David Byrne Spike Lee Offer Wisdom for Right Now
Exclusive: A Shocking New Story from
Stephen King Our Conversation with Francis Ford Coppola Will Make You Hopeful
CHARLES LECLERC
TA B L E OF C ON T E N T S O C TOB E R / NOV E M B E R 2020
“I try to keep this bizarre, futile sense of Oh, it’s Friday night at 6:00 P.M. I’ll have a martini.” —“MATTHEW RHYS IS BECOMING A MATTHEW RHYS CHARACTER,” PAGE 76
10 12
EDITOR’S LETTER THE NEXT FRONT LINE
Food insecurity in America: how you can help.
70 ON SLIDE INN ROAD
by Stephen King The architect of your nightmares delivers an unforgettable story. 76 MATTHEW RHYS IS BECOMING A
THE SHORT STORIES
MATTHEW RHYS CHARACTER
15
Inside Francis Ford Coppola’s quarantine paradise; the legend of the Pasha de Cartier; director Nia DaCosta talks about making the most relevant horror movie of our times; and the men’s-wear savants who are turning archival designer pieces into a hot commodity.
by Michael Sebastian This year, the actor has poured himself into being a dad—and restoring an old boat. 86 THIS MOMENT IN TIME
These watches offer light at the end of the tunnel—and your sleeve. 92 THE KIDS ARE NOT
F E AT U R E S
43 THE 2020 ESQUIRE GROOMING AWARDS by Garrett Munce Yes, being stuck inside changed grooming. We countered cabin fever with enthusiastic experimentation anyway. 52 COVER: YOU MAY
104 THE ESQUIRE EDITORIAL BOARD
by Kevin Sintumuang David Byrne and Spike Lee tell us how they’re getting by.
ENDORSES
MY MOTHER by Damon Young Pittsburgh has been hyped as our most livable city. If you’re white, that is. 68 300 JOB APPLICATIONS LATER
7
by Matthew Shaer Suicide rates are up in America. How a group of parents and activists in Arizona are working to stop the spread of self-destruction among their community’s teenagers.
FIND YOURSELF
62 RACISM KILLED
JACKET, SHIRT, AND TROUSERS BY LOUIS VUITTON MEN’S.
ALL RIGHT
by Jack Holmes Meet Matt Breen, one of millions who have lost their jobs as COVID19 batters the economy.
Taking dramatically to your bed.
ON THE COVER DAVID BYRNE AND SPIKE LEE PHOTOGRAPHED BY DARIO CALMESE. ON BYRNE: FLIGHT SUIT BY GREG LAUREN. CASTING BY RANDI PECK. STYLING BY NICK SULLIVAN (BYRNE) AND ASHLEY LAMPKIN (LEE). PRODUCTION BY JEAN JARVIS. SET DESIGN BY MICHAEL STURGEON. GROOMING BY MALU BYRNE (BYRNE) AND JOANNA “JOJO” RODRIQUEZ (LEE). HAIR STYLING BY LAWANDA PIERRE (LEE).
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Stella and Elaine the night after.
THE FIRE STARTED BY THE GARBAGE CANS IN THE BUILDING’S COURTYARD.
Since they were born, I’ve told our daughters that we’d never let any-
Someone had just moved out, leaving a pile of wooden furniture and an
thing bad happen to them. I’d always thought it was a false promise,
old mattress. It’s unclear what ignited this pile of kindling and fuel—a
because one day they’d be beyond our grasp. But now we were fulfilling
smoldering cigarette butt? an overworked heating duct?—but sometime
that promise.
after midnight on a hot night in August, a spark set off a conflagration that by 2:30 A.M. was raging.
final stretch to reach the ground. When it was our turn, Sally handed Elaine
“Fire!” my wife, Sally, yelled to wake me. “Michael, fire!” I heard the
to me and stepped onto the first rung. Stella was too big to carry; she had
pulsing shriek of smoke alarms and shouting coming from beyond our
to climb down herself. “I can’t, Daddy,” she said. “My legs are shaking.”
front door before I fully opened my eyes. Through a haze of yellow smoke,
I knelt down to her level and looked her in the eye. “You’re so brave,” I said.
I saw Kelsey Grammer. We’d fallen asleep to Frasier reruns.
“You can do this.” She turned around and put her bare feet on the ladder,
I shot out of bed and into the hallway. Smoke was snaking along the
with her mom just below her, and together they got down safely.
ceiling, creeping around the corners, circling my bare legs. Sally pushed
Holding Elaine in my left arm, I wrapped my right around the side rail.
past me and into our daughters’ bedroom. I followed. She grabbed Elaine,
With each step down the ladder, I had to let go, suspending us in the air
nearly two, from out of her crib; her screams joined the din. Stella, five, sat
for a brief, terrifying moment before grabbing a hold once more. Once
up in bed, her hair in her face. She looked mystified.
down, we joined Sally and Stella. Except for some small scratches and
I followed Sally to the front door. When she opened it, a heat wave knocked us back and black smoke poured in. She shut the door immediately, and we headed back to our bedroom.
bruises, we were unharmed. It was a two-alarm blaze that took the fire department hours to put out. A few people were hospitalized, but no one was seriously hurt. Parts of
We lived on the fourth floor. Outside was our lifeline, a century-old fire
the building were destroyed. Water and broken glass covered the hall-
escape. We opened the window, and the acrid smoke gave way to the
way floors. Windows were smashed out. Our unit was spared damage
thick air of late summer. The building is in Hamilton Heights, a Dominican
from the fire and the water, but the stench of smoke clung to everything.
neighborhood in West Harlem named after the Founding Father, who
We headed to a hotel for the night. Many of the building’s older tenants,
spent his final years in a mansion nearby. Cries echoed through the dark-
some who’d lived there for decades, had nowhere else to go. Once the
ness. As Sally and the girls stepped onto the landing, I promised I’d be
firefighters were done, they had to go back inside.
right back. “Buddy!” Stella said, panic in her eyes. Her stuffed dinosaur. She never slept without it.
This year has claimed so much from so many—COVID-19 has killed more than two hundred thousand Americans; wildfires and hurricanes
I pulled my shirt collar over my nose and plunged back into the smoke
have driven hundreds of thousands from their homes; simmering tensions
to collect a few things. But what? Photographs, Social Security cards,
have the nation tearing itself apart. Considering that Sally, the girls, and I
wedding vows? No time to think. I grabbed my wallet, clothes for the girls,
made it out okay, and that we’re healthy, we count ourselves among the
face masks, medicine, and Buddy.
lucky ones. We’re fortunate to have insurance and savings, and to have
Back on the fire escape, Sally scooped up Elaine, I grabbed Stella, and we began our descent. Thinking now of how near we were to the edge, how rusted the fire escape was, and how fragile the girls felt in our arms, I’m paralyzed by fear. But in the moment, we couldn’t think, just act. Fourth floor to third. We kept reassuring one another that we were okay. Third floor to second. A step collapsed under Sally’s foot, but she remained steady the whole way.
10
A bottleneck had formed at the ladder on the second-floor landing, the
such generous family, friends, and colleagues. The kindness we received was overwhelming. I will never forget it. After two weeks of living out of hotels, Sally and I decided it was time to leave the city. Let’s rent a house, we figured, and reassess in a year. And that’s the story of how I ended up moving to the suburbs of New Jersey. —Michael Sebastian
MICHAEL SEBASTIAN
T H I S WAY I N A L E T T E R F ROM T H E E DI TOR
After the Fire
T I M E T O R E AC H YO U R S TA R
DEFY T H E F U T U R E O F S W I S S WATC H M A K I N G S I N C E 18 6 5
At its food banks, Feeding America serves everything from canned goods to grab-and-go meals for children. Pictured are some of the organization’s outposts across the country, including locations in Baltimore, Tampa, and Houston, the last of which prepares food for up to 5,000 people per day.
In partnership with Feeding America, Esquire and Hearst Magazines are committed to putting an end to hunger. To help food banks feed families in need, please donate at feedingamerica.org.
THE NEXT FRONT LINE
The coronavirus pandemic has left millions of Americans facing the threat of food insecurity. Here’s how you can do your part to help. 12
EVE EDELHEIT (“8729” SIGN). JARED SOARES (MASKED WORKERS). ARTURO OLMOS (REMAINING).
T H I S WAY I N T H E C A L L
I T ’ S B E E N N E A R LY A Y E A R
since the virus that changed everything arrived in America, and we’re starting to grasp the impact the coronavirus will have on our bodies and our communities. Before the pandemic, more than 37 million people in this country lived in households that couldn’t afford or didn’t have access to proper amounts of nutritious food. It’s a horrifying number that experts believe will grow by as many as 17 million this year due to increasing unemployment rates. To help people in need of meals, Esquire and its parent company, Hearst Magazines, have teamed up with Feeding America. The hungerrelief organization sets up food banks around the country. If you’re able, we encourage you to donate as well by visiting feedingamerica.org.
Part of the Coppola clan in Napa, including Francis and Sofia (left) and Roman and Eleanor (right).
ANDREW DURHAM
QUARANTINING WITH THE GODFATHER What’s it like to spend seven months holed up with Francis Ford Coppola and 25 members of his family? For starters, wine, movies, and zero regrets. by JEFF GORDINIER
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Coppola’s setup in the Napa Valley sounded pretty sweet. I did a couple of Zoom conversations with the film director and winemaker over the summer, and what he described, as I sat by my laptop with yet another tin of tuna, struck me as a sort of Italian-American midpandemic Eden. Coppola and his family were sequestered on the expansive acreage of the old Inglenook estate that he and his wife, Eleanor, had purchased back in 1975, when the Coppolas were flush with cash from the first two Godfather films. And when I say “family,” I mean much of Coppola’s extended clan, including his children and grandchildren and nephews and apparently anyone else with a soft spot for cabernet sauvignon and wraparound porches—about 25 people total, depending on the day, all coming together for group meals and film screenings. “When I saw this coming in January, I pushed an alert button,” Coppola, now 81 years old, told me. “Now we’re sort of a family bubble.” Naturally I found myself dreaming about those film nights. Every Wednesday and Saturday evening, the Coppola crew would gather in a screening room, as twilight descended upon the vineyards, to parse landmarks by directors like Akira Kurosawa, Yasujirō Ozu, and Andrzej Wajda. (Here at home, I’ve spent much of 2020 introducing my older kids to movies like Big Night and Fatal Attraction and Thelma & Louise, but it’s not the same when you can’t debate camera angles and casting decisions afterward with the director of Lost in Translation and her dad over a bottle of wine.) Reading those names above, you may be tempted to add Coppola himself to the list of international cinematic greats, but in our Zoom chats I found the man quick to brush off that sort of fanboying. “I do not have Godgiven talent,” he said. He directed Apocalypse Now and Rumble Fish and The Conversation, yeah, but that was a long time ago, and over the past 30 or so years, he has devoted far more of his hours and energy to making wine than to making movies. Coppola no longer belongs to the “find what you love and let it destroy you” school of creativity. If you’ve ever seen the 1991 documentary Hearts of Darkness, you know that shooting Apocalypse Now almost did destroy him. Coppola has become, instead, a walking testimonial to the virtues of multitasking— and moving on. In fact, the risk and reinvention that led to the growth of his little Napa Valley utopia are rooted in the
same year: 1979, when Apocalypse Now came out and the Coppola family started making wine in earnest. (Granted, members of his family had been producing wine in their basements and backyards for decades.) “I had spent all the money I had, between these various risky things I did,” he said. Making wine while making movies may sound like a magic formula for going colossally bankrupt (hey, that’s happened to him, too), but Coppola has managed to push through by repeatedly figuring out what the marketplace wants next. “What is risk, really?” he told me. “Isn’t risk something that you undertake that’s going to depend on timing? There are a lot of gifts I don’t have, but one I do have is a sense of what’s going to be in the future. I have often been right in my estimation of what’s going to happen—in an almost uncanny way.” And so, long before celebrities like Brad Pitt and Jon Bon Jovi got into
“I DO NOT HAVE GOD-GIVEN TALENT,” COPPOLA SAID. stomping grapes, Coppola was sensing that the American drinking public might have a thirst for a non-Champagne sparkling white (his Sofia blanc de blancs, named after his daughter), and then, a full 15 years before the current vogue for a portable buzz, he and the Coppola team were selling even more of Sofia in pink cans. So what does the oracle predict now? Coppola feels that a lot of us are going to come out of this pandemic with a taste for the premium stuff—and a desire to drink it right now, while we can, instead of waiting around for some perfect moment. “I have a wine fridge like everyone. It’s a small one,” Coppola said. “I looked at what I had up here, and I took all the wines out, and I replaced them with all the best wines that I had in the wine cellar. Why not put out the best wines that I have, because I don’t know how much longer I’m going to live?” Guzzle the stockpile? Yes, this strikes me as an eminently reasonable thing to do. Even when these tumultuous years have ended, I suspect I’ll look back on my Zoom sessions with Francis Ford Coppola as a gentle toast to the possibilities of a second act. “Wine is a living thing,” he told me. “Time tends, just like with a human being, to mellow it.”
Rule No. 781 IT’S OKAY TO JUST POINT TO THE WINE YOU WANT ON THE MENU.
C U LT U R E & S T Y L E
AS QUARANTINES GO, FRANCIS FORD
16
Get Mellow with Melo A glass of S. R. Tonella with Anthony Anderson. A hefty pour of Far Niente cabernet with Jamie Foxx. Caymus uncorked at the sight of, well, any famous face. The conceit of Carmelo Anthony’s weekly YouTube talk show, What’s in Your Glass?, was simple: The NBA star and a guest would share a few sips of their favorite vintages while catching up. But as COVID-19 forced us to stay home and a swell of protests in support of Black Lives Matter urged us not just to get angry, the Brooklyn baller’s lines of questioning changed. As Killer Mike, Tiffany Haddish, and Snoop Dogg appeared on split screen, Melo no longer cared if they liked sangria. Instead, it was what advice the Run the Jewels rapper wants all young Black men to hear; what fears the Girls Trip actress and comedian has about potentially bringing another Black child into this world; why the Death Row Records alum thinks it’s important to own your own art. The entertainment factor, it’s worth noting, hasn’t wavered. Anthony is a charming, curious host. But the show has become a perfect illustration of a man willing to meet this moment, and of our need to have the Big Conversations—best conducted over a few ounces of red, of course. —Madison Vain
PASHA DE CARTIER WATCH ($16,600) BY CARTIER; JACKET ($1,520) BY CARUSO; SHIRT ($920) BY VISVIM, MRPORTER.COM.
The legend of the Pasha de Cartier is MURKY, MYSTERIOUS, and, honestly, HALF THE FUN
by NICK SULLIVAN
T H E S HORT S TOR I E S TA L L TA L E S
THE PASHA DE CARTIER IS, AS THE STORY GOES,
named for the Pasha of Marrakech, who commissioned the timepiece from the French brand in 1933. He wanted something waterproof—Rolex’s Oyster, the world’s first waterproof watch, had debuted just a few years before—that could stand up to his penchant for active sport. Thus a modern icon was born. Just one thing about that story: It’s not true. ¶ Why the confusion? Record keeping and self-mythologizing, mostly. When its namesake fell from power, the original Pasha watch supposedly disappeared. In 1943, a Cartier special order featured a watch with a rounded case and a steel cage to protect the glass. And 42 years later, in 1985, a watch bearing a striking resemblance to that timepiece—brought to life by Gérald Genta, the legendary watch designer behind heavy hitters like the Audemars Piguet Royal Oak and the Patek Philippe Nautilus—hit the market. Its name? The Pasha de Cartier. How the name became associated with the special order and not the rectangular 1933 one-off is debatable. What seems certain is that in 1985, in order to take a bold step away from classic Cartier shapes, the maison leaned on the rounded— and, frankly, more interesting—1943 model. ¶ But none of that historical murk really matters in the end. In 1985, the Pasha de Cartier created its own instant myth, oozing solid-gold charm but with a sporty edge not until then synonymous with Cartier. It was a huge hit for the brand with fans who liked both its scale (38mm was big for Cartier) and its unusual good looks. Takes on the Pasha proliferated for 25 years until it slipped from production in 2010. Now, however, like a lot of things from the ’80s, the Pasha is back, this time in two sizes, a 41mm in steel or yellow gold and a 35mm in steel or pink gold. With the benefit of a little time—and a damn compelling story, true or not— the Pasha could well be a hit again.
The Jewel in the Crown
P H OTO G R A P H B Y M A R K C L E N N O N
20
Will the world always be this unpredictable? Will my portfolio weather the storm? How can I be sure?
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i ng
Men’s wear with a HISTORY is back, but this time around, it’s HITTING DIFFERENT
G R O O M I N G : VA L J E A N G U E R R A
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the
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T H E S HORT S TOR I E S H E R E W E G O AGA I N
co m
by JONATHAN EVANS
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PREVIOUS PAGE: VEST ($189), JACKET ($159), BOOTS ($279), AND HAT ($40) BY L. L. BEAN X TODD SNYDER; TROUSERS ($268) BY TODD SNYDER.
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MORE PICKS WITH A PEDIGREE
Matrix. Except instead of Keanu (beautiful, sweet Keanu) muttering “déjà vu” at a black cat, it’s guys catching a glimpse of a From the truly old-school to Goodyear-welted boot or a flash of buffalo updated riffs, here’s a look at plaid and thinking, Wait, haven’t I seen this before? Yep. Heritage men’s wear—the wider world of Heritage 2.0 sturdy, historically inspired stuff of late2000s obsessions and early-2010s Tumblrs—is making its way back into how we dress now. “It definitely feels familiar,” says Todd Snyder, who fueled Heritage 1.0 when he was helping popularize Ludlow suits and Red Wing boots at J. Crew before launching his namesake label in 2011. This time SOCKS ($175 around, though, instead of mashing up PER PAIR) BY THE ELDER suits and boots, we’re mashing up down STATESMAN. vests and chamois shirts with sweatpants and sneakers. The vibe is still informed by the classics, but there’s enough sportswear-flavored modernity at play that this moment feels distinct from its predecessor. Call it Heritage 2.0. Why not? You can see it on city streets, bubbling up as both counterpoint and complement to streetwear’s past couple years of domiPARKA ($825) nance. And you can see it in Snyder’s new BY WOOLRICH. collaboration with L. L. Bean, which launches this fall and flips Bean mainstays into pieces that might upset the purists (he changed the pockets!) Rule No. 782 but feel fresh and free of the fustiness that sometimes comes ACCORDINGLY. with diving into the archives. A shirt-jacket gets done up in high-pile fleece with big hits of safety orange (inspired, Snyder says, by Bean’s hunting clothes). The Bean boot gets a similar color treatment on the sole or, in a brand-new BOOTS ($205) BY move, is transformed into a bold knitted BLUNDSTONE. graphic on a crewneck sweater. These aren’t gigantic, wildly transformative design decisions. Instead, Snyder says of his collabs, which range from Champion and Timex to this new one with Bean, “what I try to do is tweak it ever so slightly that I don’t ruin the sauce. That’s annoying; I started using food analogies. But I do think that is how I design.” Modern fashion moves fast. It can be tiring. Depleting, even. But Snyder doesn’t think we have to play that game. And this moment, this resurgence of interest in things that are meant to last and have a story to tell, feels optimistic in its trust that we can keep building on that story. “I think what’s nice about this,” he says, “is it’s kind BAG ($350) of a return to grass roots that makes you AND SUNGLASSES feel good inside.”
the
VEST BY POLO RALPH LAUREN.
($250), AVAILABLE AT THE SOCIETY ARCHIVE.
JACKET ($245) AND SHIRT ($125) BY TAYLOR STITCH.
CARDIGAN SWEATER ($385) BY CHAMULA.
JEANS ($198) BY LEVI’S AUTHORIZED VINTAGE.
BACKPACK ($175) BY FILSON.
BOOTS ($748) BY YUKETEN.
STYLING: CL AIRE TEDALDI/HALLEY RESOURCES
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Hot Fuzz o o It seems almost incono ceivable, at this point, o o that polar fleece was o ever not a part of the o way we get dressed. o But it’s true: The mateo o rial was invented in o 1979 by Malden Mills o and quickly snapped o up by Patagonia to o o make its now-iconic o Synchilla fabric. o These days, you can o get fleeced by everyo one from the originao o tor to a new breed of o innovators, like Aether o and Martine Rose. No o matter who it’s from, o o though, it’s still cozy— o and cool—as hell. o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o ($199) o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o NAPA BY MARTINE ROSE o ($546) o o o o o
The thirty-year-old director of the CANDYMAN sequel has made the MOST RELEVANT HORROR MOVIE of our times by GABRIELLE BRUNEY
nia
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IN NIA D A COSTA’S FIRST HORROR MOVIE, A BLACK TEENAGE SLASHER DISPATCHES
one victim by stabbing her in her bed. She pushes another down a spiral staircase and drowns the third in a toilet. Her night’s work complete, the killer collapses into a chair. “I don’t even know what to say,” she muses. “But what I do know is, the Black girl dies last.” On cue, she slumps, lifeless. The movie, a six-minute short called The Black Girl Dies Last, can be found on YouTube. DaCosta made it in high school and now sees it as being “so stupid.” She’s tried to remove it but, unfortunately, cannot remember her YouTube password. The memory lapse offers a glimpse into the mind of this emerging artist, whose name is echoing through Hollywood. Today, she’s a very different filmmaker yet remains hell-bent on changing the way you experience horror movies. They are still meant to terrify, but DaCosta is reconsidP H OTO G R A P H B Y G I O N CA R LO VA L E N T I N E
Rule No. 783 THERE IS NOTHING FUN ABOUT FUN-SIZE CANDY BARS.
