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S O N OYA M I Z U N O ( PAG E 2 7 )

– DIRECTOR ALEX GARLAND

PHOTOGRAPH BY ROBBIE FIMMANO

A lot of actors want the audience to like them underneath all the acting. “Sonoya doesn’t seem to have a trace of that in her.”

TA B L E OF C ON T E N T S A P R I L / M AY 2020

THE SHORT STORIES

24 EDITOR’S LETTER

32 LASERS NOT INCLUDED

27 THE FUTURE IS IN SONOYA MIZUNO’S HANDS

by Matt Miller How did she go from an android in Ex Machina to the star of Devs? 30 HIS AIRNESS, ELEVATED

by Jonathan Evans Jordan and Dior Men’s new collab.

by Nick Sullivan 007’s latest watch is built for real life. 36 FAST & FURIOUS IS

38 YOU ANIMAL!

by Daniel Dumas Leopard prints are easier to pull off than you think.

YOUR FACE OFF

FRANCHISE AMERICA

by Garrett Munce Be prepared for your next hangover.

by Kevin Sintumuang And you can thank director Justin Lin for that.

KNOWS YOUR TORMENT by Madison Vain And she might just be the future of guitar rock.

40 SO YOU DRANK

THE ACTION NEEDS NOW

48 SOCCER MOMMY

42 WHEN A BLAZER

50 PUT CARUSO ON YOUR STYLE RADAR

by Nick Sullivan If it isn’t already. 116 THE ESQUIRE

FEELS LIKE A CHORE

EDITORIAL

by Avidan Grossman This is what you wear.

BOARD ENDORSES... The state of Wisconsin.

ON THE COVER

CHRIS EVANS PHOTOGRAPHED BY ROBBIE FIMMANO. JACKET BY VALENTINO; POLO SHIRT BY MISSONI. STYLING BY ALEKSANDRA KOJ. PRODUCTION BY KARA GLYNN. SET DESIGN BY MICHAEL STURGEON. GROOMING BY KUMI CRAIG AT THE WALL GROUP. CASTING BY RANDI PECK.

TA B L E OF C ON T E N T S A P R I L / M AY 2020 F E AT U R E S

52 ESQUIRE ENTERTAINS 2020

How to throw an adult rager. 62 THE ESCAPE

by Mike Sager Chris Evans has earned total freedom. He’s trying to figure out what to do with it. 72 AND NOW SOME DAMN FINE SHOES 78 THE SPECTACLE FACTORY

by Eric Sullivan In a small town in Pennsylvania Amish country, a band of tech-heads run a new kind of American manufacturing plant. 86 WEARING A SUIT . . .

. . . no longer means “job interview” or “court appearance.” WHY ARE WE LIKE THIS? 94 WHAT I COULDN’T SAY OUT LOUD

by Dave Holmes 97 THE THINGS HE GOOGLED

by Josh Gondelman 98 MY RACE AGAINST ME

by Matt Miller 100 FURY ROAD

by Jack Holmes 101 GRACE

by Lisa Taddeo A new work of fiction from our most eloquent and faithful chronicler of human desire. 109 MY OVERSUBSCRIBED LIFE

by Kelly Stout 112 DRINKING WHILE DADDING

by Aaron Goldfarb

WEARING A SUIT. . . ( PA G E 8 6 )

PHOTOGRAPH BY SEBASTIAN KIM JACKET ($3,950), SHIRT ($590), AND TROUSERS ($1,950) BY BOTTEGA VENETA.

C ON T R I BU TOR S A P R I L / M AY 2020

SELF-PORTRAIT BY BELA BORSODI See “Esquire Entertains,” page 52.

An award-winning journalist and the author of, most recently, the New York Times best seller Three Women, Taddeo debuts a short story, “Grace,” on page 101. This is far from her first appearance in Esquire: Back in 2011, Taddeo profiled Bradley Cooper, who cooked stuffed squid for her.

ERIC SULLIVAN

Sullivan is a senior editor at Esquire. A feature he edited about the alarming state of mentalhealth care in prisons, written by John J. Lennon, was nominated for a National Magazine Award in 2019. His story on the little-known architects of some of the world’s biggest music tours begins on page 78.

ROBBIE FIMMANO

Fimmano, an Australian photographer based in Brooklyn, has shot subjects ranging from Lorde to Macaulay Culkin (the latter for this magazine). For this issue’s cover, he captured Chris Evans as he breaks free of his superhero past.

BELA BORSODI

A world-class still-life photographer based in New York, Borsadi for this issue was charged with conjuring set pieces that evoke the spirit of the adult rager we celebrate in “Esquire Entertains” (page 52). That’s him above, peering through the lens of a Bundt cake.

K E L LY S T O U T

Kelly Stout is Esquire’s articles director. In this issue, she reckons with a particular kind of existential dread our delivery-obsessed world can inspire right now. “My Oversubscribed Life” starts on page 109. She has written previously for The New Yorker, Jezebel, and others.

P R O P S T Y L I N G : A R I A N A S A LVATO

L I S A TA D D E O

F O O T W E A R

L E AT H E R

G O O D S

T I M E P I E C E S

B R U N O M A G L I . C O M

N O R D S T R O M . C O M

MICHAEL SEBASTIAN

JACK ESSIG

EDITOR IN CHIEF

SV P, P u b l i s h i n g D i re c to r & C h i e f Reve n u e O f f i c e r

NICK SULLIVAN Creative Director

CAMERON CONNORS Executive Director,

BEN BOSKOVICH Deputy Editor

Head of Brand Strategy and Marketing

ROCKWELL HARWOOD Design Director

SAMANTHA IRWIN General Manager, Hearst Men’s Group

JOHN KENNEY Managing Editor

CHRIS PEEL Executive Director, Hearst Men’s Group

KELLY STOUT Articles Director

CARYN KESLER Executive Director of Luxury Goods

KEVIN SINTUMUANG Culture and Lifestyle Director

JOHN WATTIKER Executive Director of Fashion & Retail

JONATHAN EVANS Style Director

DOUG ZIMMERMAN Senior Grooming Director

RANDI PECK Executive Director of Talent

JUSTIN HARRIS Midwest Sales Director

JEFF GORDINIER Food and Drinks Editor

AUTUMN JENKS Midwest Sales Director

ERIC SULLIVAN Senior Editor

SANDY ADAMSKI Executive Director

KATE STOREY Senior Staff Writer

KIMBERLY BUONASSISI Account Director

AMY GRACE LOYD Literary Editor

JOHN V. CIPOLLA Integrated Account Director, Spirits & Travel

MATT MILLER Culture Editor

KYLE B. TAYLOR East Coast Sales Director, Hearst Autos

JACK HOLMES Politics Editor

MARISA STUTZ Detroit Group Advertising Director, Hearst Autos

ADRIENNE WESTENFELD, BRADY LANGMANN Assistant Editors

ANNE RETHMEYER Western Group Advertising Director, Hearst Autos

SARAH RENSE Associate Lifestyle Editor MADISON VAIN Associate Editor, Social Media

PA C I F I C N O R T H W E S T

JUSTIN KIRKLAND Staff Writer GARRETT MUNCE Grooming Editor DORENNA NEWTON Executive Video Producer ELYSSA AQUINO Video Producer DOMINICK NERO Video Editor LAUREN KRANC Editorial Assistant ART DRAGOS LEMNEI Deputy Design Director MIKE KIM Senior Designer

E S QU I R E 04_2020

HITOMI SATO Consulting Art Director CAMERON SHERRILL Lead Motion Designer REBECCA IOVAN Digital Imaging Specialist FA S H I O N TED STAFFORD Market Director ALFONSO FERNÁNDEZ NAVAS Fashion Assistant AVIDAN GROSSMAN Style eCommerce Editor HEARST VISUAL GROUP ALIX CAMPBELL Chief Visual Content Director, Hearst Magazines JUSTIN O’NEILL Visual Director SALLY BERMAN Contributing Visual Director KELLY SHERIN Visual Editor DEIRDRE READ Senior Visual Researcher GIANCARLOS KUNHARDT Visual Assistant COPY ALISA COHEN BARNEY Senior Copy Editor CONNOR SEARS, DAVID FAIRHURST Assistant Copy Editors RESEARCH

ANDREW KRAMER, Kramer Media, 510-508-9252 HOLD MY HIGHBALL

Yes, you’re a grownup, but that doesn’t mean you have to throw a boring party. Which is why this month our food and drinks editor makes an impassioned case for the adult rager. (See “Esquire Entertains,” page 52.) He’s talking about the kind of down-home, fullthrottle throwdown you remember from before the kids and the mortgage and the fear of hangovers— only carried off with a grown-up’s taste and reﬁnement. A hosting high-low mash-up, if you will. And for the high part, you really could do with this drink right here, a simple, refreshing, elevated cocktail whose name says it all: highball.

ROBERT SCHEFFLER Research Editor

TEXAS, ARKANSAS, AND NEW MEXICO DAWN BAR, Wisdom Media, 214-526-3800 COLORADO PATTY RUDOLPH, PR 4.0 Media, 972-533-8665 I TA LY SAMANTHA DICLEMENTE, (011) 39-02-6619-3141 EVERETTE A. HAMPTON Executive Assistant JAKE HEFFEZ, ANNE MERRILL, CAITLIN MORTON, TONI STARRS, SAMANTHA WOLF, OLIVIA ZURAWIN Integration Associates MARKETING SOLUTIONS JASON GRAHAM Executive Director, Integrated Marketing JANA NESBITT GALE Executive Creative Director KAREN MENDOLIA Executive Director, Events & Promotions ALESANDRA AJLOUNI Senior Marketing Manager MICHAEL B. SARPY Design Director JACLYN D’ANDREA Marketing Coordinator PETER DAVIS Research Manager WILLIAM CARTER Executive Director, Consumer Marketing A D M I N I S T R AT I O N A N D P R O D U C T I O N TERRY GIELLA Advertising Services Manager CHRIS HERTWIG Production Manager AURELIA DUKE Finance Director WENDY S. ISRAEL Director of Editorial Operations DIRECT RESPONSE ADVERTISING

KEVIN M CDONNELL Senior Associate Research Editor

JIM BEAM® HIGHBALL

CHRISTINE HALL Director

NICK PACHELLI Assistant Research Editor

1 part Jim Beam Black® bourbon 4 parts high-quality soda water

MICHAEL ROHR Account Manager

E D I TO R S AT L A R G E DAVE HOLMES, DANIEL DUMAS W R I T E R AT L A R G E CHARLES P. PIERCE CONTRIBUTING EDITORS ALEX BELTH, GABRIELLE BRUNEY, LUKE DITTRICH, ADAM GRANT,

Pour over ice in a highball glass and garnish with an orange twist.

C I R C U L AT I O N RICK DAY VP, Strategy and Business Management PUBLISHED BY HEARST STEVEN R. SWARTZ President & Chief Executive Officer WILLIAM R. HEARST III Chairman FRANK A. BENNACK, JR. Executive Vice Chairman MARK E. ALDAM Chief Operating Officer

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M Y AU T O I M M U N E D I S E A S E C A M E O N S L OW LY, A N D T H E N A L L AT O N C E .

T H I S WAY I N A L E T T E R F ROM T H E E DI TOR

THIS ISSUE ASKS, “WHY ARE WE LIKE THIS?” SO I’D LIKE TO TELL YOU WHO I am, as a man with type 1 diabetes: I give myself at least five shots of insulin every day. A Bluetooth-equipped device is attached to my skin, monitoring my blood sugar and updating me through an app on my phone. I must keep this up for the rest of my life. The payoff for all this work is I don’t die. Many days pass in which I’m in full control of my body. But there are times when my blood sugar falls so low that I’ve guzzled something sugary—often my daughter’s apple juice—while trembling, vision blurred, heart pounding. Other times my blood sugar rises so high that it feels as if I am swimming in a sea of sludge, my brain barely working. This is my life. I have abruptly excused myself from meetings. I’ve chewed Skittles discreetly. Once, I nearly blacked out on the streets of Boston while pushing my daughter in a stroller because I refused to ask someone else for help. Opening up about this—all of this—was scary. But the terror is subsiding, and I’m ready to live the next chapter of my life. I’m writing this letter at a time when the world is reacting in unprecedented ways to slow the spread of the coronavirus. There’s no telling where we’ll be when this issue comes out, but at the moment, fear and uncertainty are the prevailing emotions from where I sit, at my dining-room table in New York City. Admitting you’re scared or need help doesn’t make you less of a man. And if you’ve been going through something like this, whether it’s a chronic illness, a sudden health scare, or anxiety, I can promise that whatever weakness you think you have, whatever secret you’ve been hiding, you’ll feel stronger once you tell someone about it. —Michael Sebastian

AARON RICHTER

why we

are

In early 2014, I began to lose weight. I was exhausted and thirsty all the time, peed constantly, woke up frequently with epic muscle cramps. I had to buy new clothes because the ones I owned no longer fit. It briefly occurred to me that I should find these developments troubling. I committed to eating more. Then I went back to my life. Eventually, a cold I couldn’t shake sent me to my doctor, and I casually mentioned my other symptoms. He suggested a blood test. A week later, as I was about to conduct an interview in front of a sizable crowd, I received an urgent message from my doctor. I excused myself, stepped outside, and called his office back. A nurse read me the results. She said they were off the charts and that I should come in immediately. I asked if it was okay to still conduct the interview. She sighed, then said to come in the morning, no excuses. I went back inside and got through the interview, apparently. I remember none of it. All I recall is the panic. Fourteen months, a handful of medications, and one misdiagnosis later, my doctors (plural by then) made the official diagnosis. Until now, I’ve told very few people: my wife, Sally; my parents; my brother; his wife; their two kids; a few childhood friends. I convinced myself that it was prudent to wait for the perfect opportunity to share it with anyone else. Because this issue’s theme is Why Are We Like This?—through which a series of writers lay bare many of our own anxieties—I decided the best way to come clean is to tell seven hundred thousand or so of my closest friends. I have type 1 diabetes. Now, that wasn’t so hard, was it? (It was.) When the diagnosis came, my first child was due in four weeks and I’d just landed a new job. The floodwaters of my life were rising rapidly, and if it hadn’t been for a very pregnant Sally—who didn’t just help me bail but did the bailing for me when it was all too much—I certainly wouldn’t be here, writing a letter from the editor of Esquire. I kept this secret for so long because it felt like a weakness. I’d experienced my fair share of major medical issues: I broke my leg playing high school football; when I was in my early twenties, I had brain surgery(!) to remove a benign tumor. I recovered quickly both times. I beat them. But type 1 isn’t something you defeat. I could barely bring myself to accept that I had this chronic, lifelong disease, let alone talk about it with other people. Quietly muscling through this seemed like strength—that’s what most men are led to believe, and it gave me some measure of ownership over this thing I couldn’t overcome—when in fact I’ve spent the past five years on the verge of an anxiety attack. The shove I needed to write this was an essay by Esquire editor at large Dave Holmes, in this very issue, about—and I’m not making this up—why men don’t talk about stuff. Dave has type 1 diabetes, too. That I knew, and I’ve shared my own diagnosis with him. What I didn’t expect was that he’d write all about his own experiences with type 1, and why he refused to seek (emotional) support for so long. The piece floored me. Two paragraphs in, I knew it was time for me to fess up.

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The Future Is in Sonoya Mizuno’s Hands How did the actor go from a dancing android in Ex Machina to the star of Devs, TV’s TRIPPIEST NEW SCI-FI SHOW?

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THE

P H OTO G R A P H B Y R O B B I E F I M M A N O

A FEW YEARS AFTER GRADUATING FROM THE ROYAL BALLET SCHOOL IN LONDON, SONOYA MIZUNO

C U LT U R E & S T Y L E

had a choice to make. She’d auditioned for a small part in Alex Garland’s directorial debut, Ex Machina, and even though she’d never read a screenplay before, he offered her a role that would require weeks of filming in London. But she was still on contract at Scottish Ballet. She could either continue down the path of a professional dancer, doing Sleeping Beauty for 80-year-olds, or break her contract and take a chance as an actor.

As she navigated the industry, Mizuno kept in touch with Garland. “When I was really struggling, and there was a period of time when I was going up for a lot of parts that felt tokenistic, I didn’t have that many people in the industry who I knew that well, but [Garland] was someone who I felt like I could talk to about these things sometimes,” she says. “And so I think he kind of saw the struggle that actors of color would have.” So she was initially hesitant when an opportunity to appear in Jon Chu’s Crazy Rich Asians came her way. “I thought, Is this going to portray Asians in a negative way? But I read the script, and it was so funny, I just felt like I would be silly not to want to be involved in it.” The movie became a phenomenon. “Everyone had similar experiences in the industry, being like the token Asian character,” she says. “Then we were suddenly there making this really interesting, fun film. . . . I was surprised by how meaningful it felt for me.” And then a chance to reunite with Garland came around with Devs. Even though she had worked with him before, the casting process was rigorous; she still had to audition. He was looking for a female protagonist with a very particular energy, one who could deliver a sad, strong performance conveying action and quiet strength. “I just knew she’d be able to do it, and she really does,” Garland says. Likely thanks to her training as a dancer, this strength is physically present onscreen at all times. She’s almost unrecognizable, and not just because of the close-cropped hair. She carries herself differently. Mizuno says she wasn’t trying to change her posture. She had a specific idea for how her charac ter would move RULE NO. 573 through the world. “I wanted her THE SMALL STUFF, RANKED IN INCREASING ORDER OF SATISFACTION: A DRINK ON THE HOUSE, to feel like she was open and ready MAKING IT THROUGH THE YELLOW LIGHT, INBOX ZERO. and confrontational and very straightforward,” Mizuno says. Garland marvels at her work. As he explains, there “I remember taking a toilet roll from my theatrical are a lot of actors who get uncomfortable with what studio I took a class at, because anything I could do to they’re supposed to be doing on-camera. They want save money would be helpful,” the 33-year-old says. the audience to like them underneath all the acting. That’s when Garland called with an unorthodox idea. “Sonoya doesn’t seem to have a trace of that in her,” He was adapting the Jeff VanderMeer novel Annihilahe says. “And so it means that she feels unusual—you’re tion and wanted to end the film with a dance sequence. not seeing a version of the performance you’re familShe spent three weeks helping to develop a perforiar with from other kinds of films.” mance in which she is digitally turned into a silver It all started with one choice: to leave the world of humanoid, giving Annihilation a mystifying finale. And dance. And then to let her artistic sides as an actor and it happened at a time when Mizuno was coming to terms a dancer come together. Knowing that gives Devs somewith herself as both an actor and a dancer. thing of a meta dimension, especially when Mizuno “I was really fighting against pushing away that describes the way in which her character makes decidancer part of me, and I’d feel like, I’m not a dancer; I sions. Most people, when frightened, resort to inacdon’t want people to see me as a dancer, because I felt tion. “Her fears did the opposite,” she tells me of Lily. like it made me less of an actor,” she says. But with “They drove her forward and made her do things, Annihilation she realized she could be both. “That’s because she was more fearful about what would hapwhen I felt like I actually started to get the work, and pen if she didn’t do them.” I felt like I actually started to be a better actor.” Mizuno chose the latter. She drafted a letter of resignation, booked a flight, got on the plane, sent the email, and turned off her phone. “So that’s what I did, and like fuck, it worked out,” she tells me over tea on a rainy afternoon in Brooklyn. It’s an origin story fitting for an actor whose first leading role is on a near-future sci-fi miniseries that explores our notions of free will. Devs, which stars Mizuno as a software engineer named Lily Chan at a fictional quantum-computing company called Amaya, is about escaping what people, what technology, what the universe dictate we must do and who we must be. Written and directed by Garland, the speculative-fiction mastermind also behind the film Annihilation, it warps our existential views on the world, reality, and autonomy. And Mizuno landed there by making bold decisions. When she auditioned for Ex Machina in 2014, Garland immediately noticed her unusual talent. “My gut feeling is that when an actor is good, it’s really easy to spot,” he tells me on the phone later. “And broadly as well, like, everyone sort of agrees. I never encounter anyone who says Philip Seymour Hoffman was not a good actor.” She plays Kyoko, the live-in assistant to Oscar Isaac’s eccentric tech genius, Nathan. It’s not a speaking role, but the character has one of the most emotional narratives in the film—an abused robot who gets revenge against her ruthless creator. Ex Machina was a critical hit, and in the wake of its success Mizuno moved to L. A. to continue her movie career. After a couple of indies, she scored a part in La La Land. But she was still living the classic life of a struggling actor.

3 SHORT QUESTIONS FOR THE AUTHOR OF A REALLY BIG BOOK IN BUBBLEGUM (750-ish pages), Adam Levin envisions a world where the Internet never existed. The innovations that arise instead are Curios, “ﬂeshand-bone robots.” At the center of the story is Belt Magnet, one of the lucky ﬁrst adopters of a Curio, who is now writing his memoir. Esquire spoke with Levin about this imagined nightmare. —Adrienne Westenfeld In what way are Curios similar to the Internet?

Curios are ideal pets. They could continually give companionship and entertainment, and instead people do impulsive violence to them. The Internet is perhaps a similar thing. Originally people were connecting through it, and now people are just dividing through it. When we look back, it seems silly that anyone thought it could go another way. At one point, Belt says, “People think they want machines that behave as though alive, but what they want is living beings that behave like machines.” How do we treat humans like machines?

People say, “I want to get a rise out of people— either for some likes or to destroy a conversation.” A lot of things seem more about pushing buttons and getting output. At the end of Bubblegum, there’s hope that we as a species may get a second chance.

People always want it to be the last generation that they’re living. I don’t know that I buy that there will be something we need a second chance for. I think things are just going to go on, and people are going to continue being terrible, and they’ll fantasize that the world ends when they do.

The Aviation Pioneers Squad

SUPER AVENGER NIGHT MISSION

Scott Kelly Rocio Gonzalez Torres Luke Bannister

HOW DO YOU MAKE A GRAIL,

well . . . grail-ier? The Air Jordan 1 is already an icon, a universally beloved sneaker with 35 years of history and a tendency to sell out with each subsequent release. How do you top that? Easy: Just talk to Kim Jones. The creative director of Dior Men is a magician of the highlow collab. He’s done it once

already, at Louis Vuitton, throwing the French fashion house together with Supreme and inspiring overnight queues—and astronomical resale prices—the world over. But that was back in 2017, when everyone was high as hell on in-your-face streetwear vibes. Now, in a more muted 2020, he’s achieved the same alchemical hype by taking

The new collab between JORDAN AND DIOR MEN puts a luxury spin on sophisticated sportswear

wouldn’t stand a chance in the paint. A satin flight jacket, a nod to MJ’s airtime-heavy game, isn’t what you’d toss on after warm-ups. This is refined stuff, better suited to the pregame tunnel than the hardwood. And then there are the sneakers: both high- and low-tops, made in Italy, dressed in Dior gray, and finished with a jacquard swoosh. Sneakerheads are slobbering over them. So are fashion fans. They cost more than ten times what you’d pay for in-line Jordan 1’s, and they’re going to sell out just as fast (or faster). Grail of grails.

by JONATHAN EVANS

ON LEFT: JACKET, T-SHIRT, TROUSERS, AND AIR JORDAN 1 SNEAKERS BY AIR DIOR. ON RIGHT: SWEATER, SHIRT, SHORTS, AIR JORDAN 1 SNEAKERS, AND SOCKS BY AIR DIOR.

the AJ1, plus a lineup of Jordan Brand apparel and accessories, in a pared-down direction. Basketball shorts break from the court in cotton twill. An Air Dior logo appears on a sweater— Carolina blue, naturally—that

S T Y L I N G : A L F O N S O F E R N Á N D E Z N AVA S . H A I R : Y O H E Y / D E FA C TO I N C . M A K E U P: Y U I U S I N G C H A N E L L E S B E I G E S . LO C AT I O N : T H E 1 8 9 6 .

