This was only like the fourth or fifth time I’d ever hung out with him, so I didn’t really understand how unpredictable and random he could be. After we got to the bar and had some drinks, I was talking to a hot UNC soccer player, and SlingBlade was playing wingman with her friend. I guess the girl he was talking to was an idiot, because eventually he got bored, and when he gets bored you never know what he’ll do to entertain himself:
Girl “So, do you like Duke?”
SlingBlade [imagine his voice in a low, baritone rumble, like Billy Bob Thornton’s in the movie] “Some folks call it a Kaiser blade, but I call it a sling blade, hrmmmm.”
Girl “Excuse me?”
SlingBlade “I reckon I want me some of them French fried taters, hrmmm.”
Girl “What did you say?”
SlingBlade “I reckon you ’bout dumb as post, hrrmmm.”
Girl [to me] “Your friend is scaring me.”
Tucker “Me too.”
After a few nights of this, I stopped trying to fight it and just went along, because after all—it is pretty damn funny. We’d be talking to some girls, and if they bored us or pissed us off, we’d just bust out with these improvised mini-montages from the movie. Usually, I’d play the role of Doyle Hargraves, the abusive boyfriend (played in the movie by Dwight Yoakam):
SlingBlade “I reckon this’n girl ’bout to fuck you, hrmmmm.”
Tucker [in a redneck voice] “Boy, you shut yer mouth or I will beat the dog shit outta yew.”
SlingBlade “I want me some of that there vaginer, hrrmmmm.”
Tucker “Dat’s it! Linda—I’m bout fed up with this retard hangin’ round the house!”
Random Girl “What is wrong with you two?”
The McGriddle Argument
Even though he can be weird in a lot of ways, SlingBlade is a legit comedic genius. The purest example of this is “The McGriddle Argument.” On the message board attached to my site, SlingBlade and I were talking about a McDonald’s breakfast sandwich called the McGriddle. This is the basic transcript of the discussion:
Tucker: “Dude—that thing looks disgusting. It has to be nasty, with the syrup shit in it. What is that?”
SlingBlade: “I can only assume from your cavalier attitude that you have yet to partake of the wonderment that is the McGriddle. Let me enlighten you. What happens is the One True God grows them on trees in the Elysian Fields using a heretofore unused incantation. He then proceeds to magic them down to your local eatery where whatever Ghetto Bastard cook your McDonald’s has rescued from welfare that week proceeds to wrap it in cellophane and pass it along to you, the fortunate consumer. You proceed to ingest this finery in the vain hope that your obviously overmatched taste buds can somehow grasp the delectable intricacies it is suddenly faced with. Is that egg? Why yes it is, and bacon too. But wait—they didn’t add…yes they did, yes they did indeed. They added cheese. And then, then my friends, they wrapped it in a sumptuous pancake bun! As your taste buds try to process that amazing piece of information, IT hits them…the syrup nugget. THE MOTHERFUCKING SYRUP NUGGET! It announces itself with a burst of confectionery grandiosity the likes of which your palate has never seen.”
Tucker: “So you like them?”
SlingBlade: “If you EVER speak ill of the McGriddle again I will personally force-feed you one while I fuck you in the butt using the wrapper as a condom and then donkey punch you when the infused syrup nuggets explode in your mouth.”
Ironically, I think more people on my message board have commented on that than anything I’ve ever written there.
“Welcome to My Life”
But of all his little quirks, one characteristic truly defines SlingBlade: his issues with women. The first few times we went out, the same basic thing happened: I’d hit on a hot girl, he’d play wingman and hit on her friend, but invariably he’d get depressed and/or upset with her, insult her, and she would run off crying or get mad at him. At first this was bothersome, because the hot girl I was talking to would usually leave with her pissed off/upset friend. But after I got used to it, I was more intrigued than upset. This was a decent-looking guy who was not only blowing pussy, he was doing it on purpose. Who does this?
I had to drag it out of him, but I discovered what is perhaps the most defining story of his life: he and his high school girlfriend, the love of his life, went to different undergrads. He never cheated on her because he is an honest and moral man, but she did not possess the same integrity. She fucked half her school, and never told him. At least not until he went down to visit her and didn’t understand why all these guys kept coming by her room asking her what she was doing later…until she dumped him and asked him to leave. He has never recovered, and still cannot deal with women on a meaningful romantic level.
After that sort of trauma I can understand having issues with intimacy, but he should still be able to hook up. You don’t have to be in love to fuck, right? Even though SlingBlade agreed with that notion in principle, it didn’t work for him in practice.
You know that saying, “Any club that would let me be a member, I wouldn’t want to join?” SlingBlade assumed that any girl that he liked enough to want to fuck, wouldn’t want to fuck him. But any girl who did want to fuck him without first knowing him and respecting him, he automatically thought was a whore…and he refused to sleep with a girl he regarded as a whore. This absurd Catch-22 pretty much guaranteed that SlingBlade got no ass.
Add in his low tolerance for stupidity and his utter disdain for whorish female behavior, combine it with the fact that many of the girls I hit on fit right into either the dumb or slutty categories that he hated, and you have a recipe for hilarity. This is only one example:
A few months after law school graduation I went up to DC to visit SlingBlade for a weekend. He was in bad shape, even for him. Working 70 hours a week doing document review as a temp (the lowest level of legal work), living in a crappy overpriced apartment in Alexandria, no women or prospects, SlingBlade was as thoroughly depressed as I’ve ever seen him. From what I could tell, the only thing that brought him joy was beating his roommate at Tetris. I decided to take him out, get him drunk and see if I couldn’t get him out of his despair.
We pre-partied at his place and got hammered, then went to some bar in Clarendon that was packed with hot girls. Across the bar I see what I think is a super-hot girl.
Tucker “Look at her; that girl is hot.”
SlingBlade “She probably looks alright when it’s dark.
Tucker “What are you talking about? She’s hot.”
SlingBlade “Here’s a shock. Let’s see: she’s a tall slutty blonde, and you are drunk. Cupid has spoken.”
We walk over there, but before I can hit on her I realize much to my dismay that SlingBlade was right: Her hot face and great tits are paired with ghetto booty and elephant legs. This girl had a cover-of-Maxim upper body and a World’s Strongest Man lower body.
SlingBlade “HAAHHAHAHHAAH—Welcome to Zerosville, population: Her.”
Tucker “I need some more shots.”
SlingBlade “Well, you know who to go to if your car gets stuck, and you need a push.”
Tucker “Dude…just leave me alone right now. If I hook up with her, you can make fun of me all you want tomorrow, but let me have my illusion tonight.”
She comes over and starts flirting with me before I can even get my shots down. I played it coy as I talked to her, but not because I was trying to run advanced game; I was trying to hurry up and get drunk so her legs would look skinnier.
Tucker