H A I R S T Y L I N G : L A CY R E D WAY. M A K E U P : J A N I C E K I N J O / T H E WA L L G R O U P.
killing
Canadian border to save her family’s home and pay for her sister’s abortion. It’s a drama, not horror, but DaCosta demonstrates an understanding of the tensions between humans and their environment. This is the backbone of scary movies. Stress materializes in haunted locales— think Poltergeist (houses), The Shining (hotels), and A Nightmare on Elm Street (towns). Horror movies are nightmares about people losing the battle against their surroundings. The women in Little Woods aren’t fighting their town’s ghosts or ghouls but its poverty, isolation, and misogyny. The movie, which stars Tessa Thompson, whom you know from Creed and as Valkyrie in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, was enthusiastically received and won two particularly important fans: Peele and his Candyman cowriter and fellow producer Win Rosenfeld. “Nia’s film displayed many of the qualities we hoped to bring to this version of Candyman,” Peele tells me in an email. In DaCosta’s version, it’s the absence of Cabrini-Green that looms large, as all of the high-rise buildings featured in the 1992 movie have since been razed. The film isn’t haunted by a monster alone but by the neighborhood of more than 15,000 residents reduced to about 140 families who live in the few original Cabrini-Green row houses that remain. “It almost feels like a graveyard, and in ways it is,” DaCosta says. “A community was destroyed there.” Candyman explores themes of gentrification and police brutality, but it also offers sharp meta commentary, delivered primarily by art-world gatekeepers who hold sway over Brianna’s and Anthony’s careers. One critic, played by Rebecca Spence, gives Anthony’s work a dim assessment at first but reverses it in favor of glowing praise as a body count mounts around him. It’s a biting critique of the ways Black art is often dismissed until national tragedies thrust it into the limelight. “There were a couple lines in there that were literally just me saying, ‘I am a Black woman making this movie for a white studio, and I’m exhausted,’ ” says DaCosta. “There’s no reason I should be in these rooms where Jordan and I are the only Black people.” Candyman was initially slated for release in September, then pushed to October, before the studio decided to move it to 2021 because of the pandemic. In the meantime, DaCosta’s next project is a musical adaptation of Jane Austen’s Persuasion, set in London’s Soho, but her career received its biggest boost yet in August, when it was reported that she would direct Captain Marvel 2, starring Brie Larson. When we spoke, DaCosta could “neither confirm nor deny” that she’d earned the coveted gig. Tessa Thompson tells me DaCosta would be a great addition to the MCU. “She has real respect and admiration for sci-fi and for the comic-book world,” says the actor. “But it’s not precious to her. I think she’ll be unafraid to really stake her claim on it, to both pay respect and homage to what’s in the canon and to figure out ways to authentically push the boundaries of where it’s been before.” According to Thompson, DaCosta made quite an impression on the Marvel bigwigs. “When she was pitching, I was as nervous as if I was going to pitch,” says Thompson. “Brie texted me, I think four minutes in, and was just like in all caps, ‘NIA IS KILLING IT.’ ”
it
ies that still terrifies me after repeated viewings. Its perspective on race mirrors white concerns about Black criminality in the ’90s, but the story’s roots in white-supremacist violence mean Candyman stands on more truly frightening ground than most of its genre peers. And no, I’ve never said “Candyman” into a mirror, either. The new film has been called a “spiritual sequel” to the original and stars Watchmen’s Yahya Abdul-Mateen II as Anthony McCoy, an emerging visual artist who develops his own fascination with the legend, and If Beale Street Could Talk’s Teyonah Parris as his curator girlfriend, Brianna. Both characters are Black and well versed in the history of CabriniGreen, though uneasy about their status as gentrifiers in the neighborhood. The movie was shot in what remains of Cabrini-Green, and location is foundational to the story. DaCosta seems to recognize inherently the importance of a place and the people who occupy it. Her first feature film, 2019’s Little Woods, which she wrote and directed, concerns itself with a North Dakota drug runner who makes one last smuggling trip across the
T H E S HORT S TOR I E S M U R DE R , S H E W ROT E
ering who commits the violence onscreen and how. And she’s doing it on the biggest stage possible. Jordan Peele, the man who reinvented the genre with Get Out, tapped her to direct the sequel to Candyman, which promises to be one of the next great chapters in the evolution of horror. “I think all horror movies are about trauma in one way or another, but I would love for there to be more space even within horror for us to talk about stuff that’s not ‘Being Black is really sad,’ ” she says. “There are so many facets to our existence.” The original 1992 Candyman, which includes a now-iconic score from the composer Philip Glass, is a modern classic. Virginia Madsen plays a white Chicago grad student fascinated by an urban legend in the city’s real-life Cabrini-Green public housing project. The lore tells of Candyman: a hookhanded Black man, killed by a racist white mob in the 19th century, who has built a word-of-mouth afterlife through gory murders. He is summoned when someone says his name five times while looking in a mirror. (Has DaCosta given it a shot? “Absolutely not,” she says. “Why invite that into your life?”) Black horror fans have long had a complicated relationship with the original Candyman. Until recently, it was among the few mainstream American horror films to feature significant Black characters while addressing racism. Yet it was written and directed by a white filmmaker who focused the story on a white character. Candyman and the inhabitants of Cabrini-Green are seen only distantly, as superstitious, poor Black people whose lives and community must be explained to the audience. I’m a longtime horror fan, and it’s one of the few scary mov-
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T H E S HORT S TOR I E S I T ’ S OH S O QU I E T
Some of THIS FALL’S BEST CLOTHES have a lot to say. They’re just not shouting about it.
FEAR OF GOD EXCLUSIVELY FOR ERMENEGILDO ZEGNA What happens when you combine Jerry Lorenzo’s street-style savvy with all the skills of Ermenegildo Zegna’s ateliers? You get a standard-bearer for a new kind of luxury that puts real-life wearability front and center. COAT ($3,415), SWEATER ($1,000), TROUSERS ($1,145), AND SNEAKERS ($595) BY FEAR OF GOD EXCLUSIVELY FOR ERMENEGILDO ZEGNA.
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P H OTO G R A P H S B Y M A R K C L E N N O N
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by JONATHAN EVANS
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FOR A M I N U T E T H E R E , S OM E OF T H E B IG G E ST H IG H - FA S H ION HOUSE S ON T H E
BOT TEGA VENETA It may have started with leather goods, but the Italian label now applies its signature blend of craft and playfulness to everything from turtlenecks to trench coats. COAT ($2,650), TURTLENECK ($980), AND SHIRT ($670) BY BOTTEGA VENETA.
planet got pretty damn loud. It was fun while it lasted (and for some it’s still going), but the pendulum always swings. And for a different breed of designer, a more subtle take on luxury is looking like the way forward. The approach is quieter, but it’s also—perhaps paradoxically—one of the most exciting things going on in the world of men’s style right now. This fall’s collaboration between Jerry Lorenzo’s L. A.–based label Fear of God and Italian men’swear powerhouse Zegna stands as an effective avatar of this movement. “Before we met for the first time, we both instinctively knew about this gap between what’s happening culturally and traditional tailoring,” says Lorenzo of the lead-up to his initial meeting with Zegna artistic director Alessandro Sartori. The resulting collection, Fear of God Exclusively for Ermenegildo Zegna, blends exceptional craftsmanship—the pieces are made in Zegna’s ateliers—with an aesthetic that feels relaxed, refined, and ready for whatever weird world comes after [gestures broadly] all this. Tailored pieces are stripped of lapels or rendered oversize, while streetwear-influenced sweats and overshirts are raised up as something seriously special. In other words, this is really, really nice stuff that’s meant to be part of your life, not saved for some occasion. “At this level of quality, with this craft and with these artisanal types of finishings and work, this collection could literally say something different,” explains Sartori. But he’s careful to note that there’s a whole ecosystem of other players pushing this trend along. There is, of course, the Row, with its ridiculously highend fabrics and savant-level distillation of classic and unassuming styles into clothing that’s stratospheric in execution (and price). Or Bottega Veneta, purveyors of an exacting sort of Italian cool that insists on precision in both material and make. Back stateAURALEE side, Hilton Turner delivers a style Founded in Tokyo that’s a little more louche, with silky in 2015, Auralee is the brainchild pajama shirts finished with piped seams that look a of designer Ryota whole lot better with a robe-inspired jacket than they Iwai. The brand makes its easydo languishing in bed. And Japan-based Auralee, going, elegant HILTON which grafts a dressed-up-but-definitely-left-ofclothes—think shades of beige BY HILTON center perspective onto everything from sweaters to and gray, with TURNER relaxed fits that suits, proves that labels the world over are crafting Helmed by (and drape just so— named for) designer clothing that’s exquisite and built for every day—or entirely in Japan. Hilton Turner, this at least every day you’re feeling like actually getting L. A.-based label JACKET ($930) puts the focus AND KNIT ($460) dressed, not just throwing fabric onto your body. firmly on tailoring BY AURALEE. Assembling an outfit in the morning is a reminder but knocks the fusty formality out of the here and now, and if you’re going to put in the of its suits so that effort to get that fit off, maybe it should pay you back. they feel more appropriate for an These clothes—precisely cut and painstakingly conNBA tunnel walk than the office. sidered but (and this is crucial) just as comfortable SUIT ($2,895) AND as those old sweats—are designed to make you feel SHIRT ($1,895; PART better IRL. You’ll know it when you slip them on, OF SET), HILTON BY HILTON TURNER. when you move in them, and, sure, when you get your boy to snap a pic for the ’Gram. G R O O M I N G : VA L J E A N G U E R R A
Photography: Michael Marquez
ESQUIRE STUDIOS FOR KNOB CREEK®
KNOB CREEK AND ESQUIRE PRESENT REAL STORIES OF EARNING IT, FROM INDIVIDUALS WHO—LIKE BOOKER NOE, THE ORIGINAL KNOB CREEK MASTER DISTILLER—PROVE THAT PATIENCE AND DEDICATION ARE ALWAYS WORTH THE EFFORT.
HOW I EARNED IT GLENN’S DENIM FOUNDERS GLENN LIBURD AND
DANIEL LEWIS BRING AMERICAN MANUFACTURING BACK TO ITS HARDWORKING ROOTS
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n the late 19th century, Brooklyn’s Gowanus neighborhood was a thriving hub of textile manufacturing. But Gowanus’s manufacturing clout dwindled in the years following WWII, as one industry after another abandoned Brooklyn. Today, two fearless souls are helping to bring back the old fighting spirit—crafting a uniquely American product and drawing on traditional American characteristics: pluck, determination, and a profound dedication to quality. Glenn’s Denim NYC cofounders Glenn Liburd and Daniel Lewis took a break to sip Knob Creek® and talk with Esquire about why they choose grit and perseverance over “fast fashion”—and why there are few things more American than bourbon and blue jeans. In recent years, the Knob Creek Distilling Company has been lifting up local heroes—spirited entrepreneurs and dedicated craftsmen who truly abide by the longstanding American principles of commitment, vision, passion and perseverance. The effort is part of Knob Creek®’s resolution to show that no one blindly stumbles into excellence; quality must be earned through years of training and devoted commitment. Glenn and Daniel possess the exact kind of work ethic and crazy attention to detail that Knob Creek® loves to celebrate. Hailing from Trinidad, Glenn grew up in a culture long steeped in a trade mentality. “There were dressmakers, shoemakers, just tradesman everywhere,” he recalls. “I grew up with a sewing machine in the house, and we made all of our curtains and cushions.” Glenn
“ T H E WA I T I S A L WAY S W O R T H I T.”
fell in love with American denim at a young age. Through movie and and TV, he became obsessed with the jeans worn in NYC by Harlem hip-hop artists, Bowery punk musicians, and avant-garde painters in the Village. After working for a couple of decades under a Savile Rowtrained tailor, Glenn finally brought his passion and skill to the United States: the birthplace of the blue jeans he loves so much. In New York he met Daniel Lewis, a textile junkie who was himself forever in search of exquisite blue jeans— and the two set to work bringing old-school denim manufacturing back to Gotham. The philosophy behind Glenn’s Denim is simple: quality at all costs, no matter how much toil it takes. Both men pull design inspiration from vintage looks. When they land on a concept, Glenn begins drafting a pattern while Daniel locates the perfect denim for the new design. Above all, they focus on fit. “This is the original denim,” Glenn explains, “made in America on American looms. It’s like apples and oranges, comparing selvedge denim to commercial denim. As you wear selvedge denim, it ages with the movement of your body.” He pauses, examining the whiskey glinting in his glass. “You think of aging a nine-year old bourbon like Knob Creek® . . . Now, just imagine a perfectly aged nine-year-old blue jean. The wait is always worth it.”
Two years makes it bourbon. Seven more makes it Knob Creek®.
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AGED NINE YEARS OUT OF PRINCIPLE, NOT OBLIGATION.
IT’S A LATE-SUMMER AFTERNOON IN LONDON, WHERE KYLIE MINOGUE, ONE OF THE GRANDE
dames of pop, is philosophizing about disco music. It’s transformative, she explains, because if you’re in the right frame of mind, the music can carry you away on its signature bass lines and horn sections. “When you’re at a club and you’re surrounded by people, you can still just shut your eyes and feel like you’re the only person on the dance floor,” she tells me. “Or you can be the only person in a room and feel like you’re out, surrounded by all this energy.”
is back
In a year of plague, turmoil, and hardship, the genre known for its hedonistic escapism is experiencing a third wave. Thank God. BY MADISON VAIN
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A L L A N TA N N E N B A U M / G E T T Y I M A G E S ( L E F T ) . C O U R T E S Y B M G ( R I G H T ) .
T H E S HORT S TOR I E S G E T D OW N TON IG H T
di sc o
C O U R T E S Y B M G ( M I N O G U E ) . C O U R T E S Y A R T I S T S ( A L B U M C O V E R S ) . R E D P I X E L . P L / S H U T T E R S TO C K ( D I S C O B A L L ) .
Rule No. 784 THERE’S NO NEED TO PRETEND YOU DON’T KNOW THE WORDS TO “DANCING QUEEN.” album is a return to everything she’s ever done well in song: gooey melodies, sheeny production, spellbinding reverie. In meetings with her creative team and cowriters, which began in person last fall before moving online as London went into coronavirus lockdown, Minogue says she kept everyone on track by routinely pulling up videos of Earth, Wind & Fire. She knew they were onto something when her longtime collaborator Biff Stannard called her in tears after finishing the sparkling lead single, “Say Something.” It was the first week of mandated quarantine, and London was eerily silent. “We were barely breathing,” she says of the pervasive feeling—but the track cut through. Hearing his reaction “made me cry,” she says. “Not just out of
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sadness, but that hope within the sadness. It’s that sweet spot of tears on the dance floor.” Minogue’s twinkling plea for unity and togetherness did the same for me. The song became my soundtrack to a summer spent at home, blaring in the kitchen, the backyard, or the living room fashioned into a workout studio. It lined the makebelieve concerts of my mind, drumming up anticipation for the crowds that will (hopefully) gather in 2021 and, more than once, despair from missing the throngs of people of years past. It prompts the existential question the entire genre faces as it resurfaces: What is dance music without a dance floor? Disco was born in the club, and when it returned in the early 2000s, it did so as the large-scale festival exploded in America. (Daft Punk’s 2006 Coachella set is widely considered the best show the event has ever seen.) But, at least for the time being, any revelry is currently confined to quarantine bubbles and at-home stereos. The clubs are closed, the event calendars cleared. It’s an oddity Minogue acknowledges. “It’s a kitchen disco,” she says. “It’s your lounging disco. A virtual disco.” Reality may be damned, in other words, but the daydream lives on.
five new essential disco albums
Dua Lipa, Future Nostalgia There’s no more obvious heir apparent to Minogue’s mirror ball than this Brit-bred Albanian pop upstart. The 24-year-old’s thrilling second album, released at the pandemic’s U. S. peak, is a pledge of allegiance to cool kids, late nights, and worn-out dance floors.
T H E S HORT S TOR I E S G E T D OW N TON IG H T
I am talking to Minogue because in this tumultuous year, disco is experiencing a renaissance. Minogue is among several artists with new albums in 2020 that sound as if they’re echoes of the 1970s. Newly minted superstar Dua Lipa and pop chameleon Lady Gaga each put out chart-topping records this spring that served as bombastic revivals. Doja Cat cracked the Top 40 with her single “Say So,” an undeniable Chic callback. Jessie Ware’s latest is a steamy retro embrace, and even R&B’s King of the Underworld, the Weeknd, toyed with Technicolor production on his 2020 set, After Hours. But Minogue’s latest, which debuts in November, is the most on the nose. Its title: DISCO. “In for a penny, in for a pound,” she says of the title. “Let’s just say what it is.” It makes sense that the genre is seeing a revival in this godawful year. Disco—born on Valentine’s Day 1970 in New York City—was pure fantasy, a strobe-lit, sex-fueled response to the late-’60s uproar and civil unrest. The four-on-the-floor beats invited revelers into a new decade, one in which the dance floors never cleared and the parties never stopped. Incorporating salsa, pop, funk, and soul, it promised not just inclusion but liberation under the mirror ball. As long as you were down to hustle, pump, and duck, it was all groovy, baby. Now, at the dawn of another new decade, with enough crises and death to make the ’60s feel almost quaint, the prospect of beaming into an alternate existence—imagined or MDMA-induced—is irresistible. “It’s three minutes of escapism and euphoria,” Minogue says of disco. “People need that.” Minogue was two years old at the time of disco’s inception, but the Aussie was the foremost architect of its second coming. She scored her first hit in 1987 with a cover of “The Loco-Motion,” which topped the charts all over the world. Her self-titled debut LP arrived a year later and was effectively the birth of what people eventually called nu-disco. The resurgence burbled throughout the mainstream in the late 1990s and early aughts with releases from Jamiroquai (“Canned Heat”), Madonna (Confessions on a Dance Floor), and Daft Punk (“One More Time”). Even U2 wanted to flirt: “Lemon,” from the band’s 1993 record, Zooropa, is bathed in ’70s nostalgia. Minogue followed her debut with five albums in eight years, collaborated with fellow Aussie Nick Cave, and starred in films opposite Jean-Claude Van Damme, Pauly Shore, and Stephen Baldwin. DISCO is as much an ode to the 6:00 A.M. set as it is a musical mission statement for the star, one of the biggest-selling female artists in history, with just as many honorifics as awards. The
Róisín Murphy, Róisín Machine “This is a simulation,” the Irish electro-pop wizard taunts on the opening track of her latest. Fine by us. Disco has always been a fantasy, and across ten songs, Murphy builds the Day-Glo delusion of our dreams. Lady Gaga, Chromatica Mother Monster’s sixth LP is a delightfully messy musical cannonball into dance-pop’s coke-spoon past. And while at times the kinetic set leans more heavily on disco’s immediate scion—house music—it basks in the glow of the same strobe light. Jessie Ware, What’s Your Pleasure? “I want people to have sex to it,” Ware said this spring, referencing her 2020 collection. As clubs remain closed, it’s not a bad backup plan for the funky, Hi-NRG exploration. The breathy trappings never feel like costume—instead, they’re downright mesmerizing. Qwestlife, Prophecy This tight, jubilant collection from two icons of Europe’s club scene, Frenchman Tom Laroye and Brit Andy Williams, dropped in March and, according to them, took inspiration from funk and boogie of the late ’70s and early ’80s. Together they mix instrumental music with electronics for a “human groove,” Laroye says.
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T H E S HORT S TOR I E S B L I N DI NG L IG H T S
Two very different brands have found a way to give GLOW UP a whole NEW MEANING
In the not-so-distant past, wearing a tech jacket signaled you were ready to scale K2 or blather endlessly about your “paradigmshifting” app. No longer. Thanks to just-techy-enough outerwear from actual mountaineering experts (Arc’teryx, Descente), futuristic fashion labels (Acronym, Alyx), or some mixture of the two (the North Face, Nanamica), ditching your topcoat is now absolutely acceptable. Just take this jacket from Stone Island, the OG of textile innovation and streetfriendly style. Toss it on over anything from workout gear (yes, we’re still exercising) to a suit (yes, we’re still wearing suits) and it’ll keep you warm and dry while providing extensive onboard storage. And that reflective shell isn’t just cool looking; it’s practical. A hit of high-octane silver keeps you visible when early sunsets and gloomy days are the norm. Plus, you can match it with that Au Départ bag you just snagged. (Yep, the one on this page.) —Daniel Dumas
of French luggage houses, along with Louis Vuitton, Moynat, and Goyard. But there’s a good chance you’ve never heard of it. Despite a timeline that stretches back to 1834, the brand was basically consigned to history in the ’70s, when it ceased production. That changed last year, when it made its comeback at Milan design week, drawing on those historical bona fides while injecting a healthy dose of 21st-century cool—and some serious tech, too. Many of Au Départ’s new pieces feature this striking update of the original house pattern established in the early 1900s to differentiate the label from its competitors. The new spin, though, is that it’s now engineered in a highly reflective woven cloth, called Reflex, that lights up like a Christmas tree when caught in a camera flash or car headlights. All the better for taking a perfectly calibrated Instagram shot—or just ensuring you’re easily seen on a nighttime bike ride. —Nick Sullivan
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TOP LEFT: BAG ($3,540) BY AU DÉPART PARIS; SUIT ($795) BY B|M|C; SHIRT ($99) BY SUITSUPPLY. BOTTOM RIGHT: JACKET ($2,670) BY STONE ISLAND; SUIT ($1,495 FOR A THREE-PIECE) BY POLO RALPH LAUREN; TURTLENECK ($90) BY BANANA REPUBLIC.
P H OTO G R A P H S B Y M A R K C L E N N O N
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AU DÉPART IS THE OLDEST OF WHAT ARE ACKNOWLEDGED AS THE BIG FOUR
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The Seekers of the Grails A growing community of YOUNG, extremely online, and DEEPLY EDUCATED FASHION FANS is turning ARCHIVAL MEN’S WEAR into a hot commodity
Since then, the market for these hard-to-find, historically significant items in the world of men’s wear has skyrocketed in value, inspiring ferocious demand. The figures who are defining how these pieces are discussed online—and, increasingly, how they’re valued on the thriving secondary market—are surprisingly young, scarily knowledgeable, and always on the hunt for the next big name in archival fashion. Weaned on flipping rare streetwear, they’re now investing in designer fashion and shaping the future of how guys get dressed in the process. One particularly prescient
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P H OTO G R A P H B Y A N D R E L PE R RY
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Zeke Hemme of Constant Practice with (clockwise from top right): YOHJI YAMAMOTO LEATHER JACKET, F/W 1991; JUNYA WATANABE X NIKE AIR KUKINI; ISSEY MIYAKE RIDER JACKET, S/S 1994; JUNYA WATANABE CONVERTIBLE BAG JACKET, S/S 2005; AND COMME DES GARÇONS HOMME PAINT-SPLATTERED WORK PANTS. BACKGROUND: CRAIG GREEN SAMURAI JACKET, S/S 2015.
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example: Simons, the designer of that $50K jacket, recently announced he’ll be reissuing 100 pieces from his archive in a bid to get in on the action. (Secure your bag, king!) Zeke Hemme is the soft-spoken 28-year-old behind Constant Practice, an online marketplace hawking the ultrarare men’s wear he’s collected for more than five years. Today, he’s among the most prominent figures in this community. Hemme has a wry, unflappable demeanor that belies a deep knowledge of the genre and masks a competitive streak born from a lifetime of playing soccer. Speaking to me via video call from his makeshift home office, the Philly-based archivist appears on my computer screen surrounded by the type of out-there designer clothing he routinely spotlights using nothing but a trusty iPhone 10. (Tim Cook, cut the fucking check.) When I ask Hemme what, exactly, makes the everyday grind that is regularly blessing the masses with unearthed gems worth all the effort, he responds with a shrug: It’s the hunt, man. Putting people on to new shit is just too much fun to stop. If Hemme seems a tad young to be collecting clothing about as old as he is, here’s something that’ll make you feel like a full-blown fossil: He’s one of the movement’s elder statesmen. On Instagram, the social-media center of the archival men’swear renaissance, a cohort of 20-somethings, as well versed in the late-’90s oeuvre of Yohji Yamamoto as they are in the rapid-fire parlance of transactional DMs, dictate the tone of the conversation. For young enthusiasts in particular, archival men’s wear is an opportunity to find not only the pieces they absolutely must have—in other words, grails—but also the items (from other designers or earlier seasons) that inspired them. It’s not unusual for these hunters to spend years researching a piece before finally tracking it down. For 23-year-old Fernando Rangel, it’s his youngest customers who tend to impress him the most with their knowledge of men’s-wear arcana. In 2018, Rangel started Silver League, his own expansive assortment of men’s wear, as a way of tracing the lineage of piece A to piece Z. He readily admits he’s guilty of fetishizing the past. (Buddy, who isn’t?!) But around the same time his peers were busy waiting for their high school crush to reply to an ill-conceived “just checking in” text, Rangel was buying up pieces from cult Japanese designers like Jun Takahashi and Takahiro Miyashita. He even created a website and Instagram account to catalog his growing collection with detailed background information and crisp photography. Out of this collective obsession for men’s wear has come a
Clif Shayne (left) and Kyle Julian Skye Muhlfriedel of Middleman with (from left): ISSEY MIYAKE CARGO BOMBER JACKET, F/W 1996, AND YOHJI
YAMAMOTO LEATHER ZIP JACKET, F/W 1991. BACKGROUND: JEAN PAUL
C O U R T E S Y S I LV E R L E A G U E ( R A N G E L , P R O D U CT S ) . C O U R T E S Y D O N AV O N S M A L LW O O D ( S H AY N E ) . C O U R T E S Y I A N L I P TO N ( M U H L F R I E D E L ) . C O U R T E S Y M I D D L E M A N ( P R O D U CT S ) .
