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THE COVER 204

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A GQ guide
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218
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Sellout Nation!!
Vice Principipals
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48 GQ.COM SEPTEMBER 2016 E R I C R AY D AV I D S O N

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54 GQ.COM SEPTEMBER 2016 ANDERS OVERGAARD


> Fear of
A Lady Planet
ALL SUMMER LONG, through the
non-stop tantrums and insults,
through the seething Republican
Convention (and, hey, let’s stop
calling what happened in Cleveland
the Republican Convention,
because that is a slur to both good-
hearted Republicans and anyone
who actually convenes. That was a
certified shitshow, and we should
be calling it by its proper name,
Tragicomic-Con), I kept wondering
why Donald J. Trump was so orange
with rage. He’s had a nice life! He
should spend more time on boats.
Get into luxury crabbing. Maybe
buy a bay. That’ll chill you out.
More to the point, I wondered, why were
his followers so drawn to that hot temper
and fulminating rage? Everyone says Hillary
Clinton has an “authenticity problem” and
that Trump “tells it like it is,” but I’ve never
believed either. Hillary’s just sti≠; that’s her
62 GQ.COM SEPTEMBER 2016
authentic self. I would argue that Trump’s
anger is fake, but his pique is real. That we
mistake his natural peevishness and easily
injured pride for something endangered
and fragile in us, and that he helps us to
mistake it. He’s not really mad at Mexicans
any more than he cares about coal min-
ers or the future of babies—Mexico is just
a dim place on the map with no Trump
hotels to brag about (sad!), whose mythic
size approximates his self-worth and so
justifies its cartoon-rank as enemy. But, to
his fans, watching him denigrate one-third
of a continent has always felt so very per-
sonal. He really cares about me!
This is the trick that every great politi-
cian does, and, people, when will we stop
saying that Donald Trump isn’t a politician?
He’s every bit as craven a politician as Ted
Cruz, Marco Rubio, and Insert Your Favorite
Demagogue. A politician is someone who
wants your vote. Trump’s actually a more
natural politician than Hillary Clinton is.
Worse, he’s no less cynical than the “career
politicians” Americans say they abhor, a
man who simply grew bored with the size
of his sandbox, real-estatin’ and reality-
TV-makin’, and so went looking for larger
conflict somewhere else. I still believe
that he doesn’t really want to be president.
He’s much more interested in defeating
anyone who might wish for the Big Job.
This is what gets him up in the morning.
Defeating is everything. No wonder, accord-
ing to veteran reporter Robert Draper,
Trump floated a weird super-VP slot to
John Kasich that would have allowed
the veep to be in charge of “domestic
and foreign policy.” (Also known as: the
world.) The president would presumably
sit back and Trumpificate.
So you’ve got a pretend non-politician
who pretend-rages for the benefit of people
he doesn’t care about. That’s a guaranteed
recipe for success. But still, why is that
blindingly attractive to so many Americans?
A lot’s been said about the lily-white appeal
and racial Unterton of Trump’s campaign,
and that’s there. But I think something
LETTERFROMTHEEDITOR
else is in the air. Something, if the country
would simply lie down on a couch in front of
me, I could explain in a kind and Freudian
way. Straight up: fear of a gynarchy. Rule by
women. It’s no coincidence that in a year
when the first female president loomed as
historical reality, Republicans would gravi-
tate toward the most swaggering, insecure
alpha male ever to run for higher o∞ce.
Whether you love, hate, or wish to fed-
erally prosecute Hillary Clinton, your ears
register it—at Trump rallies, in negative ads,
in the subtext of Chris Christie’s venom, and
surely soon at the debates—a strange male
whine that is disproportionate to any threat.
It’s the threat that comes from the imagina-
tion, the psychic kind. In that regard, the
GOP convention hit a new high in lows.
The withering attacks on Hillary—she was
name-checked compulsively and vilified
more than any candidate in modern his-
tory—were cast as dire, last-ditch attempts
to regain our “security.” But the securities at
new risk were all-male.
For the hardest-core Hillary haters and
knee-jerkiest Trumpers, this election is
not about sovereignty or national security
but about something more threatening:
submission. Just as many aggrieved white
males couldn’t bear to submit to a black
leader under Obama, causing strange,
finger-pointy, That man is from Kenya! anx-
ieties, many now can’t imagine submitting
to a powerful woman, and so must conjure
a she-devil worthy of their hysteria. Lock her
up!, the convention crowd roared, like some
chant from a witch trial.
It will all be okay, I want to say. Hillary
will become president, she will be capable
and wise, and exert sound and prudent judg-
ment, all qualities Donald Trump couldn’t
milk out of a vice president if you paid him.
She’ll be part of our growing up, our matur-
E R I C R AY DAV I D S O N
ing as a political culture, once we accept her.
But we must submit to wisdom.
JIM NELSON
EDITOR-IN-CHIEF
 gentlemen’s quarterly

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1 What was the first GQ story

you ever read?
• Clockwise fromm
I can’t remember, but the first GQ top left: GQ
story I made everyone I know read was editor-in-chief
“The Well-Hung Boy Next Door,” the Jim Nelson
profile of James Deen by Wells Tower. and Kim; Kevin
Hart and Dave
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2 What’s the worst thing Kim’s squad
someone can shout at you when
you’re exercising?
”Don’t ever darken the door of this We Partied
i d with
i h Ki
Kim & K
Ko.
Zumba studio again!” > For this year’s Love, Sex & Madness issue, we put the loveliest,
An
Anna
nna Peele
P sexiest, madliest Kardashian on the cover. To celebrate Kim K,
> @bananapeele Peele is 3 Are you Team Mystic, Team we gathered Chrissy Teigen, John Legend, Dave Chappelle, Russell
GQ’s culture editor and Valor, or Team Instinct? Westbrook, Kevin Hart, and every Kardashian in a ten-mile radius of
Matt Damon correspondent. House Tyrell. L.A.’s Chateau Marmont (that is, a lot of them). It was a night of squads,

“ W E PA R T I E D W I T H K I M & KO . , ” C L O C K W I S E F R O M TO P L E F T : N AT H A N I E L W O O D ( 2 ) ; A M Y L O M B A R D . “ O N N E T F L I X : L A S T C H A N C E U ” :
hot bods, and style gods. Check out the full slideshow at GQ.com.

1 What was your first
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My parents kept me.
2 What was your worst
accomplishment?
A number of years ago, I met
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C O U R T E S Y O F N E T F L I X . “ Q ’ S F O R D AV E , O U R S W I N G E R ” : B R I A N S TA U F F E R . “ TA K E A M A G I C A L J O U R N E Y W I T H D R E W M A G A R Y ” :
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S Plu Straight from the pages of GQ
> Drew Jubera’s 2014 GQ story, “Last Chance U,”
about a group of community-college football misfits
hoping to crack the NFL, inspired a six-part docu-
series on Netflix. Read the original story on GQ.com,
then binge-watch the series online.

John Ortved
> @jortved Ortved is
GQ’s senior associate editor,
fashion and lifestyle focused.
Ross
McCammon
> @RossMcCammon
McCammon is an articles editor
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C O U R T E S Y O F P E N G U I N R A N D O M H O U S E . L E F T, I L L U S T R AT I O N S : A L E X A N D R A C O M PA I N -T I S S I E R ( 3 ) .
Adam Levine, and I asked
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a career in music?” Q’s for Dave,
Our Swinger
3 You’re Canadian. What’s the
most Canadian thing you say? > “Dave,” the Shameless
Plug‘ #2!
“I’m sorry to hear about President prolific swinger
Trump, but you can’t live here.” from our July
issue, fielded
some curveballs in
1 What was your SAT score? a Reddit AMA.
The important thing is that I won my Take a Magical
sixth-grade spelling bee. How did you become such a popular Journey with
swinger? Drew Magary
2 Is your office aesthetic more Believe it or not, word of mouth. Once people
American Psycho or pro-tchotchke? see me and see I’m a respectful guy who > GQ correspondent
Besides books and headphones, doesn’t want to just jackrabbit their wife, it’s Drew Magary’s
the only object in my brand-new office just sort of a domino effect. new novel, The Hike,
is an antique duck-shaped clothes follows Ben, a dad
brush. I’ll go with “Psycho tchotchke.” What advice would you give to a virgin trying to get home
so that he doesn’t actually perform like a after wandering into
3 What’s your favorite virgin during his first time with a girl? a parallel universe
outdated medical practice? Be honest with her... Everyone has to have a on a business trip.
That thing in the ’80s where first time at least once. The Hike, in stores
the dentist’s office would give you now, is Magary’s
a lollipop as you left. What impact do you think the Brexit fourth book. Buy it
referendum will have on the long-term for all your friends—
viability of the European experiment? everyone loves a
Only time will tell. good dad odyssey.

74 GQ.COM SEPTEMBER 2016

 > Get the GQ Look
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G E T I T— A N D
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82 W E A R I T—
R I G H T A W AY

>EACH MONTH,
the editors of
GQ will select
a series of items
from our pages
available through
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Mr Porter.com

>TO LEARN
more—and see
what we have
wh
chosen
sen ffor you

CLOCKWISE FROM TOP: STUART TYSON; JAMIE CHUNG; MARIO TESTINO; NIGEL COX; MARK SELIGER
this month—
th—go to
GQ.com/selectsects

Just a few of our picks from this issue...

Gucci crewneck Prada shoe (center) Tom Ford jeans Gucci loafers
p. 134 p. 190 p. 46 p. 81
 • Every so often, a fashion house. His
All designer creates clothes are younger.
clothes so inspiring Bolder. Wilder. The
Things they push fashion new Gucci is such
in a whole new a phenomenon that
Gucci direction, and right its revamped stores
now that designer can’t seem to keep
is Alessandro anything in stock
Michele of Gucci. longer than a couple
In the year since he of days. All hail the
was named creative new king of cool and
director, Michele the raddest clothes on
has completely the planet.—J I M M O O R E
re-imagined the
storied Italian Loafers | $750

GQ
Endorses
1 of 2
P R O P S T Y L I S T : S H A R O N R YA N AT H A L L E Y R E S O U R C E S

TK designer | $000 | website.com

PHOTOGRAPH BY JAMIE CHUNG SEPTEMBER 2016 GQ.COM 81

 The clothes and accessories in the fall collection
GQ draw on a freaky menagerie of ideas—zoo animals
Endorses 2 of 2
Enter the and ’70s wallpaper patterns, plus iconic loafers
and Milanese tailoring, all through the filter of a
Gucci-verse Wes Anderson movie

Seek This Hide

Accessories have always been Gucci’s
bedrock. Nobody treats leather better

$1,890

$695

GROOMING: LISA-RAQUEL USING DIOR HOMME. BRACELET (ON MODEL): CAPUTO & CO.
S T I L L L I F E S : S T U A R T T Y S O N ( 4 ) . P R O P S T Y L I S T : S T E L L A R E Y AT M A R K E D WA R D I N C .
Flip
Everyone
the Bird
Gucci’s clothes are
not for the faint of heart
(or the light of wallet), but
if you’ve got the mojo and
the bucks, then pile ’em
on. In fact, maximalism $480
is the whole point. See
those loafers? They’re
lined with kangaroo fur.
The bird on this sweater
is flying through lightning
bolts and gold stars and
tiny bunnies. And why
would you wear it with
khaki pants when you
could go plaid? More is
more is more is more.

Sweater, $1,850, pants,

$890, jacket, $3,980,
hat, $295, belt, $420, and
loafers, $995, by Gucci.
At select Gucci stores
nationwide; gucci.com

82 GQ.COM SEPTEMBER 2016 PHOTOGRAPH BY ANDY RYAN $1,850

 To nail this move,
build your look
around one mellow
main color—like,
The Suited say, this gray.
From there, you
Man can freestyle.

The
Business
Shirt Gets
Busy
Don’t let people fall asleep at the
office! Loaded up with geometric
shapes, your dress shirt will
go from a snooze to a style jolt

• The hierarchy of surprising (but

dress shirts goes
like this: your safe
solids, then your
go-to stripes, and
then your once-
in-a-while plaids
and checks. Those
standards are fine,
but they can be a
little, well, standard.
Which is why we
recommend these
Art Deco–ish
prints. They’re
not too zany), and
they’re business-
appropriate (but
not too fussy). With
more shapes than
you’ve seen since
tenth-grade geometry
class, they’ve got
diamonds and circles
that pop o≠ your
chest and make
all the other guys
look like squares. Shirt $170 Caliban + tie Ermenegildo Zegna | tie bar (throughout) The Tie Bar | pocket square Thomas Mason
—ANDREW GOBLE suit H American Tailor | Where to buy it? Go to GQ.com/go/fashiondirectories

G R O O M I N G : R E B E C C A P LY M A T E U S I N G B U M B L E A N D B U M B L E

Shirt $495 Canali + tie Gant Rugger | pocket square Shirt $145 Michael Kors + tie Burberry | pocket square Shirt $385 Ermenegildo Zegna + tie Thomas Mason
The Hill-Side | suit Nick Graham Eton | suit David Hart pocket square Michael Bastian | suit J.Crew Crosby

84 GQ.COM SEPTEMBER 2016 PHOTOGRAPHS BY MEI TAO

 This month, GQ style guru
Mark Anthony Green tackles the
optics of tights, suits on a plane,
The Style Guy and the difference between
channeling style and stealing it

I take pride in Can you settle an

wearing a suit—
even on business
flights. But it’s not
exactly comfy. Can
you recommend
a good plane suit?
I don’t really
understand this
for two reasons.
For starters, you
yourself admitted
it’s uncomfortable.
Wait until you get
stuck in a middle
seat on a cross-
country flight in a
three-piece suit.
No amount of fun-
size proseccos
can save you, my
man. Second,
even if it’s a nice
suit, you look like a
traveling salesman
begrudgingly en
route to the Nashua
branch. I have a
travel uniform.
Dark jeans, solid
T-shirt, and a black
cashmere hoodie
I got from Ralph
argument for me?
Sometimes when
I see a picture of
Ryan Gosling or
Kanye on GQ’s site,
I’ll copy his outfit
head to toe. My
friend thinks that’s
lame, but isn’t
that why you guys
feature them?
There’s an ancient
Milanese proverb
that goes, “Jacketh
one’s swagger,
never thy rig.” Or
something like
that. Point being:
We want you to
take note of how
these stylish
superhumans put
clothes together.
For example, Kanye’s
oversize parka or
Gosling’s impeccably
tailored green suit.
But don’t buy the
exact same parka and
suit. Your personal
style is just that—
your personal style.

Lauren a few years
ago. The plush hood
doubles as a pillow,
and the cashmere
keeps me from
looking too slouchy.
P H OTO G R A P H : S T U A R T T Y S O N . P R O P S T Y L I S T : S T E L L A R E Y AT M A R K E D WA R D I N C . J A C K E T : C O U R T E S Y O F A L L TO O H U M A N .
Copy the fit. Copy
the color scheme.
Copy the vibe.
But don’t outright
copy anyone.
Even Gosling.

The tech tights that GQ has featured in the magazine—can

I wear them without shorts? I think they’re comfortable, but
will they look too much like leggings?
I like to think I’m open-minded as far as Style Guys go. Red
suede pants? Sure. Fur cardigan? Make Namath proud! Rarely
is it impossible to pull something off. But this—this pressing issue at
hand—is extremely tricky. Here’s the complicated, nuanced reason
why men can’t wear tights by themselves: We have penises. And
with spandex, everyone can vividly see the outline of your penis. You
might be thinking, “So what? Parisians and rock stars have been
showing bulges for centuries.” Fair. But there’s a difference between
bulges and delineation. A bulge is a vague affirmation that there’s
something at rest there. Congrats! A delineation—especially in
Style Hack: Mo’ MoMA in Your Closet
those neon and “breathable” tights that are popular now—shows
everything shy of moles and veins. If you’re uncomfortable reading Stylish—and broke—art lovers know this trick
best: Buy collaborations. Artist-and-designer
this, imagine how uncomfortable it is to see it. Even in a pair of collabs are more accepted by the art world
slim sweats, I worry about showing too much of the little Style Guy. nowadays. Which gives top-shelf artists a
green light to get into the game. And it’s cheap.
Tights are an entirely different—and not to be attempted—beast. Relatively. Take this bomber jacket KAWS did
with Mira Mikati. For a jacket, it’s a bit pricey at
$1,985. But as a limited piece of art by KAWS,
The Style Guy is in! Send questions to styleguy@GQ.com or @GQStyleGuy. which it is (only 350 made), it’s not half bad. Plus,
you can’t wear a painting on a first date.

86 GQ.COM SEPTEMBER 2016 ILLUSTRATION BY JANNE IIVONEN

 D A N I E L M C S W E E N E Y, 2 4
Bar manager

Man on $30
the Street BOOHOO.COM

Clockwise from top left:

1. Shirt by Van Heusen.
Tie and tie bar by The
Tie Bar. Pants by AMI

S I LV E R B R A C E L E T : D I E S E L . 5 . S U N G L A S S E S : M O S C O T. B A G : L O U I S V U I T T O N . B E LT : J . C R E W. WAT C H : I W C . B R A C E L E T : D AV I D Y U R M A N . 6 . B E A N I E : P S B Y P A U L S M I T H .
Alexandre Mattiussi.
2. Sweater by Gap.
Sweatpants by Adidas

WAT C H : E M P O R I O A R M A N I . 2 . H E A D P H O N E S : P R Y M A . WAT C H : S H I N O L A . 3 . B R A C E L E T : M I A N S A I . 4 . C A P : K I T H . S U N G L A S S E S : D I TA . B A C K PA C K : VA U LT B Y VA N S .
H A I R : B A R R Y W H I T E AT B A R R Y W H I T E M E N S G R O O M I N G . C O M . G R O O M I N G : K U M I C R A I G U S I N G L A M E R . C L O C K W I S E F R O M T O P L E F T : 1 . G L A S S E S : M O S L E Y T R I B E S .
Originals. 3 . Hoodie
by John Elliott.
4 . T-shirt and pants
by Zara. 5 . Shirt
by Brunello Cucinelli.
Pants by Michael
Bastian. 6. Sweatshirt
by Adidas Originals.
Shirt (around waist) by
GREG ZAMFOTIS, 34
CEO, Gregorys Coffee $98
GAP
Levi’s Vintage Clothing.
Jeans by Balmain.
Sneakers by Golden
Goose Deluxe Brand.
Where to buy it?
Go to GQ.com/go
/fashiondirectories

WITH PROMO
CODE: GQOri

M AT T G L U E C K E R T, 3 1
Product designer $95
ALPHA INDUSTRIES

BOBBY GOUSE, 2 9
Fitness instructor $90
ZARA

Cheap Flights
M E C A L L I N D S E Y, 2 7
Graphic artist $80
TOPMAN

for Everyone!
We styled six real New Yorkers
in this season’s must-have
flight jackets, all for a hundred
JUSTIN WILKES, 39
President of entertainment
for RadicalMedia
$100
AMERICAN EAGLE OUTFITTERS
bucks or less

90 GQ.COM SEPTEMBER 2016 PHOTOGRAPHS BY JAKE CHESSUM

 As we’ve long suspected,
Grooming the daily routines of well-
groomed gents involve
both upmarket products
> Secrets of the Famously Kempt and drugstore staples

• Fashion is one thing. You wouldn’t wear a $1,000 suit with a flimsy pair of lace-ups. Grooming is di≠erent. ≠ You
can pick and choose what you value most. We love Tom Ford Neroli Portofino eau de parfum, for instance. It’s oil-
based and lasts a long time. And for $300, it should. We love drugstore deodorant, too. Because it works and it’s
cheeeeeap. (Go for lightly scented. You don’t want Fresh Mountain IceBlast interfering with the Neroli.) Thinking
we couldn’t be the only ones to employ this approach, we asked a few friends of the family to tell us the grooming
products they splurge on and the ones they save on. Even we learned a few things. — M A R K A N T H O N Y G R E E N

Our
Panel

Willie Geist Tim Coppens Nas A-Trak

NBC ANCHOR R A D I C A L FA S H I O N D E S I G N E R GODLIKE MC I N F LU E N T I A L DJ

“I got a proper
shave one
time, and they
used Baxter
of California
aftershave.
I was like, ‘What “I’d recommend
is that?!’ A lot the Bevel
of aftershaves hair trimmer,
smell like your even if I wasn’t
grandfather’s a spokesman “I use Perricone face wash and
coat closet. But for it. It’s lighter moisturizer. But they have this
this has aloe in in the han face cream: Perricone MD
it. I put on way easier for Cold Plasma. It’s one of their
too much. It “Fragrance. Byredo.
B d If you’re’ someone who’s most expensive products—and
smells so good, ever in SoHo, their store not a barber. one of their tiniest. But I like it.
you just want sells a little leather travel set I’m searching I don’t even know what it really
Splurge

to taste it.” that you can fill with smaller for what does. It just has a rejuvenating
$19 , baxterof bottles of colognes. Super works.” $180, function after a night of partying.”
california.com handy.” $150 | 50 ml., byredo.com getbevel.com $162 , perriconemd.com

“Drugstores treat
razor blades
like they’re the “Lotion. One
crown jewels. day I’ll be
I refuse to buy trying Eucerin.
the expensive- Some days
locked-cabinet- it’s Vaseline.
razor-game Or any kind
razor! I go the of lotion with
other way. aloe vera.
Gillette MACH3 I’m always dry!
razors. Not I need lotion
even the Gillette on my hands
MACH3 Turbo! at least three
Just the regular. “Toothpaste. Colgatete. It’s, like
ike, times a day. “Old Spice Original Scent
I can’t even five bucks. You buy too
oothp
hpaste You gotta stay deodorant. I’ve tried artisanal
bring myself only because you need it. I’m smooth with it.” deodorants, but they end up not
to do the not going to get the special Eucerin, $8; really… working as deodorants.
Save

Turbo.” $9 toothpaste from France.” $3.50 Vaseline, $3 I stick with Old Spice.” $2.50

96 GQ.COM SEPTEMBER 2016 ILLUSTRATIONS BY LAUREN TAMAKI

 Behold the Winners
of the Decade
To celebrate the tenth anniversary of our Best New
GQ All-Stars Menswear Designers in America program, we asked
four of our favorite winners over the years to come
back and take a victory lap—designing all-new
collections for Gap. Call it the Greatest Hits from the
GQ All-Stars, hitting stores later this month

Steven Alan John Elliott

Better Versions of He’s Bringing the

Everything You Own Streets to the Mall
why we love him: why we love him:
Because as both Because after doing
a retailer and a more for sweatpants
designer, he’s raised than anyone since
our expectations Champion, he’s
for what menswear now revamping our
should be. entire wardrobes.
what to expect: what to expect:
Gray jeans. Garment- Long tees, slim jeans,
dyed, reverse-seam oversize hoodies,
shirts. And this navy leather jackets, and,
corduroy blazer with yes, sweatpants.
a relaxed shoulder. his take: “This
his take: Alan leather jacket is
says the collection based on our Rider’s
is simply “what model. It really
we do, which is has the soul of the
elevated essentials.” original piece. For
And by “elevated” the value, I think
he means sweaters that’s gonna be
and beanies made something our guy
from awesomely will be excited to
unusual yak yarn. get his hands on.”

S I LV E R B R A C E L E T A N D P O C K E T S Q U A R E : V I N TA G E . I L L U S T R AT I O N S : A L E X A N D R A C O M P A I N -T I S S I E R ( 4 ) .
Michael Bastian Saturdays NYC

Snowmobile Style Casual Clothes, G R O O M I N G : L I S A - R A Q U E L U S I N G D I O R H O M M E . L E AT H E R B R A C E L E T : C A P U TO & C O .

why we love him: All Dressed Up

Because his clothes why we love ’em:
conjure settings Because the more-
from the Galápagos than-just-surf brand
to the Erie Canal. makes refined pieces
what to expect: (like this sick camel
A collection inspired coat) that carry you
by the winter sports from a sophisticated
he played as a Friday night straight
kid in upstate New into, well, you know.
York. That means what to expect:
shetland sweaters, Oxford shirts, fleece
snowmobile patches, crewnecks, reversible
flannel shirts, and nylon jackets, and
this jacket, which tees in two-packs.
converts—via zip-o≠ their take:
sleeves—to a vest. “We focused on the
his take: The evolution of the
collection, Bastian brand,” says Morgan
says, is “all those Collett, a co-founder.
things you just want “Where we are today
to grab when it’s and where we want
snowing outside.” to be tomorrow.”

98 GQ.COM SEPTEMBER 2016 PHOTOGRAPHS BY ANDY RYAN

 The Working Man
1 of 2
> The BYOB (Bring Your Own Better) Lunch
The key to eating well—very well—at work is some Sunday prep, a little at-your-desk meal
assembly, and a drawer pantry involving more than pepper packets and duck sauce

F O O D S T Y L I S T : R E B E C C A J U R K E V I C H AT E D G E R E P S . P R O P S T Y L I S T : S A R A H S M A R T.

ingredients that will

lift your lunch and
fit in a drawer. Turn
the page for GQ’s
• When we say version (compiled
“Bring your by chef Mashama
lunch to work,” we Bailey of The Grey in
know what you’re Savannah), featuring
imagining: bologna food-lifters like dried
and sadness. But seaweed (a salty,
BYO lunch doesn’t crunchy flavor bomb)
have to be a disaster. and olive oil (the
To enjoy a fine- best way to upgrade
dining experience anything), and a
cubicle-side, forgo week’s worth of too-
the community good-for-work meals
microwave for the from chef Teddy
“desk pantry,” a Klopf of Provenance
stash of a few simple, in Raleigh.
non-perishable —J E S S I E M O O N E Y

102 GQ.COM SEPTEMBER 2016 PHOTOGRAPHS BY CHRISTOPHER TESTANI

 phase 1

The Sunday-Night Blitz

The 2 of 2
Working Three delicious, easy-to-make dishes that need less than an hour of
prep time and combine to make five meals—and some amazing leftovers.

Man 3 > Bake in a cooker with a

Olive-Oil 200-degree removable
Chicken-Thigh oven 8 to 12 hours cylinder, then mix.
Confit or overnight. Add the pork.
4 > Put the chicken 2 > Cook for 40
Really? A Desk Pantry? 3 lbs. chicken pot in a sink minutes on high.
thighs filled with ice 3 > When the meat
What makes any Chef Bailey suggests some bite. Honey and dried Hondashi (fish-stock water—this keeps stops steaming,
meal are last-minute flavor a few cans of tuna for a fruit like apricots and powder) the meat juicy. use the icing
boosters that can elevate protein hit. Apple-cider cranberries for making Salt 5 > When cool, technique you just
everything from reheated vinegar and flake salt for savory dishes a lot more Ground black remove skin and learned about.
lasagna to the last third of cranking up flavors that complex. Dried seaweed, pepper bones and store 4 > Pull the pork
yesterday’s Chopt salad are already there. Mustard sesame seeds, almonds, A few sprigs of meat in an airtight from the fat and
(or the recipes on this page). powder and dried herbs and pine nuts for crunch. fresh thyme container. refrigerate.
Which is why you need like rosemary, thyme, And any Italian cook will tell 1 fresh bay leaf
a desk pantry—a drawer, marjoram, and oregano, you that finishing a dish Inexpensive olive oil “Braised” Pork Hard-Boiled
a shelf, or just a corner along with live basil, with a drizzle of good olive Belly Eggs
under your desk—with for adding flavors that oil makes it, scientifically, 1 > Pat the thighs
non-perishable staples. aren’t. Ground pepper, 20 percent tastier. dry and season 1½ oz. Hondashi 1 > In a pot,
red-pepper flakes, generously with 8 oz. Sambal Oelek submerge six eggs
and Sambal Oelek ( GQ’ s the Hondashi and 2 Tbsp. hoisin sauce in cold water.
favorite hot sauce) for salt and pepper. 1 cup water 2 > Bring to a boil,
2 > Place in a 3 lbs. pork belly then immediately
covered pot remove from
with the thyme, 1 > Throw heat and let stand
Hell yes, bay leaf, and everything but the 10 minutes.
stash enough olive oil meat into an 3 > Shock in ice
your own to submerge. electric pressure water.
olive oil!

phase 2

A Week of Insanely Great Lunches

In addition to your desk pantry and Chef Klopf’s Sunday recipes,

you’ll need a few more things this week: sourdough, bacon, avocado,
lemon, butter lettuce, tomato, dill spears, and mayo.

monday marjoram and oregano and

Egg Salad
Mix equal parts Sambal, honey,
and olive oil with a pinch
of dry mustard and salt, then
stir in chopped eggs. Add
lettuce, bacon, and tuna, and
dress with lemon juice, olive
oil, salt, and pepper.
tuesday
Rustic Club
Slice tomato super-thinly
onto bread. Add chicken, pulled
pork belly, and bacon, and
drizzle with oil and vinegar.
wednesday
Chicken & Egg Sandwich
Mix chicken and eggs together
with pinches of dried
dry mustard. Add a spoonful
each of pine nuts and mayo.
Make into a sandwich with
pickles and apricots.
thursday
Pulled-Pork-Belly
Lettuce Wrap
Fold pork, sliced dill-pickle
spears, red-pepper flakes,
dried fruit, and vinegar into
lettuce for a healthy(ish)
burrito(ish).
friday
TGIF PBLT
Assemble avocado,
tomato, and pork on sliced
sourdough and dress with
Sambal and basil.

Counterpoint BONUS
Make Lunch While You Shave RECIPE!
> Making Lunch at Your
Job Isn’t Your Job Chef Bailey’s Ten-Minute Udon
Dinner is about the food. Breakfast is
about the food. But lunch isn’t about the food at 1 > Put 2 cups of beef 5 > Combine
all. It’s about the break. A break from your broth on the stove broth and noodles
cubicle. A break from Tim and his whimsical ties. with a couple of and season with
Even if you love your job, you need the break. ounces of beef jerky. a few pantry
You know what noon means in Latin? “Necessary 2 > Shave. ingredients.
retreat.” (Okay, not really.) But it’s impossible 3 > Add fresh udon (The GQ o∞ce
to take a break without leaving the building. Even noodles. Cook favorites: vinegar,
the universe acknowledges the importance of until tender. olive oil, dried
lunch. How? Well, she’s made lunch so cheap and 4 > Strain noodles, herbs, seaweed,
quick to order. Five Guys workers are Talladega- reserving broth. sesame seeds,
level efficient during the lunch-hour rush. Let them Pack separately. and fresh basil.)
do the work. You rest.— M A R K A N T H O N Y G R E E N

104 GQ.COM SEPTEMBER 2016

 Get Up There, Man.
Night It’s a New Era in…
Moves

The word karaoke used to evoke beer-soaked melancholy nights in Holiday Inn lobbies. Then a bunch of cool
karaoke bars—with fun menus and private rooms—opened across the country. The at-home machines got way
better, too. And the parade of celebs in James Corden’s “Carpool Karaoke” showed us all how to drop our
inhibitions. Karaoke is now,, in everyy sense,, amped
p up.
p And the open
p secret is that you
y don’t need an amazing g
voice to kick ass. The only requirements are a rowdy group of friends and a little courage. — B RYA N LU F K I N

Better Food + Better Drink = Better Singing Build a Repertoire of Go-To Jams
Three new-school karaoke bars are transforming the amateur-singing The ideal karaoke song is short (please resist “Purple Rain”),
experience into…an amateur-singing experience with killer atmosphere. massively popular (no one wants to hear that Radiohead B-side), and
cathartically fun (sorry, Adele). Work your way through this set list.
The Highball YamaSho Insa
(Austin) (San Francisco) (Brooklyn) “Just a Friend,” Biz Markie
e
Come for the buckets Beneath this Opened in late 2015, aok It’s fine if you can’t sing. He can’t sing, either.
Kar gin
of Lone Star, stay cavernous Japanese Insa offers not just Vir
for the themed restaurant lies a karaoke but also “Wonderwall,” Oasis
rooms: The Inferno basement labyrinth Korean food and a Suddenly, everyone in the room has a British accent.
lets you sing inside of singing chambers tiki bar. Polish o≠ a
a heavy-metal- filled with disco balls platter of bulgogi, “I’m on a Boat,” The Lonely Island
inspired church, and and sake carafes. then power through Being funny always trumps being talented.

B OT TO M L E F T : S T U A R T T Y S O N . P R O P S T Y L I S T : S T E L L A R E Y AT M A R K E D WA R D I N C .
The Black Lodge Happy hour cuts your your meat sweats in
re-creates the trippy room-rental fee in one of five private “Never Gonna Give You Up,” Rick Astley
setting from Twin half and your drink rooms that hold 10
Peaks’ series finale. prices by 10 percent. to 20 people each.
To be honest, it’s a pretty tough
Turn Your
song to sing, because it’s quite
Living staccato. There’s a lot going on to get
Room all the lyrics out. So in the chorus,
Into Your stick to doing the Never gonna… bit
Stage and get the room to sing as much of
First, the the rest as possible.”— R I C K A S T L E Y
creators of Guitar
Hero convinced “Pony,” Ginuwine
us we could Filthy in the best possible way, this can only be
shred like Slash. performed after alcohol destroys your final inhibition.
Now, with Singtrix,
they’re helping “How Deep Is Your Love,” the Bee Gees
us wail like Axl. Anyone can scream, but it takes real finesse to croon.
Singtrix is basically ,
k It
an at-home system Suc sh “Dream On,” Aerosmith
Jo
that lets you sing b n
a God help you singing Steven Tyler’s high notes.
Gro
along to thousands too shy to warble in channeled your inner God bless you if you can.
of free karaoke public. Be sure to T-Pain or pitch-shift
tracks on YouTube play with the filters: until you squeak like PRO TIP: See a (V) next to your song in the songbook? That means a video
or Spotify, and it’s They let you distort an anxious chipmunk. will play while you sing. Always pick the version with a (V)—karaoke vids
perfect for anyone your voice until you’ve $350, singtrix.com range from cheesy to surreal. They’re never not funny.

108 GQ.COM SEPTEMBER 2016 ILLUSTRATION BY HANNAH K. LEE

 Matrimony
Yes, There Is a Male
Engagement Ring
He wants it…but he doesn’t want to want it. Jessi Klein’s husband works
through his complicated feelings about the ultimate status symbol
• I felt like a genius when I bought my
husband his birthday gift early. A leather
iPhone case, with a pocket for his credit
card. What a great wife! But a few days
later over frozen entrées, Mike said, “Forty-
five feels like a big birthday.” He generally
treats his birthday with the reverence the
average person gives Arbor Day.
“Oh,” I said. “Well, sure. Okay. What do
you want for your present?”
Eyes cast down at his Amy’s burrito, he
said: “A Rolex.”
He immediately buried those two words
under a long string of “Just kidding”s
and “Promise you won’t”s. I mentally
threw the iPhone case into a Dumpster
behind a Chinese restaurant.
I’ve never really understood the
Rolex phenomenon. I love watches, but
I gravitate toward leather bands and
delicate faces like Michael Cera’s.
But, undeniably, there’s something to
Rolexes—something that makes them
worthy of coveting. The iconic aspect. That
112 GQ.COM SEPTEMBER 2016
crown logo that lurks in the background
of Wimbledon matches. Roger Federer
is a spokesman for Rolex. Who’s classier
than Federer? I bet he’s never heard of
frozen burritos.
The thing about Federer, though, is
he’s rich as shit. I knew Rolexes cost a lot,
but I didn’t know how much “a lot” was
until I went on their website. They don’t
list prices, which is always a bad sign.
Some Googling revealed that even the
lowest-tier Rolex would take me close to a
five-figure purchase, more than I’ve ever
spent on something I wasn’t planning to
actually live in.
Trying to justify the expense, I imagined
Mike one day passing it on to our baby
son. Since it’s a gift for two people, it’s
actually only half the price! I also sought
reassurance from my pal James, who
confirmed that Rolexes seize men with a
push-pull of guilt and fascination: It’s
a beautiful gizmo that radiates status and
achievement, but whose price point gives
guys a stomachache. Rolexes, I realized,
are engagement rings for dudes—the main
di≠erence being that most women would
absolutely buy a diamond solitaire for
themselves but can’t; men are free to buy
a Rolex for themselves but just won’t.
So that left me as the only person who
could convince my husband it was all right
to want this watch, in the form of actually
getting it for him. But I still needed help
figuring out which kind of Rolex guy he was.
“The di≠erence between the Submariner
and Datejust models is elegance v
adventure,” James texted. “Which does
Mike need more of in his life?”
I pictured Mike changing a thousand
poop diapers over the past ten months.
Did that leave a bigger deficit of adventure
or elegance? I needed a big gun, which is
how I ended up chatting with Jim Moore,
the longtime creative director of this
magazine.
The first thing Jim talked me out of
was a white dial. Mike usually wears
a black one. “Doesn’t he want something
di≠erent?” I asked. Jim assured me that
men like a uniform. He also said that while
the Submariner is great, the Air-King,
with its lower price point and humbler
profile, was a more confident choice. It’s a
male-psychology thing: While guys might
not call out a Submariner, Air-Kings get
compliments all the time. It’s why no dude
ever tells Brad Pitt, “You have a pretty wife.”
Ultimately, I made the decision the
way one should make all important choices:
I went on Internet forums to see what
anonymous randos had to say. Across
message boards, the Submariner is the
most primally loved Rolex. And almost
every thread singing its praises contained
a photo: Steve McQueen in a denim shirt,
sunglasses, necklace, and scru≠, flashing
his Submariner. Fucking fuck, McQueen
was cool. And if the Submariner was cool
enough for McQueen, what can you do?
Happy birthday, Mike. You’re not
Steve McQueen, but you’re the guy who
schlepped 12 suitcases through the airport
when we moved across the country and
emerged through security laughing even
though your finger was profusely bleeding
from getting caught in the stroller as you
stu≠ed it through the X-ray. Which means
you’re even hotter than Steve McQueen.
I love you. And I hope you love this watch.
(You can exchange it if you want.)
jessi klein is the Emmy Award–winning
head writer for Inside Amy Schumer and
the author of You’ll Grow Out of It.
ILLUSTRATION BY GUY SHIELD
 A Modest Proposal from… JOHN MALKOVICH

Get More Done by

Being Less Productive
Don’t Listen to Compliments
That Don’t Come From Yourself
You have to be able to tell yourself, “Listen,
I thought that was a very bad, inadequate
job I did.” Even if everybody else says, “Oh,
I don’t think so. I loved it” or “I thought it was
fantastic.” Even if a majority of people say
that. You have to have your own barometer.

