HAPPY THANKSGIVING! YOU’RE GETTING FAT!

This Holiday Season, I learned something special: I’m getting fat.

This realization hit me like a ton of lard when my friend and mentor, Jamie Masada, owner of the world famous Laugh Factory said, “Hey buddy, you’re getting fat.”

After saying that, he pointed to Dane Cook onstage and said “You need to try to look like that, buddy.”

“Wait? Are you telling me Dane is richer, famouser, funnier, AND fitter?”

Jamie simply nodded.

I looked down towards my stomach. In my one-beer-in repose and in the darkened light of the comedy club, my belly was protruding ominously.

It was like ‘The Jaws Shot.’

If you don’t know what ‘The Jaws Shot’ is, let me explain: there’s a scene in the film ‘Jaws” where Police Chief Martin Brody (portrayed by the still breathing Roy Schieder) sees a shark attack in the water. The director, a young upstart by the name of Steven Spielberg, decided to steal a camera effect popularized by Alfred Hitchock, where the camera quickly dollies out, while the lens simultaneously zooms in on Roy’s freaked out face. The background shrinks away behind him, but Roy’s weathered and freaked out face remains the same size. Mr. Spielberg did it so well that the Hitchcock shot henceforth became known as the Jaws shot (take note, Mencia).

The effect, also known as a Dolly Zoom, gives the sensation of a sort of vertigo, a feeling of unreality that says to the audience this dude is having a ‘disturbing realization that is causing him to reassess everything he had previously believed.’ (Gee thanks, Wikipedia!)

That unsettling vertigo is what happened in my mind when I looked down and saw my gunt, my fupa, my stubborn lump of ‘What the fuck is that?’

I knew there was a semi-situation down there but I was always convinced I was one giant dump away from a flat stomach. I was CERTAIN I was always just one titanic turd away from the abs I had back in high school! I mean, I won Best Body for Senior Superlatives (true story), I’m not fat — I’m just post-meal, right?

Granted my stomach never became flat, even after the most fiber-and-peach laden log. Whenever I took an especially impressive bm — you know, the ginormous kind that makes you feel lonely afterward? — I would immediately swivel to the mirror and check out the six pack… which became I two pack…. which became a ‘flat stomach’… which became a ‘problem area.’

My first step was to go to one of thoese fancy organic food stores and start taking crap-inducing supplements like Apple Cider Vinegar tablets and Green Tea pills, and wheatgrass shots. All this stuff allegedly makes one… what’s the technical term?… oh yeah, ‘shit your face off,’ as one health food hippie informed me. After two months of poo that smelled and looked like bails of wet hay, it was clear that bigger dumps doesn’t equal flatter stomach. It only meant more public dookie dances to the nearest toilet. Wheatgrass tends to sneak up on ya.

Finally, even after my mom concurred with Masada, I decided to (shudder) join a Gymnasium.

Mind you, I hadn’t belonged to a gym. Ever. I used to teach yoga, which kept me fit, until I had the startling (and yes, somewhat Jaws-shot-ish) realization that I fucking hated it. I jumped headlong into MMA until two broken fingers and a broken nose later I realized maybe it was time for me to be a goddamn grown up. Hikes in Runyon Canyon were good ways to have quasi-dates with health-conscious chicks, but alas, they didn’t make me gutless.

Luckily, the visual of my pregnant stomach was enough to propel my lazy ass to walk through the doors of Crunch! fitness and sit down with a manager director and discuss my ‘goals.‘

The managing director, my friend Amita Balla, convinced me to work with a personal trainer to meet said goals and somehow, I found myself handing her my credit card to complete the transaction. And yes, handing her the credit card to pay for a personal trainer induced another Jaws shot in my head.

The next day, I found myself sitting next to my new trainer, Bruce, in a little side office with gadgets and scales and pseudo-scientific looking charts and papers.

“What are you here for?” he asked.

“I’m getting fat,” I said.

“So then what are your goals?”

“Uh, to not be fat?”

“Anything else?”

“A six-pack would be nice as long as it doesn’t turn me gay,” I dryly quipped.

Bruce looked at me like a dog tilting his head at the sound of a mysterious squeaking.

“I’m kidding,” I said. “But boy this place is pretty gay. They should change the name to Snap! fitness. What about those dudes on the machine where they open and close their legs? Are they bi? It’s like straight-gay-straight-gay-Brad Pitt-Kevin Spacey.”

He laughed about as much as a young, straight African-American man is gonna laugh at anything homosexual-related, which is admittedly not much.

“Is there a chance I’ll be on the elliptical one day and Adam Lambert is just gonna run up and make out with my face willy-nilly?”

“I don’t think so,” Bruce semi-chuckled, as he awkwardly went back to the computer grogram of ‘goals’ to type in my stats.

I was trying to use humor to distract myself from the claustrophobia brought on by the proximity of treadmills. Plus, I knew he was about to measure my body fat and the mere concept of him pinching my fat with forceps gave me severe agita. I decided to take a left off gay street onto race road.

“And what about these white dudes here with the tribal tattoos. I’m like ‘Really? What tribe are you in, Trevor? And who’s your leader, Ed Hardy?’ Haha. Get it?”

“Okay, stand up. Let’s see what’s going on here,” Bruce said, apparently not getting it. “Face towards the door.”

I felt like I was in prison. Bruce took the stainless steel pinchers around my body — my arms, my gut, my butt, and my upper back between the shoulder blades.

He then sat down, did some rudimentary calculations.

“Wow,” he said. “You’re at 20 percent body fat.”

I blanched, visibly and audibly. I probably would have reacted better if he had told me I had HIV. At least that would make sense to me.

“Really? Are you sure?”

I mean, he was a young black guy — I couldn’t be utterly convinced of his mathematics.

“Yeah, according to this chart.”

“20 percent fat? But aren’t humans like 80 percent water? That means the part of me that isn’t water… is fat?”

Finally, he laughed at loud. Fat jokes. I should have known. The problem with that was I was being completely serious.

“It doesn’t work like that,” he said, “You’re not separated into fat and water.”

“So then it’s like a venn diagram, and some of my water is fat? Is that what ‘heavy water’ is? Either way, all I am is liquid and lipids. It’s fucking disgusting!”

“Well then, let’s get to work!”

And with that, Bruce stood up in a very positive, personal-trainery type of way and walked out of the medical examining room/janitor closet into the cacophony of spinning wheels and clanking steel.

This is going to suck, I thought… But then I looked at my 2nd trimester tummy and followed with a heavy (no pun intended) sigh….