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His Airness,

Elevated

P H OTO G R A P H B Y A D R I A N M E S KO

Lasers Not Included

P R O P S T Y L I N G : M I C H E L E FA R O / A R T D E PA R T M E N T

SEAMASTER DIVER 300M 007 EDITION ($9,200) BY OMEGA; TABLE LINENS ($161 FOR 66" X 86") BY SFERRA.

town’s watch of choice was invariably slim, gold, and dressy. The ’60s—and Bond in particular— ended all that: 007 was our guide through the changing times, sketching out an expanding world where the right clothes and equipment meant you were prepared for anything. And apart from a flirtation with early digital watches (as much a sign of Roger Moore’s era as a safari suit), Bond has always been a dive-watch guy. Since 1995, he has also always been an Omega guy. First Pierce Brosnan and later Daniel Craig have sported the Omega Seamaster, the brand’s preeminent diver, in every movie since. For Craig’s last appearance, in this fall’s No Time to Die, Omega is going all out for authenticity, providing Her Majesty’s longest-serving blunt instrument with a specially designed Seamaster 300 in titanium with a “broad arrow” symbol at six o’clock, signifying government-issue kit. (Omega has supplied watches to various branches of the British military for more than a century, but the mark dates even further back, to the 1500s, when it was used on British warships.) But more than tradecraft features, what’s most enticing about the new Omega piece are the simple, functional design, which harks back to the days when Bond first went into action, and the tropical treatment to the display: The dial is faded to brown and the indices darkened to dirty sand, suggesting the effects of long, long service.

007’s LATEST WATCH is built for real life. And that’s WHY WE LOVE IT. by NICK SULLIVAN

T H E S HORT S TOR I E S NO, M R . B ON D, I EX P EC T YOU TO DI V E

BEFORE JAMES BOND, A MAN-ABOUT-

P H OTO G R A P H B Y J E F F R E Y W E ST B R O O K

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Photography: Steve Makowski

ESQUIRE STUDIOS FOR KNOB CREEK®

KNOB CREEK AND ESQUIRE PRESENT REAL STORIES OF EARNING IT, FROM INDIVIDUALS WHO—LIKE BOOKER

HOW WE EARNED IT

NOE, THE ORIGINAL KNOB CREEK MASTER DISTILLER—

PROVE THAT PATIENCE AND DEDICATION ARE ALWAYS WORTH THE EFFORT.

OX F O R D P E N N A N T F O U N D E R S DAV E H O R E S H A N D B R E T T M I KO L L M A K E H A R D W O R K L O O K C O O L

This manufacturing center in the heart of Buffalo, New York, feels a bit different from those old, grainy photos of Rust Belt factory workers. Alongside the whir of sewing machines and the sound of grommets punching through banners, the thrumming guitars of a local punk band blast from a stereo and workers chatter and whoop with laughter. This is what hard work sounds like at Oxford Pennant, America’s coolest pennant company. Oxford founders Dave Horesh and Brett Mikoll take a moment to sip Knob Creek® and talk with Esquire about their satisfaction in crafting wellmade products. “We never set out to start a company,” says Brett. “We made a small batch of pennants to sell at local festivals, posted photos on the internet and went back to our normal jobs.” After that first run of pennants, friends and strangers alike started requesting pennants to celebrate everything from birthdays to barber shops. “Quickly we realized this could be a viable business, if we were willing to see it through,” Dave shares. They bought bolts of wool felt and purchased used sewing machines, running the company after their day jobs and on weekends. Oxford Pennant has blossomed into a thriving business over the past seven years, growing its offerings, its staff and its facility step by step. The company now customizes pennants for everyone from local pubs to global brands to major international recording artists, all while staying true to their brand ideals. Just like Knob Creek®’s

commitment to properly aging its smallbatch bourbon for nine years or longer, Dave and Brett are committed to the labor and patience required to run a successful small business. Both companies know the value of putting in the extra effort—in the end, it’s always worth it. The city of Buffalo and the community’s old-school work ethic are also a big part of Oxford’s well-earned success. Settling in with their go-to Knob Creek®, Brett and Dave reflect on their pride in representing a new generation of Buffalo’s manufacturing heritage. “We loved the idea that something could be homegrown in a hardscrabble city like Buffalo,” says Dave. “And now that I’m a dad, it’s really encouraged me to create something that lasts.” Knob Creek® has brought the smallbatch whiskey movement roaring back to life in Kentucky, in the same way that Oxford Pennant is reviving old-school manufacturing in Buffalo. Sipping whiskey on the rocks after a long day’s work, Dave can’t help noticing the other similarities between Oxford and Knob Creek®. “Bourbon can only be made by hand,” he observes. “It can only be made in the USA, and it cannot be made quickly. Like anything worth making, good bourbon has to be earned.” “Let’s face it,” adds Brett, “we’re from Buffalo. We know how to drink whiskey. And Knob Creek® makes good conversation. It’s a slow sipper. It’s contemplative and conversational—and that’s important, when you work as hard as we do.”

Small batch bourbon born of time and effort. Thank you for your patience.

CR O BE R M O

K E EN T

YOU WAITED NINE YEARS FOR THIS BOURBON, WHETHER YOU KNEW IT OR NOT.

AMERICA FRANCHISE

“ S U B S TA N T I A L L AC K O F G AU DY J E W E L RY. N O

entourage. No . . . honeys. Clearly you’re not a baller.” In Fast & Furious 6 (2013), a snooty British auctioneer has just mistaken Hobbs (Dwayne Johnson) and Tej (Chris “Ludacris” Bridges) for kitchen help at a fancy classic-car auction in London. They are in streetwear. The auctioneer is in a suit. The less-than-subtle subtext: You can’t afford these nice things. It seems as if Hobbs might throw this Savile Row reject into the Thames. But the crime-fighting duo take the high ground, buying the entire lot of rides with cash—plus the clothes off the auctioneer’s back. In a movie franchise that follows heisters with heart— primarily people of color—coming together to make ends meet and occasionally save the world, this is one of the only moments when the series confronts identity and discrimination head-on. When I ask Justin Lin about this scene, the

director responsible for turning the series into a multibilliondollar juggernaut has a faint look of pain on his face. “That’s basically what happened to me,” he says. Lin tells me about growing up as a Taiwanese immigrant in California’s Orange County in the ’80s. “We were fucking poor. Kids would make fun of me for the Goodwill shit that my parents bought me. And you know, as the Asian kid, you’re always getting made fun of, and you just want to be left alone.” Box-office receipts worldwide for 2006’s Tokyo Drift, a sleeper hit and Lin’s first Fast film, totaled $158.9 million. The Lin-directed Fast & Furious (2009) and Fast Five (2011) made hundreds of millions each. “I never really wanted to be rich,” Lin says. “I just wanted to be able to afford to buy sushi.” Figuring he deserved an outfit upgrade before shooting Fast & Furious 6, he walked into an upscale cloth-

S I M O N D AV I D S O N

T H E S HORT S TOR I E S L I F E , A QUA RT E R M I L E AT A T I M E

FAST & FURIOUS

IS THE ACTION

You can thank director JUSTIN LIN for that by KEVIN SINTUMUANG

S N A P S T I L L S / S H U T T E R S TO C K

acters in the original movie, 2001’s The Fast and the Furious: Vin Diesel, Michelle Rodriguez, Jordana Brewster, and the late Paul Walker organically inhabit their roles. The concept for the first film stemmed from a 1998 Vibe article about street racing with highly tuned import cars, which started with a group of Asian kids in southern California. But Fast & Furious, with its increasingly insane stunts and color-blind casting, was truly born once Lin entered the mix with Tokyo Drift. Through this reboot, he essentially reclaimed a co-opted culture. The saga begins and ends with the character of Han Lue (Sung Kang), the series’ sole Asian-American lead—often considered the true fan’s favorite character—and the only Asian-American cool guy in a movie of this magnitude. Han’s introduction, death, reintroduction, death, and re-reintroduction (we’ll get to that) have come to symbolize the care with which Lin has handled representation on and off the set.

PAINT-BY-NUMBERS DIVERSITY DOES NOT EXIST IN THE FAST UNIVERSE.

NEEDS NOW

REWIND TO 2004. THE INDIE DIRECTOR OF

Sundance darling Better Luck Tomorrow, a powerful story about identity in the Asian-American community, is tapped to direct the third Fast & Furious movie. But Lin turns the studio down. Several times. How could he work on a franchise wherein all of the Asians are depicted as villains? “Stacey Snider, the head of Universal, was like, ‘What if I let you do whatever you want? Every complaint you have with Asian-American representation, you can figure it out.’ ” He develops the main character, Sean (Lucas Black), as a fish out of water while remaining authentic to drifting culture. Lin does something ingenious with his creative control: He takes the character Han, first seen in Better Luck Tomorrow, and places him squarely in the action of Tokyo Drift. The movie was a success, reviving the Fast series and solidifying Lin’s connection to the films. Over the course of Lin’s tenure as Fast overlord, from 2006 to 2013, some notable things occur from an identity standpoint. Tej becomes the hacker brains of the crew. Letty (Rodriguez) emerges as a groundbreaking action hero. Because of Lin’s insistence on color-blind casting and an untraditionally wide search for actors, Gal Gadot is cast as Gisele, her first film role. And at the end of Fast Five, we see Han and Gisele share a kiss on the autobahn, creating the coolest interracial coupling of an Asian-American man and an Israeli woman, well, ever.

ing boutique in London and got the same treatment as Tej and Hobbs. Lin mimics the face of the salesperson—which matches the haughty auctioneer’s. It reads: You don’t belong here. “And I’m just like, ‘I have money, motherfucker.’ ” While the franchise is sublimely absurd action cinema, it’s also arguably Rule No. 574 BE THE GUY WHO ORDERS the most inclusive tentpole franchise in NACHOS FOR THE GROUP. Hollywood—and that is a key part of its success. Don’t see someone like yourself Then Lin left the series to direct Star Trek Beyond in other movies? Fast & Furious has your back. The and episodes of True Detective. He needed to grow. paint-by-numbers diversity found in many other But something happened with Han that would blockbuster series—we need a black person here; change everything. an Asian over there; and, oh yeah, let’s have a lesAt the end of Fast & Furious 6, it’s revealed that bian kiss!—does not exist in the Fast universe. it was Deckard Shaw ( Jason Statham) who killed A lot of this is due to the casting of the core char-

Justin Lin (right) directs Vin Diesel on the set of Fast & Furious in 2009.

Han in Tokyo Drift. Yet in the eighth installment, 2017’s The Fate of the Furious, Shaw is invited into our core heroes’ crew, indoctrinated into the family with an invite to their barbecue. So Han’s killer is suddenly exonerated? Fans were pissed. A movement called #justiceforhan arose. Lin first hears of all this, quite poetically, during a 15th-anniversary screening of Better Luck Tomorrow. “Shaw’s at the barbecue?” he says. “I’m like, ‘Fuck! Why would you fucking do that?’ ” FAST-FORWARD TO SUPER BOWL WEEKEND

2020. When the four-minute trailer for F9, which marks Lin’s return as director, drops, it teases a few mind-blowing scenes. A Dodge Charger swings, Tarzan-style, from a cliff! Dom (Diesel) has a longlost brother named Jakob ( John Cena)! Then this: Han materializes from a tunnel. He hugs Dom. He drives the new Toyota Supra. The marketing tagline for the movie is: Justice is coming. “I’ll admit that what drove me back to this final chapter creatively was the idea of Jakob,” Lin says. “But on the cerebral and emotional level, it was Han. And entering from the cerebral level is the hardest way to do any kind of creative process. You’re checking yourself all the time to make sure you’re not just doing it because people want it.” Will justice be served for Han? “It won’t be fully served,” he says. “There will be other things I feel should be explored. As this universe expands into other mediums, maybe TV, and when this character gets his due respect? That’s when I think justice for Han is served.” I ask Lin about representation in the Bond franchise, which Fast is often compared with. He shares the opinion of one of his editors that he has come around to. “He said, ‘James Bond cannot be a person of color or female. James Bond has to be white. That’s his superpower: He’s a fucking privileged British fucking asshole. He can get away with murder.’ ” He adds, “Because you know what? My life would be really different if I wasn’t AsianAmerican, right?”

T H E S HORT S TOR I E S T R E N D S P OT T I NG

first guy to wear leopard has been lost to history. Most likely it was one of our more stylish ancestors, who, after winning a life-or-death fight with an actual leopard, looked down at the pelt of his vanquished foe and thought, Hey! I can make a loincloth out of that. In the 18th century, before Patek Philippe and Porsche became totems of conspicuous consumption, wealthy dudes would don leopardprint waistcoats and breeches as a sign of deep pockets. By the 1970s, leopard was popular with rock stars like Keith Richards and Rod Stewart, who stretched the fabric (and the bounds of good taste) by dressing from head to toe in it. Today the key to wearing anything with a leopard print is exercising some restraint. Want to make a big statement while interviewing for that (appropriately creative) job without being a loudmouth? Try pairing a leopard dress shirt with a suit. Ready to impress your date with an advanced sartorial move? Toss a leopard blazer over an all-black ensemble. Planning to turn heads at a party without snapping necks? Walk in wearing a pair of leopard boots. Just remember, a little of this pattern goes a long way—think of it as the season-

YOU ANIMAL! Bold, brash, and A LITTLE BIT PRIMAL, leopard prints are easier to pull off than you might suspect by DANIEL DUMAS

NOTEN; JEANS ($80) BY LEVI'S; BOOTS ($1,095) BY CHRISTIAN LOUBOUTIN; BELT ($143) BY YUKETEN; NECKLACE ($550), LINK BRACELET ($675), CHAIN BRACELET ($950), AND RING ($450) BY DAVID YURMAN; LEATHER BRACELET ($75) BY MIANSAI.

P H OTO G R A P H B Y A D R I A N M E S KO

S T Y L I N G : A L F O N S O F E R N Á N D E Z N AVA S . H A I R : Y O H E Y / D E FA C TO I N C . M A K E U P: Y U I U S I N G C H A N E L L E S B E I G E S . LO C AT I O N : T H E 1 8 9 6 .

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RE G I S T E R N O W AT RE S T O RE . HARP E RS B A Z A AR . C O M

So . . .

Luckily, you can hide (some of ) your sins, even without an overstocked medicine cabinet. Here’s your “oh, shit” insurance plan for looking like you have your life together.

GET A MASSAGE (KIND OF) START WITH A SPLASH

T H E S HORT S TOR I E S DE PA RT M E N T OF BA D DEC I S IONS

If the keys still hanging from your front-door lock and the tipped-over remnants of “one last drink” weren’t evidence enough, the way you feel—like a shell of a human being—should do the trick. Yup, you’re deeply hungover. The problem is, you look the part, too. “Without sleep, skin cells aren’t able to repair themselves, resulting in puffiness, dark circles, and inflammation,” says aesthetician Cecilia Wong. That’s why you look haggard when you pull an all-nighter, but when you add alcohol, “you can also get redness, because alcohol expands capillaries,” says aesthetician Renée Rouleau. Fun.

dead skin cells. A face scrub is great, but a washcloth will suffice. “Don’t rub hard; just massage it over your face,” Rouleau says.

Cold water “instantly hydrates your skin and will attract water from the deeper layers,” says Rouleau. Fill your sink with cold water, add some ice cubes, and splash or dunk your face.

“The most effective thing to do is a facial massage,” says Wong. Concentrate on your inner eyebrows, the outer edges of your nose, and the lower parts of your cheekbones. It will help increase circulation, drain your lymph nodes, and de-puff your face quickly.

ICE ICE BABY

Keep that ice tray out. “Rubbing an ice cube on your face can help alleviate puffiness,” says Wong. Just “don’t hold it on one area too long.” Focus on the bags under your eyes. SCRUB AWAY YOUR REGRETS

All that booze dehydrated your skin, leaving it dull. Time to exfoliate and remove those

HIDE BEHIND A MASK

If you have time, Rouleau prescribes a gelbased hydrating mask. Don’t have one handy? Make one. “Mash blueberries, raspberries, or blackberries into a puree and apply directly to your skin for 20 minutes,” says Wong. “The vitamins and antioxidants in the berries help nourish and repair your skin.”

. . .You Actually Drank Your Face Off

by GARRETT MUNCE

(Speaking of which, see page 52.)

BE PREPARED FOR YOUR NEXT HANGOVER Keep these essentials on hand to avoid future “oh, shit” moments FACIAL OIL “Oils hydrate the skin and alleviate puffiness,” says Wong. It’s true whether you’re using them to massage or not. CECILIA WONG BLACK CURRANT SERUM, $72

DETOX MASK This gel mask “has anti-puffiness and antimicrobial properties, so it’s also good for breakouts,” says Rouleau. RENÉE ROULEAU RAPID

UNDER-EYE PATCHES Keep these mini masks in your fridge and stick them on while you get ready. Bags are gone in 20 minutes. SKYN ICELAND HYDRO COOL FIRMING EYE GELS, $18

DE-STRESSING SERUM The adaptogens in this moisturizing serum help calm redness immediately and chill out stressed skin. DR. DENNIS GROSS STRESS RESCUE SUPER SERUM, $74

P H OTO G R A P H B Y J E F F R E Y W E ST B R O O K

P R O P S T Y L I N G : M A R G A R E T M A C M I L L A N / H E L LO A R T I S T S

RESPONSE DETOX MASK, $64

Engineered for Enjoyment

the coat to wear when a blazer feels like a chore

T H E S HORT S TOR I E S M A K E DA D P ROU D

JACKET ($1,554) BY BODE; TROUSERS ($230) BY MR P.

by AVIDAN GROSSMAN

LET’S BE REAL HERE: IF YOUR

old man is anything like mine, he likely has no idea what in the hell you do all day. Enter the chore coat, that wardrobe

P H OTO G R A P H S B Y A D R I A N M E S KO

essential from what dear old Dad would consider the halcyon days, when men worked with their hands outside instead of tapping away at a computer

with a picture of a mountain as the desktop background. The classic version—the one that first cropped up on workers in 19th-century France and not

long after in the States—is made from heavy cotton for durability, with three or four pockets at the front to hold tools and parts. You know, for all those chores.

Newer versions, more suited to mememaking than manual labor, keep the pocket layout and come in everything from seersucker to wool. The trick to wearing them? Don’t overthink it. Just treat the chore coat as a casual cousin to your unstructured tailoring and

throw one on when a blazer would be a little too much. You want to look pulled-together but also like you’ve got a couple calluses on your hands (even if they were earned by shitposting on Twitter all day). Sure, the physical exertion you

encounter on a typical workday might be limited to throwing elbows at your local choppedsalad spot, but rest assured that if you were suddenly called upon to reshingle a roof—hey, it could happen—you’d at least look like you might know what you’re

doing. Rock a chore coat and gradually earn your father’s respect. You could’ve been a carpenter! The least you can do for your long-suffering dad is dress like one, look him directly in the eye, and then lie about what you do for a living.

S T Y L I N G : A L F O N S O F E R N Á N D E Z N AVA S . LO C AT I O N : T H E 1 8 9 6 . H A I R : Y O H E Y / D E FA C TO I N C . M A K E U P: Y U I U S I N G C H A N E L L E S B E I G E S .

T H E S HORT S TOR I E S M A K E DA D P ROU D

FROM LEFT: JACKETS BY ASPESI ($535), BODE ($1,554), CRAIG GREEN VIA MRPORTER.COM ($840), CARHARTT WIP ($158), AND LOEWE ($950).

WEIGHT LOSS

THE ULTIMATE

GRASS FED WHEY

PROTEIN SHAKE

ADVICE ON HOW THE RIGHT PROTEIN SHAKE CAN HELP YOU LOSE WEIGHT AND BUILD LEAN MUSCLE BY CHRIS HANSEN

eing a trainer, bodybuilder, and nutrition expert means that companies frequently send me their products and ask for my stamp of approval. Most of the time I dive into research, test the product out, and send the company honest feedback. Sometimes, however, I refuse to give the product a try, because frankly, the ingredients inside aren’t real food. And I’d rather drink diesel fuel than torture my body with a chemical concoction. Like my father always said, “What you put inside your body always shows up on the outside.” One protein shake that I received, that will remain nameless, was touted as ‘the next big shake’ but really had a list of gut destroying ingredients. Everywhere I read I saw harmful artificial ingredients, added sugars, synthetic dyes, preservatives and cheap proteins; the kind of proteins that keep you fat no matter how hard you hit the gym, sap your energy and do nothing for your muscles. Disappointed after reviewing this “new” shake, I hit the gym and bumped into my favorite bodybuilding coach. This guy is pushing 50, has the energy of a college kid, and is ripped. So are his clients. While I firmly believe that the gym is a no-talk focus zone, I had to ask, “Hey Zee, what protein shake are you recommending to your clients these days?” Zee looked at me, and shook his head. “Protein shakes are old news and loaded with junk. I don’t recommend protein shakes, I tell my clients

to drink INVIGOR8 Superfood Shake because it’s the only all natural meal replacement that works and has a taste so good that it’s addicting.” Being skeptical of what Zee told me, I decided to investigate this superfood shake called INVIGOR8. Turns out INVIGOR8 Superfood Shake has a near 5-star rating on Amazon. The creators are actual scientists and personal trainers who set out to create a complete meal replacement shake chocked full of superfoods that—get this—actually accelerate how quickly and easily you lose belly fat and builds even more lean, calorie burning muscle. We all know that the more muscle you build, the more calories you burn. The more fat you melt away the more definition you get in your arms, pecs and abs. The makers of INVIGOR8 were determined to make the first complete, natural, non-GMO superfood shake that helps you lose fat and build lean muscle. The result is a shake that contains 100% grass-fed whey that has a superior nutrient profile to the grain-fed whey found in most shakes, metabolism boosting raw coconut oil, hormone free colostrum to promote a healthy immune system, Omega 3, 6, 9-rich chia and flaxseeds, superfood greens like kale, spinach, broccoli, alfalfa, and chlorella, and clinically tested cognitive enhancers for improved mood and brain function. The company even went a step further by including a balance of pre and probiotics for regularity in optimal digestive health,

and digestive enzymes so your body absorbs the high-caliber nutrition you get from INVIGOR8. While there are over 1200 testimonials on Amazon about how INVIGOR8 “gave me more energy and stamina” and “melts away abdominal fat like butter on a hot sidewalk”, what really impressed me was how many customers raved about the taste. So I had to give it a try. When it arrived I gave it the sniff test. Unlike most meal replacement shakes it smelled like whole food, not a chemical factory. So far so good. Still INVIGOR8 had to pass the most important test, the taste test. And INVIGOR8 was good. Better than good. I could see what Zee meant when he said his clients found the taste addicting. I also wanted to see if Invigor8 would help me burn that body fat I’d tried to shave off for years to achieve total definition. Just a few weeks later I’m pleased to say, shaving that last abdominal fat from my midsection wasn’t just easy. It was delicious. Considering all the shakes I’ve tried I can honestly say that the results I’ve experienced from INVIGOR8 are nothing short of astonishing. A company spokesperson confirmed an exclusive offer: if you order INVIGOR8 this month, you’ll receive $10 off your first order by using promo code “ESQ10” at checkout. If you’re in a rush to burn fat, restore lean muscle and boost your stamina and energy you can order INVIGOR8 today at Invigor8.com or by calling 1-800-958-3392.