Know This: Multitasking Is

Just Procrastination
The Internet gives you the sense of getting
things done. We think we can accomplish
a lot just being on it. And perhaps we can.
But I think what the Internet does is it sort
of pushes us on to the next thing. When
people get an e-mail and they’re instructed
that they need to do this or that, I wonder
if they actually read it anymore—or if
their eyes just glaze over and they go,
“Whatever, I’ll get it later.” I think of it
as kind of an information sickness.

Don’t Believe in the Power of You

People will say how your life goes is up
to you. You know, the whole kind of
Tony Robbins, walk-through-fire of it all.
That’s all great—but maybe not realistic.
For instance, I would have maybe preferred
to be in the NBA or be a professional
baseball pitcher. But I wasn’t good enough.
No amount of exerting control over
myself—or attempting to assert control over
my destiny—would change that. I don’t
know what I would’ve ended up doing
if I hadn’t met the kids who had this stupid
idea to start a theater—which turned out
not to be such a stupid idea.

Malkovich—that guy’s got to be a machine, right? Nearly 100 Be Less Ambitious

Accomplishment may be the result of
films! The latest: this month’s BP-oil-spill thriller Deepwater ambition or drive. And I think I probably
Horizon. He’s a 40-year member of the Steppenwolf Theatre have lots of drive. But I don’t have any
Company and is now directing the play Good Canary in ambition. I never really had any. I don’t
have a hugely high opinion of ambition.
London. He’s even got a fashion line! So you might be surprised I think of ambition as the need to prove
SEBASTIEN AGNETTI/13 PHOTO/REDUX

to discover he’s a man who advises against ambition
Finishing Just Means Knowing
When to Quit
Here’s how I look at work and productivity:
It’s best to be restless. And to be able to
leave things when you feel that you don’t
have anything further to contribute. And
then, on the other hand, there are things
one believes one was completely done
with, only to find there are new things to
discover in them. I’ve had the opportunity
to go back and direct a play, or act in a play,
that I’d already acted in or directed. The
play was the same, but my relation to it was
not. In a certain way, you’re probably never
really finished, but you also have to accept
sometimes that you’re finished for now.
something to others, and the need to be
recognized. A need for rewards outside
of the work. Drive motivates you to do
whatever it is you’re doing as well as you
can. That’s an important distinction, and it
always has been. It was as true 40 years
ago when I started as it is now.
For more unexpected stories in gq, go to gq.com
/unexpected. Brought to you by the all-new 2016
Chevrolet Malibu.

114 GQ.COM SEPTEMBER 2016

 THE

AMERICAN TELEVISION STORY

The Creative Genius

Behind Peak TV
How did all of our favorite shows
(Fargo, The Americans,
The People v. O.J. Simpson) and
all that Emmy love come out of one
place, one network, and possibly
one man? Alice Gregory went looking
for the reason FX is killing it.
Plus: what to watch next!
SEE ADDITIONAL CREDITS.

EDDIE GUY SEPTEMBER 2016 GQ.COM 117


I A M A 2 9 - Y E A R - O L D C O N S U M E R of American
television and I have a problem. I, like you and
probably everyone else we know, watch a ton
of TV: hours and hours and hours a week. I am
often in danger of handing literally all of my
d i s c re t i o n a r y t i m e ove r t o s t re a m i n g s h ows .
Until a few years ago, I wondered if I was doing something
stupid by not working in TV—in the same way that I worry if I’m
doing something stupid by not having a job at a start-up. Like I’m
like the one person in 1849 Sacramento who’s “just not that into
gold.” We hear every day pretty much how it’s gotten better over the
past 15 years, how it’s taken seriously as an art form now, how it’s
our Dickens. Blah blah blah. What’s said less is how television has
also gotten bigger—there is literally just more of it. The number
of scripted shows nearly doubled between 2009 and 2015, to 400-
plus. I watch a lot of this stu≠—I think I can safely say too much—
and still it feels like I’m missing out.
The excess is indulgent—and anxiety-inducing. Some weeks my
consumption verges on career-disabling. I use my parents’ Netflix
account and the HBO log-in that belongs to the mother of a friend’s
friend’s ex-girlfriend. Sometimes I pay, sometimes I pirate, some-
times my husband will do something on my computer that I don’t
understand and—poof!—there it is, whatever I asked him to get.
Though I sometimes barely know what I’m watching or where I’m
watching it, I’m confident that it’s all pretty good.
Last summer, John Landgraf, the 54-year-old head of FX,
named this condition—this blessed/cursed feeling and this glut
of “pretty good”—that I and everyone I know had internalized
but never really interrogated. He called it “Peak TV.” “There is
simply too much television,” Landgraf said during a press tour.
People glommed on to this idea, comforted to receive such a
correct-feeling diagnosis from a bona fide expert. It was strange,
though, everyone thought, that the person credited for nam-
ing the biggest problem with television also happened to be
making some of the very best of it.
This spring and summer, I talked again and again with Landgraf
about that tension. Landgraf is responsible (along with an impres-
sive team) for everything on FX. It’s an odd thing—grouping shows
together as though they all hang out in the same locker room and
have anything much in common beyond the executives at the
top. And yet on a night in late March, all those distinct faces and
voices from the fictional universes of FX were colliding at a bowl-
ing party, uno∞cially celebrating the unexpected success of The
People v. O.J. Simpson. It had an uncanny, almost sci-fi quality to
it. Matthew Rhys from The Americans was chatting with the show’s
head writers; It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia’s Danny DeVito
sat wedged between two leggy blondes at the bar. If one listened
carefully, swaths of ambient noise revealed themselves to be made
up of the voices from Archer. The stars of O.J. were everywhere, too.
Cuba Gooding Jr. posed for selfies with fans. Sarah Paulson, John
Travolta, and Courtney B. Vance laughed and drank and ate. The
journalist Je≠rey Toobin, upon whose book the limited series was
based, wandered between tables laden with kebabs. And meander-
ing past a center lane, in a kind of metaphysical, self-made seclu-
sion, was Landgraf, besuited, drink in hand. He did not pick up a
ball that night, though he is, according to all his colleagues and
even himself, a pretty good bowler. “That’s my curse,” he later said,
smiling. “I’m pretty good at a lot of things.”
FX was, undeniably, having a moment. And it was funny to see
it expressed in real-live physical space. Though more TV was being
made than ever, FX seemed to have found a way to cut through.
(In July, that point was made quantifiably: FX garnered more
Emmy nominations than any network besides HBO.) Landgraf
and FX were doing something with their culture of creativity that
was turning FX into practically a one-stop solution to the prob-
lem—to my problem—of “Peak TV.” What a tidy fix. I wanted to
know what their secret was.
120 GQ.COM SEPTEMBER 2016
THEPUNCHLIST
• FX president
T
here’s a certain irony to the fact
John Landgraf
is making some of that the guy who delivered the indus-
television’s best try’s most headline-worthy state-
shows while also
criticizing the
ment in recent memory is himself inclined
age of “Peak TV.” toward neither superlatives nor showman-
ship. Landgraf has been called “the mayor of
TV,” a designation that implies public-facing
ambition and tactical ascendancy. But in
person—and practice—he’s less city politi-
cian than suburban dad. His speech is punc-
tuated with seemingly nonstrategic but still
squirm-inducing pauses, and he radiates an
eerie calm. It is impossible to imagine him
honking in tra∞c or yelling at an automated
phone message or even getting agitated
over nontrivial, professionally relevant
things like ratings or reviews. An assistant
in Landgraf ’s o∞ce described him to me as
“intellectually intimidating but completely
approachable socially.” The top 11 execu-
tives at FX have worked for Landgraf for
a combined 107 years. And since he joined
the network in 2004, not a single creator
of a single show has been fired or replaced.
Television has Landgraf (who premiered six new series in
STEVE SCHOFIELD/CONTOUR/GETTY IMAGES
also gotten the past year) has read drafts of every script
bigger—there and watched rough cuts of every episode
is literally that’s ever made it to air.
Landgraf ’s way of doing business—
just more of it. characterized by his loyalty and his counter-
The number intuitive investment in the odd men out—is
of scripted a philosophy born of his own life. The only
shows nearly child of two itinerant gospel musicians,
doubled Landgraf was born in Detroit in 1962 and
didn’t live at the same residence for three
between 2009 consecutive years until high school. The
and 2015, family moved often while Landgraf ’s par-
to 400-plus. ents pursued graduate degrees, and he

describes his boyhood as unhappy, salved
mostly with books. “I was often an obser-
vant outsider,” he told me.
Landgraf ’s adulthood has resembled
something of a self-caricatured corrective:
He has lived in Los Angeles now for 31 years,
18 of them in the same house, and made a
career (developing shows like Friends and
The West Wing before FX) out of providing
economic, creative, and emotional support
to writers who in all likelihood think of
themselves as observant outsiders, too. He
runs FX according to the idea that the best
TV is more likely to germinate from an envi-
ronment of safety than of chaos. Despite
the myths of creative genius, for every art-
ist with an abusive stepmother or teenage
drug addiction, there’s another who water-
colored in his bedroom between deliveries
of crustless PB&Js. Landgraf doesn’t cod-
dle, but he believes wholeheartedly in the
e∞cacy of the sandwich-supplying method.
“If I have any role in the creative process
at all, it is to simply remind the writer of
what it is she or he wanted to achieve from
the beginning and have very detailed con-
versations about how they’re achieving
that,” he elaborated. “You see what kind
of work comes out when a person, instead
of encountering resistance, encounters
support. Over and over again, I have seen
extraordinary things. Extraordinary things.”
The most famous example of Landgraf ’s
commitment to removing barriers is a bar-
gain he struck with Louis C.K. while nego-
tiating Louie. C.K. had asked FX to increase
its o≠er (a modest amount for a pilot order)
but was swayed when Landgraf agreed to
give him complete creative control. The
result was a first season of television lauded
for its singular vision and execution—one
of the most uniquely original series to air
anywhere even mildly mainstream.
More recently, Donald Glover, whose
new series, Atlanta, premieres this month
(see page 126), said that he did not want
to create a show within the constraints of
a traditional whiteboard-lined writers’
room, so Landgraf enthusiastically allowed
operations to be based out of Glover’s own
house in L.A. Glover was brand-new to the
production side of television—he had never
made a single TV episode from behind the
camera. In fact, nearly half of the series
that Landgraf has shepherded onto air at
FX were created by people who had never
before made television.
He says he prefers it that way: “Usually
in this world, when you’re in that position,
you run into wave after wave of resistance.
Because you have to prove yourself. But
when that type of talented person meets
someone who is willing to invest real sup-
port and resources behind them? It’s like
watering a flower: You just watch it grow
and explode. It’s exciting.”
122 GQ.COM SEPTEMBER 2016
THEPUNCHLIST
The Emmy for Best Emmy Goes To...
With so many FXers nominated, GQers identify the super-best of the best
Kirsten Kirsten Dunst’s blood-tingling turn as
Peggy Blumquist in Fargo wasn’t even her
Dunst
first time playing a Minnesota beautician
Lead Actress (remember Drop Dead Gorgeous?). With her
in a Limited
dexterous touch, the accidental murderess
Series became as volatile as a shimmering gas cloud.
Yes, Peggy was delusional and deranged—
but also a delight.— CA I T Y W E AV E R
Bokeem Bokeem Woodbine’s middle-management
mobster is the first notable black character
Woodbine in Fargo’s—hell, in the Coen brothers’—
Supporting tundra-white screen universe, and the joke of
Actor in a it is that he has the same “you betcha” patois
Limited Series as everyone else. He deserves the Emmy for
reciting “Jabberwocky” while he straps
on to go execute someone.— D E V I N G O R D O N
The The Americans, FX’s thriller series about
Russian spies embedded in suburban D.C.,
Americans is like a John le Carré adaptation where you
Drama Series root for the bad guy and can understand the
plot. It’s as romantic as The Notebook and as
fucked-up as the end of Memento. Also as
fucked-up as the end of Memento: It’s never
won a major primetime Emmy.—A N N A P E E L E
Sarah Paulson One’s a prosecutor, one’s a poltergeist.
vs. One was in Ryan Murphy’s American
Crime Story, the other in Ryan Murphy’s
Sarah Paulson American Horror Story. Although her
Lead Actress in a role as a ghost guest in Lady Gaga’s hotel
Limited Series was also nominated, Sarah Paulson’s
and devastating portrayal of doomed O.J.
Supporting antagonist Marcia Clark altered America’s
Actress in a sympathies so completely it deserves
Limited Series both of these Emmys.— N I L S S J O B E R G
Landgraf ’s own reserve can be seen in the shows he picks to
F R O M TO P : C O U R T E S Y O F C H R I S L A R G E / F X ( 2 ) ; C O U R T E S Y O F PAT R I C K H A R B R O N / F X ;
pursue. “TV is so inflated with its own self-worth right now,” he
said. “It’s so pretentious about its greatness.” Unlike some other
networks that shall go unnamed, FX does not seem to be oper-
ating under the mistaken assumption that Low Winter Sun is a
If we really, good thing to call a series or that a Ventura County investigator
COURTESY OF BYRON COHEN/FX; COURTESY OF SUZANNE TENNER/FX
really went should be named Antigone Bezzerides and say things like “The
deep into fundamental di≠erence between the sexes is that one of them
the point of can kill the other with their bare hands.” He gets that grandiosity
view of a isn’t the same thing as ambition.
“Part of what people want from TV is a passive experience. They
lot of different want to be able to tune out,” Landgraf said. “I don’t know if you’ve
people and ever eaten at a three-star prix fixe restaurant three days in a row,
relentlessly but when you’re done with that, all you want is a piece of pizza. You
allowed them don’t want to sit and savor and treat it seriously. You just want to
to pursue eat something when you’re hungry.”
But how do you know what kind of pizza? You could poll a bunch
that, would of hungry people. You could just give them Domino’s and assume
those shows they’ll eat it, anyway. Or you could find the most talented, most
then end up enthusiastic, most innovative pizzamakers in the country and let
having some them do whatever they want in the kitchen. They’ll come up with
common some bizarre pies, but some people will be super into them. The
people will come back for more; they might even like them more
thread that than the sous vide whatever served at the three-star place.
could be “The classic notion of a brand is something that is defined and
united?” imposed from the top down—these are our colors, this is the
 THEPUNCHLIST

tone—but we thought it would be interest-

ing to go in the other direction, from the
bottom up,” Landgraf said. “If we really,
What Shows Can I Skip? really went deep into the point of view of
a lot of di≠erent
≠ people and relentlessly
allowed them to pursue that, would those
A Unified Theory shows then end up having some common
thread that could be united?”

I
f FX is a home for specific points of
Suc k on
it
Trebek. ,
view, it’s Landgraf ’s job to choose which
of them we’ll learn to love. Historically,
the network was devoted to the elaborate
realization of hyper-masculine fanta-

F R E D A R M I S E N A N D B I L L H A D E R : C O U R T E S Y O F R H Y S T H O M A S /A M C . A L E C B A L D W I N : H E I D I G U T M A N /A B C / G E T T Y I M A G E S . TAY L O R K I N N E Y : C O U R T E S Y O F E L I Z A B E T H M O R R I S / N B C .
sies. Its initial forays into programming
included The Shield (a four-man anti-
gang unit of the LAPD enforces vigilante
justice), Rescue Me (firemen deal with

J U S T I N T H E R O U X : C O U R T E S Y O F VA N R E D I N / H B O . AYA C A S H : C O U R T E S Y O F B Y R O N C O H E N / F X . K R I S T E N B E L L A N D T E D D A N S O N : C O U R T E S Y O F J U S T I N L U B I N / N B C .
PTSD in post-9/11 New York City), Sons of
Anarchy (members of an outlaw motor-
cycle club run firearms throughout the
sun-scorched West), and Archer (a spy
solves international crimes while o≠end ≠ -

T R A C E E E L L I S R O S S : C O U R T E S Y O F K E L S E Y M C N E A L /A B C / G E T T Y I M A G E S . A N T H O N Y A N D E R S O N : C O U R T E S Y O F K E L S E Y M C N E A L /A B C / G E T T Y I M A G E S .
ing everyone on earth).
Only in the past few years has the
network begun to branch out from its
testosterone-soaked fare. It’s not like the
shows have gotten feminized, but they have
gotten, for lack of a better word, weird. Lots
of unsubtitled Hungarian on Louie; Zach
Galifianakis playing a classically trained
By St
Stephen
h F Falk,
lk
clown on Baskets; Pamela Adlon’s Better
creator of the Things (see page 130), the first FX series with
W AT C H I F T H E S H O W … SKIP IF
FXX sitcom T H E S H OW… a sole female showrunner, about a single
You’re the Worst mom doing her best to raise a family—not
> There’s a scene Is British and Was created by Has “Chicago” in
exactly avant-garde, but a far cry from her
in Moscow on features too-old/ Jenji Kohan, Michael the title. role as C.K.’s dirty-joke-trading sidekick.
the Hudson in which lumpy/dentally- Schur, Mike Judge, Ryan Murphy, who for years had been an
a newly defected anarchic-for- Kenya Barris, Vince Is an adaptation of outlier at the network with his Lady Gaga–
Russian man, American-television Gilligan, Damon an ’80s movie.
played by Robin detectives solving Lindelof, or Tina Fey (But mostly just
laced self-conscious camp, is an example
Williams, collapses a brutal murder. and Robert Carlock. because I’m jealous of a writer whose particular perspective
when faced with GQ RECOMMENDS GQ RECOMMENDS I haven’t thought Landgraf has underwritten repeatedly.
the overwhelming Happy Valley black-ish (ABC), The of one I wanted to Before creating O.J. for FX, Murphy made
number of options (Netflix), Broadchurch Good Place (NBC) remake yet.)
at an American (BBC America)
Nip/Tuck and American Horror Story,
grocery store. I’m Has the reasonable Features a comedian shows that epitomize Landgraf ’s definition
like that when Is called possibility of Fred who is clearly of “success” (“That’s somebody’s favorite
I look at my DVR — Hunters. Armisen popping up just trying to make show. That’s a show that wouldn’t exist if
these days, except Punch-worthy couples at any minute. their Louie.
demanding open-
you didn’t back it”), which he considers
I’m not nearly as There are currently
hairy and my accent floor-plan everything about eight Is a game show di≠erent from “non-failure” (“Okay, you
is believable. Yes, is always a hate- shows where this hosted by Alec did something pretty good and people are
as over-bemoaned watchable good time. is applicable. Baldwin. watching it”). Murphy had been seen as a
as it is in the press, GQ RECOMMENDS GQ RECOMMENDS Yes, it looks like an
there are just too Fixer Upper (HGTV) easy, fun-as-shit job,
TV outsider—too gay, too pop, too Glee—
Documentary Now!
many shows. How (IFC) and I would never but his bizarre and particular mind is the
can one know what Seems to be really begrudge him that, kind that Landgraf is always searching for.
to watch? Who swinging for the Is on FX or FXX. but many of us would Murphy, like a lot of other people at FX,
has time to read fences, as misguided GQ RECOMMENDS die to write for him.
actual good, as the attempt might (I’m with UTA, Alec.
explicitly frames his relationship with
You’re the Worst,
informed writing be (hello, Vinyll and Atlanta (see page 126). I promise to instruct Landgraf as one between petulant child
about television? Billions!). all my directors to and stern, but righteous, father. They
No one. That’s why I’d much rather watch leave you alone on set came to the network at roughly the same
they brought me in to something with some and keep eye contact
offer a handful of oomph and effort to a minimum.)
time, and almost immediately Murphy
helpful shortcuts to behind it, rather than was fighting with Landgraf over notes
quickly let you know a safe, tepid attempt Is on a pay network provided from the broadcast-standards
if a show is worth that feels like you’ve and doesn’t feature division. Unlike previous managers, Land-
watching or not. seen it a million times copious swearing
before. (Or a billions.) and nudity.
graf refused to indulge Murphy. “He basi-
GQ RECOMMENDS C’mon. Stop cally told me to just knock it o≠,” ≠ Murphy
The Leftovers (HBO) wasting our time. recalled, laughing.

124 GQ.COM SEPTEMBER 2016

 THEPUNCHLIST

Today, Murphy speaks of Landgraf with a kind of cautious grati-
tude, as though terrified to imagine his career without him. When
I visited the Fox lot, he ushered me into his o∞ce and gestured for
me to take a seat in an armchair. “Gosh, what can I say about John?”
he asked, settling himself into a sofa. And then he began.
“John’s parameters as both a human being and a runner of
business are very clear. And most people in this town are not like
that. They give you the runaround; they can’t just tell you the
truth, because they’re afraid you won’t come back or you won’t
like them anymore.” Murphy spoke of Landgraf as though
his insights were ones arrived at only after years of psychic pain;
his praise was cautionary. “Don’t underestimate John when he’s
been crossed. He has a very strong moral center: This is how
you should behave in the world; this is how the world should be
ordered; this is the right behavior, and this is the wrong behavior.”
Murphy was perfectly still. “He doesn’t yell, but he can annihilate
you with his intellect and make you feel like a really shitty, bad
person.… Most acts of anger feel reactive. His are set back and
thought through. He’s not trying to pick a fight, he’s trying to
change your behavior in the future.”
The conversation was a bit like listening to a Marine credit
basic training for conditioning his very soul. At one point, Murphy
predicted that Landgraf would be “the last gentleman stand-
ing” and then called him “a Mount Rushmore–like figure in the
TV industry.” He shook his head every few seconds, as though
re-registering his indebtedness each time
anew. “What people want in this busi-
ness is just someone who fucking tells it
straight. Maybe that’s the secret of John,”
he said. “And me having this therapy ses-
Sometimes sion with you,” he added.
you have Beyond the identification of singular
every vision and a stern but encouraging pater-
element nal hand, I was still having trouble under-
standing what it was that enabled Landgraf
of a good to steer the network toward the things that
show but it audiences most desire.
just doesn’t Landgraf thinks about this question
jell, and a lot. He embraces it. “People don’t know
sometimes what they want,” he often says, citing Star
Wars and Game of Thrones as examples
you have of blockbusters that were only obvious in
shows that retrospect. Even Landgraf himself doesn’t
on paper know what he’s after until he reads a draft
look really of a script, sees a cut of a pilot, eats a sand-
problematic wich with a potential showrunner and finds
that he likes the guy—trusts him, can laugh
and then with him, gets good vibes. That he admits
they’re that there is no overarching, genius, mas-
remarkable.” ter theory to picking a great show besides a
gut feeling and good judgment is one of the
simple things that make him so successful.
During one of our conversations, Land-
graf asked me if I’d ever seen the movie
Amadeus. I told him I had. “Okay, then,” he

Gimme an A! replied. “Salieri destroys Mozart, right? I

watch that movie and I think, ‘Wow, that’s
so sad.’ The tragedy is that nobody can rec-
ognize how good Mozart is as well as Salieri
can; he can see his genius better than any-
there call it.) The
weirdest, most one else. Salieri wrote some decent compo-
fascinating city in the sitions in his day, but nothing survives that
country. The alternate- we still listen to because he just wasn’t that
reality culture capital
of the world. It has good. That’s how I feel about myself. I’m
a historical claim on good, I’m really good as a writer and direc-
such things as crunk tor and dramaturge, but I’m not as good as
and Future and the Denis Leary or Ryan Murphy or any of the
word “trap.” Atlanta
is singular, it’s deep,
people making shows for FX. And wouldn’t
and it’s high as fuck. it have been great if Salieri used every bit
Glover—who was of his mind and motivation to help Mozart
from Georgia before instead of trying to bring him down? I gen-
he was the guy uinely think that what I do is the best use
from Community/the
guy who is Childish of my abilities. It’s a better use of my time.
Gambino—has I could have written; I could have created
made a half-hour show shows myself, and they would have been
about a lost soul good, but they would not have been great,
swimming in the weird
music-industry/trap/ and I really do think that what we’re making
upwardly-mobile- right now is great.”
professional seas of
Atlanta. It’s sensitive,

I
it’s appropriately
surreal, and it features
the best stoner this
spoke to Landgraf just hours after
the 2016 Emmy nominations were
announced. The network led with The
C O U R T E S Y O F G U Y D ’A L E M A / F X

side of Inherent Vice People v. O.J. Simpson, Fargo, and The Amer-
(the brilliant Lakeith icans, and its 56 were second only to HBO,
> TV is starting to black people • Real-life rapper Stanfield; keep your
pay attention to us. To (Empire!); people Donald Glover stars eye on that dude). I which has had original programming for
acknowledge (slowly, who aren’t, like, as a wannabe rap... don’t know—I haven’t decades longer. Landgraf was in a good
manager.
slowly) that we’re heteronormative but seen the whole mood. And though he didn’t boast, he
not all bland white aren’t a gay sidekick thanks to FX and season because FX also didn’t seem particularly surprised
people who live on Will & Grace, Donald Glover, TV is only made the pilot
in a place called The either (Transparent); finally admitting that available. But I’m
by the morning’s results.
Big Bang Theory dragon moms there’s an Atlanta. The gonna be watching. I was curious to hear how a specific show,
Town. Us! You know, (GoT). And now, A! (As people who live —DEVIN FRIEDMAN pitched in 2010 or 2012 or whenever, was

126 GQ.COM SEPTEMBER 2016

 THEPUNCHLIST

Landgraf isn’t ideologically opposed to

those things; he just doesn’t think they’re
e∞cient means to good TV—or profit.

The Louis C.K. “It’s not a jet engine, where a good engi-
neer can take it apart and stress-test the
pieces. There are too many feedback loops

Universe Is Expanding inside this process,” he said. “You can’t do

this perfectly; it’s just too subtle a chal-
lenge. Sometimes you have every element
Entourage.” And But we can’t monitor
of a good show but it just doesn’t jell,
House of Cards’ what kids watch and sometimes you have shows that on
and UnREAL’s anymore. Parents paper look really problematic and then
Constance Zimmer are in a lot of denial: they’re remarkable. To be honest, I never
told me people said to “My kid’s not on
her, “You’re so good the Internet.” You’re
know. I’ve been doing this for 30 years,
on Californication.” a fucking idiot, and I just don’t know. I’ve picked up some
I did a pilot, and because kids are shows that have failed, and I haven’t picked
Showtime wouldn’t watching ISIS up some shows that have succeeded.”
let me out of contract behead people on
to do the series, so cell phones. So
(Landgraf passed on Breaking Bad, to
they offered it to I just say, “It’s all out name one.) “It took me a while, to tell you
Constance. Putting there, and it’s your the truth, to accept the notion that I was
her in Better Things choice, but I’m the person in this chair, the one making
Louie collaborator had to pour milk as my competition telling you if you see
Pamela Adlon is in the bathtub, but at an audition was certain things, it
these decisions. I hated for a long time that
about to unleash a he could show his just a little homage to will stay with you. You I couldn’t do this job perfectly.”
new FX show, Better whole giant body, show that not only can’t un-see it.” Landgraf spoke slowly and deliberately,
Things. (Yes, C.K. no problem. But you am I not competitive— with a confidence complicated, sentence
is involved.) Below, can’t show any fun I put that fucking On her favorite
parts. You can’t show,
by sentence, by humility. It’s a rare qual-
her survey of the bitch on my show and show
television landscape. like, pubic areas in I’m in love with her. The Americans? ity in people in the entertainment world,
a painting. And you I freaking love that but his speech is so fluent that it preempts
On the limits of can say naughty On parental show, and my the need for paraphrasing. Like when,
basic cable things, but not “fuck.” control kid’s watching it.
> Because I’m on FX, Once in a while, you I’m like, “Honey,
mid-conversation, his childhood encoun-
My 13-year-old
I can show sideboob can fight for a “fuck.” makes me watch you want to find out ters with organized religion became evi-
with no nipple freely. The Bachelorette, about when I was dent and enviable. Given enough time, he
When Louis and On Hollywood which feels really growing up and I felt began talking about television as though
I got in the bath on doppelgängers dirty and bad and like we were gonna
Louie, they were For years, people said explode from a
it is literally divine.
awful. I feel like
so concerned about to me, “Oh, my God, I’m watching porn nuclear bomb all “What makes us good in this business is
my nipples that we you’re so good on with my daughter. the time?” our acknowledgment that there’s a point
where our control ends and something
magical begins—or, frankly, ends. Part of
transformed, incrementally, into an Emmy nominee in 2016. In his the job is so rational and quantitative and
own gentle way, Landgraf refused to answer the question. But he was can be described, and I’ve thought for 30
eager to dive into The Americans. years now about how to be good at it, and
Though Landgraf is intimately involved in all the network’s then there’s a black box beyond the data,
shows, he takes special interest in some. The Americans began beyond the knowable. It’s a weird thing to
in 2012, when Landgraf took a lunch with a former CIA o∞cer say, ‘Get good at something that’s beyond
named Joe Weisberg, who had pitched him an ’80s spy show. “I your control,’ but it’s true. There’s a kind
wanted to get a sense of who he was,” Landgraf recalled. “So much of graciousness and unfettered hope-
of this hinges on the character of the creator: their steadfastness, fulness. The job is to link this ine≠able,
their maturity, their willingness to learn. The showrunner has to even airy-fairy, stu≠ with the hard-nosed,
bring out the best in literally every person who is working on the What makes business-minded requirements of the
show.” Landgraf had a hunch that Weisberg would get along with us good job. Because, look, FX is a business. HBO
an old friend of his who had decades’ worth of producing expe- is a business. Netflix, Paramount, these
in this
K C B A I L E Y/ F X / C O U R T E S Y O F E V E R E T T C O L L E C T I O N

rience. He introduced Weisberg to Joel Fields, and now they are are businesses. And there’s a tendency
inseparable writing partners. Once the show was green-lighted, it business is for the story, the ine≠able, to be subordi-
was Landgraf who suggested Keri Russell for the lead, approved [knowing] nated and put in service of business. But
all subsequent casting choices, and gave multiple rounds of notes that there’s I’ve been trying to do the opposite, to sub-
for every cut of the pilot, down to the score. a point ordinate the business to the artist. And I do
“That first season, when we were still trying to find the voice of think it’s the best way to meet the goals of
the show,” Weisberg said, “so many of the notes from John basically where our the shareholders and my bosses. I have to
boiled down to: Push to find something unique and not homoge- control be incredibly buttoned-up on the business
nized. The big question from the beginning was: Do we turn this ends and side to make this work. If my attitude was,
into a sexy, action-y, violent spy show, or do we dig into something something ‘Screw the business,’ somebody else would
that has a more esoteric heart? The constant message from him magical be here, and they very well might have less
and his team was to explore, to not be afraid, to really find what’s heart, less respect for the stories, and this
special about this show. Which, of course, doesn’t mean run away begins—or, stu≠ wouldn’t be getting made.”
from the pulpy or exciting aspects but, you know, just don’t do those frankly,
things because you think you have to chase an audience or ratings.” ends.” alice gregory is a writer in Brooklyn.