To All the Bitches Out There…

Lately, I’ve been Internet Dating. And by that, I mean I’ve been dating the internet — last night, I totally fingered Yahoo. I almost banged Google, but you know how hard it is to fit a penis into a USB port?

Okay, that’s goofy, but in a way, it sums up my frustration with ‘dating’ in LA. It seems like nowadays, with the quasi-intimacy of facebook, ichat, and skype, all I do is have cyber-relationship where my ‘date’ and I message each other, watch the same youtube clips, and send each other emoticon’ed exclamations.

Pretty soon, it’s gonna be animated flowers and long e-walks on the Laguna Beach website. Will a woman be happy with a cartoon engagement ring?

Whatever the case may be, getting face-to-face with someone you haven’t thoroughly cyber-stalked is a rarity. Even when a date is set up, something invariably happens. Los Angeles seems to be the only town in the world where “Oh, I flaked!” serves as a legitimate excuse as to why someone shows up late or not at all.

All that aside, that’s not the REAL problem. The real problem in LA is the actual date. The reason these dates are usually awful is because they involve WOMEN.

Okay, that’s not really fair. The truth is men and women want completely different things out here from the start. Women will want to date a guy multiple times, and if it really goes well, they will then want to f@#k. Men will want to f@#k a girl multiple times, and if it really goes well, they will then want to date. And therein lies the rub.

Because women are testing both our ‘wallets’ and our personalities, they will want us to take them on a fancy dinner where they can ask us stupid questions at our financial and personal expense.

How do I know this? Because I’ve been dating in LA! So the following list is, mostly, for the ladies. Just a quick mirror up to, what I find to be, pretty shittastic behavior.

So, without further adieu, here are the TOP 10 WORSE QUESTIONS women ask men on FIRST DATES based on my personal experience since moving here in February (note — this doesn’t represent 10 first dates, some of these inanities were asked on the same date):

10.“How many women have you slept with?” While it is a valid question if you are out with a drug-using sex worker, it never does any good, and you will never get the truth. Whatever answer I tell you guys, double it. If the guy is wearing an Affliction t-shirt, triple it and add Herpes. If he’s Persian, you probably already have Herpes.

9.“What do you think of me?” and it’s retarded step-sister “Are you having a good time?” Hello, needygirl.com! Just assume he likes you and he’s doing swell! He won’t tell you anything bad, so it’s a pseudo-question that is really just you desperately fishing for compliments. Ask him if he thinks your jeans make you look fat while you’re at it.

8.“Do you believe in God?” At some point it might be nice to know if he is a high priest in a Satanic cult or a … shudder… Scientologist…. but save it for now. It’s an argument in the making. Worse still, a boring argument that won’t result in great hate sex.

7.“Do you like children?” Do I really need to explain why? Guys are still trying to decide how much booze they need to imbibe to get the courage to make a move on you. The idea that their buzzing sperm could result in a child should be avoided for at least… well, forever.

6.“What happened with your last girlfriend?” I killed her for asking annoying questions.

5. “Have you ever fooled around with a man?” Thanks for calling me gay!

4. “Do you believe in love at first sight?/Do you believe in fate?/ Do you believe in destiny?” Run for the goddamned hills if any of these are ever asked! I get the chills just writing it.

3. “What are you thinking?” Any guy who has had a long-term relationship before has 47 Samsonites full of luggage they carry around with them revolving around this loaded question. Stay away from it unless you want to witness him have a PTSD nam-style flashback or seizure.

2. “What type of car do you drive?” OK — guys: if, on the off-chance, you didn’t pick the girl up and she actually asks this, you are allowed only one feasible response and that is: “Oh, I have a black rape-van.” When she says, “Whaaaat?” Your response is “Sorry, a black non-consensual-sex van. The ladder in the back is to get a better view of playgrounds.” From now on, that’s the answer. Okay, guys?

1. “Do you ever want to get married?” Combine all of the horribleness of the above questions to form the ultimate first-date cockblocker on the planet. I’d rather hear about your yoga class and your kooky cats than to field that quagmire of a question.

When all is said and done, I’ve been trying to stick with my motto, which is BE MYSELF.

And yes, sometimes that is sort of vulgar and offensive, which can be a turn-off to some bitches.

And YES, when I pull up in my busted-up Honda that sounds like drunks midgets are fucking in the engine, I find that sometimes women in LA find that “Myself” apparently isn’t good enough to bring home to mama.

But that’s okay with me.

I think I’m gonna hold out for a non-gold-digger who can appreciate a car with character and a good old-fashioned fart joke.

CHOLO COMEDY

My heart was flopping around like a Sunfish in my chest cavity. Damn, I’m belted in Gracie jiu jitsu! I fantasize about putting vatos in flying heel hooks like a teenager dreams about twilight trysts with vampires! Why in the hell is my heart pounding like this? Don’t look at that table!

“Um… okay… Hey, my name is Bill… I’m white…. okay, moving on….”

My logical left brain kept trying to rotate my body counterclockwise, away from the seething mass of testosterone and tattoos.

“Hey, motherfucker!”

“Fuck you!”

What? Were these cholos directing their epithets towards me? Why? I couldn’t understand it. I guess I can be pretty offensive to Mexicans, Mexican-Americans, and any other variant of pigmentation on the planet, but I had barely said a word yet…. Was I about to get jumped onstage… again?

***********************

Offstage, about 5 minutes earlier, I had arrogantly planned to verbally lacerate the table of three rowdy and disrespectful cholos. They had not only been loud, but they had made thinly veiled threats to the two previous comics, terrifying half the audience in the process.

Not only were these dudes empirically scary-looking, but the symmetry of their positioning alone was daunting. At the head of the table farthest away from the stage sat the most colossal cholo. He looked like a Latin Jabba the Hut — a Jabba el Cabana, if you will. Flanking him on either side were two stoned-faced and rail thin thugs, faded prison tats on skinny necks, faces ravaged with either chicken pox or knife scars. To add to their mysterious gargoyle-like stillness, they had black baseball caps with ruler-straight brims pulled down low over their eyes. They looked like MLB pitchers hiding their tells in the bottom of the ninth.

From the safety of the wings of the club, I visualized myself getting onstage and acting out he following scenario:

“Hey guys, let me ask you a question…. You got any guns?”

“Nooooo.”

“You got any knifes?”

“Noooo.”

“Then shut the fuck up!”