T H E S HORT S TOR I E S JAG G E D RA I N B OW

captain of it all.” This lyric—this hazy, candid, could-be-from-the-’90s lyric—illuminates why 22-year-old Sophie Allison (known as Soccer Mommy) is the new vanguard of indie rock. Since dropping out of NYU and releasing her übercool, piercingly vulnerable studio debut, Clean, in 2018, she has emerged as Gen Z’s preeminent scholar of torment. Why do I feel what I feel? What am I supposed to do with all of this pain? she wonders in her music, gaze never flinching. Through her deeply intimate songwriting, Allison has managed to transcend age and era—captivating both younger listeners and sentimental loyalists of guitar-driven bedroom rock. “I have this weird disconnect with people when it comes to music and writing,” she admits when we meet in late February to talk about her sophomore album, Color Theory. “It’s way harder for me to give the album to my family and have them listen to it [than fans]. I just gave the record to my parents and I was like, ‘Don’t talk to me about it. Don’t even try it.’ But my mom tries incessantly. She’ll be like, ‘I love the imagery, and it reminds me of my youth.’ I’m like, ‘Mom, no, I can’t. Please don’t make me do this. It’s so uncomfortable!’ ” That might make phone calls home tough, but it only benefits listeners, as Allison willingly scrapes her memories for tales filled with selfdoubt, self-harm, loss, and anxiety. Recounting such singular experiences has a beguiling effect, as her songs feel undeniable and universal. “People tend to think their problems are so differ5 ESSENTIAL ent from anyone else’s,” SOCCER MOMMY she explains. “It’s imTRACKS portant to be like, Yeah, 1 “Cool” you can wallow in your 2 “Circle the Drain” sadness, but a lot of 3 “Royal Screw Up” people dealt with this.” 4 “Blossom (Wasting The blunt approach All My Time)” has made her a critical 5 “Yellow Is the darling, as well as musiColor of Her Eyes” cians’ favorite musician du jour. Clean landed on several major best-of lists the year of its release while scoring her band opening slots for touring stalwarts like Vampire Weekend, Kacey Musgraves, Liz Phair, Wilco, and Paramore. But whereas that set favors sparse, strummy coffeeshop fare, Color Theory embraces a full-band feel and a punk-rock kick. For those who are lucky enough to recall the days when female rockers like Phair, Sheryl Crow, and Natalie Imbruglia ruled the airwaves, it also beams with welcome, intentional nostalgia. (Two of the cuts’ titles reference mainstays of the ’90s and early 2000s: “Night Swimming” and “Crawling in My Skin.”) “I grew up, when I was really young, loving that stuff,” she offers. “That’s when I learned how to write a song, so I have it ingrained in me stylistically. I can’t tune myself to a new sound.” She adds, “The world needs more alt-rockers like them.”

BRIAN ZIFF

The 22-year-old indie singer-songwriter might just be the FUTURE OF GUITAR ROCK

by MADISON VAIN

SOCCER MOMMY KNOWS YOUR TORMENT

“MY WORLD IS SINKING, AND I AM THE

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T H E S HORT S TOR I E S U NS T U F F YOU R S H I RT

Put Caruso on Your Style Radar That is, if the EASYGOING BUT ELEGANT Italian brand isn’t there already by NICK SULLIVAN

ABOVE: JACKET ($2,230), SWEATER ($550), T-SHIRT ($245) AND TROUSERS ($320) BY CARUSO. RIGHT: ALL CLOTHING BY CARUSO.

make for a brand that hits the sartorial sweet spot. But in an era of creative disruption and sticker shock, that’s surprisingly rare—which makes Italian label Caruso all the more enticing. In many ways, the company, founded in the late 1950s, is a typical manufacturer of the oldschool tailoring that forms the backbone of the made-in-Italy movement. It creates high-end clothes for a who’s who of the international men’s-runway scene from Italy to Paris to New York. Yet it’s the eponymous brand, which finally put a “Caruso” label on a garment in 2009, that’s getting all the attention right now. Under (newish) CEO Marco Angeloni, Caruso offers a fresh take on Italian style that has all the hallmarks of great craft but none of the stuffy/dandy vibes that can put off men who are in search of something more like real life. Its creative director, Aldo Maria Camillo, produces fits that are easy but not floppy, with touches of functional sportswear and tailored elegance in equal measure. The collection is conceived to be flexible and suited to a man who is neither fashion addicted nor stuck in the past. And the clothing, though not cheap, isn’t unattainable—suits at $1,700, jackets at $1,400, knits at $500—and is more affordable than many brands with which Caruso rubs shoulders in stores across the States.

P H OTO G R A P H B Y M E N E L I K P U RY E A R

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Here at Esquire, we’re not against self-care per se—not even in the Goop’d, CBD-oiled, seaweed-wrapped way in which it’s practiced on Instagram—but we do believe that there’s one approach to psychological maintenance that’s not getting enough love. That approach might be defined as: Fuck it, let’s throw a rager. When was the last time you hosted a real runaway train of a party? You’re all grown up now, so perhaps it has been a minute, especially in the age of social distancing. Yes, you have friends over so that you can try out that Alison Roman recipe, keeping your voices down so as not to wake the kids. Yes, you make precise, grown-up drinks. Everyone nods in appreciation and goes home. Parties like that are comforting but not exactly cathartic. Could it be that we have built up so much coiled, toxic stress that what we really need is to shake our bodies loose with more vigor? Being an adult does not mean that you should not party; it means that you probably need to party more. There is a kind of Dionysian postbash lightness that comes when you’ve spent a night dancing and talking loud with friends. That’s the sort of self-care we’d like to endorse. So do yourself a favor and clear the living room of furniture. As soon as it’s safe to get together again, get together with intent. We’re talking about the type of rager at which you do shots and pair Champagne with cheese puffs. We’re talking about the kind of bash to which you invite old friends as well as randos you just clicked with yesterday. There’s something intoxicating about the energy of new connections. We’re talking about creating a safe space for cutting loose. Naturally, employ common-sense etiquette. Passing out? Generally inadvisable. Getting into political arguments? Precisely what you’re throwing this party to escape. If the objective is to foster a feral version of self-care, then everyone should leave feeling renewed and ready for the hard weeks ahead. Maybe Dylan Thomas isn’t the best example to cite here, considering his notorious thirst, but he did encourage us to “Rage, rage against the dying of the light.” These days, that sounds like good advice. —Jeff Gordinier

We’re guessing you’ve heard the term lately: self-care. It’s everywhere, this mantra. We are living through a volatile, infuriating, brain-bombarding era, and we are advised, sensibly, to take refuge from the endless waves of disinformation and destabilization through the simple act of giving ourselves space to heal and think and breathe.

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“This is not a mistake,” says Pete Wells, the restaurant critic of The New York Times. “At least, if it is a mistake, you won’t know until the morning.” FOIE GRAS TORCHON + MARTIN’S POTATO BREAD

“The bread’s ﬂavor is unobtrusive and lends itself as a stage for the other components to sing atop,” says chef Omar Tate, of the Honeysuckle pop-up dinners. CHAMPAGNE + CHEESE PUFFS

They’re light as a feather and go well together. DRY PLYMOUTH GIN MARTINI + DORITOS

“I lick the nacho cheese off of the chips between sips,” says author Phyllis Grant. COLONEL E. H. TAYLOR SINGLE-BATCH BOURBON ON TOP OF HÄAGEN-DAZS BUTTERPECAN ICE CREAM

“It’s one of the most decadent things in life,” says chef Lincoln Carson, of Bon Temps in L.A. LAPHROAIG + IPA

They’re such a natural match that you’d think the hops were harvested on peat bogs. I F YOU ’ R E ON I N STAG R A M , YOU C A N ’ T M I S S I T:

a gleaming Matterhorn of crunch and meat. At Ernesto’s, a chronically mobbed Basque restaurant on the edge of Manhattan’s Chinatown, chef Ryan Bartlow has unleashed the most drooled-over dish of 2020 simply by pairing pricey jamón ibérico with house-made potato chips and piling them on top of each other. The dish at Ernesto’s works because it honors the timeless mysteries of the salt-fat continuum, sure, but it’s also a testament to a different duality: the culinary magic of mixing up what’s considered highbrow (read: fancy) with what’s often derided as low (as in cheap). Over the past couple decades, chefs like Wylie Dufresne, Gabrielle Hamilton, Danny Bowien, and David Chang (whose Momofuku Noodle Bar serves up a feast of caviar and fried chicken) have helped

us realize that there’s no shame in smearing luxury items all over stuff you might’ve picked up at a gas station. High and low aren’t really that far apart; therein lies the pleasure. In the words of famed Chicago chef Grant Achatz: “When people eat crunchy ‘pommes Maxim’ that have been painstakingly sliced paper-thin on a mandoline and drowned in clarified butter, with a quenelle of osetra caviar, whipped crème fraîche mixed with red onion, and a garden-chive point reaching for the sky, they have no idea they are just spooning salty fish eggs on a sour-cream-and-onion Pringle.” These prince-and-pauper mash-ups bring delight to a party—because they’re delicious, first and foremost, but also because they send up a signal flare. The message? Relax. We’re not a bunch of pretentious twits. Here are some of our favorites.

GRENACHE + GRILLED CHEESE SANDWICHES

“Strawberry white-pepper vibes with rich cow’s-milk cheese is a go for me,” says sommelier and Esquire contributor Stephen Satterﬁeld. AMONTILLADO SHERRY + BAR NUTS

Grant Achatz has a gut feeling this would work. (We trust him.) “I am sure there is a bomb amontillado that pairs incredibly well with honey-roasted peanuts.”

5 SOPHISTICATED SHOTS CYNAR + MEZCAL

2 parts Cynar, 1 part mezcal. Like an agave plant and an artichoke had a baby. SAKE + WHISKY

TEQUILA + WHITE VERMOUTH

Beverage guru Yana Volfson is offering this at Elio, Mexican chef Enrique Olvera’s new place in Las Vegas: equal parts Dolin Blanc and Tapatio 110 tequila, chilled—a shot suitable for a ﬂaneur, not a frat boy. MINI MARTINIS + MINI NEGRONIS

Do what Orlando Franklin McCray does at Nightmoves in Brooklyn: Premix batches of cocktails like martinis and negronis, chill them, and then serve them as mini-me versions.

llective, ceremo he co nia t k l, bac

2 parts junmai sake, 1 part Japanese whisky. This will help you understand what Bill Murray told Scarlett Johansson at the end of Lost in Translation.

like shots,” he says. But his thinking has evolved, as has mine. “When it comes to having a rager, there’s always that sweet spot where the inhibition goes and the rhythm stays,” he says. “How long can one stay in that zone?” Here are some shots to keep that flow going. Just don’t overlook the vessels themselves. “There’s nothing quite like a heavy-bottomed shot glass to clack together and slam down on the bar,” says Will Hollingsworth, who owns the bar in Cleveland where I had my revelation. “I want to be able to knock it back. I want to be able to toast forcefully with my people.”

JE se b y ratory act, but do it with fancy fines leb

E N T E R T A I N S

A SHOT

E S Q U I R E

called the Spotted Owl, I did something that I hadn’t done in many years: I ordered a shot. Granted, this was not the throat-burner or sticky-sweet spring-break special that I might’ve recalled from college. This was a composed elixir of coconut-washed gin mixed with Dolin Blanc vermouth that had been infused with chai. It went down spicy and smooth—smooth enough to make me reconsider the lost art of doing shots. I reached out to Eddy Buckingham, an owner of Chinese Tuxedo in New York’s Chinatown, where I’ve witnessed quite a few celebratory shots taken. “I don’t

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GREEN party is well versed in the ways of weed. This makes it all the more important to adhere to the puff-puff-pass of it all. “It’s like salt,” Broeks says. “It’s easy to put more in, but you can never take it out.” Lightly seasoned, got it. Last is the question of what kind of green to offer. First, let’s set the record straight. “Where sativa is generally known to give more of an energetic effect, it can also make people more nervous,” Broeks says. “If your dosage is right, using something with more indica would help you to relax more.” Broeks suggests a strain from Karma Genetics called Happy Brother. Also party friendly: an African sativa like Swazi or Durban, which have THCV. “This has a thirty-minute high, but it’s also very uplifting,” Broeks says. Thirty minutes of good vibrations won’t bring down Kyle’s buzz or sweep up the glass, but it just might provide more of a soft landing than a mass exodus. Leave the oontzoontz of clear liquor and cocaine to that guy who keeps insisting you join him for a “club brunch,” and invest your mind in the smooth jazz and mellow snare drum that is being just the right amount of high on marijuana.

E S Q U I R E

E N T E R T A I N S

When the good stuff starts getting passed around, we suggest putting the playlist on pause and going way deep on an album. Here are ﬁve that will keep the chill, reﬂective vibes going. KAMASI WASHINGTON

Heaven and Earth KHALID

Free Spirit CREEDENCE CLEARWATER REVIVAL

Live at Woodstock MAC MILLER

Circles RHYE

Blood Remixed

ANOTHER GREAT IDEA: THE PONY KEG HERE’S A SCENE:

a half dozen notquite college freshmen in a backyard. Midsummer afternoon. Late nineties. Something like R.E.M. or Biggie or Dave Matthews plays on the CD boom box. Their day, their summer, their life stretched out before them lazily. No rush. Nothing urgent. They’re all friends, but the thing unifying them at this moment is a sweating keg of light beer, around which they’re all gathered, lawn chairs pulled up like it’s a bonﬁre. A KEG OF BEER IS THE NATURAL

CENTERPIECE OF ANY PARTY:

barbecue, rager in 4C, first-birthday bash. (Fun fact: A keg was present at both my daughters’ first birthdays.) The beer is cold and a little too frothy; it tastes satisfyingly metallic. It’s quenching. In other words, the keg is good! Long live the keg! But there is one problem. Unless you’re throwing a party fit for a John Hughes movie, the 165 beers you’ll get from a keg are too much. You can’t spend a lazy summer afternoon consuming vast amounts of beer, so you’ll end up dumping part of it. What a waste! The solution: a pony keg. It’s smaller, a tad rotund, fits into any space, and holds about eighty beers. And nowadays you don’t have to settle for a light beer—most local or craft beers are sold in pony kegs— which is exactly why you might want to. —Michael Sebastian

P R O P S T Y L I N G : A R I A N A S A LVATO

P R T Y GO

many parties. Kyle has four more IPAs than he needs, or Jessica knocks over a wineglass, or that couple you almost didn’t invite has the argument you feared most. In any case, the vibe has come to a screeching halt, and exit strategies begin to ruminate in the minds of your dearly beloved. Even the most neurotically planned gatherings can fall victim to a noticeable lack of chill, and it takes more than a well-curated guest list to avoid it. Weed, America’s darling drug, now accepted at more places than Mastercard, is a party staple that any shindig worth its salt has at least a bit of. But we’re not kids anymore— which means we’re not “smoking pot,” we’re not trying to sneak it, and we’re not messing around with the kind of skunk you procure behind the dumpster at 7-Eleven. No, we’re grown now, and so should be our herbal offerings. Incorporating a little weed into the mix isn’t rocket science, but given the adulthood of it all, the thoughtfulness with which you deploy it is an all-important factor. That starts with how you’re smoking it. This idealized party we speak of? It’s a grownass party. That means leaving the glassware and edibles behind. Is there anything more romantic than a tightly rolled, just-lit joint crackling at the end of your fingertips? Remember, we’re not doing drugs here, and nothing says “close the blinds and put a towel under the door” like a foot-long bong or sad little bowl piece. And anyone who’s fallen on the wrong side of the “I don’t feel it! I’m gonna eat more!” experience with edibles can attest they’re the easiest way to knock out a whole room. Don’t take my word for it, though. Sjoerd Broeks, director of genetic development at the Pharm—a cannabis-cultivation business in Willcox, Arizona—agrees that when it comes to group gatherings, smoking the old-fashioned way is the right idea. “You could be miserable for two days if you have too many edibles,” he says. “Joints are great, especially if you’re mixing flower with extracts. But I wouldn’t have anybody take more than one puff at a time.” Right on, Mr. Broeks. Which brings us to our next point: dosage. How about a metaphor? “You’re drinking chardonnay or cocktails; you’re not knocking back moonshine by the shot,” Broeks says. That means take it easy, brother. Not everyone at the

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Where did this come from? Why can’t I talk about it? Is this fine? They ’re questions we ask because we’re tired. Because we’re oversubscribed. Because we want answers. But the existential questions don’t have easy answers. We ask them anyway, starting on page 94.

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By MIKE SAGER Photographs by ROBBIE FIMMANO Styling by ALEKSANDRA KOJ

Seeing himself on Defending Jacob , Evans says, “was a little disconcerting. I was like, ‘Wow, I am watching my dad. I’m old.’ It just happened.”

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seclusion at his rambling farmhouse, set back from the road on a couple of sylvan acres in the Boston suburbs, not far from his childhood home. It’s a warm, late-winter afternoon. The trees are bare. The sky is clear. Patches of melting snow cover the ground. Five miles away is Walden Pond, where another famous figure sought refuge from the world. With his fortieth birthday on the horizon, Chris Evans seems to have undertaken a similar retreat, returning to familiar ground to regroup. The Marvel Cinematic Universe now behind him, the actor has the time, money, and wherewithal to pursue anything he wants. All he has to do is figure out what. Evans is sitting in an armchair by an unlit fireplace in an area off the kitchen, an informal sort of room you might call a den. The furnishings appear to be mid-century modern, a style often seen in Los Angeles, where he has a house in the Hollywood Hills. Evans is welcoming but not warm, broish in a manner that bespeaks form over content. In person he seems very much like the guy onscreen; his upper torso is sculpted in a way that suggests he’s still wearing his Avengers uniform under his green tartan flannel shirt. His ball cap has a shamrock on the front panel. Evans’s mutt is snoozing at my feet, letting out the occasional fart. His name is Dodger, after Evans’s favorite character in the Disney movie Oliver & Company— the roguish mongrel who leads Fagin’s gang of orphans. The pair met in 2016 at a Savannah rescue shelter where Evans was filming a scene for the feel-good movie Gifted. Whenever they fly to Evans’s California residence, they go private. You would never know it from the spotless condition of the premises, but last night Evans hosted friends for karaoke. I ask him his favorite song choice. “You can’t go wrong with Billy Joel,” he says. (Coincidentally, it was Joel who voiced Dodger in the animated film.) His lifelong crew includes a cardiologist, an engineer, a computer guy. Like Evans, they’ve made good but stuck around, rooted in their home soil, die-hard fans of the Red Sox, and the changing seasons. Evans’s latest acting project, Defending Jacob, is about to debut on Apple TV+. On the show, he plays an assistant district attorney in a small town who finds himself torn between his professional responsibilities and his love for his teenage son, who has been accused of a gruesome murder. As the episodes proceed, Evans’s character confronts his own secret past. The limited series was shot in the Boston suburbs. “It felt like I had a regular nine-to-five job,” he says. “I’d sleep in my own bed; I’d see my family on weekends. A lot of times you have a bit of a nomadic lifestyle as an actor. You live out of suitcases and in cities you’re not familiar with. Doing Jacob made me feel like I was home but still doing what I love. It was incredibly comforting.” His real estate holdings notwithstanding, he considers this his home. He spends a lot of time with his brother, the actor Scott Evans (One Life to Live, Grace & Frankie); his younger sister, Shanna; and his older sister, Carly, and her children. He often calls his mom, Lisa, ten minutes before dinner to tell her he’s coming over to eat. We’re about halfway through our two hours together when I bring up some Hollywood gossip: Evans’s team is in negotiations for him to play the role of the sadistic dentist in a remake of the musical Little Shop of Horrors, portrayed in the 1986 film by Steve Martin. Evans mentioned his interest in the project last year. His only public acknowledgment of the recent news has been a mysterious tweet—a tooth emoji with an exclamation point. He’s been acting since age nine, when he followed Carly into the Concord Youth Theatre. (When she was about twelve, Evans recalls, she starred in a production as Audrey, Little Shop’s female lead.) All four Evans siblings were active in CYT; eventually his mom became the artistic director. I ask him if his interest in Little Shop reflects a childhood love of musical theater.

65 APRIL/MAY 2020

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A cloud descends over his face. His brow beetles. He shifts himself uncomfortably in his chair. “It’s not like, ‘Oh, I love musicals!’ ” he says, throwing up a pair of jazz hands. At first, I can’t tell whether he’s joking. During my time with him, the same sequence will play out several times: I toss him what I think is a softball question . . . and suddenly he’s glaring at me like I’m Red Skull, Captain America’s Nazi foe. Or maybe not Red Skull. But you get what I’m saying. He gives me an uncomfortable look that lets me know he’s not pleased. It’s like he’s just waiting, ready for it. What arrow will this guy sling next? At thirty-nine, Evans is twenty years younger than I am. I’ve never had $70 million in the bank, but I have gone through many of life’s passages. For me, forty was a good age. I felt myself making new connections; things started to come together in a way they hadn’t before. But forty is a tough age, too. I realized I was pretty much halfway played. When that sneaks into your head, it doesn’t go away. Choices begin to feel more precious. You don’t want to fuck it up. With Evans, I sense that I am meeting a naturally shy superstar who feels as if he’s done about a zillion too many interviews, as if he is always being boiled down into an essence that does not begin to accurately reflect his many nuances. His will to explain himself has worn thin. His voice takes the tone of an overworked teacher trying to instruct a student who needs extra help. “As a kid, theater is what’s available to you, local plays. And it’s usually going to be a musical. But musicals aren’t the thing that I fell in love with. I just liked acting. I have a soft spot for theater, because it was such a big part of my childhood, a very sweet chapter in my life. But it’s not like I’ve always said, ‘Man, I got to get back to musical theater!’ ” The hands again. “My main reason for doing it was because I liked acting so much.” WHEN WE MEET, EVANS IS COUNTING DOWN TO THE MID-MARCH LAUNCH

of his post–MCU passion project, a new political website called A Starting Point. It is meant to help inform and unify our divided electorate by providing a series of two-minute videos from elected officials. Organized by topic, it has opposing views conveniently juxtaposed. The basic notion: Exchanging ideas in a peaceful manner is a good way to begin to solve differences. We move from the sitting area to the eat-in kitchen so that he can show me the site. His laptop is resting on a long, gleaming marble island. Across the room, I see the karaoke machine. I wonder fleetingly if he’d cleaned up a mess to prepare for my arrival. He may be on the Forbes list of the 100 richest celebrities, but he still seems like a guy who does his own chores. The idea for A Starting Point began to take shape a few years ago, Evans says, when he was watching a news show and found himself wondering what an oft-heard acronym actually meant—he can’t remember now, but it might have been NAFTA, the North American trade treaty, or maybe it was DACA, the Obama-era amnesty program for people brought illegally to this country as children. Either way, Evans was stumped. When he tried to Google an answer, he encountered a morass of competing headlines and long, confusing articles. “You’re just like, ‘Who is going to read twelve pages on something?’ ” The whole experience got him thinking. “It just was one of those things where you see a hole and you think, I have an idea to fill that,” he says. Over the past year, Evans and his business partner, Mark Kassen—an actor and director he met on the set of the 2011 indie film Puncture—have traveled to Washington, D. C., nine times to film 160 elected officials, including Cory Booker, Mitt Romney, Amy Klobuchar, and Ted Cruz, who brought his eleven-year-old daughter and tweeted, along with a photo of the trio, that “introducing her to Captain America was pretty awesome!” Evans conducted all of the interviews himself. Evans has received criticism for what some have called the naivete of his

undertaking; it’s hard to fathom how a series of short speeches from career politicians would cast light on anything. He insists A Starting Point is simplistic by design, something on the order of Politics for Dummies. Evans admits he felt a little out of his depth wading into the project. “We were just so aware of the fact that we weren’t in our lane. There was so much to learn, starting with the vernacular. Like, you don’t say the word politician; you say elected official.” On a deeper level, he realized how much he didn’t know about politics. “It’s a very tricky system,” he says. “The simple fact that they have to be elected to stay in office. People want to say, ‘I’m going to go to D. C. to be a politician, and I’m going to live by my morals and principles, and everything will be okay.’ But once you’re there, you have to start playing this weird game of chess; you have to start measuring whether the juice is worth the squeeze. It starts with little compromises and justifications, and before you know it . . .” His voice trails off. So far, Evans says, the majority of the interviews he’s done have been with Democrats. “A lot of Republicans didn’t want to sit with me,” he says. Part of the reason, he supposes, is his social-media presence. He has more than thirteen million Twitter followers and a reputation for strongly supporting liberal causes. He’s called Trump a “dumb shit” and referred to Senator Lindsay Graham as Smithers, the character on The Simpsons. With the launch of A Starting Point only weeks away, and a deficit of videos from red-state lawmakers, Evans tweeted support for Justice Sonia Sotomayor, who accused her conservative colleagues on the Supreme Court of bias toward the Trump administration. Despite the occasional lapse, Evans says he is committed to putting aside his personal views for the good of his project. “I’m going to take my foot off the gas [of social media] for a little bit until we get this thing up and running.” Naive or not, Evans’s reasons for creating the site, in this era of discordance, are unassailably pure. “I just want to say to people, ‘You know what’s helpful?’ That’s the beginning of the sentence,” he says passionately. “The site is not an antidote. It’s not medicine. It’s not a cure. It’s not the solution. It’s just something I think is helpful. But one thing I’m really trying to stay away from is declaring, ‘This is what’s wrong with today.’ ” Politics runs in Evans’s family. His maternal grandfather, Andrew Capuano, was an alderman and a career civil servant who was the head of the Massachusetts Department of Revenue. When Evans’s mom saw her son in Avengers: Endgame made up to look like an aged Steve Rogers, she burst into tears—he resembled his late granddad exactly. Evans’s uncle Mike Capuano was the mayor of Somerville. He served ten terms in the U. S. House of Representatives. (He lost reelection in 2018 to Ayanna Pressley, a progressive congressional freshman and a member of the Squad.) Earlier, in the sitting room, Evans had told me fondly of his time “hanging out in [his uncle’s campaign] headquarters when he would run for reelection. My mother did a lot of stuff for it. I just remember those were fun chapters of my life—just being a part of putting flyers on doors and things like that, you know?” I ask if his family background had anything to do with his decision to create A Starting Point. The cloud again. The brow. “Sure, sure, sure,” he says dismissively. He sees the connection I’m trying to make. He can already see the story I’m trying to tell. My angle. So many stories, so many angles, all of them a little bit wrong. “Just to be clear,” he says, poking the air with his finger like a politician at a debate, “it’s not like when I was nine years old I was talking about policy with my uncle, you know what I mean? It wasn’t like, ‘Man, being around those campaigns really changed me!’ I would go with my mother to his headquarters the same way I’d go with her to the department store.”

