Tour Week One – Spit in my mouth for a beer pong kit

I’ve just finished a full week on the I HOPE THEY SERVE BEER IN HELL tour bus.   It’s like any other band tour bus but instead of gigging at each city, we are showing a sneak preview of the film, which opens September 25th.    This method of rolling a film is, to say the least, unorthodox, and right now Hollywood could give a shit about the cross country shenanigans of writers, producers, gophers, and ONE comic on a pimped out tour bus that sleeps 12.  It’s like John McCain’s ‘Straight Talk Express’ tour bus if, instead of preaching fiscal conservatism, John McCain was extolling the virtues of drunken debauchery and midget fucking.   And if this grassroots method galvanizes an audience for the film, it just might shake some things up.

We started out in Atlanta and then picked off the following cities on consecutive nights:   Athens, GA, Tallahassee and Gainesville, FL; Columbia, SC; Raleigh, NC; Blacksburg, VA; and Washington, DC.  Most recently we premiered at State College, the home of Penn State University, the Nittany Lions, and their 82 year old football coach Joe Paterno — the cutest codger to ever crap in his khakis on national television (Google it).

The tour bus itself hasn’t really been home to much insanity.  For a movie called ‘I HOPE THEY SERVE BEER IN HELL,’ you would expect a modern day Fellini film – strippers, stoned sorostitutes, Hitler midgets, freaks, and omnipresent tour bus bj’s.  Instead, when you enter into the subdued fall colors of the pristine and fairly new interior, you will see writer/producers Tucker Max and Nils Parker working away on their computers, the vidiots cutting and uploading videos (http://www.youtube.com/beerinhell), and most everyone else sleeping in their sarcophagus-like bunks like vampires on the go.  Granted, many of the people on the tour are in a constant cycle of inebriation/recovery from inebriation, but even then it’s usually more of a quiet dad-in-his-favorite-recliner-bourbon-drunk than overgrown college kids trying to pretend it’s rush week at a state school.

Outside of the tour bus is a slightly different story:  sycophantic fans of Tucker Max and his runaway best-selling book hang around desperately like some weird post-modern inversion of the hippie character.  Instead of dreads and hemp shirts, they wear baseball caps – brims pointing semi-sideways, k-Fed style (like a compass pointing to Doucheville)—and Affliction t-shirts.   The Affliction?  Douchebaggery, I’m sure.

Juxtaposed with the beer ponging meatheads are the lonely dudes unable to get laid looking for a hero.   Some of the lines winding around campus blocks are proof positive that you don’t need to have a Muslim God and blow yourself up in order to see 72 virgins.

On the flip side of this are the women.   You would think that men would make up the majority of fans but, apparently, more women have been sexually molested at a young age than I previously imagined.  Women make up about half of the people lining up for each screening.  Beyond that, there is a baffling amount of beautiful, barely legal co-eds vying for a chance to sleep with Tucker Max at every stop.  Many of them, believe it or not, are virgins (for proof, again check out the youtube videos).

Mind you, my wonderment is meant in no way to disrespect Tucker – he’s an attractive and hyper-intelligent guy.  But the fact that nubile 18 year olds wanna relinquish their maidenhood to a guy who only knows how many women he slept with “plus or minus a hundred women” is something that will always be hard for me to absorb into my cerebral folds.  If I had know how sexually obsessive and aggressive women were when I was in my teens, I probably would have had a much more fertile adolescence.

And if I had known that fame made young women horny, I would have applied myself more in school.   I had experienced (to a much slighter degree) the Spanish Fly effects of fame while touring with Jamie Kennedy for 4 years, but it was nothing like this.  With Jamie, it was like ‘Why the fuck?’  With Tucker, it’s more like ‘What the fuck?!!!’

Apparently, the amount of attractiveness a man has to the opposite sex isn’t equal to fame plus asshole, it’s the multiplicative product of fame and asshole, if not fame to the asshole power.

On our very first stop, women were literally fighting to get into the minivan back to the Hampton Inn to sleep with Tucker.   Actual dialogue:  “How come that ugly girl gets to go home with him!”   “F*ck you, bitch!”  Something got thrown, some hair got pulled.   Like Jerry Springer, but these ho’s actually graduated high school.

Of course, it’s not just the women.  This underground swell of Tuckermania is worse with the guys.  In Atlanta, when I arrived to do pre-show interviews with my shotgun mic and videographer Greg, I was blown away to see a nerdy, pimply-faced guitar hero waiting outside the movie theatre at 4 o’clock – three hours before the 7pm screening.  His name was Adam.

“Hey Adam, how big a Tucker Max fan are you?”

“Dude, I’m…. like…. You have no idea….I’ll do anything!”

“Really?  How about you take that cigarette you’re smoking and burn a Breakfast Club scar into your forearm?”

Without the slightest of hesitation, the shaggy-headed high school senior reared the Marlboro back to grind it into his supinated arm.

“What the hell’s wrong with you?  I was kidding!”  I said as I grabbed his wrist an inch before the burning butt hit its mark.

I couldn’t help but be intrigued by the irony of the virginal fans juxtaposed next to one of the most prolific lotharios I’ve ever met.  Clearly, these kids needed a hero, and fictional characters in Narnia weren’t doing the trick anymore.   I wanted to call his mom and ask her why she didn’t love Adam more.

Clearly, I was entering into a different kind of fan base – the type of fans who truly represent ‘fanatics.’  It seemed I had only heard stories about these types from band legends.  I was soon to learn that fans like this not only exist, they exist in pretty much every city in America – dyed in the wool, desperate and searching, these people will do anything.

My videographer serves, in a way, as the devil on my shoulder.  Safely behind his large HD camera, he whispers evil things to do, and many of those things involve dares for the hardcore fans.  Every time he offers a new suggestion, I wince… but then I follow through, like his personal puppet.

“Hey ma’am, your friends here say you’re the female Tucker Max,”  I said.

“I’m worse!” she proudly beamed.

“Prove it:  there’s a 300 pound redneck chawing on a can of Skoal.  If you were such a huge fan, you would let him drool some dip directly into your mouth.”

Of course, in these moments where the rubber meets the road, I expect everyone to balk.  But here’s why I have little faith in the future of America:  little do.   Her three friends screamed ‘Nooooo, don’t do it!’ but she, Katy, looked at me with searching, slightly sad, eyes.  I felt compassion.

“Um, I’ll give you a free beer pong kit,” I said.  I have no idea what exactly is in a beer pong kit, but as I’ve been learning, the 18-24 demographic will do lots of dumb shit for it.

“Ok,” she demurred in spite of her friends’ accelerated and pitchier pleadings.

As we walked to find the drooling Dog the Bounty Hunter, she shuffled close to my shoulder and asked, “Would you do it?”

“No way, I’m not retarded,” I said.  It was the most honest reply I could muster.

We introduced Dipper to Katy, like it was some perverted eharmony commercial – two souls that would be forever entwined virally  — by the internet and hopefully not Herpes Simplex 1.  Katy, like a true fanatic, followed orders and lay on her back with her lips parted, gullet awaiting.
The Dipper lumbered down onto his knees and let gravity guide a slow stream of tobacco, saliva, and sadness into Katy’s mouth.   She spit and choked and the line of 320 people cheered and screamed.   It’s possible that in conducting this grotesquerie that a part of my soul died.  I couldn’t really tell because I was too busy laughing.

Little did I know, it was all about to get crazier….

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