T H E S HORT S TOR I E S W H E R E’ D YOU G E T T H AT ?
CAROL CHRISTIAN POELL TWISTED SEAM OVERLOCK JEANS, F/W 2006; CAROL CHRISTIAN POELL TARNISHED SPIRAL ZIP BOOTS, S/S 2006; AND CAROL CHRISTIAN POELL LEATHER OVERLOCK JACKET, F/W 2005. BACKGROUND: UNDERCOVER CROSSES RUG, F/W 2002.
“IF WE WERE DOING IT BY OURSELVES, IT WOULDN’T BE THE SAME.”
Fernando Rangel of Silver League with (clockwise from bottom right):
real community for these grail seekers. Kyle Julian Skye Muhlfriedel, 25, and Clif Shayne, 21, first met on the fan forum Kanye To The. For both of them, collecting men’s wear started as a hobby. They paired up in 2018 to create an online marketplace called Middleman Store, which has racked up hundreds of thousands of followers on the ’Gram. When the rapper Lil Uzi Vert liked a photo of theirs, Muhlfriedel and Shayne ended up supplying him with dozens of rare Jean Paul Gaultier pieces from the designer’s heyday. Now it’s going so well that Shayne has dropped out of college to work on the account full-time. (But stay in school, kids—unless you’re about to hit it big supplying vintage JPG to Uzi!) There’s a “DIY, almost punky vibe” to the archive scene, Muhlfriedel says. When he first started collecting, “it was a bunch of kids that were into fashion, and this was our niche.” Shayne credits an early interest in the streetwear juggernaut Supreme—a common gateway drug, so to speak, among resellers of a certain age—with sparking an infatuation with the boomand-bust nature of flipping rare shit for a tidy profit. With the fondness of grizzled veterans reminiscing about the good ol’ days, both of them recall the “Wild West” feeling of coming up, when the market was less saturated and sizable followings could be built in a matter of months. (The good ol’ days were, like, three years ago.) Muhlfriedel, for instance, worked his way up the fashion food chain, flipping A.P.C. and other brands before moving on to bigger-ticket items. Like Hemme and Rangel, he and Shayne still share a feeling of pure joy for the thrill of the hunt, exchanging jubilant text messages after stumbling across particularly rare pieces and “getting way too excited about a jacket or something,” as Shayne endearingly describes it. The community remains tightly knit, and it’s easy to see why. Talking to Hemme and his archivist coconspirators is like reconnecting with a kid you always fucked with in high school but forgot how much you liked. There is a shared fluency to the conversation that makes me think of the best moments in any given group chat, when everyone locks in at the same time and the inside jokes start flying. Hemme and Muhlfriedel talk all the time, swapping tips on, say, how to properly categorize specific Issey Miyake pieces. There’s a sense of camaraderie to the whole thing, underscored by the fact that business is booming and no one sees demand slowing down anytime soon. “It’s not a zero-sum game,” Muhlfriedel says. “If we were doing it by ourselves, it wouldn’t be the same thing.” [Cinematic violins swell.] Maybe, it turns out, the real grails are the friends we make along the way.
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already abundantly obvious: Yes, being stuck inside for months
on end did change some of the calculus of grooming in 2020. Rallying under the flag of “Who’s going to see it, anyway?” we countered cabin fever with enthusiastic experimen-
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Baxter of California Deep Clean Shampoo Going days without washing your hair isn’t that bad, but the longer you wait, the deeper the clean you’ll need. The apple-cider vinegar in this new formula is like a power wash for your scalp, removing product buildup and oil in a flash. Plus, it’s sulfate-free, so it won’t leave your hair feeling dry and brittle. $34
P H OTO G R A P H S B Y B E N A LS O P
tation. We gave ourselves haircuts, we tried different facial hair, we painted our nails, we spent way more time on skin care. And thanks to all those endeavors with the new and novel, we reminded ourselves of an old standby: Grooming isn’t always about quantity; it’s also about quality. And, hell, we had the time to find it. So through extensive trial and error, we discovered updated essentials, revisited a few classics, and reimagined our routines from the ground up courtesy of these winning products.
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BEST CONDITIONER
Drunk Elephant x Chris McMillan Cocomino Marula Cream Conditioner This subtly almondscented conditioner isn’t thick or goopy and won’t weigh your hair down. The thinner consistency makes it a good everyday option even for thin or fine hair, but it doesn’t sacrifice the hydration that thick or curly hair needs. $25 BEST STYLING CREAM
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Head & Shoulders Anti-Dandruff Styling Hair Cream As our hair grew longer this year, cream became our go-to. It smooths frizz and gives a natural
hold. This one would be top-notch on its own but has an extra kick: dandruff-busting pyrithione zinc. $10 BEST POMADE
Scotch Porter Smoothing Hair Balm This is not your grandfather’s greasy pomade. The airy texture has just enough hold to keep hair in place, and the formula contains kale protein and biotin to strengthen strands. Most of all, though, we love how moisturizing it is. $15 BEST TEXTURIZER
Fellow Mineral Spray Like a salt spray, this spritz imparts a fuller, tousled look. But it does
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more than that. “It gave my hair new life,” bragged one tester. It could be that the salt comes from real seawater or that the nutrient-rich algae prevents crunch. Either way, we can’t get enough. $28 B E S T T R E AT M E N T
Briogeo Be Gentle, Be Kind Avocado & Kiwi Mega Moisture Superfood Hair Mask A hair mask can fix a host of evils, from dryness to general unmanageability. Briogeo’s is suited for all hair types and textures and isn’t too heavy. Even using it just once a week gave us the kind of “damn, that’s impressive” hair you see on TV. $36
BEST CLIPPER
Wahl Elite Pro High Performance Hair Clipper Kit In the Annals of Grooming, 2020 will always be the year of the DIY haircut. This clipper was powerful enough to mow through the growth and user-friendly enough for novices. Plus, it comes with a wide variety of guards and accessories. $60
DR. DENNIS GROSS STRESS RESCUE SUPER SERUM WITH NIACINAMIDE
ace BEST CLEANSER
B E S T E X F O L I ATO R
Neutrogena Skin Balancing Gel Cleanser Many cleansers out there force you to choose between getting gunk out of your pores and protecting your skin from feeling stripped and dry. Instead of compromising, get one that does both. This one uses polyhydroxy acid to help remove oil and dirt from pores but won’t upset the all-important skin barrier. $11
Peter Thomas Roth Potent-C Power Scrub Our testers loved this scrub because it felt like rubbing your face with “fancy sand that smells like expensive citrus.” The powerful combination of vitamins C and E and ferulic acid leaves skin feeling instantly smoother and looking brighter, and the cocoa-butter beads moisturize so you’re not left with that uncomfortable tight sensation. $38
BEST MOISTURIZER
First Aid Beauty Ultra Repair Oil-Control Moisturizer
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We spent most of the year switching between battling skin-drying inside air and fighting mask-induced skin issues like acne. A good moisturizer helps with both problems. This cream protects and hydrates skin effectively without a heavy, greasy feel and controls oil and shine when you need it to. $32
B E S T FAC I A L SUNSCREEN
Jaxon Lane Rain or Shine Daily
Moisturizing Sunscreen As the name of this topnotch product suggests, sunscreen is an everyday essential no matter the weather. This one is barely-there thin, rubs in easily with no white cast left behind, and doesn’t make your skin feel greasy. Use it in place of your moisturizer, since it also offers hydration, or in addition to it. $32 BEST EYE CREAM
Murad Environmental Shield Vita-C Eyes Dark Circle Corrector After sleepless nights and Zoom parties that stretched into the wee
hours, this eye cream quickly diminished the look of dark circles and puffiness around the eyes. It’s packed with vitamin C to brighten eyes and make them look more awake, even when you’re feeling the opposite. $62 BEST MASK
My Clarins Clear-Out Blackhead Expert Stick + Masque The dual-action vibes of this mask made it a clear (pun intended) winner. The exfoliating stick on the cap “really feels like it’s doing something” to eliminate blackheads, according to one tester, and the green clay mask absorbs oil and deep-cleans your pores, leaving a spick-andspan complexion. $26 BEST SERUM
Dr. Dennis Gross Stress Rescue Super Serum with Niacinamide Even our skin got stressed out this year, and this blend of niacinamide, adaptogens, and superfoods came to the rescue. It targets signs of aging and fatigue, hydrates, helps diminish the look of pores, and calms redness. $74
BEST BAR SOAP
Old Spice Gentleman’s Blend Aloe & Wild Sage Body & Face Bar Developed with sensitive skin in mind, this bar soap is dye- and paraben-free and gentle on any skin type. Our testers liked it for its natural feeling and nottoo-strong scent, but most of all for its gentle, moisturizing formula that doesn’t compromise cleansing power. $5
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Degree Men Victory 72-Hour Antiperspirant & Deodorant Spray Sometimes to really combat sweat and odor, you need to pull out the big guns. Just one application of this antiperspirant spray lasted through two days of at-home HIIT workouts before one tester noticed even a speck of sweat. Best of all, the quick-drying formula doesn’t leave telltale marks on your clothes or white residue on your pits. $6
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Bevel Supreme Oak Body Wash This “genuinely refreshing” body wash, as one tester called it, exfoliates away dead skin cells gently while giving dry skin the hydration it so desperately needs. It comes in a variety of scents, but the rich Supreme Oak aroma (a blend of sweet almond, bourbon, and birch) won it the crown. $10
ANTIPERSPIRANT
BEST DEODORANT
Bravo Sierra Deodorant Our testers noted that this aluminum- and baking-soda-free deodorant wore “extraordinarily well” even in the height of summer heat. We’d expect nothing less from a brand that’s tested by members of the U. S. military, who demand performance. Perhaps most importantly, we found that the scented and unscented versions curbed odor equally well. $10
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without any stickiness. It’s so good, you may even remember to reapply. $17
I grew my hair out [during lockdown], so I’m going for a casual, slicked-back look I’ve always thought of as “rich-people hair.” It’s very thick and getting quite curly, but if I put in too many pastes and pomades, it looks overly oily, and if I do nothing, it becomes very frizzy. I use Number 4 Lumiere d’Hiver Super Comb Prep & Protect
leave-in conditioner spray after the shower and let it air-dry. It softens and moisturizes without weighing down or greasing up my hair.
B E S T A L L- OV E R SUNSCREEN
Bare Republic Mineral Body Gel Sunscreen Lotion SPF 30 This revolutionary mineral sunscreen is the antidote to every time you’ve felt like a mime (or Mark Zuckerberg) on the beach. The gel formula goes on clear, stays that way as it quickly soaks into your skin, and dries
BRAVO SIERRA DEODORANT
B E S T TO OT H B R U S H
PANASONIC ER-SB40-K
have/Beard
Every Man Jack Activated Charcoal Shave Gel A lot goes into this shave gel, like activated charcoal to soak up dirt and tea-tree oil to clarify pores. Those ingredients work together to create a rich cream that delivered a close shave and left our skin feeling smooth and fresh. $7 BEST RAZOR
Harry’s Truman Razor If it ain’t broke, why fix it? In this case: because you can. This razor looks the same, but the new blades are sharper and stay that way longer. That means a closer shave and fewer blade changes. $9
is one thing (seriously, wash your beard), but conditioner is the flex. This one—somewhere between a wash and a balm—can be rinsed out or left in to keep whiskers soft and maybe even strengthen them, thanks to the biotin in its innovative formula. $19 BEST BEARD BALM
King C. Gillette Soft Beard Balm Just like pomade for your hair, the ideal balm will keep scraggly whiskers in place but won't
Scotch Porter Beard Conditioner Washing your beard
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make your facial hair feel greasy. It’s a tough line to walk, and this balm, with moisturizing ingredients like cocoa and shea butters, does it perfectly. $14 BEST BEARD TRIMMER
Panasonic ER-SB40-K Sheer cutting power, a rotary length dial that (unlike some others) includes half-step settings, and a charge indicator make this an almost idiotproof trimmer to get your perfect length easily. $150
Oral-B iO Series 9 Rechargeable Electric Toothbrush Allow us to introduce you to your new favorite toy. The combination of a dentist-inspired rotary head and artificial intelligence turns brushing into a game. Green lights tell you when you’re using the right amount of pressure, reaching a full two minutes of brush time earns you a smiley face, and everything is stored in an app that tracks your progress. $300 B E S T TO OT H PA S T E
Colgate Optic White Renewal Teeth Whitening Toothpaste Most whitening toothpastes use abrasive ingredients to scrub away surface stains. This one uses a high dose of hydrogen peroxide to remove them more effectively while also tackling deeper-set discoloration. Even our testers’ coffee habits were no match. $7
B E S T F LO S S
By Humankind Refillable Floss This biodegradable silk floss is coated in essential oils so it glides between teeth easily and leaves a pleasant taste in your mouth, which is what you want most from a dental floss. We especially love that the glass container is refillable, eliminating plastic waste. $15 BEST WHITENER
Spotlight Teeth Whitening Strips Strips are nothing new, but they do the job and do it well. And these come with a bonus: a protective oil for your gums, which helps curb the sensitivity that all too often accompanies the whitening process. $50
B E S T M O U T H WA S H
Hello Naturally Fresh Antiseptic Mouthwash Alcohol-free mouthwashes have a reputation for not giving you
ORAL-B IO SERIES 9 RECHARGEABLE ELECTRIC TOOTHBRUSH
This is my second time ever growing a complete beard, and I’m loving it. I haven’t IAL NO N trimmed it yet—I want to see how far it can go before I shape it. My daughter knew JB SMOOVE, ACTOR how much I love Bevel, so she bought me the whole Beard Gang Bundle: beard softener, beard oil, and beard balm. I use all three. I’m all in. If I see someone with an amazing beard, I’m the one to stop you and say, “Hey, man, your beard is nice.” We exchange beard stories and beard suggestions. It’s like a beard exchange program. .2
STMNT Beard Oil A good beard oil not only keeps whiskers smooth and hydrated but also keeps itch at bay. This moisturizing oil isn’t too heavy, but it’ll help your beard stay soft all day. On top of that, “it smells good enough to be a cologne,” raved one tester. $22
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a tingly-fresh feeling, but this one solves that by using peppermintderived menthol (which also serves as an antiseptic to kill germs). $5
I’ve been wearing Tom since I was 21. My sister got me a bottle for Christmas IAL NO N and I made it last six years, saving it for only ALEXANDER HODGE, ACTOR the most special occasions, or when I really wanted to feel myself. I still wear it today—it makes me feel most myself and reminds me of my early 20s in New York. CE
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T E S QU I R E G RO OM I NG AWA R D S 2020
Dior Homme Reinvention never smelled so good. A modern interpretation of the classic, this new version is fresher and lighter but still grounded in notes like cedar, patchouli, and vetiver, producing the feeling of a smoldering fire just below the surface. It’s bold but not off-putting, like showing up to the opera on a Ducati. $95 Aēsop Rōzu If we didn’t tell you this fragrance had rose in it, you might never know. It’s floral at first spray but quickly wears down to something smokier and darker. Spices and woods jump into the mix, giving it a mysterious vibe. So can you wear a rose cologne? Yes. This one. $180
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Coach Blue A fresh, watery scent is a staple. What makes this one stand out is the ozone-fueled electricity running through it and the grounding layer of cedarwood and amber. Like thunderclouds
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gathering on the horizon in an otherwise clear sky, it’s somehow both airy and precarious. $54 Acqua di Parma Colonia Futura We’re all hungry for the outdoors, and wearing this fresh, herbaceous fragrance feels like being in nature even when we’re . . . not. It’s all about the clary sage, which adds an earthy freshness to the botanical notes of lemon and vetiver. And continuing on a theme, it contains 99 percent naturalorigin ingredients. $54 Gucci Guilty pour Homme There’s a vintage feeling to this cologne. It comes from the patchouli and cedarwood punched up with a kick of hot chili pepper, all tempered with a dash of florals. It’s warm but a little badass, like wearing a velvet suit to an after-hours party in a dingy basement. $120 Heretic Dirty Vanilla The name says it all: A fusion of woods (sandalwood, cedar, ho wood), musky patchouli, and spicy coriander doesn’t overpower the hint of vanilla but instead turns it into something overwhelmingly sensual. It’s an attention grabber that stops people in their tracks and invites them in for more. $65
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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.
HEALTH
WHY YOU SHOULD SAY YES TO CBD
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 Zebra CBD's medical advisor 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
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 Mint Oil, on the other hand, had a different but equally positive effect on my body. To take it, the instructions suggest holding the oil in your mouth for about 30 seconds. This was simple enough, and the mint taste was, well, minty. 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—a chill factor. Needless to say, I’ve really enjoyed the oil. 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! Also, I managed to speak with a company spokesperson willing to provide an exclusive offer to Men’s Health readers. If you order this month, you’ll receive $10 off your first order by using promo code “ESQ10” at checkout. Plus, the company offers a 100% No-Hassle, MoneyBack Guarantee. You can try it yourself and order Zebra CBD at ZebraCBD.com.
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My friend Lindsay Rogers in L. A. perfected my current hairstyle that I call the Soul Flux—like little twisted locks. But since I’ve been home in Fort Worth, Texas, my mother and my sister have been doing my hair, and it’s been a really nice bonding moment. They use Murray’s Beeswax Black, classic
Blue Magic Conditioner, and Göt2B Styling Spiking Glue, and there are steps,
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DIPTYQUE SOFTENING HAND RINSE
ssentials gentle enough to use multiple times a day without leaving your hands cracked, it smells luxurious but doesn’t overpower everything, and the refillable glass bottle is actually something you want to leave out on your sink. $62
BEST HAND SOAP
BEST HAND SANITIZER
Diptyque Softening Hand Rinse This year’s biggest crossover star may have been hand soap, which you always had to use but suddenly became A Thing. Naturally, the dawn of status soap followed, and this hand cleanser rose to the top of the pack. It’s
D.S. & Durga Big Sur After Rain Hand Sanitizer Who cares about a Purell shortage when you can use something that smells this good? This nondrying sanitizer employs one of our favorite scents from the niche perfumer’s collection to leave your hands
smelling pretty damn fancy. Best of all, it comes in a jumbo bottle—a 2020 must-have. $30 B E S T H A N D LOT I O N
Perricone MD Cold Plasma+ Hand Therapy So much handwashing this year created a need for hand lotion like we had never experienced before. This winner sinks into skin almost immediately with no greasy feel and has more in common with a face moisturizer than any other hand cream we’ve tried. It’s packed with lipids to help maintain your skin barrier, and we swear the more we used it, the better our hands looked. $29
I used to be strictly anti-bath. But during that grocerystore panic period, I saw lavender bubble bath on the L NO IA shelf and thought, Why not? If this thing’s going N to last, I might as well make my apartment feel like a hotel. Then one night I ran a bath and threw BOWEN YANG, COMEDIAN that bubble bath in there. Now I’m extremely pro-bath and I have made a ritual out of bath setting. I buy these Tabino Yado Hot Springs Milky Bath Salts and add bubble bath to it. The candle placement is intricate. It has to be the right alchemy of things. I’d written off baths as being very passive, but that’s the point. They are an essential, essential thing. CE
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but I wouldn’t be able to do it myself. They’ve been getting very creative. I’m grateful for quarantine, in a way, for being able to get closer with them.
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We could all use a little more wisdom these days. On the occasion of their first-ever collab, a filmed version of the stage show American Utopia, we asked seasoned iconoclasts David Byrne and Spike Lee to tell us how they’re getting by—and how we might, too. BY KEVIN SINTUMUANG / PHOTOGRAPHS BY DARIO CALMESE / STYLING BY NICK SULLIVAN AND ASHLEY LAMPKIN
DAVID BYRNE’S AMERICAN UTOPI A BEGINS WITH THE SOUND OF
birds for close to a minute before revealing the singer, seated alone at a desk, holding a human brain. Otherwise, the stage is empty, save for a curtain composed of hundreds of thin metal chains that line the walls and shimmer like streaks of rain. As in Stop Making Sense, the 1984 Talking Heads concert film, band members emerge as the show progresses. They, like Byrne, are dressed in gray suits, with no shoes, no socks. It’s a strippeddown look for a show that is as cerebral and subtly political as it is raucous and joyful. Byrne wrote or cowrote almost every song in it—a few are from his 2018 album of the same name, and about half are familiar Talking Heads tunes, including a version of “Once in a Lifetime” that’s somehow even more poignant than the original. But it’s a cover of Janelle Monáe’s “Hell You Talmbout,” one of American Utopia’s last songs, that becomes its soul. In between, Byrne muses, philosophically and humorously, on whether babies are smarter than grown-ups and why people are more interesting to look at than, say, a bag of potato chips. In the summer of 2019, before the start of the show’s run on Broadway, Byrne had the idea to adapt it for the screen. He invited Spike Lee, whom he’d been friendly with for years, to attend previews, then asked whether he’d like to direct. Lee loved the show—and the idea. The result, which comes out on HBO in mid-October, is not a glorified theatrical recording. It’s a real film. It’s also their first collaboration. Although both made a name for themselves in New York, Lee, who’s sixty-three, came along a few years after Byrne, who’s sixty-eight. The year Lee shot his first short film, 1977, is the same one that Talking Heads, the new-wave band Byrne fronted that made him famous, released their debut LP. (It was called, wait for it . . . 77.) By then, Byrne—handsome, tall like an antenna, and a bit shy—was a regular on downtown New York’s music scene. Andy Warhol was a fan. Talking Heads had premiered live two years earlier, on the beer-soaked stage of CBGB, opening for punk pioneers the Ramones. By the time Lee released his first feature, She’s Gotta Have It, in 1986, the band had banked six albums and six Billboard Hot 100 singles, and Byrne had become the unlikeliest of rock stars. “Both of us, we have longevity,” Lee says. Sure, he and Byrne have produced their share of clunkers over the years. But that’s the price of the quality that unifies and perhaps defines them: creative evolution. BlacKkKlansman (2018) and Da Five Bloods (2020) are as electric as any other Spike Lee joint. As for Byrne, he collaborated on one of the best concert films of all time (1984’s Stop Making Sense, directed by Jonathan Demme), launched a music label that releases recordings from musicians around the world (Luaka Bop), wrote two books (2009’s Bicycle Diaries and 2012’s How Music Works), and recently started a website (see page 57). American Utopia, his second musical, was a hit from the start, and it was slated to return in the fall before the pandemic shut off the lights on Broadway. In the final week of its initial run, the show set the theater’s boxoffice record for weekly earnings—$1.4 million. Consistency isn’t why Byrne is still relevant; it’s his constant transformation. “What I dig about David’s act is: He’s not going to do the same thing twice,” Lee says. “Take a risk and not just do what’s safe.” Right back at you, Spike. In early September, Esquire spoke with them over Zoom about the film, their personal growth, and life in 2020. Byrne was in his apartment in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan, a beer in hand. Lee was at his Martha’s Vineyard home, where a Kehinde Wiley painting adorned the wall behind him.
SPIKE LEE: David, can you see me?
DB: Cape Cod.