67 APRIL/MAY 2020

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“I just kind of wake up and follow my appetite. I’m at a point in my life now where I have the very, very fortunate luxury of pursuing what I want to do. And I don’t corrupt that process by thinking about how other people see me.”

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EVANS’S MOTHER, LISA CAPUANO EVANS, IS FOUND IN THE BASEMENT OF

a beautifully restored church that is now home to the Concord Youth Theatre. She’s sitting in an overstuffed executive chair that looks out of place in the backstage setting, an accommodation for her bad hip. “I’ll be sixty-five in about three weeks. It’s over for me,” she says lampoonishly, her twinkling eyes the same blue as Evans’s. After being housed in a series of spaces over the years, the company relocated here last fall, thanks to a contribution of an undisclosed sum from CYT’s most famous alumnus; Evans showed up personally to cut the ribbon. The stage of the two-hundred-seat theater sits in the approximate place where an altar once stood. “The first show we staged was Godspell,” Lisa says. “I don’t know, I thought it was funny.” Evans says fondly of his mom, “She’s a nut. She’s a character in a movie.” Half Irish and half Italian, Lisa is outspoken and funny but also sentimental. She says her son inherited her “crying gene.” She grew up in Somerville and met G. Robert Evans III at Tufts University, where he was studying to be a dentist, she a dental hygienist. They had four children—girl, boy, boy, girl. Evans is the second. “I thought they were the most beautiful things on the planet,” Lisa says. “But really, they were just goofy looking, average. They all had crooked teeth and silly haircuts and dorky clothes, and they didn’t care.” When Evans was in third grade, his family moved to Sudbury from a neighboring town. Carly, the eldest by three years, began taking classes at CYT. Soon after, her brothers began to agitate to join. “We’d come to see Carly’s shows,” Lisa remembers, “and the boys would say, ‘Wait a minute, we sit in the audience, and she gets to sing, she gets to dance, she gets to do all this stuff, and then afterward she gets candy and flowers and we take her out to dinner. We want to do this!’ ” By the time Evans was a junior at Lincoln-Sudbury Regional High School, he was deeply involved in theater. “His focus became very myopic,” Lisa says. “The director of the drama program made the kids do Shakespeare and Dario Fo and Pirandello. Chris loved it. Even at that young age, you could tell he understood what he was reading. He would portray a character in a way that might be a little different than what you might expect. Just very interesting choices.” One day, Evans came to her wearing a serious expression. “I know what I want to do with the rest of my life,” he told her. That summer, he went to work for an agent in New York. His parents covered his rent. Using his new connections, he found an agent to represent him. By January of his senior year, Evans had landed a role on Opposite Sex, a short-lived show that aired on Fox in 2000. He moved to Los Angeles and spent the next decade hustling for parts—a slacker jock in Not Another Teen Movie, Johnny Storm in Fantastic Four, a skateboarding foe in Scott Pilgrim vs. the World. Then he got the offer to play Captain America, no audition necessary. At first, he said no. “His biggest fear was losing his anonymity,” Lisa recalls. “He said, ‘I have a career now where I can do work I really like. I can walk my dog. Nobody bothers me. Nobody wants to talk to me. I can go wherever I want. And the idea of losing that is terrifying to me.’ “He would call and ask for my advice,” she says. “I said to him, ‘Look, you want to do acting work for the rest of your life? If you do this part, you will have the opportunity. You’ll never have to worry about paying the rent. If you take the part, you just have to decide, It’s not going to affect my life negatively—it will enable it.’ ” B AC K AT H O M E , E VA N S I S TA L K I N G A B O U T H I S C H A R AC T E R O N

Defending Jacob. He says he drew a lot from his close relationship with his dad, who encouraged him to play soccer and lacrosse in addition to acting.

His parents divorced in 1999, just after Evans moved to Los Angeles to film the pilot for Opposite Sex. “I was supposed to be G. Robert Evans IV,” he says. “I would’ve been Bobby, but my mother was in love with the name Chris. So my dad gave it to her.” After his father remarried, he started a second family. Evans now has a stepbrother named G. Robert Evans IV. “My dad was very happy to pass that on. I always wondered if I would have been a good Bobby. I’m glad I’m Chris. I would’ve been honored to have had that moniker, be in that lineage. But Chris is good, too.” Evans says he might not have “lasted in this business without my father’s pragmatism and his curiosity. I think my dad’s level head is the thing that makes getting up every day possible for me.” When Evans saw the final cut of Defending Jacob, he says, “it was a little disconcerting. A lot of scenes where I’m doing certain things, like, for instance, my character’s morning routine in the kitchen—there was the tie, the cup of coffee, and I was like, ‘Wow, I am watching my dad. I’m old.’ It just happened.” With our time coming to a close, Evans suggests we let Dodger outside. The French doors open onto a stone patio bordered by a low rock wall. Dodger rushes past us and into the grass to do his business. Looking for a way to sum things up, I tell Evans he kind of reminds me of a young George Clooney. It is meant as a compliment. Sort of like: He is a Clooney for a new generation—an affable, handsome, respected, and respectable male star with a great Q rating and a desire to do good works. The cloud again. The brow. A look like he’s just tasted something bad. “I don’t really think much about those things,” he says. “I actually think it’s a little bit of a slippery slope.” And here we are again. Maybe it’s nonsensical to ask such a question. Maybe I’ve run out of salient things to ask. I have watched all but three of his thirty-six movies. You do that, study someone’s work and life, and you grow somewhat fond of them, at least I did with Evans. And I want him to know my intentions. “I’m not here to fuck with you,” I say. “Okay,” he replies. “But that’s what this seems like.” Evans hops up on the rock wall and begins to walk along the top, casually playing like he’s on a tightrope, the way people do. He stops and turns. “I don’t put myself in a box. I don’t have some huge plan in terms of what my goals are. I just kind of wake up and follow my appetite. I’m at a point in my life now where I have the very, very fortunate luxury of pursuing what I want to do. And I don’t corrupt that process by thinking about how other people see me.” We stand a minute in the waning sunshine. Dodger trots up and takes a seat on his haunches on the grass nearby, posing like a statue, gazing solemnly outward. Before us spreads Evans’s front acreage. Surrounded by a weathered, split-rail fence, it slopes down a slight incline toward a rural lane. “Look at that guy,” he says, nodding toward Dodger. “I love the way he’s just sitting there,” he continues. “He’s just looking. He’s not trying to process. It’s like, the worst thing about people is the way we can see the setting sun or something equally beautiful, and for a split second it’s great—but then very quickly your brain wants to know, What does this have to do with me? And right away the greatness goes away.” Evans turns to face me. “They say in Buddhism you need the boat to cross the river, but once you cross the river, you don’t need the boat,” he says. “This guy right here is a perfect being. Look at him. He’s not asking, What does this have to do with me? He’s just sitting there, experiencing what life has to offer. I’m trying to be the same.” He hops off the wall and heads inside.

71 APRIL/MAY 2020

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THE SPECTACLE FACTORY Out in the cornfields of Pennsylvania Amish country, a band of creative tech-heads run a new kind of American industry. They donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t manufacture pickup trucks or frying pans. They make enormous, pyrotechnic, live concert experiences for the biggest stars in the world. by E R IC S U L L I VA N

photographs by FREDRIK BRODEN

Above: The rehearsal space at Rock Lititz, known as the Studio. Opposite: The companies based near Lititz, Pennsylvania, have helped produce seventeen of the twenty highest-grossing tours of all time.

GARY IN 2019, BTS BECAME THE FIRST BAND since the Beatles to release

three number-one records on the Billboard charts in the same year. One song amassed 74.6 million plays on YouTube in just twenty-four hours. They sold out Wembley Stadium in ninety minutes, were named one of Time’s 100 Most Influential People, and set the Guinness World Record for the most Twitter engagements. BTS is an international juggernaut. And all that is making Gary Ferenchak a little nervous. Ferenchak, who’s fifty-six, sleeps some nights in a double slide-out CrossRoads Zinger camper in the gravel lot at the edge of a cornfield in Lititz, Pennsylvania. Parked outside is a ’95 Subaru Legacy, his regular drive, and a ’92 Geo Tracker with locking hubs, which he’s trying to sell. Next door is a building known as the Studio, a fifty-two-thousand-square-foot box sheathed in matte black sheet metal. It stands one hundred feet tall and has four loading docks and a door that a semi can drive through. A grid of steel beams along its ceiling can hold up to one million pounds of chains, motors, bumpers, trusses, lights, speakers, and screens. The Studio is the greatest rehearsal space in the world, used by the biggest acts in the world. Including, in a few weeks, BTS. They have booked the Studio for almost a month to practice for their summer tour. The Studio is part of a larger operation called Rock Lititz, a ninety-six–acre campus that also sports a hotel and a cluster of businesses specializing in liveevent production—concerts, as well as product launches, theme parks, cruise lines, and e-sports. Anything live and huge. The town, in Lancaster County, has been home to a sound company and a staging company for decades. But since opening the Studio in 2014 and estab-

lishing Rock Lititz, its owners have adapted to the new reality in the music industry: Record sales are a fraction of what they once were, and while streaming has helped the bottom line, the big money is in touring. For a major band planning a major tour, the companies that constitute Rock Lititz aim to be a one-stop shop: They build the stage, they design the lighting, they do the sound, and after a couple days or a week or a month of rehearsals, they send you off to tour the world. BTS is sending ahead thirty shipping containers of equipment, which will become Ferenchak’s temporary new neighbors. The production will be one of the biggest that Rock Lititz has hosted—as massive as Taylor Swift’s Reputation tour in 2018, which became the top-grossing concert tour in U. S. history. The first time he saw the Studio, Ferenchak thought, This looks like an organ-harvesting facility. Ominous. A big black box in the middle of nothing. That was back in 2014, when he retired from life on the road, after twenty-five years as a sound engineer, to join Rock Lititz as the Studio’s production and operations manager. He takes care of anything within its walls: ensuring the day’s local labor is set, checking in on catering, answering a truck driver’s question at the dock, replacing toilet paper. Once, during rehearsals for her 2016 Formation tour, Beyoncé needed someone to administer her B12 shot. It was Sunday night, and Ferenchak thought at first he’d have to call in the only ambulance service in Lititz. Then he realized he didn’t: His niece, a nursing student who was moonlighting as a show runner, was qualified to administer it. Sturdy, built like a barrel, with a thick gray beard and slate-blue eyes, Ferenchak is always in shorts, cargo pockets preferred. The camper is only for late nights. He owns a house fifty miles east, in Pottstown, a bungalow with a three-car garage out back. Outside, under covers, sit two Mustangs and a Triumph. Inside the garage are another Mustang, six motorcycles, an ’87

Left: Before managing the Studio, Gary Ferenchak spent twenty-five years touring with acts like Gwar, Selena Gomez, and Wiz Khalifa. Right: A close-up of the “Elvis Board,” the console Clair Brothers built for Presley.

80 A P R I L / M AY 2020

Left: Michael Tait moved to Lititz and went on to build the greatest staging company in live music, Tait Towers. Center: Part of Roger Waters’s The Wall, repurposed as decoration. Right: Troy Clair leads Clair Global, the pioneering sound company started by his father and uncle in 1966.

Mercury Colony Park wagon, and eighteen bicycles. The commute is not ideal, and a camper isn’t a home. But he makes it work. Besides, Ferenchak likes this weird oasis, Rock Lititz, where a band of smart and resourceful misfits build dreams for superstars. A few years ago, David Byrne came to practice for his show American Utopia, and it fell to Ferenchak to pick him up at the Lancaster train station. As they wound past centuries-old farms, Byrne was mostly quiet, scanning the landscape. He waved at an Amish woman on a scooter bike, bonneted and barefoot. She waved back. Ferenchak takes great pride in the Studio. But more than that, he is proud of the community that built it, the people he works for and with. He looks forward to the moment an artist first walks into the space, marveling at the grid, highfiving over the eight gray electrical boxes that provide up to thirty-two hundred amps of electrical current. But it is the size of the room, its vastness, that causes jaws to slacken, eyes to gaze upward, silent awe to settle in. Ferenchak has always been better at taking care of others, which he chalks up to his days on the road, being the guy behind the guy. To him, self-care is a

THERE IS A TRUISM IN THE TECH WORLD: As time passes, hardware shrinks. Speaker columns that decades ago weighed six thousand pounds each? These days they’re twenty-five hundred. The cargo space required to fit audio gear has gone from two trucks to one, then to three quarters, then to two thirds. Which, far from saving tours money, just means there’s room to add more stuff to the show. Whereas artists once needed only a lighting technician and a sound technician, they now have a video person, an automation person, maybe a laser expert, maybe even a drone operator. Touring plays a much larger role in a major artist’s revenue stream—around 80 percent—than it did in the days when fans paid for albums. In 1999, the year Napster launched, music sales in the U. S. totaled $22.3 billion. By 2019, that number had dropped to $11.1 billion. At the same time, ticket prices rose, from $25.81 in 1996 to $96.71 last year, and so did the spectacle of each show. Fans are not just paying to make up for lost album sales; they’re paying for the drone operator. Every show has to be perfect. Artists and their crews need to practice. Before

W H Y I S L I T I T Z , P E N NSY LVA N I A , P O P U L AT I ON N I N E T Y- F O U R H U N D R E D ON A G O O D DAY, S U D D E N LY T H E P L AC E W H E R E EV E RY T O U R I NG M E G A S TA R M U S T G O?

pair of comfortable shoes. He could move closer to Lititz. First, he’d have to clean out the garage in Pottstown, and . . . bahhh. But most of his friends live in Philadelphia, and getting together is harder each year. Might be nice to live and work in the same place. Have a life. Maybe he’ll look into it once this BTS thing is over. HOW DOES THIS HAPPEN? When a place becomes so closely associated with

an industry or a thing—the Louisville Slugger, Carolina barbecue sauce, Silicon Valley tech—we assume there were faceless market forces at play. How did Hartford come to be the insurance capital of the world? Who knows? But there’s always a story, and that story is never about market forces. It’s about people. Why is Lititz, Pennsylvania, population ninety-four hundred on a good day, a mere two-point-three square miles, suddenly the place where every touring megastar must go? There is indeed a story, and it is a story about people.

Rock Lititz, the venues available for rehearsals typically included the local crumbling hockey arena. The production office? A locker room that might as well have been inside a jockstrap. This grew increasingly annoying as shows became more ambitious, requiring more rehearsal—and more time in the jockstrap. With the Studio, artists now have a place for all that. Once Hotel Rock Lititz opened in 2018 and their bed was across the parking lot? That was just icing. Business is good, in part because of the Studio’s fair rates: $7,500 a day, give or take, mostly inclusive. For tour managers who budget $10,000 a night on hotel rooms alone, that number doesn’t raise one hair of an eyebrow. In its first year, the Studio was at about 30 percent capacity; last year, it was booked at around 85 percent. ROY & GENE THE STORY OF ROCK LITITZ starts with a Christmas gift.

In 1955, a man named Roy Clair, who used to work in the local mousetrap factory before opening a grocery store (Clair’s), bought a PA system for his two

8 1 A P R I L / M AY 2020

sons, Roy Jr., twelve, and Gene, fifteen. The Lititz boys had taken an interest in helping out with the sound for sports events and school dances. The middle class was rising after World War II, and teens started carrying more pocket change, a lot of which they spent on LPs and 45’s. Record labels spotted a new revenue stream: Send their rosters out on the road. Musicians were getting used to the technological advancements in recording studios and were losing patience with playing their hits through tinny speakers strung up at the local rec center. But there was no such thing as an audio company dedicated to touring. The Clair boys kept working local gigs. In 1966, they were asked to run the sound at a Dionne Warwick show at nearby Franklin & Marshall College. That led to a job with Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons, and Valli invited Roy and Gene to work again on a three-night run in Columbus, Toledo, and Cincinnati. The brothers netted forty dollars. As far as anyone could tell, it was the first time an audio company had gone on tour. Lititz began as a planned community, built in 1756 by the Moravian Church, in the middle of Warwick township, which surrounds it like a doughnut. For the next century, only Moravians, an old Protestant denomination, were permitted to live there. Opened to non-Moravians in 1855, the town fostered a culture of diligence and rectitude that was passed down to each generation. Roy and Gene were very much of the place they were raised: hard workers, not hippies, looking for opportunity, not easy money. When Frankie Valli advised them to leave Lititz if they wanted to make it big, they left Frankie Valli. The Four Seasons had gone stale anyway, and the brothers felt they needed to impress a band with more clout. In 1968, they did, at the Spectrum in Philadelphia. The headliner: Cream, for their farewell tour. The Clairs had never worked an arena, but they knew that the tube amps of the time stood no chance of filling the space with sound. They found what they were looking for in the Crown DC 300, the first widely available solid-state amp, by Clarence Moore, an Indiana minister turned engineer. Cream onstage, with the Clair brothers at the soundboard? They shook the rafters. RUSSELL RUSSELL SNAVELY ENTERED THE STORY IN 1974, when he took a job at

Top: A welder at Atomic, one of the more than thirty companies located on the Rock Lititz campus. Bottom: The tour-prep area for Clair Global.

what was now Clair Brothers Audio. Snavely is sixty-seven now, as lean as he was growing up in Lititz. Lived here his whole life. He graduated from Warwick High, just like his parents, and got a job at a planing mill, putting to use the woodworking skills he’d learned from his grandfather, a builder of lawn ornaments. One night, at one of his haunts, Snavely struck up a conversation with some guys from Clair Brothers who needed help loading gear for an upcoming tour with the prog-rock band Yes. Snavely jumped. Why? “Three words,” he says. “Sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll.” But he was good with wood, so instead of having him go on tour, Roy and Gene put him in the shop—which, beyond the obvious bummers, earned him thirty dollars less each week than road pay. One of Snavely’s first projects was building the S4, a four-way speaker in a box of birch plywood, with a mix of woofers, midranges, and tweeters that together covered the full auditory spectrum. Each cabinet weighed about 425 pounds. By attaching sixteen S4’s on a bumper bar and raising them above the crowd, Clair Brothers introduced an entirely new way of rigging audio: Rather than sending sound waves along the floor level, as ground-stacked speakers did, the flown speakers blanketed the crowd from on high. The acoustics improved for every seat in the house, even the nosebleeds. Mick Jagger first heard a cluster of S4’s in Los Angeles, at one of Rod Stewart’s last shows with Faces, and decided the Rolling Stones must have the speakers, too. The S4 marked the moment that Clair Brothers Audio went from a sound company to a sound-reinforcement company—capable of building and breaking down massive audio systems in mere hours. The S4’s were designed for portability: They fit two wide in the bed of a semitruck, with no wasted space. Turned 90 degrees, they fit four wide in a European truck. Costs went down,

82 A P R I L / M AY 2020

The ninety-six acres of Rock Lititz had to be rezoned from agricultural to industrial land before construction could begin. Today, the campus is surrounded on three sides by protected farmland.

and so did load-in times. And the space the speakers saved—it was as if Clair Brothers had expanded the capacity of every truck on two continents. His second week on the job, Snavely worked eighty-two hours, which he’d never done before and hasn’t stopped doing since. The same passion he and his coworkers put into the job, they put into partying. One time, he joined a caravan of trailer-hitched station wagons heading to Tampa to run sound for Ike and Tina Turner. By the time they hit the Maryland state line, Snavely’s car had polished off a six-pack and a couple of joints. The border is barely thirty miles from Lititz. MICHAEL WHILE ON THE ROAD WITH YES IN 1974, the Clairs met Michael Tait, a wiry,

wayward Australian who was managing the band. Tait had taken it upon himself to run their lighting. He didn’t buy gear; he made it. He constructed his first rig out of twelve-volt fog lights in coffee cans, steel pipes, and resistors sourced from a military-surplus shop. The Clairs liked him instantly. Tait knew how to read people. “I found I could understand the psychology—of the audience but especially of the musicians,” he says. Once, he received a sketch for an Elton John stage that would have placed the drum kit on a riser at the level of John’s ear. “It would’ve driven him nuts,” Tait says. “You must make everything so it works for the band. When the band is grooving, the audience is grooving.” Eventually, the Clairs convinced Tait to move from London to Lititz. Here, in 1978, he devised plans for rock’s first rotating stage, which he pitched to Yes as a win-win: The audience would have an intimate experience, and the band could sell more seats. Problem was, Tait had no space to build his creation, so he turned the Lititz Elementary gymnasium into his makeshift workshop. Roy and Gene were also renting space in local schools; artists had started coming to Lititz to test the equipment before heading out on tour. But they could only do so when school

wasn’t in session. Even then, problems could arise. When Peter Frampton practiced at Manheim Central High, hundreds of teens showed up. No more of that. Together, Michael, Roy, and Gene purchased an old box factory on a back street in Lititz. They gutted its largest wing, installed a four-ton I beam near the ceiling, and repurposed its hickory flooring into walls for the control room, which they filled with $150,000 worth of equipment. A rehearsal space, four thousand square feet and thirty-five feet tall. A proto Rock Lititz. They finished just in time for the arrival of its first client, Billy Joel. In another wing of the factory, Tait built a workshop for his new lighting company, named after a light tower he’d built that collapsed into its crate and expanded back out of it via a telescopic gas cylinder: Tait Towers. But automated lighting was a growing business, spearheaded by companies with R&D budgets larger than what Tait Towers could hope to make in a year. Meanwhile, word had spread about Yes’s rotating stage, and orders were rolling in. Tait followed the money, pivoting toward stage construction. It wasn’t always smooth. In 1982, while fabricating a stage for Olivia NewtonJohn, one of his woodworkers nearly gave himself a vasectomy with a table saw. Snavely, too, was having problems. He had taken the drugs part of sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll a bit too seriously and had been given an ultimatum by Roy Clair: Get clean or get out. He’d gotten out. But he needed work, and Tait hired him to fill in for the injured employee. Over the years, Snavely helped make a rotating stage for Barry Manilow that was pushed manually by concealed stagehands. He went on tour with a starshaped stage for Kenny Rogers, and he did a lot for Metallica and AC/DC. As more money came in, the industry moved away from the party life, became more professional. When Snavely began at Clair Brothers, you had to pass the roadie test to go on tour—lifting a hundred-pound speaker horn above your head, proving you know your ohms from your amperes. All of a sudden, you needed a certification to set foot on an arena floor. More new hires had college degrees. Roadie became a bad word. Snavely felt squeezed.

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But he got clean. In 1998, with Michael Tait’s support, he checked into a facility. “I was the first one at Tait to do a lot of things,” Snavely says. “Rehab’s one.” He hasn’t had a drink in twenty-one years. NED THIS WAS SUPPOSED TO BE IT —the big night.

