There is a saying I have found to be very true: “Tell beautiful women they are smart, and smart women they are beautiful.” Seems basic and obvious, but the basics are basics for a reason.
Tucker “I don’t know anything about pageants, but I have watched some, and all those girls seem so stupid. You are just as hot as any of them, but unlike them, you’re obviously really smart. If the judges don’t see that, they’re the idiots. Don’t let it get you down.”
She turned to me, put her hand on my arm, tilted her head, and said “Really?” I just looked at her, with a controlled smirk on my face, and didn’t say anything. I’ve had girls melt on me before, but I’d never actually seen it happen as graphically and completely as it did at that moment.
So let’s see … pageant girl, spent her whole life being judged on external things, twice on the biggest pageant stage, twice judged as falling short, nothing left to fall back on so she gets depressed and insecure, needs to find some kind of external validation … meets a guy who is smart, good looking, into her, socially adept … should be obvious where this is going.
After dinner, we went next door to a bar called Gigi’s for some cocktails. On the first drink, she said to me, “I can’t believe I’m doing this. I never drink this much.” This would become the on-going theme in our relationship. Then she got real close to me, moved so I could easily see down her dress, and said:
MissVermont “Tucker … do you find me attractive?”
She was searching for even more validation; I smiled, but didn’t say anything. Once you’ve given some, the best thing you can do is withhold the rest. Like a drug dealer. The first one is free, but the second … you gotta pay for that one.
She literally put her leg over mine and sort of halfway climbed on top of me, pushing her breasts in my face.
MissVermont “Do you think I’m hot?”
Tucker “What do you think?”
MissVermont “I don’t know. That’s why I’m asking.”
Tucker “Maybe. I’m becoming a fan. There’s a lot to like about you. We’ll see though.”
She took the bait so hard that if we were in the ocean, she would have breached like an orca. The next thing I knew, we were out in the middle of Mizner Park (the outdoor piazza where Max’s Grille and Gigi’s are located), making out in the middle of the grassy median. It quickly got out of hand; I was pushing her dress up, she was undoing my belt, and we were moving towards passionate and semi-anonymous humping.
I tell her that we have to relax, that we can’t do this here. Predictably, she thought I was playing hard to get, and this only made her want me more. In response to me backing off, she desperately intensified her attack on my loins, slipping a hand down my pants, and bringing one of my hands up to her now-exposed left breast.
I tried to figure out a way for us to fuck. My apartment was a no-go; I had just moved in to my new place and didn’t have any furniture yet, not even a sofa. She lived with her parents, so that was out. I would have just fucked her right there—it was Tuesday at 12:30, and the park was empty—but I really didn’t want to get caught having sex under a gazebo right in front of the restaurant where I worked.
Remembering that she drove, I asked, “Where did you park?” She pointed right behind us, and sitting there on the curb, not twenty yards away, was the solution:
A white Ford Explorer. Without the third-row seat.
I did my best to make it romantic:
Tucker “Have you ever hooked up in your car?”
Hey—that’s romantic for me, alright?
She smiled, so I grabbed her arm, and we half-sprinted toward the car.
I’ve hooked up with enough girls to make an educated comparison, and let me tell you—I have rarely seen anyone so eager and enthusiastic about sex. Our clothes were off, in the back of an SUV where there is not much room to spare, in less than 30 seconds. About a second after that she mounted me, and we fucked like the plane was going down. When we were finished, she curled up next to me, sweaty and exhausted, and said:
MissVermont “You have a lot of experience, don’t you?”
The next day, around 11am, I got an exasperated and hysterical voicemail from Katy. She was distraught, nearly crying. It was such frantic gibberish that I couldn’t understand anything, so I called her. Apparently, that morning her mother was looking in Katy’s car for something, found my boxer-briefs on the floor, which I had, in my post-coital stupor, unwittingly left there.
Now, as I’m sure you know, girls don’t generally enter pageants at age 5 because they have some overriding desire to dress like a prostitute and parade themselves in front of creepy old men. They do it because they have evil, overbearing mothers who push them into it in order to live vicariously through their daughters. They don’t see their daughters as distinct people they should love and care for; they see them as accessories to their egos, and they measure themselves by what their daughters do. Needless to say, this sort of malignant narcissism is VERY toxic. And though I didn’t know it at the time, Katy’s mom was one of the worst examples of this type of pageant mom.
For example, Katy was talking about her mom at dinner, and said in the most nonchalant voice ever, like it was a totally reasonable thing, “Yeah, I’m a terrible cook. When I moved to law school, my mother was afraid I was going to starve. But then I had a pageant coming up, so she hoped I did starve.” She didn’t understand why I was looking at her in horror after she said that.
So of course, when she found the underwear, Katy’s mom completely flipped out and stormed into Katy’s room, woke her up, called her a whore and a tramp and all sorts of other awful things as she thrust the boxers in her face. To her credit, Katy kept her cool and told her mother that they were her workout underwear, and that she wore them under her shorts to the gym the day before and just forgot to bring them in the house. Her mom bought the story.
