Ryan Reynolds

armanibeauty.com

MACY’S AND MACYS.COM the new seduction

 JI M B OEH E IM’S First Interview Since T HE CR ASH T HAT C LA IM E D A M A N ’S L IF E

OCTOBER ’19

WHAT’S
SO INTRODUCING

FUNNY HOW WE
DRESS NOW:
ABOUT REAL PEOPLE
2019?
WE ASKED
REAL
STYLE
Hannah Gadsby
Bill Hader
Whitney Cummings
Julio Torres
Ramy Youssef
Nick Kroll

Oh, And
This Guy...

JOHN MULANEY
DEFINITELY THE FUNNIEST GUY IN A SUIT AND TIE
R A LPH L AUR EN

ralphlauren.com
The universe comes to life with the passage of time.
Time is Nature with all her expressions.
Each moment, minute and second a unique expression.

The passage of time has always been deeply embraced in Japan.

This spirituality lives within every Grand Seiko.

Ever-changing, graceful and grand.

Its design unveils the differing expressions of nature as light becomes shadow.
Meticulously crafted. Nature incarnated in every detail of its artistry.

A tribute. In deep reverence.

grand-seiko.com
this Way In
NOTHING WRONG WITHPASTA
AT 10:00 P.M.
You’ve got stale bread, cauliflower, rigatoni, and a
lemon. Evan Funke of Felix Trattoria (our 2017 Best New
Restaurant) says it’s all you need for a killer late-night eat.
Cut the cauliflower to bits, toast it in a pan, and make a
sauce using pasta water, olive oil, and wine. Cook the riga-
toni and put it all together. Also: Crumble up the bread and
squeeze the lemon on top. Hit page 57 for more dinner-
party shortcuts—and another pasta recipe from Funke.

Editor’s Letter

The Big Bite

23 William Jackson Harper of The Good Place
reflects on abs and the afterlife; when
you break up in the digital age, who gets the
social-media friends list?; how to be
nice online; have restaurants that aim to
provoke gone too far?

The Code
41 The ultimate guide to leather jackets—every-
thing you need to know about the most
rebellious article of clothing there is; how
much is too much to spend on a haircut;
Zegna gets a 21st-century upgrade; a brand-
new Italian label hits the scene.

Get Intimate, from Dinner

57 Party . . . to After-Party
Entertaining at home has rarely been
more gratifying, because there is so much com-
fort in the communion of breaking bread
with friends. With that in mind, we offer some
suggestions for bringing it all back home.

This Way Out

116 Whitney Cummings,
Retroactive Ombudsman

Bedford Bear watch ($1,950) by Polo Ralph Lauren;

ralphlauren.com.

photograph (pasta): Pede n + M u n k October 2019_Esquire 1 3

 this Way In

CONTENTS F E AT U R E S

What’s the Deal . . . with

66 John Mulaney?
By Jonah Weiner
He has two Emmys and the respect
of comedians you probably worship. He’s
also a suit-wearing square who writes
jokes about his pug. Is that what we really
need in 2019?

The Esquire Guide to Funny

76 Comedy has never been home to so many
different voices. Here, our highly sub-
jective survey of the best comedy today,
and where to find it.

How We Dress Now

82 We asked nine stylish individuals to show up to
our studio in their best fall fits. The only direc-
tion? Dress like yourself. And they brought it.

The Forever Coach

90 By Tom Chiarella
Syracuse’s Jim Boeheim is one of basketball’s
winningest coaches. A few months ago, he was
involved in a car accident that took a life. This
fall, he returns to the only job he’s ever known.

The Remains
98 By Bronwen Dickey
What was Christian Gonzalez doing in the
middle of the desert, risking his life to
return to the American town he called home?

King Layer
104 By Adrienne Westenfeld
Naoki Kobayashi, star of Netflix’s The Earth-
quake Bird, shows you how to deploy the
fashion trick for adding depth to any fall outfit.
Jacket by Bottega Veneta; T-shirt by Calvin Klein Underwear; jeans by Polo Ralph
Lauren; boots by Giuseppe Zanotti.
ON THE COVER
JOHN MULANEY
PHOTOGRAPHED BY CHRISTIAN ANWANDER FOR ESQUIRE
T H I S G U Y, I N T H R E E W O R D S . . .
GO.
While we had Bill Hader and Nick Kroll on the phone
for “The Esquire Guide to Funny” (which you can find
on page 76), a certain cover subject came to mind—who
happens to have a long history with both comedians.
Kroll starred alongside Mulaney in Oh, Hello, and Hader
worked with him on SNL. So we asked them to describe
Mulaney in three words. Hader: “Sharp. Intelligent. Fee- Jacket, shirt, and tie by Giorgio Armani. Production by Jean Jarvis.
Casting by Randi Peck. Styling by Nick Sullivan.
ble.” Kroll: “Young. Old. Eternal.” Nailed it. Grooming by Kumi Craig using La Mer at the Wall Group.

14 October 2019_Esquire ph otograph: Chr ist ia n A nwa nde r

 this Way In

HOW WE DRESS NOW

REAL PEOPLE,
ELIAS WITH R E A L ST Y L E
M a r te PAGE 82
Real estate
agent,
30

“I cherish the ring

my mom gave me
when I was eight
[ o n r i n g f i n g e r,
l e f t h a n d ] . I al ways
l i ke d j ewelry, so I
started c r y i n g
because I had no
j e w e l r y. She s a id,
‘Here, take my r i n g .’
It was probably to
k e e p m e s i n g l e .”

T H E TA K E AWAY
You don’t have to go
full cowboy to borrow
from the West.
Ground a statement
piece like this
shearling coat
against everyday
streetwear for a
look that’s rugged
but refined.

Coat by Sawyer of
Napa; sweater by
WoolOvers; trousers
by Berg & Berg;
loafers by Zelli;
jewelry by Popular
Jewelry; gloves by
Ugg; sunglasses by
Penn Avenue.

16 October 2019_Esquire p hoto g ra ph: Aaron Richter

 this Way In

M I C H A E L S E B A ST I A N JAC K E S S I G
Editor in Chief Senior Vice-President, Publishing Director
& Chief Revenue Officer
HELENE F. RUBINSTEIN Editorial Director
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JONATHAN EVANS Style Director Hearst Men’s Group
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October 2019_Esquire 17
 this Way In
A LETTER FROM THE EDITOR
NOT JUST MEN IN SUITS
his month, we’re doing a little comedy thing.
To kick things off, I’ll tell you my favorite joke:
A grasshopper walks into a bar and hops
T onto the stool. The bartender takes one look
at him and says: “Hey, we’ve got a drink
named after you.” The grasshopper says,
“Me? Leonard?”
Is that a dad joke? Yes. Am I a dad? I am! But I’ve been tell-
ing that one for fifteen years, which is eleven years longer than
I’ve had children. I first heard it from my friend Brett. It was
his go-to joke, and telling it always made him cackle. Brett
tragically died fifteen years ago this September, at the age of
twenty-three, a few weeks before the U.S. Marines were to
deploy him to Iraq. I tell that joke in part to remember him.
As we put together this issue, I thought of him often, because
he loved all things comedy, and although he wasn’t around to
see the rise of this month’s cover subject, joke teller John Mu-
laney, I’m certain Brett would’ve adored his comedy.
I should take a moment to introduce myself. Hello! I’m Mi-
chael, the new editor of Esquire. I’ve been around the office for
a little while now, serving for the past two years as the editor of
Esquire.com. The new gig is mostly thrilling, and a bit ter-
rifying. Working alongside an incredible team of editors,
writers, photographers, and designers helps me dial up the
one and dampen the other. But not by too much, I hope. It’s
18 October 2019_Esquire
somewhere between those two feelings—the thrill and the
terror—that most of the good stuff in life happens.
Now back to the issue.
This is the first time I’ve selected a cover subject, and it so
happens to be John Mulaney’s first Esquire cover. I feel a cer-
tain kinship with him—we’re about the same age; we’re both
from the Midwest—but that’s not why we’re featuring him.
As Jonah Weiner (who’s writing his first piece for Esquire)
lays out, Mulaney finds himself at a crossroads where every
path leads upward. Because comedy today is more diverse
than ever, we also surveyed the many voices who are reshap-
ing the landscape—from Hannah Gadsby and Ramy Youssef
to Julio Torres and Bill Hader—in our Guide to Funny 2019.
It’s not just the comedy evolution we’re thrilled by. Men’s
IT’S SOMEWHERE BETWEEN THOSE TWO
FEELINGS—THE THRILL AND THE TERROR—THAT
MOST OF THE GOOD STUFF IN LIFE HAPPENS.
style, too! If you ask a stranger on the street to describe an
Esquire Man, I bet they’ll put him in a suit. There’s nothing
wrong with that—we love suits—but the Esquire Man con-
tains multitudes. She might be a woman. Or they might be
nonbinary. That’s the impetus behind How We Dress Now,
spearheaded by our creative director, Nick Sullivan, who
cast real men (and one woman) wearing their own clothes,
not only to show a diversity of style but also to inspire readers.
Sometimes life tilts toward the terrifying, and those sto-
ries are also vital to tell. This month, we have two. The first
is a profile of Jim Boeheim, the Syracuse men’s basketball
coach and a staple of college hoops, who earlier this year was
involved in a car crash that claimed a man’s life. Longtime
Esquire writer Tom Chiarella met with the Hall of Famer,
who opens up for the first time about the accident. The sec-
ond is a dispatch by Bronwen Dickey from the U.S.–Mexico
border, where a team of researchers uncovered a burial plot
containing hundreds of migrants who’d died crossing north.
The researchers have spent the past six years identifying the
bodies, including that of Christian Gonzalez, whose family
last saw him alive in 2012, just before he was deported after
having spent nearly his whole life in America.
The last time I saw Brett was in 2004, in coastal North
Carolina. Just as Hurricane Charley made landfall. As oth-
er vacationers boarded up or evacuated, Brett and I foolish-
ly went to the beach. The rain fell as if from a faucet, and the
waves thundered onto the shore. Brett leaned into the gale as
I took out my camera, and the opposing wind held his body at
a slant as I clicked the shutter. I think about that picture of-
ten, not just to remember Brett but also as a reminder to al-
ways lean into the storm.
Since it first hit newsstands in 1933, Esquire has been at its
best when we’ve steered toward the tempest and still kept our
footing. What motivates us to keep at it, to always head for the
beach when everyone else is heading for higher ground, is to
inform and entertain you, our readers. Sometimes even with
dad jokes. I’ll spare you another for now and just say, simply
and sincerely: I’m glad you’re along for the ride.
—Michael S E B A S T I A N
ph otograph: Chr ist ia n A nwa nde r
 The Breitling Surfer Squad
Sally Fitzgibbons
Kelly Slater
Stephanie Gilmore

#SQUADONAMISSION
 the Big Bite A Cultural Guide to Just Enough of Everything

CARS

AM I . . .
A VET TE GUY?
The 2020 Corvette makes its case
to a new generation of drivers.
Will they see past the midlife
crisis? By Kevin Sintumuang
The existential question will come at some point in
life: Am I a sports-car guy? For many, the answer
is an unequivocal no. Got my crossover and I don’t need
to compensate for nothin’. I get that. And I’ve heard of
these Uber-only teens who don’t care about driving, let
To Vette or not
alone getting behind the wheel of anything with an ex- to Vette?

October 2019_Esquire 2 3
 the Big Bite

haust note. I’m a little sad about these developments, ly held preconceived Middle Path
because the universal urge for fast freedom and in- notions. The next-gen- The mid-engine Vette
stant independence that bubbles up when we’re teen- eration Corvette Sting- prototypes that
agers, and again manifests itself in midlife—is that all ray, aka the C8, is that car. made the C8 possible.
there is?—is most viscerally fulfilled by a low slung,
high-revving automobile. This form of therapy seems
to be falling out of favor thanks to overly sensible autos
and our mobility-app overlords. But if you have a gen-
uine lust for life, try putting down the phone and head-
ing to the nearest on-ramp with something loud, quick,
and powerful. It’s much more thrilling than taking an over the past three years. The C8’s aluminum core
Uber XL to In-N-Out. Despite its cult status, began here.
Choosing to be a sports-car guy is easier than choos- Corvette isn’t immune,
ing which arrow to add to your quiver. Because no mat-
ter how much we pore over quarter-mile times or the steady decline in buyers
differences between merino leathers, the genuine de- Mid-engine cars since 2014.
ciding factor in purchasing a Very Fast Car boils down were for overcompen- Something had to be
to: Which automotive tribe do I want to belong to? sating surgeons, done. That meant—
There’s no wrong answer here. Just realize that ev- Tom Selleck wannabes, gasp!—going mid-en-
C E RV I I ( 1 9 6 4)
ery tribe has its own unique associated stereotypes and hedge funders gine. The official justi-
Used the first-ever
that may or may not be true. There’s the Ferrari per- in a perpetual state of fication: It would make mid-engine four-wheel-
son with his Magnum, P. I. mustache (yes!) who is go- midlife crisis. the car quicker and more drive system.
ing through his fourth divorce (no!). There’s the guy well balanced. That move
(read: cryptocurrency nerds, Kanye West) who be-
lieves no vehicle shall come before the Lamborgh-
ini. The average Porsche owner is cutting you off in
heavy traffic while flipping the bird. Thanks to barely-a-
billionaire Russ Hanneman of HBO’s Silicon Valley, we
have an idea of who plunks down for a McLaren. And C E RV I I I ( 1 9 9 0)
yes, there’s the all-American Corvette owner with the The C8’s closest
salt-and-pepper goatee and Tommy Bahama shirt who small but vocal contin- concept cousin.
always seems to be blasting Jimmy Buffett. gent was personally of-
But every once in a while, a new model can be so out- fended by this change.
side the box that it completely blows apart our dear- Mid-engine was not Corvette. Mid-engine cars were for
overcompensating surgeons, Tom Selleck wannabes,
and hedge funders in a perpetual state of midlife cri-
sis. Even after the car was officially revealed in a former
blimp hangar, complete with astronauts Mae Jemison
and Scott Kelly and timed to coincide with the Apollo
11 anniversary for maximum ’Murica, there were still
people who thought it was absurd.
Their loss, because, damn, this is the stuff of bed-
room posters. The ready-to-pounce stance. The no-
see door handles cleverly tucked under the haunch of
an air intake. The glass-backed rear hood that reveals
the naturally aspirated V-8, gleaming like the menacing
vertebrae of a Decepticon. (Your move, Michael Bay.)
But are fresh design, power, and relative affordabil-
ity enough to pull new recruits from other brands and
attract younger blood? Is it possible to be a Corvette
owner without being a Corvette guy? I can imagine this
encounter: “Nice C8, man,” says an admirer. “Thanks,”
says new C8 owner. “Just so you know, I’m not a Cor-
vette Guy. I only drive this because it’s the best way to
go zero to 60 in under 3 seconds that doesn’t cost over
$150,000. It’s only $59,995. And look at it!” I want to
believe this is a coversation that can happen. Can we
make auotmotive tribes optional? Can you buy a Cor-
vette and not listen to Jimmy Buffet? As a wise man
ALTERNATE HISTORY once said: “These changes in latitudes, changes in at-
With a sub-three-second zero-to-60 time and Ferrari-like looks, would titudes, nothing remains quite the same.”
Magnum P.I. be cruising around in one on Oahu if now were then? It could happen.

2 6 October 2019_Esquire

TV
T WIT TER
WANTS TO
SEE THIS
GUY NAKED
William Jackson Harper
of “The Good Place” reflects
on abs and the
afterlife By Matt Miller
One night in 2017, William Jackson Harper found
himself at a dance party with his Good Place co-
stars. There he was with Kristen Bell, Jameela Jamil,
and Ted Danson, who dances with “a lot of hands,
a lot of faces,” as Harper describes. “It was one of those
moments where I had to take stock of my life and just
really appreciate that I’m on a set with this cast,” he
says. “And I was getting paid to do it.”
A few years earlier, before he was cast on the be-
loved NBC comedy, Harper, then a theater actor, had
considered leaving the industry. He was getting work,
but “I was still broke all the time, and I was tired of it,”
he says. “It felt like I was going to always have several
roommates; I was always going to be onstage in the
last week of a play wondering if I had enough money
to get to next month.”
Then came The Good Place, which follows a group
of strangers trying to navigate the existential, ethical,
religious, and philosophical quandaries of the after-
life. The show has racked up a number of Emmy and
Golden Globe nominations and has won a Peabody.
Despite its success and dedicated fan base, creator
Mike Schur made the bold choice to wrap up the se-
ries on his terms with season 4.
2 8 October 2019_Esquire
the Big Bite
DEEP THOUGHTS
Harper plays the philosophy nerd
Chidi on “The Good Place.”
Though he doesn’t want to say goodbye to the show,
Harper sees the decision to end The Good Place as “the
right vision.” He says these concise four seasons “will
exist as this little psychedelic bullet train of art . . . as
opposed to slowly but surely just becoming a show that
no one likes because we ran out of ideas.”
Big ideas have never been lacking on The Good
Place, which has Harper’s character, Chidi, often lec-
turing about the nuances of Aristotle. That doesn’t
mean the show is all homework, however. The Good
Place turned Harper into something of a heart-
throb after an episode with a lot of shirtless Chidi
went viral.
The actor, who was terrified about doing a shirtless
scene, dieted and worked out relentlessly before shoot-
ing, and even avoided social media when the episode
aired. He didn’t know what anyone thought until, as
he says, “My buddy texted me and he said, ‘Yo, Twit-
ter wants Chidi to get naked.’ ”
He assures me that the final season won’t feature na-
ked Chidi. “Trying to maintain that kind of shape for
me—it’s tough. I’m 39, man. That was not fun to do.”
Even though the series won’t be appeasing the Inter-
net’s thirstiness, he does hope the finale is satisfying for
fans. There’s no way to find answers to the eternal ex-
istential questions, but the show has stayed grounded
in concepts that people continually grapple with. “We
The Good Place can start from that foundation. Then from there, we
“will exist as just make it up,” Harper says. “Who knows if this bears
this little psychedelic any resemblance to what exists beyond us, you know?”
bullet train of One thing he does tell me is that the ending is “beau-
art . . . as opposed to tiful, and we go to a place that we haven’t gone in the
slowly but surely show thus far.” Which is interesting phrasing, consid-
just becoming a show ering that in its first three seasons the show has not ac-
that no one tually been to the titular Good Place. So I ask whether
likes because we ran he means this “place” in the final season is of the phys-
out of ideas.” ical or emotional sort. “I’m not going to answer that
one,” Harper says. “I’m gonna leave that one out there.”
As for what exists beyond The Good Place? In
the summer he starred in the critically acclaimed
daylight-horror film Midsommar. And this fall he’ll
be opposite Anne Hathaway in Todd Haynes’s legal
drama about an environmental suit against DuPont.
He’ll also appear on Amazon’s Jack Ryan. Details
about his role are scarce, but he does say his charac-
ter keeps his shirt on.
 the Big Bite
THIS IS YOUR BRAIN ON FOIE FOAM
At Copenhagen’s Alchemist, dishes like “Food for
Thought” (foie gras topped with aerated foie gras foam)
are meant to make you, uh, think. It’s made
from the livers of geese that haven’t been force-fed.
30 October 2019_Esquire
FOOD
CHEW ON THIS
More than a decade after Noma’s
opening, Copenhagen is
still the capital of mind-blowing
culinary experiences.
But have restaurants that aim
to provoke gone too far?
By Jeff Gordinier
I have visited thousands of restaurants in my life-
time, but over the summer I got an early peek at
the strangest one I’ve ever seen. This happened in
Copenhagen. The Danish city has been a vortex of
culinary innovation for about 15 years now, thanks
to the ripple effect of chef René Redzepi’s Noma. But
nothing could have prepared me for Alchemist.
I met 28-year-old chef Rasmus Munk outside what
appeared to be a warehouse. We stepped inside and
beheld a Roy Lichtenstein–style tableau of New York
City street scenes from graffiti artist Lady Aiko. Then
 the Big Bite

we moved into a wine cellar that looked like something standing of the concept Three Next-Wave
out of The Matrix—8,000 bottles stacked three stories of dining,” the Alche- Copenhagen
high in glass towers with transparent glass floors. Then mist site tells you. (The
we ambled into what resembled the interior of an ob- ancient alchemists were
servatory. Diners at Alchemist sit in darkness, at places con men, but whatever.)
illuminated by tiny lamps, and gaze upon a domed vista Look, I like to think
of a sky filled with stars. Munk told me that when the
dome was completed, he instructed the designer to risk-takers and envelope-
pushers, and it would be
all too easy to mock an en-
terprise that appears to
That must’ve been an expensive edge perilously close to
redo, but, hey, erecting Alchemist
is said to have cost around $15 mil- Be My Maybe, the one at from Australian-born
lion anyway, and a meal with wine which Keanu Reeves, in Noma veteran Beau Clugston.
will set you back $600 (more if you headphones, sheds tears
want a bottle of Pétrus). There are for the animal that has
performers to pay—not just serv- died so that he can be fed.
ers but also trained thespians who But I’d be lying if I told
interact with you, à la mariachis you that I want to eat at
and mimes—and dishes that Alchemist. I care deeply
force you to confront the issues HAVE A THINK about climate change,
This is lamb brain. The red coloration comes from
of the day, from climate change yet I don’t necessarily go
cherry juice. It’s sliced tableside at Alchemist.
to racism to avarice to pollution
to African water shortages to oce- about it even more. I go to Apollo Bar & Kantine:
anic debris. There is a course that’s meant to mimic Have a quiet, civilized
a clot of plastic polluting the sea. There is also a lamb from the awful news for breakfast of soft-boiled eggs,
brain, crimson from cherry juice, sliced by your side. a few hours. ham, and cheese
in a high-ceilinged museum
That’s meant to shock you with the reality of how much That’s an antiquated
space tucked away
food goes to waste. Munk calls that one “Think Out- perspective, though. We
from the phone-toting
side the Box.” throngs of Nyhavn.
Toto, we’re not in Noma anymore. restaurants that give pay-
No need to slap a category on all of this. Munk has ing customers the oppor-
already done so. He calls it “holistic cuisine.” “In the tunity to experiment with
same way as the ancient alchemists sought to fuse phi- their own discomfort—
losophy, natural science, religion and the arts to cre- especially (ironically) at
ate a new understanding of the world order, the aim of the high end. In Hous-
Holistic Cuisine is to redefine and broaden our under- ton, at Indigo, chef Jonny
Rhodes invites you to
Copenhagen, Denmark contemplate, via tasting
4 Slurp: Ramen and gyoza
menu, the odious history
of slavery, racial oppres- with a New
Nordic undercurrent,
sion, and mass incarcer-
courtesy of
5 ation; in Los Angeles, at
another former Noma
Vespertine, chef Jordan soldier, chef
Kahn ushers you into Philipp Inreiter.
a veritable spaceship,
where everything from gelatinous bites to repeated
6 loops of music is meant to foster as much disorienta-
tion as pleasure.
Does this represent the future of fine dining, or is it
a decline-of-the-Roman-Empire sign of its imminent
1
2 demise? I will only say that I spied a different vision of
restaurant bliss right down the street from Alchemist in
3 the once-abandoned Refshaleøen area of Copenhagen.
This was a place called La Banchina. It’s a shack over-
looking the harbor where you can order some ancho-
vies and a glass of wine. There’s swimming in the sum-
mer, a sauna in the winter.
You won’t think much about the sorry state of the
planet at La Banchina, but you will come away feel-
1. Slurp 2. Apollo Bar & Kantine 3. IIuka 4. Alchemist 5. La Banchina 6. Noma
ing better. And that, my friends, is its own form
of alchemy.