The collective reaction, whatever it might be, would be immediate. Everyone in the audience (sans the three amigos) would guffaw and cheer. Or their collective sphincter would knot up tighter than an ice road trucker’s lug nuts.

Jabba was drinking a fruity blue drink, so then I would follow it up with this:

“Look at you, your face says ‘FUCK YOU!’ but your drink says ‘FUCK ME!!!’”

Then the audience would explode and I would be body surfed out of the room in celebration after such a swift dismantling of this awful heckler.

I cockily smiled to myself as I hid in the confines of the comedy club curtains.

Suddenly, Manny, the comic onstage, said something that didn’t resonate well with Jabba and I saw it…. a uniquely Mexican phenomenon — the “thousand yard smile.”

See, whenever you make most race-oriented jokes, the litmus for your standing is usually clear: a smile. Having spent my entire adolescence in a predominantly black school, I learned that once you get an African-American man to laugh, things are pretty much cool. You chuckled at my ‘Once you go pale, you never have to post bail’ joke? Awesome. Now please laugh louder to cue the uptight white people to laugh.

However, for many Mexican-Americans, the smile is a much more nebulous mode of expression.

For example, one night I was doing a 1:20am spot in Times Square. In the front row, there was a group of thick Mexican-Americans, plaid sleeves folded over their chests.

I went into my bit about the debatable ethnicity of Adam and Eve:

“Eve definitely wasn’t white — a white Eve would have said, ‘I don’t think that apple’s organic!’ …. and an asian Eve would have eaten the snake!” The cholos roared. Hey, it’s not that funny, but people seem to love to laugh at Asians, particularly Asians.

I was certain they’d love the tag:

“I’m not sure about Adam. Maybe he was Latino, fellas…. I mean, it was the perfect garden — somebody had to trim the hedges!”

Crickets.

The Latinos kept smiling, but their eyes stopped dancing, becoming beams of fixed and scary intensity. One of the guys in the front row, smiling Cheshire-wide, started in: “Oh, yeah, that’s real funny, Gringo. Hahaha. Yeah, we’re landscapers. Maybe you can make me laugh even more after the show in the alley.”

Why are you smiling? I thought, as I looked at him. It suddenly struck me that he wasn’t smiling at all, he was baring his teeth.

I shook off the comment and finished the show, but I closed up certain that I was going to be flattened into a tamale. Like a man, I hid in the bathroom afterward.

Remembering that moment, I studied the way Jabba was eyeing Manny at the end of his set. Jabba had the exact same pissed-off expression, that “thousand yard smile”….

The MC whisked Manny offstage and then, almost instantaneously, ushered me on.

I took one step onstage and the arrogance immediately flew out of my body (apparently it went outside to smoke filtered cigarettes and discuss Sartre). The bright spotlights from the grid overhead bore down on me as I made my way to the mike stand. Everything was making me feel very, very… white.

“Um… okay… Hey, my name is Bill… I’m white…. okay, moving on….”

“Hey, motherfucker!”

“Fuck you!”

I flinched. I shouldn’t have said I was white, I thought. Was that racist of me?!

After my slight recoil, I glanced over at the table and noticed that the two skinny cholos were standing up and furious! And they were facing… each other?!!! Huh?

“Fuck you, cabron!”

There was a shove. The two cholos were fighting!!! Skinny cholo #1 slapped skinny cholo #2 in the face. Jabba stood up to mediate and/or referee and the three went off to the far side of the club, throwing furniture out of their way as they did.

“Anybody in a relationship here?” I asked everyone and no one. Maybe I was asking the universe. I’m not sure.

Groups of people started to quietly but swiftly flee the scene.

“I actually just got dumped by text recently. I got it while I was driving…”

I slowly sat on the stool onstage and looked out into the confused and semi-paralyzed audience members remaining as fisticuffs ensued in the wings.

“…She was in the passenger seat.”

One heavyset white girl 4 rows in tittered. That was all I needed. A modicum of validation was all I need, even as the slapping and yelling transpired not 20 feet away from my right ear.

More people got up to leave.

“She was right there!… She should have at least called like an adult.”

Another lone titter in the blackness.

Damn, I thought, a huge smile on my face, I love this job….

Hooters Girls

He was a big, black guy. That may sound like a bland description, but, in fact, the phrase ‘big black guy’ is potent and ubiquitous enough to induce fear in about 87% of all white people because, when used in a story around the watercooler, it usually precedes somebody getting hurt. So when said big, black guy approached me angrily with a clenched fist, I had to rethink my Jaeger-bomb-loosened lips’ word choices… once again. He raised his hand. There was going to be a bar fight….

As Dane Cook might say, let me ‘Tarantino’ this story a little bit.

On the last day of my tour for I HOPE THEY SERVE BEER IN HELL, I met up with Tucker Max at the Sandbar in Salt Lake City. After almost 2 months of continuous bars in contiguous states, I was probably, admittedly, at the end of my tether with women. Well, not just women, a certain TYPE of woman: specifically, sluts.

If you visibly blanched at that word, I don’t blame you. It’s a mean word and should only be applied to sluts, and their subset, skanks. (nota bene: A skank is a slut without money or class. How can a slut have class, you ask? Ask Angelina Jolie.)

When I arrived at Sandbar, Tucker was surrounded by three HOOTERS girls. I’m not exactly sure what it means to be a ‘Hooters girls,’ because the motley crew of 3 women — a little Mexican, a hippy bleach blonde, and an impossibly tall and busty brunette with, perhaps, an adam’s apple — didn’t seem to measure up to any discernible standard. unless slut is a standard. Well, technically, they work for tips, so they’re more like whores, but that’s a completely different discussion that might devolve into a debate on Capitalism.

I took a deep breath and introduced myself with a smile and a handshake. These three ladies had been sending MMS boob pic texts to Tucker all night in the finger-crossing hopes of being one of the thousand women to bone him, so my presence wasn’t really much concern to them anyway. The bleachie and the tranny were doing figure eights and peacocking for Tucker. Intermittently, they would walk away and text to ‘seem’ unavailable, but they’d swoop back and shimmy for Tucker then drift away, etc, etc.

Why did I come? I thought…. I have no interest in being in a bar in SLC late on a Tuesday and I definitely have no interest trying to convince a HOOTERS GIRL that i’m worth the walk back to my motel.

“Hey, you should buy me and my friend a shot.” It was the little Mexican girl, flashing a cute little smile that I instinctively knew had served her well over the years.

“What are you talking about?” I said, sincerely confused.

“Buy me and my friend a shot.”

