…has the season's creepiest reality show. Having done so well with daughter number one, Dina Lohan takes to shaping 14-year-old Ali's music career in a new E! reality series, Living Lohan. If the title is any indication, we're looking at jail time and nipple slips! Dina responds:

Lindsay has had a tough road. Why subject Ali to the same temptations?
I’m not going to close a door where God opened a window for Ali.

Uh, okay. What does Living Lohan mean?
It’s self-explanatory. Living the life, following us. I’m a single mom. Other moms can relate to having to work, to having the same problems I deal with. The producers wanted to set the show in Las Vegas. I didn’t want that. There’s this perception that I’m this crazy party mom, which has never been the truth.

That was my perception.
I hang out with moms! Yes, I’m Lindsay’s manager. Yes, I have to show up at events. Yes, sometimes they are at clubs. But Joe Simpson doesn’t get ridiculed—because he’s a manager and he’s respected.

Why do they ridicule you, then?
It’s because I’m a mother.

Is it true you were an analyst on Wall Street?
My ex-husband had a seat on the floor of the Commodities Exchange. And I was a chart analyst in the pit. Between dance classes and studying my craft, I would run and tell him what to buy and sell.

You could have been Suze Orman.
Oh God, no.

Do you have concerns about the paparazzi?
There are no boundaries with the tabloids. Lindsay would call me: “Mommy, I can’t even leave my house and get Starbucks today.” I mean, that’s just wrong. There need to be laws so nobody gets hurt. I think they’ve laid off Britney, the poor child. God willing, there won’t be another Diana.—mickey rapkin

Living Lohan • Premieres May 26 on E!

Image: Kevin Mazur/Wireimage/Getty Images

In 2004, Atlanta-bred rapper Lil Jon launched an energy drink, Crunk!!! (means "crazy drunk"). Now he's expanding his beverage holdings to include a trio of wines. The unlikely proprietor of Little Jonathan Winery speaks.

The label says “Little Jonathan Winery.” Why not Lil Jon?
Little Jonathan is more mature. Classy. With Little Jonathan, you could say, “Oh, that’s Lil Jon’s wine!” Or “Oh, that sounds like a nice wine.”

Are you a big oenophile?
When I was younger, we drank a lot of beer. But as you grow older, you start changing your tastes a little bit. I was drinking a lot of sweet wines, muscatels and ice wines and stuff of that nature. But
then I started getting more exposed to some red wines. Red wine chills me out. A nice glass of wine—it caps off the evening well.

Is it appropriate to drink Merlot out of a pimp cup?
No.

Even if you’re a pimp?
A pimp might have a wine-pimp-glass.

Would you ever release an album as Little Jonathan?
Little Jonathan is not a good rap name.—kevin sintumuang

Little Jonathan Winery • In select stores now

Image: Dale Wilcox/Wireimage/Getty Images

by alex pappademas

first things first: The Foot Fist Way, in which Danny McBride plays a dim, irascible Tae Kwon Do instructor named Fred Simmons, is really funny. It may be the funniest martial-arts movie about a dim, irascible white guy since Steven Seagal’s On Deadly Ground. (Here is a quote: “The funniest martial-arts movie since On Deadly Ground!”—GQ.) It’s Napoleon Dynamite with kicking and filthy language. It’s The King of Kong without real people. And it will make McBride, previously best known for his excellent dim-irascible-white-guy performances in less-than-excellent movies like Hot Rod and the Farrelly Brothers’ version of The Heartbreak Kid, into a comedy star.

McBride and his film-school buddy Jody Hill made Foot Fist two years ago, in seventeen days, for less than a hundred grand, with ambitions as modest as their budget. But after the film screened at Sundance, it became the most passed-around Hollywood cult-object since the first South Park short. Judd Apatow became a fan, as did Jonah Hill and Seth Rogen; Patton Oswalt called it “a sui generis work on par with The Big Lebowski”; and Will Ferrell and his Funnyordie.com partner Adam McKay agreed to release Foot Fist through their production company, Gary Sanchez Productions.

Next up for McBride: Total ubiquity. He’s playing an explosives expert in Ben Stiller’s Tropic Thunder and a weed dealer in the Seth Rogen action comedy Pineapple Express, directed by another old college buddy, David Gordon Green, who cast him in All the Real Girls back in 2003. The scene in Pineapple where McBride and Rogen cruise through Los Angeles while heavily armed and bumping Public Enemy—in a Daewoo!—is an instant classic. And he’s calling in today from the set of the big-screen version of Land of the Lost, which also stars Ferrell. The budget reportedly exceeds Foot Fist’s by a factor of one thousand.