130 GQ.COM SEPTEMBER 2016

 THEPUNCHLIST

HBO’s
Highest
Art
The newest strain of prestige
programming comes from
a couple of Brooklyn tokers

> Katja Blichfeld and Ben

Sinclair just work. Maybe
it’s that the couple had the
same deeply un-rebellious
preteen pre-bed ritual of
listening to the Fiddler on the
Roof soundtrack. Maybe it’s
the complementary filmmaking
style that begot three seasons
of High Maintenance, a Vimeo
series turned HBO show
about Brooklynites serviced

P R O P S T Y L I S T : J O N AT H A N R I T Z M A N F O R B E D N A R K S T U D I O . H A I R : C A S E Y G E R E N F O R B A - R E P S . C O M . M A K E U P : J U S T I N E S W E E T M A N F O R B A - R E P S . C O M .
by a Sinclair-played weed
dealer. Or maybe…
“We’re pretty co-dependent,”
Sinclair explains. “But we’re
working on it,” says Blichfeld.
Just, you know, not hard
enough to have spent more
than five days apart in the
past four years. Blichfeld, a
37-year-old Emmy-winning
casting director with a Debbie
Harry bob, brings what she
describes as “law and order”
to the marriage, while the
32-year-old Sinclair, a former
garden-store employee whose
tufts are enhanced by Toppik
“root volumizing” spray, is
all “chaos.” When Blichfeld
says she worries her neighbors
will kill her, Sinclair stares.
“I just think, like, What if that
person finds out that I didn’t
actually see ‘Shampoo’ and
I just said I did to look like a
Warren Beatty fan?” he says.
That relaxed, semi-baffled
vibe is on display this season
of High Maintenance, as
Sinclair’s unnamed distributor
flits between clients and
vignettes—every episode
features a different star and
tone, ranging from cruelly
hilarious to poignant. The new
season is the same but feels
more HBO-y, somehow. More...
expensive. “We can hire porn
actors,” says Blichfeld. “That
guy from the first episode is an
artist and a Marxist—really
interesting person. But, yeah,
he does porn.” Whatever
works.— A N N A P E E L E

132 GQ.COM SEPTEMBER 2016 AARON RICHTER

 GQINTELLIGENCE MUSIC

At just 23, C H A N C E
T H E R A P P E R has
already earned
the love and
respect of his
elders, like Kanye
West, who let him
lead off on The
Life of Pablo,
and his musical
peers, who hear
a generational
voice in his
third mixtape,
Coloring Book.
He’s so positive he
seems to walk
around on a beam
of light, even
though he comes
from an American
city going through
one of its darkest
chapters. And

P R O D U C E R : C O C O K N U D S O N . S T Y L I S T : M I C H A E L N A S H . O N - S E T P R O D U C E R : K AT I E S WA N S O N . G R O O M I N G : A N T H O N Y C R I S T I A N O AT
yet that light just
keeps getting

ANTHONY CRISTIANO SALON. CREWNECK: GUCCI. JEANS: DIOR HOMME. BOXERS: POLO RALPH LAUREN. CAP: NEW ERA.
brighter. This is
Chance’s summer,
nobody else speak
✒ ZACH BARON

> Chance the Greatest

ESPN
J U S T A F T E R J U LY 4 ,
called up Chance the Rapper
and asked if he would perform a song at
the ESPYs, in tribute to Muhammad Ali.
Maybe “Blessings,” from Coloring Book,
the ecstatic mixtape Chance released for
free this spring, turning him into a guy
who regularly gets these kinds of calls.
“Blessings”—man. Chance is 23 years old,
but most of us will go our entire lives
without approaching anything close to
whatever sacred frequency he channeled to
write this song. It’s about falling in love and
becoming a father. It’s about God. It’s about
making art when what people want from
you is product. And it’s about the value
of black life, about taking care of you and
yours when no one else will: Jesus’s black

134 GQ.COM SEPTEMBER 2016 MARK SELIGER


• Chance wrote his ESPYs tribute to Muhammad Ali just days before the awards ceremony.
life ain’t matter—I know, I talked to his
daddy / Said, “You the man of the house now,
look out for your family.” In its steely faith,
its glowing pride, “Blessings” would’ve
made an apt tribute to Ali.
But Chance had another song in his head.
He started writing it down four days before
the ESPYs, a Saturday. He flew from his
home in Chicago to Los Angeles on Monday,
on the plane ESPN sent. Now it’s Tuesday,
the day before the show, and he’s due in a
rehearsal space opposite the Burbank airport
to rehearse the song, which still has no name
and won’t even by the time he performs it.
Everyone’s waiting. The whole team of
people who follow Chance wherever he
goes these days: producers, assistants, two
di≠erent guys who play brass instruments.
The Faithful Central Bible Church men’s
choir. Chance’s friend Nico, a.k.a. Donnie
Trumpet, blasting Lauryn Hill to keep the
energy up. Everyone curled into that nest of
JanSport backpacks, electronic cords, and
watery iced co≠ee that musicians seem to
build wherever they go.
When Chance walks in, the room doesn’t
so much perk up as get more tranquil. He’s
got a kind of calming force to him, like
he’s got fewer moving parts than most
people. Slender, hat pulled low, quizzi-
cal eyebrows, mustache—he looks, from
across the room, like what would happen
if someone challenged you to draw a man
in five lines or less. He wanders up to a
microphone that dangles, boxing-style, in
the middle of the room. His band and the
choir form up loosely around him. All this
happens pretty much wordlessly. And then
they rehearse the song.
By now, hopefully, you’ve heard it. Steady
hold, I’ve grown weary and old. A song that
136 GQ.COM SEPTEMBER 2016
nods at Ali—Ain’t no one prettier!—but also
channels a kind of melancholy belief in the
rightness of things, a belief that next to loss
and failure is the sublime, and vice versa.
A belief that is particular to Chance the
Rapper. I sat in the room and listened to his
voice. There’s nothing like it in music right
now. It’s its own jazz instrument, bright and
unpredictable as a trumpet, primary col-
ored, a cheerful roar soaked in a meditative
sadness. He’s an uncommonly dexterous
rapper, but it’s the voice—the physical qual-
ity of it, the way it feels textured by experi-
ence and elation—that’s truly remarkable.
He ran through the song maybe four or five
times, never the same way twice, never say-
ing much of anything between versions.
Finally he cleared his throat and quietly
addressed the choir. He reminded them
not to smile during the performance on
television the next day. “One of the reasons
I wanted a black men’s choir is because I
want that power, that Ali feel,” he told the
assembled vocalists. He said he didn’t want
them “doing anything other than convey-
ing that power.” They should look hard
right up until the moment they open their
mouths to sing: “The duality of softness
and aggression, of blackness and shit. I
want the energy of it—it should almost be
scary.” The men of the choir nodding seri-
ously. And that was all he said. Eventually
the choir dissipated, and then the band, too,
everyone heading downtown for another
rehearsal later that night.
I lingered there a little stunned, think-
ing about what I’d just seen. There is some-
thing about Chance’s voice and manner
that suggests joy—sometimes joy shaded
by real pain, or real sadness, or real loss,
but, nevertheless: joy. I was wondering
GQINTELLIGENCE MUSIC
where the joy came from. So a few days
later I ask him.
We are at a diner in West Hollywood. And
he tells me this story. Never told it before, he
says, but somehow it occurred.
“When I was younger, my grandma said
a prayer over me that damn near sounded
like a curse.”
This was maybe three years ago—so,
after he’d made 10 Day, the mischievously
cheerful mixtape he recorded while on sus-
pension from high school for “weed-related
activities,” and either just before or just after
Acid Rap, the bratty, beatific record that
helped make him famous among rap fans
and actual rappers, a guy who Kanye West
would share festival bills with and later
invite to the studio, to work on The Life of
Pablo. A guy who then got the opportunity
to turn down every major record label in
existence, which is what he did and contin-
ues to do. Acid Rap, as in acid jazz, but also
as in the fact that he wrote and recorded
plenty of the record on actual acid. “I was
just doing a lot of drugs, just hanging out. I
was gone all the time.”
One day he went over to his grand-
mother’s house.
“And she looked me in the eyes and she
said, ‘I don’t like what’s going on.’ She said,
‘I can see it in your eyes. I don’t like this.’
And she says, ‘We’re gonna pray.’ And she
prayed for me all the time. Like, very posi-
KEVIN MAZUR/GETTY IMAGES
tive things. But this time, she said, ‘Lord, I
pray that all things that are not like You, You
take away from Chance. Make sure that he
fails at everything that is not like You. Take
it away. Turn it into dust.’ ”
He appreciated the benediction. But
also: “I’m thinking, like, damn, I don’t even
know if God likes rap! You know what

I’m saying? Is she praying that I fail at every-
thing I’m trying to do?”
But then he decided to take it how she
meant it, which was: as a blessing. As fate.
What he succeeded at would have God in
it, somewhere. What he failed at would
not. He embraced his own lack of control:
“Things that you push so hard to get, and
they don’t work out—I don’t dwell on them
as much, because she said that. You know?
Because it makes me feel like, you know…
everything is mapped out.”
L O S A N G E L E S I S a weird, complicated
town for him. It’s where all the record
labels are, for one thing. And Chancelor
Bennett, as he was born, is unsigned.
Won’t sign. It’s maybe the most interest-
ing, improbable music-industry story
going right now—a young, obviously gifted
rapper, universally hailed as the heir to
Kanye and leader of a new generation of
Internet-savvy kids who think of
Jay Z as a failed tech entrepreneur,
now on his fourth year of refusing
to sign with a label. People find out
he’s in town and his phone starts
ringing. These days he just ignores
it. Hides out in places like this one,
Mel’s Drive-In, on Sunset, where he
eats constantly when he’s in town,
surrounded by old-school diner
waitresses in red lipstick.
At this point, Chance says, he’s
refusing to sign out of spite as much
as anything else. “Just in terms
of, like, those guys being able to
say that they got me. That’s what
they want to do. It’s like a fucking • Yes, Chance says he’s getting paid, via touring and merch.
dick-swinging contest, where they
all just brag about who they recently got.
And so I’m definitely not trying to be a part
of their dick-swinging contest. I’m staying
far away from all dick-swinging.”
Plus, he doesn’t need their money. “I
make my money o≠ of touring and mer-
chandise. And I’m lucky I have really loyal
fans that understand how it works and sup-
port. I don’t see myself ever being in a posi-
tion where I need to sign to a label.”
So yeah, Los Angeles, a monument to a
swung dick. But also, he tried to live here
for six months and damn near lost his God.
This was in 2014. He’d released Acid Rap the
year before. Gone on tour with Macklemore.
Moved here at the end of December in a
pill fog, like a young rock star, and lived
a young rock star’s life. He got a place in
North Hollywood, signed a lease on it with
the mournful English songwriter James
Blake. They called it the Koi Kastle. “It was
like a big-ass rapper mansion.” Then Blake
removed himself from the lease and left
Chance to pay the whole rent. Chance set
up a studio there. “I had the pool. I had the
movie theater. I had the basketball court.
142 GQ.COM SEPTEMBER 2016
I was doing it real big. I was Xanned out
every fucking day.” He had instruments all
over the house. He’d wake up in the morn-
ing and blast gospel music. In time he made
local friends: Jeremih, BJ the Chicago Kid,
J. Cole, Frank Ocean. “A lot of those people
would be at my house constantly.”
He will admit to some questionable
decision-making during this time. He
worked for actual months on a cover of
the theme song to the animated TV show
Arthur. Recorded a song or two with James
Blake, when Blake was around. Mostly just
hung out, did drugs, saw girls. Had the
kind of nights you’d hope he might have.
“I was on a date one time at the crib, and
we’re sitting in the front room, maybe roll-
ing up some weed or something.” Frank
Ocean was downstairs, somewhere. “And
then Frank just comes up and starts play-
ing the piano and lightly singing in the
background of our date. Obviously, that
scored me a lot of points with this female.”
A reclusive genius serenading two kids, the
sun setting over the valley. “But it wasn’t
where I was supposed to be.”
After a while, it started getting to him, the
emptiness of whatever it was he was doing.
Or not doing. “I was just fucking tweaking.
I was a Xan-zombie, fucking not doing any-
thing productive and just going through
relationship after relationship after relation-
ship. Mind you, this is six months. So think
about, like, how could you even do that?”
So he decided to move back to Chicago.
Got demons out of his life. Got back to his
God, got back to the Chicago in him—all the
things that would eventually pump through
Coloring Book like blood. Got back with his
girlfriend, too. They got pregnant. “I think
it was the baby that, you know, brought my
faith back.” The heaviness of the responsi-
bility. But also the terror of it. “My daughter,
when she was still in utero, she had, they
call it atrial flutters. It’s kind of like an irreg-
ular heartbeat. But when you’re in utero,
it’s real hard to detect and also to treat.
Sometimes you have to get a C-section so
GQINTELLIGENCE MUSIC
they can operate on the baby. Never told this
to anyone.” It made him and his girl closer.
“And it made me pray a whole lot, you know,
and need a lot of angels and just see shit
in a very, like, direct way. And…you know,
God bless everything, it worked out well.”
Kinsley Bennett. Born healthy in September
of last year. Chance almost vibrating from
the energy it brought out in him.
Soon after, Chance started thinking
about making Coloring Book. All he had,
at the beginning, was a set of themes:
God, love, Chicago, dance. He rented out
a room in a Chicago studio, and then a
second room. “And then we started bring-
ing in more producers and more vocal-
ists and a choir and an orchestra, and at
a certain point we were like, ‘Okay, now
we need three rooms.’ And eventually
we decided to rent out the whole studio,
and we just put mattresses in all the rooms
and it became a camp.”
He started to try to put it all
back into the world, whatever had
built up inside him. Kanye West
called—he was working on what
would become The Life of Pablo.
He wondered if Chance wanted
to come hang out in L.A. Chance
flew in with God in his heart. “So
my vibes that I brought were actu-
ally gospel vibes. I was like, ‘Let’s
sample this, let’s make some glory
songs’ ”—songs that would become,
or add to, “Ultralight Beam,” “Father
Stretch My Hands Pt. 1,” “Waves,”
“Feedback,” and “Famous.” The med-
itative, soaring, emotional core of
Ye’s record. Meanwhile, Chance sat
and watched and learned. “I would
say almost 60 percent of working with
Kanye—let’s say 53 percent of working with
Kanye—is speeches.” In one room, West had
racks of baby clothes. He had three di≠erent
studios for producers. “There was another
guy there who was a magician.” Chance gave
what he had to give, left Kanye to it, and flew
back to Chicago.
The majority of Coloring Book ended up
getting made in about two months: March
and April. Chance slept in the studio for
most of it, with his girlfriend and his new
daughter. Studio One. “No smoke, no fool-
ishness.” Chance’s mother and his father—a
lifelong community organizer in Chicago
who used to work for then state senator
Barack Obama—coming by regularly to
check on him and visit their granddaughter.
One of the last things he did was this:
“I had the first verse for the intro song,
which is called ‘All We Got.’ ” As in: Music
TO D D OWYO U N G
is all we’ve got. Hook by Kanye West. The
song has one of the all-time rap boasts, too:
I was baptized like real early / I might give
Satan a swirlie. Anyway, there was a part of
the song that was troubling Chance. First

verse. “There was a lyric where I say: Life
was never perfect / I could merch it. And for
the first, like, the last two months before the
project came out, that was the line. It was:
Life was never perfect. And I remember, the
last week I was like, ‘Let me go in there and
do a dub’ ”—an overdub—“and say, Man,
I swear my life is perfect. Because I don’t
know if I really want people repeating that
and thinking that and shouting that to me
from the crowd on a stage. ‘Life was never
perfect.’ Life is perfect! You know?”
D O W E K N O W I F ‘Coloring Book’ has
made its way to the White House?
“Oh yeah. They’re bumping Coloring
Book hard up there. If you go up there,
you’ll probably hear Coloring Book. This is
not a joke at all.”
How do you know that?
“Malia. Malia listens to Coloring Book.
And I send them stu≠ sometimes. I haven’t
seen Malia since I was a kid. I think they
were both in school the day that I went
up there recently, but Barack was talking
about it. Or, uh, President Obama was
talking about it.”
Saying that he listened to it?
“Yeah.”
Do people know that?!
“He didn’t say it publicly. There was a
big meeting [in April] about My Brother’s
Keeper and criminal-justice reform, and a
whole bunch of artists and celebrities were
there. And at the end, everybody takes a
group photo, and he’s signing stu≠. And he
keeps pushing me to the back, and I’m like,
‘I don’t understand why he won’t sign my
shit.’ And he makes me wait till the end, and
then he brings me up to his o∞ce, and we
had a really good conversation about what
I was working on. He told me I needed to
start selling my music. He’s a good man.
Even if he wasn’t president, if his ass worked
at, like, Red Lobster, he’d be just a good man
working at Red Lobster.”
H E C H O O S E S T O R E M A I N in Chicago,
where his family goes back generations. “I’m
third- or fourth-generation 79th Street, same
house”—West Chatham, on Chicago’s South
Side. His great-grandmother marched with
Martin Luther King. He has a close but occa-
sionally tense relationship with his father,
Ken Bennett, who more recently worked for
Chicago’s mayor, Rahm Emanuel, during
some of the most violent years the city had
ever seen. Part of Bennett’s job, Chance says,
consisted of getting “a call every morning
with a list of all the people with their names
and ages of who got shot.”
Chance came of age as a musician and
a man during a moment of uncommon
interest in Chicago’s music scene—local
rappers like Chief Keef, King Louie, and
Lil Durk were getting national attention,
146 GQ.COM SEPTEMBER 2016
even as the city’s murder rate soared and
Chicago descended into bloody sum-
mer after bloody summer. The results
were strange and grotesque: Seattle after
Nirvana, but with guns instead of heroin.
He watched the media come in “and
create this poverty porn that was not
something that was a±icting
them on a personal level, but
put a magnifying glass over it
and literally take Keef to a gun
range”—which Pitchfork did, Coloring
in 2012. “MTV wanted to do a
Chiraq piece, and VICE wanted
you’ll probably hear Coloring Book.
to do a Chiraq piece. You know?
All the labels were coming out
and recording everybody. I was
going through that at the same
time. I was speaking to all the same labels.
And luckily, it didn’t work out for me.”
Paradoxically, all the interest in Chicago’s
young rappers allowed Chance to be blasé
about the attention; it allowed him to see
it for what it was. Not to mention the grim
contrast between the real life he and his
friends were living in Chicago and what
record labels and journalists wanted out of
him and his fellow musicians. “I lost a lot
of people,” Chance says now. As sunny as
Coloring Book is, it’s also steeped in shadow,
as on “Summer Friends,” a eulogy for lost
childhoods and lost companions, done up
in pointillist, Technicolor detail:
JJ, Mikey, Lil Derek and them
79th Street was America then
Ice cream truck and the beauty supply
Blockbuster movies and Harold’s again
We was still catching lightning bugs
When the plague hit the backyard
Had to come in at dark
’Cause the big shawtys act hard
Okay now, day camp at Grand Crossing
First day, n****s shooting
Summer school get to losing students
But the CPD getting new recruitment
More recently, Chance lived through the
torment that tore Chicago apart over the
video of Laquan McDonald being shot by the
police, he and his father on opposite sides of
a divide that split the city. “It was really hard
for my dad,” Chance says. “He worked on a lot
of very noble and decent causes. And I think
he believed in Rahm as much as everybody
else did.” But to Chance, the incident was a
confirmation of many things he’d already
suspected or felt. “We already have a really
bad relationship with the police. We already
have a really bad relationship with the city.
They kind of have us stuck in our corners of
the West Side and the South Side and only
come through our neighborhoods when
they’re trying to do some bullshit. Now we
have video of them doing us like this? It was
just scary, I think for everybody.”
GQINTELLIGENCE MUSIC
On Acid Rap’s “Everybody’s Something,”
Chance raps: I got the Chicago blues / We
invented rock before the Stones got through /
We just aiming back ’cause the cops shot you.
“You know, that is the feeling,” he says.
“Like, we’re all supposed to be human
beings. People tell us that all lives matter
“Oh yeah. They’re bumping
Book hard up there [at the
White House]. If you go up there,
This is not a joke at all.”
and shit, but it’s never really looked that way
to the public or to the people a≠ected by it.”
He pauses. “I think it’s always the job of
the artist, in trying times or not—it’s always
our job to tell the truth.”
H E W A N T S T O live up to that responsibil-
ity. He also still likes to get high and watch
Adaptation. At Mel’s Drive-In, his debit
card gets declined when he goes to pay. The
fraud-services lady at the bank calls, and he
recounts his Social Security number in front
of like five people. He explains he’s just in Los
Angeles for the week and gets his account
unlocked. There is a kind of sincerity about
him, an honesty about who he is and what
he likes, that draws people to him. Obama,
whom he knew when he was a boy. Lin-
Manuel Miranda, for whom he’s doing a song
on the upcoming Hamilton mixtape. (After
Hamilton won all the Tony Awards, Miranda
got on Twitter to shout Chance out: “Maestro,
you’re playing on A LOOP at the Rodgers.
Thank you.”) This week alone, he hung out
with Justin Timberlake and crashed Peyton
Manning’s retirement party. “It’s funny meet-
ing athletes and them being like, ‘I already
know who you are!’ ” he says. But he also likes
living far away from Los Angeles, where he
can concentrate on the things that matter to
him, like raising his daughter.
Every choice he’s made up to this point has
been about preserving his own autonomy;
now he’s wondering where to go next with
it. He wants to write a screenplay, or found a
theater; or maybe he’ll just give away another
record. The point is, he can choose. “Because,
you know, I don’t know, not to sound like an
asshole, but I’m paid. I definitely am getting
money.” His slender arms out next to him,
rising and falling. “You could write that in
parentheses: ‘Throws hands like he’s throw-
ing money. Throwing imaginary money.’ ”
He lights a cigarette and laughs, tossing
imaginary dollar bills in a diner parking
lot, free.
zach baron is gq’s sta≠ writer.

> We Built This Sh!tty
An Oral History of the Worst Song of All Time
THIRTY YEARS AGO, radio stations and MTV put an
insidiously catchy song called “We Built This City” into
heavy rotation and kept it there. The hit single gave the members
of the band Starship—which emerged from the ashes of Je≠erson
Starship, successor to Je≠erson Airplane, the essential 1960s
psychedelic band—unlikely second careers as pop stars. At the
time, Starship’s most famous member, singer Grace Slick, was 46.
But over the years, as ’80s music began to sound dated and
ludicrous—and no song sounds more ’80s than “We Built This
City”—it developed a hideous reputation: the worst song of all
time. Blender magazine first crowned it thus in 2004, and the
148 GQ.COM SEPTEMBER 2016
GQINTELLIGENCE NOSTALGIA
T V S A N D B A C K G R O U N D : X AV I E R A R N A U / G E T T Y I M A G E S
It has been playing, ceaselessly, for three
decades now, and it will stay lodged
in your brain, like a barnacle made of
synthesizers and cocaine, for hours
after you read this article. (Don’t blame
us—blame Starship.) This is the
true story of how “ W E B U I L T T H I S C I T Y ” —
the most detested song in human
history—got built ✒ R O B T A N N E N B A U M

• Cover art for the “We Built This City” vinyl single. Half a million people paid money to own this.
label has stuck, thanks to a series of online
polls, thickening into something close to
empirical fact. Like many things celebrated
and awful, “We Built This City” has grown
into a meme: It was the title of a 2008
episode of Degrassi: The Next Generation.
During the late-1980s peak of junk bonds
on Wall Street, Michael Milken changed
the lyrics to We built this city on high-
yield bonds to celebrate his law-breaking
firm, Drexel Burnham Lambert. Russell
Brand has sung it, Fergie and the Muppets
have performed it. John Kasich played it at
campaign events.
“We Built This City” was written and
recorded in stages, by an assembly line
of songwriters. (Cancer, too, develops in
stages.) Today, its creators are ambivalent
about what they’ve wrought. It has made
them wealthy, but years of ridicule have
taken a toll. Among the people who now say
they hate it are two band members and the
guy who wrote the lyrics. “I don’t think any-
body can take all the credit,” says Starship
guitarist Craig Chaquico, “or all the blame.”
Dennis Lambert (executive producer): The
Starship was one more act in a long line of
artists I worked with who, if they weren’t
given up for dead, were thought of as being
in a deep career hole. Bringing them back
wasn’t gonna be easy.
Peter Wolf (producer): There was a lot of
hate inside the band. What was his name,
the gentleman who just died? Paul Kantner.
Paul [Je≠erson Airplane’s co-founder] was an
old hippie who was not relevant anymore.
150 GQ.COM SEPTEMBER 2016
GQINTELLIGENCE NOSTALGIA
Dolby kind of writer—someone using new
technology. I wanted to impress Bernie:
I did a demo of the song on a Fostex deck
in my living room. It sounded like Peter
Gabriel’s “Shock the Monkey.” I sent it to
Bernie, who said, “Bernie Taupin comes
into the future.”
Member of successful ’80s band: Our pro-
ducer brought the demo to us. It’s the most
pussy thing I’ve ever heard. “Knee-deep in
the hoopla”? Well, even Mark Twain wrote
some bad prose. Don’t quote any of this.
Bernie Taupin (lyricist, in 2013): The origi-
nal song was… a very dark song about how
club life in L.A. was being killed o≠ and live
acts had no place to go. A producer named
Peter Wolf—not the J. Geils Peter Wolf, but
a big-time pop guy and Austrian record pro-
ducer—got ahold of the demo and totally
changed it.… If you heard the original demo,
you wouldn’t even recognize the song.
Wolf: I said to Bernie, “I wrote a chorus. Is
that okay with you?” He said, “Yeah, but
I don’t want to write any more lyrics.”
Everyone wanted to go more modern, and Craig Chaquico (Starship guitarist): Peter
he didn’t want to. I was happy Paul left. He came to my recording studio in Mill Valley
argued with everybody, and I hated that. and played the demo for me. About a min-
ute in, he hit the pause button and in his
Mickey Thomas (Starship vocalist): I joined Austrian accent started to sing: “Vee built
Je≠erson Starship in 1979, which was one of dis seety on vock and VOLL.”
the pivotal points of re-inventing the band.
I wasn’t exactly a Starship fan—I came out Lambert: Grace Slick was the matriarch
of soul music. There were always di≠erent of the group, and everyone was focused
members coming and going, so the band was on making her happy. She gave me very
constantly evolving. I shaved my mustache. specific marching orders: “I want to make
We were re-inventing ourselves, so I wanted hits.” She told me she wanted to tour, make
to re-invent my personal look as well. The a lot of money, and then retire. That’s how
music itself was a huge gamble. she put it.
Martha Davis (vocalist, the Motels): As best Thomas: Doesn’t every band want hits?
I remember—and we’re talking about the We did.
’80s, so I don’t remember much—[Elton
John lyricist] Bernie Taupin sent me the lyr- Grace Slick (Starship vocalist; ‘Vanity Fair,’
ics to “We Built This City” so I could write June 2012): I was such an asshole for a while,
music to it. I called Bernie and said, “My I was trying to make up for it by being sober,
artistic muse won’t let me finish the song.” which I was all during the ’80s, which is a
Regrets? Oh, hell no. bizarre decade to be sober in. So I was trying
to make it up to the band by being a good
Martin Page (co-writer): Bernie was mov- girl. Here, we’re going to sing this song, “We
ing away from working with Elton John. Built This City on Rock & Roll.” Oh, you’re
Everybody wanted him to work with a Tom shitting me, that’s the worst song ever.
“That album, for me, was musical hell. I joined the
band in ’74, and gradually the music had become vacuous,
sterilized, escapist. It was an embarrassment.
We had band meetings with big arguments. I probably
M AT T M A R T I N
should’ve tried harder to oppose it. I had a family.”
—Pete Sears, Starship bassist

Wolf: Chicago was looking for a new singer,
after Peter Cetera left. They o≠ered Mickey
the job. I said to him, “We’re a few minutes
away from a huge hit.”
Chaquico: Peter Wolf was a genius syn-
thesizer player. The Synclavier was cut-
ting-edge. We didn’t feel like we were
selling out; we felt like we were trying to
land a man on the moon.
Wolf: Journey was recording in the studio
next door, and every time I opened the door,
their band members were standing out-
side with their mouths open. “This is the
Starship? It’s unbelievable!”
Chaquico: It’s a very ’80s track. I remember
watching Miami Vice in between takes.
Pete Sears (Starship bassist): That album,
for me, was musical hell. I joined the band
in ’74, and gradually the music had become
vacuous, sterilized, escapist. It was an
embarrassment. We had band meetings
with big arguments. I probably should’ve
tried harder to oppose it. I had a family.
Les Garland ( former head of program-
ming, MTV): This is a great Garland story.
I’d known them since the Airplane days,
because I was on the radio in San Francisco.
They played me “We Built This City” and
I said, “That sounds like a radio smash.”
Then the producer, Peter Wolf, says, “We’re
thinking of putting a deejay’s voice in the
middle.” So they used my voice. I did one
take, then threw the earphones on the floor.
I didn’t think a second thing about it.
• Trigger warning: This photograph of Starship can cause unpredictable reactions in people who
survived the 1980s. From left, Thomas, former Starship drummer Donny Baldwin, Slick, and Sears.
152 GQ.COM SEPTEMBER 2016
GQINTELLIGENCE
Thomas: Anybody who says the lyrics are
dumb hasn’t taken the time to digest the
verses. I don’t think there’s anything dumb
about “looking for America, crawling
through your schools.”
Sears: That was the best song on the album,
even though it’s considered the worst song
of all time. The rest were a load of crap.
Slick (in 1985): I like this record.
Sears: Grace was unhappy. I saw that. She
was being staunchly brave. In a band, either
you’re in or you’re out.
Wolf: It sounded like nothing else on the
radio and had a very in-your-face, hard-
edged machine bottom. Yes, I’m proud of it.
Sure. The mockery came way later.
Francis Delia (video director): I got a call
from the band, asking if I could be in
Kalamazoo to join them for a dinner. It was
a very celebratory time; a bunch of guys who
were knocking on middle age suddenly had
a No. 1 song. Everyone was drinking $100
snifters of brandy.
Garland: You know me, kind of a clown.
I sent a telex to the Starship: “Thank you so
much for backing me up on my No. 1 record.
Love, Les Garland.”
Chaquico: It marked a new chapter in the
band where we couldn’t stop making No. 1
songs. We had three in a year and a half:
“We Built This City,” “Sara,” and “Nothing’s
Gonna Stop Us Now.”
NOSTALGIA
Wolf: I saw them in Costa Mesa, and when
they played the beginning of the song,
15,000 people were singing. Tears were
running down my eyes. It was very moving
for me. The ’80s, in my personal life, were a
total disaster for me.
Garland: That year, they played the MTV
New Year’s Eve party for us. Someone in the
production crew thought it would be neat
to release thousands of Ping-Pong balls.
The audience starts throwing the balls, and
while Mickey’s hitting a note, a ball flies into
his mouth. He was pissed.
Thomas: When the song went to No. 1, I said
to Bernie, “More than ever, people are gonna
ask what ‘Marconi plays the mamba’ means.”
He said, “I have no fucking idea, mate.”
Page: Hmm. Marconi was the first one to
send music across the ocean. I saw “We Built
This City” as saying stop the corporations,
we need to play music.
Thomas: Bernie didn’t say “mambo,” he
said “mamba,” which is a snake. Marconi
created the radio. Maybe Bernie meant to
say “mambo.” Maybe it means: If you don’t
like this music, some really angry snakes are
gonna come out of the speakers.
Chaquico: Marconi’s the guy who invented
the radio, and his style of music was the
mamba. But listen to the radio now. Do you
hear any mamba? That’s how I look at the
lyric: Things change. I could be totally wrong.
Thomas: At one point I did start to sing
“mambo,” to try and be more grammatically
correct, and after a while I thought, “Fuck
it,” and went back to “mamba.”
Stephen Holden (critic; ‘The New York
Times,’ 1985): A compendium of strutting
pop-rock clichés, Knee Deep in the Hoopla
represents the ’80s equivalent of almost
everything the original Je≠erson Airplane
stood against—conformity, conservatism,
and a slavish adherence to formula.
Thomas: The stakes were higher because of
the band’s past. People said, “You have to
carry the mantle of the ’60s.” C’mon. It’s 1985.
LY N N G O L D S M I T H / C O R B I S / G E T T Y I M A G E S
Chaquico: The song says we built this city
on live music, let’s bring it back—but the
music is computerized. It complains about
techno pop, but it’s a techno-pop song. It
exemplifies the problem it’s protesting.
Wolf: Do I have a sense of why people mock
the song? It’s a good question. I really don’t
know. It was a terrible video—cheap and
ugly—and it got incredible play on MTV.
I felt it didn’t do the song justice.
 GQINTELLIGENCE NOSTALGIA

Page: To make ourselves feel strong, we
say, “We’re running to the bank.” But it
does hurt. You want people to see the qual-
ity in the song, and the beautiful melody.
Chordally and harmonically it’s—this isn’t
an ego thing—it’s incredibly skillful. If it was
cheesy, I’d know it.
Chaquico: I do the song with my band—
sometimes as a full-on power trio, like if
Cream or Jimi Hendrix were to do it, but we
also do a reggae version of it, when we’re in
the mood. Imagine Bob Marley singing “We
Built This City.”
Page: “We Built This City” is like Mickey
Mouse. People want to knock it and d they
want to love it. It’s iconic, like Mickey’s
ears. The moment it comes on, people
go, “I know that. I love it.” Because people
love Mickey.
Sears: In 1987, I quit the band. And I went
into therapy for a year. At times, I’ve thought
it is the worst song ever, yes. Occasionally,
now, I hear “We Built This City” in a super-
market, or in some movie, and I’m grateful
that it helps renew my health insurance,
via SAG-AFTRA.

Thomas: I do 60 to 75 shows a year, and Chaquico: If you listen to any song a million
it’s probably the most popular song in the times, you’ll get sick of it. So a lot of people
show. got sick of that song, including me.

• Chaquico, rocking two sweet axes at once.
Chaquico: The No. 3 song on that Blender
list was “Everybody Have Fun Tonight,” by
Wang Chung, which Peter Wolf produced.
I called him and said, “Dude, I’m on one
of the worst songs ever, but you’re on two.
That’s awesome!”
Lambert: It’s part of the price you pay for
making hit records. Can’t please everybody.
I’m still here; Blender’s not.
Thomas: I was upset at first, but the article
was written with quite a bit of humor, so
after about an hour, I laughed about it. I’m
still here and Blender’s not.
Page: Thirty years ago, Grace said, “We love
it.” She’s a lovely lady. She helped me get my
green card. So I was surprised at how much
she loathes the song now.
Slick (in 2002): The Starship, I hated. Our
big hit single, “We Built This City,” was
awful.… I felt like I’d throw up on the front
row, but I smiled and did it anyway. The
show must go on.
Lambert: She’s talking out both sides of
her mouth, that’s all I can say. Maybe she
took too much heat for it over the years and
decided to take this tack to save face.
Thomas: People seem to have convinced her
that it’s a blot on her legacy.
Lambert: We licensed the song to ITT for
almost a million dollars. A major smash
song never stops earning money. I’ve prob-
ably written 500 songs, but ten of them earn
90 percent of the money I make.
Page: About two years ago, I saw an advert
in London for the mobile service Three UK
with a little girl riding a bicycle and singing
the song, and it went viral. I nearly cried.
After all these years, the song went back into
the Top 20 in the UK. It keeps creeping back.
It refuses to die.
rob tannenbaum is the co-author of
‘I Want My MTV: The Uncensored Story
of the Music Video Revolution,’ which
somehow mentions Starship only once.

The (S)Hit List: A compendium of the fantastically terrible

Only one song can be THE worst of all time—but just because “Rock Me Amadeus” didn’t win
doesn’t mean we shouldn’t trash it. Weird Al did.

TO P : PA U L N AT K I N / G E T T Y I M A G E S

Surfin’ Bird (1963)
The Trashmen
They say the word “bird”
84 times in 143 seconds,
compounding a lack
of originality: It’s a rip-off
of a Rivingtons song.
Rock Me Amadeus (1985) Wild Wild West (1999) Who Let the Accidental Racist (2013)
Falco Will Smith Dogs Out (2000) Brad Paisley ft. LL Cool J
Mocked by The Simpsons, This very uncatchy Baha Men As tone-deaf in form (rap
Family Guy, and Weird theme song is not even We would also like to + country = ugh) as it was
Al—an honor reserved Smith’s best movie- know who let the dogs in content: The laughable
only for a truly special themed sellout. (That out. So that we can find lyrics, shockingly, did
level of musical affront. would be “Men in Black.”) him. And punish him. not solve racism.

154 GQ.COM SEPTEMBER 2016

Are
GQINTELLIGENCE SELF-ACTUALIZATION

Most of us these
days want to be a
little woker. You
know, more aware,
more sensitive to
the reality of people
who aren’t like us. We
know it’s easy to be
blindly un-woke (see:

Yu
Trump, Donald J.),
but it’s also possible
to be overzealously
woke (that co-worker
who desperately
wants to convince
you he knows a gay
person). Really, we’re
all just striving for
that sweet spot: “just
right” woke. Take
this test and find out
where you fall

W ke
Yet? 1
Your idea of workplace
Telling your redhead
assistant, “You should
go brunette”
Haranguing
everyone about how
obsessed you are
with Transparent;
declaring yourself
“genitalia neutral”
Saying to your HR manager,
“Maybe we shouldn’t ALL look the
same, you feel me?”
Next up:
It’s
Halloween
at the
office...
J A M E S D AY/ G A L L E R Y S T O C K ( 2 )

diversity is…
Un-Woke Too Woke “Just Right” Woke
158 GQ.COM SEPTEMBER 2016
 GQINTELLIGENCE COMPETITION

‘AMERICAN NINJA WARRIOR’

has become one of the biggest
prime-time TV hits in the country,
thanks to a very simple premise:
Take regular (if insanely fit) folks,
let them dress up as CrossFit
superheroes, and throw them
into a sadistic, candy-colored
obstacle course. Everyone who
watches it imagines how they’d
do if they ever got a shot.
Here’s how GQ’s D R E W M A G A R Y
did. (Spoiler: He did poorly)

• The author and his

belly hair, shortly
before plunging into
ice-cold water.

> Enter O N E O B S TAC L E .

That’s all
I want to get through.
I’m at Turner Field, in
Atlanta, erstwhile home

the Ninja Dad of the Braves but now

temporary home of the
towering course run
for the eighth season of

162 GQ.COM SEPTEMBER 2016 ANDREW HETHERINGTON

 COMPETITION GQINTELLIGENCE

American Ninja Warrior—a reality sports

competition that started out on a cable
channel that no longer exists and has since
grown into the crown jewel of NBC’s sum-
mer schedule. See the course with me now:
steel trusses reaching 20 feet into the air,
blinking-light diodes shifting from color to
color. A terrifying fun house of six increas-
ingly preposterous obstacles—sliding metal
bars, spinning baskets, inverted walls—
designed to grind up contestants (who train
for months, even years) and then humiliate
them by dropping them into vats of frigid
water on national TV.
Every year, the show’s producers have
to up the ante and make the course more
challenging because the competitors
(ninjas!!!) have gotten too good. Except for
me. I am not too good. Yes, I am the lucky(ish)
39-year-old father of three who has been
allowed a guest run during a filming session
tonight. I know I won’t make it to the very
end—only a small fraction of ninjas do—but
I have ambitions. I want to get past the first
obstacle—a series of giant pinball flippers—
if only so no one makes fun of me.
I have trained for over a month—a hilari-
ously short regimen for normal contestants,
but a great deal of sweat equity from my • The scene at an American Ninja Warrior taping is a bit like pro wrestling, only all heroes and no heels.
vantage point—and one of the show’s most
decorated ninjas has served as my coun- spectacle of maniac athletes flying down outside foot. After a few test runs, I have
selor. But let’s back up so that I can tell you booby-trapped zip lines. Over 50,000 people the rhythm down and make it through with
more about how I got ready. applied to run the course this season. There ease. I am now a parkour master. Instantly, I
are ninja gyms operating in nearly every become overconfident. If the whole course is
‘ A M E R I C A N N I N J A W A R R I O R ’ was state. American Ninja Warrior is knocking as easy as this, I could be champion!
never meant to be on network TV. Its ear- on the door of becoming an Actual Sport But the whole course is not nearly as
liest incarnation—a spin-o≠ of an insane now, with actual athletes participating. easy as this. After the steps, there are log
Japanese game show called Sasuke, Like my trainer, Geo≠ Britten, the dude rolls, and spider climbs, and rope swings.
hence the ninja theme—was on the who made it through all of last season with- Swinging from one rope to another looks
since-rebranded G4 cable network. “During out falling once and was the first man to ever fun, right? Like Pitfall! WRONG. Swinging
the third season,” ANW host Matt Iseman conquer the final ANW run in Las Vegas. from ropes is awful.
explains to me, “G4 said [to NBC], ‘Listen, We meet at Alternate Routes, a ninja gym “It’s one of those weird things,” Geo≠
we’ll give you our finale for free. Just air it outside Baltimore, which is equipped with says, “where I think every human who ever
on NBC to tell people G4 exists.’ It ends up a series of slanted wooden steps designed played on a playground is like, ‘I’m great at
winning the night with no publicity.” to mimic the Quad Steps, a traditional swinging on ropes,’ when the reality is, most
From there, the show has become a minor warm-up obstacle. Geo≠ shows me how people are horrible at swinging on ropes.”
phenomenon, with entire families tuning to run through them with a series of three He’s right. I attempt my first rope-to-rope
in to cheer on the shockingly wholesome alternating, tapping steps, starting with my swing and can feel my shoulders pulling

Obstacle Curse: The six f#©%ing toughest hurdles

FLOATING STEPS BIG DIPPER PIPEFITTER
L i ke p i n b a l l . Yo u ’ r e t h e b a l l . Slide, then fling—hard. Te s t y o u r t r e e - c l i m b i n g s k i l l z .