32 October 2019_Esquire illustration: Mark Nerys

 the Big Bite

DRINKS by a shot of sour brine, Brine,

lived on. And not only is Straight Up
IN DEFENSE OF it still a shot-taking sta-
ple in New York, where
Forgo the jar of
pickles for a big
THE PICKLEBACK it was christened more
than a decade ago, but it
bottle of nothing but
the good stuff
has also improved its lot
The divey special is now fancy The thing about the
and become something
pickleback that sets it
enough for cocktail bars—and apart from, say, a
you actually want to
drink rather than some-
home By Sarah Rense Jell-O shot is that the
thing you begrudgingly
brine is actually tasty,
accept as your punish-
which makes throwing
The first pickle juice I ever drank straight was at a ment for trying to “go
a few back at home
horrendous dive bar in the East Village called Con- out” and “have fun.”
perfectly acceptable—
tinental—a place where crusty bartenders doled out On cocktail menus
especially if you
five shots of anything for $12, the sting of which you these days, you can find
use homemade brine.
could mask with $2 picklebacks. A bargain! Continen- fancy picklebacks that
tal filed for bankruptcy (twice), then closed last year. stray from the whis-
The pickleback, usually a shot of Irish whiskey followed key/pickle-juice tem-
plate. Kaido in Miami • • • Prefer your pickle brine
without garlic knobs, dill
shot of Suntory Whisky stems, and coriander seeds?
Toki followed by a shii- Lucky you: Entrepreneurial
folks are bottling the stuff
take-mushroom-brine
and selling it straight,
chaser. The Belfry in like the Brine Brothers’ Darn
New York has an entire Good Dill and Chili Cherry
pickleback menu, with Fire varieties. Pour one into
shots including the BB- a shot glass to chase whis-
Cue Back (Bulleit bour- key. Drink it plain, soaking in
bon and smoky brine) those electrolytes. Even
and the Tickleback try freezing it in an ice tray
(mezcal and chipotle and eating a cube (or four)
sour brine). BrewDog on Sunday morning. After all,
pickle juice is as close to
bars in the UK regu-
a foolproof hangover cure as
larly experiment with we’ve ever known. Just
whiskey/brine combos. don’t use those cubes to
The thing about the make a whiskey on the
pickleback that sets it rocks. It’ll taste like rotgut.
apart from, say, a Jell-O —S. R.
shot is that the brine
is actually tasty, which makes throwing a few back
at home perfectly acceptable—especially if you use
homemade brine. Any recipe for pickling cucum-
bers will supply you with juice, and—bonus—you’ll
get actual pickles out of it. In her book Pickle Juice,
Florence Cherruault, founder of the London-based
bottled-brine company the Pickle House, outlines
brine recipes with more bite, like a tomato-based Holy
Maria and a Hot-Smoked Chiliback. But her go-to com-
bo remains straight-up pickle juice. “I absolutely love
doing it with Nikka Whisky From the Barrel,” she says.
For those with serious qualms about tossing back
shots and chasers in the kitchen, a pickle-juice cocktail
might be less savage. One of Cherruault’s favorites is a
shot of vodka and a shot of pickle juice, topped off with
ginger ale over ice and finished with a squeeze of lime.
A bartender at Pine Box Rock Shop in my Brooklyn
neighborhood builds a mean spicy-pickle margarita, off
BIG SHOT menu, if you beat the crowds to her section of the bar.
Picklebacks don’t need But the simple pairing of booze and salt—for
a garnish, but it me, that’s Jameson and Bubbies kosher-dill-pickle
doesn’t hurt, either. brine—always does it right, one shot and chaser
at a time.

October 2019_Esquire 33
 the Big Bite

feed. Lately, this has meant

watching a lot of BMX videos
on Instagram.
Earlier this year, I spent
a few months hooking up
with a BMX biker. (I am
cool.) During this time,
I followed him on Insta-
gram, where he almost
exclusively posted videos
of himself BMXing. He
tagged BMX publications
and BMX teams, and I fol-
lowed them, too. I decided
it would be weird to follow
the guys on his team—
known in many circles as
“his friends whom I had
never met”—but I gave in
and followed one guy any-
way, mainly because I saw
a video of him dunking a
basketball using the wheel
of his bike. I showed it to a
friend, who responded, “I
would follow him to hell.”
All of a sudden, my In-
stagram feed was largely
BMX. To be totally hon-
est, before hooking up
with this guy, I did not
know or care what BMX
was. I thought maybe it
was like snowmobiling.
Turns out it’s just biking,
and it has to do with men
R E L AT I O N S H I P S
grinding and bonking their pegs at skate parks or
TOUNFOLLOW OR on ramps and rails in the real world. It also turns out
that BMX is actually very interesting.
NOT TO UNFOLLOW You can’t shoot
people into space
When this guy and I decided to call things off, I
didn’t unfollow him or any of the BMX accounts.
In the digital age, sharing once you’re done
with them, and you
By that point, they were some of my favorite things
on Instagram. Watching any video of any dude rail-
custody of interests isn’t easy can’t magically hopping any fence is much better than seeing screen-
By Blythe Roberson erase them from shots of people’s tweets.
your brain. It feels a bit weird to be so into something solely
Ending a relationship in 2019 involves a lot of un- because of someone I was romantically linked to.
following. To get over someone, common wisdom I’m afraid that I’m “watching boys do stuff” instead
holds, you can’t have little reminders of them pop- of pursuing my own interests, or that I’m obsessing
ping up on your phone nonstop. So you delete their over the thing they introduced me to as a metonym
number and you block each other on social media and for them. But we all get into things because of ro-

34 October 2019_Esquire illustrations: C.J. Robinson

mantic partners. Men and women have told me that,
for exes, they went down wormholes of anime ac-
counts, pro wrestling, experimental instrumental
music, and “new-age chakra shit.” The last one was
from my friend Harris, who explains, “To date in
Brooklyn, you have to learn about tarot.”
So why not just unfollow those anime or wrestling
or “new-age chakra shit” accounts when your rela-
tionship ends? Why subject yourself to those pain-
ful reminders when you could give yourself a clean
slate by removing them, and your exes, and your exes’
friends, from your feed? I’m certainly not opposed
to that, especially when you never liked the worm-
hole to begin with. I learned all about the Manning
family of football fame for my high school crush, and
when we graduated, I was very happy to stop pre-
tending to care about Peyton Manning’s career and
about the concept of football in general.
But I still love a lot of the things I learned about
through old romantic interests. I became interested
in Patti Smith and Joni Mitchell for a guy, and those
women are now hugely important to me. Patti’s Just
Kids showed me it was possible to be a young, broke
idiot making art in New York. I listened to Joni’s travel INTERNETS
album Hejira too many times and quit my job to drive
around the country. (I’m fine.) It’s lame that I didn’t HOW TO BE NICE
like these women until I had a crush on a man who
did, but at this point I don’t remotely associate them ONLINE
with him. As a friend told me, “[My ex] got me into
biking, and even though I wish he were dead, biking HANDLE COWORKERS ON TINDER AND RELATIVES
and its community have changed my life.” ON FACEBOOK WITH ADVICE FROM JOSH
And frankly, the idea of a “clean slate” is a fallacy— GONDELMAN, THE INTERNET’S NICEST GUY
you can’t shoot people into space once you’re done
with them, and you can’t magically erase them from As a result of his viral Twitter pep talks, in which
your brain. Pretending that people you used to kiss he offers compliments to strangers, Josh Gondel-
just don’t exist anymore won’t change the fact that man, a writer on Desus & Mero, has earned a reputa-
they had an effect on your life, so I don’t even try. (I I usually reach out tion as one of the most genuinely kind people on the
am friends with most men I’ve ever been iNvOlvEd if [fake news is] Internet. He just published Nice Try: Stories of Best
WiTh, which I consider healthy and cool but which super fake. You can Intentions and Mixed Results, a collection of touching
many people consider strange and concerning and take it offline so essays about the ups and downs of trying to do right
which I might be five years away from realizing is ex- that people don’t feel by others. We sought Gondelman’s advice on how to
tremely self-sabotaging.) embarrassed. stay afloat when . . .
Ultimately, I don’t necessarily mind falling down
wormholes and picking up interests from exes. You You stumble across a colleague on a dating app.
have to learn about stuff somehow, and your mom I would swipe right, then say, “lol see you at work!”
and your friends can only recommend so much. It’s
hot when people are passionate about things, when You’re scrolling six months back in someone’s
they can talk to you about those things and teach you Instagram posts and you accidentally like one.
about them. And if your relationship ends, it doesn’t Here’s my move (I don’t know if this is nice—it’s more
mean you lose the right to care about, say, the Fast ass-covering): I will then, from that point, scroll for-
and the Furious movies or the article about the goat ward toward the present and sporadically double-tap.
trapped on a roof who respects only one man. It’s more understandable if it’s someone you just met
I ran a poll on Twitter, in fact, asking what I should and just followed on Instagram, like, “Oh, cool! This is
do about all the BMX accounts I followed: Should I what they’ve been up to the last six months.”
unfollow them, forget about BMX via concussion,
start dating a new BMXer, or start BMXing myself? Someone shares fake news.
I’d been thinking about that last option for a while— I usually reach out if it’s super fake. You can take it
learning to at least bunny hop or maybe skateboard, offline so that people don’t feel embarrassed. I think
because watching so many men grinding and bonk- that’s actually nonconfrontational, and I would want
ing their pegs on various ledges and poles had in- that too. You’d want someone to say, “Oh, that’s a
spired me to be more adventurous with my body on hoax!” That’s maybe a little awkward to tell some-
simple machines, less of a physical coward. Twitter one, but you don’t want to hang them out to dry.
wanted me to BMX. —As told to Adrienne Westenfeld

36 October 2019_Esquire
 YOUR OLD FLAME
JUST TURNED INTO A
FIVE-ALARM FIRE.
 the Big Bite

BOOKS the challenges he’d later face as the CEO of Hearst

(the parent company of Esquire), where he thrived

E XECUTIVE in an era of big disruption. Under Bennack’s lead-

ership of almost three decades, Hearst increased its
revenue 14 times, grew its earnings to more than 30

DECISION times their original size, launched three cable net-

works (A&E, History, and Lifetime), and invested
in the ESPN family of networks. To mark the publi-
Former Hearst CEO Frank cation of Leave Something on the Table, a memoir of
Bennack shares lessons learned an extraordinary life in business, Bennack sat down
from 28 years in the C-suite with us to share insight on building a purposeful as
well as profitable career, whether you’re on the exec-
By Adrienne Westenfeld utive floor or just starting out.

When Frank Bennack got his start in journalism CULTURE IS EVERYTHING Office politics has harmed
as a classified-advertising salesman in 1950, it was more companies than their most evil competitors.
a different world. The newspaper was king, and the A BIT OF ADVICE Never have we been at a time when it was more im-
Frank Bennack’s
publishing industry had deep pockets. As an adman portant that leaders put a high priority on culture.
memoir, “Leave Some-
in San Antonio, Bennack couldn’t have anticipated thing on the Table,” Peter Drucker said, “Culture eats strategy for break-
is out October 15. fast.” There’s almost nothing else in a company that is
as important.

NO SORE LOSERS The other person doesn’t have to

lose for you to win in business. When the chips are
down, I always try to make that call in a way that is fair
and that recognizes the position of the counterparty,
whether it’s an employee, a partner, or whoever
it might be. It’s not only polite; it’s good business.

A HIGHER CALLING Journalism is indispensable to our

society. Maybe after the clergy, there is no higher call-
ing. It’s not a walk in the park. But it’s always been a
challenge. People thought radio would kill newspa-
pers, that television was going to kill radio, that cable
was going to kill all three, but they’re still here. There
are going to be a lot of readers of magazines, a lot of
readers of newspapers, and a lot of viewers of TV and
listeners of radio for a long time to come.

SET THE TONE Optimism and a positive attitude are

very powerful, particularly for leaders who have
tough jobs. If they don’t approach it with an upbeat
attitude, it’s very contagious. I love it when there’s a
loud noise in the cafeteria or in the halls. You know
that the people who are working on a magazine have
had a score of some kind or something good has
happened to them.

DON’T LOSE SLEEP OVER IT People who pride them-

selves on being able to get by on four or six hours of
sleep are kidding themselves. Make it a part of your
life. I’m going to rest when it’s time for me to rest. I’m
not going to let a too-difficult day get me to the point
where I toss and turn all night. I’m going to say, “I’ll
think about that tomorrow.”

OUT OF OFFICE Once in a while, put down the paper,

put down the book, turn off the television, sit in the
rocking chair, and think things over. Think, What have
FIT TO PRINT I missed? What’s the next most important thing for me
In his newly gained publisher’s office, Bennack holds his beloved to do, not only for my company but for my family and for
“San Antonio Light,” circa 1968. society? Have I done anything that makes the place bet-
ter today? If I haven’t, I’d better double up tomorrow.

38 October 2019_Esquire
 RADO.COM
MASTER OF MATERIALS

RADO CAPTAIN COOK

INSPIRED BY OUR VINTAGE ORIGINAL. SERIOUSLY IRRESISTIBLE.
the Code Because Style Is Always Personal

THE
LEATHER
JACKET:
YEP, STILL
ESSENTIAL
Everything you need to know
about the most REBELLIOUS
outerwear there is

The leather jacket

has been a rite of
passage for transgres-
sive teens since the first
intrepid motorcyclists
and aviators hit the
throttle. And its natural
durability makes it per-
fect for all kinds of
hell-raising. But its lux-
ury also makes it an
ideal choice in any guy’s
wardrobe. So if a leather
jacket is missing from
your rotation, it’s time
to find the right fit.
The style you choose—
from biker to aviator to
café racer—will depend
on the message you
want to telegraph. Just
know that all leathers of
reasonable quality will,
like you, improve with
age. And don’t worry—
with what we’ve put to-
gether in the following
pages, it’ll be hard to go
wrong. —Nick Sullivan

Jacket ($1,195) by Sandro; shirt

($60) by Lands’ End; trousers
($368) by Polo Ralph Lauren.

ph ot o gra ph : Jean Yves Lemoigne October 2019_Esquire 41

 In Paid Par tnership with

WHY RYE?
Like a well-cut suit or waxed cotton jacket, rye whiskey is enjoying a resurgence among
cocktail aficionados. Why? Because it offers a unique flavor profile while enhancing
the drink’s other ingredients. Knob Creek® Kentucky Straight Rye Whiskey is made by
selecting the finest rye grains, which are patiently aged in charred oak barrels for an
unmistakable richness and signature spiciness. An appreciation for well-crafted things
—be it a suit or a whiskey—never goes out of style. Cheers to that!

U nlike bourbon, which is distilled from corn mash and

has a sweet, full-bodied flavor, rye whiskey is made
with predominantly more rye grain in its mash—at least
51%—which results in a spicier, drier profi le that really
complements the sugar and bitters of an Old Fashioned.
In fact, many classic whiskey cocktails, including the
Old Fashioned, Sazerac, Manhattan, and whiskey sour,
were originally designed to be made with rye because the
dryness of the rye helps balance out the sweetness of
the other ingredients. It can also be paired with club soda
or ginger ale, while purists enjoy it straight, neat, or on the
rocks. And did we mention it goes great with everything
from ribs to pecan pie?
Because it’s a little brighter and more complex on the
palate, rye whiskey can take longer to drink, which is
just the thing if you’re looking to settle in for a relaxing
evening or a spirited conversation. And there’s nothing
old-fashioned about that.

Our Old Fashioned is

served up on a custom
Knob Creek® bar built by
James Schadewald/ KNOB CREEK® RYE OLD FASHIONED
Popular Mechanics.
For details, visit INGREDIENTS PREPARATION
popularmechanics.com/ – 2 parts Knob Creek® Rye Start by adding dashes of bitters to a
buildabar.
double Old Fashioned glass. Next, add
– 1 quarter part
rich Demerara syrup.* Follow with
rich Demerara syrup* Knob Creek® Rye. Bring together by
– 3 dashes Hella® adding a large, 2-inch ice cube and stirring
Aromatic Bitters for 15-20 seconds. Finish by expressing
oils from wide swath of lemon peel over
– Lemon peel surface of cocktail.
*Rich Demerara Simple Syrup Recipe: 2 parts Demerara (turbinado) sugar, 1 part
hot (not boiling) water. Combine and stir until well incorporated. Can be stored in
refrigerator for 1 week.

KNOB CREEK® KENTUCKY STRAIGHT RYE WHISKEY 50% ALC./VOL.

©2019 KNOB CREEK DISTILLING COMPANY, CLERMONT, KY.
 CL E R MON T
K . Y. U. S .

WE’VE BUILT A NAME ON

BOURBON AND A LEGACY ON RYE.

EVERY BIT EARNED

KNOB CREEK® KENTUCKY STRAIGHT BOURBON WHISKEY AND STRAIGHT RYE WHISKEY
50% ALC./VOL. ©2019 KNOB CREEK DISTILLING COMPANY, CLERMONT, KY.
 the Code: Leather Up

HOW TO WEAR IT
FIND YOUR SECOND SKIN LEADING
A good leather jacket costs serious cash, sure, but it forms the cornerstone of any wardrobe. LEATHER
• • • The first step in any
hero’s journey? Throwing
on a leather jacket, of
course. Why is it used by
so many of our favorite
film characters? It signi-
fies a kind of easygoing
ruggedness. Especially
if you wear it with a
twist. Let some of our
cinema favorites inspire
you. —Emma Carey

Keep Up With Jones

T H E S L I M BOM B E R THE B IG S O FT IE Retain the tie, but maybe
Glove-soft suede in navy blue gives the classic Made with supple calfskin, this caramel model features leave the bullwhip at home.
bomber style a sharp modern edge. pocket edges that mimic the effects of age.
Officine Générale ($1,375). Michael Kors ($798).

License to Quill
Red can break up the black-
and-brown monotony.

T H E TRU C KE R TH E G -1
The trucker cut means this jacket can be dressed up A quilted lining and plush shearling collar
with tailored trousers or down with denim. The green make this G-1 flying-jacket style a luxurious yet toasty
hue means you’ll catch some envious stares. choice for deep-winter months.
Todd Snyder ($998). AMI ($2,215). The Cooler King
Chinos will always work with
a leather jacket.
4 4 October 2019_Esquire photographs ( jackets): Jeffrey Westbrook
TIME INSTRUMENTS
FOR URBAN EXPLORERS
 the Code: Leather Up

WHAT ABOUT VINTAGE?

How to dodge the fakes and find THE REAL THING

... The great thing

about leather is that
it gets better with age.
Which means it’s not
impossible to buy a
leather jacket older than
you are that comes with
its patina preloaded.
For eBay hounds like
me, jackets with a re-
searchable provenance
invariably mean military
flight jackets that, if au-
thentic, come—like my
recently purchased G-1
jacket at left—with mili-
tary spec numbers and
U. S. government
contracts on the label.
This allows you to au-
thenticate and date a
jacket before you buy it.
World War II flying
jackets command enor-
mous prices. G-1’s from
the mid-’50s on are usu-
ally more affordable.
Caution: Such is the
appeal of flying jackets
that modern Japanese
replicas are often indis-
tinguishable from their
genuine forebears. It
takes experience to sniff
out pretenders. One
clue: The fakes are more
supple (calfskin) than
the real thing (horse or
goat leather). They’re
usually more expensive,
U. S. Navy G-1 jacket, goatskin, circa 1963, Ralph Edwards Sportswear Inc. Bought on eBay, $100 plus shipping.
too. So stick to the
right stuff. —N. S.

HOW TO KEEP YOUR ARMOR SHINING

• • • When it comes to caring for leather, it’s important to remember that it has a life of its own. It
breathes, it wrinkles, and, most of all, it’s meant to age. ¶ So keeping your leather jacket kicking
shouldn’t feel like plastic surgery. Clean it with a damp cloth when it gets dirty, and if it gets wet,
let it dry naturally. Condition it every three to six months to keep it from drying out (use saddle soap
or a leather conditioner), and give it a polish when it’s looking drab. ¶ Most of all, let your leather
breathe. Waterproofing products can suffocate its natural absorbency, so opt for a water-resistant
protectant instead. And if you’re storing it, don’t body-bag it. Put it in fabric and give it some air when
you can. ¶ Aging gracefully isn’t about masking gray hairs or wrinkles; it’s about embracing them.
Same goes for a few scuffs on your leather jacket. Just ditch the leather pants if you haven’t already. —E. C.

4 8 October 2019_Esquire photograph ( jacket) : Jeffrey Westbrook

 the Code: the Endorsement

IT’S NOT A
TUNA!
Actually, it is. SEIKO
fishes out a classic
with ties to diving and
AH-NOLD.
One of Seiko’s
most sought-after
timepieces was origi-
nally made to solve a
diving problem. On sat-
uration dives, helium
buildup inside watches
would blow the crys-
tal off and wreck the
watch. Seiko prevented
this with the Ref. 6159-
7010, featuring an
outer case that protected
the timepiece under-
water from insidious
gases. It was dubbed
“the Tuna Can” for its
resemblance to a five-
ounce tin of Bumble
Bee. What a nickname.
To top that, when
Arnold Schwarzeneg-
ger wore a model in
the ’80s, this edition
earned the moniker
“the Arnie.” Seiko’s
2019 solar “Arnie”
is an inspired reissue
that tops off its
battery using sunlight
absorbed through
the dial, and with
a 47.8mm diameter,
it’s even beefier.
Which should please
Arnie, too. —N. S.

Prospex Solar Hybrid Diver

watch ($525) by Seiko.

RING OF THE FUTURE

• • • The Black Gold V3 ring looks less like your grandpa’s old wedding band and more like your
potential great-great-great-grandson’s circa 2100. This piece of jewelry is the futuristic creation
of industrial designer James Thompson (aka “Black Badger”) and watch designer Mark Gold.
Trimmed with a mix of glow-in-the-dark Swiss Super-LumiNova material that’s normally found in
watches, it resembles a nut that fell off a Tron motorcycle. Its lume can be customized to shine in
different colors, and it has moving parts—the outer pieces rotate with a click. Something to fidget
with in the dark besides your phone. From $1,200; blackbadger.se —E. C.

Ring ($1,200) by Mark Gold x Black Badger.

ph otog raph (top) : Jeffrey Westbrook 49

 the Code: Trending

ZEGNA’S NEW
KICKS
The century-old ITALIAN BRAND
gets a 21st-century upgrade

Dressing the mod-

ern man is like trying
to eat soup with a fork, a
vexing business. It used
to be simple, if a designer
made elegant clothing
well and men subscribed
to the stereotypes of male
style. But a change has
come over us in the past
decade. Now designing
for men means creating
clothing that responds to
the needs of a wider cus-
tomer base, of broader
ages and backgrounds,
with none of the old ste-
reotypes in their minds.
We’re concerned with
looking good, but feeling
good is paramount.