“No. Are you out of your mind? I’m not some douchebag getting a boner because you’re talking to me. Why don’t you buy me a shot?”

That’s when I noticed her engagement ring.

“Holy shit! And you’re engaged. You are, in a nutshell, why men HATE women; trying to get me to buy you drinks when you’re engaged? Ugh.”

She coquettishly bit her lower lip and flipped her hair in that packaged shy way. For some reason, it angered me. Not because I almost fell for it — but because I couldn’t help but flashback to an alternate 22 year old BILL DAWES that would have fallen for it and ended up alone with Herpes 3-5 days later.

That’s when I noticed the tats and piercings on all three of the HOOTERS girl. I couldn’t help but notice the tats and the piercings on all these girls. It made perfect sense that they had them. I’m not saying that all tatted girls are sluts, but I’ve never seen the Chinese symbol for ‘Abstinence.’

However, I have noticed that message of the tattoo is almost always inversely proportional to how messed up the woman is.

A nice Christian sorostitute trying to break free from mom and dad might get a tattoo of a sexy panther or a dragon or maybe a scandalous Betty Boop pin-up tat. Look at me, I’m wild! she says to the world.

This engaged woman had a tat of a cross on her neck and sundry symbols of peace and enlightenment. Right away, I knew she was horribly damaged.

Often, when I see the girl with a sentence wrapping around her torso that says something like “peace and love and everlasting happiness in a rainbow of kittens and butterflies and puppies in a bed of roses,” the following conversation ensues:

“When you get that?”

“Oh, after my first abortion.”

Sometimes, the tats are a map of molestations, and the stories sound like a crazy game of Clue. “That was my Uncle in the living room with a Candlestick…. I’m not ready to talk about with happened with Professor Plum..”

At some point, drinks served their purpose and lubricated the cranky wheels of conversation and the little Mexican started talking a lot. Suddenly, she informed me her dad was an Indian chief

“Wait, you’re not Mexican?” I asked.

“No, I’m half Cherokee.”

“Be honest, you’re just saying that to be cool. I get it — you moved to Salt Lake and decided to reinvent yourself as some Featherhead Pocahantas because you didn’t want people to think you’re Mexican.”

“I’m not Mexican.”

“Tell your face that.”

“What does that even mean.” She was dumb. dumb enough to accept a small pox blanket and a bottle of booze for 50,000 acres dumb? Hard to tell.

“The closest your dad came to being an Indian was banging another Mexican dishwasher working at an Indian casino.”

Without warning, the girl started crying.

After much apologizing, she told me that her dad was in fact an Indian chief who had been horribly murdered ten years ago to the day. She even opened her purse and produced a wrinkled newspaper article detailing the horror. I felt like a speck of fly shit on a mound of horse dung. I bought her two shots. I made her laugh. I listened.

We had a nice hug and then I went to the bathroom… which is where the trouble started. The little Indian told her friend bleachie who told busty brunette who, in turn, told ‘big black guy.’ By the time I did my shake and shiver and walked back into the bar, there was a veritable posse about to run me out of town — the only thing missing was the torches.

The big, black guy was in my face first, hand raised, ready to strike. So I did what any man would do in that situation. I lied.

“What’s happening?” I said.

“You disgraced the memory of this poor girl’s father by making fun of his death.”

“Oh no, that wasn’t me, that was my friend — he’s outside. Let me get him.”

In the brief moment of confusion, I was outside on the patio, then outside on the sidewalk, then crossing the street, looking over my shoulder the whole way.

I promised, in that instant, NEVER to insult a woman, even unintentionally, ever again; the fission reaction they can set off with their tears can lead to the Enola Gay of beatdowns.

So never again… until the next time.

MY PLANE CRASH…ISH

“We — we have an indication of a problem. But that doesn’t necessarily mean there is a problem. Just a… an indication…. Flight attendants prepare for landing.”

That was the sentence issued forth from the captain of FLIGHT 1063 from Chicago to LAX on Wednesday, October 14th.

Now, other than the obvious, there were many things wrong with the above declaration. For starters, it wasn’t uttered by a pilot from the United States. The accent was eerily European, perhaps even British. I’d been conditioned over the past 20 years to hear that distinctly American, Capt. John Steele voice come over the PA…soothing, deep… the type of gentle bass that tranquilizes you to the point where you want to take a huge, steaming dump — YOU know the voice! (On an unrelated note, I’m convinced that the aforementioned “bowel-relaxing” voice is at least partly responsible for my incessant plane flatulence).

What made it extra wrong was the fact that the voice stammered. The captain of a plane may do a lot of comforting, Halls-mentholyptus-style ‘Uhhhhhh’s’…. but a stammer? Never…

The passengers on the flight already knew something was wrong previous to the announcement over the intercom.

The Eddie Murphy travesty, ‘IMAGINE THAT!’ had been playing for approximately 54 seconds before the audio cut and the plastic screens retreated ominously back into the ceiling. For a brief second, I suspected the American Airlines plane felt guilty for playing such a crappy movie and the mechanical reverse was a ‘mea culpa’… but then the shaking started. A horrific grinding whirr shortly followed suit. The trifecta of terror was complete when the plane started abruptly losing altitude.

Almost on cue, two stewardesses double-timed up the aisle toward the cockpit like frantic little Geishas in a Gilbert and Sullivan play. I was stiffly sitting on an aisle seat on the right side of the plane as they brushed by me. I looked at the redneck next to me in the middle seat for some acknowledgment of the tumult, but he just calmly fixated on his Sodoku puzzle. I snaked my head into the aisle and looked forward toward the gaggle of flight attendants convening in first class.

Then I saw something that utterly convinced me I was going to die: one of the attendants suddenly opened her mouth wide and quickly covered it with her hand. She was out of earshot, but I could almost hear the sharp inhale of breath. Also, I’m pretty sure that in the flight attendant manual, the hand over mouth gesture is the symbol for ‘Oh, no, we’re all going to die a fiery death!!!’

Immediately after that, the two flight attendants silently did their Geisha shuffle back to their jump seats as passengers vehemently yelled out questions after them: ‘What’s happening?’ ‘Is the plane going down?’ ‘Can I have extra peanuts?’

The noise and rattling in the cabin fought for dominion over my fear until my brain suddenly leapfrogged over terror into a new plane. My soul seemed to cleave itself entirely from my body (like some Voldemort Harry Potter spell) and hang out in the aisle, where it stoically witnessed my soon-to-be dead and on-fire body.

