Sloppy Seconds: The Tucker Max Leftovers

Tucker debates postmodernism, wrestles midgets

Occurred, December 2002

One Friday I met up with some friends from college, who are all lawyers, and went to a happy hour for some associate who was leaving his firm. We began with the Jungle Fever of liquor combos—tequila and Jaeger shots—and numerous beers later, we went to this incredibly upscale yuppie bar where douchebags with 3-Series order stupid drinks like gim- lets. I hate everyone and everything about this place.

Most of the people leave, so it’s me, my friend Jim, his girlfriend, two female associates from his firm, and a male associate. It comes out that Jim, his girlfriend, and I are going to midget boxing on Saturday night. This is a very abbreviated version of what followed:

The girls go ballistic.

They launch into all sorts of ridiculous histrionics about what horrible people we must be to exploit midgets in this way. Exploit? Yeah bitch, if everyone stops going to midget boxing, these midgets will suddenly be- come neurosurgeons. And tall. Bullshit—they just become unemployed. Plus, they’re adults, and we should treat them like adults. Tiny, little adults. If you’re a midget, and you want to box, you pretty much have to either become a midget boxer or just fight children in alleys; you’re not going toe-to-toe with Mike Tyson.

They respond with lots of fancy, meaningless words like “exploitation” and “commodification.” They also tell me I need to read some Catherine MacKinnon, some Andrea Dworkin, and perhaps even some Michel Foucault. Saying those names to me, you might as well set off a bomb in the bar.

I tried for a good ten minutes to let it go, I really did, but with Red Bull and vodka coursing through my veins, and the names of the intellectual antichrists being thrown around so flippantly, I let loose. Absolutely unleashed. I eventually started throwing out words like “fascist” and “not content to let people live their own lives” and “if you don’t like stumpy people hitting each other, don’t go see it” and “these theories only sound good or important to upper-middle-class-usually-white-people who feel guilty about their status, and have taken enough benefits out of capital- ism that they have the luxury of enough leisure time to actually think about this crap and go to $35K/year schools to learn it.”

Then it got ugly. Sort of like her face.

Bitch “This persona you take on seems to be a very direct product of this culture and the construction of masculinity within this culture. You’ve done an impressive job with it.”

Tucker “Aren’t you just the cutest postmodern social constructionist I’ve ever seen!! Funny how masculinity is ‘constructed’ in just about the same way in every culture . . . hmmm, I smell something . . . not teen spirit . . . smells like a common cause . . . human nature maybe?”

We went back and forth pitting our diametrically opposed ideologies against each other on various battlegrounds, until I pull out the trump card and point out the obvious: that they were attorneys at very large Chicago firms, and if they really thought “commodification” and “exploita- tion” were meaningful concepts, perhaps they should look for other lines of work, and “stop being preposterous hypocrites who are milking the tit of the cow they were trying to slaughter.” This last comment hit home. The male associate (who was on my side) quickly grabbed the check before blood was spilled.

So of course, on Saturday I go to the midget boxing with Jim and his wife. The only people exploited are us.

It opens with a dwarf named, I shit you not, “Puppet the Psycho Dwarf.” He was the foulest dwarf in all of Middle Earth and he gets up on stage and starts shouting “WHO WANTS TO SEE A MIDGET BLEEEEEED TONIGHT!?!!!” into the microphone. Repeatedly. There are differences between dwarves and midgets, by the way. I didn’t know this at first, but the difference is that dwarves all live together and work in diamond mines, and midgets all punch each other in the face for money.

After getting everybody ramped up, this dwarf then goes on an unstoppable ten-minute rant. He’s pointing at girls in the audience, telling them that he could smell their pussies when he walked by, and talk- ing about when he has them doggie-style he’ll have extra leverage because he’ll be standing, not on his knees. He’s bragging about his 12-inch inseam and how, when he gets it up, he can pole vault down the street. The girls are going nuts, loving it. I mean, what’s more of a turn-on to a woman than vulgar sex-talk from someone you’ll never in a million years wake up next to? One girl was so into it, she was offer- ing to suck his dick at the top of her lungs. It was crazy. And it stopped there.

The whole thing turns out to be midget WWF. All fake. Poorly acted. I paid ten dollars to see it, and I desperately want it back. And of course, the fucking midgets are laughing all the way to their tiny little piggy banks.

The highlight came when this normal-sized guy—we’ll call him “human” for short—got into the ring (part of the act), and they accused him of wanting to be a midget. He protested in that overly-expressive way they do on “Monday Night Raw” so the poor people in the rafters can see, and then three of the midgets beat the crap out of him. It would have been funny if it weren’t so unfair. You can’t one-and-a-half-team a dude like that.

This was nearly tolerable. Nearly. Then it got weird. Two other “humans” got in the ring and started rapping. They weren’t black. They weren’t midgets. They weren’t even good at rapping. They were just two white guys in a wrestling ring, yelling unmelodic stupidity into microphones. We left.