The Old Man at Burning Man

[Not single-page] A son and his father take a trip together to Burning Man:

I return to the safety of the RV after several hours roving the playa. My father is MIA. I picture him on a gurney, succumbing to a bronchial attack. Maybe lost in a dust storm, pedaling out into the desert’s lethal infinitude. Close to dinnertime, he returns, and in the manner of some nagging spouse, I commence to chew his ass. ‘Where the hell did you go?’

He shoots me a blank and rather guilty look. ‘James and I went to the Naked Tiki Bar,’ he says.

‘You got naked?’

‘I certainly did,’ he says. ‘It was a remarkably friendly place. And I actually found it very liberating to see these enormously fat women being perfectly willing to bare everything. It was fun to see all of that voluptuality. What did you discover?’

Source: GQ
Published: Feb 4, 2013
Length: 34 minutes (8,736 words)

Raider. QB Crusher. Murderer?

[Not single-page] Anthony Wayne Smith, a former defensive end for the L.A./Oakland Raiders, has been linked to the murders of four men:

“Soon after retiring from football, Anthony invested in at least one shady business—an online medical-billing scam that was later investigated by the FTC—and started spending more and more time with gangbangers and thugs. ‘He was bringing the edge around, and I didn’t like it,’ Bryan says. When he asked Anthony why, Anthony told him, ‘These guys care about me. They’re genuine dudes.’

“‘I couldn’t understand it,’ Bryan says. ‘You’re married to a lawyer. You’re living in Playa del Rey. Why would you be involved with these kinds of people?’ He began to back away, unhappily, because he felt like now he was abandoning Anthony, too. Dwayne Simon didn’t like Anthony’s new friends, either. ‘That’s when I stopped hanging around,’ he says. ‘That’s when he started to change. He got that scowl, that ugly look.'”

Source: GQ
Published: Jan 25, 2013
Length: 31 minutes (7,904 words)

The Lion Smokes Tonight

The writer lights up with Snoop Dogg, now known as Snoop Lion:

“I must pause here for a moment to point out that we are about to cross the threshold into Snoop’s Narnia. And in Snoop’s Narnia, ideas and concepts that many of us might find dubious, or unscrupulous, feel natural, even kind of innocent. By now, Snoop has joined the ranks of Keith Richards and Jack Nicholson—artists whom we have exempted from the standard rules of society because they’re so widely beloved. So in Snoop’s Narnia, it’s perfectly normal to smoke weed everywhere, all the time, at any hour of the day. In Snoop’s Narnia, it’s perfectly acceptable to look forward to teaching your kids how to pick seeds out of your stash or how to roll a blunt. ‘It’s not that I would ever push weed on our kids,’ says Snoop, who has three children, ranging in age from 12 to 18, ‘but if they wanted to, I would love to show them how, the right way, so that way they won’t get nothing put in their shit or overdose or trying some shit that ain’t clean.'”

Source: GQ
Published: Jan 8, 2013
Length: 14 minutes (3,537 words)

Danny and the Electric Kung Pao Pastrami Test

Chef Danny Bowien’s Mission Chinese Food in New York’s Lower East Side draws locals and tourists, as well as world leaders and renowned chefs:

“We were somewhere around mapo, on the edge of the catfish, when the peppercorns began to take hold. I remember saying something like, ‘Maybe I should slow down…,’ pushing a plate of Mongolian long beans into the cluttered center of the overburdened table. And suddenly the numb rush was upon me, a long, white, buzzy tunnel. At the end of it, I could still see the women across the table talking, but I could no longer quite make out the words. On the sound system, the Stones’ “Shattered” sounded like it was being played through the blades of a helicopter. I reached for the cool-looking pinkish drink on the table and took a deep gulp, only to remember it was a michelada made of Bud Light spiked with smoked-clam juice, chile oil, and a rim of more crushed chiles and Sichuan peppercorns. I felt like a Looney Tunes character trying to quench the fire of a jalapeño with a nice draught of Tabasco. Peeling myself off the ceiling, I came down face-to-face with a leering bright-yellow forty-foot dragon. On the wall, a cavalry of luridly painted Red Chinese generals on horseback regarded me with bemused, pitying expressions.”