“I’m going to die. Of course.” I said out loud, to no one in particular. Why the ‘of course’ caveat, I wasn’t certain. All I knew was that it made perfect sense that THIS would be exactly how I perish: on a plane after a protracted booty call. It couldn’t have been when I was on a cargo plane in Iraq which had to make an unscheduled emergency pickup near the Iranian border — that would have meant I could have died a quasi-hero. No, it just HAD to be after a weekend of frivolous skirt-chasing. Yay, my life!

From the ethersphere, I kind of witnessed my physical configuration in space. I was in the aisle, my left leg perched up on the armrest of the row in front of me, my shoeless right foot awkwardly wedged in the seat pocket, my left cheek resting on my hand, and my butthole wide-open and farting, either from the stress or the CHEESE FIX MUNCHIES I’d been consuming. I looked and smelled retarded.

Still, the older redneck to my right didn’t seem to notice the commotion on the plane or in my bowels. He just focused on that fuckin’ Sodoku like if he finished it in time, the plane would stop plunging… which it was now doing… ferociously….

“I’m on Lexapro so I never, ever cry. But I think I’m going to cry now.” It was a fat mother of two across the aisle to my left, seemingly making the statement for my benefit. Her two children were literally picking their noses and oblivious, as children are, to their impending mortality.

A woman in the row behind me, while simultaneously counting her rosary, leaned over and started rubbing fat mommy’s right shoulder with her left hand . “It’s okay. Let it out, it’s good to let it out.” In turn, mom started to grunt and furrow her brows like she was squeezing out a reluctant shit. This woman was going to cry, Goddammit, and no anti-depressant prescription drug was going to stop her from doing so!!!

“Unnnnnnhhhhhhhh!” she grunted/cried/sharted as her kids cluelessly picked at things. It was the most pathetic thing I had ever seen.

A really cute girl in the row in front of me was looking around, similarly terrified. She was tan, almost Indian tan (feather, not dot) with high cheekbones and wide, young eyes. She caught my eyes, possibly searching for an answer. With my body skewed in the same twisted position, I just looked at her and shrugged, like I was silently commenting on a wacky Aunt at the Thanksgiving table. I ransacked the archives of my brain and life experience and THAT is what I had to offer a terrified 20 year-old girl: “Eh.”

For about 15 minutes as the plane descended — the only calculus to determine how quickly it dove was the increasing pressure on my eardrums — I contemplated my life…

What have I DONE with it? I thought. I told dick jokes to strangers. That’s about the sum total.

I’m in my thirties, a ridiculous human being, an adolescent boy trapped in a man’s body. ‘Jesus died at 33 and I haven’t accomplished half of what he did,’ I said at loud, trying to crack up an imaginary audience. To my right, Larry the Sodoku Guy didn’t even crack a smile as he tried to work that tricky ‘4’ or ‘5’ conundrum with his pen.

Everyone else in the plane was whispering or muttering or frozen like a street mime as we dropped. I was dead….

Well, I’m here, so, guess what? I was wrong.

The plane eventually leveled out, hit the runway hot and skidded to a bumpy stop as fire trucks and ambulances converged on the scene like it was a Die Hard movie.

I had totally reconciled myself to death and, shit, I was alive after all. There was a teeny part of me that was just the smallest bit disappointed. ‘Crap,’ I thought, ‘Small things have to matter to me again now…’

As we waited on the tarmac for the maintenance crew to determine the damage (I found out later it was an electrical fire on the front wheel hub and the noise and shaking was the result of lowering landing gear at 35 thousand feet and maximum speed), I couldn’t help but notice the redneck was still chipping away at his Sodoku puzzle.

“Dude,” I said, “I went through Elizabether Kubler-Ross’ 5 stages of loss and you never once flinched or stopped playing Sodoku. What’s that about?”

Finally, he put his pen down and looked at me.

“I’m 5 years out from being a Cancer survivor. I just look at every day as a bonus.”

Then he went back to his damn puzzle. I wish I could have thought of something clever to say to him to make him feel dumb for saying that, but I couldn’t think of anything.

Harumph…. One day, I will…

The End of the Road

The dusk-strewn view from the 13th floor of the Red Lion Inn in downtown Salt Lake City perfectly epitomizes the peculiar dichotomy that is the city itself. The azure blue fades into lavender and then into a smooth pink glow which serves to outline the deep dark silhouette of the not-so-distant Rocky mountains. When you track your eyes down from this majestic vista, they sweep into a cityscape that is, frankly, fuuuuuckin’ ghetto. It is devoid of industry, excitement, or even the slightest aesthetic reflection of its majestic background. Instead, there only exists an ironic acknowledgment of the shitbox lying at the western foot of The Great Divide — the grandeur of Brigham Young’s heaven ends with a rundown “Waffle Ho se.” (the ‘u‘ is mysteriously missing).

Okay, maybe I’m getting poetic and faggy, but I just finished two full months on a tour bus promoting the movie ‘I HOPE THEY SERVE BEER IN HELL‘ and I’m feeling nostalgic about the end of the road. (note to reader: You can follow my journey and consequent sojourn into my own personal heart of darkness if you goto: http://www.youtube.com/beerinhell.)

Unfortunately, as most of you probably do NOT know, the movie has actually opened in select theaters. That’s right, it has. Don’t worry, if you weren’t aware of the movie’s existence, join the other 307+ million Americans who similarly had no clue. The public at large just didn’t know about it, and therefore, didn’t show up. Tada! Like magic!

With the limited budget for marketing and advertising we had for this indie film, we barely got the word out to the roughly 2 million plus people who had purchased and/or read the book, much less the remaining 305 million assholes cluttering up the U.S.

Still, the producers of the movie gave it a college try… literally. We gassed up a pimptastic tour bus and hit over 30 cities — most of them in huge college towns — premiering the film and seducing the 18-24 demographic into spreading the word with promises of t-shirts, beer pong kits, and meetings with the author, Tucker Max. And yes, in this context, ‘meeting’ can mean ‘giving a blow job to.’

“This was the best movie I’ve ever seen in my life!” was a common ejaculation from frat boys and sorostitutes alike after seeing the film at these screenings. Although in my head I couldn’t help but think ‘you are retarded or need to watch more movies,’ I was still excited it was making such a huge impression on these mentally challenged college children.

The film was screened for close to 15,000 people before the opening September 25th. The idea was that each person would tell their friend… they would tell their friend … and so on and so on, just like that classic Faberge Organic Shampoo commercial.