Ned Pelger stepped out of the Studio and walked across the cornfield to the top of a small ridge. Inside, Usher was onstage, ringed by dancers, rehearsing for his 2014 UR Experience tour. His sweet voice spilling out of dozens of Clair speakers. Inside, it sounded like an arena concert. Outside, Pelger didn’t so much hear the music as feel it—a deep, pulsing ripple that jiggled his guts. He began to feel nauseous. Pelger was the building’s engineer of record and had overseen its construction. They’d completed the job not a month before. And now “Love in This Club” had transmuted the Studio into a massive subwoofer. We’re in trouble, he thought. Pelger was more than just the contractor; he was family. His cousin Skip was married to Roy Clair. While still at Warwick High, Pelger went on tour as a roadie with Yes. In 1978, Pelger took a year off from college to work as a roadie for Bruce Springsteen’s seven-month Darkness on the Edge of Town tour. Springsteen demanded perfection. During sound check at each new venue, while the E Street Band ran through song after song onstage, he walked the seats, listening for dissonance. Joining him were Clair Brothers’ top lieutenant Bruce Jackson and cousin Ned. Anything Springsteen didn’t like, he asked Jackson to fix, and Pelger took notes. They called him Nedly. “Go tilt that speaker, Nedly!” “Hang more drapes to stage right, Nedly!” He knew he couldn’t keep touring and stay married to his high school sweetheart, Debby, so he settled in Lititz and went into construction. For a long stretch, his path did not overlap much with rock ’n’ roll’s. In the mid-nineties, he left his position at the top of a local construction company and launched his own business. His first major project was Clair Brothers’ new headquarters, in Warwick, just north of Lititz. Its address, 1 Ellen Avenue, was named after Roy and Gene’s mother. Around 2011, the township manager approached Clair Brothers and Tait Towers with an offer: A ninety-six-acre farm abutting Ellen Avenue was available. If the town rezoned the land from agricultural to industrial, would they be interested in buying it? By that time, the bond between the two companies had weakened. Both were under the second generation of leadership, and both were undergoing change. Troy Clair, Gene’s son, had overseen an international expansion of the business, which was now called Clair Global. Under Adam Davis and James “Winky” Fairorth, two of Michael Tait’s protégés, Tait Towers started looking for opportunities outside of rock ’n’ roll. Land was what they both needed. But neither needed that much. Troy Clair, Davis, Tait, and Fairorth split the down payment under a new

In Lititz, financial records of old jobs—like this one from Peter Gabriel’s 1987 So tour—double as wall decor.

LLC named Rock Lititz and only then began thinking about what they’d do with the land. Someone floated the idea of a rehearsal space. If nothing else, it would make a great marketing tool. In March 2014, they broke ground on the Studio. Pelger pushed his crew hard, and construction was done in just six months. He’d priced out how much it would cost to soundproof the building, and everyone agreed that it was too expensive. After all, it was in the middle of nowhere. Now Pelger stood on the hill, and his guts were jiggling. The sheriff pulled up, having received more than fifty noise complaints, and shut the place down. Usher and his crew were shuttled to a field house at Temple University, in Philadelphia. U2 was scheduled to arrive at Rock Lititz in six weeks, and the Studio was unusable. The town called in a noise-abatement consultant. Rock Lititz called in three.

THE BIGGEST MUSIC COMPANIES YOU’VE NEVER HEARD OF A BRIEF HISTORY 1966

1968

1971

1978

The 1980s

2011

2013

The Clair brothers’ ﬁrst touring gig, running sound for Frankie Valli.

Big time: They do the audio for Cream at the Spectrum in Philadelphia.

Bigger time: Elvis cuts them a $100 bonus check. Instead of framing it, they cash it.

Mickey Tait, lighting genius, sets up shop in Lititz. A liveproduction mecca takes shape.

The Clair-Tait collab grows, serving acts including Michael Jackson and Bruce Springsteen.

Tait partners with NASA to beam to a U2 concert a video of astronaut Mark Kelly introducing a song while in space.

Gene Clair dies. Longtime client Elton John dedicates “Your Song” to him at a concert.

held. Over the next ten days, four million pounds of it were sprayed on the walls inside the Studio. EZRA

( S P R I N G S T E E N ) . M I K E L A W R I E / G E T T Y I M A G E S (J O H N ) . C E M O Z D E L / A N A D O L U A G E N C Y / G E T T Y I M A G E S ( C R U C I F I X ) .

W A LT D I S N E Y T E L E V I S I O N / G E T T Y I M A G E S ( VA L L I ) . G LO B E / S H U T T E R S TO C K ( P R E S L E Y ) . E B E T R O B E R T S / R E D F E R N S / G E T T Y I M A G E S

E. H. BEILER INDUSTRIAL SERVICES specializes in pre-engineered metal

Troy Clair always introduces Andrea Shirk, general manager of Rock Lititz, as “the adult in the room.”

The Studio’s walls, made of a light-gauge metal with fiberglass insulation, absorbed the high-frequency sounds but not the low. As Usher performed, bass waves had carpeted the surrounding land in every direction. The only way to dampen them in the future was to add mass. Various solutions were discussed: building another building over the one already there, at the cost of $10 million. Lead: phenomenal sound blocker, but way too pricey and potentially unsafe. Water was excellent, too—could a waterbed stick to a wall? Sandbags sounded . . . gritty. Then Pelger, having hit pause on a book manuscript he’d begun to write— Great Sex, Christian Style—thought, What about shotcrete? The sprayable concrete used to make swimming pools—it was as cheap as crushed stone. Pelger called a fellow congregant of his church, Lives Changed by Christ, who was ex-Amish and a current shotcrete specialist. The man came down to the Studio, placed rebar against the wall, and started spraying. The shotcrete

2014

2015

2018

A new LLC, Rock Lititz, brings the leaders of Clair and Tait together ofﬁcially.

Tait builds a giant cruciﬁx for the pope’s mass at Madison Square Garden.

Hotel Rock Lititz opens, housing artists and their crews while they prepare for huge tours.

buildings. Its founder, Ezra Beiler, is a member of the Plain community, as the Amish call themselves, one of a family of thirteen. He attended a one-room schoolhouse through ninth grade, then was expected to start working. He knew he didn’t want to follow in the footsteps of his father, a farmer. Beiler had farmed every day until he was fifteen, despite a bad eye and a limp when the weather is bad, the remnants of a polio infection he contracted as a boy. The routine had bored him. “It’s everything over and over again, know what I mean?” he says. “You milk the cow; you milk it again.” Ned Pelger brought Beiler in to erect the Studio and has brought him back for each phase of Rock Lititz’s expansion. When Beiler passes by the campus— Plain people can’t drive, but they can be driven—he doesn’t think of how out of place it looks or of the increased traffic. He doesn’t think of the threethousand-odd steel sheets it took to drape the Studio. He thinks, There’s another one that created good jobs. It’s early spring, and work for Beiler and his twenty-four employees will soon pick up, including the next round of expansion at Rock Lititz. The first three buildings went up over five years; they’re constructing the next five in just eighteen months. Pelger just sent over the contracts. The new Studio and Pod 1A: $4.6 million. Pod 5: $2.3 million. The new Clair Global headquarters will be somewhere in between. Beiler estimates that when he was a kid, 10 percent of the Plain community worked in construction; today, it’s more like 70 percent. In the 1960s, government officials refused to allow Plain Sect milk to be sold unless it was refrigerated, and the community leaders weren’t about to put their people out of business, so they allowed milk to be cooled. Today, there are even Amish electricians. “As time goes on,” Beiler says, “technology changes things.” Church leaders provide guidance, but you have to let your conscience be your guide. Beiler wouldn’t build a beer distributor, but he decided Rock Lititz wasn’t a problem. ANDREA AFTER THE USHER INCIDENT, Andrea Shirk, the general manager of Rock

Lititz, received a call from a rep at Live Nation. “He’s like, ‘Are you seriously moving Usher?’ I was like, ‘Yeah.’ He goes, ‘Just so you know, we get noise complaints all over the world, and we tell them to fuck off,’ ” she says, with a throaty laugh. “I said, ‘That’s lovely. But that’s just not how we operate here.’ ” The Studio closed on Sunday, and a township meeting was held on Wednesday at the Warwick municipal building. “Troy was in Florida. Adam was like, ‘Uhhh, I’m not available that day,’ ” she says. Shirk went alone. One resident after another stood and voiced complaints. Margaret Ketchersid said she’d been excited about Rock Lititz because of the jobs it would bring, but now she worried about the structural integrity of her house—and its property value. Earl Diffenderfer said he and his wife had moved to a fifty-five-andolder development because it would be quiet, but now their house rumbled. What would it be like once the leaves fell off the trees? Marilyn Taylor said she’d felt vibrations all through her house, that they’d made her feel sick. “It was a mob in there,” Shirk says. In the weeks that followed, she and Troy Clair went door to door to conduct pre- and post-shotcrete testing, and to ensure their neighbors felt okay at every step. Without Shirk, Rock Lititz wouldn’t exist. She figured no lender would back a world-class facility with zero clients, in a cornfield. If the concept failed, what was a bank going to do with a one-hundred-foot-tall one-story building? The only way forward was with government support, so Shirk got a $3 million grant from the state. She secured the resources to restore the floodplain on the Santo Domingo Creek, which had been buried by tilled soil over the decades. The creek now flows across the property as it once did, (continued on page 114)

85 A P R I L / M AY 2020

NO LONG E R M E A NS “J OB IN T E RV I EW,” “W E DDING ,”

OR “C OU RT A P P E A RA NC E .” T H E S E

W E A R I NG A S U I T E A S I E R T H A N EV E R .

NEW FITS COME I N B OL D C O LO R S A N D R E L A X E D C U T S T H AT M A K E G E T

Photographs by Sebastian Kim Styling by Nick Sullivan THIS PAGE: JACKET ($4,695) AND TROUSERS ($1,075) BY GIORGIO ARMANI; SHIRT ($395) AND SHOES ($575) BY EMPORIO ARMANI. OPPOSITE: JACKET ($5,995), TURTLENECK SWEATER ($1,095), AND TROUSERS ($995) BY RALPH LAUREN.

TING DRESSED UP

The clearest way to communicate that you’re not headed to the office: COPIOUS AMOUNTS OF COLOR. JACKET AND TROUSERS BY LOUIS VUITTON MEN’S.

8 8 A P R I L / M AY 2020

Repeat after us: Keep your attitude fluid. Rock these like you would A TRACKSUIT. Remember, itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s not only about how you think but also about how you feel. JACKET ($2,800), SHIRT, AND TROUSERS ($1,100) BY DIOR MEN; SHOES ($795) BY MANOLO BLAHNIK.

These clothes are made for movement. The jackets? Well-cut. The pants? MUCH, MUCH ROOMIER. THIS PAGE: JACKET ($3,120), TROUSERS ($780), AND BOOTS ($890) BY PRADA. OPPOSITE: JACKET ($3,200), VEST ($1,200), SHIRT ($590), TROUSERS ($980), TIE ($220), AND BELT ($450) BY GUCCI.

91 A P R I L / M AY 2020

NEW SUITS MEAN NEW RULES. Leave the tie at home. Leave the pocket square at home. Hell, leave the shirt at home. THIS PAGE: SUIT ($1,595) BY BOSS. OPPOSITE: SUIT ($2,895) AND SHIRT ($875) BY DOLCE & GABBANA.

93 A P R I L / M AY 2020

F O R S TO R E I N F O R M AT I O N S E E PA G E 1 1 5 . G R O O M I N G : J A M E S M O O N E Y F O R A R T D E PA R T M E N T.

W H AT a

cLou ldnD ’N t ’T ULcU D N 'T C O UN L C O U LC DCO N 'O T ou l CO U D L D 'C N T 'T ULDN’T COULD NO 'T S AY

ut OUT LOUD

The easy part of managing my chronic illness was fourth-grade math. The difficult part was asking for help.

B Y D AV E HOLMES

PHOTOGRAPHS BY JEREMY LEIBMAN

94 A P R I L / M AY 2020

why are we so___________________________ PROUD

“I ain’t never told nobody this before,” the guy in the back row said, his voice low, steady, emotionless. “But I killed my little brother.” We took it in silently, the five of us on the dais and the sixty or so people in the room. Nobody knew how to react, because it was a lot, and also because he said it in the Q&A portion of a panel discussion about social media and type 1 diabetes. But he seemed to need to be unburdened, and nobody else was going to say anything, so he went on. He and his brother had both been diagnosed with type 1 in childhood, before either of them could remember, as many people are. It was the thing they had in common; the two were the only people they knew with the disease. Not that they ever discussed it. “It was hard to talk about, so we didn’t,” he said. “Neither of us wanted to ask the other one for help.” They both negotiated the confounding and complicated condition alone, this Tennessee man whom I guessed to be in his early sixties and the baby brother who didn’t make it that far. Side by side, or maybe with their backs to each other, they both lived with it. Until one of them didn’t. What really surprised me about the guy’s story was how much of it made sense. I

why are we so___________________________

was diagnosed with type 1 in my forties, which happens less often, though still to a significant number of people. I dragged myself to an endocrinologist on the first business Monday of 2016, after a holiday season I had spent sick. I’d lost weight—a welcome development, then an alarming one. I was urinating a thousand times a day; I was thirsty constantly; I was ragged. The doctor ran the tests, put me on insulin that very day, had me inject myself right there in front of him. And just before I left his office, he looked me in the eye and said, “Get yourself a community of other adult type 1’s. Go on Meetup.com, find a happy hour, go and talk to people. You’re going to need it.” He was right, and I knew it, which is why it was a little startling when I said, “That’s okay.” I’d just been diagnosed with a chronic disease that would fundamentally alter the way I lived my daily life; that part I could cope with. But admitting to another human being that I’d need to adjust? Asking for help? Unthinkable. Type 1 diabetes is a disease you can manage, but you’re always on the clock. You assume the role of the pancreas that your immune system has shut down, so you alone are in charge of regulating your blood-sugar level. Before you eat a meal, you do a quick estimation of the carbohydrate content of the food and give yourself the appropriate amount of insulin to cover it. Each day involves a full workbook of fourth-grade math. It’s like driving on a winding road, checking constantly to make sure your speed never deviates by more than a couple miles per hour. It’s a lot. But one thing it isn’t is a weakness. It’s a condition that strikes both young and old, both active and sedentary. There’s no moral dimension to it. It just is. In the weeks after my diagnosis, I told everyone I knew about it. Part of it was relief that I finally knew what was wrong with me; part of it was having a story to tell over cocktails. But when my friends or family asked how I was adjusting to it, whether I was okay with the new normal, whether any of it scared me as much as it clearly

PROUD

WE’RE ALL STILL STRUGGLING TO FIT INTO THE SUITS

WE INHERITED FROM OUR FATHERS, NEVER

did, I would answer quickly, reflexively: “I’m fine. It’s great. It’s easy.” It wasn’t. When I look back on that time in my life, I see myself struggling to get to sleep, fretting over every bite, testing my blood every quarter mile of every morning jog. A life lived in a full-blown panic attack, which I chose to manage alone. On a visit home, my mother noticed my shaking hands over dinner and addressed it with an elegantly indirect comment: “You know, when they say men are supposed to be strong, I think they mean in terms of opening difficult jars.” As clear an opening as I was ever going to get. I still didn’t take it. If a guy like me—who’s published no fewer than three articles about how sad I was when my dog died—couldn’t ask for help with a thing as important and morally neutral as my basic health, what hope does everyone else have with the trickier stuff? With mental illness, depression, anxiety, just plain sadness? If I can’t handle going to a happy hour for adults with a chronic illness, how can I blame someone else for not considering therapy? Somewhere within many of us is the desire to be the guy who has the answers, who never needs help. I pretended to be that guy when in reality I was a man with questions like “Will a long run kill me?” and “How do I eat now?” We’re all still struggling to fit into the suits we inherited from our fathers, never stopping to wonder how well those jackets fit them. We’re all still comparing ourselves to the men in old westerns, never asking whether silence really, empirically does mean strength, or whether John Wayne just wasn’t all that comfortable with dialogue. If I eventually got over it, it’s only because I was impatient to start getting healthy again. I went to a meetup, met a few people in the same boat, asked some questions of people who’d dealt with it longer, answered a few for people who were diagnosed more recently than I was. I made some friends, got myself into a running group for other type 1’s, and over time felt my overall stress level diminish. I met a guy named Craig Stubing, who hosts a pod-

STOPPING TO WONDER HOW WELL THOSE JACKETS FIT THEM.

96 A P R I L / M AY 2020

cast called Beta Cell on which he interviews other type 1’s about their lives and habits and coping strategies. It’s a good listen, exactly the kind of thing a newly diagnosed diabetic needs to hear. And for the record, while type 1 affects men and women in equal numbers, about 80 percent of the listeners who interact with Beta Cell’s social media are female. Stubing says, “I think type 1 can feel like a weakness, so men tend not to show it, talk about it, or interact with the community, because they don’t want to seem weak.” The one exception for men, not surprisingly, revolves around sports. “The men who do talk and post about it often use type 1 to show what they’ve overcome, to make themselves seem even manlier.” I look at my own Instagram, and the only times I’ve posted about my illness were after long runs when I managed to keep my glucose level stable. When I’d beaten it. When I’d won. Those times when I was less than Instagram perfect, when I might have needed some help, when I might have come off as vulnerable, I kept offline. So here I am, forty-eight years old, dealing with a new health condition and realizing the degree to which a much worse one—this hideous thing we call toxic masculinity—has me by the throat. Enough. I can’t handle type 1 on my own. I need help. By the rules of the culture by which I was conditioned, saying that out loud makes me less of a man. My God, what a relief. The guy in the back row kept telling his story. Turns out his little brother had been trying to correct a stubborn high bloodsugar level and in so doing gave himself just a little too much insulin. He passed out from hypoglycemia behind the wheel of his car, hit a tree, bled to death. The guy in the back row has blamed himself ever since. He wishes he had said something to him, though he doesn’t know what. His little brother is dead because of a freak accident that had nothing to do with him, and now he is dying from misplaced guilt. An honest talk wouldn’t have saved his little brother’s life, but it could still save his. I wanted to get to him after the forum was over, just to give him my info, see if he needed to get any more of it off his chest, try to plant the seed of the idea that his brother’s death was not his fault. But he was nowhere to be found. He must have split the second the forum ended. Before he even had a chance to talk. It was like he willed himself to disappear.

why are we so___________________________

band BTS is, so I looked up the views for their performance on Monday night’s Tonight Show. This is what the Internet is best for, in my opinion: winning petty arguments. Then, for fun, I watched the video and was struck by how good BTS’s choreography is and how big Grand Central Terminal (where the performance was filmed) looks when it’s not full of 10 million people all inexplicably trying to go to Connecticut.

UNSURE

TH hE T H I NG S

O O Oo O O OO HE G O oO OG L E D O O O O o O OO

BY JOSH GONDELMAN

Ah, the Internet, recipient of our queries, our secrets, our desires, our fears. If anyone knows why we are the way we are, it’s Google, which is why we asked the comedian Josh Gondelman, a writer and producer on Desus & Mero and a man in possession of an iron will (“I managed to go a whole day without Googling my own name”), to record everything he searched for during a cold, cooped-up 24-hour period in the doldrums of winter. Not the things he wished he’d Googled, but what he actually did. Here’s what he turned up. Tuesday, February 25, 10:56 p.m. JOE BIDEN HAIR PLUGS

By the tenth Democratic primary debate, I was pretty exhausted, so I abdicated my civic duty to watch the Boston Celtics play the Portland Trail Blazers. Still, I was following along with the action on Twitter, and when I saw that Joe Biden said the biggest misconception about him is, quote, “I have more hair than I think I do,” my

first thought was Did Joe Biden forget that he has hair plugs? Then, to make sure I wasn’t misremembering Biden’s elective hair-restoration surgery, I searched “joe biden hair plugs” and was vindicated.

me to look up whether I was free on the night of the show, my app refreshed and I lost the link she had posted and had to search for the club’s calendar.

Tuesday, 11:04 p.m.

YOUTUBE TONIGHT

54 BELOW CALENDAR

SHOW BTS

Scrolling through Instagram, I saw that my friend Natalie would be performing a show at 54 Below in midtown. In the time it took

On my train to the office, I remembered a discussion with a coworker the day before about how big a global phenomenon the K-pop

Wednesday, February 26, 9:42 a.m.

Wednesday, time unknown SHIT IS FUCKED UP AND BULLSHIT

This is, obviously, a fact. But also it’s the name of the new book by Malcolm Harris. I wanted to buy it, but ideally not from Amazon, so I found its page on the publisher’s website, ordered it, and then ordered his first book from Powell’s in Portland, which I had been meaning to do and then forgot. Wednesday, time unknown WHY DOES KELSEY GRAMMER SOUND BRITISH

It’s just that mid-Atlantic accent that actors use to sound fancy. Wednesday, 8:28 p.m. RED LOBSTER LOBSTERFEST

Saw an ad for Red Lobster. Googled Lobsterfest. In many ways, I am a fairly simple animal. Wednesday, 10:45 p.m. JOEL EMBIID INJURY

Just before bed, I checked in on my fantasy basketball team and noticed that Philadelphia 76ers star Joel Embiid had played only eight minutes, so I checked to see if he was hurt. He’s expected to be out for a week or two, and I’d like to take this space to say: Get well soon, big guy!

R AC E R AC E R AC E R AC E AC E R AC E R AC E R AC E R

R AC E R AC E R AC E R AC E AC E R AC E R AC E R AC E R C E R AC E R AC E R AC E R A E R AC C E R AC

AG A a INST

Every year on my birthday, I run a 5K in hopes of beating my younger self. Soon he’ll start catching up to me.

BY M AT T M I L L E R

98 A P R I L / M AY 2020

AFRAID why are we so___________________________

There’s a note on my phone that I update each year on my birthday with annually decreasing numbers. On my twenty-seventh birthday, 27:18. On my twenty-eighth birthday, 25:41. On my twenty-ninth birthday, 24:30. And on my thirtieth, 24:14. Those are the times of the 5K—3.11 miles—I run on every anniversary of my birth. They’re not spectacular 5K times as far as 5K times go, but the only person I’m trying to beat is my younger self—it’s Present Day Matt versus Younger Matt. On Valentine’s Day (that’s my birthday, and a subject for another day), I drag myself out of bed or leave work early to run my own personal Mortality 5K. It’s me, the treadmill, some music, and a half hour to reflect on the past year, what’s ahead, and the ghost of my younger self racing behind me (hopefully).

Perhaps you could tell from my 5K times that I don’t consider myself much of a runner. I picked up running at some point in my mid-twenties as a way to relieve stress, though it wasn’t a particularly urgent pastime. But then, one year, when it began to feel like I wasn’t so much “in my twenties” as “in my late twenties,” something changed: I thought it would feel good to run a 5K on my birthday—like a personal achievement, a little gift I gave to myself that, in my mind, increased my life expectancy. I might be getting older, but theoretically I was doing something that might make me live longer. The next year, I thought, Well, I’ve been running more this year and could probably run it faster than One Year Younger Matt. I ran it again. I beat Younger Matt, that naive little twenty-six-year-old. Then I started keeping track of the times, and now this is A Thing I Do. My times have decreased every year as I’ve continued to not just run but also attempt to be healthier in general. I love the idea of beating PunkAss Younger Matt in a race. I cherish the feeling of being quantitatively healthier as my body ages. It makes the ever-ticking biological clock seem less scary. If I’m faster every year, I’m aging backward in a sense, or at least that’s what I tell myself. There will come a day when I run the Mortality 5K more slowly than I did the previous year. That felt all the more real this year, when I beat my previous record by only sixteen seconds. I could get injured. I could have an off day. I could let myself go. Hell, I could die. There could come a day when we humans transcend our physical bodies and our consciousness exists in the cloud, a time when space and distance have no more meaning. I could be up late one year with a kid and not have the energy to run at all (truly the scariest scenario). When both my age and my Mortality 5K time do inevitably increase, maybe this Future Matt, in all his wisdom, will take it in stride—he’ll realize that his record is behind him. But I know myself, past and present. So I’m going to look at that number. Take a deep breath. And try to run it again, this time faster.

