If you have ever had a diary and written every thought and emotion that flowed through your never resting head, one is amazed sometimes by what comes through. Engaged in writing as fast as the mind is expressing itself without inhibition or censoring all those dirty bits and pieces that are the key details that make the story interesting and define the mood of the events. At one time in this process one wonders if you are really writing these thoughts with the subconscious motive that sometime, somehow it will fall into someone’s hands and be read, or if those thoughts are pleasurable to write and engrave so that later on you can read it again and conceding yourself. Tucker Max is the pure definition of these details that spice up a story and does it so that anyone with a strong stomach can read it without any of the emotional fillers. You get straight, uncut, raw “spice”, all based on his unexplainable drunken shenanigans.
But what makes this story of some random prep asshole so inviting to read? Maybe is the innate stereotype that lives within the male gender that craves to be this happy asshole even if your conscious tells you it is not right. I mean, I can barely write and analyze this book without getting in his tone and using at least some vulgarity. Maybe is the rock star lifestyle we all praise in some way or another. Or it my just be that it is the fact that sometime in our life time we have met this person and wonder if they are like that all the time, what else is there to their life. But why is this nonsense so praised for a man? there is really no other layer to this book yet it has sold 70 thousand copies.
To get the mood of the story the first tale Tucker tells us is his pride and joy which he tells everyone about, the story about the portable breathalyzer. He states that this was the most evil invention of the human being, by giving you a reading of your actual blood alcohol level and giving you an idea of how drunk you are while you are out drinking. This was a challenge for him, to see how far he can go. While living in Boca Raton one summer he bought one of these and decided to take it for a test run, he got a couple of his friends to come to a bar with him and get some women. It was twenty minutes before the time he told them to get to the bar when he arrived and so no one of his group was there but he wanted to get a head start on them and started pounding vodka and soda’s at a rate of three every ten minutes, by the time the first person of his group came he was just at .04 BAC, had showed the breathalyzer to three people at the bar and he’s confident in drinking some more, so he moved on to straight vodka on the rocks. He did the calculation that every drink he takes increases his BAC by .01, remembering shortly after that he had learned that the alcohol absorption rate holds constant when he noticed his BAC creeping up even when he hadn't drank in a while. This did not tame him, and he continued until he reached .24 and was god among the people at the bar and passed out. This episode definitely set the tone of which Tucker’s perspective was.
For being a drunken douche bag he does a very good job on documenting his stories. The places he has destroyed, the women he has falsely reproduced with, a well put out tally of the beers drank in a night and what he has or has not eaten. A good part of the action in the book takes part on the typical drunk food places that men in their respective packs go to after, during or before a night out. The other half is solely dedicated do the art of drinking, bars, tailgates and road trips with coolers. So as every good gourmet dish deserves to be enjoyed with a fine glass of wine, Max Tucker would defend beer as a perfect accompaniment to anything. Pizza, burgers, diners, sloppy joes, are some of the things that magically pop up in our heads (being a male) without even thinking about it when that blood alcohol level rises to the point of stupidity, while women would mostly not lean to those choices. Surprisingly, the first scene of the book (the one with the breathalyzer) recalls him being drunk (obviously) and going across the street from the bar he was into a sushi place, not a typical drunk food choice and surtainly not fit for the stereotype Tucker fits in, but he did not feel like being with too many people talking to him at the bar he was at the time, he did not choose to eat this, it was just the closest option a stumbling guy had in front of him. Of course some things do not mix with alcohol and apparently sushi is one of them since it all got shared with a bush outside the restaurant.
Surtainly if you are a man and are reading this, and even if you are not, tales like this make you either disgusted, laugh, mad or just interested, evoking any kind of emotion into you, maybe that is why this book even though I hate the guy, still makes me keep reading it. I’m sure it is this way for every other person of the 70 thousand that bought it. I saw part of the movie and it is not even close as enjoyable as it was to read it. The way Tucker expresses every important detail and the ones that have no importance but still add to the mood are lost in the simplicity of the movie since you are not inside the mind of Tucker and don’t appreciate the malevolous mental processes that go through his drunken mind. It is surely no scholar writing, parting from his Duke Law school background, and it enforces the fraternity prep archetype. Only men can recall tales like this, so it wouldn't be strange to find that 60 of those 70 thousand are men. These are adventures which all of us would like to live, and that’s why this book became famous, it all started by posting these small shenanigans on a web site he did on his freshmen year of Duke and pulled attention from people from all around the country wanting more and more that he found himself apparently being more successful as a human relations mogul than concentrating on his studies and his career, as he recounts all his work interviews: “he hates being a lawyer”. This website did not only appeal to men, but Tucker was a, if I may, man whore so women mysteriously were attracted to him like flies to fluorescent light that wanted to be his friend and know more about him. Focusing on persuading this “talent” that was praised by thousands of people, men and women, he was inspired to write this book.
