A look of honest confusion filled Patrick’s face.
Tucker “You know, like, can the deck and wiring handle a speaker upgrade, or am I going to have to rip it out and put all new shit in? Because that sort of work gets expensive.”
Patrick “Why would you want to change the stereo? The factory system on this is the upgraded Harmon Kardon stereo system. It’s amazing, it comes with …”
Tucker “No no no. I’m not listening to the Beatles, man. I’m talking about putting four 12-inch subwoofers and two 1000-watt amps in the trunk. Banging. Bumping. You ever heard a car driving by, and the bass is so loud, you can feel it? Like that.”
Patrick “I … uh … I don’t really know … I’ve worked here for almost a decade, and no one has ever asked that question before.”
Tucker “Really?”
Patrick “Tucker … this is a Range Rover dealership.”
Tucker “You’ve never had a drug dealer or something come in here to buy a car?”
I was being serious, but he had no idea how to take me. I had my assistant figure it out, and he was pretty sure that the factory wiring on Range Rovers not only could easily accommodate the system I wanted, but it was made so well and with such tight tolerances, it was actually one of the best vehicles to put that type of system in, because you didn’t have to hunt down all the rattling that comes when you bang in a cheap car. [You know what I’m talking about: you pull up next to some dinged-up piece of shit Mercury Cougar and all you hear is big bass beats being swallowed up by what sounds like a bunch of people playing Yahtzee with soup cans full of pennies. None of that shit with a Range Rover.]
I went in the next day, cut a check, drove it off the lot, and took it right to the stereo store.
Tucker “I want the best system I can get, without having to add another battery to the car.”
I picked this store because it was in the poor area of town, so I assumed he would get it. Nope. I don’t know what it is about the automobile and auto-accessories industries, but these motherfuckers will talk all day about all the stupid shit I didn’t care about. Hertz, watts, treble, splitters—DO I LOOK LIKE A FUCKING AUDIO NERD TO YOU?!?!? I JUST WANNA BANG!!
Tucker “Look man—I don’t care about this shit. I just want so much bass, I get hearing loss. I want to have to put a defibrillator in my car, because the bass interrupts my normal heart rhythms. I don’t want to turn heads—I want to bring the walls down.”
Salesman “I think we can do that.”
Tucker “Let me be clearer: If I DON’T get a noise pollution ticket in the first three months, I’m coming back here to get my money back.”
He thought I was kidding. Without screaming curses into his face, I emphasized that I absolutely was not. Then he looked at me like I was fucking crazy. It was the same look Patrick gave me at the Range Rover dealership. What is it with these people?
He finally quoted me a price on a system. I gave it to my assistant, and he found all the component parts on the internet for about 70% less (I may be rich, but I’m not stupid), so I ordered them and then took them in for the stereo people to install.
It was the longest three hours of my fucking life. I felt like I was waiting for a kid to be born, only better since I actually wanted this thing and I already knew I’d like it before I even played with it.
When they finally called and said it was done, my dog and I basically ran there to pick up the car. The installation guy was trying to explain some bullshit to me, but I ignored him, hopped right into the car, plugged my iPhone in, put on “Break ‘em Off” by Paul Wall, and cranked that motherfucker. There’s a short intro without bass, then it hits …
“Imma break ’em off real bad, Imma show ’em pourin’ up deuce ridin’ slab …”
BOOOOMMMM
That shit hit so fucking hard, my dog Murph yelped from shock. I high-fived the installation guy, and tore out of the parking lot:
It was time to find a cop.
Ain’t it the fucking truth: When you’re doing something wrong and don’t want the police, they’re like roaches. But when you’re looking for one because you want to bump him off the block, they’re nowhere to be found.
I drove around for three fucking hours looking for a cop. Well, it might have only been 30 minutes, but it felt like three hours. [Actually, I did see a bike cop, but fuck that. I have self-respect.]