How much martial-arts training did The Foot Fist Way require?
There was about a week of martial-arts training involved. I had taken karate when I was a kid, at the Parks & Rec, so I knew the basic principles. But Jody was definitely the one who had the most martial-arts experience. I tried to come in and take classes at the school [where we shot], but I was just a little too lazy, so I was like, “Fuck it-- I’m just gonna make Simmons lazy, and have him never actually do any of the moves.” [laughs] But watching the instructors—a lot of times, they wouldn’t even get in there. It was just them running these kids through exercises, y'know? Plus I had a good body double.

You took karate as a kid?
Yeah—I took it for three years, starting in fourth grade. I started making honor roll as soon as I started taking it, so my parents kept me in it, until I got to sixth grade and moved up to the advanced class. Then they started putting me up against these sixteen-year-old kids, who were just monsters. I used to get my ass handed to me. So I quit. That was the end of my karate adventure.

Did you base the Simmons character on any of the guys who’d taught you karate?
I did indeed. I remember the way a lot of these guys held court, and I kinda pulled on that. And in general, on different adult figures I remembered from being a kid in the South—these guys who knew absolutely nothing, and would give these long monologues where they’re teaching you about life, and even as a kid you’re looking at ‘em going, ‘What do you know about any of this?’” [laughs]

“You’re teaching karate at the Park & Rec. Something has gone wrong.”
Exactly.

Everybody’s had a dude like that as a coach, at some point.
Or someone who’s supposed to be a mentor and give you guidance, y'know, and it looks like they could probably use the most mentoring or guidance of everyone in the room.

So you had a body double? Were there injuries sustained on set?
There wasn’t really any blood spilled. The funniest thing was that my body double, Seth Jeremy, was an incredible martial artist. He’s amazing. He was also an instructor at the school. And Ben Best’s body double-- I cannot remember what his name is right now-- he was a student there. And so during the scene where me and Ben had to fight each other out in the yard, we did a lot of it, then they came in, just so there could be some wider shots with actual real kicks that would get above the waist-- we weren’t capable of that. But it was so funny, because my body double was so tough that he would not take the fall. He was just kickin’ the shit out of Ben’s body double. We were like, All right, all right—you gotta lose. But he wouldn’t give it up. He was like, No, fuck that. There’s nothing like the sound of flesh hitting flesh—it sounds so disgusting. We just watched, like, Damn, these guys are really going for it.

You wrote this movie with Jody Hill—you guys went to film school together, right?
Yeah, yeah. We met back in ’95. North Carolina School of the Arts. We lived in the same hall. Jody was my one neighbor, on the one side, and David Gordon Green, the director, was on the other. We used to raise hell. Light the hall on fire and make movies all the time and get drunk. It was an incredible way for my parents to spend money.

Was it a good film school?
Man—and not just because I went there—I think it was an incredible school. It was a conservatory, so you started in film, and from your very first year you were immersed in everything. You learned editing, producing, cinematography, everything, in an environment that I think kinda prepared us for what we were gonna be gettin' in the indie world. Like, “This is what you got, these are the people you got to do it with, you gotta pull it off.” The best thing about it was it’s a state school, so tuition wasn’t an arm and a leg to go there, and then after your second year, you go into like a concentration. And if you get into directing, the school pays for everything you do. You’re actually not allowed to put your own money in. It kinda put all the filmmakers on an even playing field—it’s not like just the rich kids have the best movies. Everyone has the same sort of money and the same sort of equipment and supplies and talent pool, and you just gotta make it work.

Did David Gordon Green make his first movie, George Washington, out of that program?
No. David graduated a year before me and Jody. I used to write with David in school—we’ve been buddies for a long time. He moved up to L.A. right when he got out of school, and basically just wrote George Washington, and came back right when we were getting ready to finish school, and then we shot George Washington in two weeks, right after we graduated. That was pretty incredible, to come out of school and see David just doing it, doing it grass-roots, and actually seeing something happen with it. I think it really jumpstarted everybody else to keep at it. I think it gave a lot of us inspiration as far as making something independent and going for it. It seemed like there could be light at the end of that tunnel, like there could actually be a career after this, maybe.