Coat ($6,950), turtleneck

sweater ($990), trousers
($5,925, part of suit), and
boots ($1,595) by Ermenegildo
Zegna XXX.

ph otograph: Allie Holloway

 For Italian men’s-wear
leader Ermenegildo
Zegna, the challenge is to
tap into the altered psy-
che of the 21st-century
male. As a global brand
with century-old roots
in making the finest
cloths for tailors, Zegna
must produce designs
that are timeless, but
current as well, sartori-
ally and emotionally.
For Ermenegildo
(“Gildo”) Zegna, grand-
son of the founder of the
company and CEO of
the Ermenegildo Zegna
Group, the first step is
recognizing the intangi-
ble qualities of men now.
“We believe masculin-
ity is a state of mind, not
linked to stereotypes,”
he says. “Men have been
coming to terms with
their weaknesses and
strengths and are willing
to embrace their view of A NEW MAN tor, Alessandro Sartori,
what masculinity is.” ZEGNA NEEDED AN AMBASSADOR FOR ITS who designs Zegna Cou-
It’s easier perhaps to NEW DIRECTION. THE COMPANY ture and is Gildo’s cre-
define what modern FOUND ITS MAN IN MAHERSHALA ative right-hand man,
ALI, FRESH OFF HIS OSCAR-WINNING PER-
masculinity isn’t. Nailing FORMANCE IN GREEN BOOK. knew Ali was perfect.
what it is is far harder. “From day one, among
To do that, the brand the panel of talents we
needed a new direction put together, Maher-
and ambassador. It shala was the one of our
found him, for this fall, dreams,” he explains.
in actor Mahershala Ali. Sartori fuses technical
Zegna’s artistic direc- innovation with ele-
gance and articulates a
vision in the Couture
line that never ignores
the luxury of a brand
steeped in textiles.
“I think that today, to
create beautiful collec-
tions is not enough,” he
says. “We have the op-
portunity to go beyond
and involve people in
things that matter. The
question ‘What makes a
man?’ is the fil rouge of
the new Zegna path.
Our aim is to encourage
an open conversation
Left: Alessandro Sartori and Ermenegildo Zegna. Above: Looks from the around modern mascu-
Ermenegildo Zegna XXX Autumn/Winter 2019 show. linity.” — N . S .

October 2019_Esquire 51
 the Code: Hardware

THE OPTIONS
NICE TIFFANY,

YOU’RE MY BOY, BLUE

TIFFANY wants to put a ring on you
DUDE
• • • Tiffany for men?
Not an oxymoron.
Here are highlights from
the expanded line.

The white dial is

elegant, the stainless
steel durable.
S PA R K J OY
TIFFANY IS JUMP-STARTING ITS Tiffany 1837 Makers watch
MEN’S OFFERINGS WITH A COLLEC- ($3,400).
TION OF SUBTLY MODERN, HAND-
CRAFTED PIECES LIKE THIS GOLD
RING AND THESE CUFF LINKS.

The macho dog tag

gets sophisticated in
18-karat gold.

Tiffany 1837 Makers ID tag

You already know
Tiffany’s jewelry.
That iconic blue box
holds an almost mys-
tical power, whether it
contains a pair of cuff
links (for you) or an en-
gagement ring (for, well,
not you). But here’s the
thing: The iconic jew-
eler doesn’t want you to
think of its new line of
men’s jewelry as jewelry.
“I think of jewelry as
more an accessory than
jewelry per se,” says Reed
Krakoff, chief artistic of-
ficer of Tiffany & Co. “It’s
not about a man who wears
jewelry or doesn’t wear
jewelry. It adds to their
own sense of style with-
out overwhelming them.”
To develop Tiffany’s
new men’s collection,
Krakoff drew on a team
of more than 5,000
skilled artisans to refine
and extend the brand’s
offerings for a new gen-
eration of men while re-
specting the company’s
legacy of modern design.
From a subtly grooved
18-karat-gold ring to a
scaled-down ID brace-
let, these are pieces that
any guy (“jewelry guy”
or not) can easily throw
on and forget about.
Taking inspiration
from the modernist
spirit with which Tif-
fany is synonymous—
think Rockefeller Cen-
ter, Radio City Music
Hall, and the company’s
iconic flagship store on
Tiffany 1837 Makers ring ($1,200) and cuff links ($3,400) by Tiffany & Co.
New York’s Fifth Ave- pendant ($4,000).
nue—Krakoff set out to
streamline men’s jew-
elry. His mission is to re-
mind men that Tiffany’s
design heritage is about
masculine modernity.
“We’re really mak-
ing things the right
way—by hand, one
at a time, using the
best materials,” says
Krakoff. “It’s just about a
man who wants to wear
something that’s per- There’s never been a
sonal.” And yes, Tiffany more dapper way
still does engravings. to nail that trick shot.
—Benjamin Chait
Everyday Objects
wooden pool triangle and
ball set ($1,500).

52 October 2019_Esquire
STACYA D AM S. COM
STA C YA DA MS .CO M
 the Code: Shop It

SAIL INTO
STYLE
Make SEASE, a new
Italian label,
your go-to for pieces
that work from
boat to boardroom
When Franco Loro
Piana’s family sold
its legendary textile and
fashion business, he and
his brother, Giacomo,
sought to define some-
thing intensely personal
to them: surfing, sailing,
and sport. The result is
Sease, a new label that
fuses luxury and perfor-
mance, two things the
Italians are historically
pretty good at.
The coat shown here
is made with a cloth cus-
tomarily used in Milanese
suits, but it comes in a
very nontraditional blend
of wool and bio-based
nylon for breathability
and waterproofing. “We
didn’t set out to make
a purely sport collec-
tion—these pieces work
just as well for you in
your city life,” says Loro
Piana, who keeps a surf-
board in his office in Mi-
lan. “It makes you feel a
bit happier.” Find Sease
online (sease.it) or in its
New York City pop-up
later this month, cre-
Coat ($2,045), sweater ($820), and trousers ($510) by Sease,
modaoperandi.com; sneakers ($416) by Common Projects. ated with luxury retailer
Moda Operandi. —N. S.

SAKS BUILDS THE MECCA OF WATCHES

• • • Saks Fifth Avenue’s New York City flagship has created an epic, Gatsby-evoking
chamber of watches and jewelry called the Vault. It features six shop-in-shops from luxury
brands such as Chanel, Chopard, and Piaget—all with their own VIP rooms—in addition
to eight vendor-designed shops, from Baume & Mercier, Franck Muller, Hermès, and others.
The interior design has the allure of a bank from the 1920s: vault doors, sculptures inspired
by safe deposit boxes, rich leather accents. Check out one of the private rooms and you
just might leave feeling the whole experience was made specifically for you. —Alyssa Sims

p hot o gra p h (t o p) : Jean Yves Lemoigne Monaco Gulf Racing 50th Anniversary special edition ($5,900) by TAG Heuer.

THE PRICE OF BEING A GOOD HAIR GUY
When I decided to
grow my hair out, I
had to break up with my
barber and switch to
a stylist. After years of
$40 crops, I didn’t real-
ize it meant my haircut
could climb into the tri-
ple digits. Finding a salon
that charged more than
a car payment wasn’t
difficult; getting over
the sticker shock was.
Men are not taught to
invest in their appear-
ance. When Bill Clinton
got a $200 haircut aboard
Air Force One or French
president François Hol-
lande spent $10,000 a
month on his grooming,
the outcry was intense.
Could these men be that
vain? But the price of a
54 October 2019_Esquire
A great haircut can be transformative.
But is it really worth SPENDING HUNDREDS on a trim? It depends.
trim actually has little to
do with the haircut itself.
So how much should you
be spending?
It used to be that the
difference between bar-
ber and salon cuts was all
about technique. Bar-
bers use a lot of clippers.
Hairstylists rely on scis-
sors, which are suited
to longer, textured styles.
Now the difference
isn’t so cut-and-dried.
“Hybrid barbering in-
corporates both tech-
niques,” says Andres
Morales, lead barber
at Johnny’s Chop Shop
in Brooklyn (haircuts:
$36). According to Mo-
rales, the combination
of the two tools allows
for more versatility.
the Code: Grooming
The price also de- is a cut specific to you. curly, thinning, or
pends on the environ- “Cookie-cutter does longer hair, even if
ment. Salons have more not exist,” says Barrett. the end result doesn’t
overhead; they’ll wash It’s like a bespoke look elaborate. Says
your hair and offer suit versus the off-the- Barrett, “Sometimes
other services, like color rack version. the differences are
(which drives up costs Short hairstyles need subtle, but they’re
even if you’re not get- to be cut about once important.”
ting it). “If you go to a a month, and invest- Chris, a publicist in
diner or a fancy restau- ing that much time and New York City, switched
rant, you’ll be well money isn’t really a via- to $200 stylist cuts be-
fed at both, but the pre- ble option for most. Jay, cause to him they’re no-
sentation is very dif- a father of two from New ticeably better. “Hair is
ferent,” says hairstylist Jersey, pays $20 for his a big part of how I show
John Barrett. (A haircut simple crop cut, because up in the world,” he
by him at his New York it works. “I try to spend says. “I’m happier. It’s
City salon costs $600.) less on me and more on worth it to me.”
The biggest price in- the kids,” he says. So choose your hair
dicator is time. Tradi- But what if you have guy based on his work
tional barbershops are difficult hair? Take it and the light he puts in
assembly lines with hair- from me: A stylist or a your step. Price is im-
cuts every 15 minutes. hybrid barber could be portant, sure, but a little
Stylist cuts take around life-changing. Scissors vanity isn’t a bad thing.
an hour, but the result can work magic with —Garrett Munce
PROMOTION

stainless steel case with gold ion plated bezel

Japanese chronograph movement
5ATM / 165ft water resistance

available at macys.com
PROMOTION

E XC LUS I VE LY AT
 E N T E R TA I N S

GET
INTIMATE,
f ro m D i n n e r P a r t y. . .
October 2019_Esquire 57
 . . . to A f te r - P a r t y
We cocoon when things get crazy. We hunker down. It’s only natural.
The barrage of unsettling news over the past few years has gotten a lot
of us longing for something settled. Entertaining at home has rarely been
more attractive, because there is so much comfort in the communion
of breaking bread and opening bottles with friends. With that in mind,
what we offer here are some easy suggestions for bringing it all back
home: Bowls of pasta that don’t require your traveling to Modena for a
master class. A pantry full of aromatic spices that can give your cooking
majestic sweep with nothing more than a shake. Rice perfumed by a
whole fish. Crispy toasts overflowing with jammy tomatoes. A nightcap
that will mellow everyone out. Whether you’re inviting over a rowdy
entourage or lighting candles at the table for a Friday-night staycation for
two, these are the things you’ll want to eat and drink as you shut out
the world and dig in. So when do you want us to drop by? —Jeff Gordinier
P h o to g ra p h s by PEDEN & MUNK
58 October 2019_Esquire

TOASTS
with the Mosts
E L E VAT E D, B U T ST I L L E ASY
• • • Make all the jokes you want about av-
ocado toast being a major millennial food
group. Toasts are the perfect party starter
because they are fast and the combinations
are limitless. But there are some guide-
lines to make them feel more special than
a quick breakfast. They benefit from a con-
trast of textures, colors, and flavors. And
there should usually be an adhesive: mayo
to grab the avocado, crème fraîche to se-
cure the endive. There’s a secret, however,
to making toasts even more special: Toss
baguette slices with a bright dressing and
bake. This trick gives you so much addi-
tional flavor and crispiness. Here’s how
to prepare them, and some tried-and-true
ways to top them. But really, anything you
dream up will be right. —Phyllis Grant
STEP 1:
Prepare Dressing
• Shake the following in a
large jar until emulsified:
• 1 cup olive oil
• ⅓ cup sherry-wine
vinegar
• ⅓ cup lemon juice
• 2 Tbsp Dijon mustard
• 2 Tbsp honey
• 3 large cloves garlic,
peeled and microplaned
• 2 tsp lemon zest
• 1½ tsp kosher salt
• Shake hard! Refrigerate up
to a month.
STEP 2:
T h e C r i s p y To a s t s
Preheat the oven to 350°F.
Pour 1 cup of dressing into
a large mixing bowl. Cut
2-day-old baguettes on
an aggressive bias into
½-inch elongated slices
and toss them with the
dressing until evenly
coated. Bake until they are
crispy and just starting to
brown, about 20 minutes.
STEP 3:
J a m m y To m a t o e s
This is an optional topping,
but it’s sure to be a crowd-
pleaser. While the toasts
cook, stem and halve 4 cups
of cherry tomatoes. Place
them in one layer on a large
baking dish and toss with
¼ cup of the dressing and a
handful of torn, hearty fresh
herbs, like sage, thyme, or
oregano. Put in the 350°F
oven. Cook for an hour or
until the tomatoes shrivel
up and get jammy. Cool
and then refrigerate for up
to a week or freeze for
up to 6 months.
STEP 4:
Time to Build
Start with these combina-
tions I love. Then play.
1. Toast base: a layer of
room-temp or warm jammy
tomatoes (remove any herb
twigs). Topping: anchovies
packed in oil.
2. Toast base: Dijon mus-
tard. Topping: finely shred-
ded red cabbage tossed
with finely chopped green
olives, chopped cilantro, and
an obscene amount of the
dressing. To finish: lemon
zest, baby knobs of Gorgon-
zola, and toasted pine nuts.
3. Toast base: a generous
schmear of crème fraîche.
Topping: chopped frisée,
parsley, and dressing. To
finish: crumbled crispy ba-
con and chopped roasted/
salted pistachios.
Note: If your crispy toasts or
jammy tomatoes are frozen,
take them out of the freezer
an hour before it’s time to
eat. You can refresh the
crispy toasts in a 350°F oven
for 5 minutes and warm up
your jammy tomatoes in a pot
or in the microwave. Take
your dressing out of the
fridge 30 minutes before
anything happens.
 hours rolling out delicate sheets of dough.
P r o S h o r tc u t s f o r So we’ve asked Funke for some delectable

KILLER PASTA
shortcuts. The idea here, with these kitchen Evan Funke’s 2. Start cooking the spa-
hacks (find two more at Esquire.com), is that Puttanesca ghetti per instructions on
the box, but easy on the
you’re using supermarket pasta straight out What you need: salt since you’re using an-
G OT D R I E D PASTA A N D T H E F R I D G E O F A of the box, but instead of flooding it with red • can of tomatoes chovies and olives.
BACHELOR? YOU CAN DO THIS. • spaghetti 3. In a pan with olive oil,
sauce from a jar, you’re creating something • olive oil add the basil, chopped gar-
significantly more delicious with a few items • garlic lic, and anchovy. Heat and
• • • At Felix Trattoria, his restaurant in you can quickly pluck from the pantry and • anchovy or 2 stir for a minute. Add the
• pitted green or tomatoes, and then, when
southern California, and in American the fridge: anchovies, garlic, olives, canned
black olives the pasta is close to done,
Sfoglino, his new cookbook, chef Evan tomatoes. Funke’s recipes are, yes, blunt— the olives and capers.
If you have them:
Funke preaches the gospel of making pasta in the best possible way. They’re straight- • basil 4. Strain the cooked
by hand. And we are believers: Esquire forward and swift, and they represent an al- pasta. Keep a bit of the
• capers
water and toss the pasta
named Felix the best new restaurant in ternative gospel for those who don’t have 1. Drain the tomatoes, in the pan until all of it is
America in 2017. But let’s be blunt. When the energy to make pasta from scratch: At then crush them with nicely coated. Add pasta
you come home drained after a hard day at the close of every day, you deserve some- your hands and toss out water if it’s too dry.
the tops where the stems 5. Garnish with basil and
work, the last thing you want to do is spend thing delicious. —J. G. used to be. Set aside. more olive oil. Eat.
 Eater, and Lifelong Outsider, could be seen united deliciousness. You can use fillets,
Embrace the as an epic love poem (with recipes) to the sure, but cooking things on the bone is al-
country that changed the self-described ways better, Orkin advises. “You get more

WHOLE FISH
BONUS POINTS FOR ’GRAM-ABILITY
• • • Ivan Orkin’s The Gaijin Cookbook:
Japanese Recipes from a Chef, Father,
ramen junkie’s life: Japan. This aromatic
dish from The Gaijin Cookbook is a reflec-
tion of the Japanese customs you’d encoun-
ter in his home. It is called tai meshi. Es-
sentially, you sear fish, transfer it to a pot
of rice, and cook them together so that they
bond into a party-bowl manifestation of
flavor seeping into your liquid,” he says.
Important step: Try to use a donabe, a tra-
ditional Japanese ceramic vessel, and leave
the lid on until the moment you’re ready
to reveal the dish to your guests. They’ll
relish the scent and grab their phones to
snap a picture. —J. G.

Ta i M e s h i coat with the vegetable

• 1½ cups Japanese
short-grain rice
• One 5-inch square
kombu (dried kelp)
• 1 whole small sea
bream, red snapper,
or porgy (about 1 lb),
cleaned and scaled
• 2 tsp kosher salt
• 2 Tbsp soy sauce
• 1 Tbsp sake
• 1 Tbsp mirin
• 1 Tbsp vegetable oil
• 1 Tbsp roasted
sesame seeds
• 2 negi (Japanese green
onions) or 4 scallions,
sliced very thin on the
bias (about ½ cup)
1. Place rinsed rice into
a large (3- to 4-quart)
donabe or Dutch oven.
Add the kombu and 1¾
cups of water to the pot.
Soak for 30 minutes.
2. Meanwhile, prep the
fish. Cut five ½-inch-
deep diagonal slits into
each side of the fish. Rub
the salt into the slits and
the cavity.
3. Remove and discard
the kombu. Stir in the
soy sauce, sake, and
mirin and allow the rice
to soak for 20 more
minutes.
4. Heat a large nonstick
pan over high heat, then
oil. Once the oil is shim-
mering, add the fish and
sear on both sides; 2 to
3 minutes per side should
be enough to give the skin
some color and the fish
a head start on cooking.
Remove from the heat.
5. Place the seared fish
on top of the rice and
set the pot over high
heat. If the fish is too big
to lie flat, curl the tail
end up around the edge
of the pot, or cut off the
head and set it on top of
the rice next to the body.
Bring the rice to a sim-
mer, then drop the heat
as low as it will go, cover
the pot, and cook for 14
minutes. Shut off the
heat and allow to stand,
covered, for 10 minutes.
6. Uncover the pot and
give your diners a peek at
what’s inside. Then care-
fully remove the fish and
add the sesame seeds
and negi or scallions to
the pot. Use a fork or
chopsticks to fluff and
mix the rice. Cover again
while you pick the meat
from the fish. Stir the
fish into the rice and
serve immediately, with
a dish of sea salt and
another of shichimi
togarashi on the side.

BRING BACK opportunities to indulge your inner child. Donner Dinner Party ($15): Good for calling
Even when our conversations turn to politics out your friends for lying. You’ll have to suss out
GAME NIGHT or other discontents, we always end the night who among you is the secret cannibal trying to
IT’S NOT JUST FOR D&D NERDS breathless with laughter. eat the hapless pioneers.

Once every month, four friends and I gather at

one person’s apartment, only to stumble home
silly, sloshed, and maybe even triumphant
come 2:00 A . M . We call this: game night.
You may say, “Game nights are for hardcore
gamers—I’m not a hardcore gamer.” Neither ( $ 3 0) : A sidesplitting
am I. Whether you’re a D&D fanatic, a charades game that asks you to
maven, or the laid-back type who enjoys casual, caption popular memes
punchy games like Cards Against Humanity, like “cat on chair” and
ga m e n i g h t c a n b e w h a t eve r yo u wa n t i t “disaster girl.”
to be. In modern life, there aren’t enough —Adrienne Westenfeld

Illustrations: N aya-Ch eyen ne October 2019_Esquire 61

 Build a Power
PANTRY
T H E S E A R E T H E S E C R E T I N G R E D I E N T S TO M A K E L A S T- M I N U T E
D I S H E S A N D O L D STA N D BYS F E E L S P EC I A L

• • • The food you cook for friends is only going to be as good

as the flavor you have at your fingertips. Pour out the stale
grocery-store powders that have been gathering dust at the
back of your pantry since you graduated from college and up-
grade to these first-rate spices and sauces. When the quality
is primo, even a pinch packs a punch. —J. G.

A. Saltverk salts Turkey!” Their foodie effu- irresistible sauces manage

Chefs will tell you that
great cooking starts with
great salt. Harvested in
Iceland and infused with
the flavors of arctic
thyme, birch smoke,
licorice, and seaweed,
Saltverk salts will deliver
that mineral magic.
B. Burlap &
Barrel spices
These days it’s not uncom-
mon to hear serious gas-
tronomes swooning over
the latest fragrant batch
from Burlap & Barrel:
“Ohhh, that wild mountain
cumin from Afghanistan!
The black Urfa chiles from
sions sound excessive un-
til you get your first taste.
Once that happens, you’ll
never go back.
C. Fly by Jing
mala spice mix
Give your steak a Sichuan-
style dry rub, because
nothing says “party time”
like numbed lips.
D. Basbaas sauces
Hawa Hassan’s tamarind-
date sauce (the sweeter
one) and coconut-cilantro
chutney (the hotter one)
have a way of delighting
your guests with surprise.
With roots in Somalia, the
to play well with every sort
of dish, even for those eat-
ers whose experience with
East African cuisine has
been heretofore limited.
E. El Naranjo
salsa macha
Salsa macha (which has
nothing to do with matcha)
is a dense, chewy smear of
chiles and peanuts that
have been cooked down to
a reddish-black paste.
This version, from the
acclaimed restaurant
El Naranjo in Austin, lends
itself to absolutely any ap-
plication, from scrambled
eggs to seafood.