Finally I found a cop car sitting at red light, all alone. I pulled right up to him, put all four windows down, turned my stereo up to only about 25% max volume, and stared at him (I can’t remember the exact song I had on, I think it was “Knockin’ Doorz Down” by Pimp C).
He immediately heard it, looked around, and saw I was the only car at the light. It had to be me who was playing music that loud.
We made eye contact.
His eyes said, “What??”
My eyes said, “WHAT!!”
He cocked his head like a dog when it hears a new noise. Here this cop is, going about his day, when some 34-year-old white guy in a Range Rover with a goofy mutt hanging her head out the back, cranks his music so loud it rattles his handcuffs. He throws his hands up in a sort of “What are you doing?” gesture. I don’t move a muscle. I just kept staring through him. Yeah motherfucker, I DO have an eye problem.
Still confused, he rolled his window down, said something I couldn’t hear, and turned one hand in a circle, clearly motioning me to reduce the volume. Not taking my eyes off of him, I violently crank my stereo knob so fucking hard I almost take it off. The volume went from “you can hear it a block away” to “registering on the Richter scale.” The bass hit my chest so hard I had trouble breathing. And just to rub it in that much more, I start bobbing my head with the music.
He hit the roof. I mean this both figuratively and literally. He got so fucking mad he jumped up in his seat, and I think his head may have hit the roof of his squad car. He immediately hit the lights and siren, so I calmly pulled through the intersection (the light had turned green at some point), and pulled over.
I was giddy! Going over this situation in my mind as I was making the “Noise Pollution” playlist the night before, I’d decided that I wouldn’t even turn the music down when the cop came to the window. I pictured this bumpkiny Roscoe P. Coltrane waddling up to my window, watching him try to yell over my music, and then I’d say something smart-ass like, “I’m sorry, can you speak up? Mike Jones is being a little loud.”
Yeah, well, my imagination had not accounted for a thick-necked trooper white-knuckling his blackjack and storming at my car with veins bulging from his forehead. Confronted with how muscular and pissed off the real life cop actually was, my excitement ebbed and I turned the stereo all the way down and abandoned all smart-ass remarks. I’m pretty sure if I’d said any of that shit I’d planned on, this story would be about my struggles learning how to eat solid food and walk again.
Cop “WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU FUCKING DOING!?!”
I can’t transcribe the cop’s entire lecture. There is only so much room in a book. The cop screamed at me for at least ten minutes. It was like Bobby Knight coaching a team on the And One street ball tour.
Cop “Well? What do you have to say for yourself?”
It was too late to back down. There’s no such thing as a lukewarm hell. As calmly and respectfully as I could, I said:
Tucker “Officer, are you going to give me a noise pollution ticket or not?”
You ever dumped someone who didn’t see it coming at all? You know the look on their face? That look of complete disbelief mixed with repressed rage, the look that tells you if you don’t get the fuck out of there, something is gonna get broken? He got that look.
His face twitched, but he didn’t say anything. Then he spun on his heels, abruptly turned, and walked back to his car. For a second, I was legitimately scared. I may have pushed this dude too far. This is a cop, and he has rules he has to obey, and I knew I hadn’t done anything that bad—but this is still TEXAS. People have been g
iven the death penalty for less.
He’d been back there for about five minutes when two other cop cars pulled up. Fuck. They talked for a while. One of the new cops came and got my license, registration, insurance, all that stuff. They checked EVERYTHING. He even checked my VIN number to make sure it matched the registration AND insurance. I’ve been pulled over at least 25 times in my life for various things, and I’ve NEVER seen that. Judging by how long the one cop was in his car on his computer, my guess is that he ran my name through not just the standard law enforcement databases, but every fucking database on earth—VICAP, INTERPOL, FreeCredit-Report.com, everything. They asked for permission to search my car, and of course I gave it to them—this was a brand new car; there was nothing in it. Still, they went over it with everything but a fucking drug-sniffing dog. After they finished, there was another twenty minutes of sitting in my car waiting for them to decide what they could do to me and get away with. Finally, the original cop came up to my window with his violations pad.