What made you want to go to film school? Did you always want to direct?
Yeah. I always wanted to write and direct. I took drama in high school, only because it was the closest thing to movies. And of course-- like all kids growing up in the ‘80s and early ‘90s, me and my friends had a video camera, and we would blow shit up and film it, on the weekends. We were always running around making films-- and we’d just be in ‘em, because obviously at sixteen we didn’t know any real actors. It was the same thing at the film school. I think things have changed there, but at the time, the film school at the School of the Arts was so new-- I think we were only like the third class to graduate from the film program-- and at that time, the drama students there weren’t encouraged to work with the film students. I think they were afraid that these young directors would kinda ruin what the professors were trying to teach the kids-- y'know, with their bad direction. So we just kinda all just showed up in our own student projects, ‘cause we didn’t have anyone to pull from. So I acted more in film school, just acting for buddies, doing whatever. But there was never really any goal to start a career in acting. It was just to get the job done.

So you didn’t really have a comedy background.
All the films I’d done at school, and all the stuff I’d done when I was younger, was all comedy. But the stuff I would write would be anywhere from, like, horror to action. I was just a fan of movies in general, so I was always trying to write the next summer blockbuster or whatever.

When you’re sixteen, you’re always Steven Spielberg in your mind.
Exactly.

So All The Real Girls, which David Gordon Green directed, was your first real movie.
That was the first real movie, yeah. Because the actor they had playing Bust-Ass, his show got picked up, and so he had to drop out of the movie just days before they had to start using him. So David was kind of in a pinch. I was out here in Los Angeles, shooting motion-control stuff for, like, the History Channel and Behind the Music. I’d gotten a 9-to-5 job after waitin’ tables and P.A.’ing for a while. I’d finally got to where I was getting steady paychecks, and then David called and asked if I could come down there. And I was like, “Shit, I can’t leave my buddy hangin’, but this 9-to-5 job with benefits seems so appealing.” But I quit that shit and just went down there and made the movie. I was just kinda surprised he’d asked me to do it, and I was really hoping I wasn’t gonna be the weak link and blow his big shot at making a movie with a decent budget. It was like, “Huh, okay—this could really end the friendship if it doesn’t go too good.”

Was a lot of your stuff in that movie improvised?
Well, y'know—I guess people will realize after they see Pineapple Express, but all of David’s films in college were fuckin’ hilarious. He really set the bar for comedy at our school. He was just doing shit that was real and funny and completely from left field. And so with that character, he had some pretty weird quirks and things written in there already, and I just kinda played with some of it. So about half of it was improv, and half of it was the weird things David already had in his head about where he wanted this character to go.

There’s that whole conversation about how Bust-Ass plays lap steel…
That was written, the lap steel! The stuff about pancakes was improv, but the lap steel—but it’s the little details, y'know? I just pulled ‘em out of my ass.

Was Foot Fist Way supposed to be a calling-card movie for you and Jody?
No, it really wasn’t. It really turned out that way, which is incredible, and I’m surprised that we weren’t smart enough to think about that from the beginning. I had just sold a screenplay, so I had a little bit of walking-around money, and was able to quit my job. So I was basically just spending all my money and being dumb. And Jody was kind of sick of the job he’d been working at. So he said, y'know, “Let’s go make a movie in North Carolina.” And it was one of those things where I really had nothing better to do, and I wanted to be there for him and help him out. And once again, it was that situation like, “Shit, he wants me to be the lead, this is all of his and his parents’ money, I could fuckin’ ruin this.” But we went down there, and literally, like-- I don’t know if we had been really nice to people for years before, and had some karma built up, but everything just went so smooth, it was insane. For a movie that had no money. We shot the whole thing in like seventeen days, and really just ran into no problems. We had an amazing crew that was all kids from School of the Arts, kinda fulfilling their internship credit, and some old classmates, and the cast were all locals, and everything just fell right into place. We just had a really good time making it. It was nice. It was a really cool experience.