62 October 2019_Esquire
 PORK
SHOULDER
• 5 lb boneless pork
shoulder
• kosher salt
• 5 Tbsp olive oil
• 1 (750 ml) bottle white
wine, such as
chardonnay
• 4 cups whole milk
• 2¼ cups heavy cream
• about 4 cups chicken
stock
• 1 large onion, halved
• 1 sprig sage
• 3 sprigs thyme
• 2 bay leaves
• 1 head garlic, halved
horizontally
JASMINE RICE
SOUBISE
• 2 cups uncooked
jasmine rice
• 3 medium Spanish
onions, sliced
• generous cup heavy
cream
• kosher salt
Make the pork shoulder:
1. Season the meat on all
sides with salt and marinate
in the refrigerator for at
least 12 hours, ideally
overnight.
2. Preheat the oven to
350°F. In a large Dutch oven
or heavy-bottomed pot, heat
the olive oil over high heat.
Season the pork lightly with
salt once more and cook it,
turning, until deep golden
brown on all sides, about 15
minutes total. Move the pork
to a plate to rest.
3. Drain the excess fat from
the pot, but keep any crispy
bits on the bottom, and re-
Give It the
(PORK)
SHOULDER
SOULFUL, FORTIFYING DECADENCE,
O N E D U TC H O V E N AT A T I M E
• • • Heartfelt. Personal. Those are often overused ad-
jectives when describing a great chef’s cooking. But
sometimes you have a dish and, well, those really are
the best words to describe what you just experienced.
Angie Mar’s milk-braised pork shoulder is one of them.
While Beatrice Inn, her restaurant in New York City,
may be known more for its decadent cuts of innovative
beef, this dish, from Mar’s Butcher + Beast: Mastering
the Art of Meat: A Cookbook, is the one that will make
your home feel like, well, home. —Kevin Sintumuang
turn the pot to medium heat.
Add the white wine and
bring to a simmer, scraping
up any browned bits. Re-
duce the wine until ¼ cup
remains, about 15 minutes.
4. Return the pork to the pot
and add the milk, cream, and
enough stock to just cover.
Tie the onion, sage, thyme,
bay leaves, and garlic in a
square of cheesecloth and
add the sachet to the pot as
well. Cover with a cartouche
(parchment paper will do),
then cover with a lid.
5. Transfer to the oven and
bake until the pork is tender
and falls apart when pulled
with a fork or picked with
hands, about 2½ hours.
Make the soubise:
1. Place the rice in a large pot.
Cover it with the onions and 2
cups of water; do not stir.
Bring to a boil, then cover
with a cartouche, reduce the
heat to low, and cook until the
rice is tender with a slight
bite, about 30 minutes.
2. Working in small batches,
spoon equal parts rice and
onion into a food processor
and pulse quickly with ¼
cup of the cream at a time,
until the rice is coarse but
creamy, like polenta. Season
lightly with salt. Transfer to
a bowl and repeat with the
remaining rice and onion.
3. Serve family-style or cut
the pork into individual por-
tions. Spread the rice
soubise along the bottom of
a platter or bowls, top with
the pork shoulder, and
spoon the braising liquid
over everything.
SMALL SPACE,
BIG PARTY
FUN IS NOT MEASURED IN
SQUARE FOOTAGE
If you’re on Instagram, chances are you’ve
seen #TheStew, a vibrant chickpea stew with
coconut and turmeric, and #TheCookies, a
crunchy, buttery shortbread/cookie fusion.
The kitchen virtuoso behind those viral
recipes is Alison Roman, a columnist at Bon
Appétit and The New York Times. This month,
Roman released her second cookbook, Nothing
Fancy, about how to have a relaxed, unfussy
gathering in the home. We asked her for tips
and tricks for throwing a great dinner party,
even if you have little to no kitchen and aren’t
exactly a party person. —A. W.
Tiny kitchen? Party on: Regardless of the
size of your kitchen, if you have a stove, a
refrigerator, and a place to put your cutting
board, you’ll be fine. Don’t try to make a
thousand different dishes.
Embrace the no-cook party: If you have
space and time, then you should absolutely
be cooking, but if you don’t have either, then
there’s nothing wrong with saying, “I’ll put out
some crackers and dip and call it a day.”
No seats, no problem: I f t h e r e’s a n
overwhelming shortage of seating, it becomes
less of a sit-down dinner party and more of
a stand-up dinner party, or a sit-on-the-floor
dinner party. Then the food becomes more
snacky and cocktail focused. I adapt once I
know how many people are coming over.
Use what you’ve got: Basically, whatever
I’m trying to serve, I pick the biggest vessel
that I have for it. I serve martinis out of a
Chemex. I serve dips out of mixing bowls.
Making do with what you have is part of the
charm of entertaining in the home.
Don’t sweat it: There’s a lot of pressure
for people to feel like they have to enjoy
entertaining. It’s okay if you don’t. If you’re
afraid that things aren’t going to go well, just
know that they probably won’t, and that’s
fine. Things don’t go well for me every time,
and I do this professionally. Enjoy it as an
opportunity to be with friends and put down
your fucking phone.
 The warm-up: Go with something gentle, à la King Krule or Juan Wauters.
LET THE
People are beginning to arrive: The power move is to go esoteric to start

ALGORITHM MOVE YOU the conversation and let people know how cool you are. Try some Chilean
pop, like Mon Laferte, or neo-flamenco R&B/pop star Rosalía.
EVEN MUSIC SNOBS CAN USE SONGS ON TAP
conversation. Think Serge Gainsbourg.
We’re going meta here. If you read enough stories about throwing a party
and head to the bit about music, the advice you’ll get is something along
the lines of: Put some effort into your playlist if you really want to control
the mood of the evening. Or enlist your music-nerd friend. Or hire a DJ.
people randomly add stuff to the queue.
All good advice, sure, but the reality is, most of us are just shouting,
After-after-party: Why not a tipsy ’90s-
“Hey, Alexa, play Feist Radio” into the ether while trying to get guests to
trash sing-along to hits everyone knows
use their coasters.
from Smash Mouth and Sugar Ray?
And you know what? Nothing wrong with that. The trick is to know the
Please leave: Silence! Nothing kills a party
right stations to hit up on Spotify and when to deploy them. Here’s a loose
like quiet. Or Kenny G’s “Going Home.”
schedule of what to play:

Raid the
TOP SHELF
TIME TO DUST OFF THE GOOD STUFF

• • • Those “special” bottles you have stored

for a “special occasion”? That’s now. With
your friends. Singular spirits have a way of
creating powerful memories when they’re
the last thing you sip after a fun evening.
Bust them out. They’ll bring back warm
feelings the next time you taste them.—K.S.

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Empirical Spirits
Charlene McGee Blend
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64 October 2019_Esquire
 Raise one
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WHAT’S THE DEAL ...
WITH
ANWANDER

J
BY

JONAH
WEINER
CHRISTIAN

O H N
PHOTOGRAPHS BY

P. 67
HE HAS TWO EMMYS, A MULTISPECIAL DEAL WITH
NETFLIX, AND THE RESPECT OF COMEDIANS YOU PROBABLY WORSHIP.
HE’S ALSO A SUIT-WEARING SQUARE WHO’S
INSPIRED BY STEPHEN SONDHEIM AND WRITES JOKES ABOUT HIS PUG,
PETUNIA. IS THAT WHAT WE REALLY NEED IN 2019?

MULANEY?
 PAGE 66:
Jacket, shirt, and tie by
Giorgio Armani.
THIS PAGE:
Jacket, shirt,
trousers, and boots,
Saint Laurent by
Anthony
Vaccarello.

ALEX, ONE OF
HT
IG
E
CHILD
ACTORS SITTING in a circle with John Mu-
laney, has a grand unified theory about bloop-
er reels that he would like to share right this
second. “Before I see a movie, I always watch
the blooper reels,” he explains. “If that movie
has no fun moments, like, so that means they
didn’t even have fun doing it? So then I’m not
gonna watch the movie.” Mulaney’s eyebrows
fly upward—Alex’s logic is a touch cockeyed
but impressive. “That’s brilliant!” he says.
It’s a Tuesday afternoon in July, and he
and the actors—ages eight to twelve—are
gathered in a fluorescent-lit rehearsal space
in Manhattan’s Theater District, here to re-
hearse his next, as-of-yet-untitled comedy
special. A couple years ago, on the same block,
he starred with his friend Nick Kroll in a hit
Broadway show they cowrote, Oh, Hello, por-
traying two grumpy, corduroy-sporting sep-
tuagenarian weirdos partial to cocaine, casu-
al misogyny, and Steely Dan. Last year, five
blocks north, Mulaney did seven straight
sold-out stand-up shows at Radio City Music
Hall; footage from one of those shows became
his third special, Kid Gorgeous. Whereas that
one, released by Netflix, was a watchmaker-
tight hour of jokes, he’s trying something
new this time: a children’s variety show. And
these children have a lot to say about bloop-
ers. “I think they should have blooper reels
at the end of scary movies so people can go
home and not feel terrified,” another kid in-
terjects. “Right,” Mulaney says, nodding. “A
catharsis of sorts.” He scans the circle. “This
whole special,” he tells the kids, “is going to
be a blooper reel.”
Mulaney, thirty-seven, is modeling the new
special on the entertainment he loved grow-
ing up: 3-2-1 Contact, the eighties-era PBS af-
ter-school classic; Really Rosie, a 1980 musi-
cal by Maurice Sendak and Carole King; and,
of course, Sesame Street. “It’s been on TV how
many—fifty years?” Mulaney tells me later.
He’s been rewatching old episodes recently,
in thrall to their elastic approach to narrative.
“It’s modular, fast-paced. Bizarrely paced,”
he says. “They’ll cut to a kid who blows up a
balloon, draws a smiley face on it, and pops
it. Like, ‘Great, love it, moving on!’ ” With
the new show, he wants to make something
that will appeal to kids and adults alike. His
thinking is twofold. “It’s something I’d like to
watch,” he says. “And I don’t wanna do any-
thing anyone else is doing.”
Mulaney doesn’t have to do anything he
doesn’t want to: A decade into his career, he’s
at the height of his powers, with a string of
successes to show for it. Kid Gorgeous won an
Emmy—his second. His first came halfway
into his five-season stint, beginning in 2008,
as a writer on Saturday Night Live, during
which time he and Bill Hader created the ab-
surdist nightlife correspondent Stefon. Last
year, Mulaney signed a multispecial deal with
Netflix and, in something like a victory lap,
returned to SNL to host. This past March,
he hosted again. Among comedians, he’s es-
teemed across generations: David Letterman
has called Mulaney “the future of comedy.”
Jerry Seinfeld has said, “He really knows his
way around the comedy arts.” Pete Davidson
has ranked him in his top five, alongside Ed-
die Murphy and Dave Chappelle.
This fall, Mulaney and Davidson will head
out on a tour—a shared bill that grew out of
their offstage friendship. Mulaney invites
Davidson to Steely Dan concerts, whereas
“Pete invites me over while he gets a tattoo,”
Mulaney says. “Like, ‘Yo, I’m getting tatted
at my house. You want to come over and we
watch Back to School?’ ” One time, Mulaney
hung out with Davidson and his then girl-
friend Ariana Grande. “We watched a movie
together,” he says. “Eighth Grade. Bo Burn-
ham.” He speaks of the tour with the tender-
ness of an older brother: “I knew Pete loved
stand-up more than anything and wanted to
get out there.”
But first, the kids’ variety show. In the re-
hearsal space, it’s time to practice a musical
number. A kid named Suri—braided po-
nytail, colorful printed leggings—launch-
es into a duet with Mulaney. It starts with
her repeatedly asking him, over ambling pi-
ano accompaniment, to “play Restaurant”
with her, where she’s the proprietor and he’s
a customer. “Won’t you please play Restau-
raaaant?” she begs. Mulaney demurs with
a singsongy reply. She begs some more till
he assents, asking, “Hi, can I come into your
restaurant?” The song cuts off and the smile
drops from Suri’s face. “I’m sorry,” she says.
“We’re closed for a private event.”
Everyone laughs. Mulaney apologizes for
his singing, which could be politely described
as pitch challenged. Suri is encouraging. “You
try,” she tells him. “You try.”
“Suri, it’s not gonna get even a tiny bit bet-
ter,” he says. “It might get worse.”
THE MAÎTRE D’
has no idea who John Mulaney is. He scrolls
through the reservation list, frowning. “John
Morane?” he asks. “I might be?” says Mulaney.
Rehearsals for the upcoming special have
wrapped for the day, and he’s trying to
squeeze in a quick bite at a nearby brasse-
rie. As if on cue, a woman approaches. “I’m
69
P.

a huge fan!” she tells Mulaney. The maître d’
looks at her, then at the clean-cut, unassum-
ing guy with the enormous backpack whom
she’s praising. “We have a table for you,” he
announces.
Mulaney places a spartan order: French-
onion soup, tap water, bread. “Food is a nui-
sance,” he says, eating with astonishing slow-
ness—maybe one slurp per minute—almost
to illustrate the point. After this he’s due at a
writing session to tinker with the new show’s
script. In one sketch, he tells me, “A kid does
a book report on A Year of Magical Think-
ing, by Joan Didion, thinking it was a magic
book: ‘Unlike 1001 Marvelous Magic Tricks to
Amaze Your Friends, this is a gripping mem-
oir of grief from one of the greatest writers of
her generation!’ ” Mulaney pauses. “Some-
one said to me, ‘You know you mention Joan
Didion three times in this special, right?’ ”
He shakes his head. “We probably have to
cut one of those.”
In the world of stand-up, where nothing’s
valorized quite like edginess, Mulaney rel-
ishes his squareness to an almost defiant de-
gree. The better part of a decade ago, when
he was still honing his style in the comedy
clubs, Mulaney saw a sea of dudes on stages
and in crowds dressed the same way he was,
in flannel shirts and jeans. So he began wear-
ing tailored suits onstage and inflecting his
delivery with the retro tones and cadences
of a fifties TV announcer absolutely crushing
an Ovaltine ad. He ignored the trend toward
confessional, morally knotty, often filthy hu-
mor—pioneered by Richard Pryor, repopu-
larized by Louis C. K.—and dug instead in-
to a finely observed silliness that he aimed
at all manner of unlikely subjects: the stric-
tures of his upper-middle-class upbringing,
the oedipal weirdness of Back to the Future,
the sublime preposterousness of Ice-T’s di-
alogue on Law & Order: SVU. Mulaney fills
his jokes with evocative details and deft turns
of phrase. He cares deeply about what you
might call joke math, tweaking and deleting
to get phrasings just right. “It’s not ‘I was so
tired that blah blah blah,’ ” he says. “You want
‘I collapsed.’ ” What’s consistent throughout
is his disregard for what’s popular. “I’ve nev-
er been relevant,” Mulaney says, “so I’m not
worried about feeling irrelevant.”
Like Jerry Seinfeld, one of his biggest influ-
ences, Mulaney is obsessed with finding the
humor in the quotidian and the banal. He’s
never funnier, as far as he’s concerned, than
when he gets “exasperated about things you
P. 70
“PETE INVITES ME OVER
WHILE HE GETS A
TATTOO.
LIKE, ‘YO, I’M GETTING TATTED
AT MY HOUSE.
YOU WANT TO COME
OVER AND WATCH
BACK TO
SCHOOL?’ ”
shouldn’t get that upset about.” Trying out
new bits, he knows he’s onto something when
it feels like “having a crush. When you can’t
stop thinking about, like, ‘Why do they do
that on House Hunters?’ and your take on it
is as strong as something written by Robespi-
erre.” (It takes a unique mind to draw a line be-
tween HGTV and the French Revolution.) At
one point, out of nowhere, he brings up an ob-
scure poster, depicting a blond woman hold-
ing a gyro, that he’s seen hanging for years in
restaurants across New York—a sight most
of us might clock once, if at all, and then nev-
er give a second thought. “I can think about
that poster for so much longer than I can think
about sex and politics,” Mulaney says.
He is deeply uninterested in political mate-
rial. At a moment when politics feels impos-
sible to ignore, the furthest into Washington
he’s ventured is an extended Kid Gorgeous run
in which he likens the president—whom he
doesn’t name—to a horse set loose in a hos-
pital. (“It’s never happened before; no one
knows what the horse is going to do next, least
of all the horse. He’s never been in a hospi-
tal before; he’s as confused as you are.”) Mu-
laney has donated extravagantly to liberal and
Left politicians—many thousands of dollars,
including at least $1,250 to Bernie Sanders
during the 2016 primaries—but keeps such
concerns out of his act. “I have a problem with
‘Comedians are really brave and we need them
now more than ever,’ ” he tells me. “It’s like,
we’re not congressmen. We’re court jesters.”
The tricky thing for Mulaney, as a joke pur-
ist, is how to come off in his comedy as appeal-
ingly out of time without coming off as boor-
ishly out of step or blithely out of touch. His
early sets included miscalculations on this
score—jokes about the confusing (to him)
 aesthetics of drag queens and the implicit fun-
niness (to him) of “midgets”; over-the-top
impressions of black characters (and one of a
mariachi band)—that he’s gotten much bet-
ter at avoiding. When it comes to the charge
among some comedians that so-called PC pu-
ritanism is threatening the profession, Mu-
laney says, “My friend Max Silvestri puts it
this way: ‘Why is everyone freaking out about
adapting?’ As a comedian, you constantly
step on your ego to go, ‘I’d like to be a bet-
ter comedian.’ ”
The second time Mulaney hosted SNL, this
past March, he ended his monologue with a
virtuoso imitation of an old-timey police si-
ren. He sustained the sound for a long twelve
seconds, then likened it to the dying moan of
“an old gay cat.” Given the care that he lavish-
es on every syllable, I ask whether any word
besides gay would have worked there. In part
I’m curious on the level of pure joke math. Be-
yond that, though, Mulaney’s career ascent
has coincided with a moment of increased
skepticism toward straight white men in com-
edy, and I wonder how that’s entered into his
thinking when he sculpts a joke these days.
“It would be totally dishonest to say it
hasn’t,” he says. “I’m a privileged white man
who has not had to deal with anything a mar-
ginal group deals with. So me saying, ‘No, that
word works better’ is, I don’t know. . . .” He
tries to make the case for it: “If the world were
1,000 percent different and no one had ev-
Jacket and
shirt by Dolce & er been marginalized? In a vacuum, yes, it
Gabbana. was a good word. It’s a detail. A description
of something. I tried it on many audiences,
and I will trust the audience.” Rather than
end there, though, he gets into a back-and-
forth with himself about when a detail earns a
laugh and when it invokes an easy stereotype.
“Let’s think about this for a second,” he says.
“I’ve always tried to describe things that I ac-
tually saw once. I’m like, ‘This person came up
to me and I will tell you what they said to me.’
But I’m open to criticism of that.” He laughs,
looking to find his way back out of the weeds.
“We’re not a good breed, the white man. We
can be trained well, but . . .” He stops to gath-
er his thoughts. His willingness to evolve, he
continues, manifests “less in what you see on-
stage and more in what you don’t.”
In November 2017, The New York Times re-
ported that several female comedians had ac-
cused Louis C.K. of inappropriate sexual be-
havior. At the time, Mulaney and C.K. shared a
manager, Dave Becky, who, it was alleged, used
his industry power over the years to suppress
several of those accusers’ stories. Mulaney qui-
etly fired him, having concluded that Becky was
dishonest with him about his role in the scan-
dal. Mulaney doesn’t want to discuss it further
on the record. Speaking to Vulture about C.K.
and Becky this past March, he said, “Women’s
opinions matter, and mine does not.”
IN JANUARY,
Mulaney appeared with Pete Davidson on
SNL’s Weekend Update to make fun of Clint
Eastwood’s The Mule. Early in the bit, Da-
vidson, who has grappled publicly with men-
tal-health issues, alluded to a note he posted
to Instagram last year in which he threatened
suicide. On live TV, Mulaney turned to him,
and with genuine emotion said, “Pete, look at
me, look me in the eye. You are loved by ma-
ny, and we’re glad you’re okay.”
I ask about this moment a couple days after
the rehearsal, over lunch at Russ & Daugh-
ters, a gourmet Jewish café that’s like the Wil-
ly Wonka factory of kippered herring. (“Please
don’t print this if it sounds wrong, but I so
identify with the Jewish people,” he says.) “I
tell him I love him all the time,” Mulaney says
of Davidson. “I have a lot of friends who are
like Italian grandmothers, just like, ‘How are
you? I love you!’” He pauses. “Pete and I came
up with that bit together, but in my head, I
was like, ‘I hope this is a cathartic thing for
him.’ However it came to be, I was very glad
it was there.”
The Mule routine may have looked like the
straitlaced older brother addressing his way-
ward sibling. But Mulaney’s relationship to
self-destructive behavior is more complex: He

spent the entirety of his teens and the early
part of his twenties as an addict, spiraling out
of control. He began drinking at thirteen—ini-
tially, he says, to deal with the awkwardness of
adolescence, and then to excess, because “alco-
hol is addictive,” he says, and he didn’t want to
stop. “I drank for attention,” he tells me. “I was
really outgoing, and then at twelve, I wasn’t. I
didn’t know how to act. And then I was drink-
ing, and I was hilarious again.” Drugs soon fol-
Jacket and shirt
by Michael Kors
Collection.
lowed. “I never liked smoking pot. Then I tried
cocaine, and I loved it. I wasn’t a good athlete,
so maybe it was some young male thing of This
is the physical feat I can do. Three Vicodin and a
tequila and I’m still standing. Who’s the athlete
now?” When Mulaney was a teenager, his par-
ents sent him to a psychiatrist, who told him
that he was one part nice kid, one part “goril-
la that wants to kill the other half.”
Throughout high school and college, Mu-
laney kept up his grades while routinely black-
ing out and doing embarrassing things that
friends filled him in on later—going dead-
eyed and slapping drinks out of people’s hands,
downing a bottle of perfume once. He can pin-
point the day in August 2005 that he finally
stopped doing coke, and the day the following
month that he gave up alcohol. He was twen-
ty-three. “I went on a bender that weekend
that was just, like, fading in and out of a mov-
ie,” he says. “It was just crazy. A weekend that
was . . . there were . . .” He grimaces. “I’m nev-
er going to tell you. That’s mine. I didn’t kill
anyone or assault anyone. But yeah, I was like,
You’re fucking out of control. And I thought to
myself, I don’t like this guy anymore. I’m not
rooting for him.” He didn’t use a recovery pro-
gram—he was able to flip a switch, he says—
and he’s been sober ever since.
He spent his childhood in Chicago, raised
Catholic by two lawyer parents along with
his three siblings, Carolyn, Chip, and Claire.
(Claire, his younger sister, also wrote for SNL.)
When Mulaney was four, tragedy befell the
family: His mother, Ellen, gave birth to a third
son, Peter, who, as Mulaney puts it now, “nev-
er came home from the hospital.” He says, “I
didn’t feel like we were growing up in a house
where something had been shattered, if that
makes sense. We’d go to his cemetery every
year. It was not, like, ‘You don’t mention that.’
But there was a tightness in the air.”
Mulaney was a self-described weird kid
with a mile-wide theatrical streak. “We were
a good, uptight family, in a fifties way,” he re-
calls. “There was a lot of fun and love. But a
strictness. My parents were a tight unit, like
Walter Becker and Donald Fagen,” of Steely
Dan. “You couldn’t play one off the other. I
said something once, like, ‘Mom sucks!’ And
my dad said”—Mulaney’s voice hits a stento-
rian register—“ ‘That’s my wife.’ And I went
to a very strict Jesuit high school, so there was
always this, like, ‘Young man, your tie is not
straightened.’ ” He found that strictness as-
phyxiating. Mulaney’s father, a corporate at-
torney also named Chip, plays a prominent
role in his son’s jokes, appearing as a steely
enigma under whose weight the young Mu-
laney squirmed and rebelled. “I remember
once I said, ‘Yeah,’ and he turned to me and
said, ‘The word is yes,’ ” Mulaney tells me.
He attended Georgetown University, his
parents’ alma mater, where he joined an
improv group that included fellow comedians
Mike Birbiglia, Jacqueline Novak, and Nick
Kroll. After graduating, Mulaney went out
on tour as an MC and opener for Birbiglia.
Later, he landed a Comedy Central job that
eventually led to a writing gig on Demetri
P. 73
 “I’M AN ENTERTAINER
Martin’s cerebral-absurdist series, Import-
ant Things. In 2008, SNL hired Mulaney
NOT AN ARTIST.
as a writer, a job he loved—“writing for
Fred Armisen is like writing a song for Jimi
Hendrix.” He left in 2012 and landed an ir-
resistible deal to write, produce, and star on
his own sitcom.
Back then, the dominant style for smart
AUDIENCES.
TV comedy was the handheld, laugh-track-
free, fifty-jokes-a-minute, single-camera for-
mat exemplified by The Office and 30 Rock.
Mulaney wanted no part of that. He opted
instead for a multicamera sitcom indebted
to I Love Lucy and Seinfeld. When Mulaney,
as it was called, debuted on Fox in the fall of
PEOPLE
TO C O N S U M E .”
2014, the ratings were bad, the reviews abys-
mal. The network killed it after one truncated
season. When I suggest to Mulaney that the
show “struggled” for survival, he grins and re-
jects the euphemism. “We didn’t ‘struggle,’ ”
,
I DO IT FOR he replies. “We were a clay pigeon shot out of
the sky immediately.”
I DO IT FOR
He still has a fondness for Mulaney, he says,
while conceding he hasn’t watched it since he
was in the editing room. (“I have reread some
scripts.”) In a postmortem on the show’s fail-
ure, he praises the jokes but faults its norm-
ie-sitcom “wrapping paper,” which gave it a
generic feel. “I lost the thread; I didn’t aim it
right,” he says in between nibbles of an every-
thing bagel. “It didn’t welcome in the people
that knew who I was, and everyone else didn’t
know who I was.” Instead of wallowing, he flung
himself back out onto the road mere days after
the cancellation—reorienting himself, city af-
ter city, by concentrating on the thing he did
best: getting a room of strangers to laugh. The
resulting special was called The Comeback Kid.
“I’m an entertainer, not an artist,” he says.
“I do it for audiences. I do it for people to con-
sume. There’s a Rilke thing about how a true
poet would write every day in a jail cell, poems
Jacket and no one would ever see. I’m not in tune with
shirt that. I want people to have a good time.” As a
by Berluti;
comedian, you become profoundly dependent
jeans by
Rag & Bone. on the laughter of strangers, not only for your
livelihood but for your sense of identity. On the
surface, telling jokes for a crowd resembles a
good-natured powwow for like-minded peo-
ple, yet there’s something irreducibly antag-
onistic about it, too, with the balance of pow-
er whipping back and forth between the guy
onstage and the people sitting in judgment of
him. “The audience is both looking up to you,”
Mulaney says, “and they are Mount Olympus.”
His foray into network sitcoms did teach him
an important lesson. “There’s a benefit to fail-
ure,” he’s said. “It gives you an existential ‘Who
cares?’” Or as he expresses it now, “Sometimes
you need to say, ‘Fuck the audience.’”
“Are you still working on that?” our waitress
asks. There’s a fat mound of golden-pink lox in
front of Mulaney; he sends it to the compost
bin along with the bagel and asks for the check.
He’s got a meeting in TriBeCa, so I walk him
there. When we arrive, we notice an intercom
next to the door, but instead of buttons be-
side names there’s a keypad for dialing ten-
ants. Though Mulaney’s on time, he doesn’t
know the number he’s supposed to punch in.
That means he’s going to be late, which he
doesn’t like at all. He emits a sound of pure
anxiousness: “Uhhh. . .” Maybe the number
is in his email? He takes out his phone, digs
around. I leave him there as he shouts a dis-
tracted goodbye in my direction and swipes
at his screen—exasperated about something
he shouldn’t get that upset about.
P. 74
Jacket by Bottega
Veneta; T-shirt
by Calvin Klein
Underwear; jeans
by Polo Ralph
Lauren; sunglasses
by Ray-Ban.
The
ESQUIRE GUIDE FUNNY 2019
25 -PA R T
to