TOMI UM SEPTEMBER 2016 GQ.COM 167


apart like a piece of cooked chicken. Geo≠
sees that I still have my wedding ring on and
advises me to take it o≠.
Why?
“Ever seen a de-gloving?” he asks me. I
have not. He then mimics pulling the skin
o≠ his finger, like removing a prophylactic.
I take the ring o≠.
A couple of weeks later, I meet Geo≠ at
a nearby climbing gym. The footholds are
cute and colorful, in order to disguise the
fact that they are merciless. They slope and
crimp and jut and generally make your
hands and feet angry. By the time I’m half-
way across the wall, I tap out. My forearms
are bursting.
“There’s something called flash pump,”
Geo≠ explains. “It actually happens on
Ninja Warrior to famous competitors,
where they don’t quite warm up enough,
and your forearms just get blown out, and
you’re done.”
What if I’m in the middle of the course
and I get flash pump?
“You fall.”
I A R R I V E A T T U R N E R F I E L D in late
afternoon. An ambulance stationed outside
the entrance nearly backs into me, which is
not a good omen. Dozens of contestants are
packed into the stadium concourse already,
some of them dressed as literal ninjas.
Since ANW is only filmed at night, aspiring
ninjas will be here from dusk until dawn,
waiting for their number to be called.
One of the men in charge of designing
the American Ninja Warrior course—like
the game master in The Hunger Games—is
executive producer Kent Weed (great name)
and he purposely varies the obstacles so that
no particular type of specialist (climbers,
runners, jumpers, etc.) has an advantage.
Once your body or any part of your cloth-
ing touches the water below, you’re DQ’d.
Run over. Bye-bye. The goal is for roughly 23
ninjas out of 100 to make it over the fabled
Warped Wall and hit the buzzer to advance
to the next round. The rest will fall.
Obstacle Curse
BLOCK RUN
Yo u r a n k l e s m a y n o t s u r v i v e .
168 GQ.COM SEPTEMBER 2016
GQINTELLIGENCE
Once you get out of the water, your wet
clothes are your scarlet letter. And every
time someone eats it, a bunch of squeegee
guys hustle out and wipe the water away. It’s
like watching undertakers at work.
I dip my hand in one of the pools to sam-
ple the water and it’s polar-bear cold. The
PR person, who had warned me earlier to
bring my own towel, comes and taps me
on the shoulder. They’re ready for me now.
I’ve been waiting all this time for my shot,
and yet I feel like this is happening too
fast. What? Now? We’re going now? These
Floating Steps are slightly di≠erent from
the ones Geo≠ has trained me for. Lots of
people are getting through them by grab-
bing them. The fuck do I do, Geo≠ ? Do I
stick with my toe taps?
“Get across them, dude. Get across them,”
he says, somewhat unhelpfully. “You have
to make a choice. Don’t hesitate. Hesitation
will kill you.”
Okay.
The sun is setting and now the course is
bathed in spotlights, giving it a menacing
air. I walk through a huge entranceway with
the American Ninja Warrior logo over-
head, which makes me feel like I’m on Skull
Island, being sent out to face King Kong.
There is nothing going on inside my head. In
scary moments, my brain goes literal. Facts
only. There are the lights. There are the steps.
There are many people here.
I spit on my hand and rub it on the bot-
tom of my shoes for better grip. (Geo≠
taught me to do this.) Then I stare at the
steps. One obstacle.
I hit the first step…left-right-left. No
grabbing on. I’m committed.
I hit the second step…right-left-right.
I hit the third step.… I’m doing it! This
isn’t so bad! I’m gonna make it to that fuck-
ing rope! I AM TARZAN.
I bound over to the fourth step and…
You know, it’s a funny thing about pressure.
Usually, you don’t feel it until it’s too late.
In retrospect, I have a great number of new
and interesting strategies for handling that
SPIN CYCLE
Yo u r w r i s t s m a y n o t s u r v i v e .
COMPETITION
fourth step. None of that matters, though,
because in the moment, when I leave that
third step, gravity takes hold with cruel
force. I yell out “BLAHHHH!!!” and then
drop straight into the cold water.
While submerged, I take stock of every-
thing. Am I dead? No, I am not dead. Should
I climb out? I don’t really want to climb out.
Everyone will see me. I could just drown
instead and that would be cool.
But there’s a nasty little coda. Even
though my run is technically over, the pro-
ducers have decided to be generous and let
me try the next few obstacles. And so we
commence with the ritual falling down. I
fall and I yell, again and again. None of the
other ninjas yell on their way down, but I
do. Real solid dad yells, too. There is much
toweling and squeegeeing in my wake.
As a final insult, I get to fall o≠ the
14-and-a-half-foot-high Warped Wall. As
Geo≠ had explained during our training,
the key to the Warped Wall—a sloping
ramp of death that goes vertical in the cen-
ter and then inverts at the top—is to run
up it instead of forward, grabbing the top
at just the right moment. This is a problem
because human beings tend to fall when
they run in that direction.
I take one run up the Warped Wall, give
it a slap ten feet up (generous estimate),
and then slide right back down on my ass,
leaving a trail of damp failure behind me.
No more, please. No more. Geo≠ shakes my
hand and warmly congratulates me even
though I have conquered nothing, not even
the one puny obstacle I set as my goal.
Like some of the real ninjas who run and
fall after me, I am soaked in grief. Those
steps will haunt me forever. If only I’d made
it, I could have done something more. “The
number one ninja statement of all time,”
Geo≠ tells me as I dry o≠, “is, ‘Well, if I
hadn’t fallen there, I would’ve finished the
whole course.’ ”
drew magary is a gq correspondent and
a sta≠ writer for Deadspin.
WARPED WALL
Ru n u p , n o t f o r w a r d . E a s y !
 > The Wiliest

170 GQ.COM SEPTEMBER 2016

 GQINTELLIGENCE CRIME

A decade in the life

Coyote
of America’s most
dedicated, brazen, and
outrageously creative
people smuggler
✒ K AT H Y D O B I E

F O G W A S his
ally, but the rain
was his best friend. It
was 10 p.m. and drizzling,
so Elden Kidd knew there
would be nobody on the
Tijuana beach to watch
them leave: no bad guys, no
policía. The rain shrouded
them as they pulled on
their wet suits, discarding
their clothes on the sand
and heading into the surf;
it mu±ed the tiny noises
they made—the frightened
gasps of the two Chinese
teenage girls clinging to
the boogie boards as the
first waves reared up and
smashed over them, the
sound of Elden’s fins slicing
the water as he headed
out beyond the surf break.
The colored lights from
Tijuana’s dance clubs began
to shimmer, then blur. The
frenetic thumping of the
bass line carried across the
dark water like someone
breathlessly chasing them.
Soon that, too, would fade.
Elden lay on his back,
kicking steadily, a tow
rope wrapped around his
shoulder linking him to
the girls. Every six seconds
the beam from Tijuana’s
lighthouse pierced the
dark and the drizzle, and
he used the light as a
reference point. First they
headed straight out into
the Pacific, paddling several
• Elden Kidd, smuggler
extraordinaire, in the surf along
hundred yards to get as
the U.S.-Mexico border. far as possible from the

JEFF RIEDEL

rusting border fence that sloped down into
the beach—an area closely surveilled by U.S.
Border Patrol—and then they could finally
turn and plow their way north, the girls’
destination all along.
Elden had begun smuggling people
across the border five years earlier, in
1989. In a business run almost entirely by
Mexicans, he was this clean-cut Mormon
from California who barely spoke Spanish—
the American Coyote. Mostly he took
Mexicans, but when his satisfied customers
found kitchen jobs in Chinese restaurants,
Elden’s reputation spread. He had shuttled
people across the border dozens upon doz-
ens of times, and always he was impressed
by the bravery he saw: farmers and factory
workers following him at a crouch along
the ragged bottom of a gully, grandmas
and children wading a cold river toward a
night-shrouded shore.
On this night, the rain, cool and sweet-
tasting, sluiced o≠ his Vaseline-smeared
face. Elden kept his ears tuned to the
waves breaking on his left. If the sound
grew too loud, he was drifting too close to
shore; if it began to fade, they were heading
farther out to sea. It would be five hours
before they would come ashore at Imperial
Beach in California. Until then, they were
alone with the thick churn of the ocean,
the velvety depths, the dark and the rain
• With an array of routes and schemes, Elden Kidd and Tim Burraston (right) ferried scores of immigrants out of Mexico.
172 GQ.COM SEPTEMBER 2016
curtaining them o≠. The girls began sing-
ing softly to each other.
Besides providing the two kids with
dark-colored life jackets and boogie boards,
Elden had fastened duck decoys on their
heads, so if anyone would happen to spot
them on a moonless night, in the rain, hun-
dreds of yards from shore, they would see
only a couple of ducks bobbing on the ocean
surface. It had taken the girls three weeks to
get this far, and this was the last leg of their
journey, his leg, at $5,000 a head. They’d
never been in an ocean before, didn’t even
know how to swim. It had helped that the
people who had brought the girls to him—
they rendezvoused at a little bike shop in
Tijuana—had told them Elden had super-
natural powers, that this American had
never failed to get people across. And the
look of him had only bolstered the myth: six
feet three, 270 pounds, a tanned and mus-
cular giant with a pleasantly white-toothed
grin. As soon as the girls had seen him, they
left the side of their Chinese-Mexican han-
dler and came to him, hugging his brawny
arms, clinging to him like delicate vines.
After an hour or so in the cold swells, the
girls began to ask, “Meiguo?” The word for
America that translated to “beautiful coun-
try.” All he could do was point up ahead
in the distance, over the black water, at a
cluster of white haloed lights that marked
GQINTELLIGENCE CRIME
Imperial Beach. Time crawled. Or sped. Lost
its shape altogether out here. Had another
hour passed? Less? Impossible to tell.
Finally, they came ashore at 3 a.m. They
dug up the plastic bag of clothes he had
stashed in the sand, buried their wet suits,
threw their life jackets into the surf, and
hurried to the motel room that Elden had
booked. There, the girls jumped into a hot
shower and stayed for 40 minutes while
Elden sat wrapped in a bedspread, shiver-
ing and waiting his turn. His throat was
raw from all the salt water, his ankles and
calves throbbed, he was physically spent,
his body tugging him down into the sweet
molasses of sleep. But elation is what he
felt—he was almost goofy with it.
T H E S E D A Y S , Elden is still an impres-
sively large man, thick-necked and bear-
pawed. I first met him in a pancake house
in Riverside, California. He had his second
wife and her two kids with him, his pride
and joy. He didn’t walk so much as surge
and shamble. Even though he’s 62, it’s not
hard to imagine that he’d once shepherded
scores of people across the border, becom-
ing a legend in a time and place now long
gone. He’d created dozens of routes and
perfected an endless array of ploys, cover
stories, costumes, and props—all products
of a profoundly devious and clever mind.
O P E N I N G PA G E S , T H I S PA G E , A N D L A S T PA G E , P R O D U C E R : PA I G E D O R I A N . P R O P S T Y L I S T : N A D I A C OTA .

• Throughout the 1990s, Tim, top, and Elden were
the rare Americans in a business run by Mexicans.
A lot has changed since Elden prowled the
border—though, to listen to Donald Trump,
you’d never know it. A cornerstone of his
campaign for the presidency is to build a
wall to save America, and so, naturally, he
doesn’t mention that much of it—some 700
once porous miles—is already sealed o≠.
Nor does he mention that more Mexicans
leave the U.S. today than enter it. Today, the
wild and untamed border—an unruly neth-
erworld where hordes of Mexicans pour into
our country—exists mostly in Trump’s mind.
But once upon a time, before 9/11, in an
era that now seems innocent and free, the
border was a stranger, more chaotic place.
And in those days, Elden felt fireproof. He
had married at 22, and he and his wife settled
in Riverside, California, and began having
babies. Providing for his family was Elden’s
high holy cause, his “earthly mission,” as
he says, a calling that made him feel both
invincible and free to do whatever it took,
however risky, underhanded, or illegal.
Then, as now, the politics of the bor-
der—the legalities of immigration—didn’t
much concern him. This was about making
money. If Elden had a flag, it would be for
his family. He was an adventurer, a restless,
ready soul. Human smuggling married so
many parts of his personality—his athleti-
cism, his wiliness, the rebellious prankster
and the defender of the underdog. As his
ex-wife says, with both appreciation and
pain, “he’s the freest man I know.”
Back when Elden first started, hundreds
of people would storm the stretch of bor-
der near Tijuana every night, swarming the
outmanned Border Patrol agents stationed
there. “It was as simple as ducking under
a fence in those days,” Elden says. Some
nights, all it took was Elden hanging out
near the Tijuana River with a rubber raft;
when immigrants reached the water, he
would ferry them across at $25 a head.
174 GQ.COM SEPTEMBER 2016
Sometimes Elden would be joined by
his buddy Tim Burraston, a surfer and
carpenter he’d met while leading white-
water-rafting trips in the U.S. and Mexico,
along the Guatemalan border. When the
river was running full, the two were in their
glory. The going price for taking someone
all the way from Tijuana to Los Angeles
was only $250. “A thousand-dollar night
was a home run,” Tim recalls.
Things would change when, in 1994,
President Bill Clinton launched Operation
Gatekeeper, intensifying security on the
most heavily tra∞cked section of the bor-
der—the six westernmost miles. Reassigned
agents flooded the area, armed with infra-
red telescopes and encrypted radios. Lines
of double fencing were built and high-
powered stadium lighting installed. Crossing
the border became a lot more di∞cult,
but being a smuggler became a lot more
lucrative. Elden began to charge $1,800 a
head for Mexicans and $5,000 for Chinese
immigrants, a riskier bunch to take across
because they were undocumented on both
sides of the border. (But children always
traveled for free; nothing made Elden hap-
pier than ferrying a child or a baby.)
As the preferred crossing routes shifted
away from the heavily policed sections of
the border and toward much more treacher-
ous terrain, many more immigrants began
to die during the passage. And although no
one ever died on Elden’s watch, the routes
demanded more complex—and inventive—
schemes. Case in point: One Christmas Eve,
he crossed six young men over the bor-
der and into California, dressed them in
Santa Claus suits he had purchased at Big
Lots, gave them bicycles, then sent them
north, through an area often patrolled by
border police. Or during pheasant-hunting
season? He put them in hunting vests and
handed out BB guns.
Of course, avoiding the cops altogether
was always preferable, and for this, Elden
figured he could use a little intel. So, one
day he approached an agent in Yuma,
Arizona, introduced himself as a Boy Scouts
leader, and said he was bringing a bunch
of scouts camping there next weekend and
he knew the boys would love to be able to
tune in to the agents’ activities and cheer
them on. Would the agent be kind enough
to share the call signs they used on their
radios? Sure. After that, Elden could easily
listen in, and if cops spotted him heading
into Mexico (“Looks like we got a guy on a
taco run…”), he would turn around, hunker
down, and try again later.
If elusiveness failed him, he resorted to
quick thinking. Once, when Elden was dis-
covered by Mexican police, he let the cops
chase him into the bottom of Smuggler’s
Gulch, where he promptly clutched his
chest and fell to the ground. Four cops
GQINTELLIGENCE CRIME
labored to drag him out of the 180-foot-deep
canyon—270 pounds of dead weight—and
then when they reached the high ground,
Elden leapt to his feet and took o≠ down
the slope again. The o∞cers were just too
exhausted to follow.
“ O C T O B E R 1 1 1 9 9 4 . To my great mis-
fortune my life has changed completely. I’m
being held against my will in the Federal
Prison in Toluca Mexico.… My heart is
broken. I feel as if I am already dead and
this place is my tomb.” That is how Elden’s
prison journal began. At the time, he had
no way of knowing that he was facing a two-
year ordeal that would make him harder,
humbler, quicker with his fists—and, ulti-
mately, a much better criminal.
Elden was arrested for smuggling in
Toluca, 40 miles west of Mexico City—he
wasn’t moving people, a crime he had com-
mitted many times, but rather marijuana,
which police found hidden beneath the
floorboards of a motor home he was driv-
ing. He’d been hired by a wealthy Mexican-
American mango grower to drive the motor
home down into south-central Mexico
for a large family gathering, take a few
days o≠ while they partied, and then drive
the motor home back to the States. This
was the third such trip Elden had taken
for the man. He claims he had no idea he
was being used as a mule. “Back then I was
still a serious Mormon, and marijuana
was the devil,” he says.
After his arrest, Elden was transported to
a prison in central Mexico called Almoloya
de Juárez. Elden’s cell block contained 250
men; he was the only American.
At first, Elden had no interest in friends
or alliances; he didn’t belong here. He had
only one aim: to survive this hell until he
could find a way out. “I dream of escape
every night, but there is no way. 10 guard
toweres maned by two men each with
rifles. High grey walls topped by spools of
razor wire. Doors, gates, bars... May God
help me and my family.”
The mornings were god-awful. He woke
to the sounds of phlegmy coughing, water
sloshing in buckets, mops clanking, the
first garbled cries and shouts of a language
not his own. Twice a day, he was fed from
a barrel filled with rice and beans or some
unidentifiable stew. “This was a rough day.
The food was horrible. Horse teeth in the
soup pot,” he wrote that October. He quickly
began to lose weight.
COURTESY OF ELDEN KIDD
Other prisoners tormented Elden, throw-
ing rocks or bread rolls at him when he was
in the yard. “Got in a short fight with a guy
who attacked me with a heavy pipe. Put him
down instantly.” Elden spent hours outdoors
in a distant corner of the yard, reading and
watching the sky. He noted snowy egrets
and kestrels, flycatchers and blackbirds.

And he tried to forget the headaches, colds,
hives, and badly abscessed tooth that
plagued him. His skin became gray.
Still, he jogged in the yard and lifted
buckets of water, buckets of rocks. He easily
won a prison-wide arm-wrestling contest.
By the spring, some prisoners were glom-
ming on to him for protection: An old man
who was too afraid to walk the yard alone. A
young Zapatista who had his shoes stolen.
(Elden retrieved them.) A humble Indian
who was getting kicked around.
But after 18 months inside, Elden had lost
his faith in God. Writing to his still devout
wife, he asked her not to judge him too
harshly. “My plan is to love you as much as
you let me. I can never be the same though.
To be the money making machine I was…
running Mexicans through the sewer river
and freezing waves or back-to-back river
trips, it’s over. When my freedom finally
comes I won’t waste even one hour doing
anything I don’t want to do. I need to enjoy
nature…see my parents, play with the kids,
catch a fish.… There’s no bitterness against
God. I just will let God do as he please and I
will do what I can to be a good person.”
In February 1996, under a treaty that
allowed American prisoners in Mexican
jails to serve their time in the United States,
Elden was transferred to La Tuna federal
penitentiary in Texas. Eight months later, he
was released. His eldest daughter, Eileen,
vividly remembers her dad’s first day home,
his grabbing her mother, pulling her close,
and slow-dancing with her. His grin like
a big wink to the kids as they watched,
delighted at his impetuousness. They
figured the worst was behind them.
But within five months of returning home,
instead of doing what everyone thought
he would do, what he had promised to his
wife—to walk the straight and narrow and
keep miles away from trouble—Elden start-
ing running people across the border into
Arizona. What was he thinking? He says
his prison experience a≠ected him in a
peculiar way. “That’s what kind of made
my mind a little twisted as far as, yeah, let’s
bring a bunch of people in.”
T H A N K S T O H I S T I M E inside the Mexican
prison, Elden was now fluent in Spanish—
a skill he knew would make him a better
smuggler. And his elder kids would be
needing college tuition. Still, to this day,
he’s not really sure why he took the risk.
He’d been released on three years’ pro-
bation, so any slip would land him back
inside. His ex-wife thinks he needed to
be the hero again—the Moses of Mexico.
Maybe his time as a lowly jailbird made
him need it even more. But I wonder if the
expectation that he would behave felt like a
harness, and parole just another cage.
What better way to feel unbound than
176 GQ.COM SEPTEMBER 2016
dashing back and forth across a walled and
heavily guarded border?
When Elden returned to smuggling, the
routes around Tijuana were all sewn up.
Everything had moved east, to Mexicali and
Los Algodones, to Sonoyta on the border
with Arizona, into more and more treacher-
ous desert and mountain terrain.
He always carefully surveyed his routes,
and sometimes made a dry run: Could he
climb that mountain? Swim that canal?
Could children? Old men? What
would happen if the plan failed?
The part of every journey that
felt dangerous to Elden was
Like a sudden change of weather, a
rarely the part that was scary
to those he was crossing with. of official vehicles—Border Patrol,
When he had used the ocean
route, it wasn’t swimming out
into the Pacific at night that
he worried about; it was the
instant right before they entered
the water, when, say, he and the two Chinese
girls were on the Tijuana beach, pulling on
their wet suits. No cover story could explain
that. And even though Elden knew he could
escape by diving into the ocean and swim-
ming away, the girls couldn’t. The moment
was electric with tension.
Within months of getting out of prison,
Elden had established a route out of
Mexicali, using an old ruse of his: bird-
watching. On a desolate stretch of fur-
rowed sand and brittle bush, Elden would
set up camp on federally owned land on
the American side of the border. A tent, his
trailer. He tramped around with binoculars
and a bird book. Made campfires. Whenever
Border Patrol came by, he o≠ered the agent
co≠ee or hot dogs or pancakes. Asked the
agent if he’d ever seen a burrowing owl
around these parts. Later he listened to
them radioing one another, “Oh, he’s just
some bird-watching nature boy.”
After a few days of this, Elden would take
a cab across the border, to Mexicali, and
meet up with his clients. On one particular
trip, they rendezvoused at a motel, where he
checked everyone’s gear—no white clothes,
no light-up sneakers on the kids. Then they
all hopped into a pair of taxis and set o≠ for
a cemetery just outside town, not far from
the border. Along the way, they stopped to
pick up flowers and a kind of powdered-chile
candy they could rub into their eyes if they
needed to cry. At the cemetery gate, the
Mexicans headed inside while Elden skirted
the perimeter until he found a vantage point
from which he could keep watch. While his
group huddled around a grave, some hushed
and intent, others brimming with the desire
to giggle, Elden scanned the area for Mexican
border police and any other kind of trouble.
As the sun dipped behind the mountain,
the dry earth seemed to sigh with relief.
A breeze kicked up and tiny birds swiftly
GQINTELLIGENCE CRIME
stitched the sky. Elden watched as his
group rose and, the parents putting their
arms around their children’s shoulders,
walked slowly to the back of the ceme-
tery. When the dusk deepened and the sky
was drenched in ink, they set o≠ toward
the border and the bird-watchers’ camp
on the other side. Elden carefully inched
the group forward. They stopped often to
crouch in the gullies. When they arrived,
Elden put the immigrants in the tent and
flash flood, or a stampede, a flock
Highway Patrol, dark unmarked
cars—swarmed Elden’s van.
got a campfire going. He sat there toast-
ing marshmallows, ready to o≠er some to
Border Patrol if they happened by.
Even when one scheme succeeded, Elden
was eager to try another. “The thing with
Elden,” Tim says, “is he’d come up with a
plan, it would work perfectly, and instead
of saying, ‘Well, that plan worked, let’s do it
again,’ Elden says, ‘Well, that worked, let’s
try something di≠erent next time.’ ”
By 2001, Elden’s operation was booming;
he and Tim were now taking people over
the Rio Grande into Texas, and the two men
were joined at the hip. The route was eas-
ier to manage with a partner, and as Elden
neared the end of his parole, he wanted to
play it a little safer. “It just came so nat-
urally to us,” Tim says. “Because of our
river-rafting tours, we knew about trans-
porting people and the logistics of packing
everything in a van and camping out, and
we were good in watery environments. We
were so good, we got careless.”
T H E T R A I L that led to their arrest began
with a sidelong glance. It was February
2001, and Tim had flown in for a job from
his home in Santa Cruz, rented a 15-seat
passenger van, and driven down to Big
Bend National Park on the banks of the
Rio Grande, where Elden had already
set up camp. Elden was driving an old
moss-colored Dodge van with crushed
beer cans on the dashboard, bumper stick-
ers written in Spanish, and no rear license
plate. Their decoy car.
In the late afternoon, the two men
waded across the Rio Grande, the cold,
jade-hued water pulling at their legs, and
then walked for about an hour and half
to Bocquillas, where they met a group of
indigenous people from Oaxaca. After fer-
rying everyone across the river, black now
beneath a thousand white stars, and hiking

a half hour more through the
hardscrabble terrain, they
arrived at the camp.
The next morning, the two
vans pulled out of the camp—
Tim and the entirety of the
group in one vehicle, Elden
up ahead playing scout, in
his. They were heading to
Fort Stockton to hole up for
the night, as they always did.
There they would get the men
haircuts, coax them into shav-
ing o≠ their mustaches, and
put everyone into thrift-store
suits and dresses. Sometimes
Tim and Elden handed them
Bibles for the ride out; some-
times they put little dots on the
women’s foreheads.
Ten miles south of Fort
Stockton, where the two-lane
road runs through a creosote-
studded desert with nowhere
to hide, Elden spotted Border
Patrol up ahead. He pulled
onto the shoulder and jumped
out. “Good morning, o∞cer.
I’m wondering if you can help
me out. My son wants to join
the Border Patrol.…” While
the agent was giving Elden a • After a life of adventure, Elden settled down. But he hasn’t changed much.
phone number, a large gold van
drove past, and he noticed Elden giving it
the side-eye before quickly looking away.
Elden turned up the charm, though now
it had a nervous edge. After Elden drove
o≠, the agent contacted Fort Stockton
P.D., asking them to watch for a green van
missing a rear plate. They found the van,
and when they ran the existing front plate,
they came up with a name: Elden Kidd.
And guess what, buddy, he’s got a prior for
transporting marijuana.
Later that day, police saw Elden with
another white man standing beside a gold
van matching the description of the sec-
ond vehicle. They put out a BOLO (be on
the lookout) alert for the two, and Elden’s
photo was distributed. The cops figured
they had a couple of drug smugglers work-
ing the west Texas border.
A month later, an o≠-duty Border
Patrol agent coming out of the Walmart
in Fort Stockton spotted a hard-to-miss
Elden walking in. He and Tim had just
made another border run, picking up 18
Mexicans, including a 6- and a 7-year-old
child, and after checking them into two
di≠erent motels, they were out buying them
socks and shoes. It was 9 p.m., and for the
next 12 hours, several law-enforcement
o∞cers watched as the two men drove
between the La Quinta and Atrium motels,
bringing bags of food from McDonald’s
and trays of co≠ee into the rooms. In the
178 GQ.COM SEPTEMBER 2016
morning, they saw Elden and his now iden-
tified associate, Timothy Burraston, load two
vans full of people. The cops waited until
the men had driven out of the city and were
heading west on Route 10, Elden in the lead.
Baby blue skies, Tim thinking ahead to the
surf back home when, like a sudden change
of weather, a flash flood, or a stampede, a
flock of o∞cial vehicles—city police, Border
Patrol, Highway Patrol, and dark unmarked
cars—swarmed Elden’s van, corralling him
and moving him to the shoulder. Tim kept
on driving, his heart leaping, blood draining
to his feet, thinking, “Maybe they don’t know
I’m involved, maybe they don’t…,” when
Texas Highway Patrol zipped in cleanly
behind him, blues and reds flashing.
At the local Border Patrol station, Elden
and Tim were stashed in an interview room,
where Elden tried to reassure his friend
with a wink. Later, Tim asked him, “Did you
think everything was gonna be okay?”
“Nah,” Elden said. “I knew we were
fucked.”
They were locked up in Pecos, Texas,
where Elden wrote to his wife, “Neither
of us fully calculated the risk. Seems like
in some ways a good thing to be caught,
because when would I have stopped?”
After 28 days, Tim got friends to sign
bonds totaling $60,000 for his bail, and he
hightailed it to Santa Cruz. Because of his
criminal record, Elden was left inside. The
GQINTELLIGENCE CRIME
charge was importation of ille-
gal aliens, and he was looking
at five years. “All I have to do
is think of this as my gift to the
family,” Elden wrote, accepting
his fate. Coal miners risked
black lung; coyotes, jail. If it
wasn’t part of the job descrip-
tion, it ought to have been.
Resigned and philosophi-
cal? Only if he needed to be.
After a decade-plus of success-
ful smuggling, Elden figured
he had some valuable infor-
mation to trade—and he was
looking for a deal. Before long,
five agents with U.S. Border
Patrol arrived. After grilling
Elden about his underground
contacts in the Mexican and
Chinese communities, they
realized he could be useful
helping to catch crooked bor-
der agents and gathering intel-
ligence on counterfeit goods
coming from China via Mexico.
If he agreed, it would be an
open-ended commitment—
they might cut him loose in six
months or in two years, they
told him. The judge might look
favorably on his cooperation,
but there was no guarantee.
“I would start walking a backwards moon
walk the 1500 miles…right now in my box-
ers just to be on my way home,” Elden wrote
to his wife. And so he signed a “contract of
co-operation,” and he was allowed to go
home before sentencing.
I M P E R I A L B E A C H , 2 0 1 6 . The Tamed
Frontier. The new 18-foot-tall border fence
runs down a blu≠, across the beach, and
then straight out into the ocean for 300
yards more, like a runaway roller coaster.
On top of that hill, a white Border Patrol
Chevy Tahoe with green stripes stands
watch. Another one comes rolling down
the kelp-strewn beach toward us. It’s been
almost 20 years since Elden last stood on
this beach. As the ocean unfurls wave after
wave, gray and pearly under a half-lit sky,
he has a visceral memory of the cold water
and the burning in his legs, and it hits
him now like it didn’t then—what a huge
responsibility it was taking people into
that ocean at night.
“What do you think, Elden? Still doable?
You just stay in the water, stay low…,” Tim
says, coming up to Elden’s side. “Like, if
you had a little bag of diamonds and you
wanted to get it…”
“If I had to smuggle diamonds,” Elden
replies, “I’d just have you swallow them
in a burrito and follow you around with a
bucket.” (continued on page 237)
 HE ISN’T GOING TO STOP BEING GREAT AT FOOTBALL—15-1 LAST SEASON,
NEAR UNANIMOUS MVP, A SCORCHED-EARTH RUN TO THE SUPER BOWL—AND
HE ISN’T GOING TO STOP REVELING IN HIS OWN GREATNESS AT FOOTBALL.
HE ISN’T GOING TO STOP CELEBRATING AFTER TOUCHDOWNS AND WINS, OR
WALKING OFF PODIUMS IN ANGRY SILENCE AFTER HIS TEAM LOSES. CAM, IN
OTHER WORDS, IS STILL GOING TO BE CAM. AND HE WON’T STOP UNTIL HE GETS
THE ENDING RIGHT B Y ZACH BARON P H O T O G R A P H S B Y MARIO TESTINO

180 GQ 09-2016

C A M N E W T O N C A R R I E S an iPad with him in a case displaying the
logo of Super Bowl 50—the game his Panthers lost in excruciating
fashion, after which he went home and cried and cried and cried,
until 4 a.m. came and he didn’t have any more tears left. He keeps a
to-do list tucked into the iPad case, like he’s about to go run errands
with the other suburban wives having lunch at this restaurant in
Buckhead, the Atlanta neighborhood 25 miles from where he grew
up and where he now owns an o≠-season home, and in time he shows
me what’s on it. A white piece of paper covered in neat, tiny hand-
writing, Cam reading aloud from it. “Gotta get a truck tag. Gotta go
to the bank. Got to…oh, send an e-mail about the play diagrams.
Gotta go get my watches wound. Gotta go to the dry
cleaner.” Gotta get in some quality time with his infant
son, Chosen. Gotta do this interview.
He holds the to-do list in his giant hands, and once
you notice his hands they’re all you can see. They’re like
weird stone formations you might encounter out in a
desert. You could imagine desperate, nomadic civiliza-
tions finally coming to rest and building settlements
around them. Otherwise he’s so perfectly proportional
you wouldn’t notice the way he’s built, which is: densely.
You wouldn’t know he regularly gets hit at car-crash
speeds by rough human equivalents of compact cars.
Plenty of players wear that kind of punishment on their
faces after a while. Not Cam. The NFL’s reigning MVP.
Entering his sixth remarkable season in the league and
he looks…fresh. Only the hands give him away, the fact
that he plays a borderline blood sport for money and
our entertainment.
Entertainment. He takes that part seriously, maybe
too seriously. Football! “What other sport do you know
brings people around, or that brings the unity from fam-
ily, friends, loved ones, like a Super Bowl does?” He loves
football. Embodies its spirit, its better angels. If someone
stumbled out of the Alaskan wilderness tomorrow, won-
dering why we’re all so obsessed with this dumb, compli-
cated game, you’d show them tape of Cam—against the
Giants last year, maybe, the game where the Panthers led
35–7 in the third quarter, gave up the entire lead by the
end of the fourth, only for Cam to rise up from the turf,
unkillable like Michael Myers, and calmly drive his team
to victory. It was like watching something implacable
make its way down the field—the improbable grace amid
chaos, the sheer power of his talent. More than 300 yards
passing, 100 yards rushing, five passing touchdowns in a
single game, the first player in NFL history to do that. A
battering ram that handles like a BMW.
182 GQ 09-2016
“The optimism of football brings people together closer than any
other sport,” he says, and that’s what Cam wants to do. His goal is
to win football games and inspire joy, in that order. “It’s all about
winning,” he says. “I’m not trying to sound like Charlie Sheen, but
it is. We live life, like, America, we’re taught to become, you know,
successful, and success comes with winning.” This is a guy who hates
losing. A proud sore loser.
Recall his post–Super Bowl press conference. A tense and compli-
cated moment for Cam. Shrouded in the cowl of a post-game hooded
sweatshirt, minutes removed from losing the most important game
of his life. The Panthers had lost just once the entire season. Had been
favored by almost a touchdown. The opposing quarterback, Peyton
Manning, minutes away from retirement, his right arm as light and
wavy as a car-wash balloon. Instead, Cam had his worst performance
of the season—sacked six times, intercepted once, fumbled twice,
once on what could’ve been the game-winning drive, then failed to
fall on the ball. One of those arbitrary moments that completely,
unfairly flips the narrative on a player; like his pal Steph Curry, Cam
went from being the author of sports perfection to a grasping loser
in the span of five minutes. Cam, what did Coach tell you guys after
the game? “He told us a lot of things.” He managed about 150 terse,
angry seconds, eyes cast nowhere in particular, before standing up,
walking o≠, going home to sob. It was national news—not just the
loss but the press conference. “Newton, 26, an ebullient, intelligent,
gifted quarterback,” wrote The New York Times, “decided to act in his
moment of truth like a 13-year-old.”
“I had so much emotion,” he says now, trying to explain. “A lot
of emotion. We play the game to win. And we didn’t.” He’s past it
now without regretting it exactly: “I could care less. You know,
what a person says to me, says about me—if it’s not coming out of
Chosen’s mouth.… That’s what the birth of my son does.
Like, what do I gain? Now I have purpose in this world.
< Whether a mean tweet, a mean [person] saying, ‘Hey,
Supreme
confidence you’re supposed to do it like this’—if my son ain’t saying
isn’t all it, then it don’t matter to me.”
Cam has in The Super Bowl still follows him around daily, like
common with a ghost. “I just hate that we didn’t win. We had our
Joe Namath.
opportunities. I haven’t seen the game yet. I don’t plan
This coat
comes from on seeing it. But it just plays back in my mind, knowing
old-school that it was plays to be had.” He hates to lose. Hates
New York to bore. He’s a born performer—all you have to do is
furrier Marc watch him on the field, or moving powerfully through
Kaufman, who an Atlanta shopping mall, to know that. He’s got pur-
still makes
Broadway
pose. He carries a to-do list. Puts on a show because
Joe’s iconic that’s what winners do.
furs to It’s this quality, paradoxically, that has led to some of
this day. the most savage and consistent criticism of Cam Newton.
Especially after things like that press conference, which
confirmed to doubters every bad thing that’s ever been
said about him. Picking almost at random here… Pro
‹‹ ‹‹
PREVIOUS PAGE
scout Nolan Nawrocki, 2011: Very disingenuous — has a
coat $4,995 fake smile, comes o≠ as very scripted and has a selfish,
Marc Kaufman Furs me-first makeup. Always knows where the cameras are
+ and plays to them. Has an enormous ego with a sense of
tank top $40 (for three) entitlement that continually invites trouble and makes
Calvin Klein Underwear him believe he is above the law — does not command
pants $60 respect from teammates and always will struggle to win
sneakers $120
Under Armour
a locker room. Only a one-year producer. Lacks account-
ability, focus and trustworthiness— is not punctual, seeks
sunglasses
Dita Eyewear shortcuts and sets a bad example. Immature and has had
issues with authority. Not dependable.
necklaces
Degs & Sal A thing that was really written. A version of a thing
watch
that gets written about Cam Newton all the time, even
Bulova now. Maybe especially now. One game away from immor-
football tality, from being dependable. Instead it’s like, Here
Leather Head Sports we go again. (text continued on page 188)
 ‹‹
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David Yurman