What was the job that Jody had been doing?
Jody is, like, embarrassed of this for some reason, so he’ll probably get mad if I tell you, but I think he should be outed, because I’ve always thought this was cool. He was a story editor for Real World/Road Rules Challenge. And in spite of what he thinks about the show, or what he did, I can completely see how it helped sculpt him. Because he’s not afraid of tons of footage, tons of improv. His eyes and ears are trained to pick out the bites that work and the jokes that work. We would improv so much on Foot Fist—every single take was completely different-- and Jody just had this knack for retaining everything we were doing, and knowing what to go to in the editing room, and sifting through all of these hours and hours of footage…

A lot of which is probably pretty boring…
Not unlike the stuff we were giving him! [laughs]

How much did the movie actually cost to make?
We got it in the can for under a hundred thousand, I think. We didn’t have enough money to have dailies or any of that kind of stuff, so we didn’t see any of the footage until we got back to Los Angeles when we were done shooting. And then we didn’t have any money to pay people to make this a priority, so our cinematographer, Brian Mandle, was syncing dailies, and then two of our buddies, Zene Baker and Jeff Seibenick, were also editors on it, and some other guys we went to school with were kind of coming in whenever they could, and trying to put it together. We had about three weeks before the Sundance deadline. Our goal was always to shoot the film and try to get it into Sundance. And by the end of the three weeks, we had a really shitty cut of the movie. It was over two hours long, and there was no sound mix, and no score. It was one of those things that we had just pushed through to get it done, and when it was done, we were like, “Well, this isn’t really that good, but we’ll just turn it in, because we said we were going to.” And everyone was kind of burnt out on it, too, because no one had really been working other jobs, and the bills were piling up, and it was time to kind of go back into real life. So we turned the movie in, and kinda went our own way. We were planning on getting back to it the next year. And then, like a month later, we got a phone call from Sundance that it had been accepted into Sundance Midnight Screenings. And we were like, “Shit—how long do we have to get this thing finished now?” Because we had stopped working on it. But everyone really kinda ponied up and came together, and we worked on the movie around the clock for the next three-and-a-half weeks, and Ben Best and his band Pyramid scored the whole movie-- they put that score together in a week. It was just crazy. We pulled in all of our talented friends to come in and help us out.

Was Sundance where the buzz started, for lack of a less-lame term?
Y'know—I guess so. We just knew that there were more people who wanted to take meetings with us. People were popping up everywhere who’d seen the movie, which was weird. I guess copies of it were floatin’ around. And CAA, they were interested in the film and really liked it a lot, and so we signed up with those guys, and they were instrumental in getting it out to people. And before we knew it—I lived in Virginia at the time, and I would come out here to Los Angeles, and it was just crazy. Two or three weeks after Sundance, I came out here, and CAA had all these meetings set up for me. Like, Judd Apatow? All these people. Like, What? And then we’d go to the meetings, and everyone had seen the movie and dug it. We were just surprised. We really couldn’t believe that people we’d respected and looked up to all this time had 1, seen our movie, and 2, actually liked it. It just blew us away.

It sounds almost like how South Park first happened, when that short they made as a Christmas card became this cult thing that got passed around.
Exactly. And that was crazy, because—it’ll be cool for this movie to have a release and be out, but when we were shooting it, we really were like, “Y'know, worst-case scenario, this is just something that some stoned college kids will pull out every now and again and watch in their dorm rooms. That’d be okay with us.” ‘Cause we had our movies like that, when we were in college, that we did the same thing with. We just wanted to put our hat in that arena. So the fact that it got passed around and had this kind of cult appeal to it, for us, was super-fulfilling. And now the fact that it’s actually gonna see a release-- we’re just over the moon about it.

What were some of the movies you used to pull out?
God—we lived with such a cross-section of people at the film school and everyone would kinda bring their own thing. Like, one of my guys, one of my buddies, would bring out Stalker, that Tarkovsky film. That was his let’s-get-lit-and-watch-this movie. And everything from Dumb and Dumber to, of course, the classics-- like Animal House, Caddyshack, Spinal Tap, Waiting for Guffman. All that kind of stuff. The old John Hughes comedies. That stuff was all just devoured on a daily basis there.

I imagine when you’re in film school and you spend your whole day thinking seriously about filmmaking, you don’t necessarily want to unwind with Bergman movies at the end of the day.
Exactly. That was what was really awesome about our group of guys. There was never any weird competition or anything like that. There was just this group that we rolled with, and no one was looked down upon, and I think that kinda helped create the atmosphere for us to be able to look at these sort of comedies, and figure out a way to develop our in those areas. No one was being pretentious and looking down on you for watching Spinal Tap instead of watching Citizen Kane for the 20th time.