If seen from a woman’s point of view, taken that there are different types of women such as girly girls, feminists, nice quiet girls, and on the other side there are the party girls, straight promiscuous girls, and tough, strong character girls. This would be a book of a guy just letting his huge ego run wild wanting attention, rambling about what he has done hoping people will admire his stupid nonsense. However, to some that don’t care about his triple digit score and just see him as an average man with an interesting life, might just buy this book for pleasure and most likely want to be his friend. Tucker doesn’t discriminate, as long as they are not overweight, he likes them all and will bring even the toughest woman to her knees, literally. This may offend a lot of women with a feminist mentality, but then again he will do it on purpose and won’t care. He is what many women would despise in a man and what some may crave.
Food here is of little importance yet beer is what his whole life revolves around so much that it is in the title, which by analyzing it as can pretty much summarize what the book is about. “I hope they serve beer in hell”, even when he dies he doesn’t care about anything else but beer, he knows he is an asshole and not a nice person so why not look for the bright side. Beer, a word that not only symbolizes a good time for the college community, but it also makes you come back to memories you may have had in the past and elicit a connection with this reading. The events portrayed by Tucker would not had happen if it wasn’t for the delicious and agonizing effects of beer. Only a man can get drunk to the point of stupor, document his mischievous ventures with as much vulgarity as Bob Saget, and still evoke such interest in people without being seen as a distasteful bastard. Beer itself is not deconstructed or criticized as a product of a delicate process of fermentation art but what surrounds it.
The closest Tucker came to fulfilling what is needed to captivate a food enthusiast’s words was when he experienced the one and only In N’ Out burger on his way to Las Vegas. It went like this: “I have only fallen in love three times in my life, and the first bite of that Double-Double was one of those times. The crispy bun complementing the cool lettuce, the special sauce accentuating the fresh tomato, the sweet meat mixing with the salty cheese, all of it coming together in a harmonious medley of flavor thus far unseen on the american fast food landscape...”(p.73). If you are a foodie, it is pretty noticeable that he was trying too hard on this since some of it doesn't make sense. He has definitely seen a food program on T.V. or read a magazine at some time and tried to replicate it here, I guess he was trying to portray his snooty side. This is the only time he uses food as a central theme for a story line, the Double-Double even pops up at different timer around the book, creating a real desire for a food item instead of a desire for beer or women.
Tucker sees the world as a huge buffet of women and alcohol, having his array of “friends with privileges” seeing them as the different flavors in a buffet there is no way of changing his view. One thing he did was somehow categorizing a number of hook-ups with food in the title of some of his chapters, like: “Do you want fries with that shake?” where he disses a girl being honest about having genital warts, the “chilli pepper hook-up” where he started “playing” with a girl after eating a bunch of hot peppers and not washing his hands, “the absinthe doughnut” where after a night of absinthe binge drinking he ends up driving the car of a random woman he hooked up with into a doughnut store, among others, these all end up in the usual endings, the explanation of each of these would just be redundant. It is clear why people tend to relate these pleasurable events with food. Food can be compared to sex and women in the fact that they are both pleasurable, biological needs, lusty, satisfying and beautiful. Throughout human history comparisons between food and women have been used to describe the beauty interchangeably.
The reinforcement he got from his web site's comments prompted him to continue his behavior. By the time he started college he had already have this site and at the stage of social reassurance that he was in his teen years these reinforcements helped mold his personality into what it is today. By now, he does everything unconsciously and he just IS an asshole, society allows it these days and does not condemn it for the most part. Even if he tried to be nice for a change, his mental state of mind will make it very hard to hold a stable relationship, he likes to chew and spit.
Tucker Max received his B.A. from the University of Chicago, where he graduated in 1998. He attended Duke Law school on an academic scholarship, where he graduated with a J.D. in 2001 (despite the fact that he neglected to buy any of his textbooks for his final two years and spent part of one semester, while still enrolled in classes, living in Cancun). Tucker is supposedly the reason Duke dropped from 7 to 11 in the U.S. News and World Report rankings during his tenure. He currently lives in Los Angeles, and when he isn’t drinking or fornicating, he writes for his web site, tuckermax.com
In my opinion, these type of people infuriate me. Well, let’s just say Tucker really gets on my nerves, not because of the things he does but that he has the feeling of being superior to everyone and that those same people in general are who support him. The way he tells his stories like as if they had a purpose for humanity, as if they were so important that everyone needs to know about it, but then again people buy it. I feel as if he wrote the book just to have some source of income to support his self-destructive behavior since he hates the career he chose to pursue. As an actual reader feedback says and I cant say any better: “I find it truly appalling that there are people in the world that like you. You are disgusting, vile, repulsive, repugnant, foul creature. Because of you, I don’t believe in God anymore. No just God would allow someone like you to exist”.
Therapy... These can be frozen, refrigerated or cooked right away.
