I am not Tucker Max. Some of you are going to read this and say to yourself “that Justin Haynes just thinks he is Tucker Max.” I’m not. I have no desire to be. To prove to you how un-Tucker Max I am let me give you two quick reasons why this tale I’m about to unfold is not at all like that.
First, I am not the lowest form of pond scum. I don’t run around in my X-Small Affliction t-shirt with my backwards baseball cap and listen to bad music. Nor am I some constantly drunk frat boy chasing tail like a twice run over coon dog. I’m actually a pretty nice and respectful guy. Which brings me to point two.
Nobody gets laid in any of my stories. Ever. I used to think that was my friends fault but I came to realize I was the common denominator in all of that. I found out most women can only listen to so many theories about Star Wars before they decide dudes like Tucker Max are at least worth the time. So there will be no illicit sex in all of this.
Now that I have buried the lead like Moses let us begin.
Austin, Texas. Spring of 2011. On a Friday night on Sixth Street Jimmy John’s Sandwich Shop saved my life.
About a month ago I was driving down to Auburn to meet my sisters and stay with them for a football game. As I was going to be their guest and I would be arriving late I called to see what their plans were for supper. My sister Lauren told me that her fiancé was getting sandwiches from Jimmy John’s for all of them to eat and that if I wanted one I needed to call him and let him now.
About two hours later I was driving through Bammerham when I got a text message from Justin, her fiancé. He said he was about to go to Jimmy John’s and get food for everybody and wanted to know what I wanted. I didn’t want anything but I did start thinking about the last time I ate at Jimmy John’s and decided it must have been years. Then I remembered.
It had been earlier that year, on a Friday night in Austin, Texas during South by Southwest, so cloaked in a booze ridden haze that I had completely forgotten the day existed. I am not a forgetful person and I sure as all get out hadn’t forgotten a single thing from that trip. Or so I thought.
I left for Austin at around 7 p.m. on Thursday night with three friends of mine. I’ll go ahead and change their names for protection: Cody, Justin (there are a lot of us in the world), and Trent. The drive was going to be twelve hours straight through and once we got to Austin we’d show all those Texans how real, deep fried in cornmeal Southern Boys like to party. We had heard about Austin.
If you’ve never been let me explain quickly what Austin, Texas is. It’s the capital of Texas disguised as a college town. It’s not one of our nice, quant little southern college towns where all the women are in the junior league and the big social gathering of the week is at the Baptist or Methodist church, but rather one of those real college towns where people stand on street corners smoking joints in plain sight of cops and there are more bars than Dollar Generals.
So here we were; us four, dyed in the wool, shaded on the back of the neck gentlemen headed for the land of cowboys and hippies. We rolled through Mississippi, Memphis, Arkansas, and into Texas like Turner Ashby's finest raiders getting louder and more brash about what we would do all the time. Never mind that we were dead tired. We were piloting on adrenaline and we knew we could make it. And you can bet your bottom dollar that when we rolled into Austin, Texas at seven a.m. on Friday morning we had made it.
Of course check in at our hotel wasn’t until later in the day and the minute we saw that hotel light our adrenaline became a thing of the past. So naturally, like any good road trip posse, we tried to sleep in the car. It worked no better for us than it did for anybody else, ever.
After about an hour or two of not sleeping we decided to head into town and see what was going on. And we started drinking. I remember most of what happened the next day because I ran out of money and sobered up pretty good but Friday I was fueled only on adrenaline, southern charm, and reading too much Hunter S. Thompson. We were, by God, in search of the American Dream out there!
We got to Sixth Street around ten a.m. and had our first drink at about 10:05 a.m. The rest of the day we walked around and listened to music. I DO remember seeing Billy Gibbons, lead guitarist of ZZ Top, at a nice BBQ joint called Iron Works that was a ways off from Sixth Street. But mostly we just listened to music and drank. At one place we saw the fantastic Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit and had free margaritas. At another place we just had drinks.
Sometime in the afternoon we decided to return to the hotel so everybody could take a nap. I, of course, was still searching for my American Dream and on the lookout for The Beast so I skipped the nap and went to the hotel bar and drank several beers and flirted with two different women. It was a good day.
At around five in the afternoon I started to give out when I saw Cody, Justin, and Trent coming down the elevator for Happy Hour. Too late now for a nap. We went back in to town and that’s when events become cave paintings to me.
At some point after it was dark I do remember Cody making me buy an energy drink from one of those places whose sole existence is to sell crap to rednecks and you always laugh at them until you find yourself inside one and realize how redneck you are. The energy drink was bright red and in a much larger bottle than any energy drink I had ever had. Cody told me he used to drink these when he was living in D.C. and doing Cody things like rock climbing and hunting bears with his own teeth that he pulled out himself. Cody’s kinda a cool dude.
I was re-energized just long enough to realize how drunk I was and that I needed food. I panicked. I suggested the next place we see, no matter what, let’s get food.
And there stood Jimmy John’s beckoning to us. We approached and had the realization that, by God, we were meant in this world to eat at this Jimmy John’s. The fates and intervened and all would be right. So we got sandwiches.
I sat on the curb out front of Jimmy John’s on Sixth Street while all these weird cowboy-hippies went by me. My feet lay in the refuse from the constant party that week that was flooding the street and my mouth dangled open as I inhaled the food, to tired to chew. Girls with antennas on their heads hawked “Keep Austin Weird” t-shirts and guys rode bicycles up and down the street, splashing moisture from that raw heat up onto my face. It was the best sandwich I ever ate.
And so I sat there in Bammerham traffic listening to a man on the radio have people call in and complain about how Auburn cheats at football and how ‘Bama is the one sacred thing left in the world and I knew they were wrong because as sure as I’m standing here today Jimmy John’s saved me from certain death (or something like it) in the land of sagebrush and sages. Put that in your American Dream pipe Dr. Thompson and smoke it.
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