Sloppy Seconds: The Tucker Max Leftovers (41 page)

Tucker “Tell her you went to jail? She doesn’t even speak English!!”

Junior “Come on man, just handle it. Fuck her if you want, I don’t care. I’m at the girl’s place now.”

Tucker “I’m not fucking a farting frog!…Hello…Hello!…YOU FUCKING ASSHOLE!”

Only Junior would seal up a girl over the 7-11 wine display. What did they talk about, the great nose on that new white zin? I have no idea what to do…so I sit on the toilet and take a dump. Halfway through pooping, I have a striking thought: Why do I care about lying to this girl? I’m not fucking her. Plus, this is a blessing in disguise—I’ll have the apartment to myself all night. And bonus: I won’t have to smell her awful floral perfume mixed with Junior’s sperm! Everyone wins!

Tucker “Hey, that was Junior on the phone. He got arrested. He’s in jail now.”

FrenchWhore “Jail?”

Tucker “Prison. You know,” and I pantomime putting my hands on bars in front of me, like I’m in jail, “Behind bars.” She is truly confused.

FrenchWhore “Prison? Why he go to prison at the 7-11?”

Tucker “No, he got arrested at the 7-11. Now he’s in prison. You know, police,” and for some strange reason, I make a police siren sound, and spin my hands above my head, trying to imitate a police car.

FrenchWhore “Police? Why police?”

Tucker “I don’t know, I wasn’t there. I was here with you. Remember?”

FrenchWhore “Why June-ya go with police?”

Instead of trying to help her figure this out, I make the mistake of being a smartass.

Tucker “Because he’s a wanted criminal. He’s been on the run for years. Very bad man. Kills puppies.”

FrenchWhore “What does zes mean, on ze run?”

Tucker “He’s a criminal. A bad man. He kicks babies in the mouth and then steals their candy.”

FrenchWhore “He keeck za babies? What does zes mean?”

I didn’t know what to do, so I took the remote and smashed her skull with it. Just kidding. I wish. I actually just turned the TV volume way up. She looked at me confused, but I ignored her. This worked for about five minutes.

FrenchyWhore “Where is June-ya?”

Tucker “He’s dead. He died in a car wreck.”

FrenchyWhore “He’s dead? I don’t understand. I thought he go with police.”

Tucker “Yeah, I think the cops killed him.”

She asked me where Junior was at least four more times. She even tried calling him, but he didn’t answer. After some interminable amount of time, she finally got the hint, and left.

Not long after that, I met some girl and I basically lived at her place for two weeks, doing nothing but eating her food and shooting loads in her. The next time I went over to Junior’s, I asked him:

Tucker “Where is my favorite stinky whore, I haven’t seen her for awhile.”

Junior “You aren’t going to believe this. Hold on, you have to hear it—”

Junior cues up his voicemail, and hands me the phone. I can hear her nasally, annoying accent before I even get the phone to my ear:

FrenchWhore “Allo June-ya, I sorry I no you call you back, but zee immigration police, they come and take me to zee jail. I am back now. You want me to come ova?”

Eventually Junior stops fucking her altogether and moves on to some other broken whore he met in line at an El Pollo Loco talking about the finer points of poultry brining. I don’t fucking know.

Of course that wasn’t
really
the end of Frenchie the Fungal Skank. About six months later, when I was back at law school, I get a call from Junior. He is laughing so hard he can barely talk. I eventually get the story out of him:

Amir was dating a girl who worked for some porn company. Every week she would bring him old, leftover porn VHS tapes lying around their office. You have to remember, this was 2000—not only when people still had VHS tapes, but before internet video took off and pretty much all internet porn became free (yes, it sucked, and I can’t wait to tell my grandkids about how, back in the days before limitless free porn, I had to walk uphill through the snow just to buy porn on a VHS tape).

Well, one day Amir was watching one of them, and saw something he couldn’t believe: The FrenchWhore, doing a porn movie. Junior didn’t believe it at first, but then saw the butterfly tattoo on her left hip. It was her.