184 GQ 09-2016
Before you leave the house,
Coco Chanel once supposedly
said, you should look in the
mirror and take one thing off—
because the goal in fashion is
simplicity. Well, all due respect
to Coco, but today you wanna
look in the mirror and see what
else you can put on. Fashion
right now is about going bigger,
louder, brighter, funner, and
altogether more maximal.
Basically the goal is to dress
more like Cam Newton, the
man who infamously wore
skintight Versace zebra-print
pants to the effin’ Super Bowl.
You’re a suit guy? Make sure
those pinstripes are nice and
thick. You need a winter coat?
Go up a size so it fits you like
a bear hide. When selecting
your accessories, delete the
word “or” from your style
vocabulary—you should only
think “and.” The more fearless
moves you make, the sooner
you’ll become the style MVP
you’ve always wanted to be.
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Tudor
09-2016 GQ 187
 HEN PEOPLE see me play, they see the antics of, like, a
heroism, you know. Superman—”
Here he does the gesture, his two giant hands parting
an imaginary business suit to reveal the logo underneath.
“A taunt. Or whatever you may call it. And I’ve always
been called Superman. Or Super Cam.”
Super Cam! Let’s just linger here for one more second. Because
it’s true, he looks fucking invincible out there. Bigger, stronger,
faster. A less-than-once-in-a-generation athlete. It’s just him; there’s
never really been anyone like him. Everything else is noise, in a
way. He’s been marked for this since he was very young. Always the
biggest in his grade. “Every team that I’ve ever been on past high
school, they won a national championship.” Heisman Trophy win-
ner. Rookie of the Year. And still nothing gets at the pure narcotic
sports rush that happens when Cam Newton takes the field. Like
a video game. The player his fellow players admire most. A homi-
cidal competitor, like his idol and North Carolina neighbor Michael
Jordan. Seventeen wins in 19 games last season and he could care
less. Still burning up about having lost twice.
E ORDERS a green tea and a Shirley Temple, extra syrup.
He orders the deviled eggs. He orders the mussels. He
orders shrimp and grits, and also trout. He’s a pescatar-
ian out of pure self-discipline. No other reason—just to
prove to himself that he can. “I feel if I can control myself
not to eat meat, I can control myself not to litter. If you can control
yourself not to litter, then you can control your choice of words.
If you control your choice of words, you can, you know, kind of go
down from there.” He’s obsessed with testing himself. Obsessed with
a certain level of control.
When the food comes he bows his head and prays:
Dear my Father Lord, I thank you for waking us up this morning,
starting us on our way, putting food on our table, clothes on our body,
shoes on our feet. Lord, bless this food that we’re about to receive. Let
it be the nourishment of our body in Christ’s name. Amen.
The waiters can’t get enough of him; they explain the menu so
many times I think I might dream about it. He is matter-of-fact
about being this kind of public figure. “My thing is: There’s no off
switch. I can’t just sit up here and say, ‘Okay, tshewww, I’m John
Doe and I can eat dinner with my son or my family and people
won’t know who I am.’ Because that’s not true.” He is Cam Newton,
everywhere he goes.
Later, we walk into a cigar store around the corner from the
restaurant. He started smoking cigars two years ago, he says; after
the Super Bowl loss he started drinking white wine, too, mostly
188 GQ 09-2016
Chardonnays. Part of discipline is knowing when to change things
up. The salesman at the cigar store, Ben, a friendly guy with a bushy
beard and a green tie, just lights up like someone shot off a bottle
rocket in front of him.
“Man,” Ben says, dazed, half to himself. “You’re bigger in person.”
“That’s what she said,” Cam says, his timing immaculate.
HEN HE and his girlfriend, Kia Proctor, had Chosen,
they decided not to tell anyone at first. A few days after
his son was born, but before anyone knew, Cam cele-
brated a touchdown against Atlanta by gently rocking
an imaginary baby on the field. Then, a few days later,
after the Panthers had lost the Atlanta game, their first and only loss
of the regular season, he posted a statement announcing the birth
and asking for privacy in this joyous time. A woman by the name of
Patricia Broderick, writing to The Charlotte Observer, responded with
a statement of her own: “Congratulations would be in order if he had
been man enough to marry the mother of his child and make a
home.” Patricia was just “very sorry.” She was “very disappointed.”
Waiters banging plates down all
around us. Cam nodding grimly as I
read Patricia’s letter to him. It’s not
the first letter that’s been written to
The Charlotte Observer about what
Cam Newton should and shouldn’t do.
They were getting bags full of them the
whole damn season. Then reporters
like the one sitting in front of him right
now would ask Cam about them. If you
can control yourself not to litter, then
you can control your choice of words.
Exhibit A, right here: All season long,
people writing in to criticize or berate
Cam, and Cam instead finding the truth
in the letter, acknowledging the senti-
ment, controlling the exchange. Using
it to grow, even.
“What do you want me to do, write
another letter back to her? No. And she’s
preaching to the choir. When she men-
tions those things, those are all things
that I’ve thought about. With my father being a preacher, you don’t
think I’ve had this discussion before?”
Now he’s laughing. Patricia’s got a point! For somebody who is sup-
posed to be me-first, Cam is very good at imagining and understand-
ing what is in other peoples’ heads. He just doesn’t always happen to
agree. “What, are you gonna hate me for it? I’m not perfect. I’m not
presuming to be. Nor am I expecting somebody else to be perfect. We
all make mistakes. We all have things that we would not want others
to know. But in my case, everybody knows everything.”
Going all the way back.
“Yeah.”
Yeah. We don’t need to recount all these things that he would
prefer other people not to know, right? Not in 2016? For a decade
now—ever since he left the University of Florida under controversial
circumstances, and Auburn, where he wound up, also under contro-
versial circumstances—Cam’s been apologizing for the teenager he
was. C’mon. The NCAA is a cartel, anyway. “We all have life lessons
that we most dearly learn from. And I just want to be the voice of
that.” He’s a better man at 27 than he was at 18, even as he regularly
endures condescension far worse than what he got as a kid.
Seriously. Look at what he’s gone through since college. All these
so-called experts calling him, in effect, lazy. NFL Network’s Mike
Mayock: “It’s just this gut feeling that I have that I don’t know how
great he wants to be.” And: “Something tells me he’ll be content to
be a multimillionaire who’s pretty good.” (continued on page 236)
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09-2016 GQ 191
There’s no telling how many guns we have
in America—and when one gets used in a
crime, no way for the cops to connect it to
its owner. The only place the police can
turn for help is a Kafkaesque agency in West
Virginia, where, thanks to the gun lobby,
computers are illegal and detective work is
absurdly antiquated. On purpose. Thing
is, the geniuses who work there are quietly
inventing ways to do the impossible

By JEANNE MARIE LASKAS MATTHEW MONTEITH

 Federal agent Charlie
Houser is forced to
fight gun crime with a
meager tool: a bunch
of boxes of paper.
BL O O D E V E RY W H E R E, a dead guy
on the floor. The cops come
in with their yellow tape, chalk
line, the little booties, cameras,
swabs, the fingerprint dust.
One of them finds a gun on the floor. The gun! He lifts
it with his pinkie, examines it, takes note of the serial
number. Back at the station, they run a trace on the gun.
A name pops up. It’s the wife! Or: It’s the business partner!
It’s somebody’s gun, and this is so exciting because now
they know who did it.
Except—no. You are watching too much TV. It doesn’t
work like that.
“Think,” says Charlie Houser, a federal agent with the
ATF. We’re in his o∞ce, a corner, and he’s got a white-
board behind him where he’s splashed diagrams, charts,
numbers.
The cops run a trace on a gun? What does that even
mean? A name pops up? From where? There’s some master
list somewhere? Like, for all the guns all over the world,
there’s a master list that started with the No. 1 (when? World
War I? Civil War? Russian Revolution? when?), and in the
year 2016 we are now up to No. 14 gazillion whatever, and
every single one of those serial numbers has a gun owner’s
name attached to it on some giant list somewhere (where?),
which, thank God, a big computer is keeping track of ?
“People don’t think,” Charlie tells me. He’s a trim guy,
51, full lips and a thin goatee, and he likes to wear three-
piece suits. They fit loose, so the overall e≠ect is awkward
innocence, like an eighth grader headed to his first formal.
“I get e-mails even from police saying, ‘Can you type in the
serial number and tell me who the gun is registered to?’
Every week. They think it’s like a VIN number on a car.
Even police. Police from everywhere. ‘Hey, can you guys
hurry up and type that number in?’ ”
So here’s a news flash, from Charlie: “We ain’t got a reg-
istration system. Ain’t nobody registering no damn guns.”
There is no national database of guns. We have no cen-
tralized record of who owns all the firearms we so vigor-
ously debate, no hard data regarding how many people
own them, how many of them are bought or sold, or how
many even exist.
“ It’s a shoestring budget.
It’s a bunch of friggin’ boxes.
All half-ass records.”
∆ In its massive reference library, the ATF houses examples of every gun imaginable—
including a gold-plated number once owned by Saddam Hussein.
What we have instead is Charlie.
“Can I go smoke a cigarette while
we discuss it?”
Anytime a cop in any jurisdic-
tion in America wants to connect
a gun to its owner, the request for
help ends up here, at the National
Tracing Center, in a low, flat, bor-
ing building that belies its past
as an IRS facility, just o≠ state
highway 9 in Martinsburg, West
Virginia, in the eastern panhandle
of the state, a town of some 17,000
people, a Walmart, a JCPenney, and
various dollar stores sucking the life
out of a quaint redbrick downtown.
On any given day, agents here are
running about 1,500 traces; they do
about 370,000 a year.
“It’s a shoestring budget,” says
Charlie, who runs the center. “It’s
not 10,000 agents and a big sophis-
ticated place. It’s a bunch of friggin’
boxes. All half-ass records. We have
about 50 ATF employees. And all
the rest are basically the ladies. The
ladies that live in West Virginia—and
they got a job. There’s a huge amount
of labor being put into looking
through microfilm.”
I want to ask about the micro-
film—microfilm?—but it’s hard to
get a word in. He’s already gone
three rounds on the whiteboard,
scribbling, erasing, illustrating some
of the finer points of gun tracing,
of which there are many, in large
part due to the limitations imposed
upon this place. For example, no
computer. The National Tracing
Center is not allowed to have central-
ized computer data.
“That’s the big no-no,” says Charlie.
That’s been a federal law, thanks to
the NRA, since 1986: No searchable
database of America’s gun owners. So
people here have to use paper, sort
through enormous stacks of forms
and record books that gun stores are
required to keep and to eventually
turn over to the feds when requested.
It’s kind of like a library in the old
days—but without the card catalog.
They can use pictures of paper, like
microfilm (they recently got the
go-ahead to convert the microfilm
to PDFs), as long as the pictures of
paper are not searchable. You have to
flip through and read. No searching
by gun owner. No searching by name.
“Okay?” Charlie’s tapping a box
of Winston Reds. His smile is imp-
ish, like he’s daring you to say what
needs to be said: This is a fucking
nightmare.
“You want to see the loading dock?”
We head down a corridor lined with
boxes. Every corridor in the whole
place is lined with boxes, boxes up
to the eyeballs. In the loading dock,
there’s a forklift beeping, bringing
in more boxes. “You go, ‘Whoa!’ ” he
says. “Okay? Yeah, but a million a
month? ” Almost 2 million new gun
records every month he has to figure
out what to do with. Almost 2 million
slips of paper that record the sale of
a gun—who bought it and where—
like a glorified receipt. If you take
pictures of the gun records, you can
save space. “Two million images! You
know, it’s 2 million photo shots. I’ve
got to have at least seven machines
running 16 hours a day, or other-
wise, right? I fall behind. And to fall
behind means that instead of 5,000
boxes in process, there’s maybe 5,500
tomorrow, you know?
“These were Hurricane Katrina,”
he says, leaning against a stack.
“They were all submerged. They
came in wet. And then we dried them
in the parking lot. When they got
dry enough, the ladies ran them into
the imager.
“Do you want to see the imagers?
I’ll show you. Imaging is like running
a copy machine. So, like, if there’s
staples? So what these ladies along
here do, from this wall to this
wall, from six in the morning until
midnight…staples.”
It’s hard to tell if he’s complaining,
or bragging.
“All this, everywhere, all these
hallways, the boxes,” he says. “We’ve
been as high as 15,000 boxes back-
logged. When we go over 10,000, the
General Services Administration
dudes are walking around going,
‘We’ll collapse the floor.’
“And then Denise says—did you
meet Denise? Denise says, ‘Let’s get
some shipping containers! They’re
like 70 bucks a month to rent.’ So we
put shipping containers out in the
parking lot here.” He pushes open a
heavy metal door and there they are,
three red, one orange, and one blue,
pinged with rust, sitting on the hot
asphalt with weeds popping through.
“See, now we fill these up. Um…” He
yanks the latch on the orange one,
bends his knees as he heaves open
the door. Inside it’s the same as the
corridors: boxes. “Maybe 50 times
a day a trace will come in for gun
records in those boxes. Right? So,
50 times today somebody will be out
here hand-searching boxes because
we don’t have them imaged yet.
“You want to go see the microfilm
archive?”
HOW WE GOT INTO
THIS MESS
UT WHY SHOULDN’T
a gun be like a car—or
food? If you need to
know the history, you
call a number and
somebody’s got the
information. If we have
an E. coli outbreak, we
don’t have much trouble getting to the
o≠ending bags of lettuce.
Guns don’t work that way.
The last time Congress seriously
addressed the notion of creating a
way to keep track of America’s guns
was 1968. Back then, assassination
was the thing. First President Ken-
nedy, then Martin Luther King Jr.,
then Robert Kennedy. The outcry
was nearly identical to the one we
have now: too many guns, too few
regulations, too many crazy people
shooting with abandon.
The Gun Control Act of 1968 was
an attempt to impose order. It set up
the Federal Firearms License (FFL)
system; gun stores would have to
become licensed and they would
have to follow certain rules. Felons,
illegal immigrants, and crazy people
would be prohibited from buying
guns. People would have to sign a
document, Federal Form 4473, also
called the Firearms Transaction
Record, swearing that they were
none of these things. (Background
checks to prove you weren’t didn’t
come until 1993.)
President Lyndon Johnson, who
signed the act into law, was at
once jubilant and depressed. He
had wanted the law to establish a
national gun registry, too, but Con-
gress wouldn’t agree to that part. “If
the criminal with a gun is to be
tracked down quickly, then we must
have registration in this country,”
Johnson said. “The voices that
blocked these safeguards were not
Each day, some
1,500 requests
tumble in from cops
all over the country
who need help
solving a gun crime.
the voices of an aroused nation. They were the voices of
a powerful lobby, a gun lobby, that has prevailed for the
moment in an election year.”
It was the same conversation we’re still having—except
now mass shootings are the thing. We average at least
one a month. Since 1968, more Americans have died
from gunfire than have died in all our wars put together.
In 2014: 33,599.
Who’s doing all the shooting and where are they getting
all those guns and how many do they have and can’t we
get control over this clusterfuck? Wouldn’t a national gun
registry give us a tool to stop some of the killing?
No, says the gun lobby. It would give the government
a tool to confiscate our guns. The idea of a gun registry is
the great fever dream that lies at the heart of gun-control
conspiracy theories: Government evildoers are going to
attack us any day now. We have to be ready. (And you don’t
give the enemy an inventory of all your weapons!)
The Gun Control Act was an abomination, from the
gun-lobby point of view. Especially Form 4473, which they
considered all but radioactive. Even though there wasn’t
a registry, there was suddenly a document that existed,
a piece of paper linking a gun to the name of its owner.
Surely the Second Amendment was thus doomed.
In 1984, Form 4473 even showed up in a movie, Red
Dawn. Soviet paratroopers invaded Colorado, and they
went on a search for gun owners by getting their hands
on a bunch of 4473s. “I’ll give you my gun when you pry
it from my cold, dead hands,” was a popular NRA bumper
sticker at the time and a variant was featured promi-
nently in the movie.
It would be reasonable to assume, as many people do,
that since 4473 is a federal form, the feds have them all
locked up somewhere safe, but they don’t. They are kept
at the store that sold the gun; only when the retailer goes
out of business do the gun records come here to the tracing
center, which accounts for Charlie’s box problem. Those
are just the out-of-business records he’s dealing with in the
corridors and the shipping containers in the parking lot.
“Those are just the out-of-business records,” repeats
Charlie, for emphasis.
The vast majority of the gun records linking a gun to its
owner are kept back at the various licensed dealers, the
Walmarts, Bob’s Gun Shops, and Guns R Us stores dotting
America’s landscape.
By law, the system must
remain intricate, thorny, and
all but impenetrable.
 We have more gun retailers in
America than we do supermarkets,
more than 55,000 of them. We’re
talking nearly four times the number
of McDonald’s. Nobody knows how
many guns that equals, but in 2013,
U.S. gun manufacturers rolled out
10,844,792 guns, and we imported an
additional 5,539,539. The numbers
were equally astounding the year
before, and the year before that, and
the year before that.
Matching a firearm to a person—
tracing a gun—is therefore a needle-in-
a-haystack proposition that depends
on Form 4473. To the people at the
tracing center, locating that docu-
ment is the whole object of the game.
It’s the holy grail. The form has the
gun purchaser’s signature on it, his or
her address, place and date of birth,
height, weight, gender, ethnicity, race,
and, sometimes, Social Security num-
ber (“Optional, but will help prevent
misidentification,” says box 8).
It’s a jackpot of information that
could help solve a murder case, or
exonerate an innocent guy on death
row, or, as happens frequently, open
unexpected investigative leads.
To search the millions of records
they have on file, tracers must scroll
through miles of old microfilm.
Last December two gunmen opened
fire at a holiday o∞ce party in San
Bernardino, California, killing 14 peo-
ple. Remember: Nobody knew who
these maniacs were or why they were
doing this. After a shoot-out, the cops
recovered a Smith & Wesson hand-
gun, a Llama handgun, a Smith &
Wesson M&P assault rifle, and a DPMS
Panther Arms assault rifle. At the
National Tracing Center, they figured
out where the guns came from, as well
as who bought them—the slain assail-
ants. Syed Rizwan Farook and his
wife, Tashfeen Malik, had purchased
the handguns legally between three
and eight years previously at Annie’s
Get Your Gun, an FFL in Corona,
California. Farook and Malik were
discovered to have posted an oath
of allegiance to the Islamic State on
Facebook just before the attack began.
But what about the assault rifles—
they were still a mystery. Turned out
a former neighbor, Enrique Marquez,
bought those during the same time
period. The FBI picked up Marquez,
who is alleged to have been plotting
attacks with Farook at Riverside City
College and on state highway 91 as
early as 2011. Remember: We didn’t
know too much about radicalized
homegrown jihadists until then.
It was a trace just like any other trace
that happens here in Martinsburg. The
ATF completed it within a few hours,
despite a system that, according to
federal law, must remain intricate,
thorny, and all but impenetrable.
HOW TO TRACE A GUN
O, TAKE THAT MURDER
we began with. Blood
all over the place, cops
looking for clues, the
booties. They find the
gun! What happens
next does not involve
the wizardry of some
supercomputer somewhere. It hinges
on a phone call.
That cop with the gun dangling
from his pinkie. He dials the tracing
center and describes the gun. This is
Step One. Let’s say, for example, he
reports that he’s got a 9-mm semi-
automatic Beretta 92.
This would seem to be a straight-
forward matter. It’s not. Cops are bad
at describing guns. This is because
many guns look alike and the nuances
can be fantastically minute and criti-
cal to a successful trace.
“ Newtown was traumatic.
People were bawling and
tracing and bawling.”
“You don’t think of Egypt making pistols, but they make
a knocko≠ of the Beretta,” ATF specialist Scott Hester tells
me. He’s a slim guy with a ruddy complexion in a black
ATF polo shirt. He’s been tracing guns for a decade. We’re
in his cubicle, and I can’t help but marvel at all the hor-
rible newspaper clippings he’s got hanging everywhere,
including one on the San Bernardino case, for which he
and his team won an award. “I did Tucson. Pick a shoot-
ing. Pick a gun crime,” he tells me. “Pick whatever you
want—a firearm event that’s any type—and one of us here
has done it. That’s just the nature of what we do. Triple
homicide here. Six killed here. Triple homicide there.
Murder here. Boston Marathon there. I mean...”
He’s holding a hefty book, one of his favorite gun ency-
clopedias, and he would like to tell me about the Beretta
92 and its various doppelgängers. “Now, the real Beretta’s
made in Italy,” he says, “but Taurus is made in Brazil. So
you have the Beretta 92 and Taurus PT 92. They’re the
exact same gun except the safety’s on the slide on one and
on the frame of the other.” I want to tell him it doesn’t
matter—I was just picking any random gun so he could
walk me through the steps about how to trace it—but
it occurs to me that his entire career is built on the
premise that, yes, it matters. “Now, Beretta was licensing
its stu≠ in Brazil,” he goes on, “but Taurus bought it out,
so they bought up Brazil—Beretta’s factory in Brazil—
and licensed it as Taurus.” He’s pointing to a page in
the book, tapping hard as if the force of the tap will make
this any easier to follow.
“Now, they’re almost identical guns,” he says proudly,
like a math professor who just reached the most obviously
correct answer, “but from di≠erent parts of the planet!”
It takes a guy working here for a decade to know stu≠
like this. The can-do attitude is comforting. It’s encour-
aging to know people here are so wildly invested in con-
quering this chaos.
So, okay, not a Beretta 92, and not an Egyptian knocko≠,
but a Taurus PT 92 made in Beretta’s factory in Brazil. Let’s
say that’s our gun. What’s the next step in tracing it back to
its original purchaser?
“I need the serial number,” Hester says. He lifts his shoul-
ders in an exaggerated shrug and lets out an ominous sigh.
Serial numbers: not so simple. “It gets worse and worse,
more and more problematic.”
Serial numbers, it turns out, are tangled clogs of hell.
Half the time what the cop is reading you is the pat-
ent number, not the serial number, or it’s the ID of the
importer, and then you have the “zero versus letter O”
problem, the “numeral 1 versus letter l versus letter small-
cap I” problem, and then there is the matter of all the guns
with duplicate serial numbers (various Chinese guns, cer-
tain pre-1968 American guns).
“Okay?” Hester says, in a pleading sort of way. The num-
ber one reason gun traces go dry is because the cop got the
gun description or the serial number wrong.
I tell him I need to move on. I could never work here. I tell
him let’s pretend there’s a miracle and we definitely know
we have a Taurus PT 92 and it has a legible serial number.
We may now move on to Step Two.

Step Two: Hester calls the manufacturer (if it’s a U.S.-
made gun) or the importer (for foreign-made guns). He
wants to know which wholesaler the gunmaker sold
the weapon to. Basically you say, “Hey, who did you
sell this gun to?”
Gun importers are licensed by the ATF, and they have to
keep records of acquisitions and sales. So the importer has
to go through all his gun records and find that particular
Taurus PT 92 with that particular serial number, find what
batch it was in, and tell you what wholesaler it went to.
Step Three: You call the wholesaler and say, “Who
did you sell it to?”
The wholesaler, who also has to keep such records, goes
through the same rigmarole the importer or manufac-
turer did, and he gives you the name of the gun store that
ordered it from him. Let’s say it was Walmart.
Step Four: This could go one of two ways.
If the Walmart is still in business, you call it. The actual
store. Not corporate headquarters, or some warehouse,
but the actual Walmart in Omaha or Miami or Wheeling.
You call that store and you say, “To whom did you sell this
Taurus PT 92 with this particular serial number on it?”
By law, every gun dealer in America has to keep a “bound
book” or an “orderly arrangement of loose-leaf pages”
(some have been known to use toilet paper in protest) to
record every firearm’s manufacturer or importer, model,
serial number, type, caliber or gauge, date received, date of
sale. This record corresponds to the store’s stack of 4473s,
which some clerk has to go dig through in order to read
you the information from the form. Or he can fax it.
Congratulations. You have found your gun owner. “I get
a sense of ‘Yeah, I got you, pal,’ ” Hester tells me, about what
Happiness Is 1.
COPS NAB A GUN.
a Found Gun NOW WHAT?
Police contact
the tracing
Linking a killer
center and
to his gun is describe the
preposterously gun they’ve
hard. On purpose. got: the make,
— RACHEL WILKINSON the model, etc.
∆ Officials fear the tracing center’s
floors could buckle under the weight
of all the incoming gun forms.
it feels like to find just the right 4473.
It can take people at the tracing cen-
ter 70 phone calls on one trace alone.
There are rows and rows of cubicles
filled with ladies on phones doing the
calling, but not everything happens by
phone. They do have some Internet in
the building: e-Trace is a system that
allows cops to submit requests for
gun traces and get the results back by
computer, if they’re subscribers. They
can also mail the requests in. Either
way, once you have found the name of
the gun owner, you get back to the cop
who initiated the trace.
“And then I say, ‘Okay, your trace
is done; I got the buyer,’ ” Hester tells
me. “And they say, ‘Oh, who is it?’ ”
Maybe it’s one of the suspects. “And
he’ll say, ‘Are you sure?’ And I’ll say,
‘I’ve got this form in my hand here.
I’m looking at the form. I can tell you
for a fact right now the purchaser and
possessor are the same person.’ And
without exception, these guys are like,
‘Oh, man, you’re a rock star. You’re a
god. Man, you rule.’ ”
2.
TRACERS CALL
3.
THEN FIND THE
THE GUNMAKER... GUN STORE...
And have the Tracers phone
manufacturer Walmart (or
(say, Glock or wherever), and
Smith & Wesson) there, a guy
dig up the hunts down a
retailer they form signed by
sold it to. the gun buyer.
SEPTEMBER
But hang on, because maybe you
didn’t get so lucky. Maybe you’re
working on a trace, and it turns out
that the Walmart that sold the gun
was one of those old cruddy Walmarts
that closed down in the 1990s. This
leads you back, as almost everything
does, to Charlie’s boxes.
Now you go dig.
All the out-of-business records that
come in here—2 million last month—
are eventually imaged and organized
according to the store that sent them.
It might be 50,000 Form 4473s from
one Dick’s Sporting Goods in some
suburb of Cleveland. So, say you need
to find one particular 4473 from that
store. “We go through them,” Charlie
tells me. “Just like photographs from
your Christmas party, and we look
through every one. Until we find it.”
More than 30 percent of all traces
lead investigators here, hand-searching
through boxes, or going frame by
frame on microfilm readers, look-
ing for a 4473 from Mom and Pop
Gun Shop long after Mom and Pop
closed up shop.
“It’s in here somewhere,” Linda
Mills tells me. I meet her in the “roll
room,” a cavern of beige drawers you
pull out and pick among—40,000
rolls of microfilm in all, each with
about 10,000 frames on it. “I’ll find it,”
says Mills. She’s in her 70s and due for
retirement and wears her white hair
long and down her back. She’s looking
for the record of a person who bought
a Remington 870 12-gauge shotgun
that was sold by a now defunct dealer
in Denver. She thinks she picked the
right roll, so she carries it back to her
desk, where the lights are as dim as
a closet’s, and where a microfilm
reader circa 1973 is planted. Here she
will sit, as she has for the past 18 years,
turning a dial right while countless
images zoom past.
“I’m looking for a W,” she says. The
images are the color of asphalt, and
the writing on them looks like tiny
pebbles, and they whiz by so fast, I
begin to get (continued on page 238)
4.
BUT THE GUN
5.
SO TRACERS COMB
STORE CLOSED! THEIR FILES
A shuttered To find the
retailer’s gun owner, they
forms go to hunt by hand
the tracing for the form
center (almost he signed back
2 million when he first
monthly). bought the gun.
2016 GQ.COM 197
 BACK WHEN HE
WAS THE NEXT
JACK NICHOLSON,
CHRISTIAN SLATER
LIVED FAST AND
NEARLY DIED YOUNG
A THOUSAND TIMES.
NOW, THANKS
TO THE MESMERIZING
‘MR. ROBOT,’ HE’S
GETTING HIS SECOND
ACT—AS A MAN
WHO COMES BACK
FROM THE DEAD. SO
HE TAKES NATURALLY
TO A BIT OF ’80S
FASHION THAT’S
REBOOTED FOR ITS
OWN UNEXPECTED
COMEBACK:
THE SHINY SUIT
B Y TAFFY
BRODESSER-AKNER
P H OTO G R A P H S BY
ERIC RAY
DAVIDSON
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200 GQ 09-2016

C H R I S T I A N S L AT E R A N D
I are dangling high o≠ ≠ the
Wonder Wheel in Coney Island
on a beautiful Saturday this
summer, contemplating our
next move. Maybe we’ll go
to fsociety’s headquarters,
which is an actual arcade when
it’s not a hacker hideout on
Mr. Robot, to play a game of
Skee-Ball. Maybe we’ll ride the
Cyclone. But he’s in no hurry.
“Look how beautiful this is,”
he says, peering out far over
the ocean. The last time Slater
was up here, he was shooting
his first-ever scene for the first-
ever episode of Mr. Robot, the
show that has resurrected his
career by giving him the kind
of character he’s always been
so very good at: a seductive
mastermind with a menacing
streak, an adult version of the
purring high school anarchist
he played in Heathers, the
movie that made him famous.
It’s good to see him on a show
like Mr. Robot. Years of trying
to live up to the Jack Nicholson
persona that he tried on too
early and got stuck in didn’t
work out so well: He struggled
with addiction, struggled with
obeying the law. He made some
good choices (True Romance,
Broken Arrow) but too many
bad ones (lunging for a cop’s
gun, Bed of Roses), and then
he lay low for a while, either
because projects didn’t get
picked up or because he was
in recovery. And now, at 47,
he’s come out the other side,
so grateful to be working and
getting interviewed for it
that it’s almost disconcerting.
He has a wife of three years,
two teenagers from his previous
marriage, and plans for more
kids. He’s got a Golden Globe,
perspective, gratitude, a role
on a show that’s so good
it got picked up for a second
season before its first one
even aired. “That just doesn’t
happen,” he says.
On maybe our tenth rotation,
the owner of the Wonder Wheel
and his wife jump in for a ride.
“Sorry to bother,” she says,
a punch-drunk smile on her
face that lets us know she’s
not actually sorry. “I’m just
such a fan.” Mr. Wonder Wheel
takes pictures of Slater and
Mrs. Wonder Wheel at di≠erent
≠ the healthiest choice you can
angles while she tells him her
favorite movie of his is Pump
Up the Volume—no, Heathers.
No, Ku≠
u≠s. And Slater big-smiles
through it all, giddy, as though
he were somebody who just
became famous on the
Ferris wheel today.
After we get o≠ ≠ and find
our land legs, I re-suggest
the Cyclone, but his answer
is no. We’ve been talking all
day about how he got his
life right, and now he sees
a metaphor and he’s going for it.
The upshot is: Christian Slater
is done with Cyclones.
“We can choose to get on this
lovely Ferris wheel, have a nice
relaxing ride, get in the stable
car, enjoy the view, have a nice
conversation,” he says, “or we
could have chosen to be wild and
crazy and gotten on the Cyclone.
I think we have to get to a
point where life does present
you with those choices. And
when you see a Cyclone, I think
make—maybe, hopefully, the
sexiest choice you can make—is
avoid it at all fucking costs.”
taffy brodesser-akner is
a gq correspondent.
A pageant champ–turned–Indian movie star–turned FBI agent
(on TV)? Watch out for Priyanka Chopra
202 GQ.COM SEPTEMBER 2016
 > “I like winning,” Priyanka
Chopra says about becoming
Miss World at 18. She sounds
like an Indian Donald Trump, but
with eyelids that work, nearly
5 million more Twitter followers,
and slightly better hair.
Now Chopra is preparing to
dominate season two of her first
U.S. TV show, ABC’s Quantico,
about FBI trainees who all seem
to have at least one plot-upending
secret. The twists serve an
important function: giving Chopra
H A I R : YA N N I C K D ’ I S AT M A N A G E M E N T A R T I S T S . M A K E U P : L L O Y D S I M M O N D S AT A G E N C E C A R O L E . M A N I C U R E : B R E N D A A B R I A L

the chance to show off her range

AT J E D R O O T. H E R T O P ( O P P O S I T E PA G E ) : C O R TA N A . S H I R T : I S A B E L M A R A N T E T O I L E . S K I R T : B A L M A I N . R I N G : L E G R A M M E .

of surprised faces. Her character

went outside to get reception on
a phone call with a terrorist, and
her friend got blown up? Shocked
and devastated! The recruit she’s
in love with is married? Shocked
and angry! But the marriage is just
part of his cover? Shocked and
secretly relieved! “They’re called
‘act enders.’ I’m really good
at them,” she says, correctly.
Thanks to her work in
Bollywood, she’s also good
at dancing and singing, which,
based on Indian movies I’ve
seen on mute in artsy bars, is
important. When asked whether
Quantico or next summer’s
movie remake of Baywatch (her
role: “billionaire bombshell”)
has a cast more likely to break out
in Bollywood-style song, she
says, “Baywatch, for sure. I mean,
they’re already running in slow
motion. They’re going to dance.”
Although Chopra has a
22-person entourage, there
is one thing she has to do
on her own: find an apartment.
She’s doing it right now, while
we’re on the phone. This is the
20th she’s looked at, and she
really likes it. Chopra claims I’m
her lucky charm. I feel like her
23rd assistant. This definitely
deserves a dance.— P E T E R M A R T I N

VICTOR DEMARCHELIER
 Welcome
To Your
New G Q . C O M 2 0 5
S E P T E M B E R
2 0 1 6

Office
A RT
ST R E I B E R

Starring
WILL
FORTE

How to Master
the (Surprisingly
Difficult) Art of
WORKING FROM HOME
 Trading in your cubicle for your condo sounds like every man’s
dream. But doing it right is tougher than you think— whether
you’re working from home one day a week or it’s your permanent
workspace. These nine steps will help make sure you’re actually
getting shit done—even if you’re working eight feet from your TV.

Apple 27" iMac

Don’t spend 13 hours
a day huddled over
a 13-inch laptop.
$1,799, apple.com

Dynaudio
Xeo 2 Wireless
Speakers
There’s no one

G R O O M I N G : N ATA L I A B R U S C H I U S I N G S H U U E M U R A A R T O F H A I R A N D M A K E U P F O R C H A N E L ; S E T D E S I G N : A N T H O N Y A . A LT O M A R E .
else around—time
Jump-Start for loudspeakers.
Your New $1,599/pair,

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dynaudio.com
Work Life

C L O T H I N G : S E E A D D I T I O N A L C R E D I T S . T H I S PA G E , 2 ) S T U A R T T Y S O N ( 6 ) . WA L L E T O N VA L E T T R AY : P S B Y PA U L S M I T H .
by Reading
This Book

Humanscale
Congrats! You
Freedom
negotiated working Headrest Chair
from home. But Most “ergonomic”
your productivity chairs are webby
can’t take a hit—or monstrosities that
make you look like a
you’ll be back in
weenie from Silicon
that cubicle. You’re Valley. Keep the
going to need to be function without
your own manager, losing the form.
Starting at $1,368,
your own boss. Start
humanscale.com
by reading The War
of Art. It’s short—
under 200 pages—
and it teaches you
that procrastination
is the enemy. And
beatable. How?
Throw up and get to
work. No excuses!
—MARK ANTHONY
GREEN
KC CO. Valet Tray Das Mechanical Keyboard Blu Dot Strut Table
Keys, shades, earbuds—they all go Crazy comfort and speed at the Give yourself the excessive desk space you’ve
here now. $135, kccousa.com keys. $175, daskeyboard.com always desired. $1,399, bludot.com

Now That You’re Comfortable but not too cozy. Productive but not too
Settled In, Build Yourself sterile. Carve out a space for work and only work.
a Badass Workstation And stock it with gadgets and gear that get you excited
to spend time in your home office.— A N D R E W G O B L E

Fight Off Demon Child

Your needy
Mother of Dragons
and Distractions
Diversions on spawn is no
excuse for not
There are always
new episodes
Your Quest for changing the
world. (Or hitting
in your queue.
Reward yourself at
Out-of-Office a deadline.) You the end of the
need childcare. day—not during.
Glory
206 GQ.COM SEPTEMBER 2016 ZOHAR LAZAR
 ABS:
Always Be Snacking

There’s a moment every day

when your outside-the-box
thinking becomes hand-inside-
the-cereal-box thinking. But
with a little prep, you can make
sure those five minutes away
from the screen crafting a killer
snack are the highest form of
procrastination, the best break
you can take. Master these
three essentials and stay in the
game.— B E N J Y H A N S E N - B U N DY

THE COFFEE
Pod coffee is the hallmark
of sad office break rooms,
and you work at home to avoid
those miniature buckets of
depression. We recommend a
six-cup Chemex with a glass
handle, a Bonavita gooseneck
kettle, and Blue Bottle’s home-
delivery service. The days of
’Bucks breaks are over.

