in my door so they could have another threesome with me—one I’d already turned down—I paused and thought about the decisions I’d made in my life that led me to this moment. I couldn’t help but think about the famous exchange in No Country For Old Men:
Anton Chigurh “If the rule you followed led you to this, of what use was the rule?”
Carson Wells “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Anton Chigurh “I’m talking about your life. In which now everything can be seen at once.”
Between the shouting and the pounding and the kicking, I chuckled to myself, thinking about the philosophical implications of it all. After a minute, the girl interrupted my train of thought:
Girl “They sound crazy! What should we do?”
Tucker “Be very quiet, so they don’t know I’m in here.”
Girl “Should I worry?”
Tucker “Just for my soul.”
I felt like Anne Frank hiding from the Nazis. I am not joking or exaggerating when I say they pounded on my door and yelled at the top of their lungs for at least 30 minutes. It got so bad, not one, but TWO of my neighbors came out in the hallway and screamed at them to shut the fuck up. The second one had to threaten to call the cops before they left.
Here’s the thing: My apartment building in LA is not an open one; you have to have a key to even get in the building. They not only came over to my place after I told them I wasn’t home and then stopped responding to their texts, but they then BROKE INTO my building to get to my apartment door. And then, made so much noise, for such a long time, that TWO DIFFERENT neighbors had to threaten them to get them to leave.
HotNurse had to come over Monday, and I asked her about what happened, and why my neighbors complained to me (I knew the answer, but as far as she knew at the time, I wasn’t in my apartment that night). She was clearly embarrassed and didn’t really have a response other than “I was drunk.”
So, that should have been the end of it, right? I mean, after that ridiculous debacle, with every last shred of the facade of sanity fully stripped away, no one in their right mind would submit themselves to any threesome that was so clearly and preposterous dysfunctional, right?
It’s like you don’t know me at all!
You ever been in Vegas with a gambler who’s on an incredible run and up a huge amount, then takes a bad beat and loses half of his run on one hand? EVERYONE knows what’s going to happen next, it’s as reliable as the Law of Thermodynamics: He’s gonna start chasing his losses trying to get it back, refusing or unable to walk away from the table, until the whole thing blows up in his face. If he walks away from the table, he’s still up huge. But he can’t. He’s a gambler.
Four days later, just like that degenerate gambler who needs to walk away from the table but can’t, I went double or nothing. Alexa and HotNurse came over again, and we had another threesome. And the inevitable happened.
It’s funny when you see an ex again after you haven’t seen her for a long time. You’re so far removed time-wise from the trauma of the break-up that you kinda look at her with a clean slate. At first you see all the obvious positive qualities and remember why you liked her so much and, for a second, you almost wonder why you broke up. Then the rest of her comes out, and you remember why you broke up: “Oh yeah, she’s a crazy fucking bitch.”
I don’t remember the exact sequence of events or the igniting incident, but I do remember the next morning that Alexa did something that reminded me of exactly who she was, and why I’d cut her out of my life, and it triggered me. I flipped shit on her. Went ballistic. Yelling, screaming, cursing, and breaking shit that ended with me throwing her out of my apartment.
HotNurse “I’ve never seen you that angry. What happened?”
Tucker “I had a flashback to dating her.”
A good thing gone too far becomes bad, and going back to the well one more time with the three of us took something wonderful, and ruined it. I knew it would happen, it was inevitable, but
I couldn’t help it: I’m a slave to my dick.
After that, I chided myself for letting Alexa find ANOTHER way back into my life, and I made it real clear to HotNurse that not only would be no more threesomes, I didn’t want to physically see Alexa in my presence again. Ever.
When these threesomes went down, HotNurse and I were in the “broken up, but not really, and maybe getting back together” stage of our relationship. There was a time when I thought we might get back together, but not after this whole debacle. Had it been any other woman than Alexa involved, we might have weathered it and, who knows, even built off it.
