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GET THE HELL OUT OF TOWN The Best New Hotels in North America

by T. C. Boyle

SEX AND LOVE IN THE SUBURBS PAGE 44

Drinking with Your Kids in Rome DRESSING LIKE A GROWN-UP WHEN YOU FLY Steakhouses, Cucumber Water, the Thrill of Airport Security Lines

IS EVERYWHERE. YOU DON’T KNOW

“I’ve always felt like an OUTSIDER. Like I was observing LIFE and not actually experiencing it.

THERE WAS guilt with that sometimes— like I WAS a vulture of my own life.”

PAGE 54

Jacket, shirt, tie, and tie bar

by Dior Men; bracelet by the Cast NYC. Photograph by Guy Aroch Styling by Bill Mullen

Used by permission of the Jack Kerouac Estate and The Wylie Agency, LLC.

dior.com - 800.929.dior (3467)

TA B L E OF C ON T E N T S A P R I L / M AY 2022

“There’s something my dad said, from the Bible: ‘Do what’s before you with all your might.’ ” —OSCAR ISAAC, P. 54 F E AT U R E S

54 COVER: THE DREAM OF OSCAR ISAAC

WELL DONE

by Maaza Mengiste In which the star of Moon Knight survives a hurricane, floats in the ocean, lives in a model home, trips on mushrooms, hosts SNL, stars in Star Wars, and makes art that gets at the rich and baffling complexity of the human experience.

But not necessarily in that order.

by Joshua David Stein For ages, the steakhouse and its trappings signified success and a good time, even if the food and service could be hit-or-miss.

Now, thanks to a handful of chef-driven restaurants, we’ve reached a new golden age. Here are the fresh temples of beef worth traveling for.

64 WHAT I’VE LEARNED:

DAY

Interview by Michael Sebastian “I like to think Oasis will get back together, but not this week.”

by T. C. Boyle It’s March 2020, and the Beryl Empress is setting sail from Japan, carrying hundreds of passengers—including a man from Wuhan. A short story for our times from an American master.

BEST NEW HOTELS IN

16

EDITOR’S LETTER

the tracksuit comes into its own.

BLUEPRINT

44 SEX, LOVE,

COURTESY OSCAR ISAAC

20 The rhetorical tic you

won’t be able to unhear (and what it says about us); reclaiming the picnic; the unlikely story of the man now playing Kareem Abdul-Jabbar on HBO; one of the last real magazine shops; the anti-fashion fashion brand; a smartwatch for watch nerds;

ber 1962, at recess, we would all look up at the sky. We’re looking at the sky again.

AND ART IN THE SUBURBS

by Garth Greenwell A former bohemian comes to terms with a kind of life—and love— very different from what he’d expected.

48 COLD WAR KIDS

by Charles P. Pierce For two weeks in Octo-

90 THE THIRTEENTH

LIAM GALLAGHER

66 TRAVEL SPECIAL: THE

Top: Oscar Isaac Hernandez Estrada and his younger brother, Mike, had truck bunk beds in their first home—the model house in a Florida development their parents bought fully furnished. Bottom: The house was almost too perfect; in 1992 it was severely damaged by Hurricane Andrew.

86 FINALLY,

NORTH AMERICA Architectural wonders.

See-and-be-seen lobby bars. Private beaches.

Our favorite places to check into.

78 ON THE MOVE

by Dave Holmes Let Benjamin Bratt show you how to look sharp for a quick getaway.

98 YOUNG PUNKS

by Caryn Rose The Sex Pistols still matter. This May, a new limited series brings the band’s incredible story to life.

112 ESQUIRE ENDORSES . . .

Climate change.

50 WHEN I DID TIME, I WAS—LEGALLY— ENSLAVED

by Mitchell S. Jackson Many states still use language from the 13th Amendment to govern working conditions for prison inmates— some of whom still pick actual cotton.

11

ON THE COVER

OSCAR ISAAC PHOTOGRAPHED BY GUY AROCH FOR ESQUIRE. CASTING BY RANDI PECK. STYLING BY BILL MULLEN. PRODUCTION BY MAY LIN LE GOFF FOR ARTWORLD AGENCY. SET DESIGN BY MICHAEL STURGEON. HAIR BY DJ QUINTERO USING LIVING PROOF FOR THE WALL GROUP. GROOMING BY AMY KOMOROWSKI FOR DIOR BEAUTY AT THE WALL GROUP. COAT AND T-SHIRT BY HERMÈS; JEANS BY RAG & BONE; TIE, SAINT LAURENT BY ANTHONY VACCARELLO.

r a lph l auren purple l a bel

EDITOR IN CHIEF NICK SULLIVAN_Creative Director ABIGAIL GREENE_Executive Managing Editor ROCKWELL HARWOOD_Design Director JOHN KENNEY_Managing Editor KELLY STOUT_Articles Director KEVIN SINTUMUANG_Culture and Lifestyle Director JONATHAN EVANS_Style Director RANDI PECK_Executive Director of Talent MADISON VAIN_Digital Director ERIC SULLIVAN_Senior Editor JACK HOLMES_Senior Writer ADRIENNE WESTENFELD, BRADY LANGMANN_Assistant Editors JUSTIN KIRKLAND_Staff Writer BARRY SAMAHA_Style Commerce Editor MAVERICK LI_Assistant E-commerce Editor GARRETT MUNCE_Grooming Editor LAUREN KRANC_Assistant Editor ART

DRAGOS LEMNEI_Deputy Design Director

CAROL A. SMITH SENIOR VICE PRESIDENT, GROUP PUBLISHING DIRECTOR JACK ESSIG_Senior Vice President, Publishing Director ANNE WELCH_Vice President, General Manager BRENT WILLIAMS ALLEN_Vice President, Marketing JEANINE TRIOLO_Executive Director, Advertising Business Operations LISA PIANA_Group Executive Marketing Director & Sales Strategy CHRIS PEEL_Vice President, Sales KEN DOWNING_Chief Brand Officer, Luxury Collection E-commerce RON SABATINI_Group Finance Manager DANA WENTZEL_Executive Assistant/Business Associate INTEGRATED ADVERTISING SALES

JOANNA NOWACK MELISSAKIS_Group Executive Director, Beauty & Lifestyle AARON KRANSDORF_Group Executive Director, Fashion & Luxury KATE SLAVIN_Senior Executive Sales Director, Luxury PAULA FORTGANG, JOHN WATTIKER_Executive Sales Directors, Fashion CARYN KESLER_Executive Sales Director, Luxury ANGELA PARAUDA, JILL SCHLANGER-SLIVKA_Executive Sales Directors, Beauty R. W. HORTON_Executive Sales Director, Travel TAMMY COHEN_Executive Sales Director, Lifestyle JOHN CIPOLLA_Senior Sales Director, Lifestyle

MIKE KIM_Digital Design Director

LAUREN DEL VALLE_Senior Sales Director, Beauty

ELAINE CHUNG_Digital Designer

MICHAEL RIGGIO_Senior Sales Director, Fashion

CAMERON SHERRILL_Lead Motion Designer REBECCA IOVAN_Digital Imaging Specialist FASHION

TED STAFFORD_Market Director ALFONSO FERNÁNDEZ NAVAS_Market Editor RASHAD MINNICK_Fashion Associate HEARST VISUAL GROUP

ALIX CAMPBELL_Chief Visual Content Director, Hearst Magazines JUSTIN O’NEILL_Visual Director JAMES MORRIS_Contributing Visual Director KELLY SHERIN_Visual Editor SAMEET SHARMA_Associate Visual Producer GIANCARLOS KUNHARDT_Visual Production Coordinator HEARST VIDEO GROUP

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ROBERT SCHEFFLER_Research Chief KEVIN MCDONNELL_Senior Research Editor EDITORS AT LARGE

DAVE HOLMES, DANIEL DUMAS WRITERS AT LARGE

CHARLES P. PIERCE, KATE STOREY CONTRIBUTING WRITER

MITCHELL S. JACKSON

ANGELA HRONOPOULOS_Senior Sales Manager, Direct Media OLIVIA BENSON, AALIA MEHRA, AMANDA SHEERIN_Sales Assistants INTEGRATED MARKETING

SARAH CLAUSEN, ALEXANDRA KEKALOS, DANA MENDELOWITZ, LINDSAY SABLE_Executive Marketing Directors AIMEE COUTURE_Senior Marketing Director SARA OLDMIXON_Marketing Director DEAN FRYN_Associate Marketing Director BRIANA ROTELLO_Senior Marketing Manager GINNY DURKIN, EMILY LYNCH_Marketing Managers ISABELLE ADLER, KENDRA WILLIAMS_Marketing Coordinators MCKENZIE SUTHERLAND_Marketing Assistant BRAND DEVELOPMENT

NICOLE SPICEHANDLER_Executive Marketing Director, Research & Brand Development ALEXANDRA STETZER_Senior Marketing Director, Research & Brand Development MELANIE SINGER_Associate Marketing Director, Research & Brand Development CREATIVE SERVICES

THEA KARAS_Executive Creative Director JESSICA TSOUPLAKIS_Senior Art Director FRAUKE EBINGER_Creative Director ALICE STEVENS_Art Director EVENTS & PROMOTIONS

KAREN MENDOLIA_Executive Marketing Director, Events and Promotions JESSICA HEINMILLER_Associate Marketing Director, Events and Promotions ADVERTISING OPERATIONS

MICHAEL NIES_Advertising Services Director MICHELLE LUIS_Senior Advertising Services Manager PATRICIA NOLAN_Operations Account Manager LOGAN BISSETTE_Billing Coordinator TREVOR CZAK_Business Assistant

CONTRIBUTING EDITORS

ALEX BELTH, BEN BOSKOVICH, JEFF GORDINIER, A. J. JACOBS, JOHN J. LENNON, MIKE SAGER OTHER CONTRIBUTORS

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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 HEARST MAGAZINE MEDIA, INC.

DEBI CHIRICHELLA_President, Hearst Magazines Group, and Treasurer KATE LEWIS_Chief Content Officer FOR CUSTOMER SERVICE, CALL: 800-888-5400 EMAIL: EsqCustServ@CDSFulfillment.com VISIT: www.esquire.com/service WRITE: Customer Service Department, Esquire, P.O. Box 6000, Harlan, IA 51593 Published at 300 West Fifty-seventh Street, New York, NY 10019-3797. ® www.esquire.com. Printed in the U. S. A.

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VA N I N A S O R R E N T I /A S P E S I ( TO P L E F T ) . V I CTO R TO R R E S / S TO C K S Y ( C L I F F S ) . T R I N E T T E R E E D / S TO C K S Y ( T R E E S ) .

MICHAEL SEBASTIAN

L E T T E R F R O M T H E E D I T O R ___________________________________________________________

IN NOVEMBER 1971, MY NEWLY MARRIED MOM AND dad flew from Chicago to Florida for their honeymoon. Halfway through the flight, the pilot pointed out a landmark below them, and the passengers on the left side of the plane, where my parents sat, rushed to the right side for a glimpse. My dad stayed in his seat, afraid the plane might tip over like a canoe.

That was his first and last airplane ride.

All of our family vacations were road trips. Each July, we’d drive an hour to a lake house in Wisconsin. Each August, we’d drive four hours to Iowa for a family reunion. Each March, we’d drive eighteen hours to Siesta Key, Florida, for spring break. My dad would pack the car like it was a game of Tetris. Then we’d pile in. My brother lost himself in a Walkman; I flipped through my book of baseball cards or stared out the window at the vast sea of midwestern corn, listening to the Top 40 radio coming from the front seat; Wang Chung’s “Everybody Have Fun Tonight” provided the soundtrack for one of those summers.

My memories of those trips are coated in a thick nostalgic glaze. At the time, though, I just wanted to stay home to play baseball with my friends and watch television.

Then a shift happened.

Actually, a break: I snapped my left tibia playing high school football and had a blue cast up to my crotch. Couldn’t leave the house if I wanted to. Whether by coincidence or fate, someone gave me a copy of On the Road to help me kill the time. It was my gateway drug to the open road.

Next I read The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. . . . They ignited a sense of adventure, and by my late teens I was accepting every invitation to travel:

red-eyes to California in the back of the plane and 6:00 A.M. flights to New Orleans; road trips up the eastern seaboard with five friends packed into a compact car; twelve-hour drives to Nashville, hungover for the return leg.

I slept on friends’ couches and floors or in cheap hotels.

The feeling of leaving a place, of stepping into a city you’ve never been to, preoccupied me. Climbing the stairs from the metro in Madrid on the first day of my own honeymoon, the centuries-old buildings revealing themselves to me and my wife through our jet-lagged eyes, is etched in my memory.

Then came my mid-thirties and children, when planning trips became less about where we’d eat and drink and more about the pool, the playground, or the friends or cousins who had come with. Which makes those times when my wife and I get away, just the two of us, seeking the sense of discovery we experienced in Madrid and the moments of luxury we couldn’t afford as newlyweds, so incredible: A first-class flight. A stupidly expensive bottle of wine. A great hotel. Maybe it’s getting older and knowing the responsibilities that await me at home, but now a trip can be as rejuvenating, as transformative, as watching a Prince cover band play in a Memphis nightclub until 4:00 A.M. We’re celebrating moments like these in this issue’s travel package, “Let’s Get the Hell Out of Town,” starting on page 66. It includes Esquire’s first-ever collection of the Best New Hotels in North America. The list is composed of not only extraordinary places to lay your head but also the restaurants, bars, pools, spas, and vibes that will leave you feeling like a new (and extremely well-cared-for) man. To say the least, you’ll have fun.

Wang Chung wouldn’t want it any other way. —Michael Sebastian

16 A P R I L / M AY 2022

P H OTO G R A P H S B Y J E N N I F E R L I V I N G STO N

G R O O M I N G : LO S I F O R H O N E Y A R T I S T S + M A R T I A L V I V OT S A LO N

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blueprint Why Are You Talking in the Second Person?

The way we tell stories has changed. It might be an annoying tic—or a total shift in how we experience the world.

a dozen times a day, and now so will you. Someone is telling a first-person story, talking about something that’s happened to them or they’ve witnessed. The action begins: I opened the door; I picked up the phone; I turned right. But then, when the story gets dramatic, the narrator is no longer the protagonist.

You are.

I opened the door, and you could see everyone running. I picked up the phone, and you could hear him laughing. I turned right, and you saw smoke in the distance. It is an unconscious sleight of hand, a conversational do-si-do we don’t do on purpose: We sprint away from first person and slide right into second.

Survivors of school shootings tell their stories: “I ran out of the classroom, and you could see blood everywhere.” Or athletes say, “I watched the ball go through the goalposts, and you could hear the crowd lose their minds.” Sometimes people go all Inception on it: Capitol Police officer Harry Dunn described his experience during the January 6 insurrection to Michael Barbaro on The Daily with “You’re seeing all of this, and in your mind, it’s like I cannot believe what I’m seeing right now.” Back to an I, but still filtered through you, an added degree of separation between the teller and the tale.

The use of second person deepens the listener’s engagement in a story. It’s verbal 3D, conversational Smell-O-Vision. Talking Heads’ “Once in a Lifetime” wouldn’t work nearly so well if David Byrne sang, “I may tell myself: This is not my beautiful wife.” But the shift in mid-story, in midsentence, feels new. The slide into second might be a tic, or it might tell us something about our relationships with ourselves in 2022.

MUSICIAN MIKE DOUGHTY FINDS HIMSELF

doing the slide as a way to avoid the appearance

20

of being highfalutin. “I get uncomfortable when people ask me questions about being a musician,” he says, “so I go to second person. They ask, ‘What do you do when you’re about to go onstage?’ and I say, ‘Well, you warm up a little bit.’ ” Doughty’s decades in the business entitle him to falute at any level he chooses, but he resists. “Maybe the you is a way to deflect the grandiosity of it.”

Or maybe the slide into second is a way for people to disassociate—maybe it would be too real for that school-shooting survivor to say, “I opened the door, and I saw blood everywhere.”

“In trauma, people do tend to distance themselves,” psychotherapist Peter Stuart says. “Retelling traumatic events is hard to do in the first person. It tends to re-traumatize.” Stuart notices it in therapy sessions. “A person will begin a difficult story and get more and more vague, and I’ll have to point that out—like, who got locked in the basement?”

If some slide into second to edit themselves out of a scary situation, then others use it for a differ-

USC English professor Karen Tongson agrees: “We’ve become so attuned to being online, on social media, essentially just on all the time, that we never see ourselves as completely alone, never singular in what we experience. Our experiences are always going to be seen, read, felt by others, so the slippage from the I to the you is the narration of that blurring of perspective between the self and a witness.” Maybe this is a good thing, a small acknowledgment of a collective consciousness. “Yeah,” Tongson says, “but it’s also a bit sad, insofar as we can’t value experience without imagining someone else’s reception of it.”

IN A TIME OF WIDE BUT SHALLOW CONNEC-

tion—at, God willing, the end of the Zoom happy hour—maybe the slide into second is an expression of the need to relate. I just saw something incredible; now you come see it with me. “In a lot of cases, the second person strikes me as an us, like all of us are experiencing this now,” Stuart says, “like a royal you.” John August, a screenwriter and a cohost of the Scriptnotes podcast, puts it in Hollywood terms. “It’s like the WE HEAR and WE SEE in scene descriptions,” he says. “I’m not telling you a story. We’re in this present moment together.”

TALKING HEADS’ “ONCE IN A LIFETIME” wouldn’t work nearly so well if David Byrne sang, “I MAY TELL MYSELF: THIS IS NOT MY BEAUTIFUL WIFE.” ent and equally modern reason: to show off. “I wonder if it reflects the way in which people are now so used to seeing themselves, as if from outside, at the center of a narrative,” says Catherine Heaney, chair of the National Museum of Ireland and daughter of the poet Seamus Heaney. “A reflexive impulse that has grown up with our use of social media and selfies and stories, turning the gaze back on oneself, so that the I becomes a you.”

After two long years of not being in moments together, I think that’s the desire that drives the slide into second. In a particularly stressful time to be alive, we’re unconsciously updating our language to trick ourselves into feeling less alone.

Or maybe reality television and podcasts have exposed me to more people with questionable storytelling skills. Hard to say. I only know this: I hear it everywhere, and you wonder what’s up.

S E A N LO C K E / S TO C K S Y.C O M

THERE’S A LINGUISTIC HABIT I’M HEARING

_ dave holmes’ _ america

blueprint

_ design

The New Power Couch The fun, sensuous, tailored yet curvy furniture of fancy ’60s homes is back. And if comfort and making a big statement are your thing, it’s time to have a seat. _

BY LAUREN GOODMAN

Pierre Paulin’s Osaka sofa.

THROW A CURVE Go Original . . .

Or Newly Inspired . . .

JEAN ROYÈRE, OURS POLAIRE, 1947

PIERRE PAULIN PACHA SOFA

GWYNETH BOUCLÉ LOVESEAT

CLAUDE HOME BOUCLÉ SOFA

MUSE SOFA BY SARAH ELLISON

HORNBAKE SOFA

BY EGG COLLECTIVE

Originals can go for more than $1 million.

$10,175; dwr.com

$1,499; cb2.com

From $4,000; claudehome.com

From $2,546; dwr.com

Price available upon request; eggcollective.com

22

F R A N C O I S H A L A R D / T R U N K A R C H I V E .C O M ( O S A K A S O FA ) . C O U R T E S Y S OT H E B Y ' S ( O U R S P O L A I R E ) . C O U R T E S Y G U B I ( PA C H A S O FA ) . C O U R T E S Y B R A N D S ( R E M A I N I N G ) .

THERE WAS A TIME WHEN THE CURVACEOUS, UNDULATING

seating of the mod era could only be found in the most outré and louche cinematic interiors. Think Bond villains, Barbarella, A Clockwork Orange. These days, however, you can’t gawk at a highend property without seeing it. These nonlinear scene-stealers have emerged in all the cutting-edge interiors that matter.

Kanye West sold his Maybach to bankroll a Jean Royère polar bear sofa. “My favorite piece of furniture we own,” he tweeted.

(A 1947 original sold for $1.1 million at Christie’s in November.)

Supermodel Elsa Hosk perched on her bouclé circular sofa for 7.3 million Instagram followers. Mega designer Yves Béhar anchored his manse in San Francisco’s Cow Hollow with four Ubald Klug for de Sede couches contoured in cognac leather waves, plus a pale turquoise Luigi Colani pool sofa upstairs.

“I loved the sensuality that each piece brought to my home,” Béhar shares. “The forms are free-flowing and speak to the body rather than the domestic rules of the past. They were definitely made to be enjoyed barefoot.”

What’s going on here? You could argue that we’ve been craving a sensuality a casa to replace the shiny nightclub we were invariably missing. And from a practical perspective, comfort has taken top priority. Where better to lounge in Gucci joggers during a Zoom? Plus, originals have become a status symbol, driving up prices. Kim Kardashian has three Royère polar bears.

Fortunately for the rest of us, others have taken notice of the demand and created inspired pieces at less astronomical prices.

(See below.)

This is more than just a piece of furniture. “A sculpture sofa makes a room come alive,” says interior designer Rodman Primack of the firm RP Miller. “After the last two years, no one needs another nondescript one. Why shouldn’t a sofa be cool?”

POLARIS New Yor k – So ut h Co ast Pl a z a – Rod e o Dr i ve – Yo r kd ale Shopp ing Cent re

blueprint

LOAF OF THE PARTY The picnic doesn’t have to mean a fussy affair with a gingham blanket and some Pottery Barn basket set.

It’s time to rethink it as a fun and funky warm-weather pursuit. Here are some tips to guide you, from this deliciously weird sandwich you’ve never heard of to the portable bar that will please all. _

BY JOSHUA DAVID STEIN

_ esquire _ entertains

Though it will be the central element of your picnic spread, the Party Loaf is itself a democratic and flexible institution. What is put onto the bread is up to you—see the chart below for some spreadable inspiration. In 1986, Betty Crocker recommended shrimp salad, deviled ham, and olive-nut spreads enshrouded in a half-and-halfand-cream-cheese frosting. But Ashley Rath, the chef behind the Venice-inspired Saint Theo’s in Manhattan, and a fan of the Party Loaf on her few days off, layers hers with homemade mortadella mousse, a spicy, creamy pasta salad, and an egg-and-anchovy schmear. (Go to Esquire. com for the full recipe.) Like our rights, the spreads that make up a Party Loaf are unenumerated. The power belongs to the people, but the party undeniably belongs to the loaf.

IF YOU BUILD IT, THEY WILL COME

FISH + GAME

What you put in a Party Loaf is your call, but here’s a banquet to get the ideas started

’NDUJA

PICNIC ETIQUETTE

RULE 365:

Double dipping is acceptable as long as you re-dip the unbitten portion of the chip.

RULE 366:

Triple dipping is one dip too far.

Spread ’Em!

A few top mail-order picks for your Party Loaf or some grippin’ and dippin’

CHOPPED-LIVER SALAD

PIMENTO CHEESE

RILLETTES

SWEET GRASS DAIRY Georgia’s Sweet Grass Dairy substitutes its own Tomme for the more traditional cheddar, but with Sir Kensington’s mayo and piquillo peppers, the pimento holy trinity is all present and accounted for. $9; sweetgrassdairy.com

WHITEFISH

PLANTS OLIVE TAPENADE

EGGS + DAIRY

MACARONI SALAD BABA GHANOUSH F O O D S T Y L I N G : S U E L I @ H E L LO A R T I S T S . C O U R T E S Y B R A N D S ( F O O D P R O D U CT S ) .

PIMENTO CHEESE MUSHROOM PÂTÉ HERBED GOAT CHEESE PUB CHEESE DEVILED-EGG SALAD

How to Assemble Your Loaf

1 Cut a Pullman loaf horizontally into four equal slices, with no crust. Milk bread would also be ideal.

2 1 4

Add a / -inch spread of your choice to each layer. (Pictured at left is mortadella mousse, pasta salad, and anchovy and egg salad, but you can do whatever you’re feeling.)

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

3

4

5

Stack the layers and refrigerate for an hour.

Remove from the fridge and spread cream cheese evenly over the loaf. Optional: Garnish with hard-boiled egg, anchovies, or some pickled zucchini.

Slice, serve, party.

It’s probably easiest to eat with a fork and knife, but you do you.

SMOKED WHITEFISH SALAD RUSS & DAUGHTERS The OG smoked-fish merchants from the Lower East Side add a touch of kippered salmon to their wildly popular, nationally shippable spread. $26; russanddaughters .goldbelly.com

’NDUJA TEMPESTA ARTISAN SALUMI The Fiasche family has perfected its ’nduja— spicy spreadable salami—over five generations, first in Calabria and now in Chicago. $33; tempestaartisansalumi.com

blueprint Going on a picnic doesn’t have to mean Solo cups and paper plates. Adding some real items from the bar or kitchen can make things feel a little more proper. So we collaborated with the party-in-a-box experts at Social Studies to make a picnic kit we have dubbed Field Day Fete. You bring the food and drink; they provide all the plates, silverware, and other accoutrements for a picture-perfect setting. You don’t even have to do dishes–just put everything back in the box and send it back. But our kit features a few cool things you get to keep, including these cheese knives and coasters that will elevate anything from Champagne to a simple can of Bud. social-studies.com

PICNIC ETIQUETTE

RULE 750:

Two Ways to Jam on Your Picnic According to Michelle Zauner, author of Crying in H Mart and lead singer of Japanese Breakfast

THE ULTIMATE PICNIC BAR (BY ABV) Whether you’re on the alcohol-free side of the bar or slumped over the vodka bottles on the blanket, this crop of seven are here to serve you.

JAM: MUSICAL There’s a song called “4th of July” by my friend Meg Duffy, known as Hand Habits. They’re an incredible guitar wizard and one of the most gifted lyricists. It starts off as a softer folky song and it explodes into an entirely different kind of jam. It’s genius.

JAM: CULINARY To be honest, I don’t really fuck with jam.

I’m definitely more into dips like this Yumm!

Sauce from Eugene, Oregon—they ship nationally—that’s made with almonds, garbanzo beans, garlic, and lemon juice. I’ll dip toast and tortilla chips into it. It’s my all-time favorite dip.

Shirtless picnicking is okay as long as you’re near a body of water.

RULE 751:

Pantsless picnicking is pushing it.

0% ST. AGRESTIS PHONY NEGRONI The same herby bitterness that helps a negroni cut through late-afternoon heat is here but sans alcohol in small, handsome batch-made bottles.

5.5% BAJA BREWING ESCORPION NEGRO Over IPAs but also don’t want a boring lager? Go with this just-bitter-enough black ale from Mexico.

12% HANA HWAJU MAKGEOLLI Makgeolli, slightly effervescent Korean rice wine, is pearlescent, florally noted, and eminently sippable. Huge in Korea and rising in the States, this is a rare Brooklyn- and female-made version.

12.5% ASHANTA WINES “UNDER CURRENTS” CARIGNAN Out of the wreckage of the pandemic and wildfires, winemakers Chenoa Ashton-Lewis and Will Basanta founded Ashanta. Their first vintage includes a breakout Carignan, tasting of good times and ripe cherries.

18% MULASSANO BIANCO

Secret Sauce Noma’s Smoked Mushroom Garum For nearly 20 years, Noma’s René Redzepi and his merry band of weirdos have been deep into fermentation. A visit to the Copenhagen restaurant wasn’t complete without a tour of shipping containers filled with old stuff getting better with age. Now you can try some of that at home.

Smoked Mushroom Garum is the first of Noma’s pantry products. Garum is an ancient Roman fermented fish sauce. This version, however, is made with mushrooms, fermented with koji for six to eight weeks, then cold-smoked and strained. It’s an umami superfluid, turning everything at your picnic, from a pasta salad to chili, tangibly more delicious. It isn’t the Mick Jagger, but it is the Merry Clayton. That is to say, the secret, soulful, and best part. $24 for 250ml; nomaprojects.com

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Hot day. Vermouth. Tonic on ice. Unbeatable. Especially with this bartenders’ favorite, an herbaceous and citrus-forward liquor from Turin.

25% DON CICCIO & FIGLI LA PERLA CHERRY MANHATTAN Forgo the intricate measuring of a manhattan with Don Ciccio’s all-in-one cherry manhattan. Slightly jammy—all you’ll need is ice and a twist.

PLANTATION JAMAICA 2007 Shame to use such a good rum as the new Jamaica 2007—13 years in Jamaica, two in France—in a rum and coke, but a picnic is not a picnic without rum and coke. And if it’s a good picnic, it deserves the best rum.

C O U R T E S Y B R A N D S ( A LC O H O L ) . C O U R T E S Y N O M A ( M U S H R O O M S , G A R U M ) . G E T T Y I M A G E S ( J A PA N E S E B R E A K FA S T ) . C O U R T E S Y S O C I A L S T U D I E S ( P I C N I C K I T ) .

USE THE REAL STUFF

_ esquire _ entertains

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_ culture _ tv

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LONG SHOT

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Imagine teaching at Stanford and then portraying your idol, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, on HBO’s Winning Time. That’s exactly what happened to Solomon Hughes, the year’s most unlikely star. _

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BY BRADY LANGMANN

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BEFORE YOU ASK, SOLOMON HUGHES

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is three inches shorter than Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. Yes, he played basketball professionally, and his sky hook is nearly as effervescent as the original. No, actor Kareem hasn’t spoken to real Kareem. No, you’ve never seen Hughes before, because HBO’s Winning Time: The Rise of the Lakers Dynasty, on which he plays AbdulJabbar, is his very first acting gig. And sure, he felt a tiny bit of pressure when his very first acting gig required him to become arguably the most influential basketball player who’s ever lived.

With that out of the way: It’s the morning after the debut of Winning Time—the über-stylized series about the Showtime-era Lakers—and Hughes, 43, is telling me how a man goes from D-I baller to Harlem Globetrotter to Stanford lecturer to would-be actor wondering what to do in an audition when Adam McKay shouts, Improvise!

It started when he realized, actually, that he wasn’t all that passionate about basketball. “I had a mentor who said, ‘While you are someone who had some talent, I felt like you just liked basketball.’ It’s liberating to hear that.”

Hughes left hoops for a career in higher ed, writing a dissertation on how athletic recruits choose their colleges and, later on, mentoring Ph.D. students. “I knew if I’m going to stay in education, I need to go after what I really want to do: teaching. I left Stanford the summer of 2019. My plan was to spend time looking for teaching

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MORE TEAMS THAT SHOULD BE HBO-IFIED ’50/’60s YANKEES Sorry, A-Rod, we need a true period drama. Give us Mantle versus Maris, a DiMaggio-Monroe fling, and Steve Carell as Yogi Berra. ’85 BEARS Pull up YouTube, type in “Super Bowl Shuffle,” hit play. The series writes itself from there.

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’90s BULLS Obviously. Bonus points if the series picks up on a downbeat: MJ’s baseball year.

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’90s/’00s U. S. WOMEN’S SOCCER TEAM Is a faithful adaptation of Nine for IX’s “The ’99ers” too much to ask for? ’90s ISLANDERS Everyone’s up for a good truecrime yarn nowadays. Let’s see the story of John Spano, who managed to fraud his way into owning the team.

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gigs.” Then a casting director called.

Wanted: Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.

A few months later, Hughes is at a 24-hour gym, launching 100 sky hooks per arm. He’s interviewing legendary trumpeter Wynton Marsalis. (AbdulJabbar famously loves jazz.) He’s thinking of his father, who’s the same age as Kareem. “My dad grew up in the South, went to segregated schools.

When I think about the conversations I’ve had with my dad about his life and then the things Kareem has written?

You’re talking about the darkness of humanity.” The work paid off. The Abdul-Jabbar we meet on Winning Time has learned the lessons of Lew

Alcindor but doesn’t yet know how to turn pain into art. Hughes adds all the necessary weightiness, temper, and heart to Kareem’s crisis of faith. “Acting has been one of the most spiritual things I’ve ever done,” he says.

At the end of our talk, I ask Hughes a question he may or may not be ready for, the great existential conundrum of our time: The GOAT—who is it?

“Ooooh, man,” he says, as if LeBron, MJ, and Kareem were holding a glass to his door. “Kareem Abdul-Jabbar primarily shot two-pointers. And he holds the Mount Everest of basketball records. I’ll let the numbers make the case for that.” Passed the test.

From top: Actor Solomon Hughes; Kareem Abdul-Jabbar in his heyday; Hughes as Abdul-Jabbar with his Winning Time costar Quincy Isaiah as Magic Johnson.

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

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_ being _ there

The Last of Its Kind Casa Magazines, a Manhattan hole-in-the-wall that attracts a famous clientele, is one of New York City’s last remaining magazine shops. It’s a place that exists out of time.

BEFORE IT WAS INSTAGRAM FAMOUS

A BOOK THAT FINDS HOPE IN THE PAST

and got write-ups by The New York Times, Vogue, and the BBC for its efforts to survive the pandemic, Casa Magazines was a place you happened upon. Perched on the corner of Eighth Avenue and Twelfth Street in New York’s West Village, Casa is among the last magazine shops in the city—a shrine to print, a place that is truly analog. It’s tiny, maybe 400 square feet, and smells delightfully of fresh paper thanks to the thousands of magazines lining the walls and piling up on the floor.

There is every title you can imagine and many you can’t, like August, a beautiful, coffee-table-sized travel magazine about places like . . . New Jersey. The owner, Mohammed Ahmed, and manager, Syed Wasim, aka Ali (pictured here), know exactly where to find each one. They also know the locals who stop by frequently, including boldfaced names like Julianne Moore and Sarah Jessica Parker. To stay in business in the depths of the pandemic, Casa started an Instagram account that quickly gained attention among New York media types, leading to collaborations with Vans, Valentino, and Wes Anderson.

Today it is a destination. Whether you stumble in from out of town or uptown, you will most certainly leave with an armful of magazines. Bring your kids and they will leave with a free candy bar courtesy of the proprietors. And if you’re in search of an N. Y. C. souvenir, nothing beats a Casa T-shirt. —Michael Sebastian

FIT TO PRINT Three more New York City hangouts that will rekindle your love of bound paper

In Lift Every Voice: A Celebration of Black Lives, a storied generation becomes immortal. Featuring 54 interviews with Black elders, ranging in age from their early 70s to 111, this hardback volume is a patchwork of remarkable lives, heroes both sung and unsung. Lift Every Voice reveals the enormous debt of gratitude America owes these men and women. It is a book with the potential to change and inspire you. —A. W.

SWEET PICKLE BOOKS, MANHATTAN

CAFE CON LIBROS, BROOKLYN

RIZZOLI, MANHATTAN

If you’ve ever thought, This book would pair well with an artisanal pickle, then have we got the bookstore for you.

The Lower East Side gem sells gently used books, rare volumes, and housemade pickles.

Be sure to snag some merch—Sweet Pickle’s tees sell out quickly.

This indie, Blackowned staple in Brooklyn has an eclectic, curated selection of everything: antiracist children’s books, one-of-a-kind greeting cards, and, as the name indicates, top-notch coffee.

Located in a dreamy beaux-arts space, Rizzoli is the mecca of coffee-table books.

Not in the market for a showstopping art book? Have no fear: You can pick up European magazines, too.

—Adrienne Westenfeld

P H OTO G R A P H S B Y S A B R E E N J A F RY

THE HIGHEST

PROTEIN SNACK NUT

*

:HŒUH ŵH[LQJ RXU SURWHLQ SRZHU :hQGHUIXO 3LVWDFKLRV LV D FRPSOHWH SURWHLQ VQDFN ZLWK DOO QLQH HVVHQWLDO DPLQR DFLGV (YHU\ R] VHUYLQJ KDV RI \RXU GDLO\ YDOXH RI SURWHLQ ,I \RX KDG WKHVH VWDWV \RXŒG VKRZ RII WRR

%DVHG RQ SHUFHQW GDLO\ YDOXH RI SURWHLQ SLVWDFKLRV YV DOPRQGV FDVKHZV DQG SHDQXWV k :RQGHUIXO 3LVWDFKLRV $OPRQGV //& $OO 5LJKWV 5HVHUYHG :21'(5)8/ 3/$17 3527(,1 WKH DFFRPSDQ\LQJ ORJRV DQG WUDGH GUHVV DUH WUDGHPDUNV RI :RQGHUIXO 3LVWDFKLRV $OPRQGV //& RU LWV DIŴOLDWHV :3

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High & Dry

_ style

SEA SHEPHERD CAPSULE COLLECTION JACKET BY SEASE.

A new Italian sportswear brand and a fearless nonprofit collaborate to bring bold, high-tech style to the fight against illegal industrial fishing _

BY NICK SULLIVAN

SEASE IS A LABEL THAT COULD ONLY HAVE EMERGED FROM ITALY. ITS

founders, Franco Loro Piana and his brother Giacomo, are sons of the famous cashmere dynasty, but their approach is far from traditional.

Sease fuses performance and elegance for skiers, sailors, surfers—just about anyone with a passion for the outdoors. This spring, the brand has created a collection of high-spec sportswear made from recycled ocean plastics in partnership with the maverick environmental crusad-

ers at Sea Shepherd. The nonprofit organization takes to the ocean to disrupt—often at great risk to its crew—the operations of illegal industrial fishing fleets. It also retrieves nets, which are recycled into usable yarn before being transformed into pieces like the spray top here. The reflective skull-and-crossbones logo emblazoned on the chest and back is a declaration of support for the cause. (And all profits from the collection benefit Sea Shepherd.) It also happens to look damn cool.

P H OTO G R A P H B Y B E N A LS O P

blueprint

Back on Track Thanks to a new breed of designers taking it just as seriously as any other style staple, the once humble tracksuit is ready for its renaissance _

BY JONATHAN EVANS

THE TRACKSUIT HAS LIVED MANY LIVES. IT’S BEEN A PIECE OF

genuine athletic gear. It’s been a B-boy uniform. It’s also been a punchline, something your Sopranos-loving neighbor from North Jersey would wear to take out the trash and sneak a cigarette. And while it never really went away, it did fade into the background for a minute there. No more. Whether hark-

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ing back to its heyday or reimagining it for the future, established labels and upstart designers alike are breathing new life into the tracksuit by rendering it in updated cuts and ever-more-luxurious materials. The right one might not replace your go-to two-button—or, hell, maybe it will—but it’s absolutely poised to become your off-duty uniform.

P H OTO G R A P H S B Y S I LV E R C H A N G

_ style

THE THROWBACK London-based designer Grace Wales Bonner has a knack for channeling the best of ‘70s style in her interpretation of the tracksuit. The jacket is cut short and slim and is finished, like the lightly flared pants, with a crocheted side stripe. Feel free to lean into the vibe with a striped sweater vest underneath. Not only is it a pattern-mashing power move—it’s era appropriate, too.

JACKET ($715), VEST ($540), AND PANTS ($570) BY WALES BONNER; SNEAKERS ($149) BY MORAL CODE.

THE SARTORIAL TAKE THE REMIX For some, modernizing the tracksuit means slimming down. For Priya Ahluwalia, it’s all about nailing that just-boxyenough shape approved by certified Cool Kids the world over, including in her native London. The impression, like the cut, is louche and loose. You could wear it with sneakers to turn up the casualness, but pairing it with loafers lends it a genre-straddling versatility that could even work at the (dress-code-free) office.

JACKET ($640) AND PANTS ($600) BY AHLUWALIA; LOAFERS ($135) BY G. H. BASS ORIGINALS.

Tod’s, the maker of “weekend on the Amalfi Coast” driving shoes, also happens to turn out a pretty mean tracksuit.

The feel is all upscale Italian, the sort of thing you could absolutely bring on that same weekend away. As for how to wear it, though, a pair of western boots will give it a little devil-maycare edge while an open-collar polo shirt will ensure Dickie Greenleaf and Tom Ripley would still approve.

JACKET ($1,045) AND PANTS ($795) BY TOD’S; POLO ($89) BY COS; BOOTS ($255) BY TECOVAS; SUNGLASSES ($720) BY JACQUES MARIE MAGE.

ST Y L I N G : R AS H A D M I N N I C K . G RO O M I N G : J E S S I CA O RT I Z U S I N G J AXO N L A N E . M O D E LS : D O M I N I Q U E H O L L I N G TO N A N D J I S L A I N D U VA L F O R W I L H E L M I N A ; J U L I A N CA R D O N A F O R M A J O R .

blueprint

_ style

The AntiFashion Fashion Brand Aspesi isn’t trendy. That’s the whole point. _

BY NICK SULLIVAN

calling Aspesi a fashion brand isn’t quite right. “Anti-fashion” is more accurate. From its founding in 1969 by designer Alberto Aspesi, the label has refused to be pigeonholed by anything as shallow as trends.

American-born, Milan-based designer Lawrence Steele knows a thing or two about that Aspesi creapproach. After logging time at ative director Moschino and Prada (not to Lawrence Steele. mention his own eponymous label), Steele worked as a consultant for Aspesi from 2004 to 2017, helping the team fine-tune everything from the shirts the company has made since the very beginning to the military-inspired outerwear that’s become a modern-day Aspesi specialty. And over those 13 years, Alberto more out of the fabrics,” he says. became not just a boss but a friend and For spring 2022, Steele worked with phomentor. “Mr. Aspesi was all about the autographer Vanina Sorrenti on a series of thenticity of the process,” Steele explains, portraits that would convey the mix-and“about things that last in time.” matchable, highly personalizable nature When Steele returned to Aspesi in 2020 of Aspesi. And to keep the freedom of exas creative director, he was charged with pression going from one season to the next, balancing that heritage with relevance for Steele is making another anti-fashion move a new generation. Things like strict gender and rejecting newness for its own sake. divisions and old-school production meth“For me, a great win is when we’ve deods were, naturally, out the window. “The signed something that we don’t want to take pieces had an appeal independent of the out of the collection,” he says. “You know, gender they were designed for,” says Steele. the next season comes along and we’re like, “Customers just bought the pieces because ‘Let’s do it again.’ My dream is to get to a they were well-made and fit perfectly into point—and I think Mr. Aspesi also arrived their lives.” And as for how those pieces there—where we’re not actually designing. are made? “We figured out the sizing so We’re kind of just creating issues of items that when we make stuff, we’re producing that people love and respond to.” less, getting more out of the garments,

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CLOCKWISE FROM TOP: SHIRT ($365) AND TROUSERS ($435) BY ASPESI. TROUSERS ($745) BY ASPESI. JACKET ($710), SHIRT, AND TROUSERS BY ASPESI.

M AX VA D U K U L / C O U R T E S Y A S P E S I ( S T E E L E ) . VA N I N A SORRENTI/COURTESY ASPESI (REMAINING).

THOUGH IT MAKES CLOTHES,

TIME INSTRUMENTS FROM THE COCKPIT TO THE WRIST

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_ dialed _ in

A Smartwatch for Watch Nerds Still not convinced you can—or should—wear a connected watch? Consider TAG Heuer’s Calibre E4, which brings legendary Swiss craftsmanship and ingenuity to wearable tech. _

BY NICK SULLIVAN

SIX MONTHS AFTER THE APPLE WATCH

CALIBRE E4 45MM CONNECTED WATCH ($2,050) AND ORANGE STRAP ($200, SOLD SEPARATELY) BY TAG HEUER.

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debuted in 2015, TAG Heuer introduced its first connected watch—a bold early entrée into a market that most of the Swiss watch industry initially dismissed. The old guard thought the Apple Watch was a fad. Now we know smartwatches are here to stay. And while personality-free designs still predominate, TAG Heuer has proven that you can have all that technology in a watch that actually looks stylish.

There’s a hitch, though. Swiss-made watches are designed to last a lifetime. Many lifetimes. That isn’t the case with smartwatches. Apple, for instance, has put out seven generations of its watch. TAG Heuer has sought to extend the life of its smartwatch—to make it last for, if not a lifetime, at least longer than others in the market. “Eventually, on a smartwatch, the battery will stop working,” says TAG’s CEO, Frédéric Arnault, who took over the brand in 2020. “The question is, how far away is ‘eventually’? The software can be maintained for years. We can change the battery to extend the lifetime of the watch.” According to Arnault, people who bought TAG’s first-generation connected watch seven years ago continue to wear it. Happily.

TAG Heuer is now on the fourth generation.

The Calibre E4 in 42mm is more elegant and refined than its predecessors. It’s also closer, aesthetically, to a mechanical watch, having slimmed down significantly. Its big brother, the 45mm version, leans into a sportier feel, accentuated by its ceramic bezel. Neither skimps on functionality. The crown, which in a connected watch is used far more often, has been enlarged. There’s a new altimeter in both sizes, plus faster Bluetooth connectivity. Both are powered by Google’s Wear OS. “The watches we are building now,” says Arnault, “we just could not have done three years ago because the technology had not yet evolved.”

If you’ve balked at wearing a smartwatch, the E4 might change your mind.

P H OTO G R A P H B Y B E N A LS O P

PROMOTION

THE 80TH ANNUAL

GO TO ALLSTARDAD.ORG TODAY AND SUBMIT YOUR ESSAY

blueprint

_ style

That Only Cost How Much?

The basic components here—blazer, sweater, trousers—will be familiar to you. What’s not is the proportion.

Everything is looser.

Chiller. The feeling is less “workaday” and more “what do you want to do today?”

The answer is anything you want, because this just-left-of-center uniform fits in, no matter the environment.

And while the jacket is a little pricier, when you’re getting your wardrobe building blocks for a song, you can afford an occasional splurge.

Looking like a million bucks with a million bucks is nothing. Doing it on the cheap? Now that’s impressive. _

BY JONATHAN EVANS

IT’S BOOM TIMES FOR EVOLVED MINIMALISM. GONE ARE THE

restrictive silhouettes and stark palette of days past. In their place are clothes in a range of hues that hang precisely—but comfortably—on the body. It’s all about elevated ease, and the best part about it is that you can do it for pretty much any price. Sure, you could spend five grand on something extra fancy. But you can also get a “Holy shit, I can’t believe it’s that affordable” version of the vibe with around $500 in your pocket. Here’s how.

JACKET ($345) BY THE FRANKIE SHOP; SWEATER ($50) BY UNIQLO; TROUSERS ($70) BY ZARA; BELT ($70) BY BANANA REPUBLIC; WATCH ($200) BY TIMEX.

THE ANTIBORING BEIGE Neutral tones have a reputation for playing a little too . . . well, neutral.

But when you put them together like this—with generous cuts that hang loose in all the right places, plus a heaping helping of texture— they’re anything but.

The trick is to go big but stay strategic. Notice how the trousers hit right at the ankle and how the coat envelops but doesn’t swallow the body. That’s how you keep things looking special, not sloppy.

COAT ($129) AND TROUSERS ($60) BY ZARA; SHIRT ($120)

BY THE FRANKIE SHOP; SHOES ($125)

BY EVERLANE.

THE ÜBER-AFFORDABLE, ÜBER-COOL SUIT A suit for less than $150? You’d expect something fit for humming fluorescent lights and humdrum office parks, right? Well, now that Christophe Lemaire—king of high-end minimal luxury with his own label, Lemaire—is at the helm of Uniqlo U, it’s time to adjust your expectations. Shoot for a fit that skims the body instead of hugging it, and don’t be afraid to go monochromatic. A white dress shirt is never the wrong call, but in this case, a dark greenish-gray one is even better.

JACKET ($90), SHIRT ($50), AND TROUSERS ($50) BY UNIQLO.

P H OTO G R A P H S B Y S I LV E R C H A N G

S T Y L I N G : R A S H A D M I N N I C K . G R O O M I N G : J E S S I C A O R T I Z U S I N G J AX O N L A N E . M O D E L S : D O M I N I Q U E H O L L I N G TO N A N D J I S L A I N D U VA L F O R W I L H E L M I N A ; J U L I A N C A R D O N A F O R M A J O R .

THE UNIFORM 2.0

PROMOTION

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Field Day Fête

Those luxuriously long summer days just got a party upgrade.

We' re taking picnics to the nines this season with our limited-edition look, Field Day Fête.

Designed in tandem by the entertaining experts at Social Studies and Esquire, our outdoor party kit comes with everything you need for sun-drenched afternoons.

From nonbreakable outdoor-friendly plates to custom-embroidered hemstitch linens, vintage flatware, party games, and cheese knives, you' ve got every excuse to get outside.

social-studies.com

PHOTOGRAPHY: FRANKIE MARIN. LOCATION: LONG MEADOW RANCH

SNAP THE CODE TO ORDER AND GET THE PARTY STARTED.

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_ grooming

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BEFORE

AFTER 2 WEEKS

_ dispatches from _ the new middle age

L I S A K E R E S Z I / T R U N K A R C H I V E .C O M

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SEX, LOVE, AND ART IN THE SUBURBS What happens when life doesn’t go as planned? Now in his 40s, a former bohemian comes to terms with a kind of life—and love—very different from what he’d expected.

BY GARTH GREENWELL I T ’ S A ST R A N G E T H I N G , I N H A B I T I N G A L I F E YO U

never would have imagined for yourself.

I turn 44 this spring. For the past nine years, I’ve lived in a small city in eastern Iowa; for almost as long, I’ve been in a relationship with a man I met soon after moving here. Six years ago we moved in together, and three years ago we

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bought a small Dutch colonial. In many ways, our lives are typical of one kind of midwestern American life. On nice evenings, we sit in our yard and say hello to our neighbors; in the autumn we rake leaves. A year ago we adopted two cats.

This is a life that no one I knew in the pre-Internet, pre– marriage equality South I grew up in, at the height of the early

CBD for Your Pain

Everyone feels the hurt as you age, but CBD can help you deal with it LIFE REALLY DOES FLY BY. Before I knew it, my 40s had arrived, and with them came some new gifts from dear ol’ Mother Nature—frequent knee pain, stress, low energy and sleeplessness. Now, I’m a realist about these things, I knew I wasn’t going to be young and resilient forever. But still, with “middle-age” nearly on my doorstep, I couldn’t help but feel a little disheartened.

That is until I found my own secret weapon. Another gift from Mother Nature.

It began a few months back when I was complaining about my aches and pains to my marathon-running buddy, Ben, who is my same age. He casually mentioned how he uses CBD oil to help with his joint pain. He said that CBD has given him more focus and clarity throughout the day and that his lingering muscle and joint discomfort no longer bothered him. He even felt comfortable signing up for back-to-back marathons two weekends in a row this year.

That made even this self-proclaimed skeptic take notice.

But I still had some concerns. According to one study in the Journal of the American Medical Association, 70% of CBD products didn’t contain the amount of CBD stated on their labels. And, as a consumer, that’s terrifying!

If I was going to do this, I needed to trust the source through and through.

My two-fold research process naturally led me to Zebra CBD. First, I did a quick online poll—and by that, I mean I posed the CBD question on my Facebook page. Call me old fashioned but I wanted to know if there were people whom I trusted (more than anonymous testimonials) who’ve had success using CBD besides my buddy. That is how I found out that Zebra CBD has a label accuracy guarantee which assures customers like me what is stated on the label is in the product.

Secondly, I wanted cold hard facts. Diving deep into the world of CBD research and clinical studies, I came across Emily Gray M.D., a physician at the University of California at San Diego (UCSD) Medical School and medical advisor for Zebra CBD who is researching the effects of CBD. Dr. Gray wrote “early results with CBD have been promising and we have a lot of research

underway now. I’ve had several patients using CBD with good success. It’s important that you know your source of CBD and how to use it properly.”

After hearing it from the doctor’s mouth, I returned to my online poll and was amazed by the number of close friends and family who were already on the CBD train. Apparently, I was the only one without a clue! And funny enough, a couple of friends who commented were using the same brand as my buddy—Zebra CBD. There was no consensus as to why they were using CBD, but the top reasons given were for muscle & joint discomfort, mood support, sleep support, stress and headaches, as well as supporting overall health & wellness.

Eventually, even the most skeptical of the bunch can be won over. With a trusted CBD source in mind, I decided to try it.

When I viewed Zebra CBD’s selection online, I was impressed by its array of products, including CBD oils called tinctures, topicals, chewable tablets, mints and gummies. After reading on their website that all their products are made with organically-grown hemp, I ordered... and it arrived within 2 days!

The first product I tried was the rub. Now this stuff was strong. Immediately after rubbing it on my knee, the soothing effects kicked in. It had that familiar menthol cooling effect, which I personally find very relieving. And the best part is, after two weeks of using it, my knee pain no longer affected my daily mobility.

The Zebra Sleep Gummies, on the other hand, had a different but equally positive effect on my body. To take it, the instructions suggest chewing thoroughly. This was simple enough, and the taste was, well, lemony. After about 15 minutes, a sense of calm came over my body. It's hard to describe exactly; it's definitely not a "high" feeling. It's more like an overall sense of relaxation— and then I was out. Needless to say, I slept great and woke up refreshed.

While it hasn’t been a catch-all fix to every one of my health issues, it has eased the level and frequency of my aches. And it sure doesn’t seem like a coincidence how much calmer and more focused I am.

All-in-all, CBD is one of those things that you have to try for yourself. Although I was skeptical at first, I can say that I’m now a Zebra CBD fan and that I highly recommend their products. My 40s are looking up!

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blueprint AIDS crisis, could have imagined. When I got a scholarship to music school, art opened an escape from that world, and until my mid-30s, my life was shaped by one of the models of artistic life America allows: I moved every few years, collecting degrees, then pursued teaching gigs. Eastern Iowa was just another stop on an itinerary that led I wasn’t sure where. I would always be in motion, I thought, always on my way somewhere else. I loved it, not least because it was what I thought an artist’s life should be: always unsettled, full of possibilities, free from the obligations of rootedness.

Transience was also central to my erotic life, and I loved that, too. When I was an adolescent, my first exposure to queer community came in bathrooms and parks, discovering the remarkable practice that is gay male cruising. Sometimes cruising is seen merely as a response to oppression—the poor queers, in places like the one I grew up in, who have no other option but furtive sex with strangers. But cruising didn’t feel like privation to me; it was an extraordinary opening up of the world. The men I met weren’t strangers; they were fellow citizens of a secret nation. Hookups became friends. There was a stretch of road in Louisville’s Cherokee Park that we took over on summer nights, sitting on the hoods of our cars, singing along to Madonna and Whitney Houston, being absolute queens. Everything in my life to that point had taught me that queerness was a source of shame; in the park I could experience it as joy.

And cruising was a practice I could take with me. Everywhere I’ve lived I’ve cruised, online and off. Promiscuity is an excellent way to experience new places, to meet people and establish immediate intimacy. Straight people were always dismissive when I tried to talk about the satisfactions—sexual, social, emotional—I found in cruising, but I was dismayed, during the campaign for marriage equality, to see queer people discounting it too, acting as though one model of life—two people in a long-term, monogamous relationship— was the only valuable model.

In my first two books of fiction, I wanted to write about often-derided forms of eroticism—cruising, promiscuity, kink. My aim wasn’t to romanticize them, but to show them as human, complex— allowing for tenderness and brutality, dignity and humiliation. All of which is also true of marriage.

i

I PUBLISHED MY FIRST NOVEL JUST BEFORE

my partner and I moved in together. This meant that I was talking about cruising just as I was settling into a kind of stability and emotional exclusivity that was new to me, and which I wasn’t entirely sure I was suited for. Along with the usual frictions and adjustments of new domesticity, I

46

_ dispatches from _ the new middle age

felt anxiety about whether a more settled life would be compatible with the risk and adventure that I had long thought were necessary for making art. I remember an evening in Boston in 2016 when, at dinner after a reading, I was talking about my partner with a group of friends, and a woman I had just met asked me—accusingly, I felt—if it wasn’t hypocritical to write books about cruising while in a monogamous relationship.

“Monogamous?” I retorted, mustering all my affronted faggotry. “But we aren’t heterosexual!”

Camp is a useful reflex when strangers you meet on book tour presume too much. Of course, plenty of queer people are committed to monogamy, and for all I might critique how the movement for marriage equality presented a sanitized, flattened image of queer lives, I’ve never been disdainful of the idea of monogamous marriage, or of the fight to claim its privileges and responsibilities for queer people. It’s a beautiful model for a life. Of course queer people have a right to it.

But monogamy isn’t the only beautiful model for a life—and it isn’t the only one for marriage, or for the kind of marriage-in-all-but-name I have with my partner. Sometimes one finds, especially among younger queers, an anxiety that legalized marriage robs queer life of its radical potential. “Homonormativity” is the catchphrase, a rallying cry against assimilation and homogenization.

quate now. “We fill pre-existing forms,” writes the great queer poet Frank Bidart, “and when we fill them we change them and are changed.” The model of marriage is such a form: It can structure our lives in meaningful, transformative ways—and also it’s something we can reinvent and reshape.

i

IDEALLY, THE KIND OF LIFE I’M TRYING TO

make allows for stability and rootedness while also leaving room for adventure. But really those terms—stability, adventure—are too dull for reality. Long-term relationships, it turns out, are adventures in themselves. After nearly nine years, my partner continues to surprise me. Those cats I mentioned, for instance: My partner has never lived with pets before and, being from the south of Spain, was skeptical about animals in the house.

There is no delight quite like seeing him, coming home after a day of teaching, cry, “¡Qué cosita!” and drop to the floor to play with our orange tabby.

Adult dignity falls away; I can see straight to his childhood. How strange that something so inconsequential should also seem so profound, an occasion for the deepening of love.

Among the biggest surprises for me in recent years has been the discovery of a new and undramatic happiness. I’m basically a believer in temperament, that our emotional thermostats are set early in life, and that despite passing peaks and valleys, they’re more or less fixed. But life with my

_ Everywhere I’ve lived I’ve cruised.

PROMISCUITY is an excellent way to experience NEW PLACES. But as I consider the married queers I know, it seems plausible that queer people have changed marriage as much as it’s changed us. For many of them, as for me, honoring a durable and unique commitment to another person is entirely compatible with a continuing engagement with queer sexual community. I haven’t made a choice between durable partnership and cruising; cruising is still central to the way I move through the world, a lifeline in a career that demands travel. I still frequently find myself in new cities, and in the intense solitude of a book tour I feel grateful for the possibilities cruising allows for intimate connection.

Maybe the biggest thing that has changed in my 40s is a new impatience with abstractions like “radical” and “normative,” which held some romance for me as a young person but feel utterly inade-

partner, in which the first and last act of each day is a habitual acknowledgment of love—a hug, a caress—has caused a minor but durable shift in the weather, a warming of the air by a degree or two.

One of many dumb ideas I had as a young person was that the kind of rooted life I lead now would be a life of banality, closed off from the passions of art. But in fact that minor shift in happiness is a profound one, and it has changed my sense of what constitutes safety and risk, complacency and adventure, banality and radiance. I sometimes say that we need art because there are mysteries so profound they defeat all our other tools for thinking. The new, apparently unremarkable, unimaginable life that is somehow mine feels like a place where literature lives. The challenge I face now is to write something adequate to it.

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COLD WAR KIDS For two weeks in 1962, at recess, we would all look up at the sky. We’re looking at the sky again.

BY CHARLES P. PIERCE

THE NUNS LIED.

In October 1962, those of us in the third grade at St. Peter’s School in Worcester, Massachusetts, noticed that we were being herded into the basement of the old school building every day. The basement was concrete, and it smelled of age and wet linoleum. It was also chilly, and yet with all of us milling around, the walls started to sweat anyway. It was a cold October that year.

Along about the fourth or fifth day of this, somebody asked the nuns what was going on. Not that we minded the break in the school day, but there seemed to be a weird kind of urgency in the way the sisters hustled us between the new school

48

A P / S H U T T E R S TO C K ( C L A S S R O O M ) . C H R I S M O R R I S ( I L L U S T R AT I O N ) .

_ from _ the _ politics _ desk

building and the old. Eventually, we all came to the opinion that it had something to do with the ominous events we heard about with half an ear at home as our parents watched the evening news.

But the nuns lied to us. They told us these were only fire drills.

Gradually, however, the recess grapevine overtook the good-hearted prevarications of the Sisters of Saint Joseph. There were enough kids who watched the news with their parents—I was one of them—and were hip to the day’s events. These kids passed the word that the Wyman-Gordon Company, where they manufactured parts for B-52 bombers, was a prime target. Wyman-Gordon was not that far from our school. Once we put that together, we’d find ourselves looking up at the clear autumn sky, searching for incoming contrails. And that, more or less, was our Cuban Missile Crisis: two weeks of existential peril we only marginally understood and rosary beads.

On February 27, 2022, having invaded Ukraine, Russian president Vladimir Putin put his nation’s nuclear-weapons forces on “special combat readiness.” This immediately escalated the seriousness of the crisis he’d created. Over here, it inspired a very curious argument, both in real life and on social media. There was some debate over which generation’s experience with nuclear terror was more acute. Boomers referred to the days of Dr. Strangelove and Fail Safe. A younger generation had grown up with its own cold war, forged by alarmism over what that generation perceived as the Reagan administration’s reckless brinksmanship with a severely wounded USSR. A TV movie, ABC’s The Day After, had scared them all to death. But in both cases, people discovered that a fear they thought had died had merely been sleeping. And all at once, the generation now coming of age had its own brand of nuclear terror.

During the conversation, I tried to explain my awakening fear and where it came from: that we knew it was serious because all the nuns lied.

For two weeks in 1962, it seemed as though the final confrontation was a phone call away, and in the chilly and sweaty basement of the old school, we sent decades of the rosary aloft like Minuteman missiles in the general direction of what we called the imprisoned people of Russia—whom, alas, America might have been forced to incinerate. And then, one day, the whole thing was over.

The fire drills were once again spaced out over months at a time, and out at recess we stopped watching the skies. That was my Cuban Missile Crisis. That was, in essence, my cold war. Now people who grew up in the heady optimism of the ’90s, or even in the martial reaction of the 2000s, have their own.

i

IN HER 2015 NOBEL PRIZE LECTURE, AUTHOR

and oral historian Svetlana Alexievich described the sense of profound dislocation that came upon the people of what was called the Soviet bloc when the USSR and its satellite governments all over Eastern Europe collapsed: Two catastrophes coincided: In the social sphere, the socialist Atlantis was sinking; and on the cosmic—there was Chernobyl. The collapse of the empire upset everyone. People were worried about everyday life. How and

saber. A big chunk of American public opinion advocates for steps that guarantee a military confrontation with Russia. And I’m back at recess again, in 1962, wondering when the contrails will come.

We must look to the lessons that Jack Kennedy had to learn on the fly: that there is a limit even to American power and that the biggest limit on our power is the stockpile of our most powerful weapons. We still live on the nuclear precipice, and the only way to keep from going mad is an unshakable faith that we cannot fall over it. President Joe

_ We still live on the NUCLEAR PRECIPICE, and the only way to keep from going mad is an unshakable faith that we cannot fall over it. with what to buy things? How to survive?

What to believe in? What banners to follow this time? Or do we need to learn to live without any great idea? The latter was unfamiliar, too, since no one had ever lived that way. Hundreds of questions faced the “Red” man, but he was on his own. He had never been so alone as in those first days of freedom.

Something similar happened over here, albeit in a gentler form. After all, we “won” the cold war.

It was a dizzying time. This sense of triumphalism in America was leavened by a mighty feeling of relief. It was a release after the decades when, every day, annihilation seemed to lurk around the corner. In September 1983, Soviet fighters shot down a Korean airliner, killing 269 people, including a U. S. congressman. Everybody held their breath then. The instincts dormant in me from my own cold war, the cold war of Kennedy and Khrushchev, asserted themselves once more.

For me—and, I suspect, for a number of other people—that relief lasted until the years 2016 to 2020, when everything we thought we were sure of dissolved again. It turned out the old fears had faded, not evaporated. They’d slept, not died.

Which brings us, again, to the events of this early spring. Authoritarianism rises in Eastern Europe.

Russia, with undisguised imperial ambitions, invades Ukraine. The United States supplies the Ukrainian resistance the way we armed the mujahideen against the Soviets in Afghanistan, except openly. Vladimir Putin rattles the nuclear

Biden is old enough to understand this simple truth, and to profit from it. Vladimir Putin is old enough, but his view is different. Back in 2019, he pronounced himself prepared to face another Cuban Missile Crisis, this time with hypersonic missiles on nuclear submarines. He looks upon survival as a badge of surrender. This is Richard Nixon’s “madman theory” come to life.

For an American politics so accelerated that it outpaces genuine understanding—and consequently an American politics that jumps at shadows and immediately goes from a resting state to a heedless sense of imminent catastrophe—these are hard-earned lessons about the relationship between patience and resolve. God help us if too many also start believing that survival is defeat.

As I got older, I read more about the missile crisis, and I was struck by how hard President Kennedy worked to keep from cornering Khrushchev, resisting the admonitions of his own military.

Later, talking with journalist Norman Cousins, Khrushchev spoke of the similar problems he had.

His generals wanted to use the missiles before they lost them. Khrushchev said that they looked at him “as though I were out of my mind or, what was worse, a traitor. So I said to myself, ‘To hell with these maniacs.’ ” Which is pretty much what I, a child of the cold war, thought throughout the early spring of 2022. To hell with all the maniacs.

I’m not going down to that basement again.

_ what’s going on? _ by mitchell s. jackson

When I Did Time, I Was– Legally, Officially–Enslaved Oregon and 19 other states still use language from the 13th Amendment to govern working conditions for inmates— some of whom still pick actual cotton. The rules are changing, but not without resistance.

BACK IN THE LATE ’90S, I OWNED A SID NUMBER (12218354)

and an address in an Oregon state prison. For part of my biddy prison bid—the old heads said my time was short fore I got there—I worked as an orderly in a mental ward of the Oregon State Hospital. The official duties included sweeping and mopping the halls, changing sheets soiled with feces and/or soaked with urine, and making beds tucked with tight hospital corners.

The unofficial duties included learning to at least feign aplomb when residents tossed food trays, tantrumed to the point of restraint, or screeched refusals of their meds.

On the up and up, it wasn’t a job I would’ve appreciated on the outs, but on the inside, I was a pair of praying hands— and furthermore envied by no few fellow prisoners for being allowed to leave the confines of the farmhouse-turned-prison that held us captive. Never mind the pay was paltry, so little that I misremember my actual wage, though research affirms it was less than pennies on the dollar.

Research also attests that I was enslaved at the time. And

50

I ain’t speaking hyperbolically or philosophically but literally and officially here. As proof, I submit Article I, Section 34 of the Oregon State Constitution: There shall be neither slavery, nor involuntary servitude in the State, otherwise than as punishment for crime, whereof the party shall have been duly convicted.

If that excerpt from my home state’s charter sounds familiar, that’s because it’s almost verbatim the infamous clause of the 13th Amendment to the United States Constitution that banned slavery in all of the U. S., save one gaping-ass loophole: “except as punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted.”

Following the Civil War, that clause, along with the bigoted laws that became the Black Codes, paved an oil-slicked road to an era of mass incarceration, and the language still figures into America’s first-in-the-world imprisonment rates.

In 2020, several recent Willamette University graduates founded an organization called Oregonians Against Slavery and Involuntary Servitude (OASIS), with the goal of center-

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blueprint ing the voices of the incarcerated in dismantling racist policies. OASIS partnered with a group of men incarcerated in the Oregon State Penitentiary to introduce a bill that seeks a ban of enslavement and involuntary servitude from the Oregon constitution. In addition to striking the language, it proposes the addition of a new article: (2) Upon conviction of a crime, an Oregon court or a probation or parole agency may order the convicted person to engage in education, counseling, treatment, community service or other alternatives to incarceration, as part of sentencing for the crime, in accordance with programs that have been in place historically or that may be developed in the future, to provide accountability, reformation, protection of society or rehabilitation.

t

THE OASIS INITIATIVE (SJR 10) will be voted on

in the state’s November election as an amendment to the state constitution. (Can you believe, in the 21st century, we have to wage a campaign to nix language that sanctions slavery?) Though the numbers point to the bill passing, does it surprise you that people have argued that slavery is dead, that the language has little bearing on people’s actual lived experience, and therefore why go through the formality of removing it?

“We constantly get asked, ‘Well, is this just a symbolic thing?’ ” says Riley Burton, an OASIS cofounder. “And the question is, Is the amendment being used as just a symbolic thing? If the basis of your system is built on slavery, then it will

_ what’s going on? _ by mitchell s. jackson

Pickens spent the ages of 15 to 39 in prison, was granted clemency last year by Governor Kate Brown, and now works as a paralegal. It’s tough to square his critical view of prison work with Mannix’s optimism. “I think we should ask the prisoners themselves,” says Mannix. “Because they like the programs that we have. They are designed to give them job skills and help them engage in useful activity while they are incarcerated. I always ask folks, ‘Do you want people to just sit in a prison cell with nothing to do?’ ” Listening to Mannix tout the merits of prison labor, one might miss that his Measure 17—on paper at least—demands “involuntary servitude” from all prisoners. Listening to Mannix talk, you’d never know that the amendment proposed by OASIS is part of a national movement, that there are 19 other states with slavery language remaining in their constitution. Hearing Mannix—also the architect of legislation known as Measure 11, which sanctioned several of my peers with mandatory prison sentences—present his arguments, one could lose sight of the billions reaped (CoreCivic and GEO manage more than half the private correction contracts in the U. S. and in 2015 alone had combined revenues of $3.5 billion) from exploitative prison labor. Mannix’s spiel fails to mention that Arkansas, Texas, and Georgia—is it a coincidence that they were all part of the Confederacy?— do not pay prisoners at all. That at Mississippi’s Parchman Farm and the former Louisiana plantation known as Angola Farm (Black prisoners

_ Can you believe, in the 21st century, we have to WAGE A CAMPAIGN to nix language that sanctions slavery? have an effect. And if it’s not [built on slavery], then it won’t.”

When OASIS began its push, its most prominent opponent was a prolific Oregon legislator named Kevin Mannix. Mannix explained to me that at first he worried that SJR 10 would create a challenge to the 40-hour workweek mandated for all Oregon prisoners by way of Measure 17—a law he propelled to approval in 1994.

“The enslavement-clause victory will be great,” says Anthony Pickens, who helped OASIS work on the bill while he was incarcerated. “But until Measure 17 gets changed, prisoners are still mandated this 40-hour, almost nonpay workweek.

We’re trying to get these walls broke down so that eventually we can get fair wages.”

52

make up 70 percent and 75 percent of their populations, respectively), the prisoners still work the fields, some picking actual cotton.

Mannix also lauds Oregon’s history as a free state—omitting the crucial fact that it was founded with a clause in its constitution that excluded Black people from residing in the state, a law endorsed

by Peter Burnett, a member of the Oregon Provisional Government’s seven-person council in the 1800s. Burnett went on to become the first elected governor of California, which I mention because both Oregon and California are known as bulwarks of liberalism.

But be not duped by their ultra-blue repute.

The Golden State pays its incarcerated workers eight to 37 cents an hour for part-time work and

$12 to $56 per month for full-time work. And in what I see as emblematic of the state’s ethic on prison labor, Cal Fire uses incarcerated men and women to work as firefighters—often on the dangerous front lines—and for decades, until just a couple years ago, barred them from landing jobs as firefighters once they were released or paroled, by reason of a rule against hiring felons.

True, I never fought forest blazes or picked cotton while I was down. Matter fact, the only other job I had during my biddy bid was washing dishes in the prison kitchen, a job for which I was also thankful. That gratitude, however, paled in comparison with what working outside the prison did for my spirits, with the feeling that I could be trusted with a measure of freedom, that I was still a contributing member of society—that in a place that made men wastrels, I was otherwise.

That the pay wouldn’t turn my books into a bank vault was cool with me. In the moment, it felt like a fair trade-off. But, see, one of the harms of belonging to a marginalized group is having your oppression obscured.

How should I reconcile my previous appreciation for holding a job outside the prison with what I now know about how my people became the grist for the prison-industrial complex? With what I now understand about the forces that made crack—the drug that landed me in prison—an epidemic in inner cities and not in suburbs, forces tied to those who made suburbs in the first damn place? With what I’ve learned about the relationship between those inner cities and suburbs and the tax dollars that fund prime public schools?

With what’s been revealed about the links between draconian mandatory minimums, three-strikes laws, and the boom of private prisons?

How do I reconcile the prior boost to my morale with the knowledge that allowing enslavement language to endure in writ not only turns incarcerated humans into legal objects but aids illintentioned people in their abuses of them? How do I square believing my old job to be a form of benevolence with the truth that, by and large, people whose ancestors never stooped sunup to sundown over cash-crop tobacco and king cotton are profiting, profiting, prospering from all the above?

On July 7, 1998, breathing what must’ve been the cleanest air that ever touched lungs and all but gliding beneath the clearest cerulean sky, I paroled from Santiam Correctional Institution.

My parole conditions specified that I get a job, which I did, working as a construction laborer.

I’ve held several jobs since then, but not none working as a dishwasher or orderly. And what, reasonable people, does that say about the purported virtue of my prison work experience?

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the dream of oscar isaac In which the star of Moon Knight survives a hurricane, floats in a warm ocean, lives in a model home, makes movies, that gets at the rich and baffling complexity of the human experience. But not

This page: Jacket, shirt, and tie by Tom Ford. Opposite: Coat and shirt

by Tom Ford; jeans, boots, and tie, Saint Laurent by Anthony Vaccarello.

wanders around his apartment, wears tie-dye, trips on mushrooms, hosts SNL, stars in Star Wars, and creates art necessarily in that order. BY MAAZA MENGISTE PHOTOGRAPHS BY GUY AROCH STYLING BY BILL MULLEN

THE FIRST HOUSE IT IS 1992 AND A HOUSE BUILT ON HOPE IS CRACKING UNDER PRESSURE.

A frightened young family huddles in the living room, hiding beneath a torn roof, praying to survive. The floors are lifting, the carpet is flooding, and as one wall then another splinters, this family’s dreams start to collapse.

Outside, Hurricane Andrew: the sound like a freight train, loud and ominous, relentless and otherworldly. It is coming for them, this force of wind and rain and some other power that feels unstoppable and ungodly, spiteful even. A tree spins through violent gusts, snapped cleanly from its roots.

Manicured lawns in the housing development explode. Sidewalks heave and ripple. Windows shatter. It’s impossible to know where inside ends and outside begins. Time has stopped, yet everything else is still in motion.

The edges of the world have blurred. I’m going to die, thirteen-year-old Oscar Isaac thinks as he hunches beneath flimsy sofa cushions with his brother and sister, his mother and her already fraying marital relationship. I’m going to be hurled into the air by this hurricane and disappear.

It is possible to be young and old at once. To be filled with both a child’s confusion and adult terror—and to still have room for some other wordless, ancient fear to thread itself through you and disrupt the sleep that comes at night, even years later. The hurricane will leave a trail of destruction behind, and though Oscar and his family will make it out alive, some things will not survive intact, like his parents’ marriage. Something else intangible will come untethered in his life. There is nothing certain anymore. There is no such thing as solid ground. And while it might not be free fall, the boy senses a shift in the balance of the world: The security that (if we’re lucky) childhood provides is gone.

He had a small desk, full of pages of the stories he had written. All of them were lost to the storm, to the encroaching sea.

As the years progress, as a burgeoning interest in music and film opens pathways and brings him great acclaim, certain uneasy dreams still persist: of the house, of walking through it, of remembering it and yearning for the promises it held.

T H E A PA R T M E N T “I’VE ALWAYS FELT LIKE AN OUTSIDER,” ISAAC SAYS. HE IS TALKING

about the characters he feels drawn to as an actor—how they, too, are often outsiders, people grappling with their place in their world. The sun, bright and unusually warm for the time of year, spills through the window behind him. He is in the Brooklyn apartment that he keeps for visiting family and friends. He is wearing an orange tie-dyed T-shirt and dark sweats, and he sits cross-legged on his bright-yellow sofa, drinking a glass of water. His curly hair is casually finger-combed off his forehead, his dark eyes warm. “Literally, and then emotionally, psychologically. I always felt like I was observing life and not actually experiencing it. There was a lot of guilt with that sometimes—feeling like I was a vulture of my own life.”

To be in conversation with Oscar Isaac, who is forty-three, is to talk with someone who has thought deeply about the course of his life—not out of nar-

Above: Coat and shirt by Tom Ford; jeans and tie, Saint Laurent by Anthony Vaccarello. Below: Jacket by Brioni; T-shirt by Gabriela Hearst; jeans and tie, Saint Laurent by Anthony Vaccarello; leather bracelet by the Cast NYC.

57 A P R I L / M AY 2022

cissism or vanity but by necessity, a desperate desire to find what feels like solid ground. For him. For his family. For us, whom his art reaches. He has worked to wrest meaning out of his confusions and fears. His effort is ongoing, and his audiences have the privilege of following him in his relentless and shattering performances, in search of the firm footing he lost every time another of his dreams was interrupted.

Forty-two movies in, where has he led us?

t

TWO NIGHTS AGO, HE HOSTED SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE, HIS FIRST

time. The gig was part of the buildup to his next big project, Moon Knight, his triumphant induction into the vaunted Marvel universe.

But everyone knew Oscar Isaac already, of course. As the wisecracking, brusque Poe Dameron in the three most recent Star Wars movies; as the unsettling, reclusive tech overlord in Ex Machina; as the desperate businessman in A Most Violent Year; as the devastated husband in Scenes from a Marriage. From Dune; from The Card Counter, a recent thriller by Paul Schrader, who wrote Taxi Driver; from the anguished melancholy of the Coen brothers’ Inside Llewyn Davis. Isaac is riveting onscreen, at ease with ambiguity, comfortable maneuvering in that unsteady space where there is no correct response, no right answers, but what exists might be something akin to a greater truth.

Then came SNL and we saw something else: Oscar Isaac is hilarious! As in laugh-out-loud, LMAO hilarious. (If you missed it, watch the whole show, but especially the skit in which he plays a janitor who wants to be a writer.)

“Oscar is really funny,” says May Calamawy, his Moon Knight costar. “He’s

always down to be goofy and play in between scenes.” When they weren’t rehearsing or filming, she says, they would play Ping-Pong on a table that Isaac had brought in.

Jessica Chastain, his costar in Scenes from a Marriage and A Most Violent Year and a longtime friend, first met him in college. “Oscar was really good friends with my college boyfriend,” she says. “So the first time I really remember being around Oscar was when all the boys were hanging out, and he always seemed like a bit of a troublemaker. He was very mischievous. I would tease him a lot because he would behave badly and I would take him to task for it.” Years later, when they were filming A Most Violent Year in 2014, Chastain brought a foot-massage machine to the set, and between takes Oscar would get his feet massaged while the two of them sat watching The Great British Bake Off. As we sit and talk in the apartment in Brooklyn, he says he’d like to go get coffee soon, but we never do—the conversation flows and there is never a natural break. He is as funny and quick-witted as the others say. He laughs easily, and bubbling between pauses is a ready smile. Behind him, a bicycle leans against the railing of the narrow balcony. A tall shelf in the living room holds rows of records. Next to the glass coffee table, on a console against the wall, are photos of his wife and their children. In one, Isaac is holding his baby son, bent down to kiss him.

There is a moment in Scenes from a Marriage, a five-part series that explores a couple’s relationship, when Isaac’s professor character, Jonathan, recounts a nightmare to his estranged wife, Mira, played by Chastain.

He is bare chested, just woken from the disturbing dream, and he is trying his best to describe what he dreamed. He is shaken—scared, even— and uses his hands as he attempts to explain what he saw. What makes this scene mesmerizing and painful is the tremor in Jonathan’s voice as he speaks to Mira, his eyes locked on hers, never leaving her. He is afraid

5 8 A P R I L / M AY 2022

to let her go, maybe more afraid of that than of anything else that has ever frightened him, and what rests between that tremulous voice and that unwavering gaze is another terror—primal, even. We feel it, too. A fear of the unknown.

He tells me about a home movie, The Avenger, he made at around ten years old with his friend Bruce. It had a simple plot: One of a set of twin brothers owes money and is trying to escape a henchman. The complication comes in the roles Oscar and Bruce assigned themselves. Oscar plays the debt-ridden brother and the henchman—dual opposing roles. The characters fight each other, and the henchman kills the brother, prompting the surviving twin to seek vengeance. It looks like the work of a child who felt split between forces that seemed equally oppressive, equally bad.

He showed a clip of this home movie on SNL, this childhood vision of himself as a hero, vanquishing the enemy inside. Emerging triumphant and strong in the world he constructed when so much else around him felt like too much.

Where can one go when it feels like there is no escape?

It is possible to be both villain and avenger, to be in a battle where you must find a way to simultaneously destroy and protect yourself. This conundrum is at the core of what makes us human—it has been the inspiration behind some of the greatest performances and the most devastating art, and of some of the most seismic human actions in world history. It is also at the core of the electrifying, elusive restlessness that flickers between Oscar Isaac’s spoken lines in every scene he does. It complicates his characters, layering their every expression with something else that eludes language, that unfolds only in the subtle gestures that constitute an entire and silent vocabulary.

Denis Villeneuve, who directed Isaac in 2021’s Dune, says there was a scene in which Isaac suggested cutting most of his spoken lines entirely. “It

This page: Coat, T-shirt, jeans, and tie, Saint Laurent by Anthony Vaccarello. Opposite: Coat and T-shirt by Hermès; jeans by Rag & Bone; tie, Saint Laurent by Anthony Vaccarello.

was a very intimate scene with Lady Jessica, and the scene became absolutely cinematic,” he says. “Oscar expressed everything in his eyes. I thought that was way more moving and interesting.”

m

MOON KNIGHT IS A THRILLING SIX-PART SERIES BASED ON THE

Marvel comic. On the show, Steven Grant is a hapless, mild-mannered museum-shop employee who starts to suffer blackouts and discovers he shares a body with a conflicted but cruel mercenary named Marc Spector— Isaac plays both characters. Grant, we learn, has dissociative identity disorder, and his struggle transforms him, allowing him to move forward in unpredictable ways.

Isaac is very aware that the Marvel franchise, of which he is now a part, has become a significant point along the continuum of cinema. “Marvel has taken the place of big comedies, to a certain extent, in the theater. There was a time when you’d go and watch the big comedies. You’d watch Hangover, you’d watch all the great Judd Apatow films,” he says. “And now it feels like these are the movies that people go to, to have a really good time and to laugh. These superhero movies, particularly the Marvel movies—exclusively the Marvel movies. That’s a really important element. But tonally, what Downey started—which was just amazing—was kind of the slightly self-referential, really cynical, but beautiful character. If you go back and watch that first Iron Man, that thing’s got teeth.”

Moon Knight, too, has its teeth, barely hidden. The series makes a unique and powerful assertion about mental illness: It removes the stigma and reminds the audience of the power of the imagination to offer life-sustaining

alternatives to a troubled man who might otherwise break.

“It’s a celebration of the power of the human mind,” Isaac says. “It’s basically saying, We have a superpower and it’s the human brain, particularly for those who deal with trauma and sustained abuse. There’s this thing that the brain can do to allow them to survive.”

If superheroes have their capes and their flamethrowers to help them survive, we ordinary humans have our imagination. It has been our shelter for millennia, a way to express and to understand what feels incomprehensible. When it all gets too heavy, sometimes the fragile rope tethering us to solid ground snaps clean, and there is often no refuge sturdy enough

“MY UNCLE SUFFERED WITH MENTAL-HEALTH ISSUES. HE STARTED CRYING WATCHING MOON KNIGHT BECAUSE, I THINK, IT JUST FELT LIKE BEING SEEN.” Jacket and T-shirt by Dior Men; jeans by Rag & Bone; hat by Borsalino; leather bracelet by the Cast NYC; bracelet by Bernard James; tie, Saint Laurent by Anthony Vaccarello. Inset: Jacket, shirt, and tie by Tom Ford; jeans by Rag & Bone.

to put us back together except in the intimate, private shelter of our minds.

“My uncle suffered with mental-health issues,” Isaac says. “He started crying watching an episode of Moon Knight because, I think, it just felt like being seen. There was something there that felt like an acknowledgment of the pain and what people do with pain, and the forgiveness, of how you forgive yourself, and how to come to terms with the child within you.”

Isaac’s performance is masterful. His work on it was intensive, says Ethan Hawke, a costar: “There are some actors—and you see them in a Marvel movie, or any big studio movie—and, like, they cashed out. They got to a certain level of fame and now they’re going to make a bunch of money and phone in a performance and they’ll get back to what they really love. Oscar didn’t do that. He worked on both of these characters differently. He had his vocal coach there with him in the makeup trailer, he’s doing countless tests, he’s coming in on Saturday for rehearsal and Sunday having brunch with the writers. He came in every day hell-bent to make something worth watching. And he transfused his energy to us.”

His work on Moon Knight as an actor and executive producer is the closest he has come to what it feels like to write and record music, he says. He’s an accomplished musician (in Inside Llewyn Davis, he sings all the songs his folksinger character performs) and was part of a band in Florida that was starting to achieve some success—they shared a stage with Green Day once—before he left to study acting at Juilliard in 2001. For years, his songs came to him only when he swam in the ocean, in Florida. While he floated with his arms outstretched, suspended between flight and collapse, a melody would attach itself to words. The words always came, without fail. Lyrics about hope and uncertainty and confusion and trying to corral a world that kept shifting.

Music was leading him toward another creative path, and eventually he had to decide between his band and his acting. The goal was the same: to try to make sense of what it means to live in a world that was not fashioned in a way he would have liked. The choice was not a choice at all, though.

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HE GREW UP AMONG PEOPLE WHO BELIEVED THAT IF THEY WERE NOT

RIGHTEOUS

“There’s something my dad said, from the Bible,” Isaac says. “It’s something along the lines of ‘Do what’s before you with all your might.’ What was before me was acting.”

To this day, though, he always has a guitar nearby.

THE FIRST HOUSE, AGAIN THE RANCH-STYLE HOUSE IN THE SUBURBS OF MIAMI, HURRICANE

Andrew still a couple years away. Several windows with crisp white frames grace the front. There is a well-kept lawn with short hedges and a tree perched on the edge of a gentle slope. This house sits, serene and lovely, against the bright Florida sky. It is a structure built to look like a home, designed to inspire dreams of a tranquil future, of a life surrounded by safety and calm.

The house, in fact, is the model for the housing development—a metaphor for every dream of those who walk through it. It is an idea of a house.

Yet Oscar and Eugenia, Isaac’s parents, bought it anyway, furniture included.

It has taken the young family years to get to this place. After many moves and several apartments, they have finally arrived. It will be the first time they live in a house.

Little by little, the family wove its own dreams around the promise that the house offered. I try to imagine what the black-and-white kitchen tiles that Oscar’s mother picked out might have represented to a young mother

from Guatemala, those tiles so emblematic of a nostalgic American dream, of Americana. That music coming from the converted garage where her husband, who is a doctor but also a musician in his spare time, writes music and listens to his stereo and plays Cat Stevens songs on his guitar: Could it have reminded Eugenia of the recording career that her mother—Oscar’s grandmother—had to abandon once she was married in Guatemala? As she goes into the room of her sons, Oscar and Michael, and watches them play in the red truck-shaped bunk bed they love, does she look inside the small desk and feel pride in Oscar’s stack of short stories and plays?

Every Friday night, on his way home from work, Oscar’s father would bring home movies for the family to watch on Betamax. Once he brought home Clue, in which Tim Curry plays a clever English butler. Another Friday night, it was Legend, the Ridley Scott movie—in which Curry plays the Devil. Oscar was fascinated. “There was one moment when the Devil laughs and I saw that little sneer in his lip. It was the revelation that the same actor from Clue is also the Devil. I just couldn’t wrap my mind around the fact that it was the same person,” he says. “So that kind of immediately hooked me into, there’s this thing where you can magically transform into somebody else and nobody will know—and maybe somebody will know.”

How much can a house contain? Eugenia’s is a story of other women from other places, like my own mother and her sisters in Ethiopia: She was never encouraged to go far in school, to pursue creative interests or a career. What

ENOUGH,

TO

THEY WOULD NOT GET CALLED UP IN THE SECOND COMING OF JESUS. she has is this house. It is tangible, more solid than her marriage. It will shelter her children and give them refuge in a storm. These children. They will carry what she is becoming too ill to shoulder. Because there is also this: the body we must all bring with us, no matter where we go, no matter how high we climb. She will teach them about love, about faith, and right from wrong. And they will flourish, no matter what happens to her.

“My mom and her sisters,” Isaac says, “were taught, Don’t waste your time on an education. Follow God, get your husband, raise your family.

Every single one of them divorced, and so I get it. It was like the house was the symbol.”

THE SECOND HOUSE ISAAC LEANS BACK IN A CHAIR IN A DIFFERENT HOUSE NOW, ALSO

in Florida, a home he bought for his mother when he became a star. He wears a black T-shirt and baseball cap. A painting hangs on a pale-blue wall.

It is sea green, with what looks like a mountainous landscape rising from water, surrounded by low-hanging clouds. Tomorrow marks the day, five years ago, that his mother died from pancreatic cancer, in this house.

And so tomorrow, he and his family, including his wife and two young sons, will walk on the beach and throw flowers into the ocean, a way to remember the woman who took him to his first audition, who drove him to every one during those early years. She stood next to him in Cannes in

HEAVEN

2010, and she was beside him when he got his first Golden Globe nomination, for Inside Llewyn Davis in 2014.

“She watched everything,” he says, smiling. His voice grows soft here, tender. “She kept a scrapbook. She did everything.”

(We are speaking over Zoom, and at one point he suggests a break to get coffee. “Ten minutes,” he says. Precisely ten minutes later, he reappears.

“Got a coffee, wiped a kid’s butt, good to go,” he says.)

Those days in the model home should have been full of happiness and excitement, but the family was slowly falling apart. His mother was suffering from kidney problems and had to start dialysis, and his father was often gone at work. His parents weren’t getting along. Oscar took refuge in his imagination. He wrote plays that were turned into musicals at school. Short stories about a mockingbird in a cuckoo’s nest, where it doesn’t belong, knocking the eggs over. About a platypus on Noah’s ark, skeptical about the coming flood. And he made those short movies about invincibility. His characters fought each other on camera, one side of himself battling and defeating the other.

Isaac has of course made friends, good friends, over the years—friends who feel like family, or a different kind of family. One is Pedro Pascal, whom he met when they both acted in an off-Broadway play. “We have very similar backgrounds,” Pascal says. “We’re both children of Latin immigrants, so there’s sort of a cultural familiarity, then at (continued on page 108)

This page: Jacket, shirt, and tie by Tom Ford; bracelet by the Cast NYC. Opposite: Jacket by Brioni; T-shirt by Gabriela Hearst; jeans and tie, Saint Laurent by Anthony Vaccarello; bracelet by Bernard James.

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What I’ve Learned Liam Gallagher ROCK STAR, 49, LONDON

Interview by MICHAEL SEBASTIAN

__ I’VE BEEN THERE, BOUGHT THE T-SHIRT. If you ever need to have a chat about anything, I’m your man. __ ONE DAY, I’M IN SCHOOL having a cigarette and minding me own business. I think I was fifteen, sixteen. A couple of lads were looking for a bit of a fight. We got into a fight, and one of ’em hit a hammer over my head. Then a couple of weeks later music started creeping in. It hadn’t before. I’m like, You know what? I like that song, that’s pretty cool. Whoever it was whapped me on the head, I’d like to thank him. __ I ENJOY GETTING UP EARLY. I like the morning. I like the quiet. You go out at eleven and all the lunatics are out. __ MONEY CHANGES A LOT OF PEOPLE, but it don’t change me. __ IF I WASN’T A ROCK STAR, I don’t think I would’ve played football as a professional because I like to go out and have a pint every once in a while, and you’ve got to be a bit of a numb to be an athlete these days, haven’t you? __ PLAYING THEM BIG CONCERTS, you’ve got to be match fit. Make sure you get plenty of early nights and look after yourself. __ I NEVER HAD A STYLIST, never ever. If you can’t dress yourself, you might as well pack it in, you know what I mean?

What’s the point of living, you know what I mean? __ YOU’VE GOT TO TALK a lot of shit to get to the nitty-gritty truth. The more shit you say, the more you get to the absolute point. __ WHY DID I get an Elvis tattoo? Because he’s cool. __ I DO BELIEVE I was supposed to be on a stage singing songs. I’ve got some good lungs on me. __ WHEN PEOPLE SAY, “Oh, I’m really offended”—no you’re not, you just fucking want a moment. It didn’t offend you.

You just like to pile on people and give people shit. __ FIFTY POUNDS IS TOO MUCH to be paying for a pair of socks. __ THERE’S NO ONE WAY to bring up a child. Hopefully you use common sense. Let them get on with it. It’s their life.

As long as they’re nice people and they’re not going around mugging old ladies and shit like that, then I think it’s all right. No one is perfect. __ IT’S IMPORTANT TO GIVE BACK, but I don’t think I do more than anyone else. __ EVERYONE GOES ON ABOUT us being the biggest. There were plenty of places where we could’ve been bigger. We were the biggest thing in England. And we were pretty big in Japan. But we weren’t that big in America, not at all.

We never played stadiums in Spain. There was a lot more work to be done, so we shouldn’t have split up, because we could have made more records. It’s a shame. I’m talking about Oasis. __ I LIKE TO THINK Oasis will get back together, but not this week. __ THE DOOR IS AJAR on everything. I wouldn’t be surprised if space aliens landed tomorrow. I wouldn’t be surprised if they were already here. I wouldn’t be surprised if God walks among us. I wouldn’t be surprised by all sorts. __ THE LAST TIME I SAW NOEL was at a football match about ten years ago. It’s a shame, isn’t it? __ THE GOOD TIMES OUTWEIGH the bad times. I think it’s best to just leave it at that. __ IF YOU DON’T LIKE what you’re doing, it must be strange. __ ALL GOOD ABOUT TURNING FIFTY. The longer you’re there for, the better it is. I like being alive. __ LIFE IS THERE TO BE LOVED AND LIVED, you know what I mean? Even though we were having shit times at home, who wants to hear it? We wanted to go out and fucking say little things make us happy. When the sun shines, it was great. When we were kicking the football around in the park or we had enough money to buy a beer, it was great.

Other than that, me dad was kicking the fuck out of me mum. So little things made us happy. We just loved the escapism of guitar music from rock ’n’ roll. Everything was a bonus. __ I’M AFRAID of going in the ground and that being it. __ RECENTLY, we’ve been playing “Wonderwall” at the end of our concerts, and it blows people’s heads, even though people go, “Oh, I’ve heard it a million times.” Well, you’re going to fucking hear it another million times. __ JUST GET OUT THERE and do your bit. __ I’D LIKE TO BE REMEMBERED FOR: He did exactly what it said on the tin. And I looked good while I fucking did it as well. __ BEING KNIGHTED? It’s not for me. I don’t need that shit. I’m quite happy just being mister. Who are you going to get to call you sir? Your kids? Your missus and your mum and your mates? __ I DON’T THINK I’ve put a foot wrong. I think it’s gone pretty much to plan.

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S I M O N E M M E T T / T R U N K A RC H I V E .C O M

Liam Gallagher’s third solo album, C’mon You Know, is out May 27.

Coat by Stone Island.

THE BEST NEW HOTELS i n

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a m e r i c a * Architectural wonders. See-and-be-seen lobby bars. Killer hot tubs.

Our favorite places to check into, from the high desert of Joshua Tree to the private beaches of St. Barts.

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THIS IS THE LIFE. How often have you said that in the past two years? A few times, maybe. Possibly not once. Makes sense, because, well, it’s been the past two years.

But there is an antidote to our collective anxiety and dread: getting the hell out of town.

We said it on a cross-country road trip when we hit the otherworldliness of South Dakota’s Badlands.

We felt it in Mexico when we ate tacos and drank Champagne on the beach. And we definitely uttered it aloud to whoever was with us in that thermal pool in Telluride overlooking the mountains. Hot tubs are very conducive to optimism.

Travel offers the opportunity to reset. A way to escape and be welcomed. To feel the intoxication of leaving a place and the thrill of arriving. To make fast friends at that secret wine bar or to cultivate deeper relationships with family and old pals. You can even find meaning in packing: You confront what truly matters (nope, don’t need a second blazer) and, perhaps, how you really want to show up to the world (yes, bring the crazy pants). The following pages are devoted to these undercurrents of joy and discovery that define travel, kicking off with an essential part of the wanderlust experience: a great hotel.

This is more than a cloudlike bed and a TV hidden in the bathroom mirror (but you’ve got to admit that trick never gets old). The very best provide restoration and inspiration, and each hotel’s staff has worked harder than ever to do so. That’s why we created our first-ever Best New Hotels list: to celebrate such hospitality and the fact that you deserve a vacation.

There’s an old adage that hotels should feel like home. But when home has morphed into an office, a daycare, and a mediocre 24-hour diner, a hotel should feel better than home. There are the classic ways the best properties provide a reset: handing you a cold towel on a humid day, serving you a welcome cocktail after a long flight, tidying up your room after your suitcase explodes. But the ones we’ve fallen in love with have given us fresh outlooks.

They’ve taught us how to farm or helped us discover a love of archery; they’ve exposed us to impeccable design that made us think, I need better bookcases.

We traveled via plane, helicopter, car, boat, and horse (!) to select this inaugural class of Best New Hotels. (Go to Esquire.com for the full list.) We defined new to include places that have opened or gone through significant changes since early 2020.

All of them are guaranteed to put you in that “This is the life” mindset long after you’ve checked out of your suite.

See you at the lobby bar. And maybe the hot tub?

—Kevin Sintumuang

THE ROOFTOP SUITES AT PARADERO TODOS SANTOS, IN MEXICO’S BAJA CALIFORNIA SUR.

*And the Caribbean.

CATSKILL, NEW YORK

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PA G E S 6 6 – 6 7 : YO S H I KO I TA N I P H OTO G R A P H Y / C O U R T E S Y PA R A D E R O TO D O S S A N TO S . T H I S PA G E : S E A N D AV I D S O N / C O U R T E S Y P I A U L E C AT S K I L L .

PIAULE CATSKILL

Website description: landscape hotel. Translation: You will be staring into the woods a lot from your modern, Scandi-style box-on-stilts cabin with floor-to-ceiling windows, your body wrapped in an unbleached cotton robe reminiscent of Obi-Wan Kenobi’s. How long can one stare into the woods, you might ask? Long enough to spot chipmunks or get a visit from an owl. You will ask yourself: Should I write a poem about the wind?

Built on a former bluestone quarry that was once Mohican land, Piaule’s minimal yet warm design produces maximum calm. Your trip will be incomplete if you don’t shuffle in your slippers through the spa to a hot tub with one side open to the elements and the mountain across the valley below. When you are done gazing at the wilderness, venture upstairs to the restaurant/bar/lobby and switch to pondering the intricacies of a local gin. Cabins from $395 —K. S.

THOMPSON DALLAS

THE RITZ-CARLTON MEXICO CITY, MEXICO

You just can’t beat the view, though the luxurious spa, sprawling art-decoinspired bar and lounge, and stately Mediterranean-influenced restaurant certainly try. Soaring fifty-eight stories above Paseo de la Reforma, right where the high-end avenue forms a seam with the Bosque de Chapultepec (a green area twice the size of New York’s Central Park), one of the newest Ritz-Carlton properties is a towering visual achievement, revealed every morning as the curtains are pulled back on each suite’s floor-to-ceiling windows. It’s impressive but not anodyne—an immediately friendly staff and a nightly sunset toast with complimentary house drinks make sure of it. Doubles from $395 —MADISON VAIN

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During the mid-twentieth century, the fifty-two-story First National Bank Tower in Dallas was home to sleazy tycoons. But by 2010, the tower was mostly empty. With a recent $450 million renovation, it was reborn, dazzling like Lazarus. Floors ten through twenty form the new, 219-room Thompson Dallas—the kind of place that has an outdoor pool with a neato window on the side to look into. The hotel is also home to one of the best bars in the state (Catbird).

And this might be a small thing, but the toiletries are D. S.& Durgha’s Bowmakers, an impossible-to-get fragrance (I tried for months) that smells of a violin workshop and alone warrants the trip to Dallas. Rooms from $650 —JOSHUA DAVID STEIN

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DALL AS, TEXAS

out of

The Discreet Charm of Airport Security

BY ANDREW SEAN GREER

So much has changed, and we are filled with nostalgia. Nostalgia for a simpler time and place, with the ordinary rituals of life. Here is the good news: There is such a place. A place where those rituals, which seemed such trouble then, have taken on the tone of ceremony.

I am talking, of course, about airport security.

Come travel with me, and share that old-timey feeling of removing your shoes, your belt, your watch in a sweet Bushera striptease! Has it changed? As someone who has traveled extensively during the pandemic, I can report: It has not. While some terminals have “simplified” the process—with upgraded lines—smaller airports still offer the “classic” service. The best part is, you never know which one! San Francisco?

Big boots, no problem.

Frankfurt? Get ready to unlace. Missoula? Wear your flip-flops. (Extra tip: No airport lets you carry a diet Fanta.)

I have, however, learned some tips. First, I always dress like a James Bond villain. I know most of you wear sweatpants for international travel (I know because I see you), but I think this gets you swabbed for bomb material. It’s just too friendly.

I find if I dress in black stretch leather and sunglasses, they let me slip

right through, even though I look precisely like someone to swab for bomb material. I don’t know quite what it is, but they take one look at me and wave me ahead of the fumbling grandpa with the diet Fanta.

Maybe they think I have to hurry to my lair to set up the lasers.

But sometimes you want to get the most out of the experience. If I’m feeling frisky, I like to bring a lot of travel-size creams and layer them all through my carry-on in a kind of lasagna. That way, when they make me unpack it, everything falls on the floor! Wearing two watches is a neat trick because it lets you go through the metal detector at least twice.

Make sure to leave some wires coiled somewhere; I don’t know why, but it fouls everything up. And if you don’t have time to prepare, you can always go with the classic: Carry a diet Fanta.

I leave you with my favorite airport-security experience. On my way to Hawaii, I sent my ukulele through the X-ray, only to have the officer say, “Sir, we need you to play it for us.” I thought of how many ukulele concerts the man must have enjoyed over the years. But he insisted: “Can you play for security reasons?”

I smiled. I said I didn’t know it, but if he could hum a few bars. . . .

How to Drink with Your Kids in Rome

BY JESS WALTER

Rome shimmers in the July heat. You are fiftythree—a father since you were nineteen.

Some friends have toddlers; yours are off to grad school.

For thirty years you dreamed of this trip but had neither the money nor the time. And now?

Four countries in two weeks have you wrung out. The Berlin airlift was easier than getting your wife, three kids, and a son-in-law to Europe.

Tonight, the family plops down at a sidewalk six-top outside a busy trattoria. Baskets of hot bread appear, chilled Primitivo. Toasts are made, and when you glance at your pretty Italian American wife, she is weeping.

Suddenly, it’s all worth it. And not just the trip.

This reverie repeats every day at cocktail hour: Aperol spritzes in front of misting fans in the boiling Piazza di

Santa Maria; martinis after your wife is “slut shamed” for going sleeveless at the Vatican; negronis in a bar built into the Janiculum Hill, where you play foosball (goooaaaal!) and your earnest son seeks drinking advice from his older sisters.

(He leans limoncello.)

On the last night, it is a wistful bottle of Barolo on the rooftop of the old convent where you’re staying. Rome spills out

before you: bell towers and tile roofs, terra-cotta walls. When the moon rises, no one speaks.

The silence is exquisite.

Maybe they’re wrong, the evolutionary biologists who insist we procreate to ensure the survival of our DNA. Maybe it’s this: to grow the people you most want to have a drink with, the ones who know to be quiet for this wine-soaked moment of joy.

MADELINE HOTEL TELLURIDE, COLORADO

NEW YORK, NEW YORK

Welcome to la dolce vita, a place where Loro Piana cashmere lines the walls of your presidential suite, where custom scents fill the air, where fireplaces roar and Bellinis are handed out by waiters in white jackets. The first of several membership clubs/boutique hotels planned by Italian hospitality’s best-known ambassadors, Casa Cipriani—located on South Street in Lower Manhattan— has had glitzy New Yorkers jockeying for access ever since it opened last year. The pitch was a gamble (there’s a dress code, and prices are astronomical), but after two years of sweatpants and remote offices, it turns out that a lot of luxury feels just right. Doubles from $800 —M. V.

COURTESY CASA CIPRIANI. COURTESY M A D E L I N E H OT E L .

CASA CIPRIANI

Many come to ski. I was enchanted by the hot tubs.

There are two, fairly sized, that flank a vast outdoor heated pool, and in the winter and cooler spring evenings, they are a sublime way to take in the crisp, clean, sky-high air and the awe-inspiring jagged mountains.

(They don’t call it Hell-U-Ride for nothing.) And while the Auberge Resorts Collection hotel could have easily rested on its prime ski-in, ski-out location and detailoriented service, it recently went through a vibrant classic-Alps-meets-Colorado-chic renovation. Hot tub not relaxing enough? Check into the Recovery Ski Lounge for some post-workout therapies that will get you back on the slopes. Rooms from $1,500 —K. S.

THE RYDER CHARLESTON, SOUTH CAROLINA

Charleston is a city with a great many great things. Lively oyster bars. Pastelhued townhouses. Harbor views. If it ever lacked much at all, really, it was perhaps quirkiness. That changed in the spring of 2021, when the Ryder hotel opened its doors. Vibrant and eclectic—the ninety-one-room property takes its name from Jack Kerouac’s Dharma Bums hero, Japhy Ryder—this is no quiet, traditional southern outpost.

Here the lobby is small but bright, the rooms spacious and welcoming, and the location unmatched. But Little Palm, the poolside bar and restaurant, is the main reason you come back. The indoor/outdoor craft-cocktail haven isn’t just hopping nightly—it’s the talk of the town. Doubles from $299 —M. V.

SEASONS NAPA VALLEY

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GREENOUGH, MONTANA

Yearning for a spot far from the madding crowd where you can indulge in the great outdoors, sleep on 160-GSM sheets, and enjoy a Michelinworthy meal? There’s no better bet than the Green O. Each of the dozen modern units (dubbed “hauses”) features a massive floor plan, Sonos sound system, gas fireplace, and private hot tub. The nucleus of the hotel is the Social Hause, a sort of restaurant-slash-gatheringplace where executive chef Brandon Cunningham whips up intensely creative seasonal fare. (Opt in on the tasting menu.) In winter months, you might snowshoe, go horseback riding, or learn the basics of dogsledding. Warmer weather might have you fly-fishing, mountain biking, or shooting skeet. Thankfully, the spa is open all year round. Units from $2,005 —DANIEL DUMAS

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C O U R T E S Y T H E G R E E N O . C O U R T E S Y F O U R S E A S O N S N A PA VA L L E Y.

CALISTOGA, CALIFORNIA

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It was worth the wait. Long delayed and highly anticipated, the Four Seasons finally opened late last year as an ultraluxe base for the northern, less visited yet more interesting part of Napa Valley. And you don’t even have to leave to indulge in a tasting—it’s on a working vineyard. Waking up early, walking among the vines, plucking grapes covered in dew, and then swimming invigorating laps in one of the enormous pools beneath the surrounding mountains are truly special moments for the core travel memory bank. Rooms from $1,200 —K. S.

AUTOCAMP JOSHUA TREE JOSHUA TREE, CALIFORNIA

Roughly a ten-minute drive from the national park’s west entrance, this trippy assembly of modernized Airstreams has the feel of a summer camp. (Or Burning Man with running water.) A beautiful Quonset hut (below) decorated with mid-century flourishes and locally sourced artwork pulls double duty as lobby and lounge, while a newly installed pool can cool you off even as the mercury rises to absurd levels. (The average temperature in July is 101 degrees Fahrenheit.) When the sun sets and the temperature drops, there’s a fire pit to gather around, an outdoor bar to order beer and wine from, and live music to listen to. Airstreams from $129 —D. D.

Let’s Go: Nowhere

BY SILVIA KILLINGSWORTH

The first thing most people ask upon hearing that I worked for a guidebook company is “Where?”—reasonably assuming that travel guides are written by people who go places. And I answer: “Absolutely nowhere.”

In the spring of my freshman year of college, I worked for Let’s Go, the bible for the traveler on a budget. I sat in an air-conditioned office all summer and dicked around with Adobe FrameMaker. No one ever remembers that travel guides must be edited (and painstakingly typeset), but that’s what I did.

What I am never quite certain of is the extent to which anyone who recognizes the Let’s Go brand is aware of its connection to Harvard: I am sorry to tell you that the guides are entirely staffed, researched, written, and edited by Harvard students, mostly undergrads.

The work had to take place

during the part of the year when we weren’t all living in campus squalor and eating our meals off trays, a fact that is, on its face, preposterous. Who, after all, would trust a bunch of smartasses whose brains hadn’t fully congealed to run a publishing business, much less to give advice on where to stay in Liguria?

The truth is that the whole thing was aspirational: We produced the guidebooks we wished to use in the world.

Sure, you could buy Lonely Planet or the Michelin Guides, but you might fall asleep on the Eurostar reading them. Let’s Go, on the other hand, was for us; therefore it was for you. We didn’t entirely know what the hell we were doing, but that was the point. Let’s Go convinced its readers they could pack a bag (take half the clothes and twice the cash), hop on a plane, land in the middle of a foreign country, and figure it out.

As with many Aces around the globe, the Brooklyn outpost is very much about building a cool community hangout the only way the Ace can. The purpose-built brutalist structure of concrete and wood is home to a lobby with a buzzing bar anchoring all of the loungy furniture, where folks Zoom on laptops by day and old-fashioneds are being stirred come nightfall. Each month features different DJs spinning soul, and the Atrium on the second floor often hosts poetry readings and film screenings. The woodshop-chic rooms aren’t bad, either. Doubles from $199 —OMAR MAMOON

THE BOCA RATON BOCA RATON, FLORIDA

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The architect Addison Mizner was a bon vivant, and his masterpiece, the Cloister at the Boca Raton, is proof.

Open since 1926 and revitalized this past year, the Mediterranean-revival building is the heart of the resort, now home to a beach club, bungalows, and a yacht club.

It’s a fabulous old-school haunt where you wander through hidden gardens, spot folks partying in a retro dining club, and grab a Gibson at the lobby bar with soaring beamed ceilings before making your way to the Flamingo Grill. There, pink-jacketed waiters make you believe you’re a power player even though you’re just on spring break. For all its history, the Boca Raton feels alive–a museum it is not. Rooms from $799 —K. S.

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J O S H F R A N E R / C O U R T E S Y A U TO C A M P ( A I R S T R E A M ) . M AT T K I S I D AY / C O U R T E S Y A U TO C A M P ( C L U B H O U S E ) . S T E P H E N K E N T J O H N S O N / C O U R T E S Y A C E H OT E L B R O O K LY N .

BROOKLYN, NEW YORK

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HEALDSBURG, CALIFORNIA

1 HOTEL TORONTO

PENDRY MANHATTAN WEST

TORONTO, ONTARIO

Beyond the modern extension of Penn Station, you’ll come across an undulating tower seemingly conjured out of nowhere in an area that was, just a few years ago, a kind of no-man’s-land. For the trek across Ninth Avenue, the Pendry epitomizes Cali-luxe: plush, earth-toned rooms where curved windows create nooks to dwell in and admire the new urban vista. Downstairs, it’s time for a mini bar crawl. Bar Pendry is a gold-leafadorned jewel box for a more clandestine drink, and Chez Zou is like a belle epoque garden complete with deft cock-

To understand the mission of the 1 Hotel, you just need to look around. A local woodworking studio has transformed fallen Toronto trees into one-ofa-kind pieces throughout the hotel, engraved with their source location.

There is a garden that supplies herbs and crops to the property’s restaurants, and even the coffee-machine instructions are printed on napkins. But it’s not all greenery and reflection—there is a stylish rooftop lounge and pool overlooking the city. The rooms are spacious, comfortable, and calming even when the popular lobby bar downstairs is at full tilt. Doubles from

tails and a secret cheeseburger. Rooms from $725 —K. S.

$360 —LAUREN KRANC

NEW YORK, NEW YORK

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C H R I S T I A N H O R A N / C O U R T E S Y M O N TA G E H E A L D S B U R G .

C O U R T E S Y P E N D RY M A N H AT TA N W E S T.

MONTAGE HEALDSBURG

When you ascend the road to Montage Healdsburg, you know you are still squarely in northern California: No Tuscany pretense here, as can be the norm in these parts. The modern glasswood-and-steel bungalows, featuring cantilevered balconies equipped with fire pits, are situated among mossy oaks, eucalyptus trees, and, of course, grapevines. While Healdsburg has some of the best bars and restaurants in Sonoma, you might find it hard to leave the property, between the zero-edge pool, the archery range, and the restaurant’s own lively bar, where locals mingle with guests. There’s fun to be had, yet the rejuvenating serenity is inescapable at the end of the day. Rooms from $1,200 —K. S.

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HOTEL SAINT VINCENT D O U G L A S F R I E D M A N / C O U R T E S Y H OT E L S A I N T V I N C E N T. C O U R T E S Y R O S E W O O D L E G U A N A H A N I S T. B A R T H . K R I S TA M B U R E L LO / C O U R T E S Y A U R O R A A N G U I L L A .

NEW ORLEANS, LOUISIANA

Why Is There Cucumber Water in the Lobby?

BY NEGIN FARSAD

Yes, there’s the French Quarter. But to experience a more laid-back, less touristy, as-slow-as-a-Sazerac New Orleans among old oak trees, genuine dive bars, and new indie shops, head to the Lower Garden District and make Saint Vincent your home base. The stately brick building, a former nineteenth-century orphanage, has been reimagined as a destination with the type of venues—Austin transplant Elizabeth Street Café, the compact yet splashy Italian Riviera– esque bar and restaurant duo San Lorenzo and Paradise Lounge— that are see-and-be-seen destinations in and of themselves. But really, get a room. Each is an inspired blend of psychedelic and art-deco decor—you don’t see that every day—plus guests get access to the nook-heavy Chapel Bar. Rooms from $329 —K. S.

ROSEWOOD LE GUANAHANI ST. BARTS

If you ever find yourself with a terminal diagnosis and a 401(k) you need to spend down in a hurry, go to St. Barts and stay at the Rosewood. Ever since Hurricane Irma wiped out much of the island’s infrastructure in 2017, the famously over-the-top hotels have been on a frantic rebuilding mission, often with environmentally unfriendly results that the locals don’t love.

But it’s impossible not to hand it to the Rosewood’s gorgeous renovation for its nods to traditional island architecture, a spa that features a quartz (!) massage table, and two private beaches. The Beach House restaurant serves up inventive Mediterranean dishes (don’t miss the sardines on toast) that will come as a welcome change from the sea of indistinguishable mahi-mahi preparations on offer everywhere else on the island. The pool is infinity, the “kids club” is luxe, and seemingly everything is made of teak. Doubles from $2,035 —KELLY STOUT

AURORA ANGUILLA RENDEZVOUS BAY, ANGUILL A

“Smell that? Barbecue and the sea—to me, that is the smell of Anguilla,” one of the super-kind staffers told me as we passed the wood-fired grill. The Aurora Anguilla takes food seriously; it has the island’s only hydroponic garden for its multiple restaurants, staffed by former members of the Eleven Madison Park team. But golf nuts come for the Greg Norman–designed eighteen-hole course. (A nine-hole course will be completed soon.) The newly renovated beach suites give off a luxe Santorini-meets-the-Caribbean vibe, and the massive villas come with private pools steps from the beach, with enough room that you might even want to invite the in-laws, too. Rooms from $1,000 —K. S.

You know exactly what I’m talking about. You walk into a hotel lobby and take in the impressively high ceilings.

You make some judgments about the decor, the mood.

And thenyou spot the carafe of cucumber water. It’s not water with lemon wedges in it; that would be obvious.

Lemon water is something your grandmother drank, and while you recognize its refreshing advantage, it’s a little hacky. Overdone. No, no, this is cucumber water.

The moment you see it is the moment everything changes. The bumpy flight, the taxi ride—none of that exists. The thrill of hotel luxury and aspirational living overcomes you.

In nonhotel life, you can’t remember ever drinking cucumber water. Who among us has sliced cucumbers and placed them in water?

Literally nobody. And yet: Your posture is a little straighter, your gait a little lighter as you approach the cucumber water like a scion of some now-defunct monarchy. Dissociated from regular life, with its shitty tap water, you act like—no, you feel like—a cucumberwater-drinking person.

If we were to re-envision society, Jay-Z would declare that after the show is the after-party, and after the after-party is the hotel lobby, because that’s where you get the CW and therefore sophistication. Opulence and flavonoids in equal measure!

A full-scale transformation into a utopian, hydrated self!

It’s weird: When you get back home, never once will you say to yourself, “I think I’ll put cucumbers in water and see if it makes me feel luxurious.”

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PARADERO TODOS SANTOS TODOS SANTOS, MEXICO

This is not the Cabo you think it is. Located down a dirt road past a farming village, Paradero is about an hour from the sprawling resorts this tip of Mexico has become known for, but out here, the vibe is a mix of desert, agrarian, surf, and well-being. The architecture is practically Martian, brutalist concrete buildings housing forty-one suites, some containing nets on the roof designed for a reclining star-gaze, and a shockingly great restaurant serving creative Mexican cuisine.

But it’s all about the cultivated experiences–guided hikes, a taco tour, temescal healing rituals.

You’ll leave feeling you’ve communed with this little patch of the planet. Rooms from $550 — K. S.

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YOSHIKOITANI PHOTOGRAPHY/COURTESY PARADERO TODOS SANTOS. JESSICA SCHUSTER DESIGN/COURTESY ESMÉ MIAMI BEACH. COURTESY NOBU HOTEL CHICAGO.

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NOBU HOTEL CHICAGO CHICAGO, ILLINOIS

ESMÉ MIAMI BEACH MIAMI BEACH, FLORIDA

Española Way has had a touristy rep for quite some time, but the Esmé is almost singlehandedly trying to shake that off by tapping into the area’s roots as a bohemian artists enclave. The suites are all different, rich with a breezy, art-deco-slashMediterranean aesthetic, and the eating and drinking options here make the block a veritable destination. The innovative El Salón bar blends all of its spirits to produce some next-level classics, and Tropezón will make you feel that a good gin and tonic and a tortilla Española are what Miami Beach has been missing. Rooms from $495 —K. S.

The first thing you notice after strolling into the serene, minimalist lobby of Nobu’s Midwest outpost is the scent: an aroma of light yuzu lemon and ginger that delivers a Zen-like sense of calm even if there happens to be a category-four blizzard raging outside.

The 115 rooms have the vibe of a luxury onsen with light-wood furnishings, heated floors, teak bathtubs (in select rooms), and gigantic windows that look out on Chi-Town’s West Loop neighborhood. Besides the sprawling namesake restaurant on the ground floor, there’s a rooftop bar, a sushi counter tucked into the mezzanine, and a forty-foot tranquility pool with a steam room. Doubles from $375 —D. D.

Nestled on the Pacific Coast Highway, this collection of bungalows began life in 1949 as the Malibu Riviera Motel. After a 2019 overhaul, the original MALIBU, CALIFORNIA spirit of the Riviera was left intact, but many of the details have been upgraded. Luxurious amenities abound: Aesop products in the bathroom, hammocks on most of the private patios, morning coffee and muffins in the lobby. There’s even a heated pool and deck, a rarity for development-phobic Malibu. But the real draw here is the atmosphere. The June is an ideal mix of unfussy and posh, an escape where you can de-stress and decompress. Is it any wonder that Bob Dylan holed up in bungalow number 13 in 1974 to write Blood on the Tracks? Bungalows from $570 —D. D.

HOTEL JUNE

In Praise of the Monday Getaway

BY JEFF GORDINIER

With all due respect to the Bangles, Monday does not have to be manic. Capitalism decrees that weekends are meant to serve as our collective days of rest, but I’ve found that the real rest takes place when everyone else is

crawling back to work.

Not long ago, seeking refuge from twin toddlers and work-fromhome monotony, I booked a room for a Monday night at the Rivertown Lodge in the Hudson Valley. As soon as I checked in and

savored the afternoon stillness, I knew I’d made a good decision. I worked for several hours, then I blissed out during a solo dinner at the tavern. Chef Efrén Hernández makes a dish of shaved raw Brussels sprouts crowned with a

thin sheet of foie gras.

I slowed down and pondered each bite like a monk practicing mindful eating. Then I slept very deeply. I awoke feeling like a new man. Adios, Friday. With all due respect to the Cure, it’s Monday, I’m in love.

n the move A generation or so ago, ACTORS AND ROCK STARS knew how to dress when they got out of town. Looking around, we see it’s a lost art. Here, BENJAMIN BRATT, star of HBO Max’s new limited series DMZ, revives that spirit and shows how to look sharp for a quick getaway. And he talks to ESQUIRE about work, family, and Roberta Flack.

BY DAVE HOLMES PHOTOGRAPHS BY JENNIFER LIVINGSTON STYLING BY ALFONSO FERNÁNDEZ NAVAS

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Jacket ($3,200), shirt ($2,700), tie ($250), and bag ($3,300) by Dior Men; jeans ($70) by Levi’s; boots ($325) by Tecovas; sunglasses ($690) by Jacques Marie Mage.

Suit ($3,295) and pocket square by Ralph Lauren Purple Label; shirt ($494) by Giuliva Heritage; boots ($1,250) by Giuseppe Zanotti; Overseas Self-Winding watch ($22,500) by Vacheron Constantin; sunglasses ($975) by Jacques Marie Mage; socks ($24) by London Sock Company.

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Jacket ($3,995) and trousers ($1,495) by Brunello Cucinelli; shirt ($950) by Fendi Men’s; boots ($780) by Sunni Sunni; watch ($4,100) by Louis Vuitton Men’s; sunglasses ($850) by Jacques Marie Mage.

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Benjamin Bratt is solid. Since his breakout role in 1993’s Blood In Blood Out, he’s been a familiar face in cop shows, romantic comedies, and whatever Halle Berry’s Catwoman was. Esquire checked in with him ahead of his latest project, DMZ, in which he plays Parco, the leader of the Spanish Harlem Kings in a war-torn Manhattan.

DAVE HOLMES: You’re working a lot.

BENJAMIN BRATT: Do you really think so?

This is going to be fascinating for me.

DH: We may not see you in four things a year, but I don’t think of you as someone who’s struggling. It seems like you have the luxury of choosing carefully. Is that accurate?

BB: That is a perception I share. Early on as an actor, I had this notion of ascension: There’s a track you must follow, and you reach a plateau where you will consistently work. I’ve gotten to that plateau. I had always hoped it was going to be at a higher elevation.

DH: What’s missing?

BB: It’s not a question of ability or training or experience. That’s why that question of perception is so intriguing to me. With DMZ, when Ava DuVernay thought I would be the right person to play Parco Delgado, she got some pushback from the network, something to the effect of “He’s too nice to play this role.”

DH: So what do you want that you don’t have?

BB: Consistency. For thirty-odd years, without

fail, at some point something really lovely has dropped out of the sky: an opportunity to work with Steven Soderbergh, or Taylor Hackford, or Sandy Bullock, or Meryl Streep, or Tilda Swinton, or Javier Bardem. I’m grateful for those opportunities. I just wish there were more of them.

DH: Where are you right now?

BB: I’m sitting by my kitchen window in Greenwich Village. My wife, Talisa, and I lived here until around ’07; took off for the West Coast; found our way back to western Massachusetts, where her family is; and then just before Covid struck, we had the idea to relocate back to the city.

DH: What was your routine in western Mass?

BB: We still keep a place there. I’ve never really spoken about it publicly, but to contextualize our lives: Almost everything we do, every decision we make personally and professionally, is informed by our daughter, Sophia, and her needs. She incurred a brain injury at birth, so she faces a host of challenges. She’s nineteen now, and we’re working to help her gain independence. We’ve lived this kind of vagabond lifestyle in search of the best therapies, the best schooling, the best social situation for her.

We’ve moved thirteen or fourteen times. In New York, there’s an amazing transitional program that helps her with how to function: how to go shopping, how to use money, how to buy groceries, how to fold and put away clothing, how to cook a meal. She’s an amazing young

woman, very spirited, very competitive. Raising children, especially one who is as challenged as our daughter, is physically and emotionally exhausting. My wife carries the brunt of it, because when I go off to work, she is left behind.

She’s my hero.

DH: How did you meet?

BB: At an audition for a film called Blood In Blood Out in the early nineties. She was a very famous model and actor; she was a Bond girl.

Within six months after consummating our affair, I got down on a knee and proposed. Falling in love with Talisa cemented what I’ve instinctually always known: Above being an artist, even above defining myself as an actor, I see myself as a husband and a father first. I don’t know if that’s been a hindrance or a help in terms of the professional path I’ve been on, but at this point it’s hard to really care too much about it.

DH: Did your father think the same of himself?

BB: My father had this very gruff male persona on the outside, but you gave him half a bottle of wine and he’d put on Roberta Flack and close his eyes and become deeply philosophical. He would come over to me and my brother Peter and he’d say, “Ben, Pete, you got the world by the ass.” He was essentially telling us that we had no idea of the potential we possessed. He could only do it when he was loaded, but it was his way of saying, “I love you and I am so hopeful about what awaits you.”

Jacket ($3,700), shirt ($950), vest ($1,300), trousers ($1,400), and trolley ($3,950) by Gucci; necklace ($2,800) and ring ($2,500) by David Yurman; sunglasses ($720) by Jacques Marie Mage.

Jacket ($1,458) and shirt ($490) by Maryam Nassir Zadeh; jeans ($90) by Levi’s; boots ($495)

by Sonora; Pilot’s Watch Timezoner Edition “Le Petit Prince” ($13,800) by IWC Schaffhausen; ring ($425) by David Yurman; sunglasses ($99) by Heywear.

Jacket ($2,650), shirt ($820), and trousers ($1,590) by the Row; boots ($950) by Giuseppe Zanotti; Tambour Horizon Light Up Connected watch ($4,100) and keep-all bag ($3,400) by Louis Vuitton Men’s; hat ($565) by Borsalino; sunglasses ($99) by Heywear.

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Jacket ($1,666) by Giuliva Heritage; shirt ($480) by Hermès; vest ($220) and trousers ($220) by Barbanera; boots ($1,195) by Christian Louboutin.

SET DESIGN: Michael Sturgeon for Monday Artists. GROOMING: Losi for Honey Artists + Martial Vivot Salon.

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The medium-rare New York strip. The ice-cold martini.

The tableside Caesar.

For ages, THE STEAKHOUSE and its trappings signified success and a damn good time . . . even if the food and service could be hit-or-miss. But now, thanks to a handful of splashy, CHEF-DRIVEN RESTAURANTS from New York to Chicago to San Francisco, the party has reached a new golden age. Here are the fresh temples of beef worth traveling for.

BY JOSHUA DAVID STEIN

PHOTOGRAPH BY CHRISTOPHER GRIFFITH

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slabs of beef, trays of oysters, and copper pots of pommes aligot. A waiter in a tux, tossing a Caesar salad. Iceberg’s in the air. Diners grinning at the show. One, a doubting Thomas, cuts into his rib eye, scarlet under char, and wonders, “Is this really rare?” Limbs are limber, eyes shine bright, the Barolo is empty. If Caravaggio were alive today, there is no doubt he would take his talents to a steakhouse. There is no other restaurant that better captures all that is primal, all that drama twixt life and death, all the revelry mankind can summon, all the pleasure mankind can feel, than a steakhouse.

And yet the past few years have not been kind to the American steakhouse. The plant-based revolution not only threatened its relevance but also triggered an existential crisis: Should these temples of beef even exist when it’s a known cause of climate change? The pandemic didn’t help, either. Steakhouses were hit hard. In Chicago, the unofficial capital of steakhouses, they closed at twice the rate of other types of restaurants. But the institution has persevered, and today the American steakhouse is experiencing a renaissance. Across the country, ambitious chefs are returning to the steakhouse to rejuvenate the genre, balancing virtuosity and fidelity, theme and variation. These restaurants are worth traveling to. Not just because hot damn if a skirt steak and a strong cocktail aren’t one way to achieve satori. But, more profoundly, because there’s something hopeful about how vibrant and vital an old idiom can still be.

THE MODERN STEAKHOUSE EMERGED from all-

male beef banquets of the mid-nineteenth cen-

CARNE MARE Manhattan

GAGE & TOLLNER Brooklyn

COTE New York and Miami

The Gorgonzola-cured Wagyu at Andrew Carmellini’s Italian chophouse is a new classic. And the roast duck d’Ivan is a very worthy detour.

One of the most beautiful historic rooms in the country serves some of the best cocktails—get the turf martini—and inventive steakhouse twists from chef Sohui Kim.

Chef David Shim and restaurateur Simon Kim have created buzzing Korean steakhouses where tablegrilled aged meat and decadent wines and cocktails promise an irresistible night out.

tury, wherein men devoured endless steak with their bare hands, often squatting on beer barrels and singing songs like “Sweet Adeline.” The first wave of proper steakhouses sought to capture this spirit, but with utensils and actual chairs—places like Old Homestead, Peter Luger, Gallaghers, and Keens, all in New York. Women were allowed in 1920, and steakhouses evolved into something classier, with salads, oysters, and cocktails. The caveman pantomime persisted and fermented into the Mad Men–era decadence of places like the Palm (near Manhattan’s East Forty-fifth Street, known as Steak Row), Bern’s in Tampa, and Gene & Georgetti in Chicago. The steakhouse was swept up in franchise madness and disseminated nationally in the form of Ruth’s Chris (the most confusing of all possessive names), Shula’s, Mastro’s, Morton’s, Del Frisco’s, and more. Around the turn of the century, in an effort to modernize, steakhouses got a makeover. They transmogrified into their second wave: the big-watch untz-untz establishments of the nineties and early aughts. The main culprit, STK, a self-described “vibe dining experience,” spread nationwide like a plague. Generally speaking, this was not a good time in the steakhouse game.

Today we’re living in the third wave of steakhouses, the most promising iteration of a debased form. In third-wave steakhouses, formal elements of the genre are imbued with imagination. The high performance of the dining room is matched by high performance in the kitchen. There were hints to herald its arrival. Since 2014, when we named Knife one of our Best New Restaurants, chef John Tesar has been serving 240-day-aged rib eye at his Dallas steakhouse. Before transform-

ing herself into a modern Escoffier, New York chef Angie Mar took over the Beatrice Inn in 2016, proffering bourbon-aged rib eye and other creative takes to the steak gods in an atmosphere that felt like an actual restaurant. The argument being made by this vanguard is that a steakhouse isn’t only vibe dining but fine dining as well.

Now the untz-untz has been replaced with French pop and New Orleans jazz (Cote), classic rock and soul (Ember & Rye), and arcane midcentury jazz (Gage & Tollner). And the food, though still checking all the steakhouse boxes, also thinks outside of them. I doubt that American Wagyu rib eye has ever before been surrounded by a fiery kimchi stew or a constellation of small ramekins of savory banchan as it is at Cote Miami, the new Florida offshoot of chef David Shim and restaurateur Simon Kim’s groundbreaking Korean steakhouse in N. Y. C. And I wonder if American steakhouse goers have ever before experienced the onomatopoeic pleasure of a Scottish skirlie, a mixture of fried oatmeal, onions, and bone marrow that skirlies as it’s fried and wows as it accompanies a cast-iron filet steak at Hawksmoor, a British steakhouse that precociously let itself into Manhattan last year.

THE STEAKHOUSE, LIKE the American western,

is a distinct genre. Both are an expression of our anxiety and an escape from it. The clearer the destination, the more comfort it offers. The western took on many forms throughout the twentieth century, from simple tales of heroes and villains during World War II to the rise of the antihero in the 1960s, each wave in conversation with the larger world. Similarly, steakhouses are the safe

COURTESY STEAKHOUSES

the table is laden with

the third wave of steakhouses

WHAT IS A STEAKHOUSE, EXACTLY? ONE OF AMERICA’S GREATEST RESTAURANT GENRES, EXPLAINED

BAZAAR MEAT Chicago

MILLER & LUX San Francisco

EMBER & RYE Carlsbad, California

José Andrés’s latest midwestern outpost has Kobe beef grilled on ishiyaki stones and million-dollar views of the Chicago River.

All the beef is sourced from northern California at Tyler Florence’s ultraluxe steakhouse, but if that isn’t Cali enough for you, live heads of romaine are trimmed tableside for Caesars.

An homage to both golf clubhouses and steakhouses of yore, this Richard Blais restaurant in the Park Hyatt prepares steaks over a live fire.

harbor in this uncertain time. Look around; what is going right? No wonder a familiar genre—one that flourished at the height of the hegemonic post–World War II order—appeals. The steakhouse is a pleasure island, Calypso’s Ogygia, the set from a movie in which we know who the heroes are and where they dine, are toasted, and drink burgundy.

“You can describe it in one word: steak,” says Tyler Florence, the chef at Miller & Lux in San Francisco. “It means a good time.”

Now, that mid-century glamour, so hankered after, operated on a submerged infrastructure of racial and gender exclusion. And the opening of a steakhouse when meat accounts for nearly 60 percent of greenhouse-gas emissions from food production seems myopic at best. But at least steakhouses are no longer an old boys’ club. And there are bad and less bad ways to eat meat, and without exception, third-wave steakhouses abide by the latter. CAFOs (concentrated animal feeding operations) are avoided out of principle because no one wants to doom-eat and because humanely raised animals taste better. Will it be enough to save the planet? Probably not. But that’s all the more reason to enjoy the occasional carnivorous celebratory debauch.

No matter the wave or the ethics, so much is predetermined at a steakhouse, one wonders why any chef would undertake and, similarly, why any adventurous diner would visit one. After all, as Andrew Carmellini, the chef of New York’s Carne Mare, says, “You can’t screw with the formula too much.”

A steakhouse offers chefs creativity because of the strictures of the genre, not despite them. A chef opens a steakhouse for the same reason Lady

Gaga records a Christmas album or Dylan Thomas writes a villanelle or Jasper Johns paints a flag.

With so much already constrained, a chef’s creativity has nowhere to go but inward and down.

That frequently means going deep on the beef and the aging. Florence has been working for two years to raise the Black Angus that are harvested, then aged for forty-five days. At Gage & Tollner, Sohui Kim serves fully grass-fed beef (as opposed to the standard grain-finished). Renee Erickson’s steaks come from whole cows butchered in-house at Bateau in Seattle, a steakhouse so good and unsteakhousey it demands definitional rearrangement.

It means chasing the gesture of tableside presentation to its extremes, as is done at Miller & Lux, where a fleet of $10,000 carts circulate the dining room offering Champagne and Caesar salads, beef tartare and bright French desserts. It means a Meat Bar at Bazaar Meat, José Andrés’s newest Chicago restaurant, where diners watch as perfectly marbled cuts of Kobe beef are grilled on an ishiyaki stone. It means slipping kimchi into the clams at Gage & Tollner and ringing the prime rib in a rich, fennely porchetta spice or curing Wagyu in Gorgonzola cheese at Carne Mare.

These touches are all brilliant—part of what makes steakhouses exciting again, not just for birthdays but for every damn day. But they’re brilliant the way the Goldberg Variations are. They play on a theme. By doing so, they allow us to see both theme and variation in a new light. A good steakhouse, like Jasper Johns’s paintings of American flags, helps us to really see “things the mind already knows.” And depending on the mind, that can be a very good thing indeed.

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Not every restaurant that serves steaks is a steakhouse, just as not every song with rhythm has swing. A steakhouse is a narrowly defined dining institution with a constellation of distinctive elements. Decorwise, we’re talking rich, dark tones. There is often wood paneling and banquettes, which are particularly important, as a steakhouse is not simply about the act of eating, which can be done solo, but the act of dining, which involves being seen and seeing others as one eats. In some ways, a steakhouse is no less performative a spectacle than a drag brunch but with money instead of makeup. This also explains the singular service of a steakhouse, waiters boasting an alchemy of sartorial splendor, a magician’s tableside flair, and the brusque delivery of a bus driver. Bow ties, often. Bonhomie, no. At a steakhouse, it’s always showtime.

Though small in scope, the menu is large in dimension, the size of a side table or the Rosetta Stone. On it is a familiar crew of classics, wellordered as marching bands at the Macy’s parade. The top part is devoted to raw seafood, a silky section led by shrimp cocktail, a selection of oysters (East and West), some lobster or crab claws, and crudo. Fluke, sometimes hamachi. These can be ordered individually or in a large plateau de fruits de mer, a spectacular display of Poseidon’s bounty. There are salads, too, but few. For many years, the standard was an iceberg wedge salad (with enough bacon and blue cheese to counteract the salubrious effect of the roughage).

But these days, often a Caesar, or Caesar-ish, salad abounds.

But make no mistake, the meat of the menu is the meat of the menu.

Listed by size and by cut—sirloin, strip, filet, chateaubriand. Steaks for two—a bone-in rib eye, a prime rib, or a tomahawk—are listed separately, bounded by a line like a foreboding ficus hedge in front of a Palm Beach mansion. Underneath the steaks are the nonsteaks: roast chicken, saddle of lamb, Dover sole. (This is also where much improvement has been made.) And at the very bottom are the sides, which must include creamed spinach, Brussels sprouts, and potatoes in starchy array from mashed to fried to aligot. —J. D. S.

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the

thirteenth

day It’s March 2020, and the BERYL EMPRESS is setting sail from a harbor in JAPAN, carrying hundreds of passengers on a luxury cruise— including a man from WUHAN. What follows is a VACATION none of them will soon forget. A new SHORT STORY for our times from an AMERICAN MASTER.

By T.C. Boyle Photographs by Ben Alsop

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th e

thought of claustrophobia. Snug, that was what it was, and snugness was what the cruise line was selling, part of the charm of being at sea in your own individual stateroom. Battening down—isn’t that the term?

Clicking her glass to mine, Amanita, her lips creased with the softest of smiles, asked, “Aren’t you glad we came?”

Well, I was—in that moment anyway. The cruise had been her idea, her fixation, actually. I was considerably less inclined than she to abandon the comforts of our home in the Recoleta quarter of Buenos Aires, where my work absorbed me, every comfort was at our fingertips, and we did not have to share space—precious living space—with hordes of strangers in costumes I can only call bizarre, from the young güera who wore two bikinis, one conventionally, the other facing backward, to the man of my own age who slathered himself with coconut-reeking grease and sang continuously into his mobile in a fluid baritone as if he were trying out for a role in Pirates of Penzance.

In any case, the great ship rolled magnificently on over the waves until the shore receded from sight and the clamoring gulls along with it, and Amanita and I clicked glasses again while I wished her a felicitous fortieth wedding anniversary, even as the ship’s captain was receiving the command over the radio to return to port. And why? Because it had been discovered that one of the passengers—a man from Wuhan—had come down with a fever.

A fever, can you imagine! At first, when the news came to us that night at dinner, where Amanita and I were seated at our assigned table in the 5-Star Red Beryl Celebrity Dining Saloon with twelve other guests, including Scott and Bunny, none of THE SHIP WAS MONUMENTAL, like Atlantis risen from the depths, its own island, its own nation, us could believe it. Turning a boat around for a a miracle of every kind of human labor and ingenuity. Even the sea was impressed. The waters fever? A few hours later, however, a new term calmed to make way for it and when it slashed across the horizon, the pelagic creatures appeared entered my vocabulary, an acronym that was as in their slippery legions to disport themselves in its wake. Dolphins rocketed alongside. Sea lions bland as any other until it wasn’t. Can you say barked. Whales bobbed up like corks to salute its monumentality, then dove deep to escape the Covid-19? I can. And I’ve said it all too many times crushing impact of its bow. In port—and it was in port now, indefinitely—its vast hull attracted the since that first day, though, like you, I presume, attentions of mollusks and crustaceans and its decks the loose-boweled gulls whose excreta would I’d never before even heard of it, let alone spoken have buried them knee-deep but for the unceasing attentions of the ship’s crew. Can you say Yokoit aloud. Forgive me, but even now, even after all hama? I can. Yokohama. There, see? that’s transpired (or, as Scott and Bunny would When the passengers boarded the Beryl Empress in Yokohama Harbor, none of them—none of say, “gone down”), I can’t help thinking that the us—expected to be there longer than it would take for everyone to settle into their staterooms and term sounds more like some version of linoleum the massive engines to crank the screws and compel the shore to fall away behind the taffrails of tiling you might install in the kitchen than a conits fourteen decks. The itinerary, lavishly laid out in the cruise line’s brochure, had us at sea for a fortnight, with ports of call at Hong Kong, Taiwan, Phu My, and Sihanoukville, among others, tagious disease that could burn through the world locales where the 2,666 of us could absorb Asia through our five senses and browse the wares of of humanity and force a ship as unconquerable the local artisans and trinket purveyors. Unfortunately, that wasn’t to be. And what resulted was as the Beryl Empress to become a floating prison. hard on us, hard on me and Amanita, my ageless and serene bride of forty years, but so much harder for the newlyweds in the cabin across from ours, Scott and Bunny, who, despite their impressive size and the solidity of their limbs, weren’t much more than children in our eyes. As if their youth wasn’t enough of a liability, they also happened to be Americans, which further complicated as the Beryl Empress, it was impossible to perceive things. Americans, in my experience, are unused to privation of any kind, expecting this great any maneuver the captain may have made, even, spinning globe we communally ride to deliver up exactly what they want, when they want. Poor I imagine, in the highest of seas, in a typhoon or Scott. Poor Bunny. Poor me. hurricane or anything else the sea might get itself The ship departed right on schedule, at 3:00 P.M. on a day of high ceilings and sea-glitter, banup to, and so none of us had the slightest intimaners flying, the trumpets, saxophones, and electrified guitars of one shipboard band or another crytion that he had turned us around until the secing out joyously and the ship’s horn delivering up a shattering salvo that resonated in every passenger’s ond dessert course was served and the waiters solar plexus, whether he or she was confined to an inner cabin or an outer, like ours, in which you began handing out printed notices as if they were actually had room to breathe and savor the fluidity of the air and the stately creep of the water below. petit fours. To that point, we’d had a grand gay It was a fine celebratory moment and Amanita and I enjoyed it with a bottle of complimentary Chamtime, everyone in high spirits and the food beyond superb. (I had the foie gras powdered with pistapagne from the high-flown perch of our private balcony, which measured one hundred and seventyfive square feet and adjoined our two-hundred-square-foot cabin, numbers that would become chios and the grilled suckling lamb, Amanita the increasingly significant as events unfolded. In all, that is, we enjoyed three hundred and seventy-five venison shoulder, after a starter of lacquered Jerusquare feet of space, room in which to drift in our complimentary fleece-lined slippers from the sofa salem artichokes in a black truffle sauce.) We’d to the vanity to the bed, to stretch out, indulge ourselves, and defeat even the slightest fleeting already met Scott and Bunny, who, as I’ve men-

In a ship as vast

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no one else on the ship shows signs of infection, then the incubation period for the virus will have expired and it will be safe to assume that it is no longer active and transmissible.”

“Fourteen days!” Bunny wailed. (She was a kind of Amazon, actually, a broad-shouldered, heavy-breasted blonde whose hands were bigger than mine and who must have stood six feet tall in her heels.) “Stuck here, you mean? Jesus, what are we going to do for fourteen days?”

Here, her husband, Scott, the newlywed, lifted his eyebrows facetiously and said, “Oh, I don’t know, I think we’ll find something, don’t you?” and we all laughed, though, admittedly, it was nervous laughter. We were all adrift at this juncture and each of us was privately trying to answer Bunny’s question for himself— the suspense sutured in place by threads of rumor—there’d been a second case, a third, an albatross would we be bored to the point of stultification? had landed on the bridge and been promptly dispatched with a single gunshot, the lobsters in the Would the captain confine us to quarters or ship’s twenty-seven industrial-sized coolers had taken on an odd greenish glow. It wasn’t panic. At would we have the ship (and its attractions) to least not on my part. Panic was undignified, and throughout enjoy as we saw fit? Would the ship’s eighteen my life I’d always abjured it in times of stress, and so it was now. restaurants, bistros, sushi bars, hot dog stands, and coffee dispensaries remain open?

Amanita and I calmly finished our coffee and the chef’s selecAnd what of the nightclub, the casino, the floor shows and internationally celebrated tion of cheeses from the seven continents (which was an odd crooners we’d come to hear? Of the disease itself as yet we knew little, except that it designation, considering that presumably there was no cheese was highly infectious and that it disproportionately endangered the elderly. I was sixtyin Antarctica), then retired to our cabin and watched the stars eight years old, Amanita sixty-two. Did that, I wondered, qualify us as elderly? Or were from our private balcony as they subtly shifted their alignment we merely, as the Americans would label us, senior citizens? with the progress of the evening. When the anchor dropped I felt the first thin knifeblade of fear insert itself then, even as Bunny, in a uvular right back where we’d started in Yokohama Harbor, it was like squeak, demanded of the table at large, “Are they going to refund our money then?” a great rending of the heartstrings of the ship itself, defeated and, without waiting for an answer, “What about helicopters? Can’t they send helibefore it had a chance to demonstrate its mastery of the high seas. There was a volcanic groaning that reverberated through copters out from the, I don’t know, embassy or something?” every square inch of the ship, then silence. Sea and sky were a Herr Pohnert was slowly shaking his head. “That would defeat the purpose. A uniform black behind us, while the shore exploded with the quarantine must be airtight unless you would risk the whole world for your own hundreds of millions of lights that fanned out over the face of individual comfort.” tioned, occupied the cabin across from ours, and over dinner we had a chance to get acquainted with the others, all of them charming, including a podiatrist and his wife from Singapore, who were the only couple besides me and Amanita in formal dress. He was a wit, this podiatrist, diverting us with a seemingly endless array of anecdotes about the alignment of great toes, the aesthetics of bunions, and the treatment of onychomycosis.

At any rate, we were all captivated not only by the podiatrist’s stories but by the amatory antics of the newlyweds, who couldn’t seem to keep their hands off each other, constantly snuggling and smooching and feeding morsels of one delicacy or another into each other’s mouths, until the gentleman across from me, Konrad Pohnert, of Düsseldorf, snatched up the notice the waiters had just passed round and cried out, “What’s this?” and we all stared at him.

“What do you mean?” I stammered, and now I too had the notice in hand and the marshaled lines of harsh black letters were infesting my brain, the harshest of them composing the supercharged word, Quarantine, and then everything, as the Americans say, fell to shit.

We retraced our route in darkness,

THEN EVERYTHING, AS THE AMERICANS SAY, FELL TO SHIT. the land to Tokyo, a city of thirty-eight million souls, not a single one of them infected. What’s more, as we’d soon come to understand, the Japanese government intended to keep it that way, even if it meant sacrificing every one of us aboard.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. At the table that evening, after the waiters had distributed the printed notices, a lively discussion started up among the dinner guests. The first thing we all did was try to break down this term, quarantine, and make it conform to our hopes and expectations, the podiatrist assailing the captain’s judgment while another man, whose name I never did catch, assured us that it was all a mistake, a case of the flu and nothing more. Herr Pohnert, who, as it turned out, was a medical doctor, asserted that the quarantine would necessarily be absolute and that most likely it would have to extend over a period of fourteen days, typical for a viral infection of the type this was most likely to be. “At the end of fourteen days, if

Scott made a fist and thumped the table. “What are you saying? Are you saying my wife isn’t, what, patriotic?” Another thump. “You know, I don’t like your tone, dude, not one bit—” It was a childish thing to say and who knows what it might have led to—tempers already fraying, apprehension in the air—if it weren’t for the reappearance of the waiters, these men and women who till this moment had been the very avatars of servility and good nature, treating each and every one aboard as if he were a visitant from the heavens who’d sat at the foot of Jesus of Nazareth Himself. Now it was different.

They were wearing surgical masks and latex gloves, as if they’d come to lay us out on the operating table and pick through our organs like the diviners of old.

I woke in the morning with a scratchy throat, but I didn’t think anything of it—it was a condition that sometimes afflicted me after a late night and too much to drink even when I wasn’t in a strange place, amid strangers. The boat was immobile beneath me, down through all

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its multiple decks to the cowed sea that had no choice but to support it, and a trio of gulls was perched on the rail of our private balcony, delighted to see us back again. Since Amanita was still asleep and I didn’t want to disturb her (no rush: we could order breakfast anytime we liked in a floating empire such as this, even at midnight), I decided to take a stroll around the deck.

The first thing I observed, up and down the passageway, was the notices Scotch-taped to the doors of the cabins, notices that would also appear on our individual flat-screen TVs in electronic array. NO CAUSE FOR ALARM, the notices read. AS A PRECAUTION, HOWEVER, WE WILL REMAIN IN PORT UNTIL FURTHER ADVISED. NO ONE, PASSENGERS OR CREW, WILL BE PERMITTED INGRESS OR EGRESS DURING THIS PERIOD, WHICH WE EXPECT

ing themselves back into the air even as two of the crew members, chanting a litany of apologies, hoisted the cell phone man under his arms and frog-marched him down the deck at the very moment a nautical term I must have come across in a book or heard spoken in some film came to me. Can you say brig? I can.

Thus began our Calvary.

There was to be no more dining in the 5-Star Red Beryl Celebrity Dining Saloon, no more strolls round the deck, no shuffleboard, no blackjack, no musical theater, no films showcased in the 5-Star Red Beryl Celebrity Theater of the Seas. By noon, we were no longer merely being advised to remain in our quarters, but ordered to do so.

Amanita was unfazed. On returning from my truncated stroll that morning, I found her sitting up in bed watching images of our very ship on the flat-screen TV while the news crawl below bristled with arcane Japanese characters. “Remember SARS, MERS, Y2K?” she asked without even glancing up at me. “It’s the same sort of hysteria, the hounds of the press playing it up in order to sell deodorant and self-cleaning toilet cartridges. Or, in this case, Handi Wipes and hand sanitizers.”

“Yes,” I said, as gently as I could, “but we weren’t locked in a cabin on a ship full of strangers

“AT LEAST WE DIDN’T HIT AN ICEBERG.”

when all that”—and here I used the Americanism—“went down. But why are you watching it WILL BE BRIEF. And, in smaller print: YOUR COMin Japanese?”

FORT AND SAFETY ARE OUR SOLE CONCERN. I bent for the remote and clicked on the channel we’d watched the night before after climbing No one else was in the passageway and when I into bed in weary resignation. Immediately the same footage of our ship dominated the screen, but went out on deck there were few people about, with the crawl in Spanish. El Barco de la Infección, the banner read, even as the camera played over though admittedly it was early yet and rather the immensity of the vacant decks and the cold sunless sky above. Soon, statistics appeared enubrisk, even for February. The man who sang into his phone was there, huddled in a bathrobe and merating the cases confirmed in China, the red-hot glowing epicenter of the outbreak, followed by gazing out over the rail at the serried buildings of a Mercator projection of the world indicating the spread of the virus to Europe and the Mideast. And the shore, the phone clutched in one hand, a surthen, abruptly, there was our ship again, a white wall rearing against the sky, and a newsman in an gical mask dangling from its cord in the other. inset was reporting that the initial case on the Beryl When he saw me approaching, he swung round and demanded, “Can you believe this shit?”

Empress had succumbed to the disease, which was All I could see in that moment was the mask, which focused my attention to an alarming degree. chilling enough to hear, but nothing like what he “What shit?” I asked, though I already had a pretty good idea. revealed next—there were already sixty-seven conHe shook the mask as if it were some living thing he’d snatched out of the air and throttled. “If they think I’m going to wear this goddamned thing day and night and sit here paying”—he named firmed cases aboard and many more expected a figure considerably below what we had paid—“a day to look at some floating junkyard, because of the close cohabitation characteristic of well then, then—” cruise ships. “It’s one big floating petri dish,” he “Then what?” I asked, wondering where he’d gotten the mask and why he wasn’t wearing it— averred, reading from a teleprompter, “and the and, more to the point, why I wasn’t wearing it, or rather, one just like it. chances of contagion are magnified by—” “Fuck,” he said, using the term as a kind of placeholder. “I’ll fucking jump overboard.”

Suddenly I was staring into the broad blue-eyed We both peered over the rail. The pier, which was the size of three or four city blocks in itself, face of Doris Day, film star of my youth. She was stretched out below us in dwindling perspective. “It’s a long way down,” I observed, and was about in a white strapless gown that might have been to turn round and continue my stroll when a scrum of crew members dressed in white hazmat stapled to her breasts, singing some banal tunesuits rushed up to us. “Please, sir,” the man nearest me cried out in a harried voice, handing me a less song on a set that was made to look like the mask and a pair of gloves still sealed in their plastic packaging. “You must put these on and wear saloon of a cruise ship. I swung round on Amathem at all times. And while you’re free to move about the ship, the captain advises you to stay nita, who’d snatched up the remote the instant confined until such time as we get a better read on the situation.”

I’d set it down. “What are you doing?” I demanded, At the same time, another crew member was admonishing the cell phone man to put his mask gesturing helplessly at the screen as Doris Day back on, but the cell phone man wasn’t having it. “Bullshit,” he shouted. “You think I’m afraid of threw up her arms and kicked out her heels. germs? You want germs, I’ll give you germs!” He made a series of kissing noises, then reared back “I don’t want to hear it,” Amanita said. and flung the mask out over the rail, where the currents of the air carried it, tumbling end over I have to admit I was tempted in that moment end, into the vast gulf below. to use an expletive, but I restrained myself. “What I watched a pair of gulls briefly squabble over it before realizing it was of no use to them and liftare you saying—Que será, será?”

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A WOMAN ON THE TWELFTH DECK, AFTER BEING TREATED FOR DEMONIC POSSESSION BY

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HAVING TESTED NEGATIVE FOR THE VIRUS, WAS ONE OF THE THREE PRIESTS ABOARD. In answer, Amanita broke into a grin and clapped her hands like a schoolgirl, but I was less “Yes, and I believe Doris Day sang that one too, sanguine. “Is that counting from the second day—or today?” I asked. didn’t she?”

Dr. Schumann exchanged a look with Dr. Pohnert, as if hesitating, but then he nodded deci“Of course she did, why wouldn’t she? But she’s dead and we’re not, at least not yet.” Our cabin, made sively and said, “From the second day.” all the smaller with the sliding door to the deck shut I pulled out my phone and consulted the calendar. “So that means, since we boarded on the against the chill, began to feel like a coffin. “Our lives first of the month, our fourteen days, counting from the second, will be up on the sixteenth?” could be at stake,” I said, “and you’re watching a “Yes, that is correct,” Dr. Schumann said, his lips squirmdead actress in a third-rate film?” ing beneath the fabric of his mask like larvae trapped in a Amanita shrugged, even as a knock came at the door and we both jumped. gauze net.

It was the steward, bringing us breakfast, though we hadn’t ordered it. He was dressed “Unless,” Dr. Pohnert put in, “another case should arise, in what seemed to have become the official uniform of the crew—a hazmat suit—and he solin which eventuality we would have to reset the clock.”

“But that’s not going to happen,” I said. “Is it?” emnly handed me two paper bags that contained not the selection of fresh fruit, gravlax, At that moment we were all distracted by a shriek from chilled shrimp, eggs Benedict, and crisply fried Peregrino Ibérico de bellota bacon that comacross the passageway, and without thinking, I pulled open posed just the smallest fraction of the choices at the 5-Star Red Beryl Celebrity Breakfast the door. Bunny was standing at the open doorway of her Saloon buffet, but rather two Styrofoam boxes of scrambled eggs and two Styrofoam cups own cabin, her back to us, shoulders heaving. “I hate you!” of coffee sealed with plastic lids. she screamed, even as we saw Scott’s face recede into the depths of the room, which was dark and cramped, and at one hundred and sixty-eight square feet and lacking a private balcony, wasn’t much bigger than the average each one climbing grimly out of the grave of the one we’d laid to rest the night before. We restroom ashore. We watched as Bunny wrestled with watched the full catalog of films available gratis to 5-Star passengers, then started in on something in her left hand, which turned out to be her diathem again. Cheese sandwiches were delivered each day at noon, burgers and BLTs in the evenings. I ordered two bottles of pisco from room service (within forty-eight hours they’d mond wedding ring. She had her hair drawn back in a run out of Scotch, vodka, gin, brandy, tequila, and Jägermeister) and Amanita made us ponytail and was dressed in gym shorts and a halter top pisco sours to enliven (or perhaps deaden) our mornings, afternoons, and evenings. I read that left her shoulders bare so that we could see the musthrough the complete works of Filéncio Salmón on my Kindle, though science fiction isn’t cles working there as she twisted off the ring, reared back, really my cup of tea. (After a point, the planet Pentagord seemed more tangible to me than and flung it at her husband. our cabin, which had become increasingly unreal, as if it weren’t a stateroom on the 5-Star The recoil of the motion carried her out into the pasBeryl Empress at all, but a coat closet in an anteroom of hell.) We made love three times sageway, sans mask or gloves, and both doctors, alarmed, that week, which, at our age, was something of a feat, testimony not so much to the fact marshaled themselves to restrain her, but she shook them that love never dies but that boredom is a potent aphrodisiac. Who would have guessed? off, her eyes exophthalmic, her face twisted in fury. “No,” Of course, as Amanita pointed out, “We have to do something, don’t we?” she cried, “no, get away from me!” For a moment, there It was on the fifth day when we did have our first bit of good news. Just after breakfast, was a standoff, Bunny, even in her bare feet, taller than the ship’s doctor (Schumann, another German) stopped by to take our temperature and either of the men and her whole body one tense cord of collect samples of our sputum to test for exposure to the virus. Dr. Pohnert, though he muscle. “If you think I’m going to stay in this cage for one was a passenger, had volunteered to help with the rather daunting task of testing each of second more with this, this shitbird that I can’t believe I the crew members and the 2,666 passengers (excuse me: 2,665, after the unfortunate actually went out and married—” passing of patient zero), and he was there too, accompanying Schumann on his rounds.

It was an epic breakdown, shameful and sorrowful, and Neither man was dressed in a hazmat suit, which made them seem less intimidating, but when Scott suddenly reappeared and reached out to take both, of course, wore prophylactic gloves and face masks. Dr. Schumann asked how we hold of her arm, she shrieked, “I want a divorce!” and were feeling, and though I’d had that scratchy throat the first day, it seemed to have gone bolted down the passageway, both doctors in pursuit. away, and so I chimed in with Amanita to say, “Fine.”

I spat in a vial. Dr. Schumann plied the nasopharyngeal and oropharyngeal swabs, secured the samples, and was just turning to go when Amanita took hold of his arm and asked, in an uncertain voice, “Is it spreading?” This, of course, was our biggest worry, to be confined to our cabins and denied use of the ship’s aside from developing the infection ourselves, because if it continued spreading, there cornucopian amenities, the weather turned bitter on us was the very real possibility that we could find ourselves confined to our 5-Star cabins as well. After the morning of Bunny’s breakdown, it began eternally, or at least until everyone aboard was either cleared or dead. to rain, a steady dispiriting downpour that erased our views “No new cases since the second day,” Dr. Schumann informed us. “Don’t you worry— of the harbor and rendered our 5-Star private balcony all we’re closely monitoring all the passengers who did test positive and we’re confident, or but unusable. We tried a game of pinochle to pass the time, at least fairly confident, that at the end of the two-week incubation period, the crisis will but found we couldn’t concentrate. I clicked on one of the have passed and we’ll all be allowed to disembark. Does that sound good?” films we’d already seen twice—a (continued on page 109)

P R O P S T Y L I N G : M I C H A E L S T U R G E O N F O R M O N D AY A R T I S T S

The ensuing days were difficult,

As if it wasn’t trial enough

97 A P R I L / M AY 2022

YOUNG Forty-four years after their implosion, THE SEX PISTOLS—their music, fashion, and attitude—still matter.

This May, A NEW LIMITED SERIES brings the band’s incredible story to life. Here, THE CAST OF the show wears summer’s new crop of sharp suits, proving there’s NOTHING MORE PUNK, right now, than dressing up.

T H E S E X P I S T O L S D I D N ’ T I N V E N T P U N K RO C K .

That honor goes to American upstarts at CBGB. But the Pistols deserve—and accept—the blame for bringing it to the ’burbs. When a teen turns up with spiky hair, a dog collar, and a leather jacket, the response is “What are you, the Sex Pistols?” It’s a generic term now, like Xerox or Kleenex. The band blazed that trail. With flamethrowers.

The Pistols’ antiestablishment attitudes sprouted from their working-class upbringing. Steve Jones was a prolific thief who claims to have walked off with David Bowie’s equipment and used it to start the band. Paul Cook was bound for the electrical trades. In the early seventies, the two childhood friends frequented a London clothing store called Let It Rock. Its owners, designers Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren, saw fashion as a method of individual expression and cultural disruption, and they helped position the Pistols for just that. They also found bandmates. John Lydon—soon to be Johnny Rotten—caught McLaren’s eye because Lydon was wearing a Pink Floyd tee over which he had emblazoned I HATE in ballpoint pen. Westwood noticed John Simon Ritchie— who would become Sid Vicious—among the parade of shop customers. He couldn’t play bass, but he looked the part: pale and lost, with a padlock-fastened dog chain around his neck.

The true genius of McLaren, who became the Pistols’ manager, was using the band to prank the music industry.

They burned through three record labels in less than a year. Shortly after the release of their first single, “Anarchy in the U. K.,” in 1976, they appeared on Thames TV’s Today. The host goaded them into uttering a number of swear words—“You dirty fucker,” Jones called him—that were broadcast into sitting rooms across England. The

most famous headline the next day read THE FILTH AND THE FURY! Police shut down the few live shows local governments didn’t ban. “It was open fucking season on anyone who looked like a Sex Pistol,” Jones wrote in his memoir, Lonely Boy: Tales from a Sex Pistol, on which the new Danny Boyle–directed FX series Pistol is based. Their arrival on U. S. soil led the nightly news. Suddenly, every high school kid and their parents knew about punk. Guidance counselors asked students whether they wanted to cut their chests with razor blades—a favorite move of Sid’s— when all they wanted to do was listen to the songs.

And that’s what people tend to forget about the Pistols: The music was fantastic. “Anarchy,” “God Save the Queen,” and “Pretty Vacant” are anthems. Naysayers gripe that the band couldn’t play their instruments. The music was loud, the lyrics brutal, and the vocal delivery aggressive. But the same was true for the first Led Zeppelin album. The instrumentation wasn’t avant-garde; Jones and Cook idolized the Faces and the Who. There were even guitar solos.

Forty-five years later, nothing on Never Mind the Bollocks sounds dated.

The Pistols disintegrated in 1978, before they could become a parody. Capitalism absorbed their legacy, smoothing over its rougher edges and morphing it into new genres like pop punk, emo, alternative rock, and grunge.

Now you can go to a mall and buy the dog collar Sid Vicious wore, because the Pistols bulldozed their way into suburbia all those years ago. Even so, the band members continued to fuck with the establishment. When they were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2006, they refused the award, instead sending a handwritten note that read: “We’re not coming. Your [sic] not paying attention.”

BY CARYN ROSE PHOTOGRAPHS BY ROGER DECKKER STYLING BY DAVID BRADSHAW

From left, on Anson Boon: Jacket ($3,570), tank ($990), and trousers ($1,290) by Alexander McQueen; boots ($250) by Underground; sunglasses ($600) by Jacques Marie Mage. On Sydney Chandler: Jacket ($3,625), top ($1,750), trousers ($1,025), and shorts ($895) by Versace. On Thomas Brodie-Sangster: Jacket ($2,790) and trousers ($1,150) by Valentino; vintage shirt by Helmut Lang, stylist’s own; vintage boots by Calvin Klein, stylist’s own. On Toby Wallace: Jacket ($2,250) and trousers ($840), Celine Homme by Hedi Slimane; vintage shirt

by Calvin Klein, stylist’s own; shoes ($190) by Underground. On Jacob Slater: Vintage jacket, cardigan sweater, shirt, and trousers by Versace, stylist’s own; boots ($150) by Dr. Martens.

THE MUSIC WAS LOUD, the lyrics brutal, and the vocal delivery aggressive. But the same was true for the first Led Zeppelin album. The instrumentation wasn’t avant-garde; JONES AND COOK IDOLIZED the Faces and the Who. There were even guitar solos.

Toby Wallace_ One moment that Toby Wallace (below) will never forget? “The first guitar lesson I ever had was from Steve Jones,” he says. “I was shit, by the way.” Wallace, twenty-six, won a breakthrough-performance award at the 2019 Venice Film Festival for his role in the indie hit Babyteeth; now he leads Pistol, playing the band’s mouthy guitarist. Jones was a founding member of the Sex Pistols, and his autobiography, Lonely Boy, is the inspiration behind the series. During the pandemic,

Wallace went for long strolls around Beverly Hills with Jonesy, downloading his memories of the punk movement. Another pinch-me moment that will stick in Toby Wallace’s mind forever? When the sixty-something rocker felt nature calling and took a leak right there on the side of the road in L. A.’s fanciest ZIP code.

Feeling he should be faithful to the man he’s playing, naturally Wallace joined him. _ Profiles throughout by Olivia Ovenden

Opposite, top, from left, on Sydney: Vintage tank available at the Society Archive; trousers by Gucci; necklaces by the Great Frog; bracelet by the Cast NYC. On Thomas: T-shirt ($105), Tagfree by Kervin Marc; vintage trousers by Richard James; necklace by Underground. On Anson: Vintage T-shirt available at the Society Archive; trousers by Givenchy; necklace by Vivienne Westwood. On Jacob: Vintage sweater ($1,590) by Dior Homme, available at the Society Archive; vintage shirt by Prada, stylist’s own; trousers ($811) by Bianca Saunders; ring ($235, worn as necktie) by the Great Frog. On Toby: T-shirt ($235) available at the Vintage Showroom; trousers by Dolce & Gabbana; necklace by Underground.

Opposite, bottom, from left, on Anson: Coat ($1,135) by Carlota Barrera; trousers by Alexander McQueen; boots by Underground; beret ($45) by the Cast NYC. On Thomas: Vintage coat by Katherine Hamnett, stylist’s own; trousers by Valentino; vintage boots by Calvin Klein, stylist’s own.

On Toby: Vintage coat by Adolfo Dominguez, stylist’s own; trousers, Celine Homme by Hedi Slimane; boots by Underground. On Jacob: Coat ($3,500) by Salvatore Ferragamo; vintage trousers by Versace; boots by Dr. Martens. This page: Vintage shoes by Dr. Martens; trousers ($1,125)

by Dolce & Gabbana. On Toby: Jacket ($3,145) by Dolce & Gabbana; vintage tank ($199) available at the Society Archive; necklace ($180) by Underground; chain necklace ($235) by the Great Frog.

101 A P R I L / M AY 2022

Sydney Chandler_ The real audition to play Chrissie Hynde came at the London home of the iconic Pretenders singer herself, when Hynde invited Sydney Chandler, twenty-six, over to share her memories of hanging out with the Sex Pistols. “I thought, If I could play her songs in front of her, then I’d be okay on set,” Chandler says. “She’s someone that has no ego, and I like to think I was able to keep a little bit of that with me.” The daughter of actor Kyle Chandler, she had just finished shooting her first project, Don’t Worry Darling, a psychological thriller from Olivia Wilde, starring Harry Styles and Florence Pugh, when she got the call to play Hynde on Pistol. “My mom sings ‘My City Was Gone’ all the time, so my parents were jumping up and down a bit when they found out,” Chandler recalls. “It’s a big leap of faith, but when Danny Boyle tells you that you can do something, you believe it. Yes, sir!”

On Sydney: Vintage tank ($199) available at the Society Archive; Belcher chain necklace ($545) and edge chain necklace ($305) by the Great Frog. On Anson: Vintage T-shirt ($190) available at the Society Archive; necklace by Vivienne Westwood.

On Toby: Jacket ($2,595) and trousers by Dunhill; vintage cardigan by Calvin Klein, stylist’s own; boots ($455) by Russell & Bromley; hat ($98) by Le Tings; necklace by the Great Frog.

You might have seen Thomas BrodieSangster (right) on Netflix’s The Queen’s Gambit, strolling across Westeros with Bran the Broken on Game of Thrones, or running through Heathrow Airport as the cherubic and lovestruck Sam in Love Actually. But Pistol is new territory. “It’s dealing with quite tough social issues so is quite different to anything I’ve done before,” Brodie-Sangster says of the project, on which he is unrecognizably louche as the band’s manager, the musical kingmaker Malcolm McLaren. “That energy and the sheer audacity of some of the lyrics—you still couldn’t get away with saying a lot of that stuff today.” A style enthusiast who recently walked the runway for Prada, Brodie-Sangster, thirty-one, especially liked power-dressing in the red tartan Vivienne Westwood suit that he wore for one memorable Pistol scene. “He really enjoyed giving one to the establishment,” he says of McLaren. “He was a naughty, naughty boy, and he wanted to encourage others to be naughty, too.”

Anson Boon_ When it came to bringing Sex Pistols frontman Johnny Rotten to life, Anson Boon (opposite) was keen to avoid doing a caricature of the anarchic hell-raiser.

“There’s an image of the band being these spitting devils,” he says. “But I was also interested in the John Lydon who loved his mum, went to bed with a glass of milk every night, and worked at a youth center for underprivileged children.” At twenty-two, Boon has already worked with Hollywood heavyweights, including Kate Winslet and Susan Sarandon in Blackbird and director Sam Mendes in 1917. For Pistol, Boon went a little Method, replicating the graffiti on the walls of the band’s rehearsal space in his own dressing room and obsessing over which of the fourteen Johnny Rotten wigs each day called for. “I did my research so everything down to the last thumb ring was correct,” he says proudly. “I wanted to pay him the respect he deserves.”

On Thomas: Jacket ($4,000) by Prada; vintage cardigan sweater, sweater, trousers, and boots by Prada, stylist’s own.

Thomas Brodie-Sangster_

On Anson: Jacket ($3,450) and trousers ($1,090) by Louis Vuitton Men’s; vintage T-shirt by Prada, stylist’s own; boots ($1,295) by Givenchy.

C H A N D L E R , H A I R : C H R I S T I A N W O O D AT T H E WA L L G R O U P. M A K E U P : E M M A W H I T E T U R L E AT T H E WA L L G R O U P. M E N ’ S G R O O M I N G : B R A DY L E A AT P R E M I E R . P R O D U CT I O N : L U CY WAT S O N P R O D U CT I O N S .

Jacob Slater_ Jacob Slater (opposite) remembers being blown away by Danny Boyle’s Trainspotting when he was fifteen years old. Years later, when Slater was working as a surf instructor in Cornwall, on the southernmost tip of England, a friend told him about auditions for a series about the Sex Pistols. The director? The same man who had made the UK of the eighties shine in the dark in another story about a group of men and their excesses and demons. “I’d always listened to the Pistols and punk

music when I was younger,” says Slater, twenty-four, who fronted the band Dead Pretties and now performs as Wunderhorse. A first-time actor, he channeled his time spent onstage as a musician to play Pistols drummer Paul Cook. Slater incorporated one particularly useful bit of advice Cook gave him when the drummer came down to watch him on set. “He said, ‘Stop fiddling with your drums in between songs, because I never did that,’ and I thought, Fair enough.”

Opposite, on Jacob: Suit ($3,095) and shirt ($675) by Giorgio Armani; tie ($175) by Title of Work; boots ($150) by Dr. Martens. Above, from left, on Thomas: Vintage suit by Richard James, stylist’s own; T-shirt, Tagfree by Kervin Marc; vintage loafers by Prada, stylist’s own; necklace ($95) and safety pin ($15) by Underground. On Anson: Jacket and trousers by Givenchy; vintage T-shirt available at the Society Archive; shoes ($190) by Underground; necklace by Vivienne Westwood.

On Sydney: Jacket ($2,400) and trousers ($1,400) by Gucci; vintage tank available at the Society Archive; bracelet ($75) by the Cast NYC; necklaces by the Great Frog. Right, on Sydney: Jacket ($995) by the Cast NYC; dress ($1,195) by Et Ochs; boots ($1,150), Celine by Hedi Slimane.

107 A P R I L / M AY 2022

THE DREAM OF OSCAR ISAAC (continued from page 63)

the same time we’re both actors. We have the same dreams. It’s something very special because it can be a lonely journey when you’re out there going after—it sounds corny, but going after your dreams, and to find family along the way.” He pauses, laughs: “The other side of it is that he’s the younger brother I never wanted.”

After Hurricane Andrew destroyed that model home, his parents separated. Oscar, his siblings, and their mother moved again to another house.

It was large and spacious and sat on five acres, its rooms waiting to be filled with memories and new hopes. Her “dream house,” he says. Oscar’s mother put everything she had into purchasing it, leaving no money for furniture. Three years later, she would undergo a kidney transplant and be forced to sell it. She had to move away again, to another town, but it was just before Oscar’s senior year of high school, so he didn’t want to leave the school district. For that last year, he slept on a couch at a friend’s house so he could graduate with his classmates.

“For me,” Isaac says, “she was unconditional love. And when she died, it felt like God died, too.”

GOD OSCAR WAS BORN IN GUATEMALA AND CAME

to the United States when he was six months old.

He grew up in a deeply religious household and in a community of evangelical Guatemalan immigrants who felt they must be prepared for the apocalypse, who envisioned the physical world as the arena for spiritual warfare, who worried that if they were not righteous enough, if they did not believe enough, they would not get called up to heaven in the second coming of Jesus Christ.

“We would have church in our house,” he says.

“We would have traveling pastors from Guatemala stay at our house. For us, it was like the end of days was around us all the time. The sense of the apocalypse, the sense that we were going to get left behind, the mark of the beast. There was a picture up: I remember my grandmother had this big painting of Jesus knocking on the United Nations, this huge Jesus. It was terrifying.”

I know the one! I tell him. When I first arrived in the U. S. from East Africa, I went to school and attended church with evangelicals, and that picture that Isaac mentions hurtles me back to my own childhood, to the fire-and-brimstone preachers, to that pastel-blue Jesus—he calls it “Godzilla Jesus”—standing in front of a huge building.

We exchange memories of how frightened we were as young children, seeing that image of an oversize, elongated Christ standing at the United Nations. Neither of us yet understood the function of the UN, but we were starting to have a sense of a world that needed to be controlled and

patrolled by a greater spiritual force, manifest in a man who looked nothing like the communities from which we came, who looked like no real human at all. To put it bluntly: That shit was scary.

It was terrifying and oppressive, and damaging, whether an adult or a child.

“It feels like something directly out of my nightmare,” he says. “It was a form of spiritual abuse.

There’s like a real spiritual abuse. So this year’s really been about trying to cultivate a healthy relationship with spirituality, because I went the opposite way—pure materialist—because of all that spiritual trauma,” he says. “If I couldn’t see it and couldn’t touch it, I didn’t want to deal with it.”

His sister and he talk about those childhood days of constant fear and uncertainty, the stifling rules and paralyzing judgment, the purported possessions and exorcisms and the continual awareness that so many of our natural inclinations can be termed sin, so much of who we are can hurl us into a fiery hell and eternal damnation. (His sister is a climate scientist now. “So her profession is end of days,” he says.)

He turned away from religion, from anything that resembled a belief in a higher power, in divine intervention. Recently he has started to reconsider what spirituality can mean, without the oppressive and controlling features. “I’m trying to move back to a sense of something bigger than myself,” he says. “There’s obvious beauty and importance and connection in spirituality, but man, can it get hijacked.”

A D A R K S TA G E SILENCE . ISAAC TRANSFORMS INTO A DIS-

illusioned sixties intellectual in a restless, radical enclave of New York City. The play, The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window, written by Lorraine Hansberry and published in 1964, is an examination of the hypocrisies that exist in even the most bohemian, liberal communities. It is a play about art and its potential to disturb and confound, and about the sacrifices and risks that making art entails. There he is, the lights coming up— This is one of his dreams. The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window is the project Isaac dreams of doing. Hansberry—the first Black woman to have a play produced on Broadway, A Raisin in the Sun in 1959—challenged society’s sense of decorum, asked what respectability means when it continues to allow—and participate in—discrimination and bigotry. Brustein’s Window was the last play that she wrote before she died at the age of thirtyfour from pancreatic cancer, in 1965.