Do you think that had something to do with being where you were, in North Carolina, as opposed to a place like USC, where the industry is basically just a few freeway exits away?
Yeah. You’re at a state school, in North Carolina, so you had a big cross-section of people. Housewives who wanted to finally finish school. There were only a few guys, like me and Jody, that were right out of high school and had never been to college before this. A lot of people had kinda transferred in. But the deal with the school was it was a four year program. Once you came in, even if you’d been to college before, you had to go for four years to graduate. And they just basically put a bunch of different people all in the same room. Plus the film school was so new—even the faculty didn’t have the curriculum down pat yet. We had a lot of freedom. We could be like, “Yeah, we need the grip truck, and the dolly, and these Ari 16 cameras for the weekend, to do a project.” And then we’d just end up filming ourselves partying at our house the whole time.

In a way, Foot Fist kind of led to David Gordon Green directing you and Seth Rogen in Pineapple Express, right?
Well, y'know, we hit it off with Judd’s crew. The first time I met all those guys-- they had invited me to come to the set of Knocked Up, and I was geeking out pretty hardcore, because I was a huge fan of Freaks & Geeks, and I loved Undeclared. I had been following Judd’s career since, like, The Cable Guy. I’d been into his sort of comedy, and what he was aiming for. So that was pretty amazing, to be able to go hang out on the set there. And then I met Seth and all those guys, and they all loved the film. I couldn’t believe that. We just got along, we gelled. They were just like any of my other buddies. So we were all just kinda swapping ideas and bullshittin’, and we were tellin’ em about David, how his stuff at school was so funny, and I think it just started to kinda open their eyes to him. And once you meet David, you can definitely see why that guy is a natural-born comedian. They just trusted him. It’s like what they did with Superbad, when they got Greg Mottola, who’s just an incredible director. I think they wanted to do something similar, and take a chance, and give an opportunity to somebody that, most of the time, probably wouldn’t be trusted with as much. I think it speaks for the movie—that movie couldn’t have been made anywhere else. It’s just insane to have that sort of protection that Judd offered David, and I think it really created a pretty memorable, unique, amazing movie.

Is the Apatow crew’s way of working, which seems to involve a lot of improvisation, similar to David’s approach? 
Judd’s been in the trenches. He’s been there for defeats and victories. When you’re dealing with comedy, and you’re sitting in a room, and the script you wrote is being developed by committee, it’s so hard to get anything funny through, and I think Judd completely gets why that’s a problem with comedies. So that was the thing that was incredible about Pineapple. Judd’s smart enough to hire funny people who he really believes in and then give them room to do their dance, to do what they do. And I think that’s how you get these unique comedies, that’s how you get these comedies that have this voice that you’re not used to seeing-- because the people that are making the films are actually able to make the film they want to make, and not the film that a committee of 16 development execs thinks should be made.

You get to die like four times Pineapple Express.
Which is great. I never had died before. That was awesome.

Did it make you less afraid of actually dying?
I’m ready for it. I know what kind of face to put on, and how I want to double over. I got it.

So you’re doing the Land of the Lost movie with Will Ferrell right now.
Right now. Literally, right before I got on the phone with you, I was just being chased by an army of Sleestaks. They’re just as scary as you remember ‘em.

Yeah-- I was going to ask what they’re like to work with.
Y'know, there’s something about the image of a Sleestak that just triggers this infant fear in the back of your mind. Just, like, “Oh, God—I remember being scared shitless of these things. And now here I am, standing next to one.”

That show was creepy as hell, even with the cheesy special effects.
It’s still scary. I’ve been devouring the episodes, just to consume this Land of the Lost world, and it freaks me out, it does. It’s pretty scary still. [laughs]

Have you doubled the effects budget to like, $80?
We have, we have. They were working with $42, and they’ve gone up to $67, which is cool. Which is almost double.

In a big, complicated movie like this, do you still get the latitude to pop off and say something funny?
That’s the thing that interested me the most about trying this project out. That was one of the initial things Brad Silberling, the director, said he wanted to do with this-- he wanted to do a huge, big-budget special-effects bonanza without the restraints that a movie like that usually has. Since it’s a comedy, he wanted to give the people that he’s hired a chance to kinda go off script and do stuff. I was like, “Wow, I can’t really think of a movie that has that sort of improv feel along with huge special effects.” It just seemed like something cool to be a part of. There’s definitely different constrictions. You can’t just do typical coverage, like, “Oh, we can just put together the best bits of whatever,” because there’s actual, like, T-Rexes in shots. And those guys are so fucking moody! So we stay on script a lot, but there’s definitely been a lot of room to play around. Which has been cool. Will’s a blast to do that with. And Anna Friel, the actress from Pushing Daisies, she’s the girl in it, and she’s fucking great. So it’s just been a good time so far.