Uu uUU UU U u uU

ROAD

The American Dream, our most rousing export, is collapsing before our eyes. Are we too angry to fix it?

BY JAC K HOLMES

“Years of Hope, Days of Rage.” It’s the subtitle of Todd Gitlin’s history of the 1960s, and a reminder that peace and harmony have never been staples of American life. Self-government is a messy business, a constant collision of interests, ideologies, and primal instincts. That’s particularly true in a nation that was in contravention of its founding principles from its first moment, and that has spent every moment since struggling to make them real. If you look back fondly on a happier, more tranquil time, you are gazing back on a landscape of American mythology. And yet it feels worse now. It’s hard to dispute that, in the words of the oft-mocked Marianne Williamson, there’s a “dark, psychic force” at work in this country today. By the end of the primary season, the major 2020 presidential candidates that remained were either channeling this energy or attempting to defuse it. Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump constitute two stark expressions of populist rage—the incumbent president as a vessel of fear and resentment of a changing world and Sanders as the next wave of reaction against a system in which so few have taken so much for themselves and left so little for everyone else to scrap over. Only one directed this rage at the material source of our vast structural problems, while the other offered scapegoats. But they both seized on our perilous state of affairs. Joe Biden, meanwhile, reached the end of primary season running on a return to the Decent and the Normal, as a healer who could balm the blisters of rage without truly putting out the fire. The top 20 percent of American households control 77 percent of all household wealth in this country, more than triple what the middle 60 percent of households control. The wealthiest 1 percent controls $25 trillion all by itself, more than that middle 60 percent—190 million people—has with $18 trillion. But any recognizable definition of “middle class” is collapsing anyway, shattered along with many rungs on the ladder of social mobility that undergirds our most intoxicating export, the American

PISSED OFF

Dream. We cannot survive as a nation where ZIP code is destiny, and where a man can pledge to spend a fraction of his $60 billion fortune to make himself the president while more than half of our citizens live paycheck to paycheck and half a million sleep on the streets each night. Fifty-three million Americans are classified as “low-wage workers” who do not make a living wage—44 percent of the workforce and the fastest-growing part of it. We cannot go on when parents no longer believe their children will lead a better life than they did, and while millions feel the whole world slipping away from them. American gross domestic product grew over the last several years while average life expectancy fell, fueled in part by deaths of despair. Hope is a terrible thing to lose. It is not just Twitter that’s making us so angry, nor is it just cable news. Nor is it even the injustice we’ve accepted since our founding, or the discrimination we continue to allow now. It’s not just that real wages have failed to keep up with the rising cost of living for decades, or that televisions have gotten so cheap while the costs of health care and college have exploded. It’s not merely that we increasingly get our information from different ecosystems and thus live in separate worlds, unable to communicate with one another and find a way forward. More than all that, we have stripped too many of our people of their hope, and rage and despair flowed readily into the void. Sometimes it even gives way to apathy and nihilism, unreason as defense mechanism. Trolling as politics, food-fight discourse. Even the righteous anger never seems to purify us, providing heat but no light. Perhaps there will come a time when things no longer deepen and darken by the day, as new enemies perpetually corporialize in the shadow of our own creeping delusion. As it stands, the fury threatens to subsume us.

why are we so___________________________

100 A P R I L / M AY 2020

FICTION

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BY L I SA TA DDEO

“This man would love her. She could feel it. She took a deep breath in, and clicked the button.” A new work of fiction from our most eloquent and faithful chronicler of human desire. 101 A P R I L / M AY 2020

BLOODY FUCK,

102 A P R I L / M AY 2020

she was still single because

her at the starter. The girl was twenty-seven to thirty-two, that pitiful age when unmarried women became Cujos beneath their thin, bronze skins. The boy was the same age. Dark-haired and bearded, wearing a sleeveless shirt and nice. No. Wonderful arms. Like a sailor. But of course not. These days, especially in America, men got their muscles at the gym. On the Nautilus. Muscles grew out of air-conditioning. And the boys got their clothes at the gyms, too, these fancy gyms. Grace was fifty. All right, fifty-one. Nobody belonged to a gym back in County Mayo but here she’d joined a Lucille Roberts once upon a time. Most recently she’d started up again at a Health Works for Women Fitness Center. Everything was mauve, rubbery. No men, nothing harder than a lump of cancer in the place. But she felt comfortable. She wore her Goatboy Soaps top and her bleach-stained Lycra pants and on Saturday evenings she swam in the pool, whole place to herself, taking long, luxurious breaststrokes through the green, palmy water. Everything she did, come to think of it, was to avoid being in the same places as these two, with their sunglasses and their brunch elbows. Today of all days. She’d wanted to treat herself. Mother’s Day. The golf course was her sacred place. Generally she came on weekdays, at odd times, to avoid being paired with eejits like these. A certain type. Well, what were they? They were young is what they were. The boy could get hard anytime. It wasn’t really so much about Mother’s Day. Or that she’d been paired with these two. It was that she had been paired with two. Instead of one—a man, with a nice swing, smile. A widower, a divorcé. With children, without. Didn’t bloody anyfuck longer matter. Because the truth was everything Grace did was to fall in love. Even since she’d stopped trying to meet someone. In fact, especially since she’d stopped trying. The stoppage itself was the final

Her friend told her

T H O U G H T G R AC E MAGORIAN WHEN SHE SAW THE TWO OF THEM COMING TOWARD

crusade, the last line of troops she’d sent out into the tick grasses of May. This is our second date, the girl whispered to Grace while the boy was teeing off. The girl didn’t know not to talk at all in backswings. Oh? said Grace, silently, with her face. We met on Venus, the girl said. Her face was conspiratorial. Very pretty, dark hair. The kind you could do anything with, barrettes, half-ponytails. Grace’s hair was fanfiction red, gorgeous if difficult to wrangle and dry. No man had ever dreamed his fingers through it. Not even the Air Force pilot with the Alsatian. The boy struck the ball well. His body remained curved in the aftermath of his stunning shot. The landscape—a heady mix of glorious Irish links and burnished New World— accordingly froze all around him. They’d imported the very particular fescue from the damp meadowlands of North Africa. It rung the white hazards like troll hairs. Otherwise the lawn was emerald Bermuda and the clubhouse was a cube of imposing, shining glass, where good lawyers went when they died, plus a $500,000 view of the Statue of Liberty and the boats in the harbor of Port Liberté. It’s a dating app, the girl continued now, louder, where the men have to get in touch first, but they can only write to three women per week. And those women have to neg the guy before he can move on to the next woman. Or, if none of them respond for fortyeight hours, he can move on. What’s the draw then? Grace asked as the boy returned to them, triumphant. Great shot, she said to him. Sorry? said the girl. For the men? Grace said. Why would they use the service at all? The boy was the type who listened. Perhaps he liked this girl. Grace always figured all men didn’t like the women they were with. It was how to get through a day. Easy, the boy said, clasping both his hands— one white-gloved, the other tan—on the shoulders of the brunette. Quality women. The girl blushed. It’s invitation only, she said. You have to be invited to join, and even then you’re vetted. IQ, personality, career. Career, Grace thought. Grace was the estate manager for a family of the kind of absurd wealth you did not believe until you saw. The Hoppas. The husband was a stockbroker, nothing wild, but the wife was the heiress to a certain mustard empire. She’d gone to Brillantmont in Lausanne. Once she had golden pigtails and now she cried to a black-and-white photo of her mother each night, backlit and trenchant on her vanity. Around the frame was a squadron of Kewpie dolls, bare-bummed, masonic.

WHEN GRACE MAGORIAN GOT HOME, SHE

drew herself a bath. Home during the summer—and most holidays—was the Hoppa estate in Bridgehampton. She had a room of her own in the service wing, with the housekeeper and the caretaker. But the rest of the year it was a studio on Jane Street. The Hoppas lived in a flabbergasting penthouse on Charles, and they wanted Grace close, so they rented her a small space in a brick walk-up. From her window perch she could watch the mademoiselles pour out of the bars, catch a whiff of them, too. Vodka and sunshine. In the subterranean wood-and-stone den, she was seated at a table by the bar. All twosomes at the bar, boy girl boy girl, and the girls were all brunettes. Everywhere these days, all you saw was dark hair and faces the color of the cashew milk they glugged. Grace had brought Anna Karenina. She was on page 44. One time, at a little wine bar on Elizabeth, a man saw her reading A Bend in the River and sent her over a double of the Scotch she’d been drinking. He was an Aussie paramedic, with a wide, rowdy neck and blue eyes. They shared some laughs and went to bed. Between her legs, his tongue was a diamond cutter. Come with me to Paris, he said. I’m leaving in the morning. Yes, she said. Yes, yes.

That was seven years ago, and she still brought books to dinner. Her friend Talia—Hebrew, vicious—told her she was still single because she wasn’t enough of any one thing. She wasn’t frank enough or reserved enough, didn’t drink too much or not at all, was neither rich nor poor; even the weight of Grace Magorian was rackingly moderate—she was neither skinny nor heavy, not busty nor flat. In all departments, Grace was in the middle. Talia was single, too. But Talia got regularly legless on ouzo. Talia went on more dates, she pointed out to Grace Magorian. You see? she said. I am who I am. I am remembered. Yes, Grace said. Yes, yes. From the female (fuckit!) waitress, Grace ordered uni, ikura, kohada, kurage, unagi, and toro. She ordered a plum wine as well as a large sake that came in a perfect wooden box. Halfway through her fish a man sat at the bar, much younger than she, alone and in a herringbone suit. It used to be that it would take a special sort to get it up in her. A man on the subway, autumn-haired. She’d fantasize the whole ride about the life they could have, sheepdogs in the countryside. Now it was barely love she clung to. Merely the idea of not dying alone. Merely that. She was considering lesbianism. They took older women. Grace’s eyes were crossed with liquor, but this man at the bar, he looked familiar. She cocked her head, squinted. It was, indeed, the young man from the course. Hello! she said. Half the room looked up from their conversations. But not the man himself. So Grace Magorian stood herself up, closed the distance. Well hello there! she said. The man blinked, and then he recognized her. Oh, hey, he said. He was a little surprised, not entirely happy. Well this is quite the coincidence! Isn’t it? Yeah. Crazy. Holy shit. Then he looked down at his phone and, drunk or not, Grace was no fool. Well, I’ll leave you to it, she said. Grace, right? the boy said. Grace Magorian. You’re here alone? Yes. I’d ask you to join me but I have a friend coming to meet me. He lowered his voice, eyes sub-rosa: Actually another friend from Venus. Where I met Veronica. Grace nodded. Oh, she said. I see. No worries, none at all, I’m off to my little corner of the world. I just meant like. Don’t blow my cover, ha. You know young women these days, if they figure you’re dating other people, they wake

103 A P R I L / M AY 2020

Not frank enough or reserved enough, didn’t drink too much or not at all, was neither rich nor poor.

Estate manager. A nice title. All that Grace did for the Hoppas, she couldn’t say out loud. Some of it was so shameful, she might as well be flossing their cracks after they took shits in their dual marble baths. I see, said Grace. Well how nice for you it’s working out. With everything going on these days, the girl said, you need a third party to make sure a guy isn’t rapey. Venus takes care of all that. When the girl walked to the women’s tees, the boy asked Grace Magorian if she was married. Grace could be forgiven for thinking there was some mild flirtation to it. He was a charming type, generous with physical closeness. He picked up her clubs, held the flag when she putted. She was happy there weren’t any around like him who’d fought for their countries, who had any proper manhood bumping about. It would be much harder that way. No, she said. Never married. She added the second part because it was either you added it straight off or you lied. Had she lied, she’d hate herself all night. She might not even take herself out for the Mother’s Day sushi dinner she’d been planning. Blue Ribbon! She had a gift card from some millionaire friend of Mr. Hoppa’s whom she’d helped out in a titanic way last summer. Seventy-five dollars. It was a nice-enough amount, if you were dining alone. Well, said the boy, you have a really beautiful accent.

she wasn’t enough of any one thing.

FICTION

up the next day all hashtag me too and shit. Of course, ha ha. She began to amble away, but something stopped Grace Magorian, and she doubled back. Jed, she said. He was in the middle of composing a text to somebody named Homeland Security. Yeah? Actually, I have a favor. Rather strange, left field, I suppose. Wondering if you might. If it’s not a trouble. Invite me to that site of yours. If it’s not just for young people. If you might, then I could. Ha ha, he said. What’s your email? Grace gave it. No problem, he said, taking it down on his phone. Thank you. He winked at her in a way that made her feel exposed. She turned, attractively, with the soft recessed lighting at her back. The last man with whom Grace had been intimate was an architect. She’d let him come inside of her, had felt the cream of him shushing against the wall of her diaphragm. He’d been beautiful, tall and gentle. Almost an apparition of a man, really, with his nice teeth and his healthy-looking body. He’d been gone, albeit politely, within the hour, never to be heard from again. What came out of her the next morning looked like paint chips. That was three years ago. And now the world was shifting. All Grace wanted was to be loved, to be heartily fucked and unconditionally loved. She wished she had the occasion to hate that she’d been harassed. Of course she had suffered the tiny, daily rapes, and the more acute ones from her youth. But the dearth of love, there was nothing like it. The truth was she envied these women who had the luxury to evoke the bad fucks and halffucks and near-fucks that had wounded them. Grace struggled to remember any touch at all. LATER THAT EVENING IN HER PINK-WALLED

studio, Grace plugged the new mauve vibrator with the jaunty ears into her laptop and clicked around for something romantic but heathen. She found a video of a young couple on the subway, posted to an Instagram account called Beasts of New York. The girl, in a swingy black cotton skirt, was straddling the boy, who wore velour sweatpants. The girl’s face was pretty and drunky as she butter-churned on the boy’s lap. His gestures were noncommittal; he was not even passionately receiving but laconically entertained. When the vibrator was sufficiently charged, Grace took her fresh laundry from the spinning dryer and went to lie down on her firm twin bed. There she held a bouquet of clean towels to her face and the

FICTION

104 A P R I L / M AY 2020

ing. She was supposed to do this for 101 sets of three, or until she found what the site called The One, a man she wanted to message her straightaway. She could not believe how impressive they all were. Frances Magorian used to say, All the reflective men are gay. Don’t chase a dream, Gracie. Men, in her mother’s estimation, were either hardworking oxen with big jaws and hearts and no brains, or else they were rich, perfect, cruel, and unattainable. How rare it is to grow up past the iniquities that ached our parents. They are little holes bored in the brain, too small to ever fill. Outside, it began to pour. Almost immediately after she heard the first pattering, Grace’s phone sounded the familiar siren. A voice memo from Mrs. Hoppa. Grace did you secure the exterior door to the outdoor sauna in Bridgehampton Grace knew Mrs. Hoppa didn’t want a voice memo back. She wrote, Yes, ma’am. She deleted the ma’am. She added an exclamation mark after the word, Yes, then deleted that, too. She added a period, and sent it. She went back to her laptop. Please one of you save me, she said to the screen. And then, one of them did.

fucks

to evoke the bad fucks and half-fucks and near-

They never married but Frances and Grace moved in with him, to his ugly but clean split-level in Cranford, New Jersey. Just then there was a nice ding on her laptop. Grace shushed the jittery vibrator and checked the screen. Welcome to Venus was the subject line. She clicked a link and there were a series of easy-to-follow prompts. She wrote a brief and spry About Me paragraph, and uploaded a picture of herself on the links her father built, in County Mayo. The photograph was taken seven years ago. Next was the birth date, and she toggled around on the year. 1966 sounded like a terrific year for wine, but not for a woman to be born. Fuckit, she thought. Like Talia said, Everybody lies these days. If you don’t, you’re toast. She selected 1972. Then 1973. Forty-five, she could pass for that. Really, she could. But not a minute younger. The only way to be any younger was to use even older photos of herself, of which she didn’t have that many, or to use a photo of a younger woman. She considered that for a moment. Considered using fake pictures so that at least a good man would write. That might be enough, to just be desired, even if it wasn’t her actual whole self they were desiring. She was shocked, right away, at how impressive the men were. She’d been on Match last year, remembered with choking gloom all those nights when she’d start off brighteyed, mousing around and, sure enough, by 2:47 A.M., she would be on the eighteenth page of men forty-two to sixty-four. Feeling winded and having gone back, several times, to adjust the salary range. Grace did not care about money, but her mother had. On Venus there were only three men per page, and Grace was being asked to rank them so the site could better configure its algorithms to serve her. The pictures of the first three men. Grace’s jaw dropped. They were kind-looking, wealthy-looking, no ornery eyebrows, no shirtless hicks on motorcycles. No selfies in bathrooms. Fuck me! said Grace Magorian. She’d found the cache! Where all the good ones had been hiding. Nearly, she texted Talia. Where is everyone? Grace’s mother used to ask. She’d come to America hoping to see “good people” and where were they? Were they in Aspen in the winter? The Hamptons in the summer? But some summers they were in Nantucket! It took Frances too long. In many ways, Grace knew she’d taken the job for the Hoppas to answer her mother’s question, to know where the good people were. And now she knew where all the good single men were, too. She thought of all the Beaujolais she had drunk alone. She went through a couple of pages, rank-

HIS HANDLE WAS DIGLITT. HE LOOKED LIKE

a John. Like a man, is what he looked like. The way they used to look. The first line of his profile text read, “I am searching for the best woman in the world.” The balance of the text was confident but not arrogant. He was not, he wrote, a metrosexual or a tough type or a brunch type or a Trump type, he was not any type, he was simply a man, his own man, and possibly yours. He was good with tools, cooking. He owned a construction company and built houses in underserved villages in South America. He’d lived and worked in thirteen countries. He knew how to read maps, and yet he always stopped to ask for directions. He believed red hair was caused by sugar and lust. Grace touched her hair, her red, red hair. He was wealthy but not an asshole. Was this possible? Grace hadn’t thought so. But here was this man. This smart, funny, alluring, six-two, fifty-year-old man. His pictures depicted a full and varied life. Kentucky Derby with ringleted nieces. A black-and-white wedding in Rio. Making French toast in Telluride. Playing with a glorious golden retriever in Central Park. He loved William Trevor stories and raclette and Abraham Lincoln and was of Celtic descent and loved Irish dance and loved Irish accents and he loved women who could play the violin and who weren’t arrogant and he loved golf and coconut water but distrusted the yoga community at large.

The truth was she envied these women who had the luxury

rabbit to her peach panties as the video of the amorous subway couple cycled on the laptop beside her. These days, it took twenty seconds, max. She barely needed the loop. Afterwards she lay there and thought of her father. It was best to think of one’s parents directly after an orgasm, when there is so much open space. Donal Magorian. Tall, broad in the neck and shoulders but skinny in the legs, with a pink face and red nose, hands large as irons. From the time he was nine years old, he’d cut turf with two Kerry Bog ponies. Later, when steel came to do the work of men, Donal and several out-of-work comrades took on a project from a foreign developer to build a golf course in their little town. It was two years of bone-breaking work, of men in white pants coming to swing invisible clubs on a mound and determine this hill might look better just there. Half the crew drank itself to death, in rage but mostly enervation. The day of the rope-cutting ceremony, Donal was one of the only men left standing, as much in the foreground of the scene as a blue-collar man could be. He stood just behind a placid Armenian with a big scissor. Grace watched on the telly, a little ashamed though mostly proud. She was at home, doing her homework, dotting all the i’s to ensure she’d never marry a man like her father. Because she was sure Donal Magorian was the only good poor man in the world. This opinion was likely handed down from her mother, Frances, who loved her husband but hated their station, who’d never been to Paris, or in a car that shone. And then, while making eye contact with him on the screen, fourteen-yearold Grace watched her father strike a paw to his chest and keel over, crumple, really, like a bad gag of a heart attack. True to Irish form, the town paper said he’d died of happiness, of pride, in himself and the beauty of the course he’d helped create. Bollocks, said Frances Magorian. My husband died a slave. There’s nothing left for us here. In a matter of weeks they’d abandoned their little flat above McDonells Bar and Undertakers and were off with some pension money to America. It was the particular tragedy of mother-duo systems like Grace and Frances that because the mother had never gotten what she needed out of life, the daughter must never advance past a certain degree. Any improvements must happen in quiet, under cover of night. And eventually even those would die the death of the undeserving, the Icaruses who had flown too close to the suburban suns of the U.S.A. Frances did find her man, a silvery American named George. She said he looked like Jimmy Stewart when he smiled.

that had wounded them.

Her hands flew off the mouse. She was afraid. That digital fear of showing someone you love them, you are stalking them, you are watching their Instagram story seventeen thousand times in one evening. There was the button at the bottom of the page, Tell DigLitt he is the one! (Don’t worry, we won’t actually tell him that, we’ll just say you wouldn’t mind if he borrowed your Short History of Nearly Everything. Then he’ll have forty-eight hours to feel you back.) She touched between her legs. She felt hungry again, as though she hadn’t come a mere hour earlier. She imagined John—she was sure

that was his actual name—atop her. Fondly she remembered sex, the back and forth of it, the way it was best when it felt the man’s member was slipping away, out of you. Christ how much was inherited from her mother, the disease of her need. In the past, Grace had felt deplorably happy when men bestowed the smallest kindnesses. If they held the door. If they absorbed their semen off her thigh with a quality paper towel. But this man. This John would love her. She could feel it. She took a deep breath in, and clicked the button.

Ç A V A V I T E , B Y G É R A R D S C H LO S S E R , 1 9 9 8 , A C R Y L I C O N S A N D E D C A N VA S , 8 0 C M X 8 0 C M . © G É R A R D S C H LO S S E R © 2 0 2 0 A R T I S T S R I G H T S S O C I E T Y ( A R S ) , N E W Y O R K / A D A G P, PA R I S .