But, alas, the movie failed at the box office. Somehow, that buzz marketing fission reaction never quite happened. Maybe we were short one fresh-faced Heather Locklear. (She was sooo hot before she became a rocker slut, wasn’t she?)

So what happened?

Who knows and herein lies the rub. With any failure like this, Monday morning quarterbacks show up like… well, like Monday morning quarterbacks.

I mean, some are contending that, with the market as glutted as it is, it’s a sisyphusian task getting ANY movie seen, much less an independent film with no star names that revolves around a personality as polarizing as Tucker Max. Although ‘I HOPE THEY SERVE BEER IN HELL’ was protested and some people claimed it was ‘ruining women’s lives’ and ‘promoting rape culture,’ in the end the film itself didn’t really generate any controversy…. probably because it wasn’t really controversial. I would even, scout’s honor, take my mom to go see it (what old person doesn’t love a great shit scene, let’s be honest?!). I guess the movie was sort of like Mitch Hedberg’s old band. “You either loved us… or hated us… or thought we were just okay.”

Others argue that the economy was at play for poor numbers. Still others thought the film’s fate was sealed by a crappy marketing team. Couple of folks blamed it on bad reviews. Many thought the reason for mediocre attendence was because the trailer blew freshly rotting leper balls (mea culpa).

The most obvious reason was also the hardest to admit. And that is, the film, while good, wasn’t good enough to generate the requisite word of mouth to make it a hit. The movie is funny and well-written with great performances, but, when all is said and done, the product was seen by a lot of people and still didn’t take off. It looks like some people tried the shampoo, worked it into a frothy lather, and told their friends: ‘Eh.’

For two months, no one, including myself, could seem to acknowledge the fact that the movie might not garner momentous word of mouth — the same word of mouth that catapulted ‘District 9,’ ‘500 Days of Summer,’ ‘The Hangover,’ and currently, the micro-budgeted ‘Paranormal Activity’ into box-office smashes. The idea that the film itself might not be enough was the big pink elephant in the tour bus… wearing a tutu, riding a unicycle, and juggling dildos.

Apparently, the film ITSELF wasn’t enough, because after 2 weeks and close to 100 thousand people seeing it, it seemed like the general populace was gently telling us: “We like you a lot, little independent movie… but we’re just not THAT into you….”

So I’m sitting here, last day of the whole tour….on the 13th floor…with the dead, and now darkened, Salt Lake cityscape spread out before me like a smallpox blanket. I’m drinking alone, a quaint and charming habit I seemed to have picked up on this tour. Tucker has just texted me, saying a bunch of HOOTERS girls want to meet him at a local bar. He wants to know if I’ll be going. Ugh. Hooters girls?! Sounds like the worst possible way to cap off this experience….

And of course I’m going.

Mac vs PC

I have a freshly purchased Mac laptop now, so I’m sure my blogs will come across much more pretentious and snide, a la Justin Long in the commercials. ‘Hey, i’m young, slender, and cute — you’re pudgy and old with a suit John Hodgman! You can’t put your hands in your jeans and dryly make fun of people like i can, you dickless nerd! Take that Bill Gates!’

I felt bad retiring my Dell. It was a soldier. I spilled coffee on it, I crumbed on it (let’s say that’s a verb) with asundry foods, and I threw it around more than Ike tossed around Tina. Last month the hinge holding the screen to the cpu snapped. So, instead of staying firmly in place, it would just impotently flop around like Hefner’s junk. Then the plastic casing started peeling and cracking off the keyboard. Finally my Dell gave up. It was like it said ‘Screw you, bitch, I’m not even gonna waste my time and energy looking for a wireless signal if you treat me like such dog shit!’

My first stop at Best Buy was in the back corner, home of the Geek Squad. I marched there morosely with my old Dell, wondering if she could be resusitated by the Geek Squad equivalent of House, M.D. In all seriousness, I was convinced some fat dude with a Harry Potter fetish would wave a wand or roll a 20-sided die and presto, my shit would be as good as new.

After waiting about 45 minutes in the computer service line, I presented my sad little laptop to a faux-hawked ‘Geek.’ When I told him my Dell was about two years old, his whole demeanor changed. He looked at me as if I were presenting him with a butter churn and a musket.

“There’s probably no point in fixing this. Have you thought about getting a new computer?”

“Maybe, do you guys carry Dells?”

Faux-hawks look of pity morphed into unabated disdain. It was as if I had just asked him what sauce is most delicious on fried baby flesh and do they have any in stock.

“Uh… no,” he said, with a wince followed by the smarmiest of smarmy smiles.

Now, I did just get a brand new Capital One credit card. Since this new card promises ‘NO HASSLES!’, I had a completely false and emboldened sense of entitlement and wealth. I felt like the asshole during family Christmas Monopoly with hotels all over Park Place. Don’t get me wrong, I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t sort of looking around for some idiot with a video camera saying ‘You find it and we’ll buy it!’

Alas, the only idiots at the La Brea Best Buy were the ones in the blue shirts.

Then I asked the dreaded question no one should ever, ever ask:

“If I do buy a new laptop, should I make the switch from PC to Mac?”

Enter the box of Pandora.

Nerdo went off about the genius of Mac and the evil of PCs like a Windows Vista operated dingo had snatched his baby.

First off, let me just say the pc vs. mac debate is hilarious because EVERYBODY feels a vehement need to offer their expert judgment. Every tech guy not only has an opinion, but it seems like their entire self-worth and philosophy on life is predicated on this opinion. It’s the nerd equivalent of the Ali vs. Tyson argument in sports.

It seems in these debates, no one really cares about what you want or need; they just want you to be aware that they’ve been in the trenches with serious gigabytes and RAM orgies and virus armageddons and lemme tell you what the real scoop is the great unwashed consumer!

Apropos to the current Apple commercials, I couldn’t help but notice that the flavor of the rhetoric rings very similar to the Barack Obama versus John McCain dialectics from last year. Obama is a Mac — hip, young, in touch with the hopes, dreams, and style of today’s youth. Mccain is the pc — archaic, contradictory, trying desperately to hold on to the glory of the 70’s and 80’s… and with saggy balls.

Like Obama, Mac seems to have won the popular vote, with a view stodgy holdouts insisting that it’s all hype and going apoplectic about the mac like it’s a kid on their lawn. ‘Macs are a waste of money. They’re not nearly as strong as a pc. Viruses? To Hell with viruses! When i was a kid, my computer had more viruses than a Bangkok hooker after Labor Day!’