We laughed about this for hours. She had never EVER talked about doing porn. Junior had even asked her about it. She swore that her only job was working at Jumbo’s Clown Room and running the massage table she put up every weekend on Venice Beach (if you lived around there during that time, she was the hot French girl who called herself “Beauty and the Beast” and would give massages on the boardwalk with her dog). The best part was the actual porn itself:

Junior “She was fucking like a goddamn acrobat in this thing. She looked like she really knew how to fuck. But she SUCKED in bed with me. She was like a dead fish. That’s why I stopped fucking her in the first place! She was terrible in bed!”

I was wrong. Apparently the French do know how to work. Hard.

HOW IRON CHEF MORIMOTO (AND JUNIOR) GOT ME KICKED OUT OF MY OWN CHARITY EVENT

Occurred, April 2005

If you like the Food Network, and you’ve only seen “Iron Chef America”, I pity you. That show sucks. Maybe not if it were judged on its own, but I can’t help but compare it to the show it was based on, the masterpiece that was the original Japanese version of the show called “Iron Chef.” It is arguably the greatest reality show—and inarguably the greatest cooking show—in the history of TV.

There is so much to love about the show. You kinda have to watch it to understand, but the show opens with this preposterous made-up story about some rich guy who decides to spend his fortune to create a kitchen stadium where the greatest chefs in the world compete to create new dishes. Then he takes a huge bite out of a yellow pepper, I guess to drive home the point about what a fruit loop he is.

But the thing is—those motherfuckers can cook. I grew up in a restaurant family and I know and love food, and I would be transfixed by some of the amazing things these chefs came up with. There was Iron Chef French Hiroyuki Sakai, Iron Chef Japanese Roksaboru Machiba and Iron Chef Chinese Chen Kenichi, and all were masters who battled the greatest chefs in the world. But to me, there was one Iron Chef who stood above the rest:

The second Iron Chef Japanese, Masaharu Morimoto.

He is the guy who made Nobu in NYC the legendary restaurant that it is now. He is the guy who turned traditional Japanese food on its head; he basically invented the idea of haute cuisine Asian fusion. I have been watching Iron Chef Morimoto on TV for years, reveling at the masterpiece dishes he created on the fly, his recreations of traditional Japanese fare, and the fearlessness he showed in the face of the established Japanese food community who hated him for what they saw as an attack on tradition. This dude had fucking balls, and he won with style.

The notion of the celebrity chef is now common, but Iron Chef Morimoto laid the groundwork for all of them. Fuck these bullshit American TV chefs who are all style and no substance—Emeril Lagasse and Guy Fieri and all the rest of the fat worthless fucks who do nothing but pander to the cameras and dance like minstrels for the attention of idiots. They are just glorified cooks, not chefs. Morimoto is a master chef and an artist, who just happens to use food as his paints and the plate as his canvas. Plus, he’s got real style. He’s the first chef I’ve ever seen that made me think, “That dude is probably cool outside of a kitchen.” The motherfucker cooked in a silver kimono for fuck’s sake!

So you can imagine my excitement when, in 2004, I got this phone call:

Junior “You’re not going to believe the restaurant that just hired me to be the general manager.”

Tucker “McDonald’s?”

Junior “Morimoto’s in Philly. Your boy.”

Tucker “Shut the fuck up!! That’s amazing!!!”

I think I was more excited than Junior. It only took a few months before Morimoto and Junior were good friends. Junior has an amazing ability to get pretty much anyone to like him. I’m charismatic too, but in a self-centered way; Junior is more of a seducer. The dude makes you feel like he understands you and cares about you, sort of like Bill Clinton (except Junior doesn’t face-fuck fat girls; he prefers broken porn stars). Junior has this way of making you want to be around him and love him, and Morimoto was no different. So after a while, I planned a trip up to see Junior and of course get to meet one of my few living heroes.