DAVID BYRNE: No, I can’t. All I see is a
SL: Ever have Cape Cod barbecue
phone floating in the middle. Maybe if I scroll—there you are. Now I see you. [Lee holds up a bag of chips to the camera.]
potato chips? DB: No, but I’ve had Cape Cod potato chips. They’re pretty good. SL: I have to do an interview eating
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potato chips for my brother! ESQUIRE: Guys, I love the film. I think it will be an awesome gift to people during this time. It fills you with hope. Spike, it felt to me like you have a pretty intimate knowl-
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edge of the show. How many times have you seen it? SL: Well, I first went to Boston, where they were doing previews. Went up on a Saturday morning and saw the matinee, then the
night show. Then it was on Broadway. I might’ve went, like, David, five, six times? DB: Yeah. Five or six times. Spike would come by himself or with family members.
SL: It wasn’t a chore, either.
The show is the best! I was doing my homework. I did not know that David had been doing this. I didn’t know nothing. ESQ: So, David, you had the initial
idea to turn this theatrical show into a film, I take it. DB: Yeah, I had a sense that it had a beginning and a middle and an end and a visual look. So I thought, Let’s see if this could be something that works
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on a screen. I mean, Spike immediately zeroed in on all that stuff. SL: It was cinematic! DB: It’s cinematic. ESQ: It was! DB: There’s a character—I mean,
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constant over David Byrne’s four-decade career, it’s his perpetual evolution. That, and others comparing him to the beloved children’s-show host Mister Rogers. “When I was younger, during my Talking Heads days, that was not meant as a compliment,” Byrne says. “It
was meant as ‘You are a weird, geeky, creepy guy. You are in your own little world.’ ” Today, that’s no longer so. “The consensus on Mister Rogers has changed a lot in the last few years,” Byrne says. “He’s seen as kind of a hero now.” He mentions the scene from the documentary Won’t You Be My Neighbor? in which
Rogers, in the wake of Robert F. Kennedy’s death, explains the meaning of assassination to children. “You knew that these kids’ parents were going to be talking about this, so he wanted to be really honest and explain it to them.” In 2018, Byrne made his own foray into explanatory storytelling. He launched
Reasons to Be Cheerful, a site that specializes in stories of hope concerning issues that matter to him, such as climate change. Its latest project, We Are Not Divided, is a collection of stories on unity and shared purpose that’s rolling out in the lead-up to the November election. And American Utopia’s themes of
civic engagement, empathy, and the longing for a better world are all Fred Rogers trademarks. As one of America’s elder statesmen of positive vibes, does Byrne now feel like a Mister Rogers for grown-ups? “Maybe in some ways,” he says. He lets the idea sink in. “Okay, okay. Yeah.”
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it’s me, but it’s also a character who goes on a journey and ends up in a very different place from where he was in the beginning. It’s kind of living inside his head. And by the end, he’s engaging with the whole world. It’s a journey the audience takes as well. SL: I’m going to cosign what David said. It’s a journey. It’s a narrative. The first time I saw the show, and he’s onstage by himself, I’m like, “Is that a brain?” [Laughs.] Maybe I was not the only person that said, “Is that a brain he’s holding in his hands?” DB: Spike, I got to ask, at that moment, when the show begins and you just see me sitting at a desk, holding a brain, were you thinking, Oh, shit, this is not what I wanted to get into here? SL: No! Dave, I respect you so much as an artist and as a human being, you know? And so that grabbed me. I had never seen a
stage like that. I was hooked. DB: Oh, good. SL: I was happy that I was coming back in a couple hours to see the evening show. And I don’t like to spend too much time in Boston, as you see from my hat. [Points to his Yankees cap.] DB: I remember that after the second show up in Boston, you came into my dressing room and said, “I want to do this. Let’s see if we can get the money.” SL: Got it done! You see, I’m a big fan. What I dig about David’s act is: He’s not going to do the same thing twice. And I just love artists like that. They’re going to do whatever it is they’re going to do. They’re going to take a risk and not just do what’s safe. Let’s try to explore something. You know, just do it! Love that about David. Both of us, we have longevity in very, very tough industries, music and film. We’re going on four decades. I’m going to tip my cap to the both of
us. [Laughs.] I’m sixty-three, you know, David’s the age he is, and we’re still full of energy, vitality. Tom Byrne was not a musician. He was an electrical engineer and an amateur painter. His wife, Emma, was a schoolteacher and a peace activist. He was Catholic, she was Protestant, and their families did not accept their union. So in 1955, three years after the birth of their first child, David, they left Scotland, where they’d lived their whole lives, for North America—first Canada, then Baltimore. As a boy, Byrne set about shedding his accent. American kids couldn’t understand him, and he wanted to be understood. But he embraced another element of his heritage: the music. One of his uncles who lived back in Scotland played the fiddle and the mandolin. It was the Scottish folk records his parents listened to that the boy fell in love with. He taught himself the
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guitar. Then, over a transistor radio, he heard Jimi Hendrix for the first time, and the song’s raw, electric energy was like a revolution. Byrne kept exploring, and the more he learned, the more he wanted to know. Through music, an entirely new world opened up. ESQ: One of the highlights of Ameri-
can Utopia is the cover of Janelle Monáe’s “Hell You Talmbout,” a protest song in which you recite the names of Black people who have been murdered by the police. In the show, you explain that you asked Monáe if you could cover the song and she gave you her blessing. At what point did the song become part of the show? So much has happened in the past four years. DB: My band and I were putting a concert together in 2017. I often end my concerts with a cover song. I’ve done Crystal Waters and Whitney Houston and Missy Elliott— SL: Hold the presses. What Whitney
Houston song? DB: “I Wanna Dance with Somebody.” SL: “I Wanna Dance with Somebody”? DB: “I Wanna Dance with Somebody,” the Whitney song. SL: I would not have expected that. DB: It breaks the fourth wall. “I’m going to step out of character and give you this gift. Let’s have a great time.” But in this case, I thought, Okay, we’re having a great time, but serious things are happening in our country. And I felt that I couldn’t just say, “Let’s party!” As citizens, we have a responsibility to engage. And that’s partly what the show is about: somebody growing into that responsibility and that engagement. I’d heard that song and thought, That’s the one to do. Talked to the band, talked to Janelle, and said, “Okay, we’re going to do this.” SL: Has she seen it? DB: No, she’s never seen the show. SL: We should send her the movie before the HBO premiere. Or at least the song. ESQ: It reminded me of that moment in Do the Right Thing when Samuel L. Jackson names all of these famous Black artists. SL: The roll call. ESQ: The roll call. Yeah. I recently rewatched the movie. Radio Raheem’s death—he’s choked to death by cops—it reminds me so much of what’s happening now. SL: Like they used to say, “ripped from the headlines.” Here’s the thing about Radio Raheem: I didn’t make that up. That was based on the choke-hold murder of the graffiti artist Michael Stewart. He and Basquiat used to hang out. The New York City Transit Authority police got him in the subway station and choked him out. Then I see Eric Garner—that’s Radio Raheem. Then I see George Floyd, who’s Radio Raheem. ESQ: Are you surprised that it’s 2020 and this is still the way it is? SL: Well, I’m going to change hats now. [Takes off his Yankees cap and puts on a hat that reads “1619.”] It’s been like that since we got here. Stolen from Mother Africa. Brought to Jamestown, Virginia, 1619. [Points to the hat.] We were shackled then and, most recently, in Kenosha, Wisconsin, where Jacob Blake, paralyzed from the waist
down, was shackled to the hospital bed. And this is 2020. ESQ: In the film version of American Utopia, you actually see the faces of these Black men and women, and their relatives. Was that your addition, Spike? SL: Right. You know, I was just listening to the lyrics: “Say their names, say their names.” And there was an opportunity to show their faces, too. But here’s the sad thing. Every time I went to the show, we’d say, “Well, here’s another name that we need to add next week. And here’s another.” After we finished shooting, we added Breonna Taylor, we added George Floyd. Who’s the brother that was jogging in Georgia? DB: Ahmaud Arbery. SL: And so now we’ve seen what happened to Jacob—and I really want to talk about this: shot seven times in the back while the officer held on to his T-shirt. His three sons saw him get shot. I mean, that’s horrendous. They’re going to be traumatized for the rest of their lives. I heard Jacob’s father say that he had just come back from the hospital to see his son, whose ankles were shackled to the bed. Where is a man who’s paralyzed from the waist down going to run to? That just showed such a lack of empathy, of humanity. It was animalistic. It seems to me that the police would try to de-escalate, knowing how stuff has been going. But it’s escalating! It’s really a shame that we needed to add more names to that great song. It’s criminal. [Takes a long pause.] David, you speak on that, please. DB: Oh, absolutely. I loved the song when I first heard it, because it reminds you of the humanity of these people who’ve been murdered. You know, they are not just numbers or something you read in the newspaper. This person had a name. And that takes it out of being some kind of political football. It’s something where you go, “This is not the way we should be with one another.” SL: That seventeen-year-old kid killed two people in Kenosha with a semiautomatic rifle, shot another person. And after doing that, he walked down the street and armed police vehicles drove right by him. He got to go home. Let me just ask you a question. Let’s switch it,
make that individual Black. He’s in the middle of the street with a semiautomatic rifle. Do you think those police vehicles are going to go right by? ESQ: Nope. SL: Hell to the no! “Will you come see my father play?” a young Spike Lee and his brother Chris would say to strangers as they handed out flyers in midtown Manhattan for Bill Lee’s jazz show. “Kid, get out of here” was the usual reply. Bill Lee was a jazz bassist who’d dabbled in folk, playing for the likes of Bob Dylan; Peter, Paul and Mary; and Gordon Lightfoot. Then Dylan went electric, and everyone wanted electric bass. “Will you play electric bass for us, Bill?” they asked. Nope. Bill Lee was a purist, and he hated the electric bass. His work dried up. Lee’s mother, Jacquelyn, got a job as a teacher at Saint Ann’s, a private school in Brooklyn Heights, to support the family. She was a cinephile, and Bill hated Hollywood movies, so Spike was always her date to the theater. It’s when he first fell in love with film. While Jacquelyn earned a living and cared for their five children, Bill focused on his art. He was as passionate as ever, but the audiences were not. Sometimes, after his sons had spent all day passing out the flyers, ten people would attend his show. Sometimes even fewer. “This is how I was traumatized,” Lee tells me. “To this day, when I have a movie come out, I hope that someone’s going to show up, and that’s because of my father.” But he says he learned another important lesson. “As I got older, I understood that you must have principles. He was not going to play electric bass.” ESQ: David, from very early on you
incorporated a lot of African polyrhythmic stuff into your music. Were you ever called out for cultural appropriation? DB: I got accused of that on a record that I did with Brian Eno, My Life in the Bush of Ghosts. With that one, we used a lot of found vocals, which—well, a lot of people do it now, but then it was considered wrong. But we went on to doing our music. I mean, we’re all influenced by other things that we see and hear, things people have said or written. We stand on the shoulders
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of giants. That’s how we make what we do. But yeah, obviously there are lines that are hard to define but that you don’t cross. You’re not just going to steal somebody’s shit and say, “This is mine. I did this.” No. You just stole that shit. But yes, if you can be inspired by something and make it your own, then you’ve created something new. A year or two ago, Angélique Kidjo, a singer from Benin who now lives in Brooklyn, covered the Talking Heads record Remain in Light. But she brought more African influences in than what was originally there. She linked the songs with Yoruba chants and praise songs to the Yoruba gods and things like that. And I just thought, All right, she’s brought it home. SL: Here’s the thing: The reason why I love David is that he comes from righteousness. It’s not appropriation. Everybody can be influenced by stuff they dig. Now, when I think about appropriation, I think about Pat Boone covering Little Richard’s songs. And he made all the money. I think about Otis Blackwell, who wrote some songs for Elvis and probably got $10,000 and a pork-chop sandwich. So it really depends on the mind-set. It’s like, when you say that you made this, that this is your creation, that’s when you’ve crossed the line. Dave, you’ve got to talk about Annie-B for a minute. The choreography in this thing is amazing. DB: Spike and [cinematographer] Ellen Kuras consulted with Annie-B Parson, the choreographer, a lot. They realized that she had created a lot of what you see onstage. She’s great at working with people who were trained in movement, who can remember all these complicated moves, and also with some of the drummers and myself. We can remember some things; our dance vocabulary is limited. SL: Hold on. David, you are a dancer. DB: Oh, well, Annie-B likes my dancing. SL: I like it, too. The point is, you love what you do. So don’t knock your dancing. You’re doing your thing, and people love it. I love it. And the way you dance is your personality. You’re not trying to be Fred Astaire or Gene Kelly. DB: Yes. I realized I’m never going to be able to do that stuff, but I’ve
got to find my own thing. SL: Yes. That’s what you do, and that’s what makes it great. ESQ: David, I love that in your book How Music Works, there are a lot of passages about choreography and movement. I feel like everyone else considers you a dancer, but you don’t consider yourself a dancer. SL: He’s a dancer. DB: I guess it’s because I’m not trained, didn’t go to school for it. SL: Hold up. Did you go to school for music? DB: I’m self-taught in music, too. SL: You’re contradicting yourself, brother. DB: Yes. Thank you.
SL: You didn’t go to Juilliard. DB: No, I went to art school but not for music. SL: There you go.
In the summer of 1977, after his sophomore year at Morehouse College, Lee was back in New York and unable to find a job. One day, he went to see a friend who’d just received a Super 8 camera, complete with film. “What are you going to do with it?” Lee asked when he saw the box. “You have it,” she said. Lee spent the rest of that summer shooting with the Super 8. “It was the summer of the blackout. So I filmed my Puerto Rican brothers and sisters and
Black brothers and sisters looting,” he says. “It was the first summer of disco. I filmed the block parties, where DJs were hooking up their turntables and speakers to the street lamps.” He edited the footage into his first short film, Last Hustle in Brooklyn. Around the same time Lee was filming in Brooklyn, across the river, in lower Manhattan, Talking Heads were completing their debut album. ESQ: On a deeper level, much of
your respective work is about questioning the status quo. Do you think that is an artist’s responsibility? SL: A young Spike Lee would have said yes. I’ve come to realize, in my
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later years, that everybody’s not the same. Some artists feel that their job is to entertain, to take people’s minds off whatever they’re going through. And I’m cool with that. You know? I’m cool with that. ESQ: How about you, David? DB: I agree. If you’re feeling it, you have an obligation to act on what you’re feeling. But it doesn’t have to be directly engaging with specific issues. There are people who, let’s say, just do comedy. They still allow people to see each other in a different way. They’re doing something. ESQ: One thing I noticed is that both Do the Right Thing and American Utopia end with a callout to vote.
SL: Get David Dinkins in and get
SL: Because this guy [Trump] is
Ed Koch out! ESQ: David, in the show, you mention going down to North Carolina and registering people to vote. What are you sensing out there? DB: I’m scared about the election. Just the other day, I started reaching out to some voting organizations, because I want to see if it makes sense for me to go to, say, Pennsylvania to get people in a swing state to vote, and to make sure that everybody who wants a mail-in ballot gets one. I think I’ll do it. ESQ: Spike, how about you? SL: Well, I’m scared. ESQ: Yeah?
going to do anything to win. It’s going to be skullduggery, shenanigans, subterfuge. And also, I feel that if we don’t come out to vote in the numbers we need for a landslide that’s not in his favor, he’s going to contest the election. I don’t think he’s going to want to leave the White House. This thing is not a lock. I don’t care what the polls say. ESQ: Spike, when you were doing press for BlacKkKlansman, you said that the 2020 election wasn’t going to be for the president but for the soul of America. And that turned out to be the theme of the Democratic National Convention.
You were right. SL: Right twice a day! ESQ: Do you think this big movement around racial justice is going to make a dent? Do you think it’s going to continue? SL: I think so. Because the young generation, not just in the United States but all over the world, took to the streets. They’re still in the streets marching, kneeling, chanting “Black Lives Matter.” And I think that this young generation, they want to be better than their parents, their ancestors. So that’s been very uplifting, to see the support, how this has really spread. In the mid-seventies, after studying art at the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence, Byrne was offered room and board at a painter’s loft in lower Manhattan in exchange for his help in renovating the place. Byrne’s ambition was to become an artist with gallery representation, solo shows, and the rest of it. His work had a sense of humor, and some of it was outright funny, but nobody seemed to care. Byrne spent more and more time around the corner from the loft, at a bar called CBGB. Patti Smith and the Ramones were there, too. Inspired by the ideas fomenting before his eyes, there on the dingy stage of the Bowery dive, he, Chris Frantz, and Tina Weymouth—two friends from college—formed a band. A hobby more than anything. Byrne started taking songwriting seriously for the first time, and the band started getting booked at CBGB. They called themselves Talking Heads. This time, people cared. Talking Heads became an instant favorite among the tight-knit art scene in downtown New York. To Byrne, the immediate affirmative response felt good. If art was a means to express oneself to others, then he’d struck upon his medium. This is working, he thought. I’m going to keep doing this. ESQ: David, in the show, you talk
about how you’ve changed and you still need to change. Were there specific things you were thinking about when you wrote those lines? DB: Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. There was the stuff I’d done in the past, but also more recently. We have to examine what we do and the
assumptions we make about others. And that’s an ongoing thing, challenging those assumptions and those biases that are inside us whether we want them to be or not. I may not want to be racist, but if I live in a racist country where there is systemic racism, then it’s inside me whether I want it or not. Part of my life’s work is to try to get it out. It’s like a poison that’s in all of us. So yeah, I’m never done. ESQ: Do you think you’re a different kind of bandmate now than you were with Talking Heads? It’s my understanding that things could get contentious. DB: I think I’ve gotten better with that. I think I sometimes failed at that earlier on. I’m not perfect, but I think I’ve learned. Yes, there are kinds of group skills, and management skills, and all those kinds of things. Not that they come out of a book, but I’ve learned to sort of work together with people without yelling at people, by not telling everybody exactly what to do. Letting them have some input, you sometimes end up with something better. ESQ: You’ve mentioned before that there’s bad blood between you and the other members. Is that still the case? DB: We’ve reconciled on some things, which is good. Other areas, no, we don’t see eye to eye. For that divorced-couple kind of thing, we actually manage to function okay. It’s not purely cutthroat. SL: I’m with David. You just got to try to get better every single day. And one of the most important things I ever read, as an artist, was when I was in film school. Akira Kurosawa is one of my favorite filmmakers. In fact, Rashomon is where I got She’s Gotta Have It from. I forget if it was for Ran or one of his later films, but he was doing press in the United States. A writer asked him, and I’m paraphrasing: “You’re one of the greatest filmmakers ever, the master filmmaker. At this stage of your life, you must know everything.” And Kurosawa said, “I see it as an eternity for me to learn.” When he said that, it was like I was struck by lightning. One of my favorite filmmakers in the autumn of his years, saying that there’s still a universe (continued on page 100)
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Pittsburgh has been hyped as our most livable city—if you’re white, that is. My mom’s story—how she
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lived, and how she died—offers proof that if you’re a Black woman, it’s one of the worst cities in America.
b y DA M ON YO U NG
St i l l - l i fe ph oto g ra ph s b y TON Y K I M My mother, Vivienne Leigh Young, as a senior in high school.
S O I ’ D T H O U G H T T H AT T H E L A S T P I C T U R E O F M E A N D M O M
before she died, on a hospital bed in the living room of the Penn Hills house my parents were renting after the bank foreclosed on theirs of ten years, was taken in the lobby of Mount Ararat Baptist Church, in Pittsburgh. It was the day I was baptized, in 2013, which my soon-to-be fiancée convinced me to do because we liked the church and it was a requirement for joining. My gray slacks are the bottom half of a Sean John suit I’d bought off a clearance rack. The red gym bag that hangs on my left shoulder contains the soaked white shorts and crewneck I’d worn beneath the white caftan provided by the church for my immersion, in the wading pool behind the altar. I’m smiling, which I rarely do in pictures but always did with Mom because she’d get mad when I didn’t. “Why do you look like you’re about to sneeze?” she’d say. But in Vivienne Leigh Young’s final year on earth, as our family witnessed time—her time—flattening and narrowing and draining and eventually slimming to a whisper, we couldn’t afford to waste any more of it with second takes. So I started smiling first. Mom is smiling, too. The hair she’d lost during chemo had grown back enough by then so that her low Caesar looks intentional. Chic. My right arm is wrapped around her. I remember the shock of that embrace, my hand feeling bones where flesh and healthy fat once were, scared to squeeze too tight for fear of breaking something. I hugged her the way you might hug a Jenga tower. But on a recent search through my Facebook archives, I realized that I was wrong. The last picture of us was taken two months later. My parents had decided to join Mount Ararat, too, but by then Mom was at a hospice in Lawrenceville, where she’d stay for three weeks before being discharged to spend her final five days on earth at home. Two associate pastors came to the hospice to perform the ceremony. She cried. I recorded it on my iPhone. We took pictures afterward. I considered sharing this story at her wake, as a segue to how I’d try to emulate her meticulousness and fearlessness with fashion. Like the time in seventh grade I rocked her bolo ties with my school uniforms while most of the boys at St. Barts wore the clip-ons you’d find at Rite Aid. Which could’ve then segued to the gray Pittsburgh Saturdays she’d brighten with daylong livingroom comedy marathons. Seems Like Old Times before lunch. Defending Your Life at three. High Anxiety after dinner. Or how she was named after Vivien Leigh—my nana’s favorite actress—but her name was spelled Vivienne, because she was special. Instead, I led with a story about her scrambled eggs, how I never liked them because she’d add milk while mixing, and they’d be runny, and I prefer eggs that remain still. And how I couldn’t tell her that—not because she was so precious about her food but because my lie had stretched so long. And how I’d pour salt and pepper on them and make bacon-and-egg sandwiches with them. Finally, I confessed. “Sorry, Mom,” I smiled from the stage, to the two hundred people in attendance, “but I don’t like sandwiches that much.” I think I chose to lead with that story at her wake because I knew the laugh would be easy, and I needed one then to get me through the rest of the speech. The rest of the day. The rest of the week. But the memories of that time, like most seven-year-old memories, are hazy. Even the ones I’m certain I remember exactly as they happened are wrong in some way. But once exposed, the false reminiscences still feel just as real. More true than the truth. Sometimes the feeling a story stirs in your gut is the only thing that matters. Not always. Sometimes. But it doesn’t matter where or when the very last picture of me and Mom was taken. Or what I was wearing. Or how many takes it took. Or why I chose to say what I said at her wake. Such details are gratuitous. The why, though— why Mom died that year, in the living room of the Penn Hills house my parents were renting after the bank foreclosed on theirs of ten years—is what festers. She spent her last years in pain. A mysterious, excruciating pain—in her back, her stomach, her head. If it seems obvious now, the source of that pain, it wasn’t so clear to the doctors she saw at the time, who found no consensus
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Clockwise from bottom left: Me and Mom at the East Liberty bus station, in 1991; and at my high school graduation, in 1997; Mom’s mom— Peggy Freeman—me, Mom, and Dad at my college graduation, in 2001; Mom, my grandmother, and me, in 1995.
