Assholes Finish First
Tucker Max
2.14.2014 – 4.27.2014
“I was surrounded by the type of passive, fearful people who’d chosen to stay in school to avoid the conflict and consequences of life. This meant I had in front of me a weekend where I could say or do anything I wanted, without worrying about anyone being able to talk over me. This must be what narcissist heaven is like.”
Pg. 6
“Nothing ventured, nothing gained.”
Pg. 9
“When I first moved to Chicago, it was to be a writer, so I refused to use my law degree to get a “real” job. I knew it would pay so much that it’d make me complacent and drain my creative energy. If I was going to become a writer, I was going to do it full-time. Anything else was a distraction from my goal, and a compromise I was unwilling to make.”
Pg. 27
“The harder you push them away, the more desperately they want in.”
Pg. 30
“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.”
Pg. 61
“She assured me that she understood. That always makes me laugh. People think they know, but they don’t know. Like Mike Tyson says, “Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.”
Pg. 98
“In the summer of 2002, I left Boca Raton and moved to Chicago to pursue my calling as a writer. I started off the same way everyone else does; by trying to get published. I took my five best stories at the time—all of which are not in I Hope They Serve Beer In Hell—and sent copies to every single agent, publishing house, magazine, newspaper, and alt weekly I could find an address for. At least a thousand query letters and emails went out. 90% ignored me, and the other 10% rejected me. There were even a few people who took the time to write me personalized rejections, telling me how awful my writing is and how I should do anything but be a writer.
The stories that eventually anchored a #1 best-seller and spawned a new literary genre got precisely ZERO interest from the very people whose only job is to discover new talent. And publishers wonder why they’re going bankrupt. That sort of rejection would discourage most people. Not me. I’m a narcissist and a genius, and I knew what I had on my hands. If no publisher wanted my stories, I’d just put them up on the internet. […] The gods love courage and defiance, and I had both. Within six months my site became a phenomenon; it was getting tens of thousands of visitors a day. I was one of the very first “internet personalities.” MTV did a documentary about internet dating that starred me, I got a Hollywood agent to pitch my stories as a TV show, and of course, the book publishers—though last to the party, as usual—decided that they should offer me book deals. In the movies this sort of think happens overnight, but in real life, it’s slow in developing. TV shows, movie deals, books—these things take a lot of time. But I was getting immediate attention on the internet, and at the beginning, that was the thing I loved the most: the newfound fame.”
Pg. 158
“Even though he was a complete dork, he had that one thing you can’t teach: desire.”
Pg. 164
“It’s not a lie if you believe it.”
Pg. 172
“From any objective perspective, we were unquestionably in the wrong. But I don’t live in some bullshit world of objective reality; I live in MY reality, and in that wonderful land of free beer and unlimited hot girls, we’d done nothing wrong.”
Pg. 188
“I never tried to sell him on my innocence, I didn’t even bring up the case at all, I was trying to sell him on me as a person. If I could do that, he’d argue my case for me.”
Pg. 203
“These people who had set up the TuckerFest event were the very definition of posers. They read my stories on the internet, saw in me everything that they weren’t but wanted to be, and then tried to have what I had by pretending to be something they weren’t. They weren’t out to do what I do […] They were trying to fill the holes in their souls be sucking my essence out of me. […] I was not a human being to them. I was an image. An object for them to use to cure their insecurities and negative emotions. And even worse, they expected me to dance like a monkey for them, to be the person they were too afraid to be, to do all the things they wanted to do. They wanted a marionette. […] I’ve gone through my life never caring what other people thought, doing the things I wanted to do and being the person I wanted to be. But by not lighting these fucking posers up the way I normally would have, I was tacitly admitting to myself that I DID care what they thought. Even though I hated them as people—as fans, I cared. I cared because without them, I wouldn’t have fans, and without fans . . . I wasn’t who I thought I was. So I did nothing. To me, an artist sells out when what he does is not motivated by internal forces, but by external ones. Under that definition, on that specific night—I fucking sold myself out, plain and simple. […]
Better just to truthfully admit my flaws, so I learn my lessons and move on . . . right to the bar and get real drunk, and forget this awful incident.”
Pg. 214-215
“Everything in my life changed after that. That weekend represented the end of an era for me. It was my last truly reckless, balls-to-the-wall, risk-everything-because-I-have-nothing-to-lose weekend.”
Pg. 218
“We’ve all deluded ourselves about aspects of our lives at times, that is just part of the human condition. […] No one has it all figured out, especially not the people who are acting like they do and judging you because of it. Pretending to be something you aren’t because you’re trying to please a bunch of judgmental hypocrites and shitheads is not the way to be happy. Living the life you want to live is. It really is that simple.”
Pg. 252
“…Even if it’s true and they are better at something than me, I don’t care, because it doesn’t matter. What does matter is that I did it when and where it counted, and until they beat me there, no one else will care either. For example, Earl “The Goat” Manigault was probably the greatest basketball player of all time, but Michael Jordan is universally regarded as the best ever. This is because the Goat only did it at Rucker Park, while Michael did it where it mattered: in front of the world.”
Pg. 254-255
“I had built her up in my mind to be what I wanted her to be, and she had played that role so well, that even when I saw something that made me know in my heart it was all a sham . . . I just couldn’t face the harsh truth.”
Pg. 324
“If I really thought about it, and fully processed this statement and what it meant, both to me and her, I am fairly confident the resulting insights would collapse the balance of cognitive dissonances I have about many aspects of my life, and emotionally obliterate me. So instead of thinking about these things, I just started laughing.”
Pg. 328-329
“I didn’t think it could get any cooler than midgets giving people lollipops at a bar, but it did—because of how the people reacted. Hipsters are generally humorless idiots, so offending them isn’t very hard. But hipsters are also a bunch of condescending, limp-wristed, panty-waisted, pacifist dilettantes, so getting them angry to the point where they will be confrontational is difficult. Well, these people got PISSED. I could’ve stood up and called Obama the N-word, and they wouldn’t have been more upset than they were with the midgets. I guess these hipsters knew what was offensive to midgets . . .even better than the midgets themselves.”
Pg. 344
“Karma may be a bitch, but its because I fucked her and never called her back.”
Pg. 349
“Don’t check raise me, honey. I will come over the top and go all in, and I always win, because I don’t care about the result.”
Pg. 350
“Many people misinterpreted a lot of things about my first book. For example, a ton of people think that because I mostly wrote about my crazy nights out, that’s all there is to me—that I’m drunk all the time and my entire life is a 24/7 party. This just isn’t remotely true. The book is only a small slice of my life, the absolute craziest things that happened to me over a ten-year period. Of course there is plenty more to my life, I just don’t write about it because it’s not entertaining. Who cares that I go mountain biking with my dog or that I’m an avid rap fan or that I am into Paleolithic eating? None of that makes people laugh, so I keep it to myself.”
Pg. 365
Tucker: “I guess assholes do finish first.”
Generals Daughter: “You’re just saying that so you can put it in your book. Fuck you! END YOUR BOOK WITH THIS INSTEAD: FUCK YOU, TUCKER MAX, FUCK YOU AND THE WHORES YOU RODE IN ON!”