Someone tells me that Gordie, the managing partner, asked, on the microphone, if I was there when it began at 9am. So I go up to him afterwards, and say, “Hey! I made it…eventually.” He smiled, shook his head, and said, “There’s always one.”
Fast forward to Monday. I’m sitting in my office, bored out of my mind, when I decide to write my friends and tell them what happened over the weekend. So I compose the now infamous email. Here it is, exactly as I wrote it that day [just so you know, it’s pretty much the same as what I wrote above]:
——-Original Message——-
From: Tucker Max
Sent: Monday, June 05, 2000 2:51 PM
To: [names removed]
Subject: The Now Infamous Tucker Max Charity Auction Debacle…
Here is the story of what happened to me this weekend at my firm’s retreat. That’s the last time I ever drink before an auction:
My roommate and I decide to leave for the Silverado Ranch by car instead of taking the bus at 2 pm. You have not lived until you’ve ridden through three hours of Bay Area traffic with Slingblade at the wheel. By the time we got to Silverado, he was madder than fire.
The first reception starts at like 6pm. There are finger foods, etc., and lots and lots of wine and beer. Not really liking any of the food, I start drinking. Heavily. By the time I know what’s going on, I’m talking to the name partner, Bill Fenwick, in a redneck accent. Of course, he is from Kentucky, so we talked about basketball for an hour. It was great.
About 9pm the charity auction began. There were lots of “Fenwick” type items, like a dinner cooked by the managing partner, etc. One of the items was an entire night chauffeured by the hiring partner, John Steele. In my inebriated stupor, I thought that if I won this, then they would have no choice but to give me an offer. The bidding starts at $50. People are bidding here and there, but I get tired of all the slow bidding, so I stand on my chair, and hold up my bidding card. Without getting down. So the auctioneer takes this as a cue to just start yelling price increases, without even identifying other bidders.
When the price hits about $800, John Steele says that he will pay half if a summer associate wins. The bidding automatically doubles (John is a litigator). As the price gets to $2000, I think I have the thing won. I get the “going once” call, and then this other summer, Aparna, goaded on by some partners, decides that she has to beat me. So the bidding hits $2600, and before I know it, I’m on stage, taking the mike from the auctioneer, and yelling at Aparna to stop bidding. My exact quote, “Aparna, seriously, stop. I have to win, this is the only way I’m getting an offer.”
So that just inspires more partners/attorneys/recruiting staff to contribute to Aparna’s pool. When the bidding hits $3400, I start yelling, on the mike, about how this isn’t fair, because she has partners bankrolling her, but I only have a “few scrubby summers in my corner.” I keep trying to bid only like 5$ more than her, but the auctioneer gets all mad at me, and is making me bid in hundred dollar increments. When her bid hits $3800, I get back on stage. After some banter, the auctioneer asks me if I want to bid $3900.
I ponder this for a second, and in front of the whole firm and spouses/significant others, with the mike in my face, say, “Fuck it—go ahead.”
I won the auction.
Now, as you can see, the email is exactly what happened. I left almost nothing out. I may be an obnoxious asshole, but I don’t need to exaggerate or lie in my stories; they are funny enough as it is. I sent this to about ten friends, and thought nothing else about it. They didn’t even think it was that great; I had had some much better ones that summer (like the one about the SOMA party, and the one about this Korean girl who raced me home doing 120mph on the 101 freeway…you get the picture).
That was Monday. Wednesday comes, and around 4:30 John Steele asks me to come to his office. I stroll up there and notice my key card, which you have to have to operate the elevators or doors, isn’t working. This means only one thing…
I get into his office, and he’s in there with some other lady I’ve never seen before. John introduces her, some HR lady, and then proceeds to tell me that I have an option to either voluntarily withdraw from the firm or get fired. He cited certain things I had done that led them to this course of action, like my “porn line” comment and some other stuff like that, but said nothing about the really bad stuff I did. If I withdraw, he tells me they will pay me a large separation sum, pay my rent for the summer, and pay the for the item I “won” at the charity auction. In total, this is close to $20,000, plus I get to keep what I’ve already made in the not quite four weeks I was there. If I get fired, I get nothing.
I’m a little bit in shock, but not really; one of the associates at the firm, who is no longer there, heard about this, and gave me a heads-up the day before. I took the money, thanked them, and headed out. It all went rather pleasantly, considering.
Granted, I had acted a little reckless, but I was nonetheless confused. I figured I wasn’t getting an offer, but I didn’t think I was going to get fired, and the reasons he gave me for them letting me go were bullshit. They had plenty of reasons, don’t misunderstand, but the ones John named did not seem like reasons to fire a summer associate.
The next day, I got two calls, both from associates at the firm. One talked to me on the phone, the other met me for lunch a few days later. They both thought I had been dealt with the wrong way, and independently told me basically the same opinion: I got canned mainly because of the Betty incident, and not because of the charity auction. The one who met me for lunch claimed that he had talked to a “very important partner” in the firm, and he was told that, given my track record of outlandish behavior, the firm was scared I was going to eventually sleep with Betty, or even do something worse than that, which would make me either a huge liability (if I, say, got drunk and set the building on fire) or invincible (if I slept with Betty). Why would it make me invincible? Because if she slept with me, and they didn’t give me an offer, then they could be liable for a sexual harassment suit. Not that I would ever sue them if that happened, but considering my behavior that summer, I can understand why they viewed me as a liability. I was never able to verify these theories, but they made sense to me.
To me, the most delicious irony is that, ultimately, because I didn’t sleep with Betty, the firm was able to get me out. Can you believe that? Because I didn’t fuck her, I fucked myself. But that’s not all.
About a month later, my email started popping up. Everywhere. Paul had forwarded it to Linda Brewer, a Dukie at another Silicon Valley firm, who forwarded it to some other people…you get the picture. That email went around the world, several times, and at last count went through like 100+ firms.
The next thing I know, my inbox is filled with these forwards, and my friends from all over the country are calling me, like, “Dude, what happened? Is that you?” My favorite random email I got was from some guy who wrote: “Mr. Max, with the hope of a six-year-old on the night before Christmas asking about Santa, I ask the same question: Do you really exist?”
I called John Steele a few months later for some reason, and the first thing he said to me was, “Man, you’re famous. We’ve been collecting those emails, and have counted over 100 firms that they’ve been too. Hey, congrats, it was really well-written.” I swear to God, I had that conversation with him.
My mother even got that email. My uncle is a lawyer in D.C., and he got it and then forwarded it to her. Her only comment: “Well, I guess that’s what happens when you can’t hold your liquor.”
I became a minor celebrity in the legal world after that. Every law student and lawyer in the country knew about me. Someone told me that some students at Columbia Law threw a “Save Tucker” party. I wish someone would have told me about it; I would have shown up. Of course, that probably would have been anticlimactic. When I got back to Duke, the Dean of Students wrote me a letter telling me that I should go into alcohol rehab. I thought