Assholes Finish First (8 page)

2:20: I look around. There are many drunk Mexicans sitting around me. They do not look happy. This might be a bad sign.

2:22: I hear someone say, “Well look, Tucker’s awake.” It’s a cop. When you wake up in a police station, surrounded by drunk Mexicans, and a cop you’ve never seen before knows you by name, it is VERY bad.

2:24: He tells me to clean up my vomit. I don’t see any vomit. I see only hundreds of paper towels on the floor, in a circle around me. The circle is at least twelve feet across.

2:25: I pick one of them up. It is soaking wet. My vomit is underneath the paper towels. ALL the paper towels have vomit under them. I must
have done this. My emotions conflict: I am simultaneously impressed and mortified.

2:30: After five minutes of putting paper towels into the trash can, I am no longer impressed or mortified. I am pissed off and disgusted. I consider paying one of the Mexicans to do this for me. This plan is thwarted when I can’t find my wallet.

2:33: The cops make clown puns as I clean. “So, these two cannibals are eating a clown, and one says to the other, ‘Does this taste funny to you?’ ” and “Hey man, stop clowning around so much.” They think this is the most hilarious thing they’ve ever heard. I want to punch them in the face.

2:35: I have to use another entire roll of towels to wipe up all the vomit. I consider that I may be personally responsible for massive deforestation. I don’t care anymore. Fuck trees.

2:40: I have to piss. I look at myself in the bathroom mirror. There is no clown makeup on my face. Not one single speck. This confuses me greatly. I seem to remember putting clown makeup on earlier that day. Where is it?

2:45: I still have no idea why I am in jail. I ask the desk cop:

Cop “Let me check… says the charge is Pedestrian in Roadway.”

Tucker “Pedestrian in Roadway? What the hell does that even mean? Don’t pedestrians have the right-of-way on roads? I can’t be arrested for being in one!”

Cop “Tell it to the judge, Bozo.”

3:15: They are satisfied that I am awake, conscious, and relatively sober, so they release me. The property clerk gives me back my bullhorn. It is broken into several pieces. “Yeah, that kind of thing happens sometimes when you’re a shithead to cops.” I angrily tell the property clerk to dispose
of the bullhorn in his rectum. He asks me if I want to go back in the jail. I quietly leave.

3:16: I am standing outside the Travis County Jail. I have no idea where I am. I remember that I puked up everything I’d eaten the past 18 hours. I am starving. I start walking aimlessly.

3:44: I see lights. A place called Katz’s. The sign says
KATZ’S NEVER KLOSES
. I am overjoyed.

3:45: I see myself in the mirror as I walk in. I look like a used condom on the floor of a public restroom. The hostess gasps when she sees me, “We can’t serve you.”

3:46: I am so famished, dehydrated, exhausted, and hungover I can no longer control my emotions. I sit on the curb and start crying.

3:47: I stop crying. I start getting mad.

3:48: I am really pissed off. I decide they are going to close. If I can’t eat, no one can eat.

3:50: I find a brick in the alley behind the restaurant, smash the lock off the circuit breaker, and pull it down. All the lights go off. You’re closed now, Katz’s. That’ll teach you to refuse to serve drunk, dirty, disgusting clowns that don’t have any money.

3:51: Petty vengeance makes me feel better. I wander around for a few more minutes, until I realize I don’t know where B-Ski lives. I give up on everything, find a bench, and go to sleep.

Postscript

I got home the next day by wandering around asking people where all the assholes lived, until I saw a building I recognized. I eventually talked
to everyone and put the missing pieces of my night together. J.D. Horne filled me in on how I got arrested:

“You want me to revisit this? Never mind the fact that you decided to kick down the door at one of the first bars completely off its hinges and I had to go back the next day and pay for it. Or, when dancing with an old lady on the street, you spun her around so many times she fell over and you just walked away from her like nothing happened, as she lay on the ground writhing in pain. Or that you offended 52 of the 54 people on the clown bus and 97% of the persons at the first 5 or 6 stops. Oh, no. The defining moment of this evening was when you were arrested after you walked dead into the middle of Sixth Street on a Saturday night, still wearing your floaties and with your bullhorn—something akin to walking on the Hollywood freeway at 6:00 pm—and ordered all traffic to stop, declaring, “I AM Tucker Max.” As I watched from the doorway of the pub, two cops approached you from the other side of the street. Your reaction? You turned the bullhorn on the rather portly male and barked, “Don’t fuck with me, tubby! I wouldn’t want a donut store to lose its best customer.” To the female officer, “Honey, you might have nice tits but I can’t tell underneath all that polyester. Let’s have sex in your patrol car and find out.” Cuffs and the clink for you—although I swear I thought I saw the female cop actually laugh.”