Cop “Sign here.”
I didn’t say shit, I just signed it and handed it back. He ripped it off his pad so hard it tore in half. I think that actually means he’s supposed to write up a new one, but he didn’t, he just tore the stub off and gave it to me and stormed back to his car. I’m pretty sure protocol says the cop is supposed to explain the various ways to pay the ticket or whatever, but I wasn’t about to press my luck. And besides, I had what I wanted.
THE (ALMOST BANNED, NOW COMPLETE) MISS VERMONT STORY
PART 1: INTRODUCTION
There are certain people whose influences define and shape your life: your parents, your friends, your teachers, the people you fall in love with. I have the same basic list of people as you probably do … but since I’m Tucker Max, there’s someone else on my list:
The first person who ever sued me because of my stories.
If you’ve been a fan for a long time, you may have read the old Miss Vermont Story on my website. You may have even been a fan long enough to remember when she sued me in 2003. That means you know the basic facts of what happened … but you don’t know the whole story.
In 2003, I gave my first rough draft of “The Miss Vermont Story” to PWJ to read. He’d met and hung out with MissVermont, so I wanted his feedback on how I portrayed her and the events. Instead of emailing me his notes, he called me. The seriousness in his voice shocked me:
PWJ “Dude, you have to cut a BUNCH of stuff out of here.”
Tucker “Why? What did I get wrong?”
PWJ “No no—it’s not what you’re getting wrong. It looks right to me. But if you print this story as you have it now, she’s going to sue you. I met her; I guarantee this will emotionally break her. You make her look like a fucking moron, and you make her mom look psycho.”
Tucker “I don’t MAKE them look like anything. You met her, you know that’s the way she is.”
PWJ “Oh dude, I know.”
Tucker “I don’t understand—truth is an absolute defense to libel. It’s all true. End of story.”
PWJ “No, that’s wrong. Dude, you really should have gone to class more in law school.”
PWJ went on to explain that it was much more complicated than that and elaborated on a bunch of shit that I would have learned had I gone to class instead of doing things like fucking excessive numbers of UNC sorority girls and spending entire months in Cancun.
Because this story was going to be the first time I would use the real name of the person I was writing about—without her permission—I had to have all my shit straight. I’ll spare you the tedious and boring legal explanation, but it boils down to this:
If I was going to use her real name, then everything I wrote not only had to be true—which it was—but it had to be PROVABLE in a court of law. In order to insulate myself from liability for any portions of the story that were potentially defamatory—which is like 650% of the story—there had to be witnesses or some other factual record of the event. Even if something was completely true, if I couldn’t prove it in a court of law, then she could not only sue me, she might be able to win. Because most of the events took place in public places and were easily provable, I could still write the story, but if I wanted to stop her from suing me, I was forced to leave out a lot of cool details. This frustrated the shit out of me—if it’s the truth, why can’t I say it?? But ultimately, I recognized that PWJ’s abundance of caution was the right move, and I restrained myself.
Well, in the seven years since I wrote and published that story, two things happened:
Despite my precautions, Katy Johnson and her mother sued me anyway.
I beat those bitches like rented mules (in technical legal terms: I won the case).
Because of that, I can now do what I couldn’t do before: tell the WHOLE story of my relationship with MissVermont, plus, I can update the story with everything that happened after she sued me, which has never been told … until now.
PART 2: THE (NOW COMPLETE) MISS VERMONT STORY
Occurred, June 2001
It all started the summer after I graduated from law school. I moved to Boca Raton, Florida and took a job managing my father’s restaurants. Considering that the general intellectual level of South Florida is somewhere just above “functionally retarded,” I wasn’t really expecting to meet a girl I would like as a person. And boy, was I right. The first few months were nothing more than emotionally uninvolved sex with morally suspect girls.
One day I was at my gym, The Athletic Club of Boca Raton. It is a massive airplane hangar of a building: a gym, health club, spa, lounge, and restaurant rolled into one. For several years it had been the “in” place to work out in Boca, one of the prime meat markets in a town full of butcher shops. It was the type of place where guttural grunts, flexing in tight shiny shirts, and spending hours talking to people on elliptical machines passes for foreplay. Welcome to South Florida.
I usually tried to avoid peak hours and the throngs of scantily clad gold-digging whores positioning themselves for third husbands. Don’t mistake me—staring at immense fake breasts spilling out of sports bras is fun for a while, but it gets old quick, especially when those breasts are attached to women whose over-enhanced faces tell a story their vacant personalities do not. They’ve circled the drain more than a few times, and no manner of plastic surgery or trips to the spa can hide the despair in the eyes left by years of whorish behavior and emotional prostitution.
I was in the free weight section of the gym, and one girl kept catching my eye, more for what she wasn’t showing than what she was. She had on a navy blue hat pulled tight over her face, a loose fitting white cotton T-shirt, and green basketball shorts. Not the standard Boca female gym outfit. Staring at her between sets, I realized that she was attractive. And by trying to hide that attractiveness, she became even better-looking. The logo on her shorts said, “Vermont Law,” which gave me the perfect in. My law degree would finally show a return.
I approached and asked if she’d attended law school at Vermont. She told me she hadn’t, that she went to undergrad there, but that she was attending Stetson for law school. I told her I just graduated from law school at Duke, and the look on her face told me all I needed to know. A few more minutes of playful banter and it would be time to close the deal.
It was about 7:30, and I had nothing to do the rest of the night, so I decided to speed the process up:
Tucker “So, what are you doing tonight?”
MissVermont [She lowered her head slightly and brushed her hair behind her ear, sure signs of attraction] “Nothing.”
Tucker “You hungry? Want to get something to eat?”
MissVermont [She looked up at me, her eyes bright, and said in an earnest, non-seductive way] “I’m always hungry.”
I swear to God those exact words came out of her mouth. I was so shocked because that is pretty much the last thing you’d ever expect any girl in South Florida to say, right after “I don’t mind that you drive a Toyota.”
She agreed to meet me at Max’s Grille at around 8:30. By the time I got to the restaurant, I had forgotten her name. Great. I got one of the managers to stand by the door with me until she came in. He introduced himself to her, she gave him her name right back, “Hi, I’m Katy Johnson.” I’m sneaky.
I’ll be honest: She looked amazing. There are pics of her in the book, but they don’t do her justice; she really is better looking in person, that night especially. She wore a peach colored dress that might as well have been painted on her nicely shaped body, full breasts taut against the upper lip of the fabric, cleavage everywhere … I was excited.
I have charmed my share of women, but I wish I’d recorded what I said that night. The conversation was great; I was hitting all her buttons in exactly the right way. Anyone who has ever played sports knows the feeling of “being in the zone.” It’s when you have one of those transcendental games, where everything works, when you see the entire court, the game slows down while you keep going at full speed, you’re three steps ahead of everyone else, everything you throw up goes in, and when you miss, the rebound comes right back at you. I was having one of those nights.
One of the specific things I remember us talking about was that she was Miss Vermont, twice, and that she hadn’t finished in the top ten in either the Miss America or the Miss USA pageant. She had all sorts of endorsement and movie deals set up if she had only finished in the top ten in either, and she was so upset by this failure that now she didn’t know what she was going to do with her life. Her life had been so thoroughly dominated by pageants that she had even moved to Vermont and transferred to the University of Vermont during undergrad in order to establish residency there (she wasn’t 100% positive that she could win either of the Miss Florida titles). It was painfully clear that Katy was the epitome of a pageant girl. She had defined her life to this point by being judged in that way, and now that it was all over, she was adrift.