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on what was wrong and who advised her to exercise more, drink less pop, drink more water, take a few Advil. Then, a year before she died, a diagnosis: lung cancer. Stage 4. Six months. The medical care Mom received after her death sentence was good. Which perhaps is how she stretched those six months to twelve. So good that the suspicion I had after her death—that she might still be alive if she’d been treated with as much care when she first started seeking treatment—solidified into a conviction. When she was a terminal cancer patient, that status was her primary identity when receiving care, superseding race, gender, and class. She was considered vulnerable. Defenseless. Worthy. Of protection. Of pain relief. Of treatment. Of effort. But when she was just another Black woman, she was just another Black woman and treated as such. Of course, I have no hard proof of this. Just faith in the consistency and reliability of Pittsburgh’s grift. And the belief that Vivienne Leigh Young died—was killed—because of her place in this place. FINDING NATIONAL LAUDS FOR MY HOMETOWN IS LIKE FINDING
a needle—any needle—in a stack of needles. In 2010, Forbes coronated the ’Burgh America’s most livable city. A few years later, The Economist declared the same for the continental U. S. “A hidden gem,” said the Huffington Post in “What Pittsburgh Can Teach the Rest of the Country About Living Well,” which ran two months after Mom died. In 2015, the blog Brooklyn Based asked, with no hint of irony, perspective, or shame, if Pittsburgh was “the next Brooklyn,” then took three thousand words to find the answer. (“We think so, maybe?”) A 2017 column from The New York Times’s Frugal Traveler made the city sound, well, sexy. There’s so much I can say to back up these proclamations. Pittsburgh is a topographical marvel planted in Appalachia. If approaching from the west on I-376, you won’t see the skyline until you pass through the Fort Pitt tunnels.
burgh’s Inequality Across Gender and Race”—a report by the city’s Gender Equity Commission released in September 2019—“arguably the most unlivable” city in the country for Black women. Black women in Pittsburgh are more likely to die from cancer or cardiovascular disease or a drug overdose or homicide or suicide than Black women virtually anywhere else in the country. And are more likely to have their pregnancies end in fetal death. And are more likely to give birth to underweight babies. And are more likely to live in poverty. And are more likely to be unemployed. And are more likely to have the police called on them in high school. And earn fifty-four cents for every dollar a white man earns. The health disparities are particularly brutal, considering that the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC) is the largest nongovernmental employer in the state of Pennsylvania, UPMC Presbyterian Shadyside ranks as one of the best hospitals in the country, and UPMC Children’s Hospital ranks as one of the best in the world. There are few better places on earth to be sick than in Pittsburgh. And few worse places in the country to be sick if you’re a Black woman. In response to the commission’s findings, the Reverend Ricky Burgess and Robert Daniel Lavelle, Pittsburgh’s only two Black city-council members, proposed a bill declaring racism a public-health crisis, which unanimously passed in December 2019. Modeled after legislation passed in Milwaukee County, Wisconsin, the resolution committed the city to equitable hiring practices and diversity initiatives. (Around sixty state and local governments across the U. S. have passed similar bills; this past September, Senator Elizabeth Warren, Representative Ayanna Pressley, and their colleagues introduced a plan to formally declare racism a public-health crisis nationwide.) The ’Burgh’s resolution was not legally binding or government funded. Still, it felt like something, something heavy, and like more heavy somethings would follow. Yet almost a year later, nothing’s changed. With all due respect to August Wilson, this is the new Pittsburgh Cycle. Fund and release a study articulating the many ways in which Pittsburgh is uniquely—superlatively—bad for Black people. Deploy a few solemn-faced politicians—some sincere, some performing for attaboys while in line at Pamela’s—to regurgitate the findings and pledge to change. Wait for the motherfucking tooth fairy to slip said change under our pillows while we sleep. Then it’s report season once again.
S
I KNOW WHY VIVIENNE LEIGH YOUNG DIED. SHE H EXISTED IN THE LEAST LIVABLE BODY IN AMERICA’S E MOST LIVABLE CITY. Then, ensconced amid mountains and converging rivers, you’ll come upon a view so distinct that you’ll want to memorialize it as a tattoo—which is what I did on my left biceps two years ago. The city’s livability isn’t just an abstraction. I began writing full-time eleven years ago, after getting laid off from the college-prep program I managed. I survived on long-term unemployment and freelance gigs while building my blog (Very Smart Brothas, now a part of The Root) in a way I wouldn’t have been able to in Philly or D. C. or New York. My rent for a six-hundred-squarefoot apartment in Shadyside, one of the most expensive neighborhoods in the city, was just $590 a month. Yet this beautiful and bountiful and livable place is, according to “Pitts-
ST I L L , N ON E OF T H I S S U F F IC I E N T LY
explains why Pittsburgh is so livable for white people and so unlivable for Black men and Black teens and Black children and Black babies and, specifically, Black women. The answer can be found between Centre and Bedford avenues, where the Civic Arena, the world’s first major sports venue with a retractable roof, was built in 1961. Which is also where, in the mid-fifties, the city used eminent domain to displace hundreds of businesses and thousands of residents from the predominantly Black Lower Hill District. Whether the eighteen hundred families had somewhere to go and settle and sit and live and breathe next didn’t matter. They just had to get the fuck out. The arena was razed a few years ago. Now it’s a twenty-eight-hundredspace parking lot for the Pittsburgh Penguins. The answer can be found in East Liberty, where my parents raised our family, a neighborhood that has changed so much in the past twenty years— demographically, culturally, economically, and even topographically—that it’s like a gentrification meteor crashed and demolished everything underneath it so white people could start afresh. The answer is that Pittsburgh is a city in the same America that owes its vast-
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Vivienne Leigh Young, 1953–2013.
ness, power, and wealth to its plundering of Native people and its centuries of free labor from enslaved Africans. (And also the same America in which, during the greatest economic downturn since the Great Depression, spurred by a pandemic that only sharpened its inequities, its billionaires got $637 billion richer.) While Pittsburgh has owned up to its disparities, it has never admitted, and will never admit, its intent. These things just happen over time, the city tells itself, like how a yard might tell itself that weeds just grow. And it’s this lie that allows the ’Burgh to smile at itself in the mirror and that drives its Black citizens mad. Because Pittsburgh’s livability for white people is possible because of what makes it unlivable for Black people. There is no abundance without a permanent underclass. Black blood sustains it. Black bodies undergird it. I know why Vivienne Leigh Young died. She existed in the least livable body in America's most livable city. I was there, driving my car, when the woman who taught me how to drive, and who’d cosigned the loan for that car, cried when I absentmindedly drove past the house that the bank had snatched from her and Dad. “Damon,” she said, her voice barely a whisper, “don’t ever take me down this street again.” I remember the morning of October 18, 2013, when
Dad called to tell me that my mother—his best friend; my sister Jemelle’s therapist; my nephew and nieces’ Gida; the woman who at sixteen got into Carnegie Mellon; who in 1984 sparked a mini race riot that led to the closure of a deli in Squirrel Hill after the white cashier called her and Nana “black nigger bitches”; who made the best French toast ever; who I never beat in Uno or Connect 4, even when I cheated; who introduced me to Steely Dan and Toni Morrison and banded collars and chicken cacciatore; who came to as many grade school and middle school and high school and college and AAU and summer-league basketball games as she could, driving sometimes, on buses and jitneys most times; and who my four-year-old daughter and one-year-old son are named after—had just died. Was killed. What do you do when a city you love kills a woman you loved? The obvious answer is to leave. But I bought a house here two years ago. My wife and I are raising our children here. Dad is still here. My memories of Kennywood fits, Eat’n Park midnight buffets, first haircut at Wade’s, last dunk on the low hoop at the ’Stein, and Mom, too. Besides, where would I go?
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Matt Breen bet on himself and thought he’d done everything right. Now he’s one of the millions of Americans who have lost their jobs—and, increasingly, their hope—as COVID-19 batters the nation’s economy.
by JACK HOLMES __ photographs by JONATHAN LANTZ
300 JOB APPLICATIONS LATER “THE FIRST THING I DID WAS CANCEL ALL
my little subscription things,” Matt Breen told me. “That’s about a hundred bucks a month, right? Give or take . . . then it was like, ‘Okay, I’m not gonna get takeout anymore.’ That was the second thing. Now I’m at the point where I’m like, ‘All right, eat one meal a day—that could be okay.’ “I’m eating a lot of ramen noodles these days,” he said. When we spoke in late August, Breen had just submitted his three hundredth job application. He was laid off from his job at a new Catholic school in Fayetteville, Arkansas, in June. Breen is twenty-seven years old. He has a girlfriend, but he lives alone with his mixed Blue Heeler–Catahoula Leopard dog, Count, in a little apartment in a twostory, motel-style block. He graduated with a degree in mathematics from the University of Arkansas two years ago. He wrote his thesis on pricing derivative securities. He was doing some tutoring to make money while mostly looking at research and financial-analyst jobs back home in Philadelphia, where his family still lives. But then he got an offer to become one of the first employees of a newly formed school. He would build the math department—design the curriculum and deal with the budget. “Invest in us and we’ll invest in you,” he remembers the pitch going. Breen took the job, which offered a salary of $18,000 in the first year. He kept tutoring on the side to help pay the bills, but it was a hit to his finances. “A fat pay cut,” he said. His role was entrepreneurial. He doesn’t have a teacher’s license, but his new boss assured him he wouldn’t need one for the time being. One of fewer than ten full-time faculty members, he put together the system that recorded grades and absences, making sure it abided by privacy guidelines. When 2019 turned to 2020, he got a raise to $45,000. He was building something. Once March came and the pandemic hit, he said, he wasn’t particularly worried about losing his job. “My understanding was that . . . they were going to cut our budgets,” he said. “So we’d have to share more of the lab kits for science class. I couldn’t get our classes a new set of
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In the coming months, Esquire will highlight the stories of people who have lost their livelihoods amid the economic turmoil tied to COVID-19 and who fear they’ll lose still more. This is the first in that series.
“ALL RIGHT, eat one meal a day—that COULD BE okay.”
calculators this year. Just little things like that that we’d have to cut back. And then they ended up laying me off.” He was shell-shocked for a few days. In a tone that ranged from numb matter-offactness to gallows humor, he remembered that he’d been working to revise down his budgets in the days before. Now he was the budget cut. After a few days, he got to work filing for unemployment insurance. While there are a lot of horror stories about overwhelmed state unemployment systems— clunky online portals, hours on hold to speak to someone, inexplicable delays in actually getting the money—he found it fairly easy. “It took me like ten minutes. It might be because I’m computer savvy.” Every Monday since, he’s checked in to answer the questions: Did you look for work last week? Were you available to work? Did you accept any work? Every Monday except when he got COVID-19. The school paid him a month’s salary in severance, which helped. As soon as that ended, the full weight of everything fell on him: His unemployment insurance was based on his previous year’s salary of $18,000. When the $600-a-week supplement Congress provided as part of the CARES Act expired at the end of July, that was a further blow. And now he’s got less than a month left to receive any sort of help at all. He already cannot pay his student loans. He’ll soon be unable to pay his rent. That’s what led him to post his story on Reddit’s r/Unemployment forum—which is where I found him. “Putting aside the real sense of betrayal, I feel like I’m in a pretty bad place,” he wrote on August 21. “It’s hard to hear ‘You’ll find something soon’ or ‘Keep your head up’ when it doesn’t seem like things are changing for the better in the larger sense. I feel like I’ve been pretty angry for a while now.” It’s the kind of post that’s become common in a venue—called a “sub” in Reddit vernacular—that originally served as a place to troubleshoot problems with securing unemployment benefits. As the pandemic and economic downturn have dragged on and Congress has allowed boosted benefits to lapse, there is a creeping sense of despair in this community. “I’m sharing my story,”
Matt Breen did exactly what he was supposed to do: got a degree in STEM and worked in education. He already can’t pay his student loans. Soon he won’t be able to pay his rent.
Breen wrote to conclude his post, “because it feels like I had to tell it somehow.” Maybe his story stood out among all the others—a Michigan woman struggling for weeks and weeks with the state unemployment system; a North Dakota petrochemical engineer weighing whether to take a manual-labor job—because it felt like a parable. Many of the stories on the sub are from people tortured by the structures we’ve built to organize our society. But while Breen’s had some of that, his was at root a tale of fate and circumstance. It is horrifying, then enraging, then profoundly sad to learn through experience how little control we really have. We cling to the notion as we navigate the world that if we just make the right choices, we’ll get what we deserve. We almost need to believe this—it keeps us crawling out of bed each morning. But we do not always reap what we sow. At the moment, Breen’s in “limbo,” as he put it. It will be tough for him to get another teaching job without a license, but besides, what he really enjoyed was building the orga-
nization. It’s tough now, too, to chase the quantitative-finance jobs he was headed for coming out of school. “On paper, they have no idea if I can do the job,” he said. “They have to take a chance on me. I know that I’m capable enough to do that kind of job well, but it’s hard to get your foot in the door.” He also initially made the calculation that he’d be better off avoiding part-time work, because it could threaten what benefits he has. When we dug into the literature from the state Department of Workforce Services, it seemed he could still qualify to receive partial benefits by taking on fifteen or twenty hours a week at a place like Home Depot. It might help on the margins, but it’s hard to see how a job like that would take him where he wants to go. If he can’t start a
school, he hopes to use his skills in data analysis and coding. For now, he spends many of his days hunched over a computer in his dining area, next to a woodworking station and the walls of bookshelves he built himself, filling out applications for full-time work. A lot of this traces back to the federal government’s decision to respond to the economic disruption of the pandemic by funneling people into the unemployment system, rather than, as many European countries did, choosing to subsidize companies’ payrolls—even at 70 or 80 percent—to keep people employed. The Paycheck Protection Program went some way in this direction, but it’s piecemeal by comparison. Plus, it’s not just that people now have to weigh decisions about when to take on part-time work or whether to accept a job they’re overqualified for after having lost one that fit. A good job is more than a paycheck—it becomes a piece of the journey, part of the story of a life. “For me, the hardest thing is I was up in Pennsylvania at Shippensburg University, and I kind of got into a slump there,” Breen said. “I ended up taking a year off, and I was working in a machine shop for about a year, and I started going to community college, and I was like, ‘I gotta prove to myself that I can make it on my own.’ “So I was like, ‘All right, what’s the most different place than Pennsylvania that I can think of? Arkansas. Arkansas is the most different place.’ I packed up my stuff and I moved down here. I went to the university. . . . I was the tutoring supervisor for the athletics department, for their tutoring program. Then I got this job; I had my own place. I was doing everything that I thought was right, you know? I was paying my bills. I was paying my student loans. I had an apartment and a good job that I enjoyed going to. “And now for me, the consequences aren’t so physical. If I get evicted or I can’t pay my rent, I’m not gonna be homeless. I’m just gonna have to pack my shit up and move back in with my family. But for me, that’s not what the issue is. The issue is that for someone trying to make it, it feels like I just totally failed at it, you know? The rational part of my brain is like, ‘Well, you didn’t create the coronavirus or have your boss lay you off.’ But at the same time, we live in a capitalist society, where if you cannot produce any kind of work product, like, what’s your purpose then? I feel aimless, I guess. I was building a life for myself here, and it just feels like it’s gone. It’s not gone; I know it’s not gone. It feels like it’s gone.”
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G R A N P O P ’ S D I N O SAU R O F A B U I C K STAT I O N
wagon creeps along the dirt road at twenty miles an hour. Frank Brown is driving with his eyes slitted and his mouth compressed to a fine white line. Corinne, his missus, is riding shotgun with her iPad open in her lap, and when Frank asks her if she’s sure this is right, she tells him everything is fine, steady as she goes, they’ll rejoin the main road in another six miles, eight at most, and from there it’s just a hop, skip, and a jump to the turnpike. She doesn’t want to say that the blinking blue dot marking their location disappeared five minutes ago and the map is frozen in place. They’ve been married fourteen years and Corinne knows the mouth her husband is currently wearing. It means he’s close to blowing his stack. In the spacious backseat, Billy Brown and Mary Brown sit flanking Granpop, who has his big old black shoes planted on either side of the driveshaft hump. Billy is eleven. Mary is nine. Granpop is seventy-five, a giant pain in the ass as far as his son is concerned, and too old to have such young grandchildren, but there they are. When they set out from Falmouth to see Granpop’s dying sister up in Derry, Granpop talked nonstop, mostly about the zipper bag in the backseat. It contains Nan’s baseball souvenirs. Mad about baseball she was, he tells them. There are baseball cards that he says are worth a fortune (Frank Brown fucking doubts this), her college softball glove signed by Dom DiMaggio, and the prize of all prizes, a Louisville Slugger signed by Ted Williams. She won it in a Jimmy Fund charity raffle the year before the Splendid Splinter called
ON SLIDE
It was supposed to be a family road trip to visit an aging relative. Then the car got stuck in a muddy rut and,
by
Stephen
well—these things never turn out well, do they?
INN
King
The legendary architect of your worst nightmares delivers another shocking story you won’t soon forget.
ROAD
P H OTO GR A P H S
BY C H R I S TO P H E R GR I F F I T H
71 O C TOB E R / NOV E M B E R 2020
SWEET SMILE,
I love you, you big strong man.
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HER
the one that says,
“Baseballs,” Billy says. “Granpop’s got baseball on the brain. Just read your funny book and shut up. Don’t distract me. I’ve made it to level five.” “If Nan had been born with balls, she could have played pro,” Granpop says. “That bitch was good.” “Donald!” Corinne Brown nearly shouts. “Enough!” “Well, she was,” the old man says sulkily. “Played varsity on the University of Maine team that went to the Women’s World Series. All the way to Oklahoma City, and almost got sucked up by a tornado!” Frank doesn’t contribute to the conversation, only peers ahead at the road he never should have gone down and thanks God he didn’t overrule his father and take the Volvo. Is the road getting narrower? He believes it is. Is it getting rougher? He knows it is. Even the name strikes Frank as ominous. Who calls a road, even a piece of shit like this one, Slide Inn Road? Granpop said it was a shortcut to Highway 196, and Corinne agreed after consulting her iPad, and although Frank is no fan of shortcuts (as a banker he knows they always lead to trouble), he is initially seduced by the smooth black tar. Soon enough, however, tar gives way to dirt, and a mile or two later the dirt gives way to rutted hardpan lined on both sides by high weeds, goldenrod, and staring sunflowers. They go over a washboard that causes the Buick to shake like a dog after a bath. He wouldn’t care if the high-mileage, gas-guzzling, overweening piece of Detroit stupidity shook itself to death, were it not for the possibility of being broken down out here in East Jesus. And now, dear God, a plugged culvert has washed out half the road, and Mr. Brown has to creep around it on the left, the tires on his side barely skirting the ditch. If there had been room to turn around he would have said the hell with this and gone back, but there is no room. They make it. Barely. “How far now?” he asks Corinne. “About five miles.” With MapQuest frozen she has no idea, but she has a hopeful heart. Which is a good thing. She discovered years ago that marriage to Frank and motherhood to Billy and Mary weren’t what she had expected, and now, as a shitty bonus, they have this unpleasant old man living with them because they can’t afford to put him in a retirement home. Hope is getting her through. They are going to see an old lady dying of cancer, but Corinne Brown hopes someday to go on a Carnival cruise and drink something with a paper umbrella in it. She hopes to have a richer, fuller life when the kids finally grow up and go out on their own. She would also like to
Corinne puts a hand on Frank’s arm and gives him
it quits. “Teddy Ballgame flew in Korea, you know,” Granpop tells the kids. “Bombed hell out of the gooks.” “Not a word the children need to know,” Corinne says from the front seat—but without much thought of success. Her father-in-law grew up in a politically incorrect age, and he’s carried it with him. She also thought of asking him what a dying, semi-comatose octogenarian was supposed to do with a bat and glove, but kept still on that point. Donald Brown has never had much to say about his sister, good or bad, but he must feel something for her or he wouldn’t have insisted they make this trip. He insisted on his old Buick, too. Because it’s roomy, and because he said he knew a shortcut that might be a little rough. He’s right on both counts. He also tucked a pile of his old comic books into the bag. “Reading material for the youngsters on the trip,” he said. Billy doesn’t give shit one for old comic books—he’s playing a game on his phone—but Mary got on her knees, reached into the cargo compartment, unzipped Granpop’s bag, and grabbed a stack. Most are cruddy, but some are pretty good. In the one she’s reading now, Betty and Veronica are fighting over Archie, pulling each other’s hair and such. “You know what, back in the old days you could go down to Fenway on three dollars’ gas,” Granpop says. “And you could go to the game, snag a hot dog and a beer. . . .” “And still get change back from a five-spot,” Frank mutters from behind the wheel. “That’s right!” Granpop crows. “Damn straight you could! First game I ever saw with my sis, Ellis Kinder was pitching and Hoot Evers was in center field. My, that boy could hit! He knocked one over the right-field fence and Nan spilled her popcorn she was cheering so hard!” Billy Brown could give shit one about baseball. “Granpop, why do you like to sit in the middle like that? You have to spread your legs.” “I’m giving my balls an airing,” Granpop says. “What balls?” Mary asks, and frowns when Billy sniggers. Corinne looks back over her shoulder. “That’s enough of that, Granpop,” she says. “We’re taking you to see your sister and we’re going in your old car as you requested, so—” “And it gobbles gas like you wouldn’t believe,” Frank says. Corinne ignores this; she has her eyes on the prize. “It’s a favor. So do me one and keep the nasty talk to yourself.” Granpop says he will, sorry, then bares his dentures at her in a leer that says he’ll do just about whatever the fuck he wants. “What balls?” Mary persists.
fuck a lifeguard with muscles, a tan, and a dazzling grin full of white teeth, but understands the difference between hope and fantasy. “Granpop,” Mary says, “why do they call it the Slide In Road? Who slid in?” “It’s Inn with two n’s,” Granpop says. “There used to be a fine one out here, even had a golf course, but it burned flat. Road’s gotten bad since the last time I drove it. Used to be as smooth as a baby’s bottom.” “When was that, Dad?” Frank asks. “When Ted Williams was still playing for the Red Sox? Because it sure isn’t up to much now.” They hit a big pothole. The Buick jounces. Frank grits his teeth. “Whoops-my-dear!” Granpop cries, and when Billy asks him what that means, Granpop tells him it’s what you say when you go over a bump like that. “Isn’t it, Frank? We used to say that all the time, didn’t we?” Mr. Brown doesn’t answer. “Didn’t we?” Frank doesn’t answer. His knuckles are white on the steering wheel. “Didn’t we?” “Yeah, Dad. Whoops my fucking dear.” “Frank,” Corinne says in a chiding tone. Mary giggles. Billy snickers. Granpop bares his dentures in another leer. We’re having such fun, Frank thinks. Gee, if this trip could only last longer. If only it could last forever. The trouble with the old bastard, Corinne thinks, is that he still gets a kick out of life, and people who get a kick out of life take a long time kicking the bucket. They like that old bucket. Billy returns back to his game. He’s reached level six. He has yet to make it to level seven. “Billy,” Frank says, “have you got bars on your phone?” Billy pauses the game and checks. “One, but it keeps flickering on and off.” “Great. Terrific.” Another washboard shivers through the Buick and Frank slows to fifteen. He wonders if he could change his name, ditch his family, and get a job at some little bank in an Australian town. Learn to call people mate. “Lookit, kids!” Granpop bawls. He’s leaning forward, and from this position is able to overload both his son’s right ear and his daughter-in-law’s left. They wince away in opposite directions, not just from the noise but from his breath. It smells like a small animal died in his mouth, shitting as it expired. He starts most mornings burping up bile and smacking his lips afterward, as if it’s tasty. Whatever’s going on inside him can’t be good and yet he exudes that horrible vitality. Sometimes, Corinne thinks, I believe I could kill him. I really do. Only I think the kids love him. Christ knows why, but they do.