76 October 2019_Esquire I L L U S T R AT I O N S B Y LÆMEUR

 S
GREAT NEW

1
EVERYONE’S A COMEDIAN! Don’t be fooled by the guy on this issue’s cover.
No Comedy has never been home to so many different voices. The new platforms—streaming,
podcasts, social media, and more—are expanding, reshaping, and, to a degree, leveling the
landscape. Here, our highly subjective survey of what’s funny now, and where to find it.

No 2

N
TERR
IBLE

Y
o
NEWS

3
E V E RYO N E ’ S A COMEDIAN!
With so much hilarity, in so many formats, the options can be
C D
overwhelming. Consider this: On the first day of the year,
Netflix released forty-seven stand-up specials. FORTY- I occupy quite a few dians expect control of
SEVEN. Amazon is entering the game, releasing specials by m a r g i n a l i d e n t i t ie s : IS the room when they’re
Jim Gaffigan and Ilana Glazer (her first). And that’s just stand-
up. The glut of comedy means there’s that much more to sift
I’m a queer woman,
from a former colony,
on the autism spec-
N OT onstage, because they’ve
got the magic stick that
amplifies their voice, and
trum. Stand-up allowed A everyone has to listen.
me to prepare, get my M O N O LO G U E ... But that’s not the world
head sorted, and be able we live in anymore. As

4 to communicate my B y the world changes, so our

No thoughts to the audience. Hannah
Gadsby
content has to change. ¶
Onstage, I’m able to get Which is why I’m con-
my story across. That’s fused when a comedian
the beauty of live performance, and interprets “Hey, that’s disrespect-
of stand-up in particular: Voices get ful” as censorship. Jerry Seinfeld
BY JULIO TORRES
to the audience in their most unmed- is a very successful straight white
I moved to New York from El Salvador when I was iated form. ¶ But the scene could use man. It’s not in his ballpark to dis-
twenty-two. I’ve always been here as a foreigner— a bit of a shake-up. I can only speak miss criticism as too PC. Comedy no
in school, at work. And I never felt quite as foreign about my personal experience, but longer exists in a vacuum. To be rel-
as when I began doing open-mic nights. I was just so the club culture was unkind to me. evant, you have to speak with your
completely different from everyone else that I felt It’s unfriendly, combative, gladiato- audience. You don’t get to just tell
like an anomaly. I actually think it helped my comedy. rial. There are those who say to stay them how it is. —As told to Esquire
If I arrived today, I would more easily find out of the kitchen if you can’t take
like-minded, like-spirited peers. There’s now a the heat, etc. I reject that. Is my voice Gadsby, from Tasmania, made waves
hyper-inclusion of different people. I’ll do shows worth less because I refuse to cross with her 2018 Netflix special, Nanette.
in Brooklyn where the lineups are entirely queer the pit of coals you want me to run This fall, she’s on tour with her follow-
people, or people of color. over to get there? ¶ So many come- up, Douglas, named after her dog.
It’s a direct response to what’s going on politically.
Something shifted with Trump’s presidency. The
entertainment industry realized, “If we don’t start
having what we put out there reflect the actual population, if we don’t stop
favoring some people—never purposely, but implicitly and passively—then
maybe we’re no better than who we’re criticizing.” —As told to Esquire No 6
Torres, a writer for Saturday Night Live, stars in the mostly Spanish-
language comedy Los Espookys and the stand-up special My Favorite
Shapes, both on HBO.
H E Y, BILL HADER,
( S N L A L U M , C O C R E A T O R A N D S TA R O F H B O ’ S
G E N R E- D E F Y I N G , AWA R D -W I N N I N G B A R RY )

WHAT’S THE BEST THING YOU WATCHED THIS YEAR?

DAV E C H A P P E L L E

5
“My favorite comedy show
I S A L E G E N D , S AY S N AT I O N
of 2019 is I Think You Should Leave with
The hilarious Ohioan is the
Tim Robinson [Netflix]. I had dinner
winner of the Kennedy Cen-
ter’s 2019 Mark Twain the other night with the Game of Thrones
Prize for American guys—David Benioff and Dan Weiss,
No Humor. He joins an elite
club: Past winners include the creators—and all we did was talk about
Carol Burnett, Eddie Mur- and quote from it.”
phy, and Julia Louis-Dreyfus.

October 2019_Esquire 77
R AM
YF
7
o
N

YO U S S E A
AS
H ED
RRIV

No 8

F*@K YOU, @FUCKJERRY

Instagram meme machine @fuckjerry came by his
14.3 million followers honestly, by the standards of so-
cial media: He stole jokes. He didn’t credit, let alone
pay, those whose work helped make him rich, without
fear of reprisal. But earlier this year, when Comedy
Central began advertising on the account, New York’s
Megh Wright launched the #FuckFuckJerry campaign.
Comics from John Mulaney to Amy Schumer shared
the hashtag, costing the account a chunk of its follow-
ers—and that Comedy Central deal. —GABRIELLE BRUNEY
No
10 W H AT D O CONAN’S FRIENDS REALLY THINK OF HIM
No 9 At the top of each episode of the podcast Conan O’Brien Needs
a Friend , a heart-to-heart between the late-night host and the
L a u gh s fo r A l o n e T i m e funny folks he most admires, his guest fills in the following
blank. See if you can match the person to the answer they gave.
O U R FAV O R I T E P O D C A S T S
“ I fe e l a b o u t b e i n g C o n a n O ’ B r i e n ’ s f r i e n d .”
Las Culturistas H ow D i d T h i s
G e t M a d e? 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.
Matt Rogers and Bowen
“awkward” “masculine” “somewhat “a tad hopeful, “There’s no ‘blank’
Yang debate pop culture. Jason Mantzoukas, Paul
trapped” but not really” here. We’re not
Start Here: “Pis Sussy Scheer, and June Diane
friends. . . . I feel badly
Cis Pussy” (Ep. 83) Rafael debate bad movies.
about not being
Start Here: “Drop
W h i t i n g Wo n g s Conan O’Brien’s friend.
Dead Fred” (Ep. 219)
Dan Harmon and Jessica I feel you would be
Gao debate thorny questions Punch Up the Jam a great friend. But, you
about race. Hilariously. Miel Bredouw and Demi a. b. c. d. e. know, I’m intimi-
Start Here: “Racism: Adejuyigbe debate bad songs. Julia Howard Will Dana Wanda dated by anyone with
The World’s Oldest Start Here: “Mambo Louis-Dreyfus Stern Ferrell Carvey Sykes a Harvard degree.”
Profession” (Ep. 25) No. 5” (Ep. 15) A n s w e r s 1c, 2d, 3e, 4a, 5b

No 11 N E W - I S H S H O W S W E L I K E • H B O A Black Lady Sketch Show, The Righteous Gemstones, Random Acts of Flyness •

No 12
Hey,Bill,
Us Again.
A Few More Q’s:
Are there subjects
that are too taboo
for comedy?
I mean, everyone and
everything is fair game.
But in the current
environment, there are a
lot of things that people
don’t want to touch.
I’ve talked to a lot of com-
edy people who now look
back at things they
did, myself included, where
you go, “Oh, man, I
would never do that now.”
Such as?
A good example is [SNL
Weekend Update club kid]
Stefon saying “midget.”
Also, any time I played
different ethnicities. By
virtue of being a sketch
show, we had to do that.
But I remember play-
ing Chinese people, and,
I mean, there’s a lot of
stuff that I’m just like ...
What led to that
shift among you and
fellow comedians?
Having a racist misogynist
for a president.
Is the election
really the defining
moment?
You have a guy in office
who would walk over some-
one dying in the street
if they were African-
American, or Hispanic, or
a woman. I think
people are sick of that
and hurt by it. And
by telling jokes that hurt
people’s feelings, in
a weird way you’re aligning
yourself with the presi-
dent, who is the worst
insult comic in the world.
N e t f l i x I Think You Should Leave, Tuca & Bertie • A m a z o n Fleabag • S h o w t i m e Desus & Mero • H u l u Shrill • F X What We Do in the Shadows
No
13
C O M E DY,
MEET
D I S R U P T I O N.
YO U ’R E
G O N N A LOV E I T.
The comedy bubble is bursting.
Its storied institutions are husks
of their former selves, and the
old guards are fading. Mad mag-
azine is kaput. The late-night cir-
cuit is run by toothless Jimmys,
too close to power to speak truth
to it. Saturday Night Live is still
led by its septuagenarian cre-
ator, who held the show back
from mentioning Harvey Wein-
stein after his downfall: “It’s a
New York thing,” Lorne told the
paparazzi. What a riot.
And what of live comedy?
Clubs are flailing, one rent hike
away from nonexistence. Yet they
remain set in their old ways, wed-
15
No 14
The Curious
P r o b l e m of
Surely the co–head writers
and Weekend Update
anchors have their moments.
But Che has a habit of
hectoring female critics on
social media, and he
defended Louis C. K.’s much-
maligned recent stand-up
BOWEN YANG
He cohosts one of our favorite podcasts,
appearances. For his part,
Jost has made transphobic and the excellent live show “I Don’t Think So,
jokes, then refused to
apologize when questioned
And this year, after Yang, twenty-eight,
about them. Too often, it’s
not their jokes that go viral;
it’s their missteps. Kim Jong Un, fans urged the show to add him
—GABRIELLE BRUNEY
ded to two-drink minimums and
male-heavy lineups.
Then there’s the Internet—
or what’s left of it. A moment
of silence for the fallen: go90.
Seriously.tv. Super Deluxe (see
No. 19). Pour another for those
that survived by becoming more
like the TV studios they were
supposed to disrupt: CollegeHu-
mor, Jash, Funny or Die. The new
streaming powerhouse, Netflix,
seems less interested in making
good comedy than all comedy. It
also paid industry aristocrat Jerry
Seinfeld $100 million for a couple
of stand-up specials and a show
about driving fancy cars with his
o
N MENTAL
SNL’S NEXT CAST MEMBER
SHOULD BE
Las Culturistas (see No. 9),
Honey!” He’s a staff writer for SNL .
appeared in a sketch as a sassy
as its first (!) Asian-American
cast member. We couldn’t agree more.
famous friends. In July, the plat-
form lost $26 billion in a week. Is
it too big to fail? Stay tuned.
If the bubble has burst, we’re
hardly in a comedy recession.
The proliferation of formats has
created massive new audiences.
It’s also given comedians new,
direct ways to reach those audi-
ences and to make money from
them. Social media, live stream-
ing, podcasts, Patreon: These
allow joke tellers to work outside
the old, tired systems. The future
of comedy won’t be determined
by institutions; it will be guided
by we the people, and those who
make us laugh. — S E T H S I M O N S
No
16
ONE THING
(AMONG MANY)
SNL GETS RIGHT:
HEALTH
Love it or can’t stand it,
SNL deserves credit for
IS recently tackling one of the
most important, most often
ignored issues of our time:
mental health. And no cast
member has done more to
advance the cause than Pete
Davidson, who has used the
show as a platform to share
his struggles with border-
line personality disorder.
It’s not just him—check out
“Friendos,” a music-video-
as-therapy-session by a
Migos-esque crew. Bonus: It
features Donald Glover and
A$AP Rocky. —DOM NERO
79
 P ub es c e n t
C O M E DY = T R AG E DY + T I M E

No 17
WHAT’S SO FUNNY ABOUT
No

18
PUBERTY?
PEN15 EDITION

T h e A u t h o r i t i e s : Maya Erskine (right)

and Anna Konkle (left), creators and stars of Pen15 (Hulu), in which
they play themselves at thirteen.

Ko n k l e
“You’re acclimating to new
emotions that you just don’t yet
have the skills to cope with.
Seeing these mid-tweens engage
in these really mature
activities but not knowing how to
do it—it’s pretty funny.”
Erskine
“Everyone that you talk to is like,
‘I felt like a reject inside at thirteen.’
As adults, we become better
actors. At that age, if someone
said, ‘Your mustache is really dark,’
I would cry for days. Now I
can be like, ‘Okay, I’ll just bleach it.’ ”

WHAT’S SO FUNNY ABOUT

PUBERTY?
BIG MOUTH EDITION
T h e A u t h o r i t y : Nick Kroll, cocreator of Big Mouth (Netflix),
an animated series based on his adolescent life.
He hits the road this fall for a string of stand-up shows.

“Everyone—rather, almost everyone—has gone, is going, or will

go through puberty. So there are a lot of universal themes. For
those going through it, things are drastically changing and the
stakes feel very high. Obviously, our show is very dirty, but also
incredibly sweet. Our goal is always to try to balance the big dirty
jokes with an honest, vulnerable look at this incredibly kooky time
in people’s lives. Working on Big Mouth has taught me that you
can be crazy, and you can have crazy jokes, while also talking about
what’s really happening with you, what’s going on in your emo-
tional life. And that one can really benefit the other.”
o
N

19
S A D TO S E E YO U G O ,

SUPER DELUXE
Esquire video editor DOM NERO remembers N o 20
the place he once called home

For three sweet years, the comedy site Super Deluxe

served as a refuge for the most batshit videos on the
Internet. TikTok and Vine (RIP) were for the fame seek-
ers; Super Deluxe was for the oddballs. I contributed a
handful of videos—I still can’t believe I was paid, in money,
EDDIE
to make a compilation of beach-volleyball butt slaps. In
October 2018, Turner Broadcasting, who owned the site,
decided to “redirect” its investment. Like that, Super
Deluxe was no more, proving once again that the struggle
between art and commerce isn’t really a struggle at all.

80
 N o 21 A N OVERSIMPLIFIED FIELD G U I D E T O C O M E D Y
Stand-up Sketch
One person, one mic, one audience. Its most Two- to four-minute acted-out vignettes, à la
celebrated performers emerged in the fifties and SNL and MADtv, traditionally built around “one
sixties with the likes of Lenny Bruce. Elevated in weird thing.” Some of its best practitioners are
the seventies and eighties by truth tellers like the weird thing.
Richard Pryor and George Carlin. The Archetype: Mr. Show with Bob and David
The Archetype: Richard Pryor: Live in Concert
Improv
That thing where the performers take a word
from the audience and run with it, but, like, funny.
Comes in two formats, short form and long.
The Archetypes: iO Theater (Chicago), Improv
Asylum (Boston), Upright Citizens Brigade (New
York and Los Angeles)

PATTI
HARRISON,
N o 22 JABOUKIE
YOUNG-WHITE,
No
28 25 24
Responding to Trump’s
ban on transgender peo-
ple serving in the mili-
tary: “I’m a transgender
woman. And as a trans-
FOUR
UP-AND-COMERS
“L. A. is a city where
you’re in a car, you’re
in a building, you’re in
a car, you’re in another
building...until one day,
FINAL
ONE

gender person, it’s hard

to articulate exactly how
& ONE JOKE someone saw a monster-
truck tire and was like,
THOUGHT
I feel. I guess if I had
to describe it, I’d say: FROM EACH ‘Enough!’ ” He mimes
flipping a tire. “And
VIA
RAMY YOUSSEF
Donald, you’re so stu- that’s how CrossFit
pid. You are soooooo stu- was invented. He was “ We talk a lot
pid. You’re lucky you’re like, ‘That felt pretty about our iden-
so hot.” —The Tonight good! I think I’ll make
tities, and we
Show, July 26, 2017 that my personality.’ ”
—The Tonight Show, talk a lot about
APARNA October 5, 2018 working to clear
NANCHERLA, misconceptions
37 JO
Recalling being stuck FIRESTONE, about those
behind four finance 32 identities. But
guys on the sidewalk: “I “Soup sucks. It’s either
it’d be really
really was trying to get too hot or it’s just wet.
around them, but—I You take the first bite cool to see some-
don’t know how else of soup, you’d better one like myself
to say this—they were like it, ’cause that’s all
the rest of the bites. You
not even have
moving at the speed of
privilege. That is just know, if you get a differ- to talk about
to say: They weren’t ent bite in there, some- being Muslim or
creating any gaps for thing’s messed up with
the soup. That joke was
Egyptian,
anyone to join them or
advance past them.” for the soup haters.” because it’s just
—The Late Late Show, —The Tonight Show, understood.
April 18, 2018 January 25, 2019
We can all just
be weird
and not have to
explain
everything.”

23
NAVIGATING THE NETFLIX SWAMP
Netflix has released more than three hundred stand-up
No specials, and not all of them are winners. These are.

F i n
Tig Notaro A l i Wo n g
Happy to Be Here Hard Knock Wife Just kidding! Turn to
Hannah Gadsby Hasan Minhaj page 116 for No. 25,
Esquire’s very own
Nanette Homecoming King
retroactive ombudsman,
Whitney Cummings.

81
 WE ASKED NINE S T Y L I S H I N D I V I D U A L S WITH NO TIES TO B I G F A S H I O N
T O S H O W U P T O O U R S T U D I O I N T H E I R B E S T F A L L F I T S . T H E O N LY D I R E C T I O N ? D R E S S L I K E Y O U R S E L F.

A N D T H E Y B R O U G H T I T. T H I S I S R E A L S T Y L E . T H E S E A R E R E A L P E O P L E . T H I S I S . . .

PHOTOGRAPHS BY AARON RICHTER

HOW We Dress NOW

82

KENNETH
McCoy
Owner,
La Ventura bar,
New York,
47
“A s I ’ v e g o t t e n
o l d e r, I d o n ’ t w a n t
to have a million
things. I just want
to have the right
things that I can
play with. I cherish
my Donegal
overcoat. It just
feels like a
p i e c e o f a r m o r.”
T H E TA K E AWAY
Athletic socks can add
a retro jock element
to an otherwise
buttoned-up look.
Coat, jacket, trousers,
and hat by F. E.
Castleberry; sweater
by Unis; shoes by
Clarks; watch by
Rolex; vintage rings.
Jason
KUSIMO
Content
creator,
27
“ T h e s e p a n t s we r e
o r i g i n a l l y a 4X . I
took them to a
t r u s t e d t a i l o r. H e
s a i d , ‘ I c a n’ t d o
t h i s .’ I s a i d , ‘ I l ove
these pants. I’m
n ot go i n g t o f i n d
p a n t s l i ke t h i s a ny-
where else, espe-
c i a l l y fo r t we n t y
b u c ks .’ H e s a i d ,
‘ I ’ l l d o t h i s fo r yo u
t h i s o n e t i m e .’
I c a m e b a c k a few
d ays l a t e r. T h ey
we r e p e r fe c t .
I s a i d , ‘ Yo u ’ r e go -
i n g t o h ave t o
d o t h i s fo r a l l of
my p a n t s n ow.’ ”
T H E TA K E AWAY
Ta k e t h e s e r i o u s -
ness of a suit down
a few notches with
a graphic tee.
Works every time.
Jacket by Oliver Littley;
T-shirt by Uniqlo;
trousers by Brooks
Brothers; watch
by Apple; jewelry from
street vendors in
Lagos, Nigeria; fanny
pack from his uncle.
 Duncan
HANNAH
Artist and
author of 20th
Century Boy,
66

“A daily uniform is a failure.

It’s cowardly. To dress in
an expressive way, obviously,
is risky. But you must fail
occasionally. We all have.”
T H E TA K E AWAY
I n ve s t i n a g o o d c o r -
d u r oy s u i t — t h e y ’ r e
durable, unfussy,
and easily worn as
separates.

Suit by Rowing
Blazers; vest by John
Varvatos; shirt
by Brooks Brothers;
watch by Rolex; vintage
scarf; family-crest ring.
 ELLIA
Park
Founder/
general
manager,
JUNGHYUN Atomix and
Atoboy,

Park 35

Founder/chef, “People think

Atomix and Atoboy, wearing a lot of
New York, black can be very
35
minimal, but
“I used to feel that it actually allows
because of my a more focused
smaller structure, play on details.
it was better to Mixing different
we a r f i t t e d c l ot h e s . textures, lines, or
And I was much shapes in black is
skinnier when I an easy way to b e
w a s y o u n g e r. M o r e m o r e e x p r e s s i v e .”
r e c e n t l y, I f i n d
that wearing over- T H E TA K E AWAY
sized clothing ac- If you’re not ready
tually comple- to go all-in on be-
ments my size bet- coming a sneaker-
t e r. C o m f o r t a n d head, pair a poppy
aesthetic: win-win!” sneaker with all
black to dip a toe in.