“You realize what the world was deprived of when she died,” Isaac says. “She was just staggering.” He is drawn to the play’s defiant statements about art, racism, homophobia, and misogyny.

There is a moment in the play when Sidney’s wife chides him for his illiberal sentiments and calls him Victorian. “The Victorians, sweet, were not against ‘sin,’ ” Sidney retorts. “They were opposed 108 A P R I L / M AY 2022

to its visibility.”

“In a way, we’re living in an almost Victorian time,” Isaac says. “It’s not about what you really believe. It’s about what you’re going to get called out on. I even noticed when I did four productions during Covid, and even the Covid protocols were all vastly different from production to production, because it wasn’t really about safety. It was about liability, right? It was about, What might we be called out on if there’s an outbreak, if this person gets sick, if that person gets sick? So it depended on who was running the show and how fucking crazy they were and how much they wanted to defend their position in their job. Then within that, of course there’s safety and we want to do the right thing and we don’t want people to get sick. But that’s not what it was really about.”

There are important conversations to be had about topics that might make people uncomfortable, but when expressing honest thoughts becomes a liability, he says, it gets difficult to communicate. “That’s very hard, to have dangerous art, so in some ways the abstract and the surreal, there’s more safety there,” he says—and that’s scary for a lot of people. “I grew up with this idea of, Don’t label me. I don’t need your labels, man.

Now it feels like you’ve got to have a label and it better be the right label. It’s very much about the labels. It’s interesting, the evolution towards that, which all comes from a reaction to something else, and how that evolves and then suddenly you find yourself in this weird place. Then how that’s going to eventually change to something else—the abstract and the surreal being the scariest place for people who need to have intense definition to be able to say what’s right and what’s wrong.”

A L AKE IN HUNGARY I SA AC A N D E T H A N H AW K E AT A L A K E I N

Hungary, on a break from Moon Knight rehearsals. They are tripping on mushrooms, lying in the grass, soaking in the sun. A live Phosphorescent album plays in the background, maybe on somebody’s phone. Everything is expansive, glowing, harsh lines melting and sun a cascade of light falling like stars. Oscar is floating again, back in the ocean, back at home in his mother’s house. He is somewhere between ascent and free fall, in that suspended place where the imagination rises to make contact with the divine. The music: soaring and aching, steady and gentle. The deep thrum of the bass, the reverb, the hush in the crowd audible even from this place.

Here is joy: It is a tender gift to cup in the hand and protect.

Here is mercy: It is all going to be all right. Keep going, keep doing what you are doing, because it matters. It is beautiful.

Oscar is both dreaming and, finally, on solid ground, the earth steady beneath him.

The crowd cheers.

Here is a dream: Remember it. Hold it tight.

THE THIRTEENTH DAY (continued from page 97)

prison picture from the 1940s featuring a brutal warden, a riot, and an elaborate escape plan thwarted by an informer—but under the conditions it wound up being worse than staring at the wall, so I turned it off. When the steward came by with our lunch (peanut butter and jelly on rye accompanied by two blackening bananas and Styrofoam cups of what appeared to be Hawaiian Punch), I asked if he had any news, as starved for information at this point as any castaway. He wasn’t particularly forthcoming, and in any case what he might have known must necessarily have been at third- or fourth-hand, but he did say, rather enigmatically, “Word is we’ll be moving soon.”

“Does that mean we’ll be evacuated?” Amanita wanted to know. She was in bed, the covers pulled up to her throat. She’d barely been out of bed since our ordeal began. Nor, for that matter, had I. After all, where was there to go? Why even bother to get dressed?

The man, like most of the crew, was Greek, or had been before he donned the hazmat suit—at least that was my recollection of him—and he stood no taller and had no more authority about him than a twelve-year-old. He didn’t say yes and he didn’t say no. Through his mask, he murmured, “All I hear is we’re going to move.”

“Ashore?” I asked, feeling a wave of relief wash over me. The TV news had speculated that we’d be moved to a containment facility ashore to wait out our quarantine and though that was hardly ideal—I pictured walled courtyards, barbed wire, sanitized cells—at least we’d be off the ship.

He was slowly shaking his head even as he turned to go, leaving us to wonder at his meaning, until not ten minutes later it became clear. We were just sampling our sandwiches and doctoring our drinks with pisco (can you say Hawaiian Pisco Punch?) when we felt a thunderous shiver run through the ship as it weighed anchor and pushed back from the pier, heading out to sea.

WHAT HAD HAPPENED —and I’m sure you must

have seen accounts in the press—was that the Japanese government, in response to the emergency, revoked whatever permits or contracts the 5-Star Red Beryl Cruise Line might have had with the Port Authority of Yokohama and not only refused to allow any passenger or crew member to set foot ashore but demanded that the ship vacate Japanese waters altogether. The irony here was that although we didn’t know it yet, we were about to continue our cruise after all, though not in the manner we’d anticipated when we’d first come aboard.

Our cabin was the last one on our passageway, so there was no one to our right, which helped ease our growing sense of constriction—Amanita, who’d booked the trip, had planned it that way for the sake of privacy, or as much privacy as you

could expect from what had already become a kind of seagoing favela. The cabin to our immediate left was occupied by a single passenger, a woman in late middle age of whom we couldn’t help catching glimpses as she moved about on her private balcony, which was separated from our own only by a laminated white plastic panel. She hadn’t been at dinner that first night, or at least not at our table, and so to this point all we knew of her was what was printed on the placard attached to her door: MRS. AMELIA KNOB. HOME PORT: BATH, ENGLAND. I mention it because she soon became central to the drama playing out on board, or at least to our little portion of it.

We were rolling right along, the Japanese shore long faded from sight and the great ship flattening the waves like a steamroller, when the TV screen suddenly went dark in the middle of the sole remaining movie we’d seen only once, a Disney confection about a misappropriated poodle finding its way home to a suburb of Paris from what appeared to be Lac Léman at the foot of the Alps, and I got up to check the connections. Amanita, who never uses foul language, let out a curse, then pulled the covers over her head and refused to emerge for the rest of the afternoon. I called down to the desk but got no answer, and having nothing else to do, I unhooked everything, cleaned the connections, and reattached the cables, but to no avail—the screen remained dead. Finally, after twenty minutes or so, a message appeared.

WE ARE HAVING TECHNICAL DIFFICULTIES, it read.

WE WILL RESTORE SERVICE AS SOON AS POSSIBLE. THANK YOU FOR YOUR PATIENCE. And, in smaller letters: YOUR COMFORT AND SAFETY ARE OUR SOLE CONCERN. For some time I’d been hearing a tapping or thumping that began to separate itself from the usual noises of a ship at sea, and when I looked up, my eyes were drawn to our private balcony, the sliding door of which was shut against the blow. An arm appeared over the top of the plastic panel to the left, then a shoulder and a face framed in wind-whipped hair the color of rainwater. It was Mrs. Knob and she was beckoning me, her face wearing an expression of extreme urgency. “Do you see what they’ve done?” she demanded without introduction when I stepped out onto the balcony. She wasn’t wearing a mask.

Neither was I. “What do you mean?”

“The telly. They’ve cut the cable.”

“Oh,” I said, and here came that knifethrust of fear again, “it’s just a technical glitch, that’s what the message said. They’ll have it up and running any minute now. How difficult can it be on a ship like this?”

“You are so naive. They’re isolating us, don’t you understand? They don’t want us to know what’s happening.” And then she began to cough, a deep dredging explosive cough that silenced the wind and chased the dolphins all the way down 109 A P R I L / M AY 2022

to the bottom of the sea.

I didn’t answer her. Shielding my face, I fled inside and slammed the door shut behind me. Then I went to the sink and scrubbed my face and hands like a surgeon heading into the operating room.

BY THE TWELFTH DAY (counting from the last

known incidence of infection, that is), conditions had become increasingly dismal. Back at home, our maid, Esmerelda, who has served us cheerfully and hygienically for thirty years now, customarily changed our bedding three times a week, whether it was strictly necessary or not, but here, needless to say, all maid service had been indefinitely suspended, so we were forced to wash our sheets, towels, and underthings ourselves in the sink and hang them to dry on the rail of our 5-Star private balcony. As you can imagine, this gave rise to a new set of difficulties altogether, including the vagaries of the winds and the depredations of the gulls we encountered at the next port of call, Hong Kong, which left me entirely bereft of undershorts for the duration. Meals, such as they were, began to appear at the oddest hours, the crew strained to the breaking point with the exigencies of providing what amounted to bag lunches for 2,665 passengers three times a day, so the breakfast waffles might come at noon and the evening’s macaroni and cheese at two in the morning. Still, we managed as best we could, though we were sunk in lethargy and victimized by a slow creep of apprehension as the quarantine period counted down and we awaited word from the authorities at Hong Kong as to whether we would be allowed finally to disembark and put an end to our ordeal.

We’d taken to leaving our door open as a way of expanding our space, at least psychologically, as did most of the other passengers on our deck, especially those confined to the inner cabins.

Like Bunny and Scott, whom we could observe lying motionless on their bed, as if they’d already been stricken. After her outburst, Bunny had been subdued, though Amanita, whose eyesight is a good deal sharper than mine, observed that she was definitely not wearing her wedding ring.

For the most part, as far as I could see, Bunny just stared at the ceiling, though every so often she’d prop herself up on her elbows and call out to us across the passageway in odd disconnected phrases like “Enjoying the ball game?” and “Five’ll get you ten.”

Once a day the crew escorted her and Scott and the others occupying inner cabins out onto the deck for a spot of exercise and fresh air, and from our doorway we got to exchange greetings with them—and rumors too; rumors proved more contagious than the virus itself. One man, trudging by in the passageway, claimed that there had been three suicides already and as many as a dozen people rescued after jumping overboard. We heard that the lobsters had again changed color, which

explained why the chef had eliminated them from culinary consideration, and that a woman on the twelfth deck, after having tested negative for the virus, was being treated for demonic possession by one of the three priests aboard. Not that we believed any of it. Rumors were rumors, nothing more. But in the absence of cable news and service for our mobiles, we were left in the dark, which only stoked our fears, which in turn gave rise to new flights of rumors.

On the morning of the thirteenth day, Dr. Schumann stopped by to test us for the final time.

Dr. Pohnert was conspicuously absent, and though I could barely summon the energy to put two words together, I did manage to sit up and inquire after him. “Can we assume he’s off doing tests separately, so as to expedite matters? Or is he”—and here I attempted a joke—“busy arranging the shuffleboard tournament?”

“Oh, I’ve got a whole crew under my wing now,” the doctor said, waving a hand as if to indicate that the situation was well under control. “As it turns out, there are twelve other physicians among the passengers—and so many nurse practitioners it’s almost as if they were attending a convention.”

Amanita, who was sipping a cup of watery tea brewed from a thrice-used teabag, looked up and smiled. “And how is Dr. Pohnert? Is he bearing up?”

Dr. Schumann frowned. “I’m afraid he’s indisposed.”

“No,” I said, my heart sinking, “don’t tell me—?”

“Oh, no, no, no, nothing like that. It’s just a head cold, that’s all. But under the circumstances—” and he trailed off.

From across the passageway, Bunny called out, “You know what the ducks say—quack, quack, quack.”

BOTH AMANITA AND I tested negative for the virus, as we had the first time around, which was a relief on many levels, but the unremitting tension of being at the center of the contagion and having to fret over every slightest palpitation, every tickle in the throat or stifled sneeze, had worn us down till we were nearly as debilitated as the initial sixty-seven victims themselves, all of whom were now out of danger and displaying no further signs of infection, according to Dr. Schumann. That evening the captain sent round complimentary bottles of something called Miller High Life, “the Champagne of Bottled Beers,” and Amanita and I sat outside on our private deck and sipped from them as we gazed out on the night-spangled waters and the infinity of individual lights faceting the jewel of Hong Kong, each of them signifying some private refuge, whether it be an apartment, an office, or a Chinese restaurant throwing open its doors to travelers from all corners of the earth.

All seemed well, and as we dined on Cup Noodles and prepackaged cheese and crackers and

washed them down with the beer, our spirits began to rise. I found myself grinning over nothing in particular, and was about to reprise one of the podiatrist’s better jokes, when Amanita, wrapped in a blanket against the chill of the night, let out a sigh and murmured, “I suppose it could have been worse.”

“Worse?” I said. “How could it possibly have been worse?”

“At least we didn’t hit an iceberg,” she said, and in the next moment we were both laughing despite ourselves. It was a companionable moment, one that only reaffirmed what we’d built together over forty years of marriage, which stood in stark contrast to Scott and Bunny, who’d gone directly from exchanging vows to their cramped economy cabin on the grandest ship in the fleet, assuming that the water slides and the casino and romantic interludes in the 5-Star Red Beryl Celebrity Theater of the Seas would provide the essential glue to bind them. When I’d last looked, Bunny was still lying there stretched out on her back, staring at the ceiling. Scott, perched in the doorway, had given us a thumbs-up and when I asked how she was doing he’d pinched his lips together, shot a look both ways up and down the passageway, and said, sotto voce, “She’s just depressed, is all.”

This was when Mrs. Knob came back into the picture. We hadn’t seen any sign of her on her balcony and when I’d glanced idly down the passageway from time to time I saw that the steward had left her bag lunch outside her door, only to remove it and replace it with a fresh one at the next meal cycle. I didn’t think much of it—she was English, after all. No doubt she’d brought kippers and Marmite and the like aboard with her, distrustful of the French-Asian fusion the ship’s 5-Star kitchens were renowned for. Mrs. Knob. The Englishwoman. She’d occupied her cabin and we’d occupied ours and we were all, equally, available to contagion, which, I suppose, is the most basic form of democracy. If she didn’t want to eat her meals, didn’t want to expose herself, didn’t want to chat at her doorway or over the laminated plastic panel of her private balcony, that was her privilege.

But now there seemed to be some sort of commotion in the passageway, colliding voices, the tattoo of rushing feet. Curious, I pushed myself out of bed and went to the door. Behind me, Amanita lay curled up beneath the covers, softly snoring, though it was three in the afternoon—she’d taken to napping at all hours as a way of defeating time, as I had myself, both of us drifting into a kind of self-willed narcolepsy. Across the hall, Scott and Bunny had shut their door, and what that might have meant I didn’t have a chance to consider because my attention was caught by the two crew members outside Mrs. Knob’s cabin. One of them was rapping on the door and persistently calling Mrs. Knob’s name while the other applied a master key to the lock, which didn’t seem to be having the desired effect. “Mrs. Knob?” the first 110 A P R I L / M AY 2022

man called. “Mrs. Knob?” The second, his features shrouded by the mask, let out a curse. “She must have jammed something in the lock.”

At that moment, they both shifted their attention to where I stood leaning out into the passageway. “Do you know the woman in this cabin?” the first man asked.

I shook my head. “Not really,” I said.

“When was the last time you saw her?”

I shrugged. “Maybe two days ago? I’m not sure.”

At that, the second man produced a batterypowered drill and applied it to the lock, which, after a moment, did the trick: There was a clunk, then the thump of something dropping to the deck, and the door pushed in. From where I was standing I could just barely see a fraction of the room, and so, curiosity getting the better of me, I stepped out into the hall and peered through the doorway.

Did I touch the doorframe? Breathe the air? Allow my unslippered feet to contact the threshold? I don’t know. But the world is a tactile environment, composed of atoms, and what we touch and what we breathe in is not always subject to our will: Mrs. Knob was lying supine on the floor while the two crew members knelt over her, the beak of her nose thrust up like the sail of her own private barque, her eyes fixed on the ceiling.

SO THERE WAS TO BE another fourteen days

at sea, news that came down to us via our flatscreen TVs within an hour of the discovery of Mrs. Knob’s body. Sequestered now in a rippling black 5-Star body bag, Mrs. Knob was wheeled away on a gurney even as hazmat-clad crew members thumped up and down the passageway, wielding sprayers of disinfectant. “Will they bury her at sea, do you think?” Amanita wondered aloud, her eyes roving over my face.

I was sitting on the bed beside her, idly flipping through the pages of an overstuffed novel I’d read three times already and knew so well I could have recited it from memory.

“I don’t think they do that sort of thing anymore. Most likely they’ll lay her out in one of the coolers next to the Chinese man and the green lobsters—till we get to shore, that is.”

“If we ever do get to shore,” Amanita said, and she slid over on the bed and wrapped her arms around me. “I’m so sorry for putting you through this,” she whispered. “I just”—and here her voice scraped—“thought it would be an adventure, that’s all.”

From across the hall, even through the airtight door, we could hear Bunny’s high fractured voice singing, “Mama’s little baby loves shortenin’, shortenin’, Mama’s little baby loves shortenin’ bread!”

The great ship gave a shudder then and the distant groan of the anchor revealed the sequel: We were heading back out to sea, rejected by Hong Kong and its 7.4 million inhabitants before we had a chance even to breathe its air. “It’s not your fault,” I told my wife, though of course it was, and

all I could think of in that moment was the leather sofa in front of the fireplace back at home and the very old Jerez brandy I kept in the glass decanter in the polished teak cabinet beside it.

I’M SURE ANYONE reading this account will be

aware of our plight over the course of the subsequent days, during which we were rejected by any number of ports in succession, including Sihanoukville, where the Cambodian prime minister, Samdech Techo Hun Sen, desperate for favorable publicity, had initially invited us to dock, then at the last minute withdrew the invitation because the ship before us had unleashed the virus on the city despite the fact that all the disembarking passengers had ostensibly tested negative for it. You might know that, but you’re probably not aware of the degree of privation to which we were all subjected at this point, everyone alike, including the Americans. As if the food hadn’t been bad enough as it was, now we faced shortages of the essentials—wine, macaroni, hot sauce, and creamer packets for our morning coffee. Stevedores had refused to attend the ship at Yokohama and we hadn’t got close enough at Hong Kong for it to matter, but the cruise line had arranged for a helicopter drop of various foodstuffs and medicines off of Sihanoukville, including test kits for the virus, though ultimately the supply proved inadequate and testing was reserved only for those who might be showing symptoms.

But the worst thing, the degrading thing, was the filth we were forced to abide. Some sort of mold had made every surface of the cabin sticky, and though we complained repeatedly, the best the crew could do was pass us a sponge, a bucket, and half a cup of Clorox (itself in short supply) through the door of our cabin. Then there was the bedding. We washed the sheets as best we could in the shower, using those diminutive bottles of shampoo in lieu of detergent, the supply of which we’d exhausted sometime during the third week, and there was of course the problem of my lack of undergarments, which necessitated the frequent washing of my Dockers and being reduced to wearing my tuxedo trousers while they were drying over the shower rail. The weather continued foul. The whales and dolphins vanished. The bands did not take up their instruments, the roulette wheels sat idle, and the 5-Star Red Beryl Celebrity Saloon gathered dust. No matter—the ship, grand monument that it was, quelled the waves and humbled the seas even while the authorities tried in vain to find a port that would take us when our second round of days had counted down to the finish.

And Bunny? On the morning of the second thirteenth day, after the steward had arrived with our bag breakfast (two balls of rice darkened with soy and two cups of creamless coffee), I glanced across the passageway and saw that Scott was alone in

his cabin. I was astonished. And terrified, that too.

Had she somehow come down with the infection?

Did this mean that we would not be disembarking tomorrow at whatever port for which the captain was now heading? Would we have to endure two weeks more of this purgatory? Was the world uninhabitable? Was normalcy a joke? A sudden rage seized me—Bunny. What a ridiculous name.

What a ridiculous person. I was ready to don my mask and gloves and drag her out of the sick bay or wherever she was and fling her overboard myself if that would spare us.

“Where’s Bunny?” I called to him. Amanita, who’d been asleep—always asleep now, even at mealtimes—roused herself at the sound of my voice and peered blearily over my shoulder.

“They had to take her away. And no, it’s not the virus, thank god—she’s just, well, feeling the strain.

She’s very sensitive.”

THAT AFTERNOON OUR SCREENS came to

life again, first with an announcement that we were on a course for Phu My, in Vietnam, where we would be allowed to disembark, as no one had tested positive for the malady since the unfortunate loss of a passenger two weeks earlier, and then with the full array of news programs, movies, and games we’d been deprived of in the interim. And there it was, like a miracle—the image of our ship steaming across the screen under a banner reading, CRUISE SHIP CLEARED TO DOCK, while various talking heads clucked over our predicament, as if they could begin to know the half of it. The sun rose up suddenly out of the clouds to bathe us in a rhapsodic light and the sounds of electric guitars and saxophones began to drift down to us from the promenade deck above. Gulls materialized out of the ether to beat their white wings round our private balcony like angels sent out from shore to guide us in. The sea fell away. I was so moved I took Amanita in my arms and pulled her to me for a long lingering kiss, the kind of committed and passionate kiss we’d rarely given ourselves over to since the early days of our marriage. The moment held and it was exquisite. But then, and perhaps it was because I’d been breathing through my nose while we pressed our lips together, I couldn’t catch my breath. In the next moment I was coughing and I couldn’t seem to stop.

“Jorge, what’s the matter?” Amanita asked, the urgency in her voice like a new force gathering on the earth. “Are you all right?”

My eyes were clouded, my chest ached. The cough stopped then, as abruptly as it had begun, but the itch lingered, digging in its claws. I felt dizzy, everything in motion around me, as if the great ship had finally given way through all its fourteen decks and left me floating suspended in the void. The next cough was there, already scratching at my throat, but I shook my head, looked into my wife’s eyes, and said, “It’ll pass.”

111 A P R I L / M AY 2022

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least to enterprising people of fortune and discernment—are manifold: __A built-in, can’t-fail diet: Climate-driven food shortages will put us all on a much more austere nutritional plan. And weren’t you just complaining about that weight you put on in the past two years? But hold up, you caution, shouldn’t Big Agriculture have an interest in cutting its share of greenhouse emissions—reducing livestock farming, for example—to stave off the worst disruptions of climate shift on the food system? Fortunately for us all, the ag lobby has in fact been devoting stupefying sums to bankrolling very receptive lawmakers from both parties to strangle regulation and maintain the status quo. Start rightsizing the waist on your jeans. __A real-estate bonanza: A highly predictable market is a boon to the savvy investor. We know what’s going to happen—it’s like betting on the Harlem Globetrotters! Study topographical maps and crossreference them with foreclosure rates in distressed mountain communities. Feet above sea level x local unemployment rate = points on the back end.

You’re welcome.

OP

THINK ABOUT IT. The advantages of climate change—at

ST

locked-in-syndrome level of anxiety that can seize whenever someone’s rude enough to rub your nose in the fact that climate change is not a hazy future concern but actually already upon us right now. Uncontrollable wildfires. Deadly heat waves. Sea levels swallowing coastal cities. Megadroughts, monsoons, cyclones, floods. Actual swarms of locusts. The head of the UN—the limp-dick UN—is calling it “code red for humanity.” Jeezus—we get it. So what’s a guy to do?

The solution is deceptively simple: Don’t fight it, embrace it! As has been scolded into us since we were four and a half: Change is good. In fact, climate change is probably the best thing to ever happen to us. So you can keep your little Nissan Leaf.

We’ll stick with our F-150, for the daily commute, alone. Fuck it: We’re rolling coal.

Feels better already, doesn’t it?

__Record-setting everything: Make like Republican members of Congress and really strap on those rose-colored glasses. View harrowing statistics not for what they are but for what they can be—hypersuperlatives to be proud of. Every year a banner year! Highest temperatures on record, again! Most wildfires of any season ever! We may be precipitating a Sixth Mass Extinction. Literally epochal. Why sit on the sidelines? __Energy stocks: Don’t be tempted to short XOM and CVX. Peak oil is a myth and so are American oil companies’ commitments to investing in alternatives to fossil fuels. Do you really think that Keystone setback will keep oil executives from licking up the rest of the Alberta tar sands, especially now, as the new geopolitical strategic reality sets in? Hell no! Have a little faith. __Science: We are all of us participating in one gigantic, ever-unfolding grade-school lab experiment.

And who didn’t love grade school? Let’s not slow climate change until we’re absolutely certain it’s occurring. We can’t stop the moldy potato from festering before things get interesting! Will the Adélie penguin survive the die-off ? Are we indeed shifting the earth’s rotational axis? Think of the over/ under possibilities. __We’re pretty sure there’s a German word for it: that cozy, smug feeling we get when we revel in the hypocrisies of those stridently calling for climate action from the swivel chairs in their private jets. Billgatesgefallenfreude? Bezoshassenvergnügen? Leoschmerz? Pointing at them absolves the rest of us, and don’t it just feel good? __Host-city sweepstakes: As with the Olympics and the World Cup, ambitious countries can bid themselves out to attract the next big international climate conference, enhancing local economies and their profile on the tourist circuit.

As long as governments keep settling for nonbinding pledges—and failing to meet even those—there will be no end to these party junkets. Who got next?

Bangladesh, a country almost entirely below sea level, could probably use a boost ahead of what’s coming.

After all, what do they (or the rest of us) have to lose?

D ON’T

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