I legitimately don’t remember dancing with an old lady, or any of that shit with the cops, which sucks. It’d be one of my proudest memories.

Nils explained what happened from the time I passed out in the paddy wagon until I woke up in jail:

“The most amazing part of our bumpy ride to Travis County Jail was the arrival, when the cops opened the back of the paddy wagon to let us out. I walked out easily. You were
facedown on the corrugated metal flooring, with your feet splayed out and your hands cuffed behind you, and the cops would not help you. They just shouted at you to “get the fuck out of the wagon.”

What you should have done was shimmy your way down the length of the floor on your stomach and basically slide out backward until your feet hung over and you could land upright. Instead, you were intent on getting to your feet INSIDE the paddy wagon but without using the benches or the wall to help. And that’s exactly what you did. You somehow used your face to balance yourself as you slowly got to your feet. It was the most amazing thing I’d ever seen, drunk or sober. Even the cops were impressed.

After staring, then laughing at us as we made our way through booking, they had us take our clown makeup off for the mug shots. I think you used up the remainder of your cognitive ability with that Houdini paddy wagon move, because by this time the only actions you were capable of were the involuntary ones: breathing, blinking, farting. The guys behind the counter recognized this and allowed us to go into the bathroom together (apparently against policy) so I could help you remove your makeup and prevent you from faceplanting into the sink.

This was the first opportunity I had to look at myself in the mirror. The amateur application of clown makeup always leaves something to be desired. After 8 hours of drinking, eating, laughing, sweating, and yelling, you stop looking like happy-go-lucky fun clown and start looking like live-in-the-sewer-and-gnaw-on-small-children’s-bones clown. Your makeup was equally streaked, but when I went to scrub it off, it sloughed off into the paper towel in a single layer, like the charred skin of a 3rd degree burn victim. It was remarkable.

Once they took our mug shots, they set us down in a large, open holding area filled with rows of white plastic chairs and other nonviolent offenders. For the most part, everyone kept to themselves, and you fell over passed out on a vacant row of chairs.

Nothing of note happened for the next 45 minutes or so. That’s when you started puking. EVERYWHERE. I’ll never forget it. It was this viscous, dirt-brown mixture that rocketed out of your mouth like someone was jumping up and down on your stomach. You never woke up, I don’t think you even made a sound, you just puked. And puked. And puked some more. It just kept coming. Watching you from across the row of seats, it felt like staring into the mouth of a sewage runoff pipe spilling toxic sludge into a white linoleum lake.

Lake TuckerPuke. Right then the desk sergeant came over with a giant brown roll of industrial-strength paper towels.

DeskSergeant “He’s your friend?”

Nils “I guess.”

DeskSergeant “Then you’re cleaning it up.”

The desk sergeant handed me the paper towel roll and walked away. There was no way I was actually cleaning that shit up. I wasn’t the one who thought it was a good idea to deep-throat a CamelBak full of vodka.

I did the next best thing. I unrolled nearly the entire roll and gently laid layer upon layer of towel on top of the stagnating pool of TuckerPuke. This must have satisfied the desk sergeant, or he didn’t bother to check back with me, because he didn’t call my name again until it was time for my release, sometime around 2am. You were still passed out.”

I present to you the actual mug shots from that night:

And the funniest police report ever written:

The Capitol City Clown Crawl is still an annual event in Austin, and though J.D. Horne no longer runs it, he and I still attend, dressed as clowns of course. If you ever go, I would advise you not to act like I did.

Unless, you know… you’re an asshole.

T
HE
DC H
ALLOWEEN
P
ARTY AND THE
W
ORST
G
IRL
I E
VER
F
UCKED

Occurred—October 2001

My friends and I graduated from Duke in May of 2001. After graduation, our jobs took us to different cities. Everyone else worked for various law firms and I worked for my dad’s restaurant business in Florida. Within a few months, we independently came to the same conclusion: Work sucks.

The biggest difference between school and work is not free time, not responsibility, not money, not even access to college bars and parties. The biggest difference is hope. When you’re still in school, no matter what is going wrong or how bad it gets, you know it’s going to end. You know school will eventually be over and you can move on to something different. You know you have another chance, because your “real life” is still in front of you.

It’s not like that with work. Once you are done with school and get a job, that’s it. That
is
real life, that
is
what you’ve been working toward in school… and if you hate your job or what’s going on with your life, there isn’t an obvious end to it or an obvious escape. I mean, besides alcohol. We were slowly realizing that the “real life” we’d chosen really fucking sucked. A lot.