Coat by Rick Owens;

shirt by Undercover; Jacket and skirt by
trousers by Comme Comme des Garçons;
des Garçons; sneakers sweater by Acne
by Nike x Undercover. Studios; sneakers by
Nike x Sacai.

85
 JAMES
Scully
Casting
director and
activist,
54

“ T h i s y e a r, I d e -
cided to narrow
my entire ward-
robe to one small
closet. Funnily
enough, the things
I kept were mostly
the things that
were the oldest.
The things that
speak the most
about who I am. As
my clothes fall
apart, I just patch
them. I love the
idea of wearing
something until
it’s shredded and
f a l l s a p a r t .”

T H E TA K E AWAY
These jeans fit so
well that Scully
practically lives in
them. Don’t be
scared to wear your
favorite pieces so
much that they feel
like a second skin.

Coat by Helmut
Lang; jacket by Junya
Watanabe Man x
Brooks Brothers;
sweater by Tom Ford;
T-shirt by James
Perse; jeans by
J. Crew; shoes by
Alden; bag by
Stanley & Sons.
 Elmore
RICHMOND III
(“ALI”)
Artist,
45

“Sometimes you can go shop-

ping with the wrong people. At
this point, I have to always
trust myself. I’ve been doing this
for a long time, and now I
just pull the trigger if I love it.”
T H E TA K E AWAY
All of these pieces
are from different
eras. Let history in-
spire you, whether
you were there
for it or not, and
don’t be afraid to
mix and match.

Vintage 1940s naval

jacket; bespoke shirt;
T-shirt by Saint James;
trousers by Marithé
François Girbaud;
loafers by Belgian
Shoes; frames by
Bausch + Lomb; socks
by Ralph Lauren.

87
 TAKASHI
Ya m a d a
General manager,
Takihyo New York,
48

“I never throw away T-shirts,

because they have so many
memories. They’re a history of
my life. I keep them not to
wear them but for my memory,
like someone keeps photos.”
T H E TA K E AWAY
Ev e r y t h i n g f i t s w e l l .
Sportswear doesn’t
need to be over-
sized or sloppy.

Jacket by Adsum; shirt

by Shuttle Notes;
T-shirt by Engineered
Garments; trousers by
Battenwear; sneakers
by Vans; socks
by Paper Project.

88
 PATRICK
McCoy
G R O O M I N G B Y K U M I C R A I G U S I N G L A M E R F O R T H E W A L L G R O U P, A N D B Y M A G D A L E N A M A J O R .

J r.
Funeral director,
32

“A d d i n g a p a t c h
makes something
that much more
y o u r o w n . Yo u
h ave a s t o r y t o t e l l
for people, who
will always ask.
Ev e r y b o d y f o r -
gives a well-worn
n a v y b l a z e r.”

T H E TA K E AWAY
Yo u c a n b u y p a t i n a ,
but it’s more fun to
add it yourself.
Stains and scuffs?
Let them be.

Coat by Barbour; blazer

and shirt by Rowing
Blazers; sweater-vest
and trousers by Ralph
Lauren; tie by Brooks
Brothers; boots by
Chippewa for L.L.
Bean; watch by Rolex;
bag by Prometheus
Design Werx; socks,
Rugby by Ralph Lauren.
 BY PHOTOGRAPHS BY

TOM CHIARELLA BRAD HARRIS

SYRACUSE’S JIM BOEHEIM IS THE LONGEST-TENURED COACH IN

COLLEGE BASKETBALL HISTORY, AND ONE OF ITS WINNINGEST—A LIVING LEGEND.

EARLIER THIS YEAR, WHILE DRIVING, HE WAS INVOLVED IN

AN ACCIDENT THAT TOOK A MAN’S LIFE.

THIS FALL, AT 74, HE RETURNS TO THE ONLY JOB HE’S EVER KNOWN.
WHAT ELSE WOULD HE DO?
PG
 It’s twilight at the Turn-
ing Stone Resort and Ca-
sino, and the curtains glow
a dim blue. Jim Boeheim
stands on his heels at the
lectern, the night before his annual charity
golf tournament. Weight back, hips supi-
nated, eyes down. The thunderheads are
in. The bad weather is jammed in to the
west and headed this way.
Golf tomorrow is probably off.
But this is upstate New York, the Mo-
hawk Valley, east of Syracuse. People
know the weather doesn’t make any guar-
antees as to your happiness. Boeheim
smiles and addresses the room from the
cockpit of his trademark what-are-you-
gonna-do shrug. Then he sets about his
business for the night.
He’s wearing a sport
coat over a logoed golf
shirt atop expensive khaki
pants and some kind of
BOEHEIM HAS
boat shoes. The hoops
coach in summer. Boe-
SHOWN
heim’s not playing in the
tournament anyway. His FROM THE
game has slipped—he
doesn’t like that one bit.
And there’s the business
BEGINNING
of tomorrow: a hearing
regarding an accident in
THAT HE IS
which he struck a man on
the interstate on his way CAPABLE OF
home from a game last
winter, and the man died.
It’s no secret. Boeheim
was never charged with
EVOLUTION.
any wrongdoing. But a tragic accident, a
gut punch for the born-here, played-here,
coached-to-the-tippy-top-here legend.
Grim business for an often misread guy.
He will be cleared, but first he’s going
to have to live through the reconstruc-
tions of the incident, the vetting of his
reactions and intentions. Like anybody
in a fatal accident. For the record. He
knows this.
But that’s tomorrow.
He tells a few jokes from the lectern.
Outlines projects funded by the Jim and
Juli Boeheim Foundation and its $4.4
million in grants, all within the region.
He auctions off a trip home from a road
game with the team. Floor seats at an-
other game. He’s done this for more than
ten years now, since before the foundation
he and his wife started to help kids in need
and fight cancer cut its first check.
He knows these folks—local contrac-
tors, executives, coaches, alumni. He uses
their first names, and breaks the chops of
various donors accordingly.
Thunder rumbles outside. The rain
starts in. Boeheim doesn’t give it a thought.
but in Syracuse, some claim to suffer Boe-
heim. Him with his 73 percent career win-
Boeheim will tell you: There’s a lot to ning percentage. Him with his puzzling,
love in Syracuse in late June. The sky that sometimes stifling Zone.
very afternoon, before the banquet? Clear That Zone is a subject of debate in up-
and enamel blue. The trees? Verdant ceil- state VFWs from East Rochester to the out-
ings on the city streets. Men and women skirts of Schenectady, the general bounds
cook meats on their porches, smoke twist- of the region that supplies the Orange with
ing away from their grills, hopeful fingers attendance topping twenty-five thousand
to the night sky. for a full slate of home games played in sleet
He ticks off the lakes: There’s one in the storms, blizzards, and snow squalls. And
city itself. A bigger one to the north, loaded Boeheim explains the Zone often—but he’s
with walleye. Beyond that, the Great Lake, imperious, they say. Short-tempered.
Ontario—practically an inland sea, horse- Again and again, Orange fans want to
shoed into an eastern shore. The foot- know what he knows that they do not.
hills of the Adirondacks are minutes from For this type of fan, Boeheim is just a guy
downtown. You can hunt there. Golf. Hike. who won’t get out of the way. He agreed to
You can kayak the ancient canal with your retire in 2018, but then he recruited his own
wife. Whatev. So much. Boeheim knows. son to play for him. He’s nearly two years past
“It’s like a secret,” he his intended retirement, planning for three
says. “Sometimes I don’t more. Boeheim is now a devoted father, a guy
even want to tell people
how great it is.”
who backed out of a deal in order to watch
his son play out the string for the Orange-
And “Boeheim” is ex-
actly what they call him
men, not to mention two other children who
play regularly for nearby colleges. He lives
in Syracuse. Not Jim Boe-
heim. Not Coach Boeheim.
amid a wealth of basketball blessings. Good
money. Good program. Good conference.
Not Coach. Boeheim. Syr-
acuse men’s basketball
coach for forty-three years
He has outlived scandals, losing 101 wins
from the official record due to a program
scandal for which he took the blame.
now. Before that, he was an
assistant at Syracuse, a cap-
And cancer (of the prostate, in 2001).
And personal turmoil. The accident, and
tain at Syracuse, a player,
and a kid who walked on.
the window it opened on grief.
He almost certainly should be in the mix
At Syracuse. In his time
as coach? Six Final Fours,
eleven All-Americans,
thirty-four twenty-win
when talking about the greatest coaches ever.
He pretty much snuck up on that territory.
He’s never been a short-list kind of guy. He’s
labored at the far geographic limits of New
seasons, and a national championship, all
while playing in the two best conferences
of their respective eras.
In Syracuse they say his name from the
back of the throat, like something guttural. A
complaint. Bay-hime. Two accented syllables.
Solid. Like con-crete. Or expel it into the air
quickly, like a sneeze. Boeheim. Gesundheit.
Everyone agrees, Boeheim plays things a
little crabby during games. He prowls court-
side, contorts his face, shrugs and smirks up
to the refs. When he sighs, he’s like a groan-
ing Whisperliner on the tarmac. He is the
face of exasperation. What you see in him
is that he’s already seen enough.
It’s not a true love-him-or-hate-him thing
for Boeheim in Syracuse. He’s all they have.
In this frontier town of minor-league sports,
Boeheim, six-foot-three, seventy-four years
old, with the trademark looks of bafflement
shot from the Syracuse bench, is the only
real sports star for a hundred and fifty miles.
No one much hates the gangly, perpetu-
ally balding Boeheim. Not in Syracuse. It
turns out haters don’t gotta hate Boeheim,
PG

A LIFE IN ONE PL ACE
From left: Working the ref, circa 1981. • Playing for
’Cuse in the 1960s, Boeheim (wearing glasses)
guards Princeton’s Bill Bradley at Madison Square
Garden. • Former Georgetown coach John Thompson
and Boeheim were both part of the original Big
East; Thompson retired two decades ago.
York. He’s always been at Syracuse. Upstate.
Up there. Never wants to leave. Never will.
And Syracuse is still winning: 20–14 last
season, good for an eight seed in the tourna-
ment. He smiles back at the cameras some-
times now. I’m still happy here, he seems to
say. So sue me.
Days after the golf tournament, he leans
over the neatly stacked desktop in his of-
fice. “In ninth grade my German teacher was
the high school counselor,” he says. “And
one day, I don’t know, random, he says to
me, ‘Jim, everybody isn’t going to like you.’
I don’t know why he said that to me. I never
thought I was that worried about what peo-
ple thought, but maybe he saw something.
It’s a good quote because everybody’s re-
ally not going to like what you do or who
you are. It’s like you win the national cham-
pionship, and next day you take a poll, and
20 percent of the people think you’re not a
good coach. You’re just not going to make
everybody happy. That’s just the way it is.”
The term upstate doesn’t mean anything
specific in New York. It mostly means
somewhere other than here. In Manhat-
tan, upstate could mean Westchester—
you could walk to Westchester from Man-
hattan—or Poughkeepsie, a mere two
or three counties up the Hudson. But in
Poughkeepsie, cities like Utica, Rome,
and Syracuse are distant upstate outposts.
Whereas in Syracuse—five hours from
Manhattan by car—upstate might mean
the austere and windblown city of Water-
town, the forgotten village of Canton. Or,
God forbid, Potsdam.
In a lot of ways, being “upstate” just
marks you as being from somewhere far
from the action.
That’s Boeheim. He’s a Syracuse guy. He
comes from somewhere else. Upstate.
He was born in Lyons, New York, a sweet
and sleepy burg about forty minutes from
Syracuse. Boeheim tells stories about going
down to the soda fountain after his games in
high school. His father was an undertaker.
They had an embalming room directly off
the kitchen.
He gives a Boeheim shrug at the memory
of it. “The other side of the house was the fu-
neral home,” he says. “At a busy time we’d
have two or three bodies in the house and
one would be in our living room.”
Would he just look at them? It feels like
a lot to look at.
“Not really,” Boeheim sniffs. “We had to
be respectful. You know.”
The undertaker’s son. Was that what
made him leave Lyons?
“I just didn’t want to do that,” he says.
He’s most earnest when his answers are sim-
ple. “But I could have gone back and done
that. Possibly. Sure. But I was always going
to teach, if I didn’t coach. I could teach. Or
I could go do that.”
He walked on at Syracuse in 1962 and by
his senior year was cocaptain of the team
with future NBA Hall of Famer Dave Bing,
who was also his roommate. The civil rights
movement made its way to Syracuse while
Boeheim was there, and the school became
an unlikely pioneer. The white walk-on from
upstate and the black star from Washing-
ton, D. C., became close. “So Syracuse was
the first school that really recruited the
black athlete,” Boeheim says. “Dave was a
really good role model, and he did every-
thing right.”
Bing, who went on to own a steel factory
and served as mayor of Detroit from 2009
to 2013, remembers Boeheim as an antic-
ipatory player. “He knew how to get to ex-
actly where he was supposed to be at the
end of the play,” Bing says. “He sat around
all night talking about how we could work
from point A to point B to the shot. Same
stuff he’s doing now.”
I ask about other similarities between
past and present. He says: “He was a good
shooter, but he communicated first. A lot of
people must look at his antics on the floor
now and see a crybaby. But I watch him, and
he’s still communicating. He knows how to
play the refs. Jim’s a sincerely introverted
guy. It wasn’t easy, it couldn’t have been, to
learn this new language on the floor.”
After he graduated from Syracuse, Boe-
heim took a position as graduate assistant
with the program and spent weekends for
the next five years playing semipro ball in
Scranton, driving downstate. “The games
were in Harrisburg, Scranton. Hartford
had a team. New Haven had a team. Al-
ways somewhere else,” he says. “I was the
fifth-best player on my team. I played with
Bill Spivey, who’d been banned for point
shaving. He was thirty-eight years old. But
he was seven-two and he could still play. I
drove ten hours each weekend. Five to get
to a game, three to get back to Scranton, two
to get back here. So, ten hours, played two
games. Which was all right.”
The money was pretty good, he says, when
added to what he was earning as graduate
assistant coach, and the golf coach.
Besides, he says, “I always liked driving.”
Syracuse basketball is centered in the
fifty-four-thousand-square-foot Carmelo
K. Anthony Basketball Center, a training
and practice facility opened in 2009, in
part from a large gift made by none other
than himself—Boeheim’s recruit and Syr-
acuse star for exactly one season, 2002–
03, the only championship season in Boe-
heim’s tenure.
Thereabouts they call it the Melo, which
may be the greatest designation in con-
temporary American architecture.
Boeheim stands in his office, then sits, be-
fore standing again to take a look at what’s
happening on the practice courts. He looks a
lot younger than he is. He’s slim, light in the
way he treads the stairs. Energetic. A combi-
nation of bored and springy, like a guy who’s
spent a little too much time on a treadmill.
Sure, he is unassuming.
Modest. Khaki pants, de-
cent shoes, a pullover. He
doesn’t exude a lot of won-
“I GREW UP
der at how he came to be
here. He isn’t puzzled by IN A FUNERAL
his work. He has shown
from the beginning that he HOME. I’M
DIFFERENT
is capable of evolution. As
player, assistant, and head
coach. He’s lived through
and thrived in so many dis-
tinct epochs of basketball THAN MOST
that he has become a kind
of memorial to them all. PEOPLE.”
A scrappy college player
and assistant coach in the John Wooden era,
and a knock-around minor-league pro in the
late sixties. Newly minted head coach at a
then-independent Syracuse, in the highly
physical seventies. Hired Rick Pitino as his
assistant in his first two seasons. No shot
clock, no three-point line, and big men were
the linchpin of a recruiting class. He aver-
aged twenty-five wins in his first four years,
playing in the old Manley Field House (you
could squeeze ninety-five hundred in there,
but it was tight) before the Carrier Dome
opened in 1980.
He was influential in the formation of
the Big East in 1979, a national, television-
friendly super-conference that pros-
pered in part on the big personalities of
its mouthy, chattering coaches—Mas-
simino, Carlesimo, Calhoun, Carne-
secca, Thompson, Boeheim. His teams
flourished when the three-point shot
was unleashed in 1986 and evolved in
the shot-clock era (introduced as a forty-
five-second clock in 1985),
winning 243 games in the
league’s first ten years.
His first real star, Dwayne
“Pearl” Washington,
brought out the crowds
like you’ve never seen.
There was Patrick Ew-
ing at Georgetown, Chris
Mullin at St. John’s, but
the Pearl—he was like dy-
namite going off.
Boeheim almost won
it all in ’87. Man, he had
Sherman Douglas, Rony
Seikaly, Derrick Coleman
on that team, and they were cruising. Then
Bobby Knight’s Indiana Hoosiers nipped
them 74–73 at the buzzer in the champi-
onship game. But Boeheim was big-time.
He survived the decade-long influx of tele-
vision money that created new rivals out of
mid-major opponents. When the century
rolled over, he helped make recruiting into
PG
a truly national free-for-all. (He won 232
games in the nineties.)
After he finally won his championship,
he assistant-coached three U. S. Olympic
teams, under Mike Krzyzewski, in 2008,
2012, and 2016, and they won gold med-
als all three times.
He survived Syracuse’s departure from
the Big East in 2013 and a scandal for which
he was stripped of those 101 regular and
postseason wins between 2004 and ’12.
Since then he has guided the program into
position as an ACC powerhouse, and won
back more than half the 101 wins he lost.
He may not be the single greatest coach
in men’s NCAA history. But there’s a case
to be made that he is several great coaches,
over several great eras. He is a Mount Rush-
more on his very own—all four heads. Same
man, different challenges, a stunningly con-
sistent result in each iteration.
We’re in the Melo waiting for his wife,
who’s going to tour with us through some
of the projects their charitable foundation
has funded.
While he waits in his office, Boeheim can
watch over two practice courts and dozens
of training devices designed to improve the
heaving of three-pointers, the pinpointing
of free throws, the act of exploding upcourt
with newfangled urgency.
The Melo may have saved his career, he
says. Extended it, anyway.
“This job is all time and space,” Boe-
heim says. “This building, this office and
the view—that takes care of the space. It
saved me. I’m not always walking around,
building to building, to get a look. The team
wants to be here, in this space; they can get
in here twenty-four hours a day.”
He looks at me, purses his lips. “They have
key cards,” he explains.
So the Melo gives him the space he needs.
What about the time?
That’s where the trademark Zone defense
enters. I ask the standard question: What’s
with the Zone?
Boeheim smiles and states that his per-
sistent use of the Zone is strictly a method of
budgeting practice time so he’s most free to
teach. “Time and space,” he repeats. “There’s
an economy to every practice. We practice
two hours. When you play man-to-man, you
have to devote an hour and fifteen minutes
to drill work. Every day. You have to practice
Zone, too. That’s thirty minutes. So that’s
the whole practice. Two hours. No choice.”
Boeheim looks out at the court as he
SUCCESS
Led by future NBA star Carmelo
Anthony (top, right), Syracuse won the
national championship in 2003,
beating the Kansas Jayhawks 81–78.
It was Boeheim’s third trip to the
final game; he has led the Orange to
three Final Fours since.
speaks. He wants me to understand. And the
thing about Boeheim when he’s trying to ex-
plain something? To me, to a ref, to a player
during a time-out or a practice or from across
the floor at the Carrier Dome at full decibel?
You can’t not understand him. You can’t
not get him.
He speaks so plainly, and with such con-
viction, that there’s not a lot of room for mis-
understanding. He’s boiling it down, hard
as he can, all while watching out of the cor-
ner of one eye the practice routine of a lo-
cal player who’s training for an upcoming
season in Italy.
“Now, if you play all Zone, you gotta
spend an hour on it,” he was saying. “Once
you start spending an hour on your Zone,
you can’t just go back, spend fifteen minutes
on man-to-man, and try to use it. Man-to-
man is different every game. It’s just not go-
ing to work. So we did away with it.”
It’s like a lesson plan, then. He purses his
lips again. Shrugs. “Not many people know
that, but it’s factual. It’s a fact,” he says.
Is he ever tempted to experiment with
man-to-man defense?
“This isn’t an experiment,” he says sharply.
“You only get one chance, and if you experi-
ment during a game that you need to win and
you lose it because you experimented, what
did you learn? And then you miss the tour-
nament by one game? It’s not good.”
Understood.
His wife picks us up in the parking lot
of the Melo for our tour of the good works
of the Jim and Juli Boeheim Foundation.
It’s a big SUV, with a pile of golf clubs sit-
ting in one half of the backseat. Drivers—
big, fat-headed drivers that appear to have
been tested and rejected by someone fill-
ing out their bag. She offers me my choice.
“Take one,” she says. “They belong to no
one at this point. You should take one.”
This is Juli Boeheim, his second wife, for
more than twenty years now. The mother of
three of his four kids, all three of whom are
playing college basketball within a reason-
able driving distance from one another—a
son at Cornell, a daughter at Rochester, and
Buddy, at ’Cuse. Boeheim attends their home
games religiously. He loves those moments
in the stands. It’s a part of the hoops heaven
he lives in at present. He doesn’t feel pulled
apart by competing obligations. “Not at all,”
he says. “That’s what holds me together.”
Juli is Boeheim’s energetic counterpart,
talkative, challenging, focused like a laser.
She drives. Boeheim’s future as a driver is at
this point still uncertain, pending the state’s
decision following the hearing. (His license
would be fully reinstated several weeks
later.) It is an unstated tension.
 Boeheim looks at the city, a bit dislocated
as passenger. Each time we stop for a look at
one of their foundation’s many good proj-
ects, I ask him what neighborhood we are
in. That seems to puzzle him.
“This is western Syracuse,” he says at one
point. He looks at the sky. “I don’t know what
they call it.” Boeheim settles in the passen-
ger seat, reaches for the stereo once or twice,
turns it down. He’s a known Springsteen fan.
And on our way to a Boys & Girls Club on
the southern side of the city, I ask him, What
Springsteen does he usually play?
“Nothing,” Boeheim says. “I mostly lis-
ten to sports. Or the golf channel on my way
to work.”
“I thought you liked the Boss,” I say.
“Nah,” Boeheim says, demurring. He
sniffs after a second, having rethought. “I
mean yeah.” Another pause. It seems that
he’s grinding out an answer.
“Once in a while, I’ll listen to him,” he al-
lows. “I may put on the Springsteen station.”
That’s as specific as he gets. He doesn’t want
to grasp for song titles, or lyrics. “But I’m not
big on tapes and...I have his albums, a couple
of them, but...I mean tracks, but I just never
really play....” He drifts away then, looks out
the window, takes a breath. “I don’t play mu-
sic. I really don’t. I used to. I’m sorry.”
“Nothing to apologize for,” I tell him.
The moment is uncomfortable, and again
it occurs that driving itself may be the is-
sue. He sat through the hearing—two hours
during which the February accident was re-
constructed, and recounted, in order to es-
tablish the facts—just four days prior. It
was Boeheim’s chance to retain his driving
privileges.
A newspaper account reported that the
judge warned Boeheim that the proceed-
ings might be painful. As the accident was
recounted, the local paper said, Boeheim
laid his head on his arms as he listened.
Whether Boeheim is feeling any tension
as we bounce from the Boys Club to an out-
door basketball court to a First Tee golf cen-
ter, he does not say.
In any case, at one point Boeheim says,
simply, “Dancing in the Dark.”
“What’s that?” I ask.
“I like that one song,” he says. “I do lis-
ten to that one.”
It’s not a song I know well. Top 40 Bruce.
And the word “Seriously?” slips out. I re-
gret it immediately. “I mean, when do you
listen? After games?”
Boeheim doesn’t seem to notice my re-
sponse, or my question. He’s regarding the
street in front of us. It’s a song about hating
the place you are, the place you find your-
self. I can remember one line: “There’s a joke
PG
here somewhere, and it’s on me.”
“No,” he says, as we pull into the park-
ing lot of the Boys & Girls Club. And that’s
it on the song.
The Boys & Girls Club is a rough busi-
ness, the edges a little frayed, well-used. It
provides meals for neighborhood kids twice
a day for the entire summer. The floors are
polished by the shoes of a thousand run-
ning children on a hundred afternoons.
The Boeheim Foundation rebuilt this place,
but it hardly looks flashy or overdesigned.
We traipse from the computer room to the
gymnasium and back out to the cafeteria,
such as it is. At one point, Boeheim stands
in front of me with his hands in his pockets.
“The roof was a wreck when we started
this,” he says. “And the HVAC needed to
be replaced. No one much wants to step in
and build a new roof in a facility like this.
It’s not hard to fund a basketball court. We
knew someone would step in for that. So we
did the roof. This place has to be here. These
kids use it all year.” He shrugs and stares at
me. “We redid the electrical, too. And the
wireless or something. It might be hard to
see the impact,” he says.
It is not. The place is solid, permanent. It
feels like it has always been here. It is just a
modest surface, like the man who’s talking.
 LEG ACY
In his forty-fourth season, Boeheim
will coach his own son. He and
his wife run a charity that gives away
millions. His program is a powerhouse.
Of the fatal accident, he says,
“It’s a terrible thing. You know that you
did everything you could.”
Back at the Melo, Boeheim reflects on
forty-three years in the game.
What’s the biggest change? I offer one:
the transfer portal that allows student-ath-
letes to transfer their eligibility from school
to school, a fairly free-market process. It was
initially thought to favor large programs like
Syracuse, because players might seek to
work up from smaller schools to the premier
programs as their prospects improved. Of
course, players might leave Syracuse as well.
To which Boeheim says: “I think it’s great
for kids to go if that’s what they really want,
but what if they just work through it? Would
it have worked out better? Brandon Triche
played very little here when he was a fresh-
man and he became a great player for us. We
had a kid leave here and go to Vanderbilt, he
didn’t play, and Vanderbilt didn’t win a con-
ference game last year.”
The biggest difference, he says, is the cul-
ture of impatience and expectation that’s
taken over amongst the players. “They just
want to play in the NBA. Twenty years ago,
nobody even thought that much about the
NBA. And they’re not going to get there.
The NBA thinks it’s a problem. They’re
worried about it. They don’t—there’s no
place! There are six hundred players in the
G-league. Every one of those guys thinks
they’re going to go to the NBA. Not even
thirty of them are going to. There’s no place
for these guys, and we’re making it a culture
of ‘Let’s go. Now.’ They don’t want to go to
college. They don’t accept what it means.”
And the effect?
“What we’ve needed to do is give kids
more money, which we have. People don’t
realize that. Nobody writes this. These kids
get paid. My son gets $1,300 a month. He’s
a scholarship player because we give him
cost of attendance.”
In cash? I ask.
“In cash. And they take their board
money, instead of eating meals, and they
buy their own food, but we also provide food
for them, legally now, twice a day.”
Boeheim shakes his head.
He makes that look, like, You get me?
Finally, we are alone, talking about pot-
boilers and detective novels. He’s a Mi-
chael Connelly man. I decide I have to
ask about the accident, the man he hit on
I-690. The PR guy had politely asked me
to keep my distance from the subject; I’d
promised only that I’d do my best. This
feels like an opportunity, unless I’m mis-
reading things. I apologize and let him
know that I’m wading in.
“Asking?” he says, repeating the last word
I used. He’s leaning back in his desk chair,
arm wrapped over his ribs, as if suppress-
ing an ache.
“Yeah,” he says. “That’s fine. I don’t have
a problem with you asking.”
I offer him another out. We can do it later.
“I don’t have a problem,” he says. “The
crazy thing is, I’ve had five hundred emails,
minimum—perfectly serious—more than
five hundred emails from people that had
the same thing happen to them. The testi-
mony, the inquest, or whatever—it’s hard.
And it should be hard. They looked into it.
Every minute was accounted for.”
Going over one small set of reactions, one
sequence of actions where you do your level
best and it’s not enough. “It’s a miserable
thing because a man was killed,” he says.
He pauses then, sighs. Pushes his glasses
up his nose. He’s worrying.
“And his family . . .”
He lets another moment pass, then:
“You know, I’ve been very smart, in a way.
I stopped drinking completely.”
Do you mean that day?
“I mean altogether,”
he says—he means years
ago. “I stopped drinking.
HE SEES A
Not that I ever drank that
much. Because if I’d just CULTURE OF
had two drinks that night?
Just two.” He holds up two
fingers, a reverse peace
IMPATIENCE:
sign. “Even if I had one,”
he says, staring at the wall
“THEY JUST
above my head. “They’d
ask: Were you drinking?
WANT TO
Again and again. And I
would have had to say, PLAY IN
Well, I had one drink.
That would be the head-
line. They’d say ‘drinking.’
So even if you had two, or
THE NBA.”
say you were just at the limit.” He holds out
his hand, splays out his fingers, ticks off the
register of events that would surely follow.
“Fired, prosecuted probably—all that.”
Even sober, it was an impossible scenario.
“I came over a hill and it was pitch-black,
and the other car was black. So I’m coming
over the hill; I didn’t see it. I thought I was
going to just go straight into the car, but I got
around. I actually made a move—because
there was nobody in the road—to get past
the car. As I’m going by, the guy steps out.”
There’s a pause then. Boeheim stares past
the front of his desk, thinking it through.
“He’d gone back to the car. He went back to
get something and then tried to get back out.”
There were reports that Boeheim was di-
recting traffic afterward. “I heard you were
trying to keep people away and warn them,”
I say.
“I got a letter from a guy who said I saved
his life because he was going too fast and he
saw me and slowed down and was able to
get off. But it’s a terrible thing. You know
that you did everything you could and it just
didn’t work and then somebody’s dead and
it’s just terrible. There’s no way to talk about
it or explain about it.”
Jim Boeheim stares straight at me. He’s
rock-solid, not choked up or overly emo-
tional. Not that I can see. He leans back in
his chair and widens his eyes. “Well, the
only thing that shouldn’t be said maybe,”
he begins. He reaches out and puts a finger
squarely on his heart. “I grew up in a funeral
home. I’m different than most people. I grew
up with people dying, and picking up peo-
ple who had died, and bodies. I mean, it’s
different for me.”
He falls into a palms-up demeanor. “It just
is. I was close to my grand-
mother. I loved her and ev-
erything. When she died, I
went to the funeral and that
was it. I felt that I could take
it. It’s just life. That’s what
happens,” he says. “I felt
like I could take it.”
He thinks back then, not
looking for what makes
him especially resilient.
He wheels out one of his
soda-fountain stories. “In
my sophomore year, high
school, I had a really big
game, just great, and I went
down to the local soda foun-
tain, and the guy waited on
four people and didn’t say
anything. He ignored me. So I just sat there,
until he came by and said, ‘Well, what do
you want?’ ”
Boeheim raises his eyebrows then, to be
sure I’m still with him. He’s got his hands
folded on his belly, his feet up on his desk.
“And he was just joking around, you know:
small town, you’re like everybody else.
There’s no difference. I was brought up like
that. It’s what I believe. I don’t think I’m bet-
ter or different than anybody else.”
He raises one eyebrow, holds his palms out,
tilts his hand a little. It’s a look he sometimes
gives when he thinks people don’t get him.
But I get him.
You couldn’t not.
At the Forensic Anthropology
Center at Texas State
University, a scanner makes a
3-D image of the skull of an
unidentified migrant who died
attempting to enter the U. S.
 the