Will Forte Shares His Secrets for a
Successful Day Working at Home
The first thing I do is check my shower. And then
I check my stove. Then I check my shower again.
Then check my stove again. Because I’m OCD. And
once I’m sure the shower is o≠ and the stove is
o≠, I go upstairs to flip through the channels and
make sure Shawshank Redemption isn’t playing.
If it is, I’ll watch it. Whether it’s five minutes in
or 40 minutes in, I’m going to watch it. And then
I figure out which Zamfir album I’m going to
listen to. There’s something about the pan flute
that really brings out the best in my grammar.
Lastly, I light some incense. I just came out
with my own brand of incense, that’s made of
my own body hair, called Forte Hair Incense.
I figured I’d just come right at it with the name.
In the incense game, you have to be very clear.
THE JUICE
A crummy blender brings
the whole party down. Bite the
bullet and buy professional
grade—even if it costs as much
as a round-trip flight to Mexico.
Then make the Vitamix 750 your
vacation substitute by loading it
up with superfruits—blueberries,
goji berries, coconut, etc.—
and give yourself a healthy mid-
afternoon bump.
THE MIX
The goods that’ll keep you going
longest are always natural.
Experiment with combinations
of nuts, dried fruits, and bite-
size veggies. Stock up on
sweetened cacao nibs instead
of eating chocolate—that’s
like chewing coca leaves
instead of doing cocaine. Smart!

Motherf#©%ing Disco Naps A Mopped Hubs and Tubes

Mother Nature It’s only a nap until Floor Would Help Pornhub and
Your golf clubs are you wake up three Me Think chill seems like
whispering sweet hours later with So now you’re Martha a good way to
nothings. So what. 45 unanswered Fucking Stewart? Do “clear your head,”
Today’s agenda e-mails. It’s the dishes when you right? Nope!
is today’s agenda. quicksand. Stay get home from work, Take it out on
a-woke! like the rest of us. Microsoft Word.
 Do It the
Same Way,
Every Day

Whether it’s an
office day or a home
6 Learn from Marc Maron:
Don’t Hide Your Work When
It’s Time to Entertain
“I do my podcast out of my garage every
single day. It’s okay for your workspace
to look like a workspace. Just manage
y
day: The alarm clock the clutter. Depends on who’s coming
doesn’t change. over. Today I have Jeff Goldblum. The
Breakfast? Same president’s been here! But if I’m having
peanut-butter toast.
Normal office time, people over, a dinner party, I’ll tidy up
you’re ready to go. a bit. Keep the bedroom clear. Keep a
Not just because you place to sit down and watch TV. They know this is where I work.
want to avoid giving
your less fortunate
The goal is to make it look like a workspace, not a disaster area.”
colleagues stuck
at the office reason
to talk behind your
back. But as a way Master the Art of
to differentiate Telecommunication
from the weekend. Earlier this year, I moved
Take calls when you from New York to Los
always take them. Angeles. My wife got
E-mail responses a job worth relocating
right away. Lunch at Let an for. My editors, kindly,
one. Coffee at three. App Teach let me go. It’s 2016, we
What’s the point of Your Internet figured. If I’m needed
working from home Not to in the office, they have
if you keep it all Distract You holograms for that,
exactly the same, right? Well, as the author
you might ask? The William Gibson likes
solitude. The space. Of course, in an to say: “The future
No distracting ideal world you’d be is already here—it’s just
co-workers, no able to fully focus not evenly distributed.”
meetings, no excuse for eight to ten At GQ, we use Skype.
to not take a bite out hours a day, crushing It’s just like calling your
of the big project PowerPoint decks. grandparents, except
you never have We know how hard it terrifying, because when
quite enough quiet is. Which is why we the audio cuts out,
to complete. The suggest downloading or your voice starts a
office away from the Freedom app. noise-rock feedback
office is luxurious. It temporarily locks loop because you forgot
Each session at you out of all the fun to put headphones in
home is an extra- stuff on your phone, (and you will), your boss
juiced workday, not computer, etc. will be there, staring
a workday lite: It’s Wait’ll you see what at you. (Hi, Jim!) Here
when you tackle the you get done in an is the good news:
above-and-beyond. hour without text We’re getting better,
— DA N I E L R I L E Y messages and Twitter. used to it. They put me
on an iPad and stick
me at the edge of
the table. My advice is
Cool! You’ve got a handle on your to come prepared, pick
your spots. Also, this
office away from office. Next and final is the part of these
step? Kick ass and show your boss how things where the writer
always tells you to
much more productive you’ve been while wear pants. But seriously:
remote. Then persuade her to bump you Wear pants! Cover up
from one day a week out of office to three. the windows, block out
the sunlight. Don’t let
them know how nice it is
there. They might try
to join you.—Z ACH BARON

208 GQ.COM SEPTEMBER 2016

A RIFF ON
CARHARTT
Usually a pillar of
Milan-after-dark
elegance, Prada is
suddenly borrowing
the dusty clay color,
reinforced material,
and hard-nosed
manual-labor spirit
of workwear pants.

››
pants $1,000
sweater $870
Prada
+
boots $895
Giuseppe Zanotti
Design
bracelet
David Yurman
ring
John Hardy
guitar
Fender

210 GQ 09-2016
IT AIN’T EASY LEAVING A TWEEN-ADORED BOY BAND.
BUT WHEN ZAYN MALIK BROKE OFF, HE IMMEDIATELY
STARTED DATING SUPERMODELS AND MAKING HIT
RECORDS OF HIS OWN. HERE HE SHOWS US HOW TO
WEAR THE PANTS (SPECIFICALLY THE NEW TRICKED-
OUT, SLIMMED-DOWN UTILITY KIND) AND TELLS US
WHAT’S NEXT ON HIS RISE TO THE TOP
P H O T O G R A P H S B Y ANDERS OVERGAARD
 GO AHEAD,
PUT YOUR
FEET UP
Utility pants should
be tough enough for
work but comfortable
enough for lounging.
See how these have
the same stretchy
cuffs as your favorite
sweatpants? That’s
the idea. Stuff a
snack in your cargo
pockets and you’ll
never need to get up.

‹‹
pants $130
Armani Exchange
+
sweatshirt $1,190
Gucci
tank top $88
John Elliott
sneakers $695
Giuseppe Zanotti
Design
socks
Uniqlo
ring
David Yurman

212 GQ 09-2016
MOTOCROSS
MEETS THE
FRENCH
ARISTOCRACY
Think of it this way:
Either you can buy
pristine Balmain pants
and then cry when
the first speck of dirt
graces your shapely
calves, or you can buy
grimy-on-purpose
Balmain pants and
never worry about
a damn thing.

››
pants $1,461
Balmain
+
jacket $7,900
Louis Vuitton
tank top $195
Dolce & Gabbana
sneakers $695
Giuseppe Zanotti
Design
necklaces throughout
Miansai (top)
Degs & Sal
link bracelet
George Frost
 COMING SOON TO YOUR FEET

Last summer, Giuseppe Zanotti—the Italian shoemaker whose flashy footwear has lured
superstars like Beyoncé and Kanye for collaborations—came across scores of young
women in Central Park losing their bananas at a One Direction show. “When you see
another generation, another kind of lifestyle, it’s another world,” he tells us. Wanting
a piece of that world, he asked Zayn—whom he’d hit it off with at Paris Fashion Week—to
help design a line of dressy sneakers (as seen here) that are more like minimalist soft-
bottomed boots: much simpler than the studded and flame-embellished sneaks Zanotti
is known for. (“It doesn’t have to be fireworks,” he says.) Zanotti, who was a radio
deejay in his 20s, sees his new collaborator as not just a talent but a talisman. “My work
is to be a shoe designer, but also to understand what this generation likes to wear.
The music helps me understand.”

214 GQ 09-2016
METAL GEAR
SOLID
The beauty of these
pants is that they
can look streetwise
or sophisticated
(or both at once). To
class up those punky
metal zippers, pull
on the kind of fitted
sweater you’d wear
to dinner with your
girlfriend’s parents.

››
pants $168
Nautica
+
sweater $2,600
Dior Homme
boots
Giuseppe for Zayn

‹‹
pants $1,395
Versace
+
t-shirt $75
Icons
jacket $5,900
Bottega Veneta
link bracelet
George Frost
other bracelets, vintage
ring
David Yurman
sneakers
Giuseppe for Zayn

T H E R E I S N O electricity in
the tiny sea shanty where
Zayn Malik would like to have
a conversation about Zayn
Malik. No heat and no real
floor. Just darkness—and
the underfoot lick of London’s
dead-black Thames.
And yet, near midnight,
when our pirate hero (singer/
musician/T-shirt maker) Zayn
bursts through the rusty-
hinged door, home from sea
to his shanty (an unfurnished,
pitch-dark toolshed his people
thought would be maximally
“chilled,” as Zayn su≠ers severe
anxiety), he’s in a good mood.
“Romantic!” He sparks a
joint to illuminate a stubbled
boomerang jaw, plus a brown
suede shearling jacket that
swells him to the rough scope
of a weedsidaisical Saint
Bernard. He doesn’t seem too Zayn, flicking his lighter for endorses. (Specifically,
anxious, moving with the loose- emphasis), his own hair he says: “Sick!”)
hipped swagger of someone having been man-bunned, His other, newer, and more
used to walking in fake wind. skunk-striped, and buzzed ambitious fashion project is
He looks, as he would say, sick. under some fake scalp tats. footwear. He loves biker boots
“It’s about being happy Zayn now has two lines so much he made a pair with
to look a bit scru≠y,” he says of his own. The first is his Italian designer Giuseppe
of his style, which comprises contribution to the Great Zanotti, a similarly edgy dude
thousands of dollars of Upscale Merch Revival—a he fell into natural partnership
designer merchandise. “I just 26-piece capsule linked to his with at Paris Fashion Week last
got into the whole rock sort album, Mind of Mine, with year. “Style is not being afraid
of feel to clothes—big boots, shirts featuring Urdu script for to be bold about some things, or
skinny jeans, and dark T-shirt, his Pakistani roots (like the to say what it is you have to say,”
and rings. Just the grungy feel.” word for mind, pronounced Zayn says. “I feel like Giuseppe
Grunge, to be clear, as zehn) and graphic work by does that with his collection—
opposed to the pip-squeak Iron Maiden’s guy. It’s Hood by and I try to do that with my
gleam of his boy-band start. Air crossbred with Supreme’s music. So it kind of works.”
If you don’t know Zayn, 23, as ’99 Arabic collection, says The Meanwhile, if you want to
ex–One (of the) Direction(s), Guardian, a review Zayn know what’s next, as we did,
he is now a hugely famous solo
act, a recipient of Gigi Hadid’s
giddy PDA, and an ongoing
case study in mononymous
rebranding. And as Zayn, he’s a
true style renegade. He’s worn
robot arms (Versace). He’s worn
a doorman duster (Valentino).
He’s worn one Yeezy and one
dress boot at the same time. His
metaled-up ears, full sleeves,
and daily-shifting hair are pure
Beckhamian (“He’s sick,” says

››
pants $395
Belstaff
+
shirt $175
Icons
desert boots $995
Giuseppe Zanotti
Design
socks
Falke
necklace
Degs & Sal
ring
David Yurman
grooming by larry
king at streeters. set
design by roxy walton.
produced by ragi
dholakia productions.
where to buy it?
go to gq.com/go
/fashiondirectories

216 GQ 09-2016
you’ll get the kind of answer
where the platitude machine-
gun fire of an ex-boy-bandee
merges with press ramble and
weed haze into maybe-sort-of-
possibly-deep profundity:
“I’m being very, like,
blessed at the minute by God
or whoever it is [lighter flick],
fate or whatever, so um, there’s
a lot of o≠ers come our way
at the minute with di≠erent
things to do with fashion. And
hopefully I get to get involved
in all of them. I’d love to just
continually have a presence,
because I feel like it’s very
heavily tied into music and the
image and the fashion, and
it’s all kind of one thing. So you
kinda gotta be in there, I guess.”
Honestly, you do gotta be in
there. And by our lights—even
in the dark—he is.—SARAH BALL
 09.16
GQ

218
218 Dan
Winters

G Q ’ S Guide to
BEING THE BEST BRAND
YO U C A N B E

DANNY M¢BRIDE
Starring

Remember when “selling out” was the worst thing an artist could do? If you licensed your song
to an ad, you were a sellout. If you let them make your novel into a movie, you were a sellout. If
you wanted to make a commercial, you had to do it in Korea so no one here would see it. But now?
Everyone does it. Oscar winners. Knighted sirs. Even Bob Dylan. And no one cares! The big
risk now isn’t selling out—it’s doing it wrong. GQ teamed up with DA N N Y M C BR I D E and his Vice
Principals co-star W A LTO N G O G G I N S to demonstrate how to sell out without selling your soul
 r i e f Hi s t o r y o f
AB

SELLING OUT
THE BEATNIKS AT THE 1965 Newport Folk Festival
should have known something was up when Bob Dylan
walked onstage, trailing a suspicious cord behind him.
He plugged in his Stratocaster and launched into “Maggie’s
Farm,” but he may as well have been performing a Puccini
aria, since he was barely audible over the boos. The charge:
The harmonica-tootling folk king had Sold Out. But when We’re
we look back through the Snapchat filter of 2016, it’s clear
what he was really doing: expanding his brand. Okay with
When pop stars began signing endorsement deals in It If You
the ’80s, they weren’t just accused of dumbing down their
art but of exsanguinating its authenticity. Madonna feigned
REALLY
Pollyanna purity in Pepsi commercials, and even David Commit
Bowie, the ghostly prince of the avant-garde, slummed it Ryan Reynolds
in Japanese sake ads. When electro-elf is an actor, a man,

P R O D U C E R : D AV E Y E A G E R A N D K A T H R Y N W I N T E R S . S E T D E S I G N : E D M U R P H Y A T A R T W O R K S H O L LY W O O D . S T Y L I S T : N I C O L E S C H N E I D E R A T
Moby licensed every song on his album and a deeply

T H E W A L L G R O U P. G R O O M I N G : C H E R I K E A T I N G A T T H E W A L L G R O U P. S P E C I A L E F F E C T S M A K E U P : J O R J E E D O U G L A S S A N D B R I A N K I N N E Y.
Play to brands like Nordstrom and committed brand
ambassador of
Volkswagen Polo, he found himself in Swiss watch
artistic purgatory, too pervasive for original manufacturer Piaget.
— M AG G I E L A N G E
fans and too weird for anyone not looking
to buy a German supermini. Musicians GQ: If you were
In 1965, Bob Dylan didn’t even need to align with companies stuck on a desert
was asked what to earn the scorn of the sellout police. island, which three
product he would Piaget watches
ever sell out for. After Metallica hired a producer who had would you bring?
His response? worked with Bon Jovi, chat rooms filled Ryan Reynolds:
“Ladies’ garments.” with metal geeks whining about how Two Polos and
Four decades an Altiplano. The
later, the voice
mainstream they’d become. Commitment Altiplano, I love.
of a generation to artistic purity had curdled into hair- It’s so beautiful.
appeared in a splitting snobbishness. What I really need
Victoria’s Secret is a desert island.
commercial,
Everything changed as the ’90s progressed.
fulfilling his Hip-hop was about upward mobility; the What type of
prophecy and conspicuous presence of platinum and watchband
paving the Patrón didn’t undermine artists’ success, best represents
way for these your soul?
enterprising it legitimized it. After Jay Z blew up in If you’re talking about
celebrity heroes. 1998, he eviscerated the false dichotomy of a soul, and a soul is
authenticity and wealth, acquiring critical transcendent, a metal
watchband. That’s
acclaim along with a portfolio of partnerships and investments: a dangerous question.
Samsung, Budweiser, Tidal. Unlike with the sellouts of the What if I was like
’80s and ’90s, Jay Z’s hustle was part of his artistic narrative, crocodile skin?
the scrappy Brooklyn drug dealer made good. Which Piaget
As hip-hop and its Midas values have seeped into the watch represents
mainstream, selling out is no longer a transgressive act. It’s now humankind as
it currently exists
mandatory to extend your tentacles into brands—as long as you on earth?
do it right. Alicia Vikander and Vuitton pair like champagne I don’t believe that a
and caviar. Matthew McConaughey’s Lincoln commercials Piaget watch reflects
the nature of our
align perfectly with the machismo kitsch of the McConaissance. society right now. It
When Gwyneth Paltrow endorses a $15,000 dildo on Goop, reflects the nature
she’s luxuriating in her “other half” wellness branding. of how we could be,
But few have done it with the cocky insolence of Bob Dylan, how we would want
to be. The world is
the OG sellout. Dylan doesn’t need to expand his brand in a state of slightly
anymore, but he’s doing it anyway—a middle finger to his perplexed chaos right
Newport hecklers. Over the past 15 years, Dylan has appeared now. A Piaget watch
is the utopian destiny
in commercials for Victoria’s Secret, Pepsi, Chrysler. At 75, he to which we are
doesn’t give a fuck. And neither does anyone else.— E M I LY L A NDAU inexorably marching.

What celebs bring to your brand, according to the Davie-Brown celebrity marketing index • T R U S T: Morgan Freeman • I N F L U E N C E : Kate Middleton

KELSEY DAKE
09.16
GQ
221
221
 DIDDY
1989: Starred in
TIME
Tim Burton’s film WARNER
CABLE
revival of Batman. KATHY BATES
DIRECTV
2014: In Birdman,
portrayed an aging
actor haunted
CHRISTOPHER JEFFREY TA MB O R
by the superhero
GUEST DIRECTV
he played as a CABLE GUYS
DIRECTV
young movie star.

Th LLongg A
The Arc 2016: Cast as the
of the Perfect Sellout: villain in next
year’s Spider-Man:
MICHAEL KEATON Homecoming.
LIEV SCHREIBER
TIME
WARNER RO B LOW E
CABLE
D RA KE DIRECTV
With a lilittl
W ttlle help
elp,, Walt
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JUSTINN BBIEBER ADAM LEVINE

DIDDY PROACTIV
PROACTIV
PROACTIV

JENNIFER GA RNER
K AT Y P E R R Y NEUTROGENA

PROACTIV

UNLICENSED
DERMATOLOGISTS

Q U VEN ZH A N É
WAL L IS
MASERATI
ALEC BALDWIN
WILLEM DAFOE
MERCEDES

HULU WH I P S
CAPITAL
ONE

M AT T H E W
M C CONAUGHEY
h
Th e r e A r e T i n g s Th a t LINCOLN

MONEY CAN’T BUY

AMAZON
ECHO

NEW
ERA

Wisdom from the agents behind celeb paydays

JU LIA
“Beyoncé turned “Anne Hathaway was “Up on that stage, DISNEY A MY POEHLER LOUIS-DREYFUS
WORLD
down a Facebook o≠ered $500,000 by it’s all the same shit. OLD NAVY OLD NAVY
post for a hair brand. some billionaire in, It doesn’t matter
Her people said, like, Bahrain to come if it’s a bar mitzvah.
‘You can come up and have dinner.” It’s more, ‘Am
with $2 million—she —Mike Esterman I doing this for some
won’t take it.’ ” [Editors’ note: dictator’s kids?’ ”
—Mike Heller She did not go.] —Steve Einzig SENSIBLE DENIM

A P P E A L : Robin Williams • FA M I L I A R I T Y: George W. Bush FR E D A RMIS E N

PAUL DANO OLD NAVY

GAP
 Your Map to the

(SELLOUT)
DANIEL CRAIG
HEINEKEN
WI LL
BRAD PITT FE R R E LL
BUD

STARS
HEINEKEN
LIGHT

There’s a galaxy of branding

J ENNIFER
CLIVE OWEN ANISTON opportunities out there
PAT RI CK
THREE WATER
OLIVES
SWAYZE
PBR
HEL EN M IR R E N
BUDWEISER VERNE TROYER
GEICO

DOOMSDAY PREP
JULIA ROBERTS
L AVA Z Z A
BO OZE

LINDSAY LOHAN GEORGE CLOONEY

ESURANCE NESPRESSO
GWYNE T H
PA LTROW
CHEVY
E VY CHASE
CHA ST I M U L A N TS
MARTINI
& ROSSI DORITOS

C H A R L I ZE A L PACIN O
THERON FRIENDS OF OBESITY VITTORIA
MARTINI
& ROSSI

DAVID
V I D LY
LYNCH
SIGNATURE
CUP
A R N O LD
SCHWARZENEGGER
BUD LIGHT

RACHAEL RAY
DUNKIN’ L E BRON JAMES
DONUTS
MCDONALD’S BRA D LEY COO PE R
TO M
HÄAGEN-
HIDDLESTON DAZS
JAGUAR WHO O P I GO LLDBERG
POISE

JAMIE LEE
JOHN STAMOS CURTIS
OIKOS ACTIVIA

STEVEN TYLER
PLUMBING SKITTLES
P ROBL E MS
JAMES
FR A N C O CAM NEWTON
SCION OIKOS

MERYL
Y L STREEP
STR
LISA
SA RI
RINNA
N AMERICAN
STEPHEN EXPRESS
DEPEND
COLBERT
SAMUEL L .
WONDERFUL TINA FEY JACKSON
PISTACHIOS AMERICAN
CAPITAL
EXPRESS
NUT ST U F F ONE
SEE ADDITIONAL CREDITS.

ROBERT D E NIRO
J E NNI FE R
GARNE R AMERICAN
EXPRESS KEVIN BACON
CAPITAL
ONE VISA

KATE M C KINNON CR EDIT SH AR KS

MASTERCARD
09.16
CHARLIE SHEEN KATE WINSLET GQ
LELO AMERICAN
CONDOMS EXPRESS
223
223
 bodied Old-Guy Voice
Di s e m s are occurring not on the NFL field
MAKE BANK
Ever swelled with pride for humanity while watching a Visa ad? Worried
that your family is going to explode because it isn’t “in good hands”? Wanted to
eat at Arby’s, even though it’s Arby’s? Congratulations—you’ve been
manipulated by the voice of an old man. See if you can match the AARP-eligible
actor to the corporation he’s imbued with wisdom and gravitas.
Ving James
Rhames Earl Jones
Morgan Dennis
Freeman Haysbert
MO RG AN FREEM AN > VISA • DEN N IS H AYSB ERT > ALL S TATE
V I NG RH AMES > ARBY’S • JAME S EARL J ON ES > VERI ZO N
If It Makes Us
Think,“Why Is
He Doing That?”
YOU’RE DOING
IT RIGHT
Julia Louis-Dreyfus doesn’t
need Old Navy. She’s got
Seinfeld money. I can no more
picture her purchasing a pair
of $29.94 boot-cut jeans than
I can Oprah seeking external
validation from a Weight
Watchers meeting or Diddy
spot-treating his adult acne
with Proactiv. Which is why
this kind of endorsement—
taking money you don’t need
for a product you don’t need—
is the ultimate power move.
By associating yourself with greasy teens squeezing husky thighs
09.16 into cheap denim, not only do you embrace the plebes of Middle
America; you prove nothing can blemish your brand.— A N N A P E E L E
224
224
AT T E N T I O N : Morgan Freeman • V I S I O N S O F F O R T U N E : Bill Gates
GQ
This season’s most herculean exertions
but in the bleached halls of a suburban
high school, as Danny McBride É and
Walton Goggins vie to become its head
administrator. We talked to three-time
sellout McBride (K-Swiss, Southern
Comfort, PlayStation), star of HBO’s
Vice Principals, about something
even nobler than the education of
America’s youth: ads.— CA I T Y W E AV E R
What commercial jingle will be lodged
in your brain until you die?
GQ When I was a kid, there was a karate
school in northern Virginia. Their
ad was two little kids who would
DM say, “Nobody bothuhs me.” “Nobody
bothuhs me, either!” Then it would
cut to a shot of a bunch of people doing
karate in a field, and the song was like, [singing]
“Call U.S.A. 1000! You will...fight for life!”
So you have strong brand loyalty to that dojo.
Are you usually a devoted customer? Like, do you
use store loyalty cards?
I read some crazy story about a guy who was getting
workers’ comp. [His employers] hired a private
detective and accessed, I think, his grocery-rewards
card and saw that he was, like, buying alcohol
and shit on certain days, which went against [the
lost time] he was claiming. That kind of spooked
me—that they can track your purchases and use your
purchases against you. I don’t want that.
You don’t use loyalty cards because you want to
be able to commit fraud?
You never know what opportunities might come
your way. And I hate when you go to Barnes & Noble
and they’re like, “Are you a member of our rewards
club?” I’m like, “No.” “Would you like to do that?”
“No. I wouldn’t. I’ve been to fuckin’ Barnes & Noble
before, and I know all about it. I want this book.”
What’s the best music for a car commercial?
Old classic rock. That sells a truck. And house music
to sell compact cars.
What’s the best music for a prescription drug that
prevents blood clots?
Kendrick Lamar.
Have you ever done a weird overseas commercial?
I would love to. I’d wanna be filmed in black
and white with a tuxedo, half unbuttoned, walking
on the seashore, looking o≠ into the distance. It
could be for any product.
You’ve been paid to endorse goods a few times
Stateside. What do you think it is about your face and
voice that makes people want to buy products?
I don’t know if it does equal people buying the products.
I’m pretty sure K-Swiss closed down after my ads.
As a celebrity, do you get tons of free swag?
I don’t. Heineken sent me a beer keg one time. I don’t
think a lot of brands want to be associated with me.
 226 G E N T L E M E N ’ S Q UA R T E R LY

On a Saturday evening in Februar y,

a 45-year-old Uber driver and father
of two named JASON DALTON got into
his car, left his home near Kalamazoo,
Michigan, and began shooting people. But
the strangest, most unfathomable
thing about the night that Dalton killed
and killed again is what he did in between

BY C H R IS H E AT H ILLU S T R AT IO N BY J O H N R I T T E R

JA S O N DA LT O N began
this particular Saturday—
February 20, 2016—by
doing nothing at all
unusual. While his wife
of 20 years went out
with their 15-year-old son
and their 10-year-old
daughter, Dalton, 45, took
their German shepherd,
Mia, for a walk, then ran
errands for a couple of
hours with a friend, Brian.
Afterward, he told Brian he
might take a nap, then
go to work. Dalton was an
insurance loss adjuster
in Kalamazoo, Michigan, but
less than two weeks earlier
he had also started doing
some driving for Uber in his
off time. The Daltons were
doing fine, but he liked the
idea of making some extra
money. The plan was to take
his family to Disney World.
It looked like another
ordinary day in the life of
an ordinary man in an
ordinary part of America.
Except that on this day, for
reasons that Jason Dalton
would later struggle to
explain, Kalamazoo would
be terrorized by a man
driving around town and
shooting people, apparently
at random. And the person
doing the shooting would
turn out to be an Uber
driver named Jason Dalton.
GENTLEMEN’S QUARTERLY
A
SDDIFFERENT as one mass shoot-
ing
gmmay be from another, we have
becoome primed to expect cer -
o
tain patterns. First, the violence.
Then
en, the explanation. It’s never
en
a su∞cient ex explanation, of course, but gen-
erally, with
withi
within a day or two, we learn of some
kind of motive or circumstance that acted
as a trigger. Whether radical Islam, anti-cop
vengeance, suicidal depression, or virulent
misogyny, an explanation swiftly emerges
to help us understand. And then we wait
to hear about all the warning signs that
were missed, the clues that, if only recog-
nized or heeded at the time, could have pre-
vented this bloodshed.
But what if one day a man became a mass
killer and there were no real clues at all about
why in the life he’d lived beforehand? Could
such a person exist? In the aftermath, as
everyone struggled to comprehend the chaos
Jason Dalton had caused, that was exactly
what those closest to him suggested was the
case. Brian, the man whom Dalton would WHEN DALTON went out that afternoon
characterize to the police as his best friend, to pick up Uber fares in his silver Chevy
said that during the hours they spent Equinox, he also brought along the family
together that day, Dalton had been “a little dog, Mia. His first fare of the day, a female
more quiet” than usual, enough that Brian college student, refused to get in the car
asked if anything was wrong. Dalton said because of Mia, but the local man he picked
no. He remembered Dalton asking him up just after 4 p.m., Matt Mellen, was okay
if he was interested in driving for Uber as with it. Mellen thought it a bit weird, but
well, but Brian told his friend he was too it was a beautiful Saturday afternoon, so he
busy. Nothing about those hours gave Brian figured maybe they’d just been for a walk.
any hint what was coming. “And I like animals,” Mellen explained.
Afterward, Dalton’s wife, Carole, and his “Doesn’t bother me.” So he got in the front
parents hired a lawyer to speak for them, passenger seat. Mellen was headed from the
and the lawyer’s message was that they were edge of downtown Kalamazoo to a friend’s
ba±ed: “They’re thinking like everybody house to pick up his car, which he’d left there
else, Why?… Certainly they’ve looked inward after a birthday party the previous night. He
as a family to see whether there was anything and Dalton even chatted a little to begin
that would have been an indicator that Jason with. Small talk. Nothing unusual.
was capable of something like this, and we’ve After they’d driven a short while, Dalton
got nothing to o≠er.”
≠ received a phone call. He was using Bluetooth,
The lawyer also shared this: Two days so Mellen could hear the call, though he
before it happened, Carole did notice that wasn’t really paying attention and wasn’t
her husband seemed a little down and had even quite sure if the voice he heard was
asked him about it. He told her that he was male or female, adult or child. Anyway, they
KALAMAZOO COUNTY SHERIFF’S OFFICE VIA GETTY IMAGES
just tired from all the driving. didn’t talk for long.
That’s all she had. He was tired. That was when the universe abruptly
shifted.
“He hung up,” said Mellen, “and he floored
it. He hammered the gas pedal. He just
What happened next
could be seen on the
started driving crazy.”
Later, there would be much speculation
showroom’s surveillance about this phone call, the call that seemed
cameras. Dalton parks in to set Dalton o≠. For a while, the popular
assumption was that the caller must have
front of the dealership been his wife: Their relationship must’ve
offices, then approaches been failing, and an incendiary moment
the father and son. must have enraged him. And as it turned out,
He was almost upon the the call did indeed come from her phone—
but it wasn’t Carole on the line, it was their
Smiths before they son. Dalton had called a little earlier as she
noticed him. and their children were sitting down to eat

at Wings Etc.; their son had answered (he
was playing games on the phone when his
father called) and they chatted about his
drivers’-ed class. Then—the call that came
during Mellen’s journey—Carole had asked
their son to call back to check whether
Dalton wanted them to pick up some food
for him. What might have seemed like a cru-
cial moment was actually a brief, banal call
from his teenage son about a chicken dinner.
Whatever the real trigger, Dalton’s behav-
ior became unhinged. He sped into an
oncoming-tra∞c lane, blew through a stop
sign, and violently sideswiped a Ford Taurus.
But, as he did so, he reacted as though noth-
ing had happened.
“Dude, you hit that car!” Mellen shouted at
him. “You just hit that car!”
“I didn’t hit anything,” Dalton replied,
with eerie calm, and accelerated onward.
“I was like, ‘Bullshit!’ ” says Mellen. “And
then I was just, like, pleading for him to stop
the vehicle so I could get out.”
But Dalton wouldn’t stop. He shot through
some more lights and repeatedly swerved
onto the wrong side of the road. In the back,
Mia got down on the floor and hid. And yet
the whole time, Dalton showed no outward
signs that anything unusual was happening.
“I was, ‘Please just let me out! Please just
let me out!’ ” says Mellen. “And he was, ‘Well,
don’t you need a ride to your friend’s house?’
I was, ‘Not anymore! Let me out! Let me
out!’ And he refused to let me out.”
By then, they’d passed the correct turn,
so Mellen started indicating other houses,
saying that’s where he had to go: “Pointing
out random houses so he would slow down.”
Finally, halfway down a quiet stretch of
Iroquois Trail, Dalton slammed on the brakes
and asked again where Mellen’s friend lived;
Mellen took advantage of the moment to
leap out. “The worst ride I’ve ever had in
my life, that’s for sure.”
Kacey Black was having a cigarette with
her husband outside their house on the
corner of Iroquois Trail, enjoying the fine
weather, when, amid the loud screeching of
Dalton’s braking and acceleration, they saw
Mellen tumble out of Dalton’s car. Dazed,
Mellen told them what had happened. “I
was, ‘Am I having a mental breakdown?
Did that really just happen? What the hell
was that? What the fuck just happened?’ ”
Black called 911, describing the silver Chevy
SUV, and an Uber driver throwing out a pas-
senger, but she didn’t feel they grasped the
extremity of what she’d seen. “They basically
just blew me o≠,” she says. “They said, ‘Okay,
well, we’ll report that.’ They sounded like
they didn’t even believe me.”
Mellen also called 911 as he headed down
the road to retrieve his car. He had to tell
the story three times as he was transferred
to di≠erent jurisdictions, but each time he
clearly identified the man as an Uber driver.er.
er
“I just wanted to report it,” he told them, m,
m the jaail was that he had in some
“because I don’t want somebody to get hurt.”tt.”
Back home, Mellen called his fiancée, and nd
at 5:33 she posted a warning for their friends
on Facebook about an Uber driver named
Jason, using his Uber photo:
“ATTENTION kzoo peeps!!! This uber driver
named JASON drives a silver Chevy Equinox is
NOT a safe ride!… Despite Matt pleading with
this driver to pull over he refused.… He was
acting completely normal throughout all of
this erratic driving!!… Hoping this man will be
arrested or hospitalized soon if he has a medi-
cal condition causing his behavior.”
After Mellen escaped from his car, Jason
Dalton sped home. When he arrived, he went
inside and drank a glass of water, then went
down to the basement and prepared his guns,
filling up the magazines. By the time he set
o≠ back out into the world, he was carrying
a loaded Glock 9-mm semi-automatic pistol
and he was wearing a bulletproof vest under
his jacket. Around the time when he headed
back onto the Kalamazoo streets, Dalton
also called his wife. He wanted to swap his
damaged car with a Hummer they owned,
but that was parked at his parents’ house
(they were away for the winter in Florida)
and his wife had the keys.
When her phone rang, she was in the park-
ing lot of Sam’s Club with their kids, loading
up the car. Their son answered and relayed
the message; Carole said she’d meet him at
her parents’ house.
But Dalton didn’t go straight there. Instead,
he accepted a new fare.
Dalton’s
House
Mellen
llen
D
Div Outt of
Dalt
alton’s Car
The Up
And Under
W MAIN ST.
131 Seelye
Kia
2
Cracc ker
MIN K AL A M A ZO O
Barrell
A
FTER JASON DALTON was cap-
FT
tureeed, the word coming out of
way acknowledged his role in
the murders.
m He was variously
described byy police
p as “quasi-cooperative,”
“pretty matt
matter-of-fact,” “a hard read,” “polite,
meek, and mild,” “very even-tempered,” and
“not upset about anything.” But he was also
said to have shown little emotion or
remorse, and the clear impression was that
he had o≠ered
≠ nothing close to an explana-
tion. As the local under-sheri≠,≠ Paul Matyas,
put it: “He’s not particularly saying.”
Two days later, when the public finally
got a look at Dalton—on live video streamed
from the jail to the courtroom as the charges
were read to him, a process that took nearly
ten minutes—it was hard to read anything
at all on his face. Blank? Stoic? Dazed?
Eerily composed? Any could describe how
he seemed. He spoke only one substan-
tive sentence, after the judge asked if he
had anything to say.
“I would prefer,” he said, “just to remain
silent.”
This silence left everyone in limbo. But the
fact that nobody could say for sure why this
had happened hardly stopped people. Nature
abhors a vacuum, and the Internet has given
everyone the means to fill it.
And so over the next few days, all of the
following explanations would be o≠ered,
often with great conviction, to explain what
Jason Dalton had done: mental illness, fam-
ily breakdown, withdrawal from antidepres-
sants, “maybe a spooky demon possessed
him,” he’d been fired, he was a sleeper agent
activated by a phone call, he was coming
down from meth, he was sexually frustrated,
Meadows
Townhomes
Dalton’s
Parents’ Homme
ome
Site off 43
Arrest
er
The
h Wild
Bull
94