Probably not though. I think this set of events was almost certainly a symptom of larger problems, and not the cause of them. People will ignore a lot of reality in order to maintain their fantasies. Shit, I could ignore a marching band going through my living room if I was fucking one girl while another ate my ass out. HotNurse and I eventually broke up, and went our separate ways.
Epilogue
This all concluded in July 2009. I immediately started intense promotion for the IHTSBIH movie and was really busy. HotNurse kept hanging out with Alexa, our lives went in different directions, and we didn’t talk for a while.
In September 2009, HotNurse met a guy—also famous—and started dating him soon after that. As I write this, HotNurse is married to that guy (I’ve never met him, but we have friends in common who all speak very highly of him), she has a beautiful child with him, and she seems legitimately happy.
She is still friends with Alexa, who knows a good thing when she sees it. In fact Alexa not only went to their wedding, SHE WAS IN IT.
You read that right. Alexa was one of HotNurse’s bridesmaids.
Less than a year after they were eating each other out as I alternately fucked them, Alexa stood behind HotNurse as she got married. To a different guy.
I have no idea if he knows. Maybe he had a threesome with them too. I don’t know, I don’t care, I didn’t ask, and it’s not really my business. But still—how fucking weird is that? I am kinda blown away by it. Not in a bad way—I’m not mad or upset by it. I’m not sure there’s a word for the feelings I had upon learning this. Something between confusion and shock, I guess. With a big dollop of relief plopped on top.
I imagine this is what Seth Macfarlane felt like after he woke up late the morning of 9/11 and missed his American Airlines flight from Boston to LA—huge relief that he wasn’t on that flight, but also guilt, because all those other people were.
I don’t know. All I’m really sure of is that if I were marrying a girl, and she and her bridesmaid had had a threesome with her very last ex less than a year before … I think I would have an issue with that bridesmaid being IN the wedding, along with a few questions about my soon-to-be-wife. But as we all know, I’m not normal in a lot of ways.
I’m gonna end this here because, quite frankly, the next logical step in this story is a whole bunch of self-reflection and soul-searching, and that would ruin the funny parts. HotNurse is happy with her husband; I’m happy; Alexa is still a sociopathic whore—let’s quit while we’re all ahead.
Stuff like this is the reason people say fact is stranger than fiction. Fiction has to make sense. Reality doesn’t have to do shit.
IN THE TRUNK
Occurred, November 2009
Remember all the stupid shit you lusted for as a kid? New Air Jordans, some whore trinket, that new CD—that shit dominated your desires. The whole world would end if you didn’t get it. I can remember an entire year of my life where all I wanted on earth was a black Raiders hat (I was an N.W.A. fan, not some wanna-be Raiders fan living in Kentucky, so fuck off).
Then, like every other male, I discovered the ultimate toy to lust after—pussy—and that was pretty much that. I’ve basically forgotten or stopped caring about all the stuff I used to care about when I was little. Except my desire for one specific thing that not even pussy could drive off:
A loud, obnoxious, bass-heavy stereo system for my car.
Since as long as I can remember, I’ve wanted four 12’s slammin’ hard in my trunk. I’ve wanted to come down the street and bump every motherfucker off the block. I wanted the hoppers and hood rats running for cover, scared of my system because it bangs so hard it might explode their chest. I never cared about my slab drippin’ in candy paint, or rolling on 24’s, or poppin’ trunks, or hittin’ switches. That flexin’ bullshit is about impressing other people—I don’t give a fuck about them. I care about the bass in my trunk banging so hard, it feels like an earthquake.
Yes, I am white. No, I don’t go to Tyler Perry movies or listen to Steve Harvey’s radio show. No, I’ve never been a wigger or tried to appropriate urban culture or adopt an identity that wasn’t authentic to me. It’s not about that. For me, having a system that rattles you to the soul is about the music.