I freed myself from Faux-hawk finally and found other blue-shirted sales rep to help me make a more informed decision. But they were all, seemingly, in sync with the masses:

‘No question, the mac man… (snicker, head nod)… it’s amazing… it’s the change this country has been looking for… (smirk)… if you get a PC you don’t care about black people.’

I love black people, so I bought the Mac. A 13 inch Macbook Pro. I used a Capitalone No Hassles Gold Card that I plan to pay off in 2012, shortly after the Mayan calender ends and the world implodes.

Upon purchasing the Mac, I went from feeling douche-y to feel that I was better than everybody else that had a PC. It was a quick invasion of the body snatchers transformation. I drank the punch, and it had pretty icons and a webcam.

I returned to the Geek Squad to get my data transferred from the amish butter churning device known as a Dell into my Mac. They said it would take 3 hours, but when I returned 8 hours later, it hadn’t budged.

So I found a little asian girl named Jenn and I started ranting and raving about how I was lied to and I need my computer to do research (translation: to google myself).

She was really sweet and listened to my little bitch rant politely and told me she would personally take care of it herself. My heart rate slowed, I apologized, my pupils went back to normal size, and then I noticed that this Japanese geek was smoking hot. I also, vaguely, remembered that I was single now and that single people are allowed to flirt and pick up.

“So I went with the Mac. Good call?”

“You know what they say: once you go Mac, you never go back.”

She grinned with good teeth and smiling Japanese anime eyes. Wow, she was smoking. Maybe the Mac WAS the right call — even hot asians love it!

“I should get your number in case I have any problems with it, huh?” I said. I couldn’t help but third-eye notice that my pick up ability was about as subtle as a meat cleaver to the cranium.

“Sure,” she said. “Call me if you have questions about the Mac.” She scribbled her name and number on a piece of paper and handed it to me with my freshly loaded laptop.

“I’ll be honest, I’m gonna call. But not about the Mac.”

“I know,” she said with a coquettish smile.

I had no rebuttal other than a silent blush, so I grabbed my new Mac, my dead Dell, and I went to the parking lot, thinking about my American computer and my Japanese future ex-girlfriend.

When I got home, I still had the computer but had somehow, with the magic of ADD and absent-mindedness, lost Japanese Jenn’s number.

I tried to see if I could look her up online and that’s when I found out the truth: my internet was down. The Dell was fine, someone had just accidentally unplugged my modem.

Oh well, I can always return the Mac to Best Buy. At least that would give me an excuse to find Jenn’s number again…

MAKING A MESS IN THE SWAMP

So the movie I’ve been touring with I HOPE THEY SERVE BEER IN HELL opens on September 25th at a theatre probably nearish you and I hope you come see it.

At the end of 6 weeks of being on a tour, I’ve been thinking “What Would Doogie Write?” Or what would the narrator at the end of “The Wonder Years” say. Or even what would Sarah Jessica Horseface clickety clack at the end of a “Sex and the City” episode.

Frankly, I am not sure if I learned anything or grew or matured in the slightest on this tour. If anything, I may have regressed emotionally and mentally. I pretty much went out and drank every night instead of going back to the hotel on the tour bus. After each show, I”d meet a group of guys and girls (okay, usually girls to be honest) and say “Take me out on the town; just make sure I get back to this address.” Then I would hand them a day sheet with the address of our shitty, way-out-of-the-way hotel. Since most of the shows were in the south and the Midwest, people were usually pretty accommodating and happy to be hanging out with Tucker’s proxy.

My first out-of-body experience happened in a bar in Gainesville, Florida. Crowded. Every guy was like 6″2′, backwards baseball caps. The wet tile floor suffused a smell so distinct, that fraternity rush week witches brew of day-old draft beer, sneaker grit, sweat, and the smallest waft of yesterday’s vomit. I sniffed in the Proustian wave of my undergraduate Saturdays, when I was still wide-eyed and convinced I might be a functional and contributing member of society. Ahhhh college.

Some Belushi-esque guy came over with shots and handed me my very own pitcher of the pisswater they had on tap. The shot went down - Jaeger bomb — and all I could think was how malicious shots have been getting now that extreme caffeine is part of the equation. What a chemical cocktease that is: ‘I need to sleep…I must fight!… I wanna watch TV…I’m gonna paint my apartment.’ Dealing with women’s mood swings in my generation is bad enough; I can’t imagine what these kids have to adapt to with confused college girls who have a WWIII of Red Bull, hard liquor, estrogen, and molestation memories being waged through their frantic neurons.

Now, I was aware the shot and the petrie dish of college “draft” beer wasn’t a good idea, but since the breakup of my relationship with my girlfriend, I decided to become a yes man and just say “yes” to whatever was offered me. So, I sat down on a wet stool and put the v of the pitcher to my lips. Mmmm, tepid and tasteless, the same flavor I remember from my collegiate experience.

I looked outside and there was a tall girl, about 6″1′, trying to get my attention. I wasn’t finished with my pitcher so I can’t say she was “cute,” nor could I understand what she wanted with me. That’s when I saw her look behind me to Tucker Max, who, per usual, was being bombarded by a bunch of guys who insist “Dude, I’m just like Tucker Max” or “That book is my Bible” or whatever sycophantic bullshit it is that makes them feel like they have the right to surround him like a prologue to prison gay porn. One woman put it best: “Tucker is like a mall Santa. They all want a turn on his lap and they all come up to him with their hopes and dreams…and questions about whether or not he’s the real deal.”

I knew Tucker would probably want to part the sea of Douchebags for a leggy blonde, so I called over to him.

‘Hey Tucker, this girl wants your attention,’ I said.

‘Sweetie, I can’t get you in if you”re under 21,’ he said with a shrug.

Something I had heard earlier struck me suddenly. Tucker is a huge college football fan and bleeds Kentucky blue. And, like all Ketuckians and most NCAAF fans, hates the Florida Gators and wishes Tim Tebow would get caught in a public bathroom gay sex scandal already.

‘Dude, go fuck her on the football field,’ I said.

Almost as if he was in the wings of a Broadway show and this was his big cue, Tucker instantaneously exited the bar to the giggly delight of the leggy blonde and the confused consternation of the Affliction tee-shirt wearing wannabes.

I drank my pitcher and had a bizarre conversation with a grad student with a rose tattoo on her left breast who kept dropping her thesis title on me. She was getting drunk Gecko eyes and I knew it was close to time for me to go back to hotel Sportscenter.