↑ high school senior, lives in the Meadows
Dashboard camera
footage shows police
leading Dalton (left)
away from his car,
finally putting a stop
to his long night of
bloodshed.
he was disappointed by Marco Rubio’s poor
showing in New Hampshire, it was a primal
expression of free will, it was being a fat man
denied his lunch break, high levels of lead
in his blood, Chantix anti-smoking pills, Big
Pharma, grief over the death of Justice Scalia,
a brain tumor, elevator music, money prob-
lems, and Beyoncé’s halftime performance
at the Super Bowl. His behavior was said
to be, variously, the fault of Donald Trump,
George W. Bush, Barack Obama, Michael
Bloomberg, liberals in general, too many guns
in America, too few guns in America, Uber in
general, Uber’s lax hiring policies, Uber’s low
pay rates, Mossad, and the Illuminati.
Do something that seems unfathom-
able, then sit there and say nothing, and a
nation’s splintered psyche will be imprinted
upon you.
GENTLEMEN’S QUARTERLY
D E ALLEN BLACKBURN, an 18-year-old -old
-o
townhomes in northeast Kalamazoo. He’d
spent most of that Saturday outside, until
ws
w
d imbued
his girlfriend, Maci, messaged him, asking if
he wanted to come hang out at her place in
downtown Kalamazoo. He did, so sometime
after 5 p.m., she called an Uber to pick him up.
By mistake, Maci initially entered the
wrong pickup point—the Meadows town-
homes admin o∞ce, rather than DeAllen’s
address—and so after a while Dalton called
her. (It was her name on the Uber account
and, subsequent events would suggest,
she was the passenger Dalton thought
he was picking up.)
“He was like, ‘Hey, I’m lost, can you help
me out?’ or whatever,” Maci would recall.
“So I gave him directions.” Then, she said,
he went silent for about ten minutes. “I was,
like, texting him repeatedly. I was, ‘Okay, did
you find it?’ or ‘Are you lost still?’ ”
Dalton’s silver car can be seen on the
security cameras circling the estate from 5:33
onward, trying but failing to find DeAllen.
By chance DeAllen’s guardian, Amy, actu-
ally saw Dalton in his vehicle during this
period when she went out to her mailbox.
She didn’t realize he was there for DeAllen,
or she would have said something, but she
did notice how on edge he seemed: “He was
really aggressive. He’s sitting kind of by
the trash can and as I’m coming forward
he’s, like, a crazy look in his eye, and as I’m
approaching, he stepped on the gas and
almost runs into me. My first intent was to
throw up the finger—thank God I didn’t.”
Meanwhile, Maci continued to text Dalton.
At 5:40 she wrote, “All good?”
Dalton didn’t reply. It was right then,
as he looped one more time around the
Meadows, that he spotted a 25-year-old
woman who was leading five young chil-
dren, including her daughter, across the
grass to the playground. Dalton rolled down
his window and asked if she, as she later
recalled it, was “Maisie or Misty.”
The woman said no—in fact, her name was
Tiana Carruthers—and Dalton momentarily
drove o≠. But then he turned the car around
again and headed back. Still sitting in his
car, he took out his Glock semi-automatic
and pointed it at Carruthers through the
driver-side window.
DeAllen was still waiting for his ride when
he heard gunshots, out of sight but some-
where nearby.
Maci, meanwhile, was typing out one more
text to Dalton: “Are you close?”
I
N TH HE DAYS afterward, a few scat-
H
tered news articles purported to
o≠er
≠ in nsight into the mass murderer
n
Jason n Dalton. Potentially meaning-
they d
th
ful d
dw
details were seized upon and
de
with far more significance than
deserved. Neighbors were quoted say-
ing that Dalton sometimes fired guns out
the back of his house. An old insurance
co-worker contacted the police and said
that when they worked in the same o∞ce
nearly 15 years earlier, Dalton would get
upset when he was challenged by clients.
One time he yelled and hung up on a cus-
tomer, and then paced around his desk.
More suggestively, a man named Mark
Cottingham, who owned a nearby business,
Visions Car & Truck Accessories, detailed a
disconcerting interaction with Dalton over
a repair the previous September: At times
Dalton seemed to have unreasonable anger,
but other times he was all sweetness. To
Cottingham, it almost seemed like Dalton
had a dual personality.
But if Dalton had really been a man on
the edge—a swelling river of anger about
to burst its banks—you’d have expected 30
similar stories to follow, and 30 more after
that. And they didn’t. Taken all together, it
was pretty thin stu≠.
There was one fact, though, that seemed
pretty damning on the surface, and seemed
to speak to Dalton’s state of mind that day.
The errands he had done in the early after-
noon with his friend Brian involved visiting
three gun stores. At one of them, Dalton
bought an $85 black tactical jacket, which
had a chest pocket designed for hiding a
handgun. What clearer sign could there be of
premeditation, of a man planning a mission,
equipping himself ?
Except.
For one thing, it wasn’t at all unusual
for Dalton to spend his Saturdays at a gun
store—he was a regular customer, often with
Brian. (Brian, who, it should be noted, is a
volunteer sheri≠ ’s deputy.) Guns were one
of Dalton’s hobbies. And at the store where
he bought the jacket, Southwick’s, the way
the owner described Dalton’s demeanor that
afternoon was a poor fit for someone gearing
up for a homicidal rampage: “He was smiling
and joking around, and he did a one-armed
hug to my manager and told him to have a
good day.” And while eyebrows would be
raised over news reports that Dalton owned
16 guns, that’s not particularly unusual
around here. Or in many places. (It was
recently estimated that each gun owner in n ACKING DOWN people who
America has an average of eight guns.)
Even the tactical jacket itself turned out tto
be one more false lead. It was widely assumed ed
that he wore this jacket during his killing g thee more ba±ed they are. Andrew
spree—but his wife later found it in their
house, still in the bag from the store, its tags
on, apparently unworn.
• • •
WHEN TIANA CARRUTHERS saw the gun,
she shouted at the kids to run, and tried to
do the same. As she did, she was shot four
times. The first bullet hit her in her left arm.
The second bullet hit her in her right leg.
One of the last two bullets broke her other
leg, and the other went through her buttocks
and lodged in her liver. As Dalton sped o≠,
he knew that he had just killed someone.
Nobody could survive that many gunshots.
Somehow, Dalton was wrong. “I just
remember just shooting and shooting,”
Carruthers said. “I tried to move but I
couldn’t move. After I realized he wasn’t
going to stop shooting, I just pretended like
I was dead already.” Some of Dalton’s shots
missed. Seven bullets went into the house
behind her, four of these going through
the wall, stopped only by the clutter in a
closet a few feet from where three teenagers
were playing NBA 2K15.
When the neighbors found Carruthers,
she was on the ground, wedged between the
curb and the back wheel of a truck, and she
couldn’t feel her legs. She told them that the
man who had done this was heavyset with
blue eyes and had a dog in the back of his
car. And that she had never seen him before.
Dalton hurried home as fast as he could and prepared his guns: “He stated it was
like he wasn’t even himself, like it was an altered reality.” He said that it was the Uber
app that made him get his gun, and made him put on the bulletproof vest.
As the 911 calls came in from the Meadows,
one of the dispatchers recognized the sim-
ilarity between the description of the vehi-
cle this shooter had been driving and the
one reported by a distressed Uber rider an
hour earlier; the dispatcher even called
Matt Mellen back for more details. Mellen
repeated that the man’s name was Jason,
and this time he sent the photo from his Uber
receipt to the dispatcher’s private phone.
But somehow, amid all the chaos and
violence to come, this connection seems to
have been overlooked or ignored. Evidently
no one involved grasped the implications of
this information—that if Jason Dalton was
an Uber driver, police could easily locate
him with Uber’s help. Instead, an opportu-
nity to end the violence before it escalated
came and went.
T
RAC
AC
knew w Dalton over the years, you
find the opposite of what you’d
expeeect: The better they knew him,
Jamieson w was close with Jason Dalton for
over tten years and the best man at his wed-
ding. He met Dalton at a party when they
were both 18, and they bonded over cars: “He
was the guy that I used to see on the cruise
strip in his black Camaro, and I was the guy
he saw in the green ’69 Charger.” Dalton
invited him over to his parents’ to check out
his car and they became fast friends.
I asked Jamieson what they’d do apart
from car stu≠.≠
“Chase girls,” he said. “Go to the beach. Go
to clubs. Basically just doing stu≠ ≠ that guys
do. Going to the drag strip. Going to Silver
Lake Sand Dunes. Going dirt-bike riding.”
In middle age, the two men drifted apart—
no real reason, just jobs and families and kids.
The last time Jamieson saw Dalton was a year
earlier. He didn’t seem much di≠erent.
≠ “A lit-
tle grayer,” said Jamieson. “A little heavier.”
Jamieson was finding all his memories
of Dalton unpleasantly prodded by recent
events, and it was only adding to how unex-
pected this was. One memory in particular:
He and Dalton used to talk about when peo-
ple went crazy. “Not murders, necessarily,” he
clarified. “But we knew people that seemed
a little o≠—like, ‘Oh yeah, someday you’re
gonna see that guy in the news for doing
something insane.’ We would always use the
term ‘go postal.’ He didn’t really like them.”
And now…Jamieson is at a loss. “I just
can’t put my finger on it. I stare into space
like I’m going to get the answer, but it’s just
not there. It truly doesn’t seem real. That
Sunday morning, my phone was blowing up
all morning. I didn’t know what people were
talking about. They said, ‘Dalton…’ I was,
‘What about Dalton?’ I turned on the news
and there he was. I said, ‘You gotta be kidding
me.…’ ” He shook his head. “If this becomes
common, we’re all in trouble. I mean…Jason?
He was a wuss.”
• • •
JASON DALTON had just shot a complete
stranger four times. This is what he did next.
He raced away at great speed, to his par-
ents’ house. Just down the road from the
Meadows, he went through a red light at
about 80 miles an hour and, for the second
time in two hours, sideswiped a car. There
was something wrong either with the Uber
app itself or, more likely, with the way Dalton
was using it, because soon after he had
arrived at the Meadows townhomes the app
had registered that he had his passenger on
board, and so it began recording his route.
That is also why, a little later, Maci would
get a receipt that showed Dalton circling the
estate, then driving to his parents’ house; she
was billed $7.31 for the phantom journey.
At his parents’ house, Dalton hid the dam-
aged Chevy Equinox in the garage. When his
wife arrived, though, he discovered that the
Hummer wouldn’t start and so instead he
took his parents’ black Chevy HHR, which
she had been driving.
Carole Dalton’s full description of meeting
her husband that evening—the last time she
would see him as a free man—unveiled itself
over several di≠erent accounts. The first,
relayed through her lawyer, Paul Vlachos,
was the most anodyne. “Carole asked what
had happened,” Vlachos said, “and he said
he’d had trouble with the taxi people. He said
he’d contacted Uber and they were going to
handle everything.” She did reveal a rather
strange instruction from her husband: He
told her and the kids to stay at his parents’
house and lock the doors. “She listened to her
husband,” Vlachos said. “He wasn’t dishev-
eled or acting strangely or anything at that
point that would have given her any pause.”
In later versions, which weren’t released
until weeks later, her husband’s behavior
seemed weirder, and less benign. The “trou-
ble” now involved a taxi driver shooting at
him. Dalton fetched a loaded gun for his wife,
telling her that she could not go back to work
anymore and the kids could not go back to
school. When she (continued on next page)
 TH E UB ER KILLER
C O N T I N U E D F R O M PAG E 2 3 1
asked what he was talking about, Dalton
replied, obliquely, that as soon as she saw some-
thing on the news, she’d know it related to him.
Carole also told the police that when she
arrived at his parents’ house, a little after
6 p.m., Dalton was in the garage on the phone.
He told her he was reporting the damaged
car—to either Uber or the insurance company,
she assumed.
But it appears she was wrong.
There is a strange coda to Maci’s experience
with Dalton: At 6:09—nearly 30 minutes after
Dalton shot someone he presumably assumed
was Maci and left her for dead—he called back
the real Maci. Perhaps he’d realized from her
texts that she could not have been the woman
he had just left on the ground.
Maci said that they spoke for nearly three
minutes, and she described how the call
ended: “He was, ‘Sorry, I don’t have time for
this anymore. I have better things to do, and
you’re just wasting my time, and I basically
can’t do this anymore—you can call someone
else [for a ride].’ ” Mostly, Dalton was unpleas-
ant. “He was really sketchy and rude,” she
recalled. “Like, he was extremely rude to me.”
• • •
T H E D A L T O N S L I V E D on the northwest
corner of a rural junction in the Kalamazoo
suburbs. Since they moved in 17 years ago,
their one direct neighbor had been a machine
mechanic named James Block. He was just as
mystified as everyone else.
Block told me that when the Daltons first
arrived, they kept to themselves, but a couple
of years later, after they had a baby boy, they
opened up more. Or Jason did, anyway. “He
was a talker. A ten-minute conversation turned
to 40 minutes, easily. He was so sociable. He
would never actually let you leave.”
Block was the person who insisted that one
widely circulated rumor, accepted as fact—
that Dalton liked to fire guns out of the back of
his property—simply wasn’t true. Sometimes it
was folks hunting coyotes in the wooded land
back there; other times it was actually Block
himself. “I got a target thing back here so I can
shoot my gun,” he said. “I mean, I got an AK-47
and stu≠.”
≠ (Block, for the record, has 13 guns.)
After that terrible night, Dalton’s wife and
children had moved elsewhere, but Block said
that he had seen Carole several times since,
when she’d come by to pick up stu≠ ≠ from the
house. They’d talk about the kids and the dogs.
Once they’d gotten everything, she told him,
they were never coming back.
• • •
A F T E R L E A V I N G H I S W I F E and children
at his parents’ house, Dalton headed to the
family home. At about seven that evening,
232 GQ.COM SEPTEMBER 2016
his neighbor’s daughter saw the car in his
driveway, idling for a few minutes with its
lights on. Then it sped down the driveway,
stopped for 30 seconds, reversed fast back up
the driveway, then parked with the lights on
for five more minutes.
Whatever was going on in Dalton’s mind,
his trip there seems to have had a practical
purpose. Later, when the police searched the
property, they would find the Glock with which
he had shot Tiana Carruthers, lying on a work-
bench; it appeared to have jammed. Now, as he
drove away, Dalton was carrying a replacement
inside his coat pocket—a Walther P99 9-mm
semi-automatic. He would be needing a gun that
worked, because he wasn’t done yet. Not nearly.
Still, anyone trying to understand what he
was thinking may struggle to comprehend
what Jason Dalton did next: He started pick-
ing up Uber fares again. And his passengers
in this period didn’t notice anything about his
behavior that might suggest what he’d done
over the last few hours: two high-speed acci-
dents, a cascade of bullets fired at a stranger.
At 8:02 he picked up Keith Black at his home
near the Western Michigan campus and took
him into the center of town. Black sat in the
passenger seat and made small talk. Another
passenger, later that hour, remembered Dalton
singing along to the radio. At 9:21, when he
picked up a fare at the Fairfield Inn, next to
Cracker Barrel, and took three passengers to
the Beer Exchange in town, he couldn’t get his
app to start and the fare wasn’t charged prop-
erly, but he seemed easygoing enough about it,
like it wasn’t a big deal. He seemed to be doing
his job as though nothing had happened and
nothing else would.
• • •
J A M E S B L O C K and Jason Dalton would
greet each other every morning, as Block
ferried kids to school and Dalton headed to
work. They had their final substantial con-
versation, for 20 minutes over the fence, only
two days before the shootings. One of many
online eruptions about the case was sparked
by the discovery on Dalton’s Facebook page
that he was listed as a “Progressive.” Finally,
a mass shooter who couldn’t be stereotyped
as some kind of a right-wing nut: Look! You
liberals do it too! Then someone pointed out
that Progressive was actually the name of the
insurance company Dalton used to work for.
After that, the default assumption seemed to
be that he would turn out to be a right-wing
nut after all. But that seems unlikely as well.
“He never told me if he was a Republican
or a Democrat,” Block explained, though he
recalled that during their last conversation,
they did discuss politics. “He goes, ‘Man, look,
we have a choice between Trump, Hillary,
Bernie Sanders…’ He never mentioned Cruz.
He goes, ‘Look at our choices!’ He was like,
‘Man, who are we supposed to vote for?’ We
both laughed about it.”
• • •
T Y L E R S M I T H W A S 1 7 . He had spent most
of Saturday looking for a car with his girl-
friend of nine months, Alexis, also 17; in the
evening, his father, Rich, a plumber, joined
them to see what his son had scoped out ear-
lier. Tyler and his father both loved cars, but
they were also looking for something they
could use to go into business together. There’s
a strip of dealerships along Stadium Drive,
and as the time neared 10 p.m., they pulled
into Seelye Kia. Tyler and his father got out
to look at a blue Ford pickup truck parked
right by the entrance of the closed dealership.
Less interested, Alexis stayed in the backseat
of their Range Rover, which was pulled up
next to the pickup truck with its lights on,
engine running. As though the three of them
wouldn’t be more than a moment.
What happened next could be seen on the
showroom’s surveillance cameras from several
angles. Dalton enters the frame, drives around
the lot and parks in front of the dealership
o∞ces, then approaches the father and son on
foot, walking past the Range Rover, apparently
without seeing Alexis. He was almost upon the
Smiths before they noticed him.
Dalton later said, mystifyingly, that he
had gone into the car lot because he felt com-
pelled to look at a black BMW. This is exactly
how, according to the police report, Dalton
explains the subsequent change of plan that
actually made him a killer for the first (and
second) time:
“Jason advised that he got out of his car and
instead of looking at the black BMW, he shot a
couple of people.”
Alexis watched as Dalton walked up to Rich
and Tyler Smith and spoke to them.
“He asked them what they were looking at,”
she said. “They turned around.… ‘Yeah, we’re
looking at…’ That’s all the words they got out,
because he pulled out the gun and started
shooting. They looked at him, and they put
their hands up, and they said, ‘What are you
doing?’ and they fell down. That’s when I
ducked behind the seat.”
According to another witness, who was
driving by at the moment of the attack, even
after the father and son fell, Dalton shot them
some more.
Only then did Dalton try the door of the
black BMW next to the bodies, but it was
locked. Alexis, panicked, crouched behind the
seat, could see Dalton’s shadow move over the
Smiths’ Range Rover as he came back past her.
She’d left her cell phone at Tyler’s house.
After waiting about 90 seconds, she leaned
the front seat forward and looked for Dalton,
then got out and crawled to where her boy-
friend’s still body was lying on its back.
She took the cell phone from his pocket,
then retreated to the Range Rover. At 10:08
she dialed 911.
By then, Dalton was long gone. Whatever
was guiding him, it was telling him that he had
somewhere else to be.
• • •
T H R E E W E E K S A F T E R the shootings, when
the police released accounts of their two for-
mal interviews with Jason Dalton during
his first 24 hours in custody, it turned out
that what they’d so far been implying—that
Dalton had o≠ered no explanation for his
actions—wasn’t quite true. In fact, he had.
Maybe they didn’t believe him, or couldn’t
take him seriously. Maybe they felt that an
explanation like the one Dalton had given
was the same as no explanation at all. Or
maybe they felt that passing on what he had
said would be one further insult to his vic-
tims. Because while Jason Dalton had given
an explanation, it wasn’t one that would sat-
isfy—or make much sense to—anybody.
THE UBER KILLER CONTINUED
This is the moment in his police interroga-
tion when he finally explained:
Dalton said if we only knew, it would blow our
mind. Dalton then explains how when he opens
up the Uber taxi app a symbol appeared and he
recognized that symbol as the Eastern Star sym-
bol. Dalton acknowledged that he recognized the
Uber symbol as being that of the Eastern Star and
a devil head popped up on his screen and when
he pressed the button on the app, that is when all
the problems started…. Dalton said the iPhone
can take you over. Dalton explained how you can
drive over 100mph and go through stop signs and
you can just get places.… Dalton described the
devil figure as a horned cow head or something
like that and then it would give you an assignment
and it would literally take over your whole body….
A while later, he elaborated:
Dalton was asked what was di≠erent tonight
from the other nights and he said as driver part-
ner with Uber, the icon is red and it had changed
to black tonight.… I asked him why he was carry-
ing his firearm tonight and he said that the Uber
App literally took over his mind and body. Dalton
said that when the Uber symbol is red it is just
picking up and dropping o≠ people, but when he
recognized the symbol and spoke what the sym-
bol was, the color changed from red to black.
After this report was released, the headlines
went around the world: variations on “the Uber
app made me do it” and “the devil possessed me
through Uber.” And, naturally, the assumption
was that Jason Dalton was crazy, a liar, or both.
When Dalton’s full explanation finally
became public knowledge, it was mostly
greeted cynically, as though people saw calcu-
lation behind the crazy talk. It was a plot every-
one has seen over and over on TV: the murderer
who tries to avoid the harshest punishment by
laying the basis for an insanity defense.
Except that the full transcript of those
police interviews simply doesn’t read that way.
Over and over and over, Dalton avoided giving
this explanation. He refused to say, or asked
to take the Fifth, in total, at least twenty-two
times before he finally blurted it out. In the
meantime, he was otherwise reasonably coop-
erative (he said he didn’t want to call anyone,
that he wasn’t suicidal, that he wasn’t hungry,
wasn’t on any medications, wasn’t on drugs)
and answered more general questions about
his life calmly and sensibly, discussing his mar-
riage and dog and daily habits. He also defini-
tively ruled out what didn’t happen: He denied
seeing a psychiatrist or being bipolar or hav-
ing any mental problems, and he insisted he
wasn’t an anti-government or militia person.
“He said nothing triggered him,” the report
records.
Even when Dalton finally told the police
the truth as he claimed to experience it, he
made it clear that he really didn’t want to. He
came across less like someone trying to seem
delusional than someone rational enough to
know that what he was saying sounded com-
pletely insane.
• • •
A T T H E S T A R T of the night, four women
over 60—Mary Lou Nye, Mary Jo Nye, Dorothy
Brown, and Barbara Hawthorne—and 14-year-
old Abigail Kopf met up for dinner at the
Cracker Barrel, then carpooled to see a per-
formance of Chinese acrobatics on campus.
Now, a bit after 10 p.m., they were back in the
Cracker Barrel parking lot purely so they could
split back into two parties, before heading
home. By the time Dalton came upon them on
foot, four of them were in one car, and the fifth,
Mary Lou Nye, was in another.
The first time Dalton described what he did
here, he said the only thing he remembered
was the percussion of the gunshots. But the
next time he remembered more, including a
particularly disturbing detail: He went up to a
woman in a white van and “asked her whether
she could spare a dollar to make America great
again.” After she declined, he shot her in the
head. He said that he was about to run away,
but then he heard the four women in the other
car scream, so he shot them, too. He methodi-
cally described the order in which he did this:
first the driver, then the rear-seat passenger on
the driver’s side, then the front-seat passenger,
then the rear-seat passenger behind her.
The police would quickly gain access to sur-
veillance footage from Cracker Barrel—not as
clear as the Seelye footage, but clear enough to
confirm that it was almost certainly the same
shooter. “They show,” Kalamazoo’s chief prose-
cutor, Je≠ Getting, would say, “that it was done
intentionally, done deliberately, without any
hurry. There’s no question about whether he
did this with the intent to kill somebody.”
Meanwhile, at Seelye Kia, one of the o∞cers
on the scene listened as reports came over the
radio of what had happened at Cracker Barrel.
“We got a serial fucking killer going around,”
he said.
The o∞cers also discussed how lucky Tyler
Smith’s girlfriend, Alexis, was to be alive:
“She should have been dead, too,” said
one. “She got fucking lucky. His tunnel vision
fucked him up.”
As they stood there, trying and failing to
come up with anything that would make easy
sense of any of this, they discussed one final
haunting image from the scene. “The father
falls on his son’s lap,” one said. “Like they’re
almost hugging each other.”
Even at this late hour, police still had peril-
ously little information about the shooter—all
they knew about Dalton was what they could
see in the security footage. Soon the public was
warned to look out for an older white male
driving a dark-colored Chevy HHR. Shortly
after, word arrived that, in addition to the
father and son at Seelye Kia, all five victims
from the Cracker Barrel parking lot were dead.
• • •
T H I S L A S T D E T A I L wasn’t true. In fact one
of the Cracker Barrel victims was still alive. But
nor was this sloppy journalism—the media and
the police were simply passing on information
they had received from Bronson hospital; doc-
tors treating 14-year-old Abigail, who had been
shot in the head, had called a time of death,
and the body was maintained so her organs
could be harvested for transplant. And then
breathing and a heartbeat were detected—the
type of event that people like to see as a kind of
miracle, a miracle that would grow and o≠er
succor to a shattered Kalamazoo over the next
weeks as Abigail would recover su∞ciently
to say her first word—“pig,” because she had
a pet pig—and take her first steps. Her story,
accompanied by upbeat bulletins from Tiana
Carruthers, became the story that Kalamazoo
wanted to tell about this night.
The other story was too awful. And the
closer you looked at it, the less and less sense
it seemed to make.
• • •
A F T E R T H E C R A C K E R B A R R E L shootings,
Dalton went back to his family home—a jour-
ney of 16 miles—one final time. His neighbor,
Jim Block, ominously heard four shotgun
blasts on Dalton’s property at around 11:20.
But if there are rules or patterns to shooting
sprees, Dalton sidestepped them all. The shots
Block heard, Dalton later explained, were just
him firing into the garden shed with a shotgun.
Even at the time, he recalled, he wondered why
he’d just done this.
Then he got back into the Chevy HHR and
drove o≠ into the night. He left the shotgun
behind, but the Walther 9-mm he’d already
used to shoot seven people now contained
20 fresh rounds.
It remains the most ba±ing aspect of
this long surreal night: Dalton, who had
just slaughtered six people, the subject of a
county-wide manhunt, simply resumed pick-
ing up Uber fares, once again shuttling peo-
ple back and forth from bars in downtown
Kalamazoo for a few dollars each, just as he
might have on any other night. Only on this
night, he was driving around with a loaded
murder weapon hidden in his coat.
The police, meanwhile, were still struggling
to make sense of what was happening. They
established an emergency operations center at
the Kalamazoo Valley Community College, and
the key figures arranged to meet there at 1 a.m.
(Chief Hadley had been sleeping on his couch
when his 9-year-old daughter walked in and
told him, “Daddy, your phone’s going o≠ a lot.”)
Someone was going around Kalamazoo shoot-
ing people—young, old, male, female, white,
black—seemingly at random. And they had no
way of knowing whether, when, or where the
killer might strike again.
What no one could have imagined was that
neither, it seemed, did Jason Dalton.
• • •
D U R I N G H I S F I R S T couple of days in police
custody, Jason Dalton gave various accounts of
that day, and while some of what he told them
matched known facts, just as often his details
and chronology would be deeply muddled. But
over time, a picture of why Dalton believes he
did what he did builds. It was as though he
knew he had murdered people, but he could
do no more than watch, unable to intervene
in his own actions. Or, as ba±ingly relayed by
the police: “Dalton told us that he is not a killer
and he knows he has killed.”
It all seems to have started while Dalton
was at the dog park, early in the afternoon. His
Uber app beeped in a way that made him feel
he was being urgently summoned, so he ran
to his car and drove as fast as he could to the
college campus, where the girl refused to get
in his car because of the dog. Then he picked
up Matt Mellen, and he described with chilling
accuracy how crazily he drove, and Mellen’s
panic. Afterward, Dalton hurried home as fast
as he could and prepared his guns: “He advised
it was scary. He stated it was like he wasn’t even
himself, like it was an altered reality.” He said
that it was the Uber app that made him get his
SEPTEMBER 2016 GQ.COM 233
THE UBER KILLER CONTINUED
gun, and made him put on the bulletproof vest.
All he would say to explain why he shot Tiana
Carruthers was that “it just had a hold of him.”
Parts of what Dalton was claiming did have a
kind of logic or real-world context. For instance,
all that stu≠ about the Eastern Star, which is
both the symbol and name of a branch of the
Masons: Dalton told the police “his grand-
mother was in the Eastern Star and his grand-
father was in the Masons”; this turned out to
be true. What’s more, Dalton’s mother would
later tell the police that he’d asked her about
the Masons during an unusual phone call weeks
before the shooting. Dalton’s wife, meanwhile,
told police that he would discuss the Masons
with her. Clearly, somehow or other, this had
been percolating in Dalton’s mind.
Similarly, one theme in Dalton’s police
interviews was the intermittent problems he
had with his Uber app. Even though Dalton
himself never seemed to connect these with
his improbable story of the app taking over his
body, the overlaps seem evident. For instance,
many of the visual cues he described sounded
like standard app functions that he’d simply
misinterpreted. And some of his movements
that night—returning to the Cracker Barrel,
with Seelye Kia along the way—appear to have
resulted from a compulsion to retrace his steps
from the botched fare an hour earlier.
None of this, of course, means that he truly
was possessed by his Uber app. But it may
mean this much: As he sat there talking to the
police—lost within whatever vortices of unre-
ality were swirling around inside his head—
Jason Dalton was trying as best he could to
explain what had happened to him that night.
• • •
A N D S O T H E U B E R D R I V E R carried on
Uber driving. At 11:30 p.m., Jason Dalton
accepted a ride request from a 19-year-old stu-
dent named Nick. Nick couldn’t find the car,
so he called Dalton, who said he’d been there
and maybe Nick hadn’t sent him the right
location. Then, at 11:58, Nick was notified that
his ride was canceled, with a $5 fee. Annoyed,
Nick called again.
“Oh, report it to Uber,” said Dalton. “Okay.
’Bye.”
At 12:04, Dalton successfully picked up
three friends who wanted to be taken to one
of the dorms at Western Michigan University.
They were surprised that Dalton didn’t seem
to know where he was going—they had to
direct him—and they didn’t think he was very
friendly. But he got them there.
Meanwhile, Derek, a law student from
Indianapolis, was finishing his night at Bell’s
Eccentric Café. He’d traveled up earlier in
the day with his wife and in-laws to see his
wife’s stepbrother’s jam band. It was after
midnight, but it was only a few blocks back
to their hotel. They would have walked, but
one of the hostesses told them something that
made them reconsider: There was an active
shooter on the loose. They weren’t that wor-
ried, but they figured they might as well be
prudent and order an Uber. Seemed safest.
Derek used his phone, and their ride came
up: Jason, Chevy Equinox. Shortly afterward,
the driver called. He said he was five minutes
away and added that, by the way, he wasn’t
in a Chevy Equinox—they should look out for
a black HHR instead. A few minutes later, at
12:12 a.m., Dalton pulled up.
234 GQ.COM SEPTEMBER 2016
Derek got in the front, next to Dalton. His
father-in-law was behind him, his wife in the
middle, and his father-in-law’s wife, Sheri, was
behind Dalton. Before the journey started,
Sheri told her husband, “Hey, don’t say any-
thing.” Because she thought he might. And, of
course, he did.
“You know there’s a shooter situation going
on?” he told Dalton.
Yes, Dalton replied, he knew that. To Derek
it seemed a bit awkward, this whole exchange,
so trying to make light of it, he chipped in:
“You’re not the shooter, are you?”
“No,” Dalton said.
That answer, so deadpan and curt, only
added to the awkwardness, so Derek doubled
down.
“Are you sure?”
“No, I’m just tired,” Dalton replied. He said
he’d been driving for seven hours.
After that, they chatted normally: the slightly
drunken reveler from out of town and, next to
him, a newborn serial killer with a loaded pistol
in the pocket nearest Derek, inches away.
“I always make conversation with Uber
drivers,” said Derek, “because, I don’t know, it’s
just awkward when it’s quiet.” And there was
nothing to raise their suspicions. “He drove
very carefully.”
They were dropped o≠ at 12:15, though once
again either Dalton or his Uber app messed
up, because their receipt would show that they
continued to be charged as he continued, his
car now empty, down Portage Street. “There’s
not really much funny about this,” said Derek,
“but…the guy over-charged us.”
• • •
F I V E D A Y S A F T E R the shootings, Carole
Dalton would file for divorce from her hus-
band of 20 years. Not as a reflection of any-
thing at all prior to February 20, 2016, lawyer
Paul Vlachos insisted, but in response to what
had happened, and to life moving forward, and
to protecting herself and her children. Vlachos
also said that while Dalton’s parents were
declining to see their son, and had gone back
to Florida, Carole had visited him twice in jail.
“The second time she went in she said, ‘As
you know, we’re getting a divorce…,’ ” he said.
“They didn’t talk about the case.”
• • •
M A R C D U N T O N W A S O U T with two friends
at the Central City Tap House when they
decided to move on to Up And Under, more
of a roughneck spot. The trip was only a few
blocks, but it was cold out, so they called an
Uber. They were picked up by Dalton at 12:26.
They’d heard what had been going on in
Kalamazoo that night and had taken in the
specifics of the police warning. They realized
that Dalton and his car fit the description. Still,
it’s a common car. And, anyway, Dalton was
an Uber driver. Surely someone on a shooting
spree wasn’t going around picking up fares.
Nevertheless, during the ride, Dunton did
ask Dalton: “You’re not the guy going around
killing people, are you?”
“Wow,” they remembered Dalton answer-
ing. “That is crazy. No way—I’m not that guy.”
Dalton remembered them, too. Later, he
would tell the police that he felt like his pas-
sengers were mocking him; in his mind, he
said, he heard one of them say, “Does he have a
gun?” and “Are you gonna shoot me?”
But he didn’t shoot them. He just drove
them to their destination and let them out.
• • •
D U R I N G J A S O N D A L T O N ’ S first police
interview, before he’d begun to try to explain
anything, he asked if he could call his wife. But
as soon as she came on the phone, he ended the
call. He said he just wanted to hear her voice.
Later he explained that he wasn’t sure what he
had or hadn’t done, and he was afraid he might
have killed his family.
For the most part during the interviews
that night, Dalton appeared a≠ectless, but
there is one moment, faithfully recorded in
the police report, that is eerie and sad in a
di≠erent way. In between sessions with di≠er-
ent o∞cers, during a short interlude when
Dalton had been left alone but was still being
filmed, he could be heard speaking aloud to
himself. The words the police believed they
heard him say in the empty room:
“Sorry to you, my love.”
• • •
S E R G E A N T J A M E S H A R R I S O N didn’t
normally work in the city, but he’d been
called into town to investigate a report of a
shooting—another incident entirely, nothing
to do with Dalton. And as it turned out, not
even a real one. Prank call. Happens. But like
everyone else working in law enforcement
in Kalamazoo that night, he was now on the
lookout. Harrison was idling at the stoplight
on the corner of Main and Michigan when he
happened to turn and spotted something over
his right shoulder: a black Chevy HHR about
to pull out of the Up And Under parking lot.
In a bar a few blocks away, Mallory Lemieux,
a student at Western Michigan, was enjoying
a mother-daughter night out with several
other friends: seven girls, seven mothers.
Lemieux noticed her father had been calling
and texting since the previous bar, so she went
to the bathroom to find out what was up. A
shooter on the loose, seven people believed
dead. Her father told her what was right now
being talked about on the news: a Chevy HHR
driven by an older male. The moms and
daughters decided to just hit one more spot,
the Wild Bull, then call it a night. Her dad kept
phoning, increasingly worried, and by now
the other women were getting calls and texts
too, so she summoned a cab.
At 12:33 a.m., Lemieux’s Uber request was
accepted by the nearest driver, and his infor-
mation came up on her phone:
Jason. Chevy Equinox.
When Lemieux saw the word “Chevy,” and
Jason’s picture, she panicked. (She did notice
that the Uber app was telling her, wrongly,
that the car on its way was a Chevy Equinox,
not an HHR, but as far as she was concerned
Chevy-anything was too close.) She canceled
the ride and tried to rebook a di≠erent driver.
At 12:34, her new request was accepted.
Jason. Chevy Equinox.
She canceled again. On her Uber app, she
could see the car icon move right past where
she and her group were waiting. Meanwhile,
Sergeant Harrison trailed Dalton as he cir-
cled the Wild Bull. Harrison had no idea that
Dalton was an Uber driver; there was every
reason to worry that this person might be
going from one Kalamazoo nightspot to
another, scoping out new victims.
THE UBER KILLER CONTINUED
“I’m like, ‘Oh shit,’ ” Harrison would later
tell his colleagues, “because there’s 30 or 40
[people] standing outside the Wild Bull.”
But instead Dalton headed north, then took
a right turn down Ransom Street, into the qui-
eter industrial and business district northeast
of downtown. He was listening to the radio:
Open House Party on 103.3 FM. There were
no signs that he noticed Sergeant Harrison
behind him, or the second car of Sergeant Scott
Miller, who had just joined the pursuit.
At 12:38, Mallory Lemieux tried Uber one
more time.
Jason. Chevy Equinox.
This time, though, she noticed something
odd: The car icon was not moving toward her
on the map. In fact it had stopped moving
entirely. No matter. He was an older man in a
Chevy. She canceled a final time.
• • •
I N T H E D A Y S after his arrest, Jason Dalton’s
court-appointed lawyer would apply on his
behalf for a competency test—not (yet) to con-
sider his mental state when these acts were
committed, but merely to judge whether he
had the mental capacity to understand legal
proceedings. Dalton told the psychologist who
interviewed him about the app, how it had
taken over his body and controlled his actions.
Asked whether this was possible or whether his
mind could have been playing tricks on him,
Dalton sounded like someone who was slowly
beginning to wake up: “That’s what I’ve been
trying to work through.… I guess that’s the
heavy part. I believed at the time I was experi-
encing something. I’m not sure what that is. In
the cell, it’s heavy thinking about if I was imag-
ining those things or if they were real.”
The psychologist found Dalton competent
to stand trial.
• • •
J U S T A F T E R 12:37 a.m., a few hundred yards
away from where Mallory Lemieux was about
to cancel her ride for the third and final time,
Sergeant Harrison flipped on his lights to make
what police call a felony stop. Dalton pulled
over almost immediately. The two police cars