REMAINS
Christian Gonzalez grew up riding ATVs, ran cross-country
in high school, and spoke English without an accent.
So what was he doing in the middle of a deadly desert, risking his life
to return to the American town he called home?
Forensic scientists in south Texas want to give his family—
and hundreds of others—some answers.
By B R O N W E N D I C K E Y
I. CASE #0383 Before long, the volunteers were working in
four-minute shifts with eight-minute rests.
Had Case #0383 been investigated and sampled
for DNA before burial—both of which are required
by the Texas Code of Criminal Procedure whenever
Case #0383 was pulled from a plywood box by the gloved unidentified human remains are found—his unusual
hands of three researchers wearing white Tyvek suits and origins might have been easier to determine. But he
medical masks. It was a May morning, and the air was damp was buried as a John Doe in a public cemetery with-
out his family knowing where he was or what had
and heavy under a hot iron of clouds. The rest of the team happened to him. His name, where he came from—
moved quickly around them, before the sandy soil could col- where any of the people came from—the answers
lapse the hole. Grasping the corners of his white body bag, to these questions would take four years of forensic
they lifted the man’s crumpled form to the surface, where a analysis, fueled by fundraising, coalition building,
and a good deal of lucky Internet searching, to find.
new bag, a clean white sheet to cover it, and a small bouquet Still, anyone could guess with reasonable cer-
of flowers waited. The sound of the long zipper mixed with tainty how he died: His remains were found in
the scuff of boots in the dry dirt and the steady inhaling and Brooks County, one of the poorest counties in Texas,
with a population of seventy-two hundred spread
exhaling of the workers in the heat, the only other sounds in out over 944 square miles. Death certificates are is-
the Sacred Heart Burial Park in Falfurrias, Texas, southwest sued by a justice of the peace, and the closest medi-
of Corpus Christi, eighty miles north of the border between cal examiner is almost a hundred miles away.
At last count, 730 people had died over a
the United States and Mexico.
fourteen-year period in the Brooks County desert
This work, of exhuming the unnamed, was being carried out by trying to enter the United States.
two forensic anthropologists and their students, who had traveled It was simply not equipped.
to this cemetery from two universities, Baylor, in Waco, Texas, and Many of these deaths could be traced to one cruel quirk of geog-
the University of Indianapolis. After placing #0383 in the new bag, raphy: the unusual location of the Falfurrias Border Patrol check-
several of the students walked him to a staging area. There, a member point. Every public American highway that radiates out from the
of the Brooks County Sheriff’s Department hoisted him into a refrig- border is monitored by U. S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP),
erated trailer, where he would be safe until he was driven out of the which migrants will do just about anything to avoid. In most other
burial ground and into a temporary holding facility two miles away. Texas counties, the distance between the physical border and the
The plywood box containing the remains of Case #0383 had been highway checkpoint is usually less than five miles, which many peo-
oriented east to west next to those of five oth- ple can walk in a few hours. Falfurrias Station,
ers—one female, four males—in a long, shal- which occupies a compound on U. S. 281, sits
low trench near the back of the cemetery. Based THE SKELETON seventy miles north of the border, a distance
on a few scattered metal markers (“Unknown IS CLEANED , that can take migrants anywhere from three
Male,” “Unknown Female”) and the memories —
AND PERSONAL EFFECTS days to a week to cross.

KIDS’ DRAWINGS,
of the cemetery’s groundskeepers, who pointed By the end of its first week of work, the foren-
out places they believed migrants were bur- sics team had exhumed the remains of sixty-

FAMILY PHOTOS,
ied, the forensics team planned to do perhaps eight people. It could take years to identify the
a dozen exhumations. bodies, if that was even possible.

ROSARIES—
“But the more we dug, the more we found,” Though the researchers did not yet know it,
says Justin Maiers, an Indianapolis biol- the bodies of almost one hundred additional
ogy student who spent a week at the burial .
ARE REMOVED migrants still lay beneath their feet.
ground, digging.
More trenches, more plywood boxes, more THEY ARE USEFUL IN THE TWENTY-SEVEN YEARS AGO, when she
body bags wrapped around human bones.
IDENTIFICATION was an undergraduate studying anthropology

PROCESS.
These were not “mass graves,” as the media at Baylor, Lori Baker met one Texas sheriff who
would later report, but individual burial con- wanted to keep the skull of a young migrant boy
tainers—in some cases, plain garbage bags— on his desk, like a trophy.
crammed together in no particular arrange- This was in her home—in her backyard.
ment. From what the volunteers could tell, graves had been gouged By the time she finished her doctorate and began working to iden-
wherever they could fit, sometimes squeezed between other head- tify human remains in forensic cases, there was no cohesive protocol
stones. Each set of remains took more than an hour to measure, map, in place for handling the deaths of foreign nationals in south Texas.
document, and remove. So Baker established an initiative called the Reuniting Families Proj-
It was somber, quiet for the most part: the light scratching of tools, ect to provide a framework for identifying them.
the groan of old wood, the beep and click of digital cameras. The That was in 2003. A decade later, she arrived in Falfurrias to spear-
workers knelt and stood, knelt and stood, lifted, lowered, lifted, low- head the first field season at the Sacred Heart Burial Park, and she
ered—grave after makeshift grave, new batches of remains in vary- was gutted by what she found. Dozens of people—was it more?—
ing states of decomposition. The temperature was 97 degrees. Their who had suffered in life enough to risk the physical torture of a bor-
hands grew blistered and swollen. Bruises mottled their legs. Sweat der crossing had been discarded in death.
stung their eyes and ran down their arms. Sometimes a member of “There was no respect, no dignity toward those individuals,” Baker
the team had to step away, just for a moment. says of the migrant burials in anonymous holes.

10 0 October 2019_Esquire

T H E I N V E S T IGATOR S D
(A) Kate Spradley of Texas State
University at the school’s Forensic
Anthropology Research Facility.
(B) A forensic-anthropology team
exhumes the bones of migrants in
Falfurrias, Texas. (C) In the lab,
everything is painstakingly photo-
graphed and logged, to increase the
chances of identification. (D) A
student of forensic scientist Lori
Baker reconstructs a skeleton.
This is America, she remem-
bers thinking. This is not what
we do here.
The history of our species is a
history of movement, whole civilizations picking up and settling down
and picking up again. We write complex histories of power and re-
sources and laws defending borders drawn, then redrawn. But we
often overlook one blunt fact in all of this: We are always, all of us,
searching the horizon for home.
Or a home.
Some people risk their lives defending their right to stay in the
place they call home. Others risk their lives for the right to leave in
search of a new one. At any given moment, millions of us are wan-
dering the chaos of this planet, making wagers we hope will get us
there. Some bet their lives against the open ocean, the thickest jun-
gles, the scorching plains, because anything ahead is better than
what they’re running from.
For those of us still standing, by chance or luck, what do we do
when someone searching for a new home dies on the doorstep of
ours? In our own backyard?
When word began circulating in Texas about the migrant burials
near the border, Baker was one of the first scientists to offer assistance
to local authorities in several counties. Some were more receptive
than others. The leaders in Brooks County, especially the then chief
deputy sheriff, Urbino Martinez, welcomed any help they could get.
Brooks County’s mortuary services weren’t large enough to pro-
vide long-term storage for the bodies that were accumulating within
its boundaries. A handful of cases were sent to a mortuary in Mission,
Texas, but in general none of the funeral staffers were trained to
identify decomposed remains.
Martinez says he and his colleagues simply did not know what
to do; they were already stretched so thin, with only a handful of
deputies to cover an area of almost one thousand square miles.
B
C
Without the funding for full
death investigations, local
authorities directed funeral-
home staff in Falfurrias to bury
the bodies of migrants in any location available.
Until 2013, no one else was willing to take them.
“I knew we’d catch hell for it,” Martinez says, remembering the
intense scrutiny that the county received for burying migrants
so quickly. “But I knew it was the right thing to do. If we could be
an example to others, then so be it.” (A 2014 investigation by the
Texas Rangers concluded that, while these burials were unfortu-
nate, they were not illegal.)
After almost forty years of working in law enforcement, Martinez
had seen the long shadow of migrant agony change his community,
and he worried about going numb to it. Almost every week, hunters
and ranchers outside Falfurrias found the dead in their paddocks
and under their trees, leaning against their fence wires or propped
against their cattle gates.
THAT ANYONE SURVIVES the journey is a miracle. Brooks County
is a flat hedge maze of scrub oak and cactus where summer tempera-
tures regularly top 100 degrees. There are no hills or mountains on
the horizon to aim for and no streams or rivers to follow. It is so dis-
orienting that people who live there will tell you they don’t even drive
into the brush without GPS units and extra tires. With (maybe) a few
bottles of water and one or two snack bags of chips, migrants walk for
days in heat so oppressive that it can swell the tongue. Drifts of sand
slow every step, and the rocky service roads that cut through aren’t
much better. Few are marked, and all look the same.
Yet this hostile terrain is a highly appealing route for human
traffickers, because most of it is sparsely populated and private-
ly owned. That lowers the chances of migrants running into law
enforcement; U. S. Border Patrol agents can only enter a property
October 2019_Esquire 1 01
 The Clinton
administration establishes The Homeland Security 2008: Barack Obama is elected
The the U. S. Border Patrol’s Act is passed, creating U. S. president. In the first year of his
BORDER “prevention through
deterrence” strategy.
Immigration and Customs
Enforcement (ICE).
administration, 393,000 people are
deported from the U. S.
and
CHRISTIAN 1994 1997 2002 2007 2009
GONZALEZ: The Gonzalez
family migrates
Christian
graduates from
Christian is charged
with aggravated assault
A TIMELINE to the U. S. from high school. after an incident
Mexico. with an air rifle.

if the owner gives them permission. But when something goes
wrong—a dizzy spell, a sprained ankle—there’s no one there to
help. The migrants themselves often don’t know how far they’ll
have to walk until there’s no turning back.
Over the years, as easier, more populated crossing points were choked
off with physical barriers and tighter enforcement, a quiet, unremark-
able corner of the American South became the nation’s “second bor-
der,” where migrants began dying in shocking numbers. The Border
Patrol called this strategy “prevention through deterrence.”
AFTER HIS REMOVAL from Sacred Heart, Case #0383 was driven to
San Marcos, Texas, a trip that ended at the Freeman Ranch, a sprawl-
ing, thirty-five-hundred-acre farm complex where J. Edgar Hoover
reportedly liked to hunt. Now it houses the Forensic Anthropology
Center at Texas State University (known as FACTS). The center has
two main components, the Forensic Anthropology Research Facil-
ity (FARF), where researchers study the process of human decom-
position in a range of outdoor environments, and the Osteology and
Research Processing Laboratory (ORPL), which is devoted to the
analysis and identification of human remains. At twenty-six acres,
FARF is the largest out-
door decomposition fa- A identification purposes. Spradley and her col-
cility, more commonly
known as a body farm, in
the world.
Forty-five of the first
sixty-eight cases from Sacred Heart—including Case #0383—were
transferred to Texas State under the umbrella of a service-learning
program called Operation Identification, or OpID. Kate Spradley,
forty-six, a slim, quiet woman with short brown hair and dark-rimmed
glasses, is the director of OpID. Its goal is to process, identify, and
repatriate the remains of migrants who died in south Texas. As even
more unmarked burials were discovered in Brooks County in 2014
and 2015, Texas State gradually took over the exhumations in Fal-
furrias, which continue to this day.
When a new case arrives at FACTS, it winds down a pitted dirt
road and through a cattle gate surveilled by security cameras to the
loading dock of the program’s multipurpose laboratory building,
slowly pull the body bag from the truck’s bed and onto a stiff board,
which they slide onto a gurney and wheel into the building of white
tiled walls and lots of industrial brushed steel.
A large, color-coded dry-erase board lists the stages of processing
bones and helpful tips for the use of maceration chemicals.
Most of the human remains at FACTS are those of donors who
willed their bodies to the school for research, but the OpID cases are
kept in a separate area and handled only for
leagues make every effort to honor each case
RESTING PLACES
(A) Zaira Gonzalez had the coordinates
where her brother’s remains were found tattooed
on her arm; it would take the family more than
a year to pay for a headstone. (B) Officials log the
remains of a man who died crossing the border
near Falfurrias. (C) The area designated for
decomposition at the Forensic Anthropology
Research Facility. (D) Christian played varsity
soccer at Palestine High School.

D
B
 May: July 2017: Christian’s
Christian is June 15: Obama introduces September 14: The remains sister, Zaira, April 7:
arrested by ICE DACA, which grants of a young man are found discovers his case on Christian’s
and deported. protections to Christian’s by Border Patrol agents a national database. funeral is held.
younger siblings. on the La India Ranch.