The boy thinks he might faint. He wishes, God he wishes that he’d never
LOOKED DOWN O N D THAT
A
“Lookit there, right over there!” One arthritis-bunched finger stabs out between Mr. and Mrs. Brown. The horny talon at the tip almost rips into Mrs. Brown’s cheek. “That’s the old Slide Inn, what’s left of it! Right there! I been there once, you know. Me and my sister Nan and our folks. We had breakfast in our rooms!” The kids look dutifully at what remains of the Slide Inn: a few charred beams and a cellar hole. Mrs. Brown sees an old panel truck up there, parked in the weeds and sunflowers. It looks even older than Granpop’s Buick, the sides caked with rust. “Cool, Granpop,” Billy says, and once more returns to his game. “Cool, Granpop,” Mary says, and goes back to her funny book. The ruin of the hotel slips behind them. Frank wonders if perhaps the owners burned it down on purpose. For the insurance money. Because, really, who would want to come out here to spend a weekend or, God forbid, a honeymoon? Maine has plenty of beauty spots, but this isn’t one of them. This isn’t even a place you go through to get to somewhere else unless you can’t avoid it. And they could have. That’s the hair across his ass. “What if great-aunt Nan dies before we get there, Granpop?” Mary asks. She’s finished her comic book. The next one is Little Lulu, and she has no interest. Little Lulu looks like a turd in a dress. “Well, then we’ll turn around and go back,” Granpop says. “After the funeral, accourse.” The funeral. Oh God, the funeral. Frank hasn’t even thought about how she could be dead already. She might even pop off while they’re visiting, and then they would have to stay for the old bird’s funeral. He’s only brought a single change of clothes, and— “Look out!” Corinne shouts. “Stop!” He does, and just in time. There’s another plugged culvert and another washout at the top of the hill. Only this one goes all the way across. The crevasse looks at least three feet wide. God knows how deep it is. “What’s wrong, Dad?” Billy asks, pausing his game again. “What’s wrong, Dad?” Mary asks, stopping her search for another Archie funny book. “What’s wrong, Frankie?” Granpop asks. For a moment Frank Brown only sits with his hands at ten and two on the Buick’s big steering wheel, staring over the Buick’s long hood. They knew how to make ’em back in the old days, his father sometimes likes to opine. Those, of course, being the same old days when a selfrespecting woman wouldn’t go shopping without first cinching on a girdle and hooking up her stockings to a garter belt, the days when gay people went in fear of their lives and there was a penny candy called nigger babies avail-
HOLE.
able at every five-and-dime. Nothing like the old days, yessir! “Well, fuck your fucking shortcut,” he says. “You see where it’s gotten us.” “Frank,” Corinne starts, but he gets out before she can finish and stands staring at the place where the road has cracked open. Billy leans over Granpop’s lap to whisper in his sister’s ear: “Fuck your fucking shortcut.” She puts her hands over her mouth and snickers. That’s good. Granpop chuckles, which is even better. There are reasons why they love him. Corinne gets out and joins her husband in front of the Buick’s sneery grille. She looks into the crack in the road and sees nothing good. “What do you think we should do?” The kids join them, Mary on her mother’s side and Billy on his father’s. Then Granpop comes shuffling along in his big black shoes, looking cheerful. “I don’t know,” Frank says, “but we’re sure not going this way.” “Got to back up,” Granpop says. “Back all the way down to the old Slide Inn. You can turn around in the driveway. No chain.” “Jesus,” Frank says, and runs his hands through his thinning hair. “All right. When we get to the main road, we can decide whether to keep going to Derry or just head home.” Granpop looks outraged at the idea of retreat, but after scanning his son’s face—especially the red spots on his cheeks and dashed across his forehead—he keeps his trap shut. “Everybody back in,” Frank says, “but this time you sit on one side or the other, Dad. So I can see where I’m going without your head in the way.” If we had the Volvo, he thinks, I could use the backup camera. Instead we’ve got this oversized piece of stupidity. “I’ll walk,” Granpop says. “It’s not but two hundred yards.” “Me too,” Mary says, and Billy seconds that. “Fine,” Frank says. “Try not to fall down and break your leg, Dad. That would be the final touch to an absolutely wonderful day.” Granpop and the kids start back down the hill to the burned-out inn’s driveway, Mary and Billy holding the old man’s hands. Frank thinks it could be a Norman Rockwell painting: “And an Old Bastard Shall Lead Them.” He gets behind the Buick’s steering wheel. Corinne gets in the passenger seat. She puts a hand on his arm and gives him her sweetest smile, the one that says, I love you, you big strong man. Frank isn’t big, he’s not particularly strong, and there’s not much bloom left on the rose of their marriage (a bit wilted, that rose, petals going brown at the edges), but she needs to soothe him out of the red zone, and long experience has taught her how to do it.
He sighs and puts the Buick in reverse. “Try not to run them down,” she says, looking back over her shoulder. “Don’t tempt me,” Frank says, and begins to creep the Buick backward. The ditches are deep on either side of this narrow track, and if he drops the rear end into one of them, they will be Katie bar the door. Granpop and the kids reach the driveway before Frank is even halfway down the hill. The old man can see tracks pressed into the weeds. That panel truck looks like it’s been there for years, but Granpop guesses that’s not the case. Maybe someone decided to camp for a few days. It’s the only thing he can think of. There sure can’t be anything up there left to scavenge—any fool could see that. Donald Brown loves his son, and there are many things Frankie can do well (although Granpop can’t think of any right off the top of his head), but when it comes to backing up that Buick Estate wagon, he isn’t worth a dry popcorn fart. The rear end is wagging from side to side like the tail of an old tired dog. He almost dumps it in the left ditch, overcorrects, almost dumps it in the right one, and overcorrects again. “Boy, he’s not doing that very good,” Billy says. “Hush up,” Granpop says. “He’s doing fine.” “Can me and Mary go up and look at the old Slip Inn?” “Slide Inn,” Granpop says. “Sure, go on up for a minute. Run, and be ready to come back down. Your dad’s not in a very good temper.” The kids run up the overgrown drive. “Don’t fall in the cellar hole!” Granpop bawls after them, and is about to add that they should stay in sight, but before he can do it there’s a crunch, an abbreviated honk of the horn, and then his son cursing a blue streak. There. That’s one of the things he’s good at. Granpop turns from the scampering kids to see that, after managing to back all the way down the hill without going off the road, Frank’s ditched the wagon while trying to make a three-point turn. “Shut up, Frankie!” Granpop shouts. “Quit that cussing and turn off the motor before you stall it out!” He’s probably torn off half the tailpipe anyway, but there’s no point telling him that. Frank shuts off the motor and gets out. Corinne gets out too, but it’s a struggle. She tears an arc of weeds ahead of the door and finally manages. The car’s rear end is bumperdeep on the right side and the front is angled upward on the left. Frank walks to his father. “The ground gave way while I was turning!” “You cut it too tight,” the old man says. “That’s why only your right-side back wheel went in.”
edge of
the long hole
AND A WOMAN’S
l
THE KIDS ARE INSPECTING THE PANEL
truck at the top of the hill, close to where the Slide Inn once stood. The tire on the driver’s side is flat. While Mary goes around the front to look at the license plate (she’s always on the lookout for new ones, a game Granpop taught her), Billy walks to the edge of the long hole in the ground where the Inn once stood. He looks down and sees it’s full of dark water. Charred beams stick up. And a woman’s leg. The foot is clad in a bright blue sneaker. He stares, at first frozen, then backs away. “Billy!” Mary calls. “It’s a Delaware! My first Delaware!” “That’s right, Sweetie,” someone says. “Delaware it is.” Billy looks up. Two men are walking around the far end of the foundation hole. They are young. One is tall, with red hair that’s all oily and clumpy. He has a lot of pimples. The other one is short and fat. He’s got a bag in one hand that looks like Granpop’s old bowling bag, the one with ROLLING THUNDER on the side in fading blue letters. This one has no writing on it. Both men are smiling. Billy tries to smile back. He doesn’t know if it really looks like a smile or more like a kid trying not to scream, but he hopes it’s a smile. He doesn’t want these two men to know he was looking into the cellar hole. Mary comes around the side of the little white truck with its flat shoe. Her smile looks completely natural. Sure, why not? She’s a little girl, and as far as she knows, everybody likes little girls. “Hi,” she says. “I’m Mary. That’s my brother Billy. Our car went in the ditch.” She points down the hill, at where her father and Granpop are looking at the back end of the Buick and her mother is looking up at them. “Well, hi there, Mary,” says the redhead. “Good to meet you.” “You too, Billy.” The fat young man drops
He walks to the edge of the long in the ground where the Inn once stood. It’s full of dark water. Charred beams stick up.
“The ground gave way, I’m telling you!” “Cut it too tight.” “It gave way, goddammit!” Standing side by side as they are, Corinne sees how much they look alike, and although she’s seen the resemblance many times before, on this beshitted summer morning it comes as a revelation. She realizes that her husband is on time’s conveyor belt, and before it dumps him off into the boneyard, he will actually become his father, only without Granpop’s sour but occasionally engaging sense of humor. Sometimes she gets so tired. Of Frank, yes, but also of herself. Because is she any better? Of course not. She looks around where Billy and Mary were, then at Granpop. “Donald? Where are the kids?”
LEG.
a hand on Billy’s shoulder. The touch is startling, but Billy is too scared to jump. He holds on to his smile with all his might. “Yup, little problem there,” the fat young man says, peering down, and when Corinne raises one hand—tentatively—the fat one raises his in return. “Think we could help, Galen?” “I bet we could,” says the redhead. “We’ve got our own problem, as you see.” And he points to the flat tire. “No spare.” He bends down to Billy. His eyes are bright blue. There doesn’t seem to be anything in them. “Did you check out that hole, Billy? Mighty big one.” “No,” Billy says. He’s trying to sound natural, unconcerned by the question, but doesn’t know if he’s getting that in his voice or not. He thinks he might faint. He wishes, God he wishes, that he’d never looked down there. Blue sneaker. “I was afraid I might fall in.” “Smart kid,” Galen says. “Isn’t he, Pete?” “Smart,” the fat one agrees, and tosses Corinne another wave. Granpop is now looking up the hill, too. Frank is still staring at the Buick’s ditched rear end, shoulders slumped. “That skinny one your dad?” redheaded Galen asks Mary. “Yup, and that’s our granpop. He’s old.” “No shit,” Pete says. His hand is still on Billy’s shoulder. Billy looks around at it and sees what might be blood under the nail of Pete’s second finger. “Well, you know what?” Galen says—he’s leaning down, speaking to Mary, who’s smiling up at him. “I bet we could push that big old sumbitch right out of there. Then maybe your dad could give us a ride to someplace where there’s a garage. Get a new tire for our little truck.” “Are you from Delaware?” Mary asks. “Well, we been through there,” Pete says. Then he and Galen exchange a look and they laugh. “Let’s take a look at that car of yours,” Galen says. “Want me to carry you down, Sweetie?” “No, that’s okay,” Mary says, her smile growing slightly tentative. “I can walk.” “Your bro don’t talk much, does he?” Pete says. His hand, the one not holding the bowling bag (if that’s what it is), is still on Billy’s shoulder. “Usually you can’t keep him quiet,” Mary says. “His tongue is hung in the middle and runs at both ends, that’s what Granpop says.” “Maybe he saw something that scared him quiet,” Galen says. “Woodchuck or fox. Or something else.” “I didn’t see anything,” Billy says. He thinks he might start crying and tells himself he can’t, he can’t. “Well, come on,” Galen says. He takes Mary’s hand—this she allows—and they start down the overgrown driveway. Pete walks beside Billy with his hand still on Billy’s shoulder. It’s not
gripping, but Billy has an idea it would grip if he tried to run. He’s pretty sure the men saw him looking into that water-filled cellar hole. He has an idea they are in bad trouble here. “Hey, guys! Hello, ma’am!” Galen sounds as cheerful as a day in May. “Looks like you got a little trouble here. Want a hand?” “Oh, that would be wonderful,” Corinne says. “Terrific,” Frank says. “Damn road went out from under the car while I was turning around.” “Cut it too tight,” Granpop says. Frank gives him an ugly look, then turns back to the newcomers and gins up a grin. “I bet with you two men, we could push it right out of there.” “No doubt,” says Pete. Frank holds out his hand. “Frank Brown. This is my wife, Corinne, and my father, Donald.” “Pete Smith,” says the fat young man. “Galen Prentice,” says the redhead. There are handshakes all around. Granpop mutters, “Meetcha,” but hardly gives them a glance. He’s looking at Billy. “Ma’am,” Galen says, “why don’t you take the wheel? Me and Pete and your handsome hubby here can push while you steer.” “Oh, I don’t know,” Corinne says. “I could do it,” Granpop says. “It’s my car. From back in the old days. They really knew how to make ’em back then.” He sounds sulky, and Billy’s heart, which had risen a little, now sinks. He thought Granpop might have an idea about these men, but he doesn’t. “Gramps, I need you to do the heavy looking-on. I’m sure Frank’s missus can do the driving. Can’t you?” “I suppose . . .” Corinne trails off. Galen gives her a thumbs-up. “Sure you can! Kids, you stand aside with your gramps.” “He’s Granpop,” Mary says. “Not Gramps.” Galen grins. “Why sure,” he says. “Granpop it is. Granpop goes the weasel.” Corinne gets behind the wheel of the Buick and adjusts the seat forward. Billy can’t stop thinking of that leg sticking up out of the murky water in the cellar hole. The blue sneaker. Galen and Pete take spots on the left and right of the Buick’s canted rear deck. Frank is in the middle. “Start her up, missus!” Galen calls, and when she does, the three men lean forward, brace their feet, and place their hands on the station wagon’s flat back. “Okay! Give it some gas! Not a lot, just easy!” The motor revs. Granpop bends toward Billy. His breath is as sour as ever, but it’s Granpop’s breath and Billy doesn’t mind. “What’s wrong, kiddo?” “Dead lady,” Billy whispers back, and now the tears come. “Dead lady in that hole up there.”
“Little more!” fat Pete yells. “Goose the bitch!” Corinne gives it more gas and the men push. The Buick’s rear tires start to spin, then take hold. The Estate wagon comes up onto the road. “Whoa, whoa, whoa!” Galen shouts. Billy has a sudden confused wish that his mother would just drive away and leave them, that she would go and be safe. But she stops, puts the Buick in park, and gets out, holding down the hem of her dress with
the heel of her palm. “Easy-peasy-Japaneezy!” Galen cries. “Back on the road and good as new! Only we’ve still got a little problem. Don’t we, Pete?” “Sure do,” Pete says. “Flat tire on our truck and no spare. Picked up a nail when we druv up there, I guess.” He puffs out his stubbled cheeks, now shiny with sweat, and makes a flat-tire sound: Pwsshhh! He put his bag down to push, but now he picks it up. And unzips it. “Damn,” Frank says. “No spare, huh?” “Don’t that suck?” Galen says.
75 O C TOB E R / NOV E M B E R 2020
“What were you doing up there?” Corinne asks. She’s left the Buick running, the door open. She looks at her husband, who’s smiling his big banker’s smile, then at her two children. Her girl looks okay, but Billy’s face is white as wax. “Campin’,” Pete says. His hand has disappeared into his bag that isn’t a bowling bag. “Huh,” Frank says. “That’s . . .” He doesn’t finish, maybe doesn’t know how to finish, and no one seems to know how to start the conversation (continued on page 100)
IS BECOMING
MATTHEW RHYS
PHOTOGRAPHS BY SEBASTIAN KIM _ STYLING BY NICK SULLIVAN
CHARACTER
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MATTHEW RHYS
($358) by the Frye Company.
The actor has built a résumé that assures viewers that whatever he’s in must be good. This year, he’s poured those efforts into being a dad—and restoring an old boat.
78 O C TOB E R / NOV E M B E R 2020
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E V E RY F R I DAY N I G H T A R O U N D D I N N E R T I M E ,
the actor Matthew Rhys conducts a ritual in which he mixes himself a vodka martini. He prefers it with olives, and sometimes the big hit of salt from making it lousy with olive juice. On the rare occasion that he’s out of vodka, Rhys will opt for gin, but he’s cautious: There’s a reason it’s called “mother’s ruin.” It’s not his first drink of the week. In the past several months, Rhys and his partner, the actor Keri Russell, who joins him for this languid ceremony, have taken to drinking Pomerol, a merlot from the Bordeaux region. But the martini is a mile marker—another week of this god-awful year of pandemic and death and turmoil in the books. “I try to keep this bizarre, futile sense of Oh, it’s Friday night at 6:00 P.M.; I’ll have a martini. The fucking week is done,” he says. Rhys, forty-five, is Welsh, so everything he says has a lyrical lilt, as if Dylan Thomas (minus about one million packs of unfiltered Camels) were telling you about the intimate details of his life. He’s also grown a beard, a big one, starting from the very early days of this pandemic. It lends itself in a perverse way to the type of actor Rhys has turned into. He’s come to embody characters who are wrestling with disillusionment and searching for hope. A Soviet spy who falls in love with his suburban American lifestyle (The Americans). The man who leaked the Pentagon Papers (The Post). An Esquire magazine writer in the throes of an existential crisis (A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood). A lowlife drunk riddled with PTSD (Perry Mason). It’s the kind of résumé that assures viewers that whatever Rhys chooses to be in must be good. There are also echoes of the American experience in these roles, which Rhys acknowledges. “Growing up, I think we always associated America with hope—the pictures, the TV shows: Anything is possible, justice is always served, and therefore there’s hope,” he says. “I’m not so sure these days.” For nearly everyone in Hollywood, including Rhys, 2020 has been quiet. Filming for HBO’s Perry Mason wrapped in late January, just before everything shut down. In March, Rhys, Russell, and their three children—one together, two from her previous marriage—headed north from their home in Brooklyn to a house in the Catskill Mountains. They remained in the mountains for six months, hence the beard. As it was for most families, the early part of quarantine was chaos for the Rhys-Russells, as they adapted, practically overnight, to homeschooling. “We had three kids on three screens, and it was just this perennial bargaining to keep them there for their allotted time,” he says. “Then school finished, and we felt this great sense of freedom.” There were scripts to read and Zoom calls about potential projects, but much of the time was given over to exploring the outdoors. “I feel like I’ve done my greatest canon of work in the Catskill Mountains, as I’ve played the
part of more superheroes during the day than anyone I know,” he says. “To stave off screens or boredom, you’re always trying to come up with something new or imaginative. What small house can we build to catch a fairy?” Rhys is an attentive dad. At one point his four-year-old son interrupted our interview. “Dada.” “Yes?” “I said a bad word.” “That’s okay.” “I said ‘shit.’ ” “Okay, well, let’s not say it again.” He also does the bargaining with his partner that all dads know. Time has always been a precious resource for parents, but in the pandemic, with no break from the onslaught of requests from children, it has become an even rarer gem. So parents negotiate with each other. If I distract the kids for a while, can I have some time for myself? “I’ll say to Keri: ‘I’ll take them to the lake for a couple hours,’ which was basically just a precursor to saying, ‘If I take them out of this house for two hours, can I please have maybe an hour and a half, or two hours, for myself to go run up a hill?’ ” Now back in Brooklyn, and with Hollywood still figuring out how to make entertainment amid an out-of-control pandemic, Rhys is settling into his role as a Matthew Rhys character, minus the tragic backstory. A Matthew Rhys character for the rest of us. His agenda includes filming the second season of Perry Mason next year, seeing the kids through another school year, and finishing the renovation of his ninety-year-old boat. Not in that order. About that boat. It’s from the 1930s, and there are only four like it in the world. The most famous of them is named Pilar, which Ernest Hemingway acquired with the help of Esquire magazine. (Esquire’s founding editor lent Hemingway money to purchase the boat, then used that as leverage to persuade him to write for the magazine; it now sits in dry dock outside Havana.) Rhys’s boat is named Rabbit; he bought it three years ago and is nearly done restoring it. “I’ve had more setbacks than the Democrats,” he says of his shipwrighting efforts. With some luck, and a few more weeks of hard work, Rabbit will be seaworthy by the early fall. He has considered making it a charter, complete with a 1930s Hemingway experience with gramophones and cocktails. Rhys might even serve the drinks, dyeing his beard white so it becomes Hemingwayesque. “So, I’m telling Keri,” he explains, “ ‘Look, this beard is now a part of the charter experience. I don’t have a choice about shaving it. I have to grow it . . . in earnest.’ ” He pauses for a moment, allowing the full weight of his Hemingway pun to land. “She thinks that’s a terrible fucking joke.” —Michael Sebastian
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“I’VE HAD MORE SETBACKS THAN THE DEMOCRATS,” HE SAYS OF HIS SHIPWRIGHTING EFFORTS.
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84 O C TOB E R / NOV E M B E R 2020
PRODUCED BY BENJAMIN DOBSON.
F O R S TO R E I N F O R M AT I O N S E E PA G E 1 0 2 .
THIS MOMENT
IN TIME Tudor Black Bay Fifty-Eight Navy Blue For Tudor, the blue thing started in the 1960s, when the brand debuted its first dive watch with a blue dial and bezel. It continued with the Submariners supplied to the French navy, or Marine Nationale, until the mid-’80s, the color of which serves as the inspiration for the blue hue on the new Black Bay Fifty-Eight Navy Blue. The name and the 39mm case, on the other hand, come from an earlier Sub, from (you guessed it) 1958. BLACK BAY FIFTY-EIGHT NAVY BLUE ($3,375) BY TUDOR; TUDORWATCH.COM.
Winter’s latest analog wonders offer a light at the end of the tunnel— and your sl ee v e
THIS THIS MOMENT MOMENT
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photographs by jeffrey westbrook
Panerai Luminor Marina Goldtech While divers have been big news in watchmaking this year, it’s divers all day every day for Panerai. The maker started by supplying big, beefy watches to the Italian navy in the 1930s, and the no-nonsense display and unique case shape—both derived from those early pieces—are what still appeal to this day. The scale, of course, is what gets it noticed on your wrist. But the gold in this all-new version, with its blue sunray dial, will certainly help.
Breitling Endurance Pro First there were gold and silver. Then steel. Now a brave breed of watchmaker has started experimenting with truly new-age stuff like Breitlight, a polymer amalgam that’s 3.3 times lighter than titanium (which makes it nearly six times lighter than steel). Couple that with a “thermocompensated” quartz movement
“ Iƭve been th in k in g ab ou t th is, Mr. H an d. I f Iƭm h er e a nd you ’re here, d oesn’t th at ma ke i t our t ime? Cer t a in ly, the re’s n oth in g wr on g wit h a l itt le fea st on ou r t i me. ” —S picoli , J.
LUMINOR GOLDTECH 44MM ($22,900) BY PANERAI; PANERAI.COM.
Montblanc 1858 Chronograph One of the dilemmas of playing to the vintage trend in watches is, how old do you go? Fauxtina, the artificial pre-aging of a watch to give it the look of a well-worn beater, gets tired very fast. Instead, Montblanc draws on the very real history of the watchmaker Minerva, which was founded in 1858 before being acquired by Montblanc, and artfully folded into its horological offerings, in 2006. Take the 1858 automatic here: While the dial harks back to the 1930s, when Minerva was known for its excellent chronographs, the deep-blue color, ceramic bezel, and calfskin strap give it a distinctly modern demeanor. 1858 AUTOMATIC CHRONOGRAPH ($4,500) BY MONTBLANC; MONTBLANC.COM.
in, A. comes soon enough.” —Einste “I never think of the future—it
“TIME, HE’S WAITING IN THE WINGS / HE SPEAKS OF SENSELESS THINGS / HIS SCRIPT IS YOU AND ME, BOY.” —BOWIE, D.