pulled in behind Dalton and, after a pregnant
minute, ordered the driver to put his hands out
of the window. Dalton complied. At 12:38 a.m.,
Harrison—gun drawn, covered by Sergeant
Miller, his gun also drawn—slowly edged toward
Dalton’s car, then grabbed Dalton’s wrists.
“Do you have anything on you?” Miller
asked, but Dalton just stared blankly ahead.
Patting him down, Harrison found the pis-
tol—“Gun!” he announced—and placed it
on the roof of Dalton’s car. Then Dalton was
handcu≠ed and Harrison led him to the police
car. As Harrison searched Dalton some more,
one of his colleagues walked by and gave
Harrison a fist bump.
The call went out over the police radio: “One
detained. Firearm on person.”
After Dalton was put in a car and driven
away, the o∞cers who remained at the scene
seemed surprised, and maybe disappointed,
that such a violent and terrible situation could
have ended so quietly. Snatches of their con-
versations could be heard on the police-car
audio, the o∞cers still adrenalized as they
talked through what had happened:
“He had a bulletproof vest on. I can’t believe
we didn’t have a fucking gun battle out here.”
“Oh man. Could you get a better fucking
backdrop? Brick building…brick building…
metal building…no residential.”
“Dude, I’m gonna tell you right now, I really
wanted to… [mimes firing his gun several
times] I was like, ‘You fucking piece of shit.’ ”
“When he stopped here, I was like: ‘Game
on.’ ”
“We would’ve fucking obliterated his ass.”
“He didn’t say a single thing when we pulled
him over. I can’t believe he didn’t go out in a
blaze of glory.”
They also discussed whether more bodies
would be found. Somebody mentioned that
o∞cers were checking all the other parking
lots along Stadium Drive.
“He’s got to have killed his wife and every-
thing,” said one.
“I would think so,” came the reply.
As the news came through that his wife
had been successfully contacted—“She’s a
14”; Kalamazoo police code confirming she’s
okay—they sounded perplexed. Cops at the
Seelye scene were also surprised. Clearly this
was not how they had anticipated the night
would end:
“He didn’t fight us? I am surprised that he
didn’t want to go at it—figured that would be
suicide by cop.”
“Wow. What a fucking puss.”
• • •
I N T H E M O N T H S S I N C E his arrest, there
has been little sign that Jason Dalton might
o≠er a clearer account of his motives. At a
pre-trial hearing in late May, Dalton inter-
rupted the testimony of Tiana Carruthers—
who was sitting in the witness box a few
yards from him and who was beginning to
describe how he shot her—with a seemingly
nonsensical outburst:
“No,” Dalton cried out, “they gave bags,
these old people, they have these old black
bags, that are called—they’re black, they’re
black bags that people drive around and peo-
ple look at them. It gets real bad, it’s time peo-
ple look and that’s when they tell the people it’s
time to get to temple.”
He then appeared to try to break free of
his restraints, repeatedly shouting “Take!” at
Carruthers, who had burst into terrified tears,
and jabbing his right forefinger at her in a way
that seemed to resemble someone firing a gun.
After that, he had to be dragged from the
courtroom, his body deadweight, legs trailing
on the floor. For the rest of the hearing, once it
reconvened, he appeared by video link, flanked
on either side by a law-enforcement o∞cial,
each with a hand on one of his shoulders.
A few weeks later, a new, peculiar detail
emerged—if true, an almost clichéd serial-killer
precursor. Someone told the police that Dalton
had once talked of “choking and killing” the
family cat, then leaving it on the marital bed.
Asked about this, his wife confirmed that six or
seven years ago she had found their cat, Leo,
dead, lying where it usually slept on their bed.
She assumed it had died of natural causes.
In early June, it was confirmed that Dalton
would be o≠ering an insanity defense, though
the bar for proving that Dalton was legally
insane when he committed these crimes, given
all the methodical acts that punctuated the
day, might be a high one.
At trial, he can be convicted without
us ever knowing why he did what he did.
“Legally, I don’t have to prove motive,” said the
Kalamazoo prosecutor, Je≠ Getting. “I have to
prove he did it, I have to prove premeditation,
deliberation. Legally, that’s what’s important.
The reality is, there’s a want to explain it, but
that’s not something I have to prove in court.
We’ll continue to look for explanations, but I’m
not sure we’ll ever get a good enough one.”
• • •
J A S O N D A L T O N later tried to explain why
he had allowed himself to be arrested without
a fight. He said that he did reach to his right
side for his gun when he was pulled over, but
then, once again, something happened with his
phone. In one police interview, he said that it
beeped. In another, he said that his app turned
from black to red. At that moment, he said, “he
felt like he was no longer being guided.” As the
report summarized, “Dalton said that was the
reason he didn’t shoot the officer.”
• • •
E V E R Y O N E S T I L L wants a reason. Of course
we do. A reason helps us to know how to feel,
helps us know where to put an experience like
this. A reason reassures us that it can’t happen
again. Not easily, anyway. Not often.
And maybe that kind of reason will come.
Maybe more information will surface—
medical, situational, ideological, biograph-
ical—that will help us understand. Experts
of various kinds will be invited to explain or
name Dalton’s behavior in ways he cannot.
When we can’t explain something, we often
pretend by finding clever words to describe
it. Maybe we’ll even convince ourselves that
we’ve learned what we needed to so that
we can file away the horrific deeds of Jason
Dalton, and move on.
That’s what we want. That’s what we
demand. But when it comes to reason and
motive, cause and e≠ect, the eternal need for
sense and order to triumph over chaos and
entropy, we often expect too much. Maybe,
more often than we can bear, the one thing we
don’t want to accept is the one thing we need
to: Sometimes the world fractures. It just does.
For now, this is what we do know. On each
of the first 16,678 days of his life, Jason Dalton
killed no one. The next day, he killed six people.
There’s one further form of testimony that
might provide some insight about what was
going on in his mind: a handwritten polygraph
background information form he completed on
his second day in custody. Yet again, the most
revealing clue is the absence of clues. What
shocks the most is Dalton’s respectful compli-
ance, the way his banal, diligent attempts at
honesty sit there on the page, in contrast to the
barbarity that will define him forever:
Physical Condition Now: “Feel okay”
Hospital (injury, fracture, surgery, etc.): “2000–
2009 stitches R Hand”
Person Most Respected: “Father”
Person Least Respected: “None”
Best Thing: “Got a job at Michigan Appraisal”
Worst Thing: “This + the consciousness of what
has happened”
Self Concept: “Okay.”
How Honest: “1–10 Rating I Rate Myself a 9.”
Ever Arrested: [Dalton has ticked the “Y” box]
What For: “Just this”
chris heath is a gq correspondent.
SEPTEMBER 2016 GQ.COM 235
 CA M NEWTON
C O N T I N U E D F R O M PAG E 1 8 8
He came into the league under the shadow
of real prejudice. He told the football writer
Peter King he wanted to be considered an
“entertainer and icon” in addition to a foot-
ball player, and America reacted like that isn’t
exactly what we want our quarterbacks to be.
We acted like he’d said he wanted to join Mobb
Deep and play QB in his spare time.
Then the owner of the Panthers, Jerry
Richardson, went on Charlie Rose and bragged
about telling Newton that he couldn’t get any
tattoos or piercings as a condition of being
drafted by the team. That he couldn’t so much
as grow his hair out. Even Charlie Rose was
taken aback. He was incredulous. “I just
sound reasonable to me,” a then 75-year-old
Richardson said. (Cam denies this part of the
conversation between him and Richardson
ever took place—“He never said that,” Cam
says. Control the narrative. Obviate distrac-
tion. Discipline. But Richardson’s account
survives on YouTube; look it up, if you want to
break something.)
As a rookie, Cam wears No. 1 because his
teammate and future backup, Jimmy Clausen,
already has Cam’s old number, No. 2, and
won’t give it up. He sulks after losses; his own
coach, Ron Rivera, calls him “Mr. Mopeyhead.”
A legit charge, maybe: The Panthers were
losing constantly then. Cam on the sidelines
with a towel over his head. But that wasn’t the
reason they were losing, Cam says now. They
were losing because their team wasn’t good.
“You had certain guys that didn’t know how to
win that would make bonehead mistakes.” But
people wanted to blame the towel, or what-
ever Cam had on that day. “If you’re losing, it’s
like, Oh, my God, they’re losing because he’s
wearing, you know, white shoes! Everybody
else is wearing orange!”
Then the Panthers started winning—a lot—
and all of a sudden maybe leadership wasn’t
actually Cam Newton’s problem. “Only thing
changed was that our record was pretty bad.”
Then it was pretty good. It’s like whatever was
essentially flawed in Cam was…not an essential
flaw at all. It was a win-loss record. The more
his team won, the more maybe Cam was a real
leader after all. Playo≠s
≠ three seasons in a row,
Super Bowl last year. Cam showing up on your
TV every Sunday like Tony Soprano garroting
new victims. And meanwhile ostensible sports
fans found new things to get upset about.
He smiled on the field and on the sidelines.
He danced after touchdowns. “The chest pu≠s. ≠
The pelvic thrusts. The arrogant struts,” hyper-
ventilated a woman named Rosemary Plorin
(who, to be fair, later apologized), again in a
letter to The Charlotte Observer, a wonderful
newspaper that’s kept its lights on during this
di∞cult time for newspapers thanks in part
to reactionary complaints about Cam Newton.
236 GQ.COM SEPTEMBER 2016
Reactionary—or, as Cam’s longtime backup
quarterback Derek Anderson has put it, “flat-
out racist.” An honest question: Can you
name a contemporary athlete who has been
subjected to more veiled and sometimes out-
right racism than Cam Newton? Is this even
a controversial opinion, to think that Cam
lives in a world of coded and not-so-coded
critiques that basically boil down to resent-
ment about the existence of such a sublime
black quarterback?
• • •
A C C O R D I N G T O Cam Newton, yes, actu-
ally. It is. “I don’t think of it like that,” he says.
Shaking his head softly.
I want to be clear about a few things here.
We’d met maybe 25 minutes prior—one of
those situations where we’re both trying to
talk about a lot of things in a relatively short
amount of time. It’s amazing, the scale and
duration of what Cam’s endured from the
football public; it’s why I wanted to ask him
about it. But faced with a national-magazine
writer and a switched-on tape recorder, you
too might say something other than what you
really thought, if that thought seemed like a
dangerous, potentially uncontrollable thing
to share with a stranger. With a person whose
motivations you couldn’t be sure of. Maybe
today he woke up and felt like being just a
quarterback, not a black quarterback. Maybe
he feels fatigue at having to have this conver-
sation with any random reporter who thinks
he’s entitled to his thoughts on this subject.
Maybe losing the Super Bowl, and hearing
all the criticism of Cam Newton that poured
out afterward, left him in a place where he
just wanted to retreat, at least in front of a
reporter, and for once in his life just not be
responsible for explaining away the cruel
and insinuating things that other people say
about him. Maybe he just didn’t feel like par-
ticipating in the whole economy of outrage
that surrounds him today.
Actually, I know he didn’t feel like it, because
this is how the rest of this conversation goes:
Your now former teammate Josh Norman
said last year, “I’m going to be precise when I
say it: It’s hate.”
“His response may be somebody else’s
response, but that’s not how I feel.”
Do you feel like football fans are racist
toward you?
“It’s not racism. Everybody’s entitled to
their own opinion.”
So if it’s not that, what is it, do you think?
“I’ll let you be the judge. I don’t look at it
like that. I look at it like some people have cer-
tain beliefs, and I have my own belief, and we
can agree to disagree on certain things. But
this is what makes sports so amazing, that we
can start a discussion around a table, in the
newspaper, in the magazines, that will get peo-
ple’s attention. And that’s what sports does.”
In January, right before the Super Bowl,
you said: “I’m an African-American quarter-
back that may scare a lot of people because
they haven’t seen nothing that they can com-
pare me to.”
“I don’t want this to be about race, because
it’s not. It’s not. Like, we’re beyond that. As a
nation.”
You really think so?
“Yeah. I mean, you bring it to people’s atten-
tion. But after that, that’s it.”
N O T S A Y I N G C A M doesn’t mean what he
says here. I couldn’t begin to know that. But
I do know that he and his father, Cecil, have
said and indicated otherwise as recently as
four months ago. In April, after the Super
Bowl, Cam gave an interview to Ebony and got
to talking about the hoodie he’d worn during
his Super Bowl press conference. He asked
them if they would consider taking his pho-
tograph wearing a hoodie again. According
to the magazine, Newton’s father explained
to them why: “The hoodie can represent a lot
of things as it pertains to a young Black man.
Trayvon Martin. Black Lives Matter. Even as
athletics can function as a leverage piece for
African-American expression, it still points to
the inequities that go on.”
My guess, based on the few public quotes
from Cam Newton and his dad on this sub-
ject, is that what Cecil told Ebony is more or
less how Cam actually feels. But now, when I
bring up this exchange in the magazine, this is
what he says: “For what it’s worth, I really wear
hoodies. Like, that’s a fact.”
Is that why you wanted to wear it for the
photo shoot, though?
“I know why I do certain things, and it’s
because how it makes me feel. I’m comfort-
able in a lot of things that I wear, and wearing
a hoodie happens to be one of those things.”
Look—even by the standards of professional
sports, the NFL is by far our most buttoned-
down, militaristic, conservative, tyrannical,
anti-individual league. Maybe it’s because it’s
been so lucrative for so long. Maybe because
it’s always been a capital-t, capital-gg Team
Game that has allowed for precious few flashes
of individuality. The NBA is a collection of per-
sonalities, of aggressively civic-minded guys
like LeBron James, Dwyane Wade, Chris Paul,
and Carmelo Anthony, who began this year’s
ESPYs broadcast with an urgent re-assertion
of the value of black life. It’s a league of play-
ers who share opinions when they have them,
even when those opinions are controversial,
or fuck with the league’s money. Not the NFL.
It prefers its stars to be anonymous pitchmen,
or at worst, big and dumb and cuddly. There’s
a rule about taking o≠ ≠ your helmet on the field
and actually showing your face. There’s a rule
about excessive celebration. The league is so
massively popular in part because it is scru-
pulous about never betraying a political opin-
ion beyond an unwavering faith in American
greatness. It’s a sport for men like Cam’s
now retired Super Bowl 50 opponent Peyton
Manning, who celebrated his last moments on
a professional football field by seeking out the
pizza CEO Papa John in the midst of a crowd
and kissing the man’s flushed bronze cheek
before kissing his own wife. A real-life deleted
scene from Talladega Nights.
Meanwhile, Cam Newton’s most famous
on-field gesture last year was the dab, a dance
that comes from whatever the spiritual oppo-
site of corporate America is. He hangs out with
Future and Jeezy on the sidelines of Panthers
games. He’s been spotted at the Atlanta strip
club Follies. Is an outsize personality in a game
that does its best to be devoid of human per-
sonality at all. And he knows this, the expec-
tations the league has of him, the way they
sometimes run counter to who he is as a per-
son and as a man. “That’s the deal. Like, I knew
this coming into the league. It’s a responsibil-
ity that I have that’s unbeknownst to anybody
 CAM NEWTON CONTINUED
else. Or it’s like a pinnacle that you’re put on.
People expect certain things from you. Undue
things, and easy things. And that’s cool, you
know. And that’s what I do now.”
It’s arguably part of his job to look me in the
eye and say that a hoodie is just an article of
clothing. Which isn’t to say it’s not a choice. It
very much is. But you could understand why
he’d make it. Even if it’s dispiriting to hear. It’s
probably dispiriting to say, too. To channel the
most anodyne version of himself through con-
versations like the one below:
Do you have an opinion on Donald Trump?
“I don’t. I think he’s an unbelievable busi-
nessperson. That’s probably it. But outside of
my personal belief, that’s just, you know, my
personal belief.”
Did you vote for the North Carolina gover-
nor that enacted that bathroom law?
“Um…that’s too personal. You know, I gain
nothing by answering it.”
I think the bill is repellent. I’m not trying
to be coy.
“I love people too much to care about those
type of things.”
That’s exactly why it bothers me.
“I went to school to study sociology. You
know, and that’s something that really gets
my attention. I don’t look at things through
color lenses. I don’t look at things through
genetic images or whatever. Their sex. I just
love the di≠erent
≠ type of vibes people bring.
I try to alleviate any type of bad energy. But I
could care less. I love a person because of who
they are. And that’s who I am. So whatever you
are personally, I don’t care. You know, if you
a good person, you a good person. No matter
what anything, from religion to politically to,
you know, sex preferences—”
Wouldn’t that be a reason not to vote for the
North Carolina law?
“But that’s too personal. That’s when you
put the microscope to the person. But overall,
I don’t care. Man, in my circle, and especially
growing up in Atlanta, you see everything!”
• • •
T H A T P A R T I S T R U E ! Cam walks around
Atlanta like the city belongs to him, like
he belongs to the city. We barely make it into
the cigar shop before the other salesman,
a dapper guy with cu≠ ≠ links and thick-framed
glasses named Jonathan, cries out in recog-
nition, takes Cam aside, Cam getting more
and more excited.
He turns around: “This guy’s fiancée sold
me the pants!”
You know the ones. Zebra-print Versace. Part
of a long series of out-there, occasionally dubi-
ous fashion choices for Cam, who more than
once wore a $200 foxtail—the feathery tail of
a dead fox—clipped to his trousers during a
press conference. Another way he can’t help
but assert personality in his colorless league.
After he wore the Versace pants on Super Bowl
Sunday, they sold out almost immediately. Cam
was even told they made more. “I heard that’s
unheard of,” Cam says proudly.
• • •
H E ’ S F A S C I N A T E D with other successful
people. “Because I love people! I love them,
man. Pretty much can talk to anybody.
And that’s kind of like my gift and curse.
Sometimes I talk too much. But needless to
say, it’s fun. I’m all about learning.” Fascinated
with those who came before him. “I read The
Wall Street Journal constantly. I read, you
know, certain magazines, just to try to get hip
to certain people’s vibes.” He says he’s been
watching ESPN’s O. J. Simpson documentary.
“That’s been unbelievable. Just compelling to
just see a person of his magnitude. And not
just him, because the show doesn’t just talk
about him. It talks about everything around
him, from the socio-economic problems that
we had to everything. And it’s just a day back
in the history, and to keep people hip to what
or where we came from.”
This spring he shot a TV show. All in with
Cam Newton, for Nickelodeon. A big deal—
no other active quarterback has his own
television half hour. Cam grew up watching
the network, “from Nick at Nite to All That
to SpongeBob to Rugrats, everything.” Then
they gave him his own show, about help-
ing kids accomplish their dreams. He loves
kids. “Not necessarily saying that the older
generation isn’t important. I just feel like
my impact and my heart tends to, you know,
go the younger route.” Every episode, Cam
helping some young boy or girl realize some
weird ambition, like making a YouTube show
about snake handling. Cam out in the desert
with this kid, in a full rubber bodysuit so he
doesn’t get bitten. Cam looking at the camera
in terror: “You never know when a snake is
just gonna pop outt of the bushes!”
What an opportunity, for him and for the
children. He believes people have di≠erent
≠ tal-
ents in this world, see? That’s the idea behind
the show. “When you look at comic books, and
when you look at di≠erent
≠ superheroes, they
all possess something di≠erent.
≠ Spider-Man
wasn’t like Superman. Superman wasn’t like
Wonder Woman. Wonder Woman wasn’t like
Aquaman. Aquaman wasn’t like the Hulk.
They all brought something di≠erent.”
≠ Don’t
be like Cam, was the idea. Be like yourself.
Be your own Aquaman.
• • •
H E S A Y S T H A T Chosen’s helped him grow
up, become a better man. Before, the goal
“was always to live comfortably and do the
things that you want to do with whoever you
want to do it with. Now it’s like, you have a
seed on this earth that you see all your sim-
ilarities in, from the nose, the ears, the face,
the smile. You know, the body composition,
and everything just makes you feel obligated
to make his life as easy as possible.”
What about the parents who won’t let their
kids play football anymore? Would you let
Chosen play?
“Of course. Why wouldn’t they let them play
football?”
I’m incredulous that he’s so incredulous.
Concussions. Brain damage.
“But they don’t talk about the joy it brings!
Super Bowl Sunday trumps every TV rating
known to man.”
But that’s the point. I get to sit on my couch
and watch you risk physical harm from Von
Miller for my own entertainment. It’s great for
me. But is it great for you?
“Oh, of course!” I believe that he really
believes this. I believe that he loves what he
does, even when it doesn’t love him back.
“There’s no doubt in my mind: Yes.”
zach baron is gq’s sta≠
a≠ writer.
T H E W IL IE S T C OYOT E
C O N T I N U E D F R O M PAG E 1 7 8
Elden was sentenced shortly after Sep-
tember 11—an event that made his decision
to work for the government feel righteous. In
exchange for his help, the judge gave Elden
three years’ probation. He would eventu-
ally report to agents at the new Department
of Homeland Security. Elden would be an
information gatherer: Watch this guy or that
warehouse. Get close to so-and-so. He says he
handed the authorities puzzle pieces, rarely
getting a glimpse of the bigger picture, but he
preferred it that way. Eventually his smuggling
contacts dried up. Still, he kept his eyes open.
He says the last time the government con-
tacted him for a tip was in 2008.
Tim got three years of probation, too.
He never wants to slip up again. “Elden’s the
tough guy; I’m the guy that hits the floorboards,”
Tim jokes. These days Tim performs in a
band; he picks up carpentry jobs only when
he runs completely out of money, the slacker
to Elden’s workaholic.
Early that evening, I head with Tim and
Elden over the border into Mexico to take a
road trip down memory lane. Before leav-
ing his house in Riverside this morning,
Elden had tucked an axe in the back of my
Jeep Cherokee (“You never know when
you might need to chop some firewood,” he
explained dubiously) and then worked the
roof lining loose on the driver’s side and
slipped several thousand dollars in there.
(He brought along his bird book and binocu-
lars and had debated whether to pack some
Red Cross T-shirts for us.)
As we near the border, Tim is anxious
because he doesn’t have a passport. Elden
keeps telling him everything is going to be
fine, but Elden, who’s got an almost socio-
pathic sense of security, only makes Tim more
nervous. “You always say that, ‘Don’t worry,’
and then something bad happens,” Tim
complains to Elden as we crawl toward the
border checkpoint.
We roll through without incident and are
soon strolling the streets of Tijuana. Tim and
I watch as Elden pads ahead of us, past the
hawkers and the call girls, the police cars with
their roving lights. So much has changed, but
has it? Fences and walls and cameras and
patrols. But Elden is only a calmer version
of the man he once was—a guy who always
figured that he’d been born in the wrong cen-
tury, that the 1800s would’ve suited him. Still
the man who needed a wilderness to traverse.
As he ambles down the neon-lit street, he looks
like an old lion in a jungle, Elden does, an out-
back Buddha, a man on the loose.
kathy dobie’s last article for gq, “The
Curious Case of the Homesick Bank Robber,”
appeared in the January 2016 issue.
SEPTEMBER 2016 GQ.COM 237
 GUN S
C O N T I N U E D F R O M PAG E 1 9 7
actual car sickness. I ask her how she can pos-
sibly read anything moving this fast.
“I’m looking for a W,” she says, picking up
a magnifying glass and leaning in toward the
upper left of the screen. She’s hunting for the
first letter of a 15-character code atop the
defunct dealer’s record books. “Sometimes
they’ll just put the numbers, they won’t put
the alphabet.” Now she’s squinting, one eye
closed, the machine whirring, the images
zooming. “We had 8’s. We’re still in the 9’s. See,
now it went on to a di≠erent
≠ gun again…. But
if we get past—wait!”
Abruptly, she hits the “stop” button. “See,
here’s W’s.”
• • •
Information Is Power
S I X T Y - F I V E P E R C E N T of the time, workers
at the tracing center are able to successfully
trace a gun used in a crime back to the original
purchaser. A routine trace takes about a week,
but they can turn an “urgent” around in 24
hours. The San Bernardino case was an urgent.
The Boston Marathon bomber case was an
urgent. Gabby Gi≠ords: ≠ urgent. Charleston.
Aurora. Fort Hood. Columbine. Washington
Navy Yard. Sikh temple. Just figure every crime
you ever watched endless horrifying footage of
on TV involved somebody here in Martinsburg
searching through a rat’s nest of records and
then experiencing a moment of jubilance upon
seeing that, yes, this is it, here is the 4473 that
belongs to that lunatic. (Or his mother. Or his
uncle. Or the pawnshop dealer who sold it to
someone else. Tracing the gun beyond the ini-
tial point of purchase is on the cops.)
This is the maddening, ine∞cient way gun
tracing works, and there is no e≠ort ≠ afoot to
make it work any better. For all the talking we
do about imposing new limits on assault weap-
ons, or stronger background checks, nobody
talks about fixing the way we keep track—or
don’t keep track—of where all the guns are.
On just one of the days I visited the tracing
center, there were 5,000 trace requests in the
hopper awaiting attention. There would be
about a thousand more the next day.
In 2013, recognizing how important trac-
ing is for solving crimes, and for providing
intelligence regarding patterns of illegal gun
tra∞cking, President Obama asked for more of
it: He signed a memorandum demanding that
all firearms recovered in the course of criminal
investigations be traced.
But Congress didn’t give Charlie any funds,
or manpower, to accommodate an influx. In
fact, his budget has been flat since 2005. What
Charlie got from Congress is the same thing
he always gets: scrutiny. “If a stick drops in
the road, we’re getting some pressure,” he
tells me. The idea—which is forcefully pushed
238 GQ.COM SEPTEMBER 2016
by the gun lobby and implanted in the heads
of lawmakers at the behest of the NRA—is to
make sure Charlie is not using his power to
access America’s 4473s to secretly create a
searchable database.
There is no other place in America where
technological advances are against the law.
Unless you count the Amish. Even if a gun
store that has gone out of business hands over
records that it had kept on computer files,
Charlie can’t use them. He has to have the files
printed out, and then the ladies take pictures
of them and store them that way. Anything that
allows people to search by name is verboten.
To be clear: Charlie doesn’t want names.
“You got a dead guy in Chicago, right? So what
name did you want me to look for?” he points
out. “I ain’t got a damn clue! Nobody else
does, either. I don’t need to be able to search
by the name. If I knew the name, I wouldn’t
have to trace the gun.”
Still, you never know. The NRA, which, in
the words of its CEO, Wayne LaPierre, regards
the ATF as “jackbooted government thugs,”
demands that Congress keep an eye on things.
“Hitler and Stalin, like every dictator who
perpetrated genocide during the 20th century,
assiduously confiscated guns before starting
the genocide,” wrote gun-rights activist Dave
Kopel in a recent NRA publication.
“Registration. Confiscation. Extinction.
Each step makes the next step much easier.”
None of which has anything to do with what
actually happens here. People here are trying
to help cops on the street nab bad guys. “We
are a factory producing investigative leads,”
says Charlie. That is the point of the place in
its entirety, despite anybody’s worry.
“They say, ‘They’ve centralized the records.
We’re comin’!’ ” Charlie says. “Checking all
di≠erent
≠ angles. ‘Are you keeping—you know,
how are you keeping information? Are you
collecting information you shouldn’t be? Are
you accessing information you shouldn’t have
access to? Has the computer world at the trac-
ing center gone too far? We might need to back
you o≠≠ a little bit.’
“You go, ‘Back us o≠ ? Back us o≠
o ?’”
• • •
How to Work the System
R E C E N T L Y , C H A R L I E had a heart attack.
“Yeah, it was pretty—yeah. They cut a hole in
my arm, jammed a catheter up there, blew out
the blockage. Then they sewed it back up. I
rolled the windows down, drove to North
Carolina, hung out on the beach the next day.”
He tells me he looked at the ocean, the
waves rolling, seagulls gulping. He sat there
and thought about his life, and what it would
be without cigarettes.
I ask him if he thinks the stress of being the
person in charge of keeping track of America’s
estimated 300 million guns—with the aid of
little more than a photocopier—had anything
to do with his heart giving out.
“I gotta go to the hospital on Friday for like
five hours for tests to make sure I’m not gonna
keel over dead soon,” he says.
We’re in his o∞ce again, and he’s in his
shirtsleeves and his tie is loosened. He’s
chewing gum madly. He’ll never smoke again.
“Sometimes you just kind of wonder if you
train-wrecked the thing, would you get more
money?” he says, referring to the lack of funds
and his frustration with this place. “ ‘Well,
yeah, we couldn’t solve this one!’ ‘Well, why
not?’ ‘Couldn’t find the microfilm. Just took
too long!’ Right?”
He glances out his window toward the park-
ing lot. It’s surrounded by a chain-link-and-
barbed-wire fence lined with a black screen so
no one can see in.
He tells me he has a wife he loves. “She’s
not the kind of wife you’re gonna expect.
She’s an arson-and-explosives expert. She’s
working on a serial arsonist tonight.” He’s got
four kids and two grandbabies he loves. He’s
painted portraits of all of them. “Oil paints,”
he says. “I read a book on it. How the mas-
ters, like, painted.” He’s looking somewhere
just over my head, like he’s imagining all of
this in the air. “What is the color that I used.
Okay, burnt sienna. You get that on the outline,
right?” He tells me about his guitar and learn-
ing flamenco music. “I got a book on it. But I
hit a plateau.” He tells me about the history
of the blues. “I got a book on it. You go, ‘Well,
I gotta dump the nylon string. I need, like, an
amp.” He tells me he blew his amp on “Gimme
Shelter” the other night.
He started with the ATF as an agent in
Detroit, infiltrating street gangs. That was his
hometown. The auto industry, robots, pro-
cess control—he loved that stu≠. He studied
computer science and industrial engineer-
ing in college, then joined the army full time
and became an intelligence o∞cer. “Which is,
you know, the movement of large quantities
of information, figuring out what’s worth a
damn.” Given his background, the ATF figured
he might excel at more than gang work. “They
said, ‘Hey, you might be a good fit for some-
thing that’s computer-heavy,’ which…which we
are in a certain sense here.”
Just without the computer.
He got to the National Tracing Center in
2005. He never expected to stay. It was a step-
ping stone to maybe a cushier deal maybe up
at headquarters in D.C.
But then he started to think about ways to
work with the antiquated system—and make
it more e∞cient. Would it even be possible?
“You mind if I do the whiteboard thing?” he
says, standing up. It’s covered in numbers,
arrows, circles, and dashes. “I don’t know what
my mojo was here,” he says, looking at it, and
then attacking it with the eraser. “I went to the
bookstore just looking for a way to organize
better and I just… Right?” He’s looking at his
tray of markers, trying to pick. “Like, ISO 9000
stu≠,
≠ right? And you just stumble across some-
thing, you look at it and go, ‘Well, that looks
like what I’m looking for.’ Six Sigma, you know
that kind of stu≠ ?’ ”
I have no idea what he’s talking about.
“I just found it at Barnes & Noble,” he says,
in a tone suggesting that this shit is basic.
He uses the blue marker. “I mean, I know
that the average person can type in 1,600 gun
descriptions per eight-hour day,” he says,
scrawling the numbers. “Why? Because I time-
and-motion studied them. And then—I don’t
know if you know anything about queuing
theory. Do you have one line with three cash
registers—or do you have three lines come
into one?” Arrows, circles. He’s moved on to
the black marker. “There’s a whole science of
mathematics behind queuing theory. So what
we did was, I sat around trying to figure out
what would be the best way to queue the traces
up and punch them through....
GUNS CONTINUED
“Let’s say yours is one hour, 60 minutes.
Yours is one minute, yours is one minute, and
yours is one minute, right? One minute, one
minute, one minute, one minute…one, two,
three minutes…”
In these moments, I realize that during his
tenure here at the tracing center, and faced
with the obstacle of no computerized search
technology, Charlie went ahead and turned
himself into the computer.
Soon he’s got the green marker going, and
next it’s purple. He sees it all on the white-
board and in the air, and soon he is spinning
and pointing. “…So now it’s 69, 72 minutes,
divide by 4…4 goes into that once…32, 80…
My turnaround time just became 18 minutes!
I just shu±ed you around in a di≠erent order.
Average turnaround time. Right?”
It doesn’t matter if I follow; he’s so happy
about all this I want to clap. For five years
Charlie took it upon himself to create a new
workflow system for the tracing center, break-
ing down each step in the tracing process
into equations, doing time-motion studies
for actions as minute as how long on aver-
age it takes the ladies to go from their desks
to the roll room. Every step was analyzed and
rethought, the numbers crunched.
And now? Despite no increase in budget, no
new technology, no new sta≠: “I’m doing twice
as many guns, twice as fast, and almost twice as
accurately as we did when I got here in 2005.”
He tosses the markers in the rack, sits down.
I can tell he wants a cigarette.
Charlie didn’t train-wreck anything. Charlie
did the opposite. And maybe there’s some
solace in that fact alone. If America has to have
this gargantuan arsenal of personal firearms,
and no registration system, no laws allowing
us to keep track of them like we do, say, cars, or
household appliances, or bags of lettuce, well,
at least we have Charlie. You can pass laws and
add amendments until you paralyze an entire
institution, but you can’t outlaw the natural
human urge to make life better.
“So we fire the Glocks through as fast as
they go into mainstream tracing, and we send
the gun made in the Czechoslovakian factory,
which is gonna take a genius an hour, send
Czechoslovakia over here…. That’s how you
start stripping time o≠ stu≠!”
• • •
“What’s in It for Charlie?”
W H A T ’ S I N I T F O R any of these people who
don’t ever seem to leave the National Tracing
Center? I meet one woman who’s 84 years old.
She unpacks boxes. She says she won’t leave
until they kick her out. Nobody here seems all
that put out by the microfilm reading, or the
staple removing, or even the box sorting. “I
love tracing,” people say.
Back in the cubicles, I sit with an ATF spe-
cialist named Daniel Urrutia. He’s a big guy,
shy, a blocky head and a thick accent. He’s
been here 18 years. Everybody I talk to has
been here years and years. Urrutia tells me
about a 96-year-old guy who got robbed and
beaten nearly to death in his own home; the
gun trace that Urrutia did on the stolen gun
is what broke the case and how they caught
the assailant. He tells me about an 8-year-old
girl who got killed, and a college girl who got
raped, and in both cases the gun trace Urrutia
did solved the crime. He tells these stories in
detail, explaining why he searched one place,
rather than another, and how critical these
choices were, and how he agonized over them,
and somewhere in the middle of the stories,
his eyes well up. At first I think he’s got aller-
gies or something—he is not a person you
imagine crying. “When I first started, I was the
lowest salary in the whole tracing center, as a
contractor,” he tells me. “Now I’m doing this.”
He points to a framed letter from the Floyd
County, Indiana, police, thanking him for the
valuable role he played in nabbing the monster
who beat up the 96-year-old man.
The longer I stick around the National
Tracing Center, the more emotion starts pour-
ing out.
“That’s how I look at this,” Hester explains.
“It’s an honor to do what I do. I mean, you have
the Gabby Gi≠ords case. That’s a classic exam-
ple. I had that one done within an hour, tied
right to the shooter. Problem solved. At that
point, the defense can’t say, ‘Well, it wasn’t his
gun.’ Really? His name’s on the form; he signed
it. Guess what? You’re done, topic over.
“I’ve had situations where the tracing’s been
done where the guy bought the gun, you know,
25 years ago and he’s still got the gun and he did
something stupid with it. I’ve had situations
where the person bought the gun two hours
before the crime. I had a lady who bought a gun
five minutes before the crime. She went home
and killed her kid, and then herself.
“There are some that will stick…. A lot of
them stick in my head and won’t go away.”
“I know I should move on,” Linda Mills
tells me, hours after she first started zooming
through microfilm looking for the Remington
shotgun, which she has not yet located. Sooner
or later you’re supposed to give up and start
a new case, but she’s not surrendering. “You
think, ‘What if it were my child, or what if it
was my parent, or what if it’s somebody that I
love whose life is involved?’ ”
“The day of the Newtown shooting,” Urrutia
says, “I was the whole day here. A day and a
half. When I sleep? I slept here.”
That’s the one I hear most about. Everyone I
meet eventually wants to tell me what that day
in 2012 was like.
“Newtown was traumatic,” Charlie tells me.
“People were bawling and tracing and bawling.
Everybody’s going, ‘Oh, my God, somebody’s
done what? It’s a kindergarten class? Who,
what, how many?’ There’s confusion. We start
to get a little bit of stu≠. Everybody’s jumping
around, waiting for anything they can get. We
gotta get this, you know, right? We gotta do
something, we gotta do something, we gotta
do something. C’mon, c’mon, let us, give us a
chance, right? Put us in. You know? Give us,
give us—give us a way to contribute. Let us do
our part. Because that’s, you know, that’s what
I get out of this whole thing.
“You go, ‘What do you get, Charlie?’ Right?
‘What’s in it for Charlie?’ That’s what I get.
“This place looks to you like a factory. Right?
It looks like a factory and a government cube
farm. And that’s what it is. But 1,200 traces a
day, of which we have no idea which one’s going
to save somebody’s life. You don’t know which
one, so which one do you get to mess up on?
Which one do you go slow on? Which one?
Uh—well, none of them, right? None of them.”
jeanne marie laskas is a gq
correspondent. Additional reporting
by Rachel Wilkinson.
A D D IT IO N A L C R E D IT S
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SEPTEMBER 2016 GQ.COM 239
 DANNY M¢BRIDE
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and uor
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o Ame
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ed min
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er. Butt McB
Mcc rid
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and
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A tal a kin
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whi te andnd d taagge
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(page
age
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8) to us—
us and nd it it, it ‘BL
BLANK
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f ce: “T “That
hat wa
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McB ridee hasa lot
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skiin—h
n
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e off fee
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gs abob ut Reall Don
Rea n DraDrape
per?
per
admen—
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nt cacan?
n?
Roc
o k on.

ON HER, HAIR AND MAKEUP: LOUISE MOON FOR LEONOR GREYL

09.16
GQ
240 DAN WINTERS