About 30 minutes later, Tucker came back with the girl. The illegal break-in into the football stadium and subsequent consummation of their love for each other in the world famous “Swamp” was announced, and high fives broke out faster than herpes 2 at a state school in Arizona. Word spread throughout the bar and the high-five fission reaction continued.

The music changed and DAVE MATTHEWS came on the corner jukebox. The dregs on my pitcher was all that remained.

I paused for a second and thought about it. Was I the biggest overgrown loser on the planet and should feel guilty…or was I being given the rarest of rare chances - the opportunity for a “DO OVER.” College again but knowing what I know now? I”ve fantasized hundreds of times about “If I could go back….”

Suddenly, I didn’t feel so bad. Suddenly the grad student with the environmental thesis and faded ink on her tit seemed slightly more interesting. And suddenly, I wanted a Jaeger Bomb….

The I HOPE THEY SERVE BEER IN HELL tour bus is more than halfway done. We’ve been as south as Gainesville and as north as Toronto. One thing I learned is that DOUCHEBAG isn’t latitudinally contingent. You’d think the type of audience for the movie and the level of discourse would elevate commensurate with the slide up the longitude ring, but you’d be wrong. The exact same type of idiot in the south is up north, just with slightly rounder vowels and more gold chains. Some of the fans of Tucker Max get really belligerent and, for lack of a better word, headlocky. When guys want to exert their special form of ‘I just had my first beer’ male bonding, sometimes it’s okay, but sometimes… you’re in Boston, where the douche degree gets turned to 11. Due to legal constraints regarding the events of the tour, I’m not allowed to say what happened in Beantown, but I CAN say that it is not untrue that possibly someone didn’t not get choked out by a producer of the movie in a location not unlike outside an alleged movie theatre… you get the point.

Despite some fancy Brazilian jiu jitsu moves, at this point in the tour it’s almost impossible to pick an interesting story or event that hasn’t been covered by Tucker Max and posted on www.ihopetheyservebeerinhell.com. One of the refreshing/terrifying things about touring with Tucker is his brutal honesty amalgamated with an I could give a rat’s ass what you think mentality. This makes him almost impossible to embarrass or one up. It doesn’t stop me from trying.

For example, during a recent screening of the film in Minneapolis, I was hanging out in the back of the tour bus, which is always parked directly outside the movie theatre when the film is rolling. I was brainstorming with the ‘vidiots,’ the two videographers who have the unenviable task of making me look as funny and as un-douche-y as possible in 2-3 minute montages of man on the street mayhem http://www.youtube.com/beerinhell.

The vidiots and I had dealt with protesters before the premiere that day and we were going over the video tapes of the protest. Well, it wasn’t really a protest – it was two spindly almost virgins with comic con tees, unfortunate grooming techniques, and a blind self-righteousness that could only exist in college freshman and on Fox news (okay, Republicans, Michael Moore too).

For the uninformed, there has been a small group of men and women who have upgraded Tucker Max, the writer of I HOPE THEY SERVE BEER IN HELL, from sexist to rapist. Apparently – and it’s a good thing I didn’t know this in college when I was drinking straight from the tap and trying to hump anything with a bracelet – have sex while drunk is rape… or something.

More specifically, these die-hard protesters contend that Tucker, who goes out drinking and hooks up with women who ALSO go out drinking, is a rapist because a woman cannot consent to sex if she’s had (sic) a ‘few drinks.’ Tada!

Um, I think the calculus on that is woman + 3 jager bombs + Tucker Max = RAPE!

Thusly, according to these protesters (we got them in Raleigh, Boston, and Minneapolis), making sweet, sweet love to a drunken slut is always, and in every way, rape. I’m going to have to tell my dad to stop hooking up with mom.

Jokes aside, therein lies a slippery slope of consent. There’s no instance in the book where a girl resists Tucker and he roofies her or shoves a beer pong tube into her trachea or does some Criss Angel sleight-of-hand and presto is inside her bewildered vagina. It’s typical relatable stuff: going out to bars, getting hammered, making dubious choices, and waking up wondering why you made dubious choices. There’s a name for that cycle: college.

Daniel Tosh, one of my favorite comics, has this joke: “If no meant no, none of us would be here. No means work the nipples and neck and try again in 5 minutes.” Of course, 20 thousands comic could make similar jokes and saucier jokes about rape or consent and there would never be a picket line. Why Tucker? Because these kids look up to him as their idol and something about the written word gives it some sort of biblical gravitas to these whales with whistles, I mean protesters.

Which leads me to this: while debating this very serious subject and how best to portray Tucker as non-rape-y as possible, we hear a knock on the door to the editing bay in the back of the tour bus. It’s Tucker with an incredibly attractive girl – blue eyes, auburn hair, cherry lips, and a low slung floral print shirt dancing coquettishly over small breasts.

“Hey guys, go up front,” Tucker says. We look at each other, clueless as to what’s going on. For a second, I think Tucker wants to show his friend the editing bay. As I get up to leave like an automaton, it dawns on me. Duh.

We three head up front and sit in the common area, slightly dumbfounded. Finally, I manage a sentence.

“So, like, Tucker is fucking that girl or something back there?”

Nils Parker, Tucker’s co-writer, co-producer and best friend, looks up from his laptop computer and shrugs as if to say ‘Yeah, and it’s Tuesday, so what?’

15 minutes later, the nice lady opens the door from the editing bay and does the mini walk of shame out of the bus and into the theatre. Well, she didn’t look ashamed; she looked like the cat that ate the canary.

“Um, Tucker, is there a part of the editing bay back there I should avoid?” Greg, one of the vidiots, offers.

“No, it’s okay, I finished in her mouth.” Again. Like it’s Tuesday.

An hour later, during the question and answer period, I decide to embarrass Tucker in front of 300 plus people. A soldier from Afghanistan is telling Tucker how big a fan he is and how much his wife is a fan as well. He contends that he flew 8500 miles JUST to see the premiere in Minnesota.

As the MC of the event, I grab the microphone : “Wow, you flew that far to see Tucker? If you were a really, really big fan, you’d let your wife blow Tucker on the tour bus.”

Immediately, I wheel the mike to face the blue-eyed nob slobberer from earlier: “What’s it like blowing Tucker on the bus, ma’am? Would you recommend it?”

The audience erupted. How embarrassing for her and Tucker! I am a master…. Until:

“I highly recommend it,” she says.

And he says “Wait, what’s her name came back into the movie theatre after? I didn’t know that.

Huh, okay, next question?”

Tuesday.

I stand there with the microphone defeated. Tucker is frankly out of my league.