Will’s production company is releasing Foot Fist Way, right?
Yeah. Adam McKay and Will, they started Gary Sanchez Productions, and they got ahold of the film, and I guess it kinda fit into what they wanted to do. They wanted to use Gary Sanchez for their projects, but also to kinda break new talent, or put projects out there that normally wouldn’t get that Will-and-Adam sort of exposure. We were just luckier than shit. They saw the movie and dug it, and we’re huge fans of theirs, so it just worked out that we would be one of the first films on their slate.

It seems like the kind of thing Ferrell would be into—Fred has a lot of qualities in common with the characters he likes to play. That ridiculous strutting manliness...
…combined with no self-awareness.

And you’ve got an HBO show on deck, too, right?
Yeah. After we met with Adam and Will and kinda got the ball rolling with Foot Fist, they were curious about what other stuff we were interested in doing. One of the big influences on us is British comedy—we’re big fans of British comedy, everything from The Office to Spaced to Alan Partridge. We thought it would be awesome to do something like that, where you don’t have this humongous order of episodes, and you can just come in and just kill it each episode and then be done with the season, and maybe you just do it for one or two seasons, and that’s it. And we had this idea about this baseball pitcher that kinda falls on hard times. And they liked the idea, and we pitched it to HBO, and HBO dug it, and they were into the idea of doing a small number of episodes, so that it wouldn’t become a formula and we could kinda keep it fresh. We shot the pilot last summer, and then right we started writing, the writers’ strike happened, and we had to put out pencils down, so everything kinda got pushed, and then Land of the Lost came so it got pushed even more, but we’re back on track for writing this summer, and we’re gonna go back down to Wilmington, North Carolina, and we’re gonna shoot it this fall.

The character’s sort of in the same vein as a lot of the guys you’ve played in movies recently—he’s a Southerner who’s not a particularly great guy.
Exactly. That’s one of the things that really interests us now— just kinda playing with the idea of these heroes you’re supposed to follow, and those kinds of stories. I think the archetype has always been that the hero’s this guy who’s essentially good and doesn’t have a lot of flaws, and everyone can get behind him, he doesn’t offend anyone. And we just instinctually try to push that aside. It’s like, “How fucked up can we make this guy and still keep people on board?” You can present a character that people normally would have nothing to do with, and you figure out a way to make them empathize with him and kinda go on a journey with him. I don’t know-- it just seems interesting to try to help people see the truth, even in an asshole.

How’s your haircut gonna be in Land of the Lost?
Y'know, it’s crazy—this is the first time I’ve been able to have my normal haircut. I always have buzz cuts, or mullets, or lines shaved in my head, something really disgusting. My fiancée just hates it, because every time I come back from my first day on a movie, she just looks at me like, “Oh, Jesus Christ, I have to sleep in a bed with this guy.”

You’re finding these weird regional variations on the mullet.
I’m just there with my fingers crossed, like, “Please, don’t say I need a mullet for this. Please don’t say I need a mullet for this.” And they’re like, “Well, you don’t need a mullet. But what if…”

one summer evening, after tearing up the court at Virginia Park in Ann Arbor, Michigan, I check my voice mail and hear this: “Hey, Davy, this is Chris Wallace from the NBA. We’re having a tryout for the NBA’s D-League next month, and we’d love for you to come down. Give me a call.”

I play the message again, wondering if this is just one of my buddies fucking with me. It sounds like the real thing, but where could they have seen me play? Surely there aren’t any pro scouts checking out my spin moves at the YMCA.

Then it comes to me: It must have been that visit to New York a couple of months ago, when I jumped into my friend’s rec-league game at Hunter College and scored twenty-two points in the second half, in jeans and sandals. I guess somebody was watching.

At the bar that night, I play the message for my friends and, after a few beers, for strangers. Later, maybe 4 a.m., while shooting around at the park across the street from my house with my friend Jordan, I tell him, “These once-in-a-lifetime opportunities only happen in Disney movies starring Dennis Quaid and Mark Wahlberg.”