Morimoto has a place in NYC, and he and Junior were going to be there for a week or so doing some stuff, so Junior invited me up to come hang with them. I wasn’t as excited as I was when I went to the midget convention in Milwaukee, but I was about as fucking psyched as I could be to meet another man.

Junior “Here’s the thing though, man: Be cool. Morimoto doesn’t like most people. He’s very much a traditional Japanese chef in his approach to life and people.”

Tucker “I don’t like most people either. It’s perfect.”

Junior “But you know how hierarchical and rigid they can be in some things?”

Tucker “Dude, in my boarding school, I coached dozens of F.O.B. Asians through chemistry and biology. I can handle this, no problem.”

We all met for lunch at some fancy hot new NYC restaurant, and since the Iron Chef was with us we got the prime table, right next to this huge koi pond in the middle of the restaurant.

The first thing you notice about Morimoto is that he speaks two languages, neither of which is English. He speaks Japanese and what I call “Morimoto.” Junior had to translate from “Morimoto English” to standard English for me at first, but I quickly got the hang of it.

Second, Morimoto was pretty much exactly like I thought he’d be: quiet, professional, reserved. No problem, I can play it cool too. I had just read
Shogun
, so I actually knew some Japanese and I used those words correctly at various conversational points. And every time I addressed Morimoto, I called him “Chef.” This is actually a big deal in Japan. In America, kitchens are places where talented but undisciplined people go to work and snort coke. It’s the opposite in Japan. Being a chef there is one of the most respected jobs—akin to being a doctor in America—and they get treated with an immense amount of respect. Food and cooking also have something of a spiritual importance to the Japanese, and the kitchen is a place of reverence and discipline.

For example, at one point, the waiter took Morimoto’s finished plate away, and took chopsticks off and put them back on the table, with one end on the little rock that fancy places have. But he wasn’t paying attention and put the chopsticks down with the food-touching end on the table. Morimoto noticed immediately, and reproached him. Morimoto “No. Chopstick go other way. Otherwise, rock have no meaning.” And then of course, once we started talking about food, it was on. And when Junior mentioned to Morimoto that I was an “Iron Chef” fan, and I started talking about the Battle Porcini episode where he made the mushroom crème brûlée, he realized I was not just some idiot; I actually had an idea of what I was talking about. Like any true artist, he loved talking about the complexities and artistry of what he did, and we must have gone over every dish in that episode.

The conversation was great, but sadly the restaurant was not. It was clearly one of those places for people who think they’re better’n me. Which is fine, if the food and service really are that good. Except they weren’t. After the entree plates sat finished in front of us for about 20 minutes, I joked we should throw the chicken bones in the koi pond to feed the fish. Morimoto thought that was fucking hilarious. We busted on the restaurant for a while more, and then after lunch went our separate ways. Junior called me a few hours later.

Junior “That went great. I’ve never seen him actually warm to someone that quickly. He likes you a lot.”

Tucker “That’s cool, I really like him a lot too. He’s a cool guy.”

Junior “He said he would definitely hang out with you again.”

Tucker “You do realize we’re talking about how much a Japanese guy is into me, right? This is weird. I’m going.” And yes, if you were inclined to make some sort of gay/bromance/man date joke, this would be the appropriate place. Those of you inclined to do that can go fuck yourselves.

We went out drinking/eating a few more times together. There aren’t really many funny stories to tell; it was just guys hanging out, breaking each other’s balls and having fun. There was one incident, though, that was noteworthy:

One night out we all got really bombed, and like a fucking idiot, I got my car towed. Once I figured out where the NYC Tow Pound was and how to get my car back, it was already 2am, so I told Junior and Morimoto I’d see them later. Except Morimoto wanted to come with me.

Morimoto “I live New York City twenty years, many cars get towed, never see tow pound. I come. We go.”

I have done a lot of really weird shit in my life, but walking into the NYC Tow Pound with Iron Chef Morimoto, and watching one of the DMV ladies scream and come out for a picture is at the top.

And of course, I couldn’t help but snap a pic too [that’s me, Morimoto, and Junior]: