Like many other half-drunk Vandy kids, the opportunity to meet the infamous Tucker Max was appealing enough to make McFadden’s the bar of choice last Thursday night.
Filing in through the line, it was difficult to miss the oversized Tucker Max bus parked right in front of the bar, a road-blocking and obnoxiously over-the-top display of false affluence. Once in the bar, one could figure that Tucker Max was in fact close. The TV’s displayed countless amounts of half-naked girls and free t-shirts were flung from atop the bar by sketchy, overweight 45-year-olds sporting gangly beards and ‘staches. Passing these layers of the Tucker Max experience, I went straight to the core, the back room housing the college-legend himself.
Refusing to wait in line, I walked around the side and started a conversation about his new movie, “I Hope They Serve Beer In Hell,” sparking his interest by giving him details about the movie only someone who had seen it would know. This past summer, I worked for the talent agency that repped the writer, and had access to the movie.
Shelton with Tucker Max.
I asked him what he thought of the final product. “I don’t really give a shit, it’s gonna make me a shitload of money.” I told him while that may be slightly true, if he would have adapted his book into the screenplay himself, he would have made much more money. He quickly became enraged and asked who I thought I was, “an agent?” I told him that I would be in the future, but now I just interned at the company with which he signed the deal.
“You are the f*cking scum of the Earth,” he retorted. Offended and shocked by the hypocrisy of his claim, I volleyed back, “Have you ever read anything you’ve written?” This sent him off on a two-minute rant in which he made three claims, each of which oozed more bullshit than the last. “1,” he began “I invented a literary genre. Two, I am richer than you will ever be, and three, these girls are waiting in line to [expletive] me.”
Understanding the falsity of his claims, I was irked and drunk enough to debase them. I told him that his blog was no more than an editorial piece applied online; no literary genre was created, only shifted mediums. Second: if he was so rich, he wouldn’t have to travel across the country in a bus to 18 and over bars for a few hundred dollars to meet fans, and three: it’s widely known in the industry he makes all of his stories up, aggrandizing regular feats into those of colossal proportions.
By this time security had pushed me away from Tucker, but he kept on telling me how I was only a college kid, and didn’t know anything about the real world: A valuable lesson from a 31-year-old pervert. As an ending note, Tucker Max’s new movie is an absolutely terrible piece of filmmaking and not even remotely satisfying to its intended audience, college guys. So don’t waste your money, you’ll feel worse than the girls who wake up next to him the morning after.