Source: GQ
Published: Nov 24, 2012
Length: 15 minutes (3,894 words)

Murder of an Idealist

The life and last days of Ambassador Chris Stevens, who was killed during a Sept. 11 attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya:

“It’s curious that a kid from California who grew up knowing nothing about the Arab world would come to devote his career to the Middle East and North Africa—as opposed to, say, Asia or Scandinavia or even no particular place. A European woman named Henriette, who met Stevens in Jerusalem in 2003 and had a ‘fantastic, turbulent’ on-and-off romance with him for nine years, tried to explain it to me.

“‘After we had become a couple,’ she said, ‘I asked Chris when was the first time he noticed me with interest. He told me that it was at the dinner party where we first met. He said that he had liked the way I smelled. Chris was a sensualist—he applied all his senses in experiencing the world. For people like us, the Middle East is tantalizing. The smell of coffee with cardamom, and of apple tobacco burning in water pipes; the color and touch of carpets and fabrics; the sounds of the muezzin call to prayers and the energy of crazy urban traffic and large desert landscapes. The warmth of its people and the sound of their music and language. If you combine that with analytical curiosity invested in understanding the long history of the region and the complex dynamics of its current politics, the Middle East is a place you can’t resist. It is not only an intellectual endeavor—it makes you feel fully alive.'”

Author: Sean Flynn
Source: GQ
Published: Nov 6, 2012
Length: 18 minutes (4,605 words)

The Truck Stop Killer

The writer recalls her past life, without family and hitching rides at truck stops—and a time in which she may have crossed paths with a serial killer:

“I had a vision of Lisa Pennal as a truck-stop Kali roaming the back lots in her denim skirt and fuzzy slippers with an ozone hole for a halo. She would be easy to dismiss. Rhoades intentionally chose women who lacked credibility. Sometimes, as with Shana Holts, the girl who had escaped in the brewery, the sense of not being credible was internalized. Lee told me that the final lines of Holts’s police statement read, ‘I don’t see any good in filing charges. It’s just going to be my word against his. If there was any evidence, I would file. I would file charges and sue him.’

“It took me a second to understand those last sentences. What evidence was she lacking? She was found running naked, screaming down a street in Houston with DNA all over her body, her head and pubic hair shaved, still with his chain around her neck. How could she lack evidence? But I thought about what she’d said—’It would just be my word against his,’ which was clearly followed by the unvoiced thought: And who is going to believe me? I could easily imagine my own teenage voice whispering those same words.”

Source: GQ
Published: Oct 24, 2012
Length: 32 minutes (8,063 words)

The Blind Faith of the One-Eyed Matador

[Not single-page] Less than a year after losing half his face to a bull, the victim of one of Spain’s worst matador gorings returns to the ring.

“There is the physical pain, which the doctors reduce with morphine, and then there is the terror. They’re telling him he might never again wear his ‘suit of lights.’ Never stand before another bull. If he can’t return to a plaza, he’ll be exiled from his life. Evicted from his own skin.

In his hospital room, as soon as he can move again, he begins to rehearse bullfighting moves with the sheets. And on October 19, less than two weeks after the accident, he gives a press conference in a wheelchair with his face uncovered.

“‘I have no rancor toward this bull or toward my profession,’ he slurs into the mike. He makes the following pledge: ‘I will return to dress as a torero.'”