“Yeah,” Jordan says, “but those movies are based on true stories.”

The next day, I call Chris Wallace. Turns out he’s not a personnel guy. He’s a publicity director. My invitation to predraft camp is not, in fact, the real thing; it’s a stunt. I’ve been invited because I’m a magazine writer, and the NBA’s hoping to draw some attention to its kid-brother league. Wallace expects me to make an ass out of myself.

“Should be fun,” he says, chuckling. “You’ll be running with the big boys.”

“Count me in,” I say. I’m gonna show those fuckers what this little white boy can do.

damn, these guys are tall. I’m in the lobby at the Hilton in Arlington, Texas, on Friday afternoon, waiting for my turn at the registration table. Gym bags dangling off the shoulders of seven-footers force me to keep bobbing and weaving so I don’t get smacked in the face.

The NBA Development League is one of those weird pro-sports way stations, like hockey’s AHL or Double-A baseball. It rose up as the old Continental Basketball Association went bankrupt in 2001, and though its connection with the NBA lends it some legitimacy, it still has its bleak qualities: You play in front of sparse crowds in drafty arenas for teams like the Fort Wayne Mad Ants and the Sioux Falls Skyforce. Salaries top out at $30,000. You’re constantly on the road and rarely get to see your family. But down-and-out as it may seem, the league has also become a bona fide pipeline to the NBA. Over the past seven years, thirty-six players have made the leap; the names of these players become a kind of mantra among D-League hopefuls—Jamario Moon, Matt Carroll, Mikki Moore. If they can make it, the thinking goes, so can I.

Once we register and get our team assignments, we’re corralled into a huge conference room for a welcome reception. At my table are two of my teammates for the weekend—Marcus Sloan, from Houston, and Anthony Moore, from Baltimore. Marcus, 24, a wiry six feet nine, shows a quiet confidence; he played four years of Div I ball at nearby Texas Christian University. He’s cautious about his expectations for the weekend. “I just want to play the best I can and have fun,” he says. “Everything else is out of my control.” Anthony, 28, has a round head and a booming laugh. He’s an inch shorter than Marcus but far outweighs him. Since his playing days at a community college outside Baltimore, he says, he’s let himself slip to 303 pounds, about thirty pounds heavier than his ideal playing weight. He looks nervously around the room.

“Got some ballers up in here,” he says.

He’s right. I’ve seen plenty of the guys in this room throwing down monster dunks or drilling buzzer beaters on SportsCenter—Cincinnati’s Melvin Levett, USC’s Dwayne Shackleford, even Ron Artest’s brother Daniel, who’s been playing pro ball in Germany. They’re all strangely somber—200 guys sipping from water bottles, peering around at one another, trying to gauge how they measure up.

Here’s how I measure up: I’m short. I suck at dribbling with my left hand. I graduated from college eleven years ago and never even played high school ball. Still, there’ve been games in my life when I could not miss: That intramural game in college when I nailed twelve of thirteen three-pointers to win the East Quad crown; that playground game on the South Side of Chicago when they started calling me White Chocolate, and guys draped along the chain-link fence were betting twenties on my shots—a huge dude named Lonnie won six bills on me and tipped me out fifty bucks. On days like that, it’s hard not to wonder what it would be like to play ball all the time—to make a living doing what I love best. For the other guys in the conference room—guys who played college ball but went undrafted—this tryout is one last chance to make that dream happen. For me, it’s a chance to see how my rec-league skills hold up.

Finally, in strides a smiling giant with long braids like Busta Rhymes’s. It’s NBA forward Mikki Moore, who takes the mike to welcome us. “My dream started with the D-League,” he says. “Now it’s your time to shine.” Moore has a gentle charisma and charm—he’s the perfect ambassador.

“Just ’cause you’re not in the NBA already doesn’t mean you don’t have NBA potential,” he goes on. “Every year thirty or forty guys jump from college to the NBA. A couple hundred others with the same amount of talent don’t make it. It’s guys like you—guys like me—that have to find an alternate route.” His voice gets soft. “A few years ago, I was playing in the D-League. But last week, I signed a contract with the Sacramento Kings for eighteen million dollars!”

The room erupts with deafening applause. A few guys stand and pump their fists and give each other high fives.

