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.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.THE DC HALLOWEEN PARTY AND THE WORST GIRL I EVER FUCKEDOccurred—October 2001My 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.As a way to relieve this post-school malaise, we decided to pick a city and all travel there to celebrate Halloween as a group.PWJ suggested Washington, DC.His little sister was having a huge Halloween party at her house in Arlington (just across the Potomac in northern Virginia), and she was going to have so many girls at her party that she actually asked PWJ to invite his guy friends:“PWJ, please bring your friends.I’m worried that this will be like the 4th of July party I had.There were 100 girls and only 25 guys.All my single friends were bored.”PWJ added that his sister’s friends fell into two groups:1.Elementary school teachers (her current occupation)2.Sorority girls recently graduated from Southern colleges (her previous occupation)Plane tickets were purchased post haste.I arrived in town a day before everyone else.It wasn’t for an extra day of drinking, though I can always use that.I came early to cheer up Hate and SlingBlade.As much as the rest of us were starting to hate our lives, it was WAY worse for those two, because they didn’t even have real jobs to hate.When we graduated, they were the only two of our group who didn’t have law firm jobs waiting for them.Now, six months later, they still hadn’t found permanent law firm jobs and were relegated to doing document review to survive (essentially legal temps, REALLY shitty work).They tried to joke about it, but you could tell it was not good.Two months before Halloween, in an email chain where we were all bitching to each other about our lives, Hate sent this email:From: HateTo: Tucker Max, PWJ, GoldenBoy, El Bingeroso, Credit, Jojo, SlingBladeSubject: DepressionAh yes, I would like to welcome all of you to the world of depression.I know it well.I would be happy to conduct a seminar on how to cope with depression for those of you newcomers to the scene.The price of admission will be one case of domestic beer.In the biz, we call this “medication.”Also outlined in the course will be proper masturbation techniques, clinically known as “a reason to get up in the morning.” And finally we will teach basic rugby techniques, also “legalized assault.”As for getting out of your dead-end jobs, I have no tips, as I cannot even get into one.That was bad, but it was this email from SlingBlade that made me book the early ticket:From: SlingBladeTo: Tucker Max, PWJ, GoldenBoy, El Bingeroso, Credit, Jojo, HateSubject: re: DepressionThese are actual quotes from a conversation Hate and I had last night concerning the state of our lives.You can judge for yourself how we are doing (bonus points for matching the quotes to the person):“The problem is I have no beacon, nothing to look forward to.Or even any hope that anything good will happen to me… ever.”“One of us needs to get laid.”“Just one of us?”“What are the odds of both of us getting laid?”“The problem with this interview is that I have to get them to like me, and at this point, I don’t even like me.They’ll ask, ‘What do you have to offer us?’ The answer, of course, will be I have nothing to offer you or anyone else.”“I’ve decided to compile a list of reasons why I shouldn’t kill myself.As you can see, the paper is blank.”“I could never kill myself [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]