In fact, it was only after her mom bought the story that Katy called me in hysterics. I should have known that a hysterical voicemail AFTER the problem had passed was an awful sign, but I was 25 years old and the worst kind of idiot: I knew nothing, but thought I knew everything.
For our second date, I had her over to my place to cook for her. I forget what I made; I think it was miso-glazed Chilean sea bass with Asian baby vegetable stir-fry and polenta croquette. To make this the right way, you have to do it from scratch, which is a lot of work. I grew up in a restaurant family, I can do all that prep work, but fuck that—it’s a serious pain in the ass. Why would I now spend an hour buying the perfect ingredients, two hours prepping them, and then another 30 minutes cooking them just to impress some girl I wasn’t all that into, and that I’d already fucked?
Instead, I took the easy way out: I went to my restaurant, picked up all the ingredients already prepped by a Haitian making $8 an hour (who’s way better at it than me), and had her arrive at my place as I was in the middle of cooking the whole meal—which was actually little more than heating everything up on the stove. I had done this with girls before, and it’s a money move—it spares me from doing any actual work, while the girl sits in the kitchen drinking wine and watching me showcase my cooking talents.
MissVermont was more blown away by me cooking than most girls and—after basically pounding a large glass of wine—came over to me as I was standing at the stove searing the fish, pulled my pants down, and went down on me right there in the kitchen.
The fish burned a little, but whatever. She still ate well.
We saw each other somewhat consistently over the next two weeks. It was a relationship defined very much by sex. She could not get enough of me, especially sexually, and I was a big fan of her always-eager body. According to her, I was introducing her to a whole new world. These are verbatim quotes:
MissVermont “I didn’t know what sex was before you.”
MissVermont “You’re like a disease. A Tucker sex disease.”
MissVermont “You infiltrate me and my body craves you. You’re an addic
tion.”
Look, I’m not that good. She was just inexperienced, and the few guys she’d been with sucked, so she thought I was that good. Like when I play basketball with Asians, I look like Dwayne Wade compared to them.
She claimed she’d only been with two guys before me. I generally abide by the “whatever she admits to, multiply by 3 and add in at least one black guy” rule of counting women’s sex partners, but given the facts I observed over the next few weeks, she might have been telling the truth.
For example, she was very schizophrenic about sex. One day, she’d want to fuck every minute of every hour, not caring if we ate or slept. Two days later, she wouldn’t come home with me after a date. It was like she couldn’t resolve the battle in her consciousness, and vacillated between eager slut and chaste prude.
Most tellingly, she just didn’t have sex like she knew what she was doing. There is a difference between an inexperienced girl reacting to her first real sexual encounters and an experienced woman acting inexperienced to manipulate the guy. I’ve been with both, and she was quite obviously the former. For instance, after a few days of intense sexual activity, Katy was having problems with soreness and was waking up with nausea.
Tucker “Just go to your gynecologist, make sure everything is OK.”
Katy “Oh … OK, I guess I can do that …”
Tucker “What?”
Katy “Well, it’s just that … I don’t have a gynecologist …”
Tucker “You don’t have one? Why not?”
Katy “I’ve never been to one.”
Tucker “WHAT? YOU’RE 23 YEARS OLD!!!”
Katy “I know … it’s just … my mom wouldn’t let me go. She said I don’t need to see one until I lose my virginity.”
Tucker “Oh my lord.”
I emphasized how important it was to have a doctor regularly look inside her ham wallet, and that even if it meant lying to her mom and just paying for it out of her own pocket, she really needed to see a gynecologist. She was hesitant, until I showed her some WebMD articles about STDs and HPV and cervical cancer, and the accompanying pictures. She quickly made an appointment. A few days later she called me and left this voicemail:
MissVermont “Tucker, I just got back from the ob/gyn and we need to talk.”
Now tell me—if a girl you’d been sleeping with, who was complaining of nausea, called and left you that message, what would you have done? I freaked out, found the tallest flight of stairs I could, and was busy orchestrating a complicated plan to “accidentally” throw her down them. I finally got her back on the phone. No, she wasn’t pregnant, but, and again I am quoting:
MissVermont “Oh no, nothing like that, and I don’t have any STDs. My ob/gyn said the soreness is because of you. He said you need to be gentler with my pussy.”
I still laugh every time I think about that phone call.
The next time we had sex I was less selfish and much gentler, and I guess it worked well, because she came so violently she almost passed out.
MissVermont “Jesus Christ, you are amazing. Where did you learn to do that?”
Tucker “Home schooling.”
It was around this time, after about two or three weeks of fucking, that I saw her website. She had told me earlier what she was doing now that her pageant career was over—going to law school, pageant consultant work, running her charity organizations, and trying to start her career as a cartoonist—but I hadn’t really paid much attention. I just assumed she was lip servicing that shit, and would eventually go into real estate or PR, like all washed up beauty queens.
She wasn’t bullshitting. She emailed me about something else, and included a link to something she was proud of: her newest cartoon. I clicked on the link … and spent the next three hours utterly and completely absorbed in the rabbit hole I’d fallen down. Her actual site has been down for years, but the lawsuit briefs have screen shots of some parts of her site that were up at the time. Here are a few of them:
[If you’re having trouble reading some of them, you can also see the full size versions at www.tuckermax.com/missvermont]
This is supposed to be advice to young pageant girls, and apparently she thinks they need to be TOLD that they can’t steal expensive designer clothes. Is petty theft this much of a problem in the junior pageant circuit? And look at Katy’s reaction in the last panel—she’s got her arms crossed and she’s smiling, like she’s happy her friend got arrested. What a fucking cunt.
Aren’t those girls supposed to be her friends? Why are they talking shit about her? Probably because she was such a cunt when their friend got arrested. She needs to feel better, so she goes to the only thing on earth she knows she smarter than, better looking than, and thinner than—a fucking cow. Why a cow? Seriously, why not friends or parents or even a dog?? You know Katy, maybe the reason you don’t get along with other girls is because your best friend is a goddamn farm animal.
This one is disturbing on many levels. Notice how the characters have flat affects—no expression, just caricatures of emotions. This is what sociopaths are like. More importantly, look at what this cartoon is saying, that the struggle here isn’t accepting oneself, it’s about destroying the chance to do it. She can’t actually use restraint and not spend, she has to remove the opportunity to even use a charge card. It’s like saying it’s hard to not speed when you have a fast car, so the answer is to drive it into a pole. You can’t speed if your car is broken. That’s the type of logic you see on Lockup: Raw. I mean, you don’t try to help someone stop killing themselves, you just take away their shoelaces. She’s admitting she is incapable of taking care of herself, and is nothing more than a ward of whoever pays her bills.
WHY DOES HER EXPRESSION NEVER CHANGE!!!! And honey, purses are just signaling devices to other women about status. They have nothing to do with personality.
What is her talent? Superhuman handjobs? And if this is a talent show, why is the ribbon already on her guitar? She gave such a good handjob the judges just ran up there and stuck it on there. You have to go to great lengths to improve—apparently this means posing with a guitar in your bedroom, on a beach, and in a pasture. Don’t even get me started on the word play.
I guess the point she’s making is that a tattoo’s not like an unwanted pregnancy—you can’t stab it to death to make it go away. I like how the guy apparently has a tattoo of a peace dove—this is a mark of cain to her? And the guy doesn’t say anything? He just sits there are she shits all over him? WTF? He looks suspiciously like a Jew. Like a young Jeff Goldblum. And like he’s getting this tattoo against his will in that second frame. What is this, Dachau?
Seriously—who rides a bike to or from a porn store?
Who are these dudes that only have one leg and ride up his ass on the bike? Where are their bikes?
And I mean, if I saw some random guy riding his bike down the street, smiling and waving porn in the air—you wouldn’t go party with that dude?
And in case you aren’t sure what Hike means, she has conveniently put a hiking trail behind him. A hiking trail that goes ten yards, before it dead ends in a church.
I’m no Freud, but do you think it really coincidence that the colors on the smut are the same are the colors of her shirt and hair? A good artist does that on purpose. She is not a good artist, she’s just an idiot.
You don’t drink? Only in a cartoon, Katy.
I like how as she says she doesn’t drink, she’s chillin on his futon with her legs in the air. Yeah, you NEVER do this.
What is the end game here? So some creepy albino with a mullet and red eyes invites you back to his place, and you think this is a good idea. So you decide to sprawl out in your tube top and lecture him about drinking?
Why does she think being Christian means she shouldn’t drink wine? DIDN’T JESUS DRINK WINE??? Didn’t he say drink wine, because it is my blood??? But apparently in Katy’s world, God won’t bless wine drinkers. And sorry Katy, humans can’t be divine, only Jesus can be.
> That’s the best part of this cartoon—that the dude is the most pious person. He’s the one drinking wine like Jesus says to do, he even says a prayer over it and asks God for his blessing. She refuses to drink the blood of Christ (wine), and then gets her theology completely wrong (humans can’t be divine).
She doesn’t play with her reputation, even though her dress is cut basically at her pelvic bone? I guess reality doesn’t matter, just what people think about her. That’s her reality, whatever her reputation is. But according to the cartoon, she still wants to grind her crotch against a dudes genitals, she just doesn’t want to be judged about it.
This makes no sense to me. Is she saying that if you like flirtatious guys, then for some reason, cookies are great. Unless he’s fucking a ton of other girls, the well, cookies aren’t worth a shit. I could’ve told you that. Cookies aren’t as good as sex. And in no case do cookies make a guy like you over girls who put out. Is it me, or did Katy draw the girls he’s with to look like black coke whores?