Zenith Defy Classic Carbon
DEFY CLASSIC CARBON ($19,500) BY ZENITH; ZENITH.COM.
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Bell & Ross BR 05 Skeleton Blue
Why combine a mechanical watch and a classic arcade fighting game? Why not? Seiko has a knack for making really good watches that are accessible in both price and attitude, and a special six-part collection released in September features radical rethinks of the fan-favorite 5 Sports inspired by characters from the long-running Street Fighter series. This one’s based on Zangief, the burly wrestler, with his red trunks and red-and-yellow wristbands. You might notice the resemblance.
Bell & Ross found a winning formula with its squared-off, aviation-inspired design, but that hasn’t stopped the company from getting creative with the concept at times. Case in point: the new skeletonized BR 05, with a clear blue dial showing the BR-CAL.322 movement beneath and all the way through to the other side. Skeletonizing is the watch world’s version of showing your knickers, so it’s a real test of skill to pass muster and achieve the perfect harmony of function and design required.
5 SPORTS STREET FIGHTER V ($440) BY SEIKO; SEIKOUSA.COM.
BR 05 SKELETON BLUE BY BELL & ROSS; BELLROSS.COM.
“ ‘WHAT A CURIOUS FEELING!’ SAID ALICE; ‘I MUST BE SHUTTING UP LIKE A TELESCOPE.’ ” —CARROLL, L.
Seiko 5 Sports Street Fighter V
TAG Heuer Carrera When it was introduced in 1963, the Heuer Carrera Chronograph bridged the gap between the gentlemanly chronographs that preceded it and the chunkier ones that followed. The new Carrera is inspired by the clean design of that original Carrera (ref. 2447), with a stripped-down display and a focus on visual polish over bells and whistles. Multiple versions, all with the in-house Calibre Heuer 02 movement, are available. But for our money, a steel bracelet and blue dial perfectly capture the style’s retromodern appeal.
“
M TI
E
IS
L D I NG T HO N’
US / T
S . ” —BY RN E IME ISN’T AFTER U , D.
CARRERA CHRONOGRAPH ($5,350) BY TAG HEUER; TAGHEUER.COM.
Over the past two decades, suicide rates have shot up everywhere in America. As public-health crisis, a group of parents and activists in the East Valley of Arizona are
the kids are not all right
researchers test new theories to better understand this massive, mostly disregarded working to stop the spread of self-destruction among the teenagers in their community.
by MATTHEW SHAER photographs by ADRIANA ZEHBRAUSKAS
Lorie Warnock holds a portrait of her son, Mitch. She’s been advocating for suicide awareness in the East Valley since 2016.
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MARCUS WHEELER LIVED IN A SUN-BLEACHED TRAILER JUST OUT-
side of Tempe, Arizona, but for a long time, he told classmates his home was actually across the street, in an upscale apartment complex. Once the lie was exposed, no one blamed him. How could they? His friends had supportive families, tidy suburban lives. Marcus had neither. His estranged mother lived in the Philippines and hadn’t spoken to her son in more than a decade, and his father was a long-haul trucker who thought his son would benefit from a crash course in independence. Marcus was eighteen and alone. Or mostly alone: He had a girlfriend, friends, and the other runners on the Corona del Sol High School track team. One morning in early 2015, Wheeler arrived at school wearing a bright yellow shirt emblazoned with the logo of Central Arizona College, which had offered him an athletic scholarship. His smile was toothy and broad. Wes Jensen, a teammate of Wheeler’s, could see how proud his friend was. But he also knew Marcus was going through some stuff. He’d confessed to Jensen that he’d recently come close to killing himself but that another friend had talked him out of it at the last minute. Jensen hadn’t been sure how to respond. Marcus had promised that that part of his
the school. His phone buzzed. A text from his girlfriend: “It’s Marcus.” Jensen didn’t understand. Why would anyone have Marcus at gunpoint? Then it clicked— his comments about suicide, the mess with his girlfriend, his expulsion from the track team. Jensen made a dash for the door, certain that if he could just talk to Marcus, even for a moment, he wouldn’t go through with it. He got as far as the door before his classmates piled onto him and dragged him back. Around 9:00 A.M., Amy Gallagher, a Tempe police officer assigned to Corona del Sol, entered the breezeway and attempted to get Marcus to lower the gun from his temple. “I can help you. I can help,” she repeated. “No, you can’t,” Marcus replied. He swayed back and forth, glanced down one more time at his phone, then pulled the trigger. BECAUSE THE BREEZEWAY WAS STILL CONSIDERED AN ACTIVE CRIME
scene, twenty-seven hundred students were routed out another side of the school. Among them was a sophomore named Mitch Warnock. Stocky and strong, Warnock, sixteen, was one of the top pole vaulters in the state; he’d competed alongside Wheeler on the Corona track team and had looked up
life was behind him, so Jensen had let the matter drop. In the spring, Marcus was kicked off the track team for violating its code of conduct—he’d been playing a taglike game called Assassins, and another student had been injured. Had it been a matter of just losing his scholarship, Marcus might have been able to cope. But around the same time, his relationship with his girlfriend fell apart. Marcus, already in a precarious emotional state, took the breakup poorly. “Help,” he tweeted on May 11. “I want my life 3 months ago back.” The next morning, he issued a final warning: “There is going to be a suicide in the school right now.” That morning, George Sanchez, a biology teacher, was returning to his classroom with a stack of photocopies when a student alerted him that there was someone in the breezeway with a gun. Sanchez dropped the photocopies, called 911, and helped clear the area. All the while, he kept his eyes trained on Marcus, who was clutching a handgun. “I can’t take it anymore,” the boy was repeating. “I just can’t.” There was a look in his eyes that Sanchez would never forget. As they waited for the police to arrive, administrators ordered the school into lockdown. In a classroom on the second floor, Wes Jensen picked up his phone. Local news stations were reporting that a man with a gun had entered
Marcus Wheeler had an athletic scholarship to Arizona Central College. “It was absolutely amazing to watch him run,” said track teammate Wes Jensen. “He was such a pure athlete, you know?”
to the older boy. “I knew Marcus’s death was hitting him hard, like it was hitting all of us hard,” a friend of Mitch’s told me. “But we didn’t really get into it that morning, because that wasn’t how Mitch was. For his whole life, he put out this image of having his shit together.” Warnock wasn’t any more forthcoming with his mother, Lorie, an English teacher at a nearby high school. “I remember he had this shocked look on his face, and I sat him down and said, ‘Mitch, what do you think about what happened? What do you think about dying by suicide?’ ” Lorie told me. “He said, ‘Oh, no. That would be the worst thing. That would be’—how did he put it? He said, ‘That would be giving up the most precious thing, which is your life.’ ” In 2015, the United States was in the midst of what a Newsweek cover story declared a “suicide epidemic.” Nearly every demographic was affected: Black people, white people, Latinx people, and especially Native people, whose communities consistently have the highest rates in the nation. Young people, too, like Marcus Wheeler. By the year’s end, more than forty-four thousand Americans had killed themselves—an average of one suicide every twelve minutes. In the weeks and months after Marcus Wheeler’s suicide, Lorie Warnock grew concerned about her son. It was obvious to her, and to his friends, that Mitch was more traumatized by Wheeler’s death than he’d initially let on. “I think in Mitch’s mind, Marcus had escaped. He’d got out of his pain,” Tyler Stolworthy, a friend of the two boys’, told me. “To Mitch, that was a green light.” Although there was a prayer circle for Marcus in the aftermath of his death and a balloon-release ceremony on the football field—and although counselors were made available to the student body—many students wanted more. They felt as if the school was moving too quickly toward normalcy. “It was just, ‘This happened, let’s move on,’ ” Stolworthy said. “That was the mentality that everybody had, I guess.” In the fall of 2015, Mitch was summoned to a meeting at school. The message he got was that if his academic performance didn’t improve, he shouldn’t expect to get into college. Devastated, Mitch transferred all his hopes for college admission onto a pole-vaulting scholarship. To help manage the stress, he started drinking. One evening the following school year, Mitch showed up intoxicated to a Corona football game, barely able to stand. “I was like, ‘Yo, man, are you cool?’ ” a friend recalled. “Because the security guard at the gate had noticed how drunk he was, just by his actions.” When the guard pulled Warnock aside,
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R O N C E TO N ( W H E E L E R )
“I just thought, Something extremely bad is happening here. This is an epidemic. And we’d all better start paying attention.”
“But I thought, What’s the exact strategy here? Are we going to be able to do something before we lose another kid?” McPherson had spent more than twenty years in education, first as a high school teacher, then as a middle school guidance counselor, then as a vice principal, while raising her four girls. Later, she began advising local schools on policy and curriculum. She’d worked closely in recent years with the Tempe Union High School District; she’d attended the meeting where Lorie Warnock spoke and had made it a point to introduce herself. Warnock, in turn, asked McPherson to accompany her to a subsequent school meeting— as moral support, but also because she knew McPherson shared her frustration with the way the suicides were being handled. “In my mind,” McPherson told me, “it could have gone a very different way.” Over the next few weeks, McPherson and Lorie Warnock began brainstorming about how to make sure both students and faculty were heard—and to ensure teachers had the training and resources they needed to recognize signs of mental distress in high school students. In the process, they learned something chilling: Warnock and Wheeler hadn’t been the only students at Corona del Sol to commit suicide. Two others had taken their own lives since Marcus’s suicide, including a third member of the track team. “I just thought, Yeah, something extremely bad is happening here,” McPherson told me. “This is an epidemic. And we’d all better start paying attention.” THAT SUICIDE MIGHT BE TRANS-
mittable is not a new idea: History is rife with episodes of apparently interconnected self-harm, such as the deaths of seventy children in a single Tyler Hedstrom (far right) had recently gone on tour with a rock band from Phoenix. To keep his spirits up after a Moscow school district in less than series of setbacks, his brother, Alex (above left), had reminded him that the band had invited him back. “I’ve met probably twenty families that went through what we went through,” said their mother, Sheila (above right). two years, starting in 1908, or the drowning suicides of 150 residents of Budapest in 1928. But it is only recently that scientists have confirmed that in certain circumstances, suihe exploded—Corona del Sol had a zero-tolerance policy on drinking on school cidal ideation can travel from person to person like a virus. property, and he faced suspension. “I’m going to kill myself,” he said. “It’s One of the first studies on clustering, as the phenomenon is known, was over. It’s over! My scholarships are going to be taken away.” The police were carried out in 1985 by the CDC in two towns in Texas where fourteen teens summoned, and Mitch’s parents were called. When Lorie Warnock and her had died by suicide over a brief period. To map the connections between the husband, Tim, arrived, they were told what Mitch had said. “Looking at it retdeaths, the researchers designed a case-control study, an epidemiological roactively, he was repeating the same verbiage that Marcus had used before tool traditionally used to figure out why certain people succumb to a disease he died,” Lorie said. “Almost exactly the same, like he’d internalized it.” while others prove resistant. Several patterns emerged. Many of those who’d After they got home, Lorie walked in on Mitch attempting to take his own died had experienced family instability, substance-abuse problems, or a prolife. She managed to convince him to spend the night at a psychiatric hospipensity for violence. And several had been connected: Ten victims had been tal. He was released the next day and seemed to be doing all right, but about aware of the recent suicides in the community; six had personally known a week after that, in mid-October, Warnock attempted suicide again. This another victim; and four had known two or more victims. time, Lorie wasn’t there to stop him. Some of the interventions the CDC researchers proposed were rudimenIn December, at a meeting of the Tempe Union High School District’s govtary and centered on limiting “romanticized” or “sensational” media covererning board, Lorie Warnock addressed the group. “I was a mess,” she told age. As the research on clusters has developed, so too has our ability to me. “I was like Skeletor. I dragged myself up there and I said, ‘I am Lorie Warrespond to the phenomenon in more nuanced and effective ways. Scientists nock and I am Mitch’s mom.’ I unleashed. I just went off.” She was upset about now understand, for example, that most suicide victims later determined to her son’s 2015 meeting and shocked that administrators hadn’t been more be part of a cluster are young men (as is true of nonclustered suicides, too). proactive about outreach to students in the wake of Marcus Wheeler’s death. They often have a history of mental illness or self-harm. Transmission—a term (“The response to what happened to Marcus was beyond inappropriate,” used frequently in the academic literature on clusters—tends to occur in Lorie told me.) Soon half the room was crying with her. The board said it would continue to investigate the issue—“listening a lot . . . spaces like schools, where, as a 2019 paper in The Lancet titled “Clustering of Suicides in Children and Adolescents” notes, “social cohesion contribut[es] learning a lot,” as the superintendent described it to me. But to Lorie and to the spread of ideas and attitudes.” many other mothers in the Tempe area, that wasn’t enough. “Yes, it was “If you rewound the clock a few decades, the question was ‘Are suicide encouraging that people were paying attention, that they were saying they clusters actually real? Do they exist beyond chance?’ ” Madelyn Gould, a psywanted to help,” Katey McPherson, a resident of nearby Chandler, told me.
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chiatric epidemiologist who coauthored the 2019 paper, told me. “Well, we now know that yes, they’re real, and they’re a public-health problem. So now the focus, for a lot of us, is continuing to understand risk factors”—which, in turn, allows counselors or teachers to gauge which of their students may be at risk of taking their own lives—“and figuring out the manner, or mechanism, that clusters can grow.” A groundbreaking paper published this year in the Journal of Adolescent Health provides some of the most compelling evidence for how those mechanisms operate. For the paper, researchers surveyed students in a community in northeastern Ohio where a suspected cluster of teen suicides had grown to twelve deaths. Of the students who had posted on social media about the suicides, 23 percent reported having suicidal ideation, and 15 percent went on to attempt suicide. “Suicide interventions,” the researchers noted, “could benefit from efforts to mitigate potential negative effects of social media and promote prevention messages.” To put it another way, social media can be corrosive—it can inspire fear or mimicry—and should be balanced with community outreach. Recently, Madelyn Gould and several of her colleagues published a set of “key messages” for how to address suicide clusters. One of their recommendations was to respond proactively, with “bereavement support, provision of help for susceptible individuals, engaging with the media proactively, and population approaches to support and prevention.” When several teens died by suicide in Palo Alto, California, in 2014, this was the precise advice that the local schools’ superintendent at the time, Max McGee, followed. “I’m not an epidemiologist,” McGee told me recently. “But I thought, Okay, this is literally contagious. And I’d spoken to people like Dr. Gould and Dr. Joshi”—Shashank Joshi, a professor of adolescent psychiatry at nearby Stanford University—“and my feeling was that we shouldn’t wait for a miracle cure. We should take community action, and do it quickly.” He encouraged the local newspapers to avoid publishing details of how the children had died; he arranged weeks of focus groups and counseling for all students. When a new death occurred—there were four in all—he emailed the entire student body and their parents, and instituted a relaxed class schedule. “And this was very important. Maybe the most important: As soon as we heard about a suicide, we identified the kid’s friend group and their siblings and we contacted them right away, to check in on them, to talk to them,” McGee said. “Because I knew from the research that these were the people who were going to be most at risk.” Nationwide, the crisis is far from diminished. By one estimate, as many as 13.5 percent of all suicides in the United States are now connected to clusters. And in recent years, fresh outbreaks have been identified in a range of settings: rural Appalachia, the Mormon enclaves of Salt Lake City. But recent research suggests a large number occur among the middle class, in quiet suburbs with good public schools. Places, in other words, like the East Valley of Arizona. THE EAST VALLEY EXTENDS FROM THE EASTERN LIP OF PHOENIX
through Tempe and out to the ragged volcanic rock of the San Tan Mountains. Comprising more than a million residents and several municipalities, the East Valley nonetheless feels like a single, small town: It shares governments and a newspaper and a population connected through community organizations and sports leagues and strip-mall corridors of Starbucks and fast-food joints. “It sounds corny, but it’s a place where everyone at least knows of each other,” one East Valley teen told me. “If you’re a kid growing up in Chandler, you know people in Gilbert, in Tempe.” Which to many onlookers helped explain the increase in adolescent suicides statewide—from 2009 to 2015, the rate among Arizona teenagers had risen by 81 percent. By May 2017, two years after Marcus Wheeler died, ten teens in the area had ended their own lives, including three in Tempe, two in neighboring Gilbert, and three in Chandler. “There was no doubt in my mind—zero doubt—that this was a cluster,” said Max McGee, whom Katey McPherson invited to counsel the school boards of the East Valley on the steps Palo Alto had taken. “And it seemed to me like there was a lot of overlap with
what I’d seen in Palo Alto. The pressures of school, of getting into college, of the performance arms race, as I call it.” Any roadblock to that success, such as trouble with the police, could send a child spiraling. To McPherson and Lorie Warnock, the obvious answer was to begin training teachers and educators on prevention techniques. To be proactive, and to get out ahead of the problem before it could worsen. Not everyone was willing to listen. “You’d get superintendents saying, ‘Suicide has always been a thing. We’re just seeing a bit of an escalation,’ ” McPherson told me. “Then you had some outright freaking defensive administrators and teachers. But we didn’t shut up. Not because we were being rude but because the kids kept coming forward and saying, ‘The adults aren’t listening. The adults don’t understand.’ ”
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Queen Creek, at the southern end of the East Valley, is the fastest-growing community in Arizona. The desert town also has reckoned with a cluster of teen suicides.
In 2017, Tatum Stolworthy, a Corona student and Tyler’s sister, founded a peer-support organization known as Aztec Strong. Tatum believed the best approach to dealing with suicide was through destigmatization—to talk about the issue, to bring it into the light. McPherson, supported by Stolworthy’s community efforts, and Lorie Warnock approached a state legislator, Mitzi Epstein, with a request that she sponsor a bill mandating suicide-prevention training for all educators in the state. The bill failed. McPherson and Warnock pressed forward, taking meetings with every city official and school administrator in the East Valley who would hear them out. “I became, unfortunately, ‘Katey the Suicide Lady,’ ” McPherson told me. Obituaries for suicide victims rarely list the cause of death. Using the connec-
tions she’d made across the East Valley school system, McPherson started collecting information. “I’d get a link to a social-media post and there’d be a picture of a student who died and hundreds of comments—kids going, ‘I just lost another friend.’ Or ‘I’ve lost three friends this year,’ ” McPherson told me. “There were just so many of them, the suicides, and they had occurred pretty closely together.” She created a chart on her laptop to keep track. The names on the list weren’t just high schoolers. They were recent graduates; they were grade schoolers. One evening last fall, I had dinner with Joey, twelve, an East Valley resident, and his father, Mike. (At their request, I’ve used pseudonyms.) Joey was slight and brown-haired and shy; he spoke haltingly, his gaze trained mostly downward. A few years earlier, he told me, he’d met another student whom
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I’ll call Chris. Neither boy had many friends, and they’d formed an instant bond. “We used to gather acorns in little jars and throw them at the playground walls,” Joey said. “You know, dumb stuff like that.” “It wasn’t dumb,” Mike interjected. “You were nine.” Joey shrugged and flashed a half smile. “Still,” he said. Chris and Joey never saw each other outside of school—Chris lived with his custodial guardian, a distant relative, and the man wanted him home immediately after last period every day. Fifth grade was hard for Chris: He was bullied; he performed poorly on tests. “I remember him telling me about his problems . . . how he wanted to kill himself,” Joey said. “But I didn’t know what suicide was. What it meant.” “Did he?” I asked. “I know for a fact he did,” Joey said, “because his dad had killed himself in prison.” Whether Chris knew about the deaths of his peers around the East Valley is unclear. But as Mike recalled, “This thing for a couple years was such a big talking point in our schools and in our area. It was on the front page all the time. All the time.” In 2016, after a class trip to a roller-skating rink, Chris and Joey were hanging out on their school’s playground. “We were throwing acorns at the wall,” Joey told me. “The bell rang, and I said, ‘See you later.’ Typically, Chris said ‘See you later’ first, but that time he didn’t say anything at all. I think he just didn’t want to lie to me.” The next day, Mike got a text from another parent. Chris had taken his own life. “We spent hours of trying to come to terms with it,” Mike said. “Me talking through it with Joey and Joey being like, ‘Oh, it must be someone with the same name. It can’t be my Chris.’ ” “I remember that,” Joey said. “It was like, first confusion, then disbelief, then more confusion and sadness. Then anger. Just half a second of anger.” “What were you angry about?” I asked. “I was angry at his family. I was angry at Chris.” “Why Chris?” “Because he should have known how much I’d miss him.” “How do you feel these days?” “I mean, I can get on with my life, and it’s not 24/7, but I think about him—” Joey stopped and turned away so I wouldn’t see the tear slip down his cheek. “I’m better,” he said. WHEN TYLER HEDSTROM WAS TWO, HIS FATHER, SCOTT, DIED OF
cancer, which meant that he was both a stranger and a mythical figure to his son. Ghost and mirror. Everyone was always telling Tyler how much he resembled his dad, and as he got older, he saw it himself, in the grainy photographs his mother, Sheila, kept around their East Valley home. Sheila didn’t say it, but Tyler acted like Scott, too. He was sensitive. He felt things deeply but held
Community organizer Katey McPherson has tracked the suicides among East Valley teenagers since Marcus Wheeler’s death. There are forty-seven names on her list.
everything inside. “Freshman year, he took a writing workshop, and all his stories had cancer in them,” Sheila said. “I realized that he had an abandonment thing. There was a fear of something horrible happening again.” Sheila and her second husband, Greg, lived with Tyler and his older brother, Alex, in Queen Creek, a desert town at the southern end of the East Valley. Thirty years ago, Queen Creek was a railroad outpost surrounded by sand. But an influx of tech companies, the creation of a regional airport, and the presence of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints helped make the place the fastest-growing community in the state. (Sheila and Greg are not Mormon; they’ve since moved away from Queen Creek.) In July 2017, about a week before the start of the school year, Tyler and a friend were parked on a neighborhood street when an officer pulled up, searched their car, and found a small bag of marijuana. “The police’s attitude was ‘He’s not under arrest, but we are going to turn the drugs over to the DA and see what the DA wants to do,’ ” Greg told me. Alex tried to console his brother by reminding him how much he had going for him: Earlier that month, Ty had gone on tour as the drummer for Anarbor, a rock band from Phoenix; he’d been invited to join them again. And the upcoming school year was an opportunity for a reset. “That calmed him down,” Alex said. But then, he added, Tyler and his girlfriend broke up. To Sheila, who is now friends with Lorie Warnock, the similarities between Tyler and Marcus Wheeler are obvious: Both boys had recently gotten in trouble, which they worried might threaten their future. And they had dealt with the death or the absence of a parent. “I’ve probably met twenty families that went through what we went through,” Sheila told me, and “that is the one common thread I’ve seen. I’d estimate nine out of ten victims had lost a parent.” But in the summer of 2017, Sheila hadn’t yet met the Warnocks or read up on Marcus Wheeler’s death. And she was unaware of two additional teen suicides in Queen Creek. “Tyler never talked to us about suicide,” Sheila told me. “He didn’t talk about self-harm; he didn’t talk about the other kids.” She swallowed a sob. “To us, he presented as he always was.” Alex Hedstrom suspects that his brother was affected by the growing number of suicides far more than he let on. “I think a seed was planted,” he told me. When Alex was younger, he’d gone through a hard time and briefly contemplated suicide. “But I wasn’t just thinking about just killing myself,” he told me. “I would think specifics, and those specifics came from influences, from different—” he paused and waved his hands in the air. “Basically, from inspiration from shit I’d seen before. You read about it a lot, you hear people talk about it at school, and maybe it gets that much easier to think about killing yourself, you know?” One evening in July, Tyler posted a despondent message to his finsta, or fake Instagram, the account he reserved for posting the kind of content he didn’t feel comfortable sharing under his own name. I’m a loser, he wrote. I’m a piece of shit. The next morning was an ordinary one for the family. Sheila and Greg went to a Diamondbacks game with her parents, and Tyler had an orthodontist appointment. (Alex was living with his girlfriend at the time.) When they returned from the game, Sheila and Greg were surprised to find the house quiet: no thrash of a drum kit, no music leaking out from under Ty’s door. “I had these big plans that we’d all go out to a family dinner,” Sheila told me. “I’d get some food in Tyler, and he’d feel better. It would all be better.” Instead, bounding up the stairs, she saw her son’s body. “I sometimes do the ‘what if’ thing. Like, ‘I’m a nurse. Maybe I could have somehow saved Ty,’ ” she told me. “But the truth is, as soon as I walked into that room, I knew there was no saving him.” ONE OF THE COMMUNITY LEADERS TRACKING THE UPTICK IN TEEN
suicides in the East Valley was Joronda Montaño, the program director at NotMYKid, a nonprofit that provides counseling to high schoolers in the area. Montaño was one of the first people to identify the deaths as a cluster. Montaño told me that “statistically speaking, this area has long had high teen suicide rates. But it’s only pretty recently that you had all these kids looking at each other, saying, ‘What exactly is going on?’ ” I asked what students had said 98 O C TOB E R / NOV E M B E R 2020
Rudy Bencomo’s mother, Deanna, and niece, Aria, hold his graduation photo. Deanna is now involved in a suicide-prevention group cofounded by Katey McPherson. Aria was close with her uncle, and he often appears in her dreams.
to her about the response from their teachers and school administrators. “One of the things that’s come out is that they don’t feel that the adults care. And that has everything to do with the way that it’s handled when a suicide happens. From their perspective, it’s, ‘Oh, you don’t want us to talk about it.’ ” In August 2017, a few days after Sheila found her son’s body, another Queen Creek mother, Deanna Bencomo, received a call from the school. Her son, Rudy, hadn’t shown up to class that morning. Deanna was alarmed. Earlier that summer, Rudy, who struggled with anxiety and depression, had checked into a psychiatric hospital after intentionally cutting himself. “It’s time to tell my story,” he’d tweeted upon his return. “On June 15, I attempted suicide. I went to a behavioral hospital and this why I’ve been gone for a min.” He con-
After Rudy’s death, his classmates attempted to erect memorials inside the high school—for Rudy and for the others who’d been lost to suicide. Autumn Bourque, a Queen Creek student at the time, wrote a Facebook post in which she accused school administrators of not encouraging or even supporting the memorials—of essentially wanting to cover up the problem. “I am tired of watching my friends cry, and I’m tired of feeling the pain of loss,” she wrote. “Here the school believes that keeping things quiet is better than saying anything at all.” The post went viral locally. I spoke to Bourque in September. “It seemed as if the school was embarrassed by the events that took place,” she told me, “so tried to hide it.” She recalled that when she’d asked why the memorials were a problem, she was told, “It glorifies suicides.”