FICTION

IN GRACE MAGORIAN’S SIXTEENTH YEAR,

she’d learned what true love was and, just as quickly, accepted that it was not for her. Other bits of love had begun sooner, starting when she was nine or so. Instinctively she knew love was not the right word. Cuddling twiggles on her knee at the dinner table. The nighttime check-ins that began quietly and grew into fifteen- and thirty-minute sessions. Out her door after, she’d hear him say to her mum, Another nightmare. Not a problem, Franny. It’s my pleasure. The thing was, what was the thing? The thing was, by the time Grace was old enough to feel the oval notion, George was the only thing she associated it with. It made it better that he belonged to her mother. Each time Frances was cold to her, Grace had her little revenges. The first night George became her lover coincided with the week that Frances had all but forgotten her only child’s birthday. Frig me, Grace, you’re fifteen today. Feels like only yesterday we put yer big da in the ground and you held to my knees like a refugee. Grace didn’t know she was with child for three months. There was so much extra saliva in her mouth, but otherwise she felt like a regular blooming girl. She was excelling in school, had loads of friends, and was fucking her mother’s boyfriend once a week. Wednesday was the special day, when Frances would go out food shopping, which she enjoyed doing alone. There was a little routine. As Frances was preparing to leave, George would shower and go to wait in his office, reclined on the faux-suede pull-out, which they didn’t discuss he’d bought precisely for this purpose, and reading some big, beautiful book. James Joyce, often. And when Grace sauntered in, like a less-aware Lolita, George would clear his throat and begin to read aloud. It was of a night, late, lang time agone, in an auldstane eld, when Adam was delvin and his madameen spinning watersilts, when mulk mountynotty man was everybully and the first leal ribberrobber that ever had her ainway everybuddy to his love-saking eyes and everybilly lived alove with everybiddy else . . . And Grace would go to sit beside his waist and on cue his large priestly hand would come to rest on her hip. By increments—and it was these discreet slow-building increments that she grew to associate with rocketing desire, so that for years Grace could wait on love—he would be plunging inside her, the book wedged somewhere against their stillclothed bodies. She would come again, later, to the presence of paper cuts. By the sixth month there was no hiding it. One fall morning Grace emerged from the

shower and Frances saw it, the slope of her daughter’s young belly, and grabbed her by the ear. Grace said it belonged to some eejit from Irvington. A black feller, she said, by way of accounting for some wrongdoing. Where was George? Grace could not remember those months. She had no memory of him from then, but he was not dead yet. She was not taken to the doctor. Frances gave her black syrupy things to drink. Potions, she called them. But the fetus, who evidently had the genes of Donal Magorian, persisted. IN THE MORNING, THERE WAS A SINGLE

email. From The One, by way of Venus. Grace’s heart grew to twice its normal size. She did not open the email straight away. First she did the three or four things she’d been dreading. She sent an email to both Hoppas, Thing One and Thing Two, asking for a raise. She paid off a credit-card bill with some of her dwindling cash. She made a mammogram appointment. Then she went on Facebook and wrote to a few friends back in Ireland who she felt warmly towards, but who thought of her as a prodigal daughter, gone to eat from silver spoons in the New World. Hey Angela, nice photo. How’s the craic? G. For a few minutes Grace got lost in Angela’s little, warless life. Angela had a beautiful daughter named Mary Katherine. She had red hair like her mum, and like Grace; it seemed all the girls Grace had grown up with had had red hair. Mary Katherine appeared to be single, but it wouldn’t be long. She was in her late twenties, with a set of erotic tits and a rich, auburn brow. Finally, with a cup of pine tea she’d stolen from the Hoppas’ Ketchum home, Grace read DigLitt’s profile again. Particularly she loved his Idea of a Perfect Day. A farm of fresh-cut winter berries, glazed in a frost. We aren’t homesteaders but in the winter we can things, you and I, and we don’t tell anyone, which is how to maintain goodness. The clouds are winter blue. Our Alaskan huskies are tired from a day of herding the miniature Babydoll sheep. We take off our water-resistant winter boots that we bought in Montreal, when everything seemed free, and dry our wet feet by the fire. You heat our cider and calvados while I clean the artichokes and later, we eat them, our faces glazed in the oil of the vegetable. I ask you to say plum pudding, again and again and again and again. And again. He liked his cold to be ice cold and his hot to be melting hot. He liked extremes in everything, his trees to be not pines in the Adirondacks, not even sequoias in the Sierra Nevadas, but the Hyperion giant in a secret place only a handful of people knew. He liked his women either untouched angels or deeply

10 6 A P R I L / M AY 2020

damaged, like a case of chilled Labatt that had been shipped without temperature control to Florida. She opened the email. Dear Grace, it began. Her heart, her red, red heart! I am writing to say, And then Grace’s heart turned cool, into a gray liver. The email ended there. No more text, no more signature, just a swath of white. At the very bottom, Sent from my Venus. Clearly, clearly! There had been a whole beautiful paragraph in there, saying she was the one, too, her love of Bach and Gaddis and bidets, but he didn’t realize it had gotten erased before he hit Send. He was worldly and had lived in Africa and was full of pulchritude and nonprofits, but he did not know how to work these newfangled dating sites and why should he! Quickly, she wrote. Hey hey—I received your Dear Grace, but it ended after I am writing to say, and Dear John, I am writing back to say, I read your profile and Jiminy Christmas! Also your eyes are remarkable. I enjoy artichokes more than any woman in the world. I don’t know if I am the best woman in the world, but I think that I could be? Can you kindly resend what you wrote?

W hen

THE BABY, AT LAST, HAD COME OUT OF HER,

it was plain and silky as a rabbit in a store window. It was too early but alive, and Grace herself was so young, she didn’t realize it was not too late to be saved. When Frances left the room for more towels, the wonderful thing swam to Grace’s breast. It did not suckle, it was not interested in food. She. She was a girl. With lips like tuna belly and fingers like the springing tendrils of grapevine left to stand lonely after the harvest. As the years burred away the glinting trapezoids of memory, Grace was left with merely the summary of the situation: In another life, Grace Magorian lost a child. A miscarriage in the seventh month. Back in Ireland, was it? No, no. Here, in the States, and yet, a late, lang time agone. And remember. Women like her did not make a big deal. The type of women men found the easiest to be around, and yet did not marry. At noon there was a ding at her computer.

But it was not from the love of Grace Magorian’s life. It was an email from the Hoppas. From Thing One, the missus. Dear Grace, Thank you for your email, our account manager has advised against a raise but we will talk about it some more. Would you have the freon checked in Bridge, we never got properly cooled last night. We are on our way back into city. See you. —Mrs. H. They liked Grace to be in whichever house they were not occupying. Grace packed her bag. It would be good to be in the Hamptons. The love of her life would feel her distance and he would seek her out faster. It was necessary, of course, to play games in the very beginning. THE KITCHEN OF THE HOUSE IN BRIDGE-

LIFE DOESN’T END TILL YOU WANNITU, Fran-

Instagram story seventeen thousand times in one evening.

107 A P R I L / M AY 2020

Are you still out there, love o’ my life? Then she deleted that, and wrote, Please, I need a sign. She deleted that as well.

them, you are watching their

hampton was a kitchen for astronauts, for moon boots and bottomless bowls of lemon. Azul Macaúbas counters and steel that shone like guillotines. Grace had brought artichokes from the city. They were charred at the tips but otherwise sumptuous. She set them on the counter, with two bottles of claret. Grace had stopped smoking in 2004 but sometimes she forgot, and looked for a light. It had been two days. He had not written. She knew, if the whole weekend passed without word, that she would write again. But that she already knew this was hurtful enough to make her hate him. Already he was cruel. Already, once again, her life was over. But he wasn’t cruel. He did Habitat for Humanity. He did not merely go to charitable parties but built houses with his own hands. He’d watched every single episode of Sex and the City. I am looking for the best woman in the world. Grace remembered, with bitter fondness, the time her mother said to her, Who do you think you are in that getup, Gracie? The First Fecking Lady? This was a year ago, several days before Frances Magorian died easily in her sleep. Having drunk one of her potions. The brill thing about them, they were full of everything you already had in the house. That same day she’d said to Grace, Remember me in the same color green, Grace? That dress I usetuh wore to the club? Frances Magorian hadn’t wanted to be forgotten. It was the terrific plight of women who wanted to be remembered to shack up with men who needed to forget it all. In a way Grace had felt she could not be free until after Frances was gone. In terms of finding love. After all, think of what she had done to her mother. Yes of course she’d been groomed for the raping, but hadn’t she been complicit? Wasn’t it, in the end, also a rape

against her mother? She said as much once to a therapist. The therapist, newfangled, was aghast. She had short gray hair and did not go in for nuance. She clicked again through his pictures, admiring the JFK jaw, the Irish-American skin that would soon sag but for now still looked lovely on ski trails. Why won’t you write to me? she whispered. She put on some Debussy, decanted the claret, and trimmed the artichokes. She floated around the kitchen, selecting the River Cafe olive oil from the suspended shelving and the coarse Korean gray sea salt from the lit spice display in the wall. You couldn’t see the speakers but the music felt like it was coming from inside your own ears. She’d shown her mother pictures of the Bridgehampton kitchen on her cell. I don’t go in for that modernist shite, said the old lady, turning her face away without fully registering the image. While the artichokes were roasting in the royal blue La Cornue, Grace cut up a link of wild boar salami and rang Talia on speakerphone. She told her about the man from Venus, the empty email. Talia was from Pittsburgh by way of Israel but really she was from nowhere. Fuck it, Grace, who cares. You’re fucking fifty, you can’t afford to play these games. Just write again. What’s the name of that site? How’s it I haven’t heard of it? It’s invitation only. You have to be invited. So fuckin’ invite me. You have to be vetted, Grace said. So fuckin’ invite me then fuckin’ vet me already. I think I just had my last period. Grace pictured Talia in her apartment, a fifth-floor walk-up in Chinatown, with the racket of the city and the steam of the prawns from the restaurant below. She was in a garnet negligee probably, and perfumed. Yeah, I have to uh. I have to be a member for a certain interim, and then. You fuckin’ keeping the keys to the kingdom from me you ragged cunt? Grace found Talia mysterious. She did not seem to want anything, she just enjoyed the feeling of wanting. They were friends because they were both middle-aged and single. Divorced women did not go near women like Grace and Talia. The fifty-plus never-marrieds were zombies who ate foul cheese and smelled of crying. While Talia rattled on about a recent Tinder date—a sixty-something who got drunk, berated a busgirl, and confessed how sad it made him that he no longer cared if a woman was hot; they could have hairy moles on their lips, he just wanted to fuck something that sprung back at him—Grace opened her laptop, logged into Venus, and wrote to DigLitt:

ces Magorian said to Grace Magorian as the latter held her glossy blue child to her breast. People go when they wannu. Same went for your da. Was it irrational, Grace thought, to have become so incapacitated because someone she didn’t know, never met, had ghosted her? She sat for a spell in Thing One’s hinokiwood soaking tub. The water was scalding and the eucalyptus oil smelled, pleasingly, of poison. But she had never been able to stand a bath. Just sitting there. It seemed so sloppy. She climbed out, her heart racing from the heat of the water. Her hands still dripping, she reached for her phone. An email from Country Living. 17 Explosive Desserts for the Fourth of July. Nothing more. No, it couldn’t be. Clearly there was a mail-carrying issue with this stupid hipster site. Like everything created by millennials, Grace thought, it was beautiful but empty. It took several minutes but she found a contact number for Venus. A girl answered, who most definitely had cobalt fingernails. Grace explained the situation, the mostly blank email, the soundlessness that followed. The girl, named Jo, asked for Grace’s handle, and for the one belonging to the man she loved. For several minutes there was silence at the other end, and Grace could feel the girl’s eyes on her profile, this Cujo who knew nothing, thinking, Yeah, right this man wrote to you, you old hag. Looking at both their profiles and thinking, Get real, lady. When her voice returned to the line, Jo told Grace there had been no outages on their end, and there was nothing they could do. If somebody didn’t write you back, it was recommended that you move on as quickly as possible. Then whytha fuck did you ask for our frickin’ handles! I’m sorry, ma’am, the girl said. A voice had never sounded farther away. Within minutes Grace was naked astride the mahogany captain’s chair in Thing Two’s office, furiously toggling between windows on her laptop. She searched DigLitt’s profile for phrases and places she might string together, to figure out his real name. She did not look for him on Facebook, because his World at Large section called social media “an extant place for those who don’t think the bad things will happen to them, who think the good are due to them, and want you to know about every Miami vacation.” She spent four hours sleuthing. It was

FICTION

in the photograph on the ski run, which he had newly made his main image, meaning he’d been online since she’d written him last. She moved her head back and forth, to feel the blood whoosh around. Then Grace had Toni tell DigLitt he was The One. Behind the hedges there was a noise. Larger than a rustling. Grace froze. Talia had wanted to come down. She always wanted to come down, drink the booze of rich people and talk about herself. Sometimes Talia did impulsive things, but she would have written first. Talia? Grace said. No sound returned. In what felt like an act of self-preservation, Grace got into the pool. It was cold. Even in the heat of summer. Another derivative of Thing Two’s penny-pinching. There was another, louder noise, this one a nagging thump, a human head dropped from a park bench onto grass. Hello? It’s him, Grace thought, it’s him. Come for me. The way George came, the prefatory night in her room, when Grace figured it was what God sent for her, what He knew she needed—not another father or a childish lover, but some glorious, steadfast inbetween. I am ready, Grace thought, to be swallowed by love! She’d told Talia on the phone, You don’t understand, this man’s profile. It is enchanting. He is perfect. Kind and funny and loves all the right books and films. There is a picture of him, for fuck’s sake, stirring a huge pot of crayfish with a crescent of Mongolian babes at his knee. Talia said, Sounds like a regular asshole to me. Another noise in the brush, this one fantastically loud. And followed by a whimper, not human, but nor did it sound like it came from animal, though it must have. It must have been a deer come to die in the brush. Hit by a Range Rover on Montauk Highway, struggled to this private square of land to go tenderly into the night. Grace Magorian was neither sad, nor afraid. She did not pity, or require any in return. In the thicket the noise persisted for a minute or less, and then stopped, the way a metronome stops. When the vibrations persist. Grace imagined cool, soft blood, like a quality egg yolk sitting around. She checked her Toni Magorian email account for what she knew would be there. Her fingertips dripped cool water between the flat keys. She felt young in the pool, as young as she had been before she turned old.

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Everybody lies these days. If you don’t, you’re toast.

feverish. She didn’t realize the time going by. The only time she’d ever felt such a divine slippage of time was at a school dance the year before she became intimate with George. She’d danced most of the night with a boy named Brian, who seemed too good for her but did not act it. He wore a plaid blazer, and his skin was attractively acne-scarred. For all her intelligent effort, Googling Africa and Brazil and architecture and all the clues in his profile, she could not turn up a LinkedIn or anything. Nothing at all! She took a pill from Thing One’s medicine cabinet. It was a pink oval, like the beginning of a woman. At first she meant only to hold it for another date. She had a storehouse in the studio, of pills and gold bits and bobs she’d been squirreling from the Hoppas these many years. She thought, how much easier it would have been for her mother to have such pretty little pills, instead of the potion of a poor woman, the bleachy rubbish kept under the sink. She placed the pill under her tongue. It felt so small, like it wouldn’t do anything at all. So there she placed another. As the sun set, Grace Magorian began to feel feral. The many years of aloneness piled up inside her like indigestion. She didn’t know where the housekeeper was, the landscaper. If anyone was home, alive, in that great breathless house. Naked, she ate the leftover artichokes over the kitchen sink, the army-colored juices streaming down her chin and neck, onto her medium, freckled rack. Then she floated outside, still naked. The backyard was a solitary rectangle of prim lawn encased by privet hedges. There was a pool, of course, as lonely as could be, and two Adirondack chairs gazing into the emerald hinterlands. She took her laptop by the edge of the water, and laid out beside it, feeling the elegant stone against her skin. She set up a new email, then she invited the new email to Venus. She knew exactly what she wanted and found a series of images, easily, on Facebook. Mary Katherine was, of course, a few years older than Grace’s daughter would have been. But it was close enough. Grace was tired by then, her eyes warped by the squiggles of text, so she wrote a meager little About Me section. She named some movies an eejit might like, said she lived in Fort Greene, enjoyed temperate weather, and the skin of an old book. Grace deleted the last bit, and replaced it with something about art galleries and air travel, called herself Toni, and clicked Save. Then, feeling free, light, shaved of those twenty-plus extra years, she found DigLitt again, his eyes shining coldly

thought. Like Talia said,

Fuckit, she

S he

BLACKED OUT MAYBE, AND WHEN SHE

blacked back in, she looked again at her screen. The eyes of the love of her life were startling, truly. His eyes did not betray him. But Grace knew now where the good people were. She had always known, of course, that whereas old women for the most part grew into their age gracefully, abandoned the frissons of youth, old men more firmly clawed into the bedrock of their power, their money. If they had none, they hated the world. Hipsters. Bitcoin. If they had plenty, they were afraid of everyone trying to steal it. If they had a stepdaughter, then that was the only time they were afraid of women. She dipped her head beneath the surface of the water. Her scalp went aqua cold. Down under she couldn’t hear anything at all, the whole nut of her was senseless as a toenail. She opened her eyes and realized she had never opened her eyes underwater in the dark, not once in her whole life. There was so much to see. Grace saw the thumbs of her father, the boundaries of his laugh, the great vineyard of his chest. She saw the dance with the young man in the old barn the night that went by too quickly. She saw in the deepest layer of water the bite-blue lips of her child, a young woman for whom all the boys would have gone crazy. All the barn dances, the nights in green dresses. At last, in the hoofing beat of the water, she heard her mother. Stop waiting on ’em, Gracie. Stop looking for them. And then she heard the old lady laugh, as much as someone could hear someone laugh underwater. Meanwhile the water turned darker and warmer and sweeter. Up above the surface the night changed its clothes. Somewhere someplace forgettable—Philadelphia—a pretty girl played Debussy for an auditorium of throat-clearers, having only learned, thus far, to wait for the clap. The music filled the room, stretched itself out to every corner. The music rose to the ceiling and pressed heavily against the doors and dispersed into the thin night, it poured out of speakers in rich kitchens and poor, and all the way down beneath the water, it dripped out of those Diluvio Aquasonic speakers that glowed like fucking aliens. So that Grace heard the music loud and clear. Yes, ma’am, said Grace Magorian. The best man in the world does not exist. But the best woman. That is me. I am the one you are looking for.

why are we so______________

O OV O E OV OV o VE R RR E SS VE e OV E R S U B M Y OV VERSUBSCRIBE D eD SCR IBE E CRIB D b RIBED DD E I E BD ED ED D

ALONE

LIFE

A journey to the tipping point of life optimization

BY K E L LY STOUT

Direct-to-consumer programs have been around since at least the 1700s, when milk started arriving on American doorsteps without a trip to the barn, but we’re currently living in a golden age of subscriptions. In the first half of the 2010s, the amount spent on them went from $57 million to $2.6 billion, according to a

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McKinsey report. They’re the revenue stream of the future, say all the experts in this kind of thing, arguably the chief of them being Tien Tzuo, author of Subscribed: Why the Subscription Model Will Be Your Company’s Future—and What to Do About It. For Tzuo, the sky is really the limit on what you can subscribe to, a position he articulated in an account of perhaps the most horrifying-sounding dinner party of the past century: “My colleagues and I, often over dinner and wine, would challenge each other to come up with businesses that couldn’t be turned into a subscription model,” he explained to Fast Company. “We tossed out ideas like guitars, cement.” According to Tzuo, the product itself is not what matters; it’s the customer’s desire. “Using cement as an example,” he continued, “you realize that flooring is the actual need. There’s a whole revolution of industrial carpets now. There’s a service contract, you simply pay some monthly fee plus overages, usage, etc. So you can actually subscribe to a floor.”

why are we so___________________________

followed, plus vitamins every thirty days. It was only a matter of time before I filled out a survey aimed at delivering “hyper-personalized” shampoo to my doorstep on a regular basis. For days after I hit “submit,” I wondered whether I’d accurately described the width of my part. At night, I lay on my side with one eye open, scrolling through my feeds. If I wanted, I could shave and save on fancy blades with Billie, the Instagrammable sorbet-colored razors that would look really good against my shower tile and restock themselves the moment I ran out. I could begin each morning with a smoothie full of chia seeds, papaya, and avocado designed by the nutritionists at Daily Harvest, then brush my teeth with a Quip (free shipping for life!). On the subway into work, SmileDirectClub offered to fix the crowding of my upper incisors. Get started today! It would be so easy! You don’t even have to leave your apartment, Jet.com said. You know, said Feather, you don’t even have to commit to your couch; we’ll send you a new one every year. It’s that simple; it’s that light. It’s how New York eats, Seamless shrugged and told me. Yes! I felt like shouting. Charge my card over and over until I’m thin enough, hairless enough, eating vegetables in the right quantities, watching the right shows, and never having to think about any of it! I could lounge from the comfort of my Plumas Living Room Package ($166 a month). I could shape my butt from the seat of a Peloton ($58), then rent a pair of butt-hugging pants from Nuuly ($88). I’d look forward to renting a dress from Rent the Runway for a summer wedding ($89) to which I could drive in a Zipcar ($7). If I were in the mood to relax, I could sit down with my Kindle Unlimited ($9.99), Netflix ($8.99), Hulu ($5.99), HBO Now ($14.99), Apple TV+ ($4.99), Disney+ ($6.99), or YouTube TV (a hefty $49.99) and light a eucalyptus-scented candle from a Vellabox monthly candle subscription ($10) to set the mood. I could crack open a bottle of wine preselected by the people who really know me at Winc ($39 a month plus shipping). Then, and only then, could I get down to the real business of my life.

ALONE

My zits didn’t show up with much esprit de corps until I was in my twenties, but in an effort to get ahead of embarrassment, my mom ordered Proactiv—the “easy threestep system that works for all ages and all skin types”—for my brother and me one lazy afternoon when we had the TV tuned to the infomercial channel. It was a whole ordeal. Someone over eighteen had to call a 1-800 number, and the phrase “check or money order” was involved. When the bottles arrived, I used the system once and got a rash in the shape of a beard around my jawline, an early but indelible lesson that anything describing itself as a “system” will come with some measure of pain. I never used it again, but orders that must have totaled five to six gallons of renewing cleanser, revitalizing toner, and repairing treatment continued to show up at our front door until I was well into college—to the immense frustration of my mom and the various customer-service representatives she enlisted in the effort to get the shipments to stop. My family moved out of that house ten years ago, but it wouldn’t surprise me to hear that those bottles are still amassing on the stoop. You’d think I’d have learned my lesson, but on a heavy, wet summer evening fifteen years later I stared morosely into an after-work beer with a coworker and complained that I wasn’t in the mood to go to the grocery store. She suggested, as though we were in a commercial, that I try a mealkit delivery service called HelloFresh. They send you all the ingredients in preapportioned little packets, along with recipes. It didn’t sound like my thing, but at the moment she suggested it, the edges of my life were feeling a little sharp, and I was eager for anything that might smooth them out. I signed up that night. Around this time, Dermstore.com told me I could save 15 percent on sunscreen if I elected to receive the same tube in the mail every month. (This came out to a savings of around four bucks.) I coughed up a monthly fee for Spotify Premium. I signed up for a trial subscription to Hulu and learned that my insurance company would only cover my antianxiety prescription if I received it by mail. This, the promotional materials assured me, would be really good for me, because I wouldn’t have to go to the pharmacy anymore. For Christmas, I ordered my husband a recurring box of accessories that would arrive every month. (“It’s like a gift that doesn’t end,” I told him with crazy eyes on Christmas morning, the walls slowly closing in.) An HBO Now subscription

Why is life on the subscription model so appealing? Any one of a thousand marketing presentations saved to a thousand Dropbox accounts ($16.58 a month for the premium plan) could tell you the answer. People want time. They want ease. They don’t want to catch themselves on the seams of life. Why would anyone, as Forbes put it, “run to the store every three weeks for dog food or charcoal for your grill when you can subscribe to those items on Amazon?” The dream of the subscription is that without having to use our brains for something as mundane as remembering to buy razor cartridges, we might do something better with our time. We might even become more optimized human beings—an economic fever dream that dates back to, I don’t know, the invention of the cotton gin. Probably earlier. In a memorable essay for The Guardian, Jia Tolentino summarized the economist William Stanley Jevons’s definition of optimization: “We all want to get the most out of what we have.” Saving not just time but effort is key to forward momentum in the industrial phantasmagoria that is, at this moment, blasting circus music into my ears. It’s a flattering proposition that implies I’m capable of something grand. Once we’ve saved all that money, all that time, all that hassle, out pops a gameshow host—his smile wider than a SmileDirectClub member’s—to ask us, What will you do with all this time?

One answer is work. With fewer hours, minutes, or even seconds spent chopping onions and herbs for tonight’s dinner, I could be turning that extra time into money. But I had a different idea: What if, instead, I enjoyed myself? In her book How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy, Jenny Odell makes a compelling case for leisure time—not leisure time as “side hustle” or “monetizable” or even something that will improve the self, but as recreation for no reason. This is a novel idea in 2020, even though it’s been around for more than a century. “As far back as 1886 . . . workers in the United States pushed for an eight-hour workday: ‘eight hours of work, eight hours of rest, and eight hours of what we will,’ ” Odell writes. The movement inspired a poster of people in canoes and a song about feeling the sunshine and smelling the flowers. When I read that, I thought: Dang, I never canoe! Maybe shaving off a sliver of my time at CVS could add to those eight what-I-will hours. And yet I spent those extra seconds sitting on my couch. I wasn’t doing anything except scrolling through my feeds, thinking about my subscriptions, contemplating how I could optimize my life further. I wasn’t even going to the store. I considered whether the ease my subscriptions gave me counted as recreation. In an economy in which precarity is dressed up as a meaningful challenge, recreation becomes a slippery concept; that which is not painful might as well be pleasurable. At least at the end of a day of hustling, side-hustling, and ball-busting, when I collapse on my sofa under the strain of toiling under capitalism and pretending to love it, my vitamins will be there waiting for me. If it isn’t hard, it must be fun. It’s not just recreation that these subscriptions want to replace, but friendship. The fact that so many subscription companies have “club” in the name is no accident: They want us to feel part of something. But these clubs don’t gather or share wisdom. They just come to you and say, “You’re one of us now.” When I take a Dollar Shave Club razor to my stubble in the shower, there’s no one there to compare my pleasure with. Is my shower optimized? Is it fun? Is it as easy as it possibly could be? I don’t know, because the truth is I’m not in a club, I’m just in the shower, and there’s no one else in here to see me cry. Customized care is a big part of all this. You get exactly what you need exactly when you want it. Dollar Shave Club (“We Deliver Everything Now”) implores me,

WHEN I TAKE A

on its home page, to “tell us how you get ready. This will help us customize a box just for you.” How nice. Just for me. But it invites an anxiety that I hope no one can hear over Spotify ($9.99 a month for Premium) booming in my living room: What if I’m not getting ready right? What if there are inefficiencies? What if I’m not right?