Source: GQ
Published: Oct 3, 2012
Length: 29 minutes (7,418 words)

‘The Best TV Show That’s Ever Been’

[Not single-page] An oral history of the TV show “Cheers”:

Danson: I’ll tell you about the worst day of my life. Shelley and Rhea were carrying that week’s episode, and the guys were just, ‘Let’s play hooky.’ We’d never done anything wrong before. John had a boat, so we met at Marina del Rey at 8 a.m. We all called in sick, and Jimmy caught on and was so pissed. Woody and I were already stoned, and Woody said, ‘You want to try some mushrooms?’ I’d never had them, so I’m handed this bag and I took a fistful. On our way to Catalina, we hit the tail end of a hurricane, and even people who were sober were getting sick. Woody and I thought we were going to die for three hours. I sat next to George, and every sixty seconds or so he’d poke me and go, ‘Breathe.’ [gasp] And I’d come back to life.

Harrelson: I was a little worried about him. It looked like his face was melting. I think I may have been freaking a little myself, but I had to be cool about it.

Wendt: We got into serious trouble for that. I think we thought Jimmy and Les and Glen would have more of a sense of humor about it. We did it because Ted was doing it. He’s sort of a reluctant leader. He didn’t try to flex his influence. He’s just eminently followable.

Source: GQ
Published: Sep 27, 2012
Length: 47 minutes (11,853 words)

Al Sharpton’s Got a Brand New Bag

The reverend has a new primetime show, but remains a polarizing figure:

“Sharpton has a long record of involvement in civil rights cases, but there are still those who want to remember him as the guy who defended Tawana Brawley, the teenage girl who claimed to be gang raped by a group of white men before a grand jury dismissed her claims as bogus and Sharpton was successfully sued for defamation. They want to remember him as the guy who said inflammatory things—the man who railed against ‘diamond merchants’ and an ‘apartheid ambulance’—during the Crown Heights riots. Last year, he penned an apology in The New York Daily News for his language during the riots, and for failing to pay more tribute to Yankel Rosenbaum, an Australian graduate student who was killed in what some Jews remember as the worst episode of anti-Semitic violence in American history. ‘I said things growing up. I used to use the ‘N’ word. I used to talk street language about a lot of things that you just can’t do,’ he says. ‘And they’ll bring it back to haunt you.’

“‘The other thing I’ve learned, when I’ve had to deal with things I’ve said 20 years ago, 30 years ago, the first thing you should say is, ‘I shouldn’t have said it,” he says. ‘You don’t justify something. If you said something that’s wrong or that was stated wrongly, say that. The public can accept a mistake. What they can’t accept is you digging in and it’s an obvious mistake.'”

Source: GQ
Published: Sep 17, 2012
Length: 13 minutes (3,282 words)

20% of Anorexics Are Men

[Not single-page] More men are getting diagnosed with eating disorders, but are struggling to receive help:

“As recently as a decade ago, clinicians believed that only 5 percent of anorexics were male. Current estimates suggest it’s closer to 20 percent and rising fast: More men are getting ill, and more are being diagnosed. (One well-regarded Canadian study puts the number at 30 percent.) It’s unclear why, but certainly twenty years of lean, muscular male physiques in advertising, movies, sports, and of course, magazines like GQ—from Marky Mark to Brad Pitt to David Beckham—have changed the way both men and women regard the male body. And thanks to the web, those images are easy to seek out and collect. For American men, the chiseled six-pack has become the fetishized equivalent of bigger breasts. Like all fetish objects, it stands for something deeply desired: social acceptance, the love of a parent or partner, happiness.

“But many afflicted men feel too stigmatized to go to a doctor—and many doctors don’t recognize the early, ambiguous symptoms. ‘It is not what a primary-care physician will consider at first glance,’ says Mark Warren, founder of the Cleveland Center for Eating Disorders. ‘Often it won’t be what they consider at fourth or fifth glance.’

“Diagnosis is hard. Finding treatment is even harder. Many residential centers don’t admit men, out of a belief that treatment should be sex-specific.”

Source: GQ
Published: Sep 13, 2012
Length: 24 minutes (6,008 words)