A new statewide law requires schools to provide teachers with suicide-prevention training. It’s known as the Mitch Warnock Act. tinued, “Queen Creek has experienced a lot of suicidal tragedy. . . . It’s heartbreaking and raises questions. Suicide, successful or not, leaves consequences for everyone. I’m dealing with them now [with] my friends, family, and people I don’t know. . . . Things are rough. And life is hard. Don’t give up. I am not telling you this for sympathy points. But this shit needs to stop.” Now he was missing. “The people at the school, they go, ‘His friend called and said he has a rope, and we’re worried he’s going to try to hurt himself,’ ” Deanna recalled. “They’d already started looking for him, and I knew the longer it went, the worse it would be.” That afternoon, Deanna found out her son was gone.
(Queen Creek officials told me, “Certain memorials are allowed to stay as long as they stay within guidelines provided by school administrators”; they added that the district has partnered with a local suicide-prevention center, La Frontera Empact, to help “prevent what is sometimes referred to as the contagion effect.”) In 2018, Queen Creek invited Suniya Luthar of Arizona State University to survey the district’s teenagers with the goal of understanding why so many students were struggling. In total, Luthar, who’d run similar studies at schools around the country, collected data from more than (continued on page 102)
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YOU MAY FIND YOURSELF
ON SLIDE INN ROAD
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of cinema for him to learn. So that, I mean . . . I don’t want to stop learning until I’ve taken my last breath.
going again. Birds sing in the trees. Crickets rub their reedy legs in the high weeds, which is the universe they know. The seven people stand in a loose circle behind the idling Buick. Frank and Corinne exchange a look that asks, What’s going on here?
In a 1984 promo video for Stop Making Sense, David Byrne appears as different characters and interviews himself. For one character, he wore blackface, and brownface for another. He’d forgotten about the skit until recently, when a reporter brought it to his attention. Rather than deny it or defend it, Byrne announced the revelation himself. “I acknowledge it was a major mistake in judgment that showed a lack of real understanding,” he wrote in a statement released on Twitter in early September, just days before we spoke. “It’s like looking in a mirror and seeing someone else—you’re not, or were not, the person you thought you were.” What has been the response? “I’m not checking it all over the place,” he says, “but for the most part, Spike and those on social media have been very supportive.” Though he admits, “There’ve been some places and some institutions that seem to have feelings that maybe I’m a little toxic now. But I thought, This is not about what I did thirty years ago. This is about me opening this up for discussion at this point. And so I definitely stand by my decision to expose myself.” ESQ: Tell me about the title American Utopia. DB: A friend suggested it to me. And I thought, Oh
my God, people are going to think that I’m being ironic. Or they’re going to think that I’m supporting something that I’m not. And then I realized, No, that is what I’m doing in the songs and onstage. It’s sincere. It’s not ironic. I have to own it. When people see it, they’ll understand. ESQ: Is the show going to come back? DB: We hope so. But nobody knows when. ESQ: Could you ever see that show without yourself in it? DB: I often ask myself that. Could this go into repertoire? SL: Nope, that ain’t going to work. DB: Nah, it ain’t going to work. SL: There’s no understudy for David. [To Byrne] What’s the title of the show? DB: American Utopia. SL: It’s David Byrne’s American Utopia. ESQ: The show is very hopeful. But if we end up having the same president after November . . . DB: I knew that’s where you were going. ESQ: . . . what’s the way forward for the show? Do you change it? Do you tweak it? DB: I think I would have to. I couldn’t not acknowledge that. SL: You’d need to write another song. DB: I might have to. SL: [Long pause to think the unthinkable.] Nightmares. The world is bananas.
GRANPOP KNOWS. HE SAW MEN LIKE THESE
in Vietnam. Scavengers and skedaddlers. One he saw stood up against a board fence and shot by one of his own men after the Tet Offensive wound down, a clusterfuck the grandchildren he’s too old to have will probably never read about in their history books. Frank, meanwhile, jerks to life like a wind-up toy. His your-loan-is-approved smile reappears. He takes his wallet from his back pocket. “I wish we could take you to a garage or something, but I’ve got a full car, as you see—” “Your missus could sit on my lap,” Pete says, and waggles his eyebrows. Frank chooses to ignore this. “But tell you what, we’ll stop and send someone back first place we see. In the meantime, how does ten apiece sound? For helping us out.” He opens the wallet. Very gently, Galen plucks it from his hand. Frank doesn’t try to stop him. He just stares at his hands, wide-eyed, as if the wallet is still there. As if he can still feel its weight but now it’s invisible. “Why don’t I just take all of it?” Galen says. “Give that back!” Corinne says. She feels Mary’s hand creep into hers and she folds her own fingers over it. “That’s not yours!” “Is now.” His voice is as gentle as the hand that took the wallet. “Let’s see what we got here.” He opens it. Frank takes a step forward. Pete takes his hand out of his not-a-bowling-bag. There’s a revolver in it. Looks like a .38 to Granpop. “Stand back, Frankie-Wankie,” Pete says. “We’re doing business here.” Galen removes a small sheaf of bills from the wallet. He folds them over, puts them in the pocket of his jeans, then tosses the wallet to Pete, who puts it in the bag. “Gramps, let’s have yours.” “Outlaws,” Granpop says. “That’s all you are.” “That’s right,” Galen agrees in his gentle voice. “And if you don’t want me to lash this boy upside his head, give me your wallet.” That does it for Billy; his bladder lets go and his crotch gets warm. He starts to cry, partly out of shame and partly from fear. Granpop digs his old scarred Lord Buxton from the front left pocket of his baggy pants and hands it over. It’s bulging, but mostly with cards, photos, and receipts going back five or more years. Galen pulls out a twenty and a few ones, stuffs them in his pocket, and tosses the Lord Buxton to Pete. Into the bag it goes. “Ought to clean it out once in a while, Grampy,”
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Galen says. “That’s one slutty billfold.” “Says the man who looks like he warshed his hair last Thanksgiving,” Granpop says, and quick as a snake striking out of a bush, Galen slaps him across the face. Mary bursts into tears and puts her face against her mother’s hip. “Stop that!” Frank says, as if the thing is not already done and his father bleeding from lip and nostril. Then, in the same breath: “Shut up, Dad!” “I don’t let folks sass me,” Galen says, “not even old men. Old men should especially know better. Now Corinne. Let’s get your purse out of the car. Your little girl can come with us.” He takes Mary by the arm, the pads of his fingers sinking into her scant flesh. “Let her alone,” Corinne says. “You’re not in charge here,” Galen says. Not sounding so gentle now. “Tell me what to do again and I’ll change your face. Pete, make Frank and his father stand together. Shoulders touching. And if either of them moves . . .” Pete gestures with the revolver. Granpop shuffles next to his son. Frank is breathing through his nose in quick little snorts. Granpop wouldn’t be surprised if he passed out. “You saw, didn’t you?” Pete asks Billy. “Fess up.” “I didn’t see anything,” Billy says through his tears. Blubbing like a baby and can’t help it. Blue sneaker. “Liar pants on fire,” Pete says. He laughs and ruffles the boy’s hair. Galen comes back, folding more bills into his pocket. He’s let go of Mary. The girl is now clinging to her mother. Corinne looks dazed. Granpop doesn’t waste time looking at his people. He’s watching Galen rejoin Pete, needing to see what passes between them, and he sees pretty much what he expected and no sense pretending otherwise. They can take the Buick and leave the Brown family, or they can take the Buick and kill the Brown family. If caught, these two will get life in the Shank no matter what kind of score they run up. “There’s more,” Granpop says. “What’s that?” Galen asks. He’s the talker. His fellow outlaw seems to be the fat silent type. “More money. Quite a bit. I’ll give it to you if you let us be. Just take the wagon and let us be.” “How much more?” Galen asks. “Can’t say for sure, but I put it around thirty-three hundred. It’s in my go-bag.” “Why would an old fuck like you be driving around the williwags with three thousand and change?” “Because of Nan. My sister. We were going up to Derry to see her before she passes away. Won’t be long, if it hasn’t happened already. She’s got the cancer. It’s all through her.” Pete has put his not-a-bowling-bag down again. Now he rubs two of his fingers together and says, “This is the world’s smallest violin playing ‘My Heart Pumps Purple Piss for You.’ ” Granpop pays no attention. “I cashed out most of my Social Security to pay for the funeral. Nan hasn’t got squat, and they give you a discount if you pay cash.” He pats Billy’s shoulder. “This boy looked it
all up for me on the Internet.” Billy did no such thing, but except for another chest-hitching sob or two, he keeps quiet. He wishes he and Mary had never gone up to the Slide Inn, and when he looks at his father through blurry eyes, he feels a moment of bright hate. It’s your fault, Dad, he thinks. You ditched the car and these men stole our money and now they’re going to kill us. Granpop knows. I can see he does. “Where’s your go-bag?” Galen asks. “In back with the rest of the luggage.” “Get it.” Granpop goes to the Buick, which is still idling. He gives a grunt as he raises the tailgate; that’s his back trying to cramp up. Back goes first, pecker goes last, everything else in between, his own father used to say. The bag is just like Pete’s, with a zipper along the top, except it’s longer—more like a duffel bag than a bowling bag. He runs the zipper and spreads the bag open. “No gun in there, Gramps, is there?” Galen asks. “No, no, that’s for boys like you, but looka this.” Granpop brings out a battered old softball glove. “The sister I was telling you about? This was hers. I brought it for her to look at if she hasn’t passed on yet. Or in a coma. She wore it in the Women’s World Series, out in Okie City. Played shortstop. Before the Second World War, if you can believe it. And lookit this!” He turns the glove over. “Gramps,” Galen says, “all due respect but I don’t give a chicken-fried fuck.” “Yeah, but here on the back,” Granpop persists. “See it? Signed by Dom DiMaggio. Joltin’ Joe’s brother, you know.” He tosses the glove aside and burrows into the bag again. “Got about two hundred baseball cards, some signed and worth money—” Pete grabs Billy’s arm and twists it. Billy screams. “Don’t!” Corinne screams back. “Don’t hurt my boy!” “It’s your boy’s fault you’re in this mess,” Pete says. “Snoopy little brat.” Then, to Granpop: “We don’t want no fuckin’ baseball cards!” Mary is crying, Corinne is crying, Billy sees his dad looking ready to pass out, and Granpop doesn’t seem to care about any of them. Granpop has retreated into his own world. “What about funny books?” he says. He brings out a handful and brandishes them. “The Archies and Caspers wouldn’t fetch nothing, but there’s a few old Supermans . . . and a Batman or two, one where he fights the Joker. . . .” “I think I’m going to tell Pete to shoot your son if you don’t stop stalling,” Galen says. “Is the money there or not?” “Yeah,” Granpop says, “down at the bottom, but I got something else that might interest you.” “I’m all done being interested,” Galen says. He steps forward. “I’ll just get the money myself. If it’s there at all. Get out of my way.” “Oh, wake up,” Granpop says. “This would fetch twice what I got for cash.” He brings out the Louis-
ville Slugger. “Signed by Ted Williams, the Splendid Splinter himself. Put it on eBay, it’d fetch seven thousand. Seven at least.” “How’d your sis come by it?” Galen asks, interested at last. He can see the signature, faded but legible, on the barrel. “Just gave him a smile and a wink when he came down Autograph Alley,” Granpop says, and swings the bat. It connects with Galen’s temple. His scalp pops open like a window shade. Blood flies up. His eyes squeeze shut in pain and surprise. He staggers, one hand out and flailing, trying to keep his balance. “Get the other one, Frankie!” Granpop shouts. “Take him down!” Frank doesn’t move, just stands there with his mouth open. Pete stares at Galen, for a precious moment completely stunned, but the moment passes. He turns the gun toward Granpop. Billy springs at him. “No!” Corinne shouts. “Billy, no!” Billy grabs Pete’s arm, bringing it down, and when Pete fires the gun, the slug goes into the ground between his feet. Galen straightens, one hand clutching the station wagon’s raised tailgate. Granpop winds up, ignoring a howl of protest from his back, and hits the redhead in the ribs with 33 ounces of solid Kentucky ash. Galen’s knees buckle and his gasp—“Pete, shoot this fucker!”—is hardly more than a whisper. Granpop raises the bat. There’s another shot, but he’s not hit (at least he doesn’t think so), and he brings the bat down on Galen’s lowered head. Galen falls facefirst in one of the Buick wagon’s tire treads. Pete tries to shake Billy off, but Billy holds on like a ferret, his eyes bulging and his teeth digging into his lower lip. The gun waves here and there and goes off a third time, sending a bullet into the sky. “Now you, motherhump,” Granpop snarls. Pete at last flings Billy away, but before he can raise the gun, Granpop brings the bat down on his wrist, breaking it. The gun drops onto the ground. Pete turns and runs, leaving his not-a-bowling-bag on the ground. The two children fling themselves at Granpop, hugging him and almost knocking him over. He pushes them away. His old heart is hammering and if it just gave out, he wouldn’t be a bit surprised. “Billy, get the fat one’s bag. Our goods are in it and I don’t think I can bend over.” The boy doesn’t, maybe the gunshots deafened him a little, but the girl does. She throws the bag into the back of the station wagon and then rubs her hands on the front of her unicorn tee. “Frank,” Granpop says, “is that redhaired boy dead?” Frank doesn’t move, but Corinne kneels next to Galen. After several seconds she looks up, her eyes very blue under her pale forehead. “He’s not breathing.” “Well, that’s no great loss to the world,” Granpop says. “Billy, get that gun. Keep your hands away from the trigger.”
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Billy picks up the fallen revolver. He holds it out to his father, but Frank only looks at it. Granpop takes it and puts it in the pocket where his wallet was. Frank just stands there, looking at Galen, lying facedown in the weeds with the top of his head stove in. “Granpop, Granpop!” Billy says, tugging the old man’s arm. His mouth is trembling, tears are streaming down his cheeks, and snot lathers his upper lip. “What if the fat one has another gun in their little truck?” “What if we just get the hell out of here?” Granpop says. “Corinne, you drive. I can’t. Kids, get in back.” He’s not even sure he can sit, he’s fucked up his back most righteously, but he’ll have to do it, no matter how much it hurts. Corinne closes the tailgate. The kids take one more look up the overgrown driveway to see if Pete is coming back, then they run for the wagon. Granpop goes to his son. “You had a chance and just stood there. You could have got me killed. Got all of us killed.” Granpop slaps Frank across the face just as he, Granpop, was slapped by the man who now lies dead at their feet. “Get in, son. Maybe you’re too old to help what you are, I don’t know.” Frank walks to the front passenger side like a man in a dream and gets in. Granpop opens the door behind him and finds he can’t bend down. So he falls backward onto the seat, pulling his legs in after him with little whimpers of pain. Mary crawls over him to close the door and that hurts, too. It’s not just his back, feels like he’s busted his gut. “Granpop, are you all right?” Corinne asks. She’s looking back. Frank is staring straight ahead through the windshield. His hands are on his knees. “I’m all right,” Granpop says, although he isn’t. He’d like to have about six of the painkillers his sister no doubt has from her oncologist, but Nan is a hundred miles from here and he doesn’t think they’ll be seeing her today. No, not today. “Drive.” “Did you really have that money, Granpop?” Billy asks as his mother starts back the way they came, going much faster than Frank dared to. Wanting to put the Slide Inn behind them. And the Slide Inn Road—that, too. “Course not,” Granpop says. He wipes tears from his granddaughter’s face and hugs her against him. It hurts, but he does it. “Granpop,” she says, “you left Aunt Nan’s special baseball bat.” “That’s all right,” Granpop says, stroking her hair. It’s all sweaty and tangled. “Maybe we’ll get it later.” Frank finally speaks. “We passed a Red Apple store on 196 just before we turned off. I’ll call the police from there.” He turns and looks at the old man. There’s a red mark on his cheek from the slap. “This is your fault, Dad. It’s all on you. We had to bring your fucking car, didn’t we? If we’d had the Volvo—” “Shut up, Frank,” Corinne says. “Please. Just this once.” And Frank does. Thinking of Flannery O’Connor.
THE KIDS ARE NOT ALL RIGHT (continued from page 99)
1,750 students, ranging from grades nine to twelve. Last March, she presented her findings at a public meeting. Queen Creek’s teens, she told the audience, were at or below average levels in several categories, from substance abuse to “rule breaking.” But when it came to anxiety and depression, the rates in the town were “elevated and notable.” Around 40 percent had reported not having a single adult at school in whom they could confide. Last fall, I met with several community leaders from Queen Creek in a conference room of a municipal complex in the town’s small downtown. The mood was strained. “I came from a district in northern Arizona, and we were bordered by a Navajo reservation—very different dynamic, high poverty. And we had suicides there, too,” Perry Berry, the Queen Creek School District superintendent, told me. “I would assume that if you talk to other districts throughout any part of the state, it’s happening. Do you know what I’m saying?” But all that proved was the magnitude of the problem, not its absence. I pressed Berry and assistant superintendent Cord Monroe about the criticism of the town’s response to the deaths. Monroe said that the school was bound by the wishes of the victims’ parents, some of whom may not want it publicly known how their child died. “It’s a delicate balance” he said. Berry added that the district had improved its outreach efforts. “We got a lot smarter about communicating with teachers, communicating with fellow students.” RECENTLY, I PRINTED OUT A MAP OF THE
East Valley. Using little red pins, I marked the site of each death, from Marcus Wheeler until the latest, in early August of this year, in an attempt to create a sky-level view of the cluster. It didn’t take long for the map to become a wash of red. There were the loose groupings, separated by a few miles or a town line. Then there were the tighter bundles of victims from the same school, or even the same sports team. Forty-seven names in all. Eventually, I ran out of pins. In September 2019, I had lunch with Katey McPherson at a café in Gilbert. She was about to launch a program called One Gilbert, a suicide-awareness program backed by the thenmayor, Jenn Daniels, a young mother of four who was committed to raising awareness and increasing services in her town. McPherson said she was tired. But she was also cautiously optimistic. Local politicians were giving voice to the problem in a way they never had. And more residents were actively working toward destigmatizing the topic. Lorie Warnock and several of her friends had formed Parents for Suicide Prevention and were distributing pamphlets to families throughout the
East Valley. In Queen Creek, Sheila and Greg, Tyler Hedstrom’s parents, and Deanna Bencomo got involved with a nonprofit cofounded by Katey McPherson, Project Connect Four, to draw attention to the deaths of local teens. The group had demonstrated outside Queen Creek High School, holding up signs that read, YOU MATTER. As far as McPherson could tell, there had been just four teen suicides in the region in the first nine months of the year, a marked decrease from the year prior. Like many of the East Valley parents I spoke to, she believed the drop was largely due to the programs and policies that schools and governments were putting into place. “Right now, thank God, it’s been really quiet,” she said. “We’re making progress.” She knocked on the tabletop. “I hope we’re making progress.” Whether the progress will hold is unclear. In response to the coronavirus, many schools in the East Valley have been maintaining online-only or hybrid schedules this fall, and perhaps beyond. The community’s various awareness and prevention efforts have been hampered, too. Organizations have done their best to adapt—NotMYKid, Joronda Montaño’s group, has been running mental-healthawareness sessions over Zoom that focus on coping skills and self-care; Deanna Bencomo moved her fundraising efforts for suicide-prevention programs online. In September, at a high school in Chandler, Arizona governor Doug Ducey and state health director Cara Christ held a press conference to address the issue. Christ said that it would be several months until they had concrete data regarding the effect the pandemic has had on suicide rates. Ducey noted that researchers had reported a threefold jump in depression since the start of the pandemic. “Many of them are struggling during this time of increased isolation and heightened stress,” he added. “And we must be there for them.” There’s reason to believe that the East Valley will follow through on that promise. A new bill, S.B. 1468, went into effect at the start of the school year. The legislation, a revived version of the one that failed three years ago, requires school districts and charter schools in the state to provide suicide-prevention training to teachers and guidance counselors working with students in middle school and high school. “Suicides can be prevented when a student displaying warning signs is identified and counseled,” Sean Bowie, the young state senator who cosponsored it with fellow Democrat Mitzi Epstein, said in a statement after the bill became law last year. “Our bill provides a critical tool for educators to spot those warning signs in their students who are at risk.” It’s known as the Mitch Warnock Act. McPherson attended the signing ceremony. After it ended, she sent me a photograph from the statehouse. In it, the governor, sitting at a desk, is holding up the inked copy of the Mitch Warnock Act while a small crowd looks on. Directly behind him stand Lorie and Tim Warnock. Both are clapping.
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