2012 2013 2016 2018

Lori Baker, founder of
the Reuniting Families
Project, offers to help local
authorities in south Texas
exhume bodies.
September 6: Christian’s
father receives a call
after his son had crossed
the Rio Grande.
Researchers begin Donald Trump is April 19 to May 31: Two thousand
exhuming remains at the elected president. children are separated from their
Sacred Heart Burial Park parents at the U. S.–Mexico
in Falfurrias, Texas. border and held without a clear
plan for reunification.

as a life, rather than as a number. If the lab is able to make a positive tem (CODIS) used by law enforcement, which compares the DNA
identification, friends or relatives of the deceased are invited to the found at crime scenes with that of people who have been arrested.
facility so that the process can be fully explained to them. Spradley But the NamUs database is different. NamUs merges information
will also assemble a skeleton on black velvet and enlist the help of a from missing-persons reports and data collected from unidenti-
priest in order for the loved ones to say goodbye in a private, less clin- fied remains into one system that can be accessed and searched by
ical setting before the remains are released for burial. government agencies and the public. Because its daily operations
When an OpID case arrives at the lab, the body bag is opened, the are run out of the University of North Texas Health Science Cen-
remains are photographed and documented, and any personal effects ter, staffers at UNT’s Center for Human Identification are able to
found with it are recataloged and stored in a freezer to keep them from upload DNA data from NamUs cases into CODIS, creating another
degrading or getting damaged. If the remains are “fresh”—meaning possible route to a positive match. When the first OpID cases were
they have not yet fully decomposed—the body bag is zipped closed entered into NamUs in the fall of 2013, there were only eight re-
and driven to the outdoor “decomp” area, which is secured behind cords of missing persons from Brooks County. As of this writing,
another locked gate for privacy. There it is laid out, still in the bag, there are forty-eight.
inside a large chain-link enclosure designed to protect it from wild- Once the skeleton has dried, all of the bones except for the left
life and weather damage. fifth metatarsal (the bone in the foot right below the pinkie toe) are
Depending on the condition of the remains and seasonal tem- placed in a custom cardboard container slightly bigger than a shoe
peratures, the decomposition process can take anywhere from six box. The skull is stored upright in its own compartment of the box,
months to a year. the long bones of the arms and legs are laid
When I visited FACTS this past April, there in the lower compartment, the ribs are bun-
were roughly a dozen white bags inside the enclo- WHILE HIS MOTHER dled together with a black Velcro cable tie,
sure. They were neatly arranged in two rows, with WAITED FOR HIM TO TAKE and the teeth are put in a small paper bag.
tall grass growing between them. Two faded fu-
neral wreaths were affixed to the outside; a woman
HER TO THE GROCERY STORE ,
The box is labeled with its case number and
stored on a shelf in a cool, dry room until it is
in Rio Grande City who wanted to show her sup- CHRISTIAN WAS ready to be analyzed. The metatarsal is sent
port for migrant families donated them last year. off for DNA sampling.
“It’s much better than it was,” Spradley said as ARRESTED BY ICE— Matching an OpID case’s DNA to that of
she drove me through the ranch on a Kubota util- a living relative is challenging for many rea-
ity vehicle. “When we started, we had to stack
PART OF AN APPARENT sons, especially if the deceased migrant has
them. It was full.” SWEEP OF UNDOCUMENTED no family members in the United States. Even
Once a case has fully skeletonized, it is taken IMMIGRANTS . if there are family members in the U. S., that
inside the main building to the ORPL. Students can be tricky, too, because the law requires
unzip the bag on the floor and check for any be- that a relative’s DNA sample (a cheek swab)
longings. The next part, in which the bones are placed in one of two be taken in the presence of law enforcement. Those closest to a per-
steam-jacketed kettles to dissolve the remaining tissue, always takes son who tried to enter the United States illegally might be wary of
some getting used to. (“People usually know right away whether or not providing their DNA to police, so NamUs staff members work with
they can handle it,” Spradley said.) If there is still tissue on the bones law-enforcement agencies, nonprofits, and human-rights groups to
after they’re cleaned in the kettle, they are taken to an autopsy sink facilitate Missing Persons Days in counties across Texas. At these
and lightly scrubbed with a soft toothbrush. Then the entire skele- events, the families of missing migrants can give samples without
ton is laid out on a gurney. worrying about possible arrest or detention.
While the skeleton is being cleaned, students remove the personal Only after all these steps have been taken can the OpID case be given
effects associated with its case number from the freezer and wash the a comprehensive forensic analysis, which begins with the assembly of
clothes in five-gallon buckets before hanging them on a line to dry. the full skeleton on a gurney or table lined with brown paper so that
Items in the migrants’ pockets—kids’ drawings, letters, family pho- key features can be noted and arrows drawn. The skull is placed on
tos, prayer cards, rosaries—can often be the most important keys to a small pillow the size of a beanbag to keep it still, with the lower jaw
their identities and a much faster route than DNA testing, which can beside it. If any of the teeth have fallen out during the cleaning pro-
take several months. When all the effects are clean, staff members cess (which is common once the tissue that holds them in place has
photograph them against a black background and upload the photo- dissolved), they are lined up in order next to the jaw.
graphs into the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System, Using statistical models, Spradley and her staff can usually esti-
or NamUs, a database overseen by the National Institute of Justice. mate an individual’s age, sex, and ethnicity from the skull alone. If the
Many people are familiar with the Combined DNA Index Sys- long bones of the limbs are recovered, they can (continued on page 112)

October 2019_Esquire 1 03
 K i n g
NAOKI KOBAYASHI, Japanese pop icon and star of Netflix’s

104 Photographs by Victor Demarchelier

 L y e r
The Earthquake Bird, shows you how to deploy the
timeless fashion trick for adding depth—
and versatility—to any fall outfit.
Styling by Nick Sullivan
 Japanese boy bands (yes, two), records in Japan alone. He also
Kobayashi regularly entertains belongs to J. Soul Brothers, a
crowds of more than fifty thou- group with more than ten mil-
sand people. He’s been singing lion in worldwide record sales.
and dancing on global stages “J-pop fans are like beasts,”
since 2009, when he joined the he says of performing for
third generation of the nine- screaming, sold-out stadiums
teen-member Exile, which has on annual tours. “But they
sold more than twenty million and the guys are my family. I
love them.”
Kobayashi, who’d acted
onstage for years in between
PREVIOUS PAGES,
tours, decided in 2015 that
LEFT: film should be his next move.
Jacket by Alanui; vest After a few gigs on Japanese
($1,525) by Brunello television and a fateful meet-
Cucinelli; shirt ($300) by ing with Ridley Scott, he was
Boglioli; trousers ($345) cast in a movie the director
by Joseph Abboud.
was executive-producing:
RIGHT:
Jacket ($6,000), sweater Netflix’s The Earthquake
($980), shirt ($700), Bird, based on the same-
trousers ($1,400), and named noir novel about an
loafers ($730) by Gucci; expatriate accused of mur-
socks ($37) by Falke. der when her friend—one
third of a love triangle—dis-
appears. Kobayashi stars as
Teiji, a Tokyo photographer
who drives a wedge between
the women, played by Alicia
Vikander and Riley Keough.
The project marks his first
foray into American cinema,
and he’s eager to become a
familiar face—in fact, he as-
pires to bring his martial-arts
experience to action films and
the Marvel Universe.
“A lot of movies from
America have changed my life
and my views,” Kobayashi says.
He cites Leonardo DiCaprio,
Adam Driver, and Bradley Coo-
per as his inspirations, noting
how, despite reaching vaunted
status, they are “still strug-
gling” and evolving. His goal is
to launch a career as varied as
theirs—one that allows him to
sing and dance in a musical as
well as wield a sword.
“I need to act to save myself,
and to open my mind,”
Kobayashi says. “I’m not spe-
cial, though. I’m just the son
of my parents. But through
stories, we can connect.”
—Adrienne Westenfeld

106
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Coat ($3,000) by Stile
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Texture isn’t just a how-it-feels thing—you can add

VISUAL TEXTURE , too, like a plaid topcoat.
 THIS PAGE:
Vintage jacket by Barbour;
jacket ($2,400) by Stile
Latino; shirt ($300) by
Boglioli; jeans ($148) by
Levi’s Made & Crafted;
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If you feel like an outfit is a little too dressy,

don’t be afraid to throw in a hint of VINTAGE
to rough things up.

108
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Fo r store information see page 115. Gro omi ng by Ku mi C rai g u sin g L a Mer at th e Wall G rou p.

Don’t obsess over every single element of an outfit.

A down jacket draped over a TWEED BLAZER?
Go for it.

111
THE REMAINS
a complete skeleton, the forensic anthropol-
ogist can piece together a more detailed nar-
rative. Is the skull noticeably asymmetrical? If
so, the living person likely would have had an
irregular face. Do any of the bones show dis-
tinct bulges around them, kind of like a stick
wrapped in duct tape? That’s a healed fracture,
which looks very different from the jagged line
of a freshly broken bone. Even a detail as faint
as a ridged pattern in a person’s tooth enamel
can indicate stress or malnutrition early in life.
When Spradley turns on the lights in the
room where all the cardboard boxes of OpID
cases are stored, row upon row, each box an
individual life with a story and a family, she
knows these are the remains of people for
whom life went very wrong. As a scientist,
she knows she can’t fix that.
But she can do this.
When the researchers analyzed Case #0383
in November 2016, they were able to cross-
reference it with a body-recovery report from
the Brooks County Sheriff’s Department. Late
in the evening of Friday, September 14, 2012,
two Border Patrol agents had found the body
of a young man under a cluster of scrub oak
on the La India Ranch, a trophy-hunting pre-
serve that specializes in nilgai, a large species
of Asian antelope. He had been dead for sev-
eral days. If, like most migrants attempting the
same route, he was dropped off by a coyote, a
human trafficker, on route 755 and told to walk
around the CBP checkpoint, then north to a
pickup vehicle on highway 285, he would have
trekked twenty miles in some of the state’s hot-
test and most disorienting terrain. He had col-
lapsed beside a white rock road, three miles
from the public highway and five from the
town of Falfurrias.
The checkpoint was already nine miles be-
hind him.
The Border Patrol agents called a sheriff’s
deputy and a justice of the peace out to the
scene. The deputy checked the man for iden-
tification but found none, though he did find
a plastic bag containing a few grooming items
and a cracked iPhone wrapped in a Mexican-
flag bandanna. The justice of the peace pro-
11 2 October 2019_Esquire
nounced the time of death as 1:31 the next
morning, September 15.
“It’s very difficult,” U. S. Border Patrol
spokesperson Henry Mendiola told The
item about the recovery of this particular body.
“A lot of these folks end up in paupers’ graves
or John Doe. It’s unfortunate.”
Case #0383’s skeleton was almost com-
pletely intact, save for a few small bones in his
hands and feet. The anthropologists estimated
that he had been twenty-six to forty-four years
old and stood approximately five-seven to five-
ten. The thing that struck them almost imme-
diately was the condition of his teeth: straight
and white, with no cavities or fillings. That led
them to believe he had not spent much of his
life in poverty, as perfect teeth generally re-
quire good nutrition and dental care, which
are hard to come by for economic migrants.
The only other feature the scientists noted
was that a section of #0383’s right femur and
several of his left ribs were stained a deep blu-
ish green. Whoever buried him had thrown
their medical gloves into the plywood coffin
before they nailed it shut.
On November 15, 2016, the staff at FACTS
finished #0383’s final report and sent it to
Brooks County’s Urbino Martinez, who had
just been elected sheriff. The tidy box of bones
went back on the shelf. With the DNA sam-
ple and photographs having already been up-
loaded to NamUs, there was nothing else to
do but wait.
II. CHRISTIAN
By the summer of 2017, Zaira Gonzalez had
been searching for her older brother, Chris-
tian, for almost five years. The last time she
saw him, in May 2012, they were both getting
ready for the day in their family’s small home
in the east Texas city of Palestine.
Then a junior in high school, Zaira was try-
ing to make sure she fulfilled all her credits
for graduation the following year. Christian,
who was twenty-two at the time and working
a maintenance job at a nearby ranch, told his
sister he’d pick her up from school, then come
back home and take their mother to the gro-
cery store.
Later that afternoon, Christian texted
Zaira and said he’d be late. He needed to run
an errand downtown but promised he’d still
be home in time for the shopping trip. Zaira
shrugged it off and took the bus.
Ever since the family had come to the United
States from Mexico in 1997, when Christian
was eight, Zaira was three, and their younger
brother, Gustavo, was only eleven months, the
Gonzalezes had worked to build a life in Texas
that was more solid than the one they had on a
chicken farm outside Monterrey. Their father
installed carpet and worked as a mechanic in
the oil fields; their mother provided childcare
for neighborhood kids and cleaned rooms at a
local motel. Their rental house contained lit-
tle more than a television and a mattress on
the floor, but eventually they saved enough
for a used Chevy truck and their own three-
bedroom home.
Most important, the children grew up as
Americans.
As the oldest child, Christian wanted to
make his parents proud. They depended on
him not only to help out around the house and
look after his younger siblings but also to act as
a bridge between the family’s Mexican roots
and its American future. They spoke little En-
glish when they arrived in the States, but Chris-
tian picked it up immediately, having watched
hours of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles back in
Monterrey. He became their interpreter. “His
parents made the money, but in a lot of ways,
he really took care of them,” says Christian’s
best friend, Lizz Bailey. “He always wanted to
take care of everybody.”
Christian played varsity soccer and ran
cross-country at Palestine High School. He
went out to restaurants in Tyler, doused him-
self in Hollister cologne, and wore cowboy
boots with his letter jacket. He listened to Blake
Shelton in his dad’s truck and fussed over his
hair before taking his girlfriend to prom.
On weekends, Christian four-wheeled
through the piney woods of east Texas or
watched romantic comedies with Lizz, who
never complained when he wanted to see Sweet
Home Alabama for the hundredth time. She
did, however, tease him for being “a dark-
skinned white guy,” while he ribbed her for
not speaking Spanish. (“He called me a ‘Sam’s
Choice Mexican,’ ” she says, laughing.) Lizz
eventually gave Christian the nickname Bud-
dha because of his cheerful, unflappable de-
meanor—and because of how much he could
eat at school fundraisers.
Christian also mediated his parents’ dis-
putes with his siblings—especially Zaira,
who was testing out the role of family rebel.
Whenever she was grounded for partying with
her friends, their parents deputized her older
brother as chaperone. “If I left the house, it
had to be with Christian,” she says. “He was
like a second dad to me, always trying to keep
me in check.”
Christian was a member of Life Teen, the
youth group at Sacred Heart Catholic Church;
volunteered at the local soup kitchen; and
helped lead vacation Bible school for the
younger class. “He was particularly good at
welcoming new people,” recalls Marty Flynn,
the leader of the youth group. Christian at-
tended more regularly than most kids, which
Flynn says is one of the reasons he remembers
him. When Flynn’s wife gave birth to their son,
Christian showed up at the hospital with bal-
loons. “He was a popular kid, he was friendly,
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and people enjoyed being around him,” Flynn
says. “He was good at having fun and being
goofy, but also knowing when it was time to
settle down.”
Life was normal for the Gonzalez children.
They barely discussed the fact that they were
legally considered undocumented immigrants,
and Zaira says their status had no real effect
on their lives other than the occasional glitch
it caused with school paperwork. They didn’t
really remember Mexico and didn’t speak En-
glish with accents. All those years, Zaira says,
“I didn’t know I had come to a place where a
lot of people didn’t want us here.”
This sometimes meant that they didn’t under-
stand just how little room they had for error.
In 2009, two years after Christian graduated
from high school, he was at home playing with
a Crosman air rifle when it went off, hitting
a younger boy from his neighborhood in the
torso. The pellet lodged under the boy’s skin,
requiring a trip to the hospital—and prompt-
ing a visit from the police. Christian insisted
that this was an accident and that he did not
know the gun was loaded. It didn’t matter.
Christian was charged with aggravated assault.
For an undocumented immigrant, any en-
counter with law enforcement—even a traffic
ticket—becomes a giant clock ticking down.
On that afternoon in May 2012, when Chris-
tian told his sister he had to go downtown be-
fore taking their mother to the grocery store,
he was responding to a call asking him to re-
port to his local probation office.
He went.
According to Zaira, Christian Gonzalez was
arrested that afternoon by Immigration and
Customs Enforcement (ICE), part of an ap-
parent sweep of undocumented immigrants
who had convictions on their records. Chris-
tian signed the forms necessary to get himself
out of jail and onto a bus headed for Reynosa,
Mexico, just across the border.
Within two weeks, he was back in the coun-
try of his birth with a few hundred dollars and
the duffel bag of clothes his family had packed
for him since his arrest: Ariat jeans, Ariat cow-
boy boots, and a tooled leather belt he wore on
special occasions. Zaira stuffed her brother’s
Nintendo DS game console into one of his
boots, along with some Pokémon games.
In Mexico, which to him was essentially a for-
eign country, Christian tried his best to adjust
to the way things worked. He moved in with
an aunt and uncle in rural Tamaulipas, not far
from Monterrey, and picked onions for about
a hundred dollars a week. But shortly after he
arrived, members of the local cartel kidnapped
Christian’s uncle, a farmer who had recently
been diagnosed with cancer, and held him for
ransom. Though the family paid the money,
they never saw or heard from the uncle again.
They never received a body to bury.
11 4 October 2019_Esquire
Christian’s parents then bought him a bus
ticket to Monterrey, where he stayed with rel-
atives and found work in a factory. Zaira mes-
saged her brother regularly and mailed him
items she hoped would cheer him up, like a new
iPhone and a pair of black and blue Nikes she
bought at the Bealls department store across
the street from their high school.
Still, Christian told Zaira he found it difficult
to fit in. Without the support of the friends and
family he had grown up with, he grew lonelier
and more desperate. “The scariest thing about
distance,” he wrote on his Facebook page, “is
that you don’t know whether they’ll miss you
or forget you.”
In July, Christian began telling friends that
he would be back in Palestine by his birthday,
August 13. When they asked how that was
possible, he told them not to worry about it.
His friend Lizz and her mother, Mendi, both
worked at the Palestine Police Department, so
he went particularly light on the details with
them. “I think he respected what we did for a
living and didn’t want to put us in a bad posi-
tion,” Lizz says, though she now wishes Chris-
tian had let her know he was planning to cross
the border. Lizz remembers Christian sound-
ing upbeat the last time they spoke—“but he
wasn’t one to open up and tell you when things
were bad, especially knowing his family was al-
ready hurting.”
His birthday came and went. So did the
first days of September. Then, a little after
9:00 A.M. on Thursday, September 6, Zaira
says, Christian’s father answered a phone call
from an unfamiliar number. You need to talk
to your son, the man on the other end of the
line told him in Spanish. He’s being stubborn.
He needs to get moving.
Christian had found a coyote to help him
swim across the Rio Grande. After resting for
a few days at a stash house in McAllen, Texas,
they were now somewhere near Falfurrias, and
as the coyote put it, the two were “bumping
heads.” He was giving Christian one last chance
to pick up his pace before leaving him behind.
The man put Christian on the phone. He
sounded sick, shaky. I don’t think I can make
it, Papa, he said. I can’t do this anymore.
After Christian went missing, a hole opened
up in his family that seemed to have no end.
The coyote had warned Christian’s parents
not to call the police, or they too might be ar-
rested, according to Zaira. They didn’t file a
missing-persons report, at least not then. Their
son’s deportation had been traumatic enough,
but the anguish of not knowing where he was,
or what had happened to him, washed over
them like a black wave. Christian’s father sim-
ply couldn’t talk about it. His mother refused
to celebrate Christmas until her son was home.
When Zaira graduated from high school the
following spring, all she wished was that her
brother could be there to see it. His disappear-
ance had shaken something loose in her. She
stopped fighting with her parents and stepped
up as the family caretaker, the role Christian
once played. Sometimes she would open his
old bottle of Hollister cologne just to remem-
ber how he smelled.
Bolstered by the security of a new program
called Deferred Action for Childhood Arriv-
als, or DACA, which temporarily protected
her and her younger brother from deporta-
tion, Zaira vowed to keep searching for Chris-
tian and asking others for help. He couldn’t
have just vanished. Someone had to know
something. But five unobserved Christmas-
es passed with no word from anyone about her
brother’s whereabouts.
In late July 2017, Zaira received a mes-
sage from her cousin, who had come across a
Spanish-language Facebook page with entries
for several John Does who had been found in
south Texas. There were no photographs of the
men, only dates and long strings of numbers, so
Zaira didn’t know what to make of them. But
any scrap of information was a start.
After getting off work at a Medicare call
center that evening, Zaira began plugging
the ID numbers into Google and pairing them
with search terms. “Missing person Texas.”
“Missing man Texas border.” “Missing
migrant Mexico.”
A government database called NamUs
popped up.
Zaira started scrolling through all the en-
tries of recovered remains in Brooks County.
Part of her prayed that every click would be
the one that gave her some answers, and part
of her still held out hope that maybe Christian
was alive somewhere and just couldn’t call. She
had lived for so long without an end that she
didn’t know what might happen if the end was
finally in front of her.
She did this until almost 1:00 A.M.
Exhausted, she decided to check one more
entry and call it a night. She clicked on the
link for NamUs #UP14039 and waited for the
images to load.
There was Speed Stick deodorant and some
disposable contacts.
There was a pair of boot-cut Ariat jeans,
size 33x34.
There was a riveted black leather belt, em-
bossed with a star pattern.
There was a black iPhone, cracked, and a
Mexican-flag bandanna.
There were two faded Pokémon game car-
tridges for a Nintendo DS.
But the moment she started feeling a heavi-
ness in her chest was when she saw the shoes.
Black and blue Nikes with neon green insoles,
size 11. The same ones she had bought at Bealls
and texted pictures of to her brother to make
sure he liked them.
Zaira didn’t even need to see the other items
to know that she was looking at her brother’s
belongings, but she checked the remaining
photos to make sure. They were two pieces of
jewelry, a brown Catholic prayer necklace and
a gold necklace with a name scrawled across it:
CHRISTIAN.
Six months later, Officer Lizz Smith gently
broke the news to the Gonzalez family that
the results of their cheek-swab DNA tests had
come back, and they were a match for OpID
#0383. A little before 1:00 P.M. on Saturday,
April 7, 2018, the Gonzalez family arrived at
a different Sacred Heart—not the cemetery
in Falfurrias where at least 163 migrants were
once buried but Sacred Heart Catholic Church
in downtown Palestine, their hometown.
Zaira planned the funeral so that her parents
wouldn’t have to, and she tried to think of ev-
erything. She picked out the spray of red and
white flowers and the dark polished-wood cas-
ket and the high school photos of her brother,
one from graduation and one from a soccer
game, which were propped up on easels around
it. She arranged with Kate Spradley for the fu-
neral home to pick up the small box of Chris-
tian’s remains and organized a small fund-
raiser to help pay for the funeral costs. Before
she left the house that day, she made sure her
mother had a jacket, because the temperature
was much cooler than the previous day’s. She
also asked the funeral home to secure the top
of the casket. She was worried that her father,
in his grief, might open it.
Then, just before the service was to begin,
it struck Zaira that she had forgotten to ask a
friend, someone who knew Christian well, to
share some words about him. She and her par-
ents were all too distraught to speak. Father
Victor would be giving a full Catholic mass in
Spanish. It needed something personal.
Across the crowd, Zaira spotted Marty
Flynn, Christian’s youth leader from Life Teen,
entering the church. She ran over and tugged
on his arm. Would he do it?
Of course he would.
Flynn does not remember exactly what he
said that day—it was a blur, spontaneous, from
his heart. The emotional pitch of the afternoon
swirled everything together.
Here’s what he’s pretty sure he was able to
communicate to the people who came and
filled the church to capacity that day:
That Christian’s life had meaning. That he
deserved better than what had happened to
him. That he was sensitive, and unique, and
loved by so many people. That he made mis-
takes, as we all do. That he treated others with
kindness and dignity.
And all that kindness, all that grace, was
with him when he died. And in that way, Flynn
told the crowd, no matter where he was in his
final moments, Christian Gonzalez did not
die alone.
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October 2019_Esquire 11 5
 this Way Out T O PA G E
RN 76
TU
No 1 – 24 F
25

O
R
OF TH
No ESQUIRE GUE
ID
WHITNEY CUMMINGS, F U N N Y 2 0 1 9E T O
RETROACTIVE OMBUDSMAN
ESQUIRE’S been around for eighty-six years and counting. We don’t
always get it right, okay? We recruited the funny person at left—
whose Netflix special CAN I TOUCH IT? is must-see TV—to serve as our
resident self-critic. We asked her to tread lightly. She didn’t listen.
Credit where
it’s due: You guys were
onto something
here. I prefer a man
who just uses water
to style his hair.
Pomade makes you
look like a Ken
doll who fell into a cup
of clam chowder.

that Esquire’s staff

used to drink on the job. PHOTO CAPTION :
A sober person did not write will about
this headline. I’ve read did have an
it six times, and I still don’t Esquire-
know what it means. approved cut.

I miss the
days when Mitt
These are not Romney’s hair
was the most
annoying thing
about him.
PHOTO CAPTION :
A gallery of

who know that

I must admit, he good looks start
has excellent hair. at the top.
Romney should do us all “CH O ICE CUT S ,”
a favor and send his barber JUNE 1986
to the White House.
Which will prove my theory
that the president’s
source of power lies hidden
in that sweaty nightmare atop The Endorsement: Mitt Romney’s Hair
“GROO M I N G TUN E- UP, PA RT O N E ,”
MARCH 2010

11 6 October 2019_Esquire
OCTober 17-20, 2019
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+ A day at historic Lime Rock Park for hot laps in Performance
$BSPGUIF:FBSmOBMJTUT
+ Five-star accommodations at Troutbeck Inn, Cranwell Resort,
and Canyon Ranch Lenox
+ Bespoke culinary and cocktail events

To apply, visit
experiences.roadandtrack.com
Space is extremely limited. Itinerary subject to change.