See, I love Southern rap. I grew up on it. I could talk for hours about why rap is America’s second great original art form (after jazz). I could write 10,000 words about the crucial artistic and emotional influence The Geto Boys have had on me, and the influence Rap-A-Lot has had on my business career. I can’t even name one member of Linkin Park and I doubt I could pick Dave Matthews out of a crowd, but I could make a convincing case that Scarface is not just the most important rapper, but one of the most important American musicians. Ever.
Most people don’t get Southern rap, even some rap fans. They think it’s too slow, or it’s too angry, or they criticize the content of the lyrics. Of course, they listen to it on the earbuds that come with their iPods or on the factory system in their Honda Accord … please. Southern rap can’t just be heard, it has to be felt. You gotta go where it’s a sticky 95 degrees in the shade, and listen to “Choppin Blades” in a car with all the windows down and the bass hittin’ so hard it rattles your brain stem … and it all makes sense.
But even though I’ve owned plenty of cars, and I’ve had enough money to get a pretty good stereo system for a while, I’ve held off. Not because I had outgrown it—fuck that. I refused to half-ass my shit. I may have grown up on Southern rap, but liking an art form and internalizing the value system of that art form are two very different things. Growing up I used to watch all these motherfuckers who were the definition of hood rich come to the basketball courts, and it never made sense to me.
I remember one specific dude who was like five years older than me, who always used to ball at the same public courts as me. He was out of school and worked some bullshit dead end job, and the only two things that mattered to him were pick-up ball and his car. It was a 1983 Chevy Monte Carlo (he kept it clean though), and damn, his shit BUMPED. He had a legendary stereo in Lexington; you could hear him five minutes before you saw him.
One day, he showed up to the courts with a “For Sale” sign in the window of his car. Some of the older guys asked him what he wanted for it.
Guy “I’m thanking … if’cha wanit wit’da stereo, it be like, bout 8 thou. Wifout da stereo, I take tree thousand, prolly.”
He was totally sincere, and the guys nodded in assent at this pricing, which they seemed to find very reasonable.
I was fucking shocked. I was only like 14 or 15 at the time—and don’t get me wrong, I lusted after his stereo system—but even to me, this was the height of idiocy. His stereo was worth more than his car? By almost TWO TIMES? And not only that, but I was pretty sure this dude still lived at home with his parents. This was the early 90’s in Kentucky, so most of my friends and I lived in houses that cost about $60,000. For the price of JUST his car stereo, he could’ve had a down payment on a fucking HOUSE. A place to LIVE. Instead, he bought a CAR STEREO?? How fucking stupid is that?
That’s why all those people I grew up with are still poor and stuck in Kentucky—it’s not ultimately about opportunity or education or anything like that. Yeah, that shit helps, but it’s more about the values you have, and how those values guide the choices you make. I swore to myself that I would never be that guy. Hood rich is f
or people who find out they’re gonna be a dad on the set of Maury Povich. That’s not who I wanted to be. That day, I made three promises to myself:
I was going to have a system at least that good, if not better.
I would only put that system in a serious luxury car, something so expensive the stereo cost less than 10% of the cost of the car, and most importantly,
I had to be rich enough to pay cash for the car. No loans, no financing, no debt. If I can’t cut a check and drive it off the lot, I can’t afford to put a system in it.
That day came in the fall of 2009, shortly after I moved to Austin. I did my research, and decided to get a Range Rover. Shopping for a car that costs more than the average annual salary of 90% of the people in this country is a different experience. You aren’t treated like a customer, more like a client. There’s no hustle, no hard sell, there’s not even a discussion of price at all, since their prices are fixed. You can either pay or you can’t. The salesman, Patrick, gave my dog some treats and got me a cappuccino as he explained all the dials and gadgets and horsepower and all the other stuff I didn’t give a fuck about. It was time to lay my full hand on the table:
Tucker “Look, you don’t need to do all this. I don’t care about any of that. I barely understand how an internal combustion engine works. All my friends who know shit about cars say Range Rovers are awesome. I’m sold. There is only one thing I care about: Can I put a bumpin’ system in here?”