DOLLAR SHAVE CLUB RAZOR TO MY STUBBLE IN THE SHOWER, THERE’S NO ONE THERE TO COMPARE MY PLEASURE WITH

BECAUSE THE TRUTH IS I’M NOT IN A CLUB, I’M JUST IN THE SHOWER, AND THERE’S NO ONE ELSE IN HERE TO SEE ME CRY.

None of this bothered me much until I detected a blip in the system. My life started to take on a formless quality, overly smooth, frictionless. It began to feel like my life was disaggregated, as if I’d uploaded my needs to the cloud. My apartment no longer held all the objects I needed for daily life. At the same time, I was spending too much time indoors with my soaps. What I owned started to feel too slippery to wrap my mind around without it escaping. My world was disarticulating. I felt uncontained; I could no longer look at the objects in my apartment and know where what I own ended. When you’re oversubscribed, your belongings are theoretical. In a few months, I’d think, I’ll own a new beanie, I’ll have another jar of vitamins, a new toothbrush. Shampoo arrived without my having to consult the used bottle to figure out how full it was, and I hardly had to think. I was starting to miss the boring day-to-day-ness of being alive. I was floating in a logistical clean room. Plus, although I’m a pretty careful spender, by and large, I’d started to lose track of who had my credit-card number and what password I’d need to rustle up to change it. Surely I could subscribe to some kind of password manager for a reasonable $2.99 a month or so, but I barely had the energy left to look. I moved to a new apartment and spent far longer on the phone with a customer-service robot at the mail-order pharmacy trying to update my “profile” with the new address to refill my prescription than I would have stopping by the place where I once watched a teenager shoplift ChapStick. My vitamins got lost in the mail. I was suffering from a loss of control, though no one could rightly say I was suffering. The obvious answer to my problem, should one even be forgiving enough to call it that, was to unsubscribe from everything making my life too easy. But unsubscribing turned out to be just slightly harder than I’d anticipated. Subscriptions lend an accidental permanence to everything. Good luck moving if you have to untangle your subscriptions from one another. Quit whenever you want, they told me. No hassle. But I found myself in a warren of passwords and

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security questions, some linked to defunct email addresses, memories of my earlier, less optimized self. It turned out I wasn’t the only one stuck in a subscription feedback loop. Gary Rhoades, the deputy city attorney in Santa Monica, is part of the intimidating-sounding California Auto-Renewal Task Force, which is concerned with “explicit consent for renewals,” something that’s hard to give if you’re buying soap on your smartphone when the font size is tiny. In 2019, CART brought a case against the significantly less intimidating-sounding Guthy-Renker, the El Segundo–based direct-marketing company behind my old pal Proactiv, “after years of that anxiety that consumers have, and consumers reporting from all over that they had been charged for things that they didn’t think they had purchased,” Rhoades told me. The complaint was that Guthy-Renker didn’t make it clear enough to its customers that the charges were going to be recurring, leading to surprise payments. In the end, the company was forced to pay $1.2 million in penalties and a whopping $7.3 million back to customers who, I’d imagine, had been forced to move into increasingly large apartments to contain their steadily accumulating bottles of unused revitalizing toner. Rhoades and his colleagues are noble public servants, devoted to rooting out “unlawful business practices,” and I am grateful to all of them. But as we talked, he struggled to answer a question I unfairly put in his hands: What if these business practices aren’t unlawful so much as annoyingly convincing? What do I do if I’ve been tricked into thinking I could shave off a few minutes here, a few there, for the slim price of my sanity? We know what to do for the poor saps stuck with Proactiv, but what about those of us with a deeper illness than acne: those of us who invited all this into our lives, saying, Yeah, save me from the normal coarseness of being alive? Those of us who, given the right branding, the right payment structure, might have subscribed to a floor? I didn’t want to become that—compelled not just into the subscriptions I actually enjoyed (Netflix, for example, I could not bring myself to abandon, nor my bimonthly delivery of eyebrow “pomade”) but also into a life where I could self-quarantine without ever actually intending to. I’d have to go back to buying shampoo when the bottle got low. I’d have to remember that I was running out, then hope they had “my” kind at the not-at-all-curated drug-

NK dr iD R I n I NG W H I L E DA D D I N G

I’m not drunk, I’m drinking, and you know what? I will watch that next episode of PAW Patrol.

BY AARON

why are we so___________________________

store near my office, knowing full well it wouldn’t even be perfectly formulated for my (medium-width) part, then lug it home. I’d have to support the local pet store, run by a wonderful woman with an eye patch who once told me mournfully that the makers of my dog’s favorite bison treat had “a lot of bad blood” with the makers of her favorite food. In other words, I’d have to leave my couch. Once I got past the logistics, unsubscribing felt pretty good. The feeling of arriving home and realizing that I’d forgotten to buy shampoo returned, and it had a texture I didn’t mind. Like eating a sandwich after months of yogurt. Everyday pains, it surprised me to learn, added something to my life. Perhaps I was never a great candidate for subscription life anyway. Aversion to wasted time, I have long suspected, is something of a brag, the equivalent of saying, “I’m bad at vacation.” Canon office thinking goes that the “worst” kind of meeting is one where you don’t really need to be there. But those are my favorite! All you have to do in that situation is just sit there and act like you’re in a meeting. It’s a small moment during the day when merely bringing my body to a room is enough. I began bringing my body into more rooms I didn’t strictly need to be in when I unsubscribed: pharmacies, post offices, the line at the MetroCard machine, all of them quotidian, none of them optimal. Choosing among face washes every time one ran out meant I could spend some time not being inventive, not being productive or ingenious or, yes, proactive. This brought me unexpected joy. Wasting a little time where I didn’t necessarily need to be was an affirmation: Just being here was enough.

BUZZED

GOLDFARB

When I pick up my three-year-old, Ellie, at preschool and she sprints into my arms, the struggles of the day dissipate. When my newborn, Wilder, giggles as I tickle his tiny belly, my heart melts. But eventually, he’ll have a shit explosion out the back of his diaper just as she starts rolling on the floor, wailing, “I need a cheeeeeeese stiiiiiick!!!” Screw your cheese stick, honey. I’m reaching for the Wild Turkey. Intellectually, I know this is “bad parenting.” In actuality, drinking while dadding makes me much better at child-rearing. With a slight buzz, the relentless crises don’t seem so bad. Booze eliminates the inherent boredom of fatherhood; I stay off my phone and engage with my kids. It lowers my IQ and raises my sense of childlike wonder. Slightly sauced, I now read ponderous children’s books with a gusto I couldn’t muster sober. “Chicka chicka boom boom!” I say, and I really fucking mean it. “What will the Very Hungry Caterpillar eat next?” I wonder. “Four strawberries? Incredible!” My mom recently implored me to remove an Instagram story that showed me sipping a beer while coloring page after page of Elsas and Annas with my daughter. “You don’t want people to think you drink with her,” she said. My mom comes from a generation that believed parents were either alcoholics or teetotalers—no inbetween—so she doesn’t understand that drinking and parenting can be mutually advantageous. At the least, it makes another

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episode of PAW Patrol bearable. This is no Don Draper crap—come home, fix a stiff martini, and retire to an easy chair while ignoring the kids and letting Betty handle the bedtime routine. I’m not drunk dadding; I’m drinking while dadding. Although, yes, if I have to attend Sesame Street Live! I’ll need to get a bit blotto to deal with Elmo’s annoying ass. I’m one of these modern dads who had children later—me when I was thirty-seven and already two decades into an adult life of happy hours and bar crawls, cocktail parties and Sunday Fundays. So, maybe a bit selfishly, I decided there was no need to alter my lifestyle simply because a little pisher was in the equation. It works! Where I live makes this possible. Whereas many of us were raised in the ’burbs with parents who served as full-time chauffeurs— nothing stronger than a thermos of Folgers in the center console—parents my age are increasingly choosing to remain in urban areas. In my Brooklyn neighborhood, that means every dad can safely holster an IPA in the UPPAbaby’s cupholder at all times. And because I don’t have to drive us home from another excruciating princess party, I can have one or two or three cocktails with the other forty-something parents who refused to give up every part of their former lives to raise a brood. The only thing I have to remember—no matter how many times I listen to a bunch of three-year-olds sing-yell “Into the unknoooooooown!”—is not to drink too much. Sober dadding may be hard, but dadding while hungover is impossible.

113 A P R I L / M AY 2020

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THE SPECTACLE FACTORY (continued from page 85)

and Rock Lititz gained a couple more acres to build on. Before the shotcrete on the Studio walls had dried, Shirk moved on to the next phase: a $22 million, 252,000-square-foot building intended to house live-event production companies. Looked at one way, Pod 2, as it’s known, is a commercial office space. Shirk is the landlord; the twenty-seven businesses are her tenants. But there’s more to it. It’s a collective of creative, hardworking, like-minded people. An ecosystem with crosspollination. With synergies. That’s the hope, anyway. And that’s what motivated Shirk to take the job. When she left Bose, outside Boston, and moved to Lancaster—her husband is a twelfth-generation Lancastrian—she walked away from leading a hundred-person team. Rock Lititz offered the chance to do more than crank out a product. It was mostly up to Shirk to decide which companies got space in Pod 2, and she selected based on who she thought would “enhance the Rock Lititz brand.” Leases are for ten years, so she thought long and hard about the right mix. Its largest tenant is the production company Atomic, which has been in Lititz since the early nineties, when its founder, Tom McPhillips, the set designer for the MTV Unplugged series, moved to be close to Tait and Clair. Others include specialists in pyrotechnics, barricades, and shipping logistics. When a new tenant arrives, Andrea sends them a welcome box of cookies. Two hundred seventy-five people work in Pod 2. The building has common spaces, a smaller rehearsal space, a café, and a brewery. A gym with a rock-climbing wall? Check. A health clinic? That’s equipped to provide vaccinations for those who need them before touring overseas? Check and check. You could spend months there without needing to leave. Or you could walk across the parking lot and book a room at Hotel Rock Lititz. Shirk oversaw that project, too. Building buildings isn’t an issue. The bigger challenge is building a community. Most of Shirk’s staffers are women, but it’s a small team. Men dominate the companies of Rock Lititz, as they do across the industry. And diversity? That’s a problem in the industry and in the area. The city of Lancaster has one of the fastest-growing Hispanic communities in the state; four in ten of its residents are Latino. But the rest of the county is among the whitest you’ll find in America. In Lititz, just ten miles north, 96 percent of inhabitants are white. There are other struggles. People have tried to copy the Rock Lititz business model—one in Delaware, another in Las Vegas, a few in Nashville. Anyone with time and money can build a replica, but you can’t just up and construct a dynamic collaborative environment. To make Rock Lititz uncopyable, Shirk believes it must invest in the next

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generation. One of the tenants she selected for the next round of expansion—which will cost around $42 million in total—is a music school, and she recently spoke to hundreds of area middle school girls about how cool it is to study and work in a STEM-related field. She’s trying. Shirk can do all this because she has the backing of the Rock Lititz owners. When Troy Clair first asked her to run the business, he said, “Boy, we can’t get shit done. I just need an adult in the room.” That’s how he introduces her: the adult in the room. ADAM HOW DO YOU DEFINE A COMMUNITY? Measure

its contours? Rock Lititz is a community. Amish country is a community. Rock ’n’ roll is a community. Adam Davis, Tait’s chief creative officer, likes to say there are two kinds. One is Lititz and the surrounding towns. It’s the community to which the Clair family is most devoted. They’ve remodeled churches and rebuilt the rec center. Roy served as the mayor of Lititz for eight years. They maintain a public baseball field on the front lawn at 1 Ellen Avenue. The other kind of community is the international network of the live-event industry. “There’s this ecosystem that exists in the back halls of every amphitheater and arena in the world,” he says. “When you drop into it, you’re amongst your peers, and when you leave, you’d never know it exists.” When Michael Tait retired in 2006 and Davis and Winky Fairorth took over, Tait Towers was a rock ’n’ roll company. Today, concert touring makes up a third of the business. Tait has fourteen offices around the world. Last year, half of the twenty highest-grossing North American tours were by musicians fifty-five or older. “We thought a lot of our clients were going to die and we’d be out of business,” says Davis. “So we thought we’d better diversify.” The next generation at Clair Global is grappling with the same concerns as Davis. “I mean, live entertainment is great,” says Shaun Clair, who, with his brother Matt, will likely take over the business from their father, Troy. “But is it exponential? No.” Rock ’n’ roll, on its own, is no longer enough. Clair has been growing its installation business— sound systems for megachurches and stadiums. They’re focusing on “rapidly deployable networks”—temporary WiFi for big events. They wired Madison Square Garden for Pope Francis in 2015 and ran the audio. Tait carved the twelvefoot crucifix that hung above the pontiff, who liked it so much that before he went back to the Vatican, he asked to take it with him. “Not that I’m not passionate about rock ’n’ roll,” Davis says. But the projects he’s most excited to discuss have nothing to do with music: a movable scoreboard for a hockey arena, animatronics for theme parks, augmented-reality body scans to enhance the retail experience.

Automation is at the root of Tait’s strategy for the future. Navigator, its proprietary software, drives 80 percent of its projects. Computer-controlled tools do the work that was once the purview of shopworkers. “Things have advanced so much,” says Russell Snavely. “I probably didn’t adapt well enough.” On the manufacturing floor, he wears a hat that says “Older Than Dirt.” If a CNC machine can’t make something, Snavely’s called in to do it by hand. He’s the company’s longest-tenured employee. “In all honesty,” he says, “I feel like a dinosaur.” As Davis sees it, nothing about the core mission of any of the other companies that make up Rock Lititz has changed. It’s just gotten bigger. “I’ve gotten so used to growth that I don’t think of it as growth anymore,” he says. Last year, he brought on a privateequity firm to facilitate Tait’s ambitions. “The basis for our whole business is creating these magic moments. What that means is more spectacle.” Is there such a thing as too much spectacle? “Gosh, I hope we never find it,” he says. “Think about what the Romans did. They would flood the venue; they would have tigers fighting humans. Real tigers! Human beings crave the spectacle.” MICHAEL MICHAEL TAIT RECENTLY SOLD his stake in Rock

Lititz, leaving Troy Clair and Davis as primary owners. “This is making money, but this is land, and we’re developers, and the real payoff comes down the line,” Tait says one afternoon, seated in a common area of Pod 2. “It’s a long-term investment, and I ain’t going to be here long-term.” Tait is seventy-four. His bald head is ringed by long, white hair, irregularly dyed blue. His eyebrows, too. He wears mismatched shoes. He likes attention. (“Of course I do. Who doesn’t?”) At least he’s self-aware. “I just got a little crazy in the last few years,” he says. His biggest retirement project is also his newest: Mickey’s Black Box, the community theater he is planning as part of Rock Lititz’s expansion. “One of the beauties of my situation,” he says, “is that I can afford to build this building without borrowing.” All in, he’ll pay around $5 million, cash. The idea came to him last spring, after reading in the local paper about a one-woman show whose star had terminal ovarian cancer. Tait knew her. Her name was Camilla Schade, and she’d once had a troupe to which Tait would donate materials. He didn’t see her show, and she died shortly after. “I love Lititz. I love Lancaster County. I just thought this would be something that’s good for the community,” he says. “I mean, obviously, I believe in Tait, Clair, and employment, blah, blah, blah. That’s all good. But this is going to foster the arts that are not looked after.” How he’ll use the space—“well, that’s a mystery.” He plans to offer it to artistic endeavors for little more than the electricity costs, but he’s not above renting it out for a wedding at full market rate. It’s unlikely that he’ll return to the type of work he left behind when he ceded Tait Towers to the next gen-

eration. “If I was twenty, I probably wouldn’t do the rock ’n’ roll thing,” he says. “Everyone wants a bigger show than the next person. It’s like a three-ring circus. I never did this for the money. I did this because I wanted to build cool shit.” GARY WHEN GARY FERENCHAK IS ALONE at the Studio on a windy day, the building creaks and groans as if it were about to come down. It won’t. If a westward wind were to whip around Zion Hill and hit the Studio at one hundred miles per hour, the building would sway nine inches, but it would endure. Still, the big space at times seems to create its own climate, and at other times to respire. Tied to one corner of the catwalk is an inflatable eyeball, a two-year-old remnant from the rehearsals for Katy Perry’s Witness tour. Out on the floodplain, ducks congregate yearround, sometimes with herons. In the winter, snow geese fly over by the thousands. The only long-stay residents on the property are an Amish family: the brother of the man on the next farm over, his wife, and their young children. They live and work on the northwest corner of the land, in a cluster of old structures that includes a 19th-century farmhouse, a banked barn, and a concrete hatchery. When the family moved in, Rock Lititz helped out, covering the cost of dumpsters and repairs to the roof of the barn. In return, the family is expected to keep their small section of the property looking presentable. Last year’s corn crop grew on the future site of Mickey’s Black Box. It’s early March. A week ago, Ferenchak loaded out Billie Eilish’s crew. Before that was Hall & Oates, and before that, Green Day. (Rock Lititz wouldn’t confirm the Studio’s schedule, citing the confidentiality of its clients.) The BTS load-in has begun. They’ve just finished assembling the steel framework onto which the stage will be constructed. (Stadiums don’t have ceilings, so you bring your own.) The plan to drop off thirty shipping containers was nixed. Instead, the components arrived on fifty-three-foot flatbeds, at least a dozen of them. They drove right into the Studio. Due to the coronavirus outbreak, the band has canceled the first leg of the tour, a four-night run in Seoul. But tomorrow morning, the band’s production team will arrive as planned. Semitrucks will show up, transporting a city-block-sized video screen that Tait built, a sound system from Clair Global, and all the rest of it. Eighty-five local crew members will be on hand. Andrea Shirk has asked them to gather early, to review best sanitary practices. It will be a busy day. Ferenchak climbs into the CrossRoads Zinger. The space is spare, but he likes it that way. This isn’t home, after all. He stretches out on the cream couch, in the starboard slide-out. Black sheets on the windows block the glow of the parking-lot lights. It’s the night shift on the floodplain. When the air is still, it sounds like a frog convention.

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(ISSN 0194-9535) is published six times a year (with combined issues in April/May, Summer, October/November, and Winter, and when future combined issues are published that count as two issues, as indicated on the issue’s cover), by Hearst, 300 West 57th St., NY, NY 10019 USA. Steven R. Swartz, President and Chief Executive Officer; William R. Hearst III, Chairman; Frank A. Bennack, Jr., Executive Vice-Chairman. Hearst Magazine Media, Inc.: Troy Young, President; Debi Chirichella, Executive Vice President, Chief Financial Officer and Treasurer; John A. Rohan, Jr., Senior Vice President, Finance; Catherine A. Bostron, Secretary. © 2020 by Hearst Magazine Media, Inc. All rights reserved. Esquire, Man at His Best, Dubious Achievement Awards, The Sound and the Fury, and are registered trademarks of Hearst Communications, Inc. Periodicals postage paid at N. Y., N. Y., and additional entry post offices. Canada Post International Publications mail product (Canadian distribution) sales agreement no. 40012499. Editorial and Advertising Offices: 300 West 57th St., NY, NY 10019-3797. Send returns (Canada) to Bleuchip International, P. O. Box 25542, London, Ontario N6C 6B2. Subscription prices: United States and possessions, $7.97 a year; Canada and all other countries, $19.97 a year. Subscription services: Esquire will, upon receipt of a complete subscription order, undertake fulfillment of that order so as to provide the first copy for delivery by the Postal Service or alternate carrier within four to six weeks. From time to time, we make our subscriber list available to companies that sell goods and services by mail that we believe would interest our readers. If you would rather not receive such mailings via postal mail, please send your current mailing label or an exact copy to Mail Preference Service, P. O. Box 6000, Harlan, IA 51593. You can also visit preferences .hearstmags.com to manage your preferences and opt out of receiving marketing offers by e-mail. For customer service, changes of address, and subscription orders, log on to service.mag.com or write to Customer Service Department, Esquire, P. O. Box 6000, Harlan, IA 51593. Esquire is not responsible for unsolicited manuscripts or art. None will be returned unless accompanied by return postage and envelope. Canada BN NBR 10231 0943 RT. Postmaster: Please send address changes to Esquire, P. O. Box 6000, Harlan, IA 51593. Printed in the USA.

THE ESQUIRE EDITORIAL BOARD ENDORSES . . . The state of Wisconsin

W IS

Just north of the WisconsinIllinois border, at the

intersection of Interstate 94 and State

Highway 50, is a restaurant called the Brat

Stop. It sells brats, obviously, along with a festival of other

meats in tubular form. There is beer—so much beer—plus a cheese shop

T H I S WAY OU T DEC LA RAT IONS

where you can grab cheese curds, meat sticks, and a six-pack of New Glarus (sold in

Wisconsin only). It’s a jumping-off point for a land of majesty and plenty. ¶ Hillary Clinton

lost more than the White House by failing to visit Wisconsin; she missed the Europe of the Midwest, whose people value beer, cheese, and encased meats. The landscape consists of wide rivers, undulant hills, happy valleys with golden farmland, towering forests, glacial lakes, and dramatic sandstone bluffs. Towns with French names like La Crosse, Eau Claire, and Prairie du Chien dot the map, a reminder that the French (and later the Germans) found promise in Wisconsin. It’s a place the Esquire Editorial Board heartily endorses. ¶ What’s more promising than a ButterBurger, the pride of Wisconsin’s own regional chain, Culver’s? The heat of a shaggy, diner-style patty clarifies a thick smear of butter, turning it into

pure,

sublime butterfat. Embrace the lustrous fat streaming down your chin. Pair it with a side of creamy,

crunchy

fried cheese curds and you’ve got a religious experience. ¶ If you can be persuaded to strap yourself

into

a swimsuit after that meal, you won’t be disappointed. Wisconsin is home to Wisconsin Dells, a puzzling

town

of approximately fifty-five hundred people and six gargantuan water parks, one of which—Noah’s Ark—

is the

nation’s largest. The most deranged of the town’s many attractions are the Museum of Historic Torture Devices (enough said); Mt. Olympus, a Greek-pantheon-themed water park; and Wizard Quest, a claustrophobic nightmare masquerading as a family-friendly interactive labyrinth. Where else in the world can you get lessons in torture, mythology, and wizardry all in a few square miles? ¶ Water is central to life in Wisconsin—in fact, in many of its lake towns, life is transacted on the water. Why drive or walk to share drinks on your neighbor’s dock when you could cruise there by boat? Move to a lake town in Wisconsin, embrace the boat culture, and you’ll feel

IN NS

positively Venetian. ¶ In just about every town, you’ll find an old Wisconsin standby: the windowless bar. You’ll know it by its ramshackle exterior, pockmarked parking lot, and location on a country road. Don’t call it a dive bar—that would be too upscale. This, dear reader, is a town bar, which offers watered-down Bud Light, spectacular gossip, and not much else. It’s absolutely glorious. ¶ And then there are the people. Like most mid-

westerners, they’re a friendly, gregarious bunch—unruffled by much and

apologetic about nearly everything, making for a neighborly land of fellowship and generosity. Blame their joie de vivre on the victuals: Wisconsin staples like sausage, beer, and cheese are meant to be enjoyed en plein air and in good company. Or maybe it’s something in all that water. Whatever it is,

116

keep your land of milk and honey; we’ll take the land of beer and cheese.