“God bless the D-League!” shouts Moore. “God bless Miller Lite for sponsoring this weekend! Now lace up your shoes and show the world what you can do!”

we split off into smaller conference rooms for team meetings. Marcus, Anthony, and I are on Team 11. Our coach is Brian Walsh, assistant coach for the D-League’s Rio Grande Valley Vipers. He’s a bulldog of a man, about five and a half feet tall, with that perfect coachly ratio of kindness and toughness. He gives us the lowdown: Our tryout won’t include timed sprints, bench presses, or vertical leap tests—everything will be decided on the court. We’ll play four games, two on -Saturday, two on Sunday, all under the watchful eyes of D-League coaches and scouts and Chris Alpert, the D-League’s personnel director. Out of 200 players, Alpert and his staff will offer contracts to ten to twenty of them, making them eligible for the D-League draft in the fall.

“It’s easier to shoot your way out of the running than to shoot your way in,” Coach Walsh warns us. “You’re as likely to get signed for your defense as your offense.”

I see Marcus smiling. In college, I later learn, he was known as a defensive stopper; he led TCU in blocked shots three years in a row. Coach Walsh asks us to form a circle and give our name, height, position, and basketball background. Most of my teammates played Div I ball—either they were the star of a school from a smaller conference, like Valdosta State, or they were the third- or fourth-best player at a school from a major conference—ACC, SEC, Big 12.

When it’s my turn, I pipe up in the huskiest voice I can muster: “Yeah, my name’s Davy. I’m five ten and three-quarters; I play the point. Basketball background—well, I’ve played at a thousand parks and gyms.”

Everyone laughs, and Walsh jumps in to save me. “What you’ve done up till now means nothing,” he tells us. “It’s what you do in four games this weekend that’s gonna determine your basketball future.” He grunts and smiles. “No pressure, though. Okay, let’s run through some plays.”

I follow along closely, and soon my notebook is filled with X’s and O’s. When Walsh is done, we’re all issued matching jerseys and shorts. Up in my hotel room, before crashing for the night, I decide to try them on—it’s the first real uniform I’ve ever worn. I pull on my ratty basketball shoes (nabbed for twelve bucks from Value Village in Ypsilanti, Michigan), stare at myself in the mirror, and—shit, I look like I should be delivering you hot wings to eat while you watch a game, not playing in one.

This could get ugly.

in the lobby, waiting for our bus to the UT Arlington athletic center, everyone’s occupying his own meditative space. Marcus sits on the floor stretching his legs, his eyes closed, head bowed to his knee as though deep in prayer. Only Anthony, a true underdog, seems relaxed. He’s eating crackers and reading an article in a film magazine about the making of Harry Potter.

When we get to the arena, we run our pregame warm-up. I feel good, and every shot I fling up is going down. Marcus whistles. “Dang,” he says. “If I get the rebound down low, look for me to kick it out to you. I want to rack up some assists.”

Once the game starts, its pace is relentless, a nonstop sprint. When I sub in, I’m matched against a six-foot-two guard who played at Southern Oregon. I decide to drape myself on him on the perimeter so he can’t get off a shot, even if it means surrendering the drive. My lungs are on fire; my vision feels fogged. Then the ball rotates to me on -offense, and I let loose a long-range jumper, six feet behind the three-point line.

Swish!

My teammates shout and wave Gatorade towels. I see a couple of the guys in the bleachers exchange a look. Did they just jot something down on their pads? Walsh subs me out, and I collapse into my seat.

“Beautiful shot,” says Marcus. I nod but can’t catch my breath to say anything.

The next time I enter the game, though, I’ve regained my wind. I’m defending the same player, whom I’ve managed to keep scoreless so far. With just a few minutes left in the half, he drives past me, heading for the rim, when Anthony steps up and sends his shot into the bleachers.

“Dang, I got to call my cousin in Amarillo, ask him to fedex that ball back!” I shout.

The opposing player glares at me, but apparently I look too ridiculous to deserve a response. We end up winning by twenty.

marcus was a standout at Eisenhower High School in Houston and played four solid though undistinguished years at TCU—he was a stellar rebounder and defender but averaged fewer than four points a game. He played his last college game in March ’05, and after graduation his coach hooked him up with a management-track position with Frito-Lay in Austin. “I was the lucky one,” he tells me over lunch in the cafeteria after our first game. “Most players don’t have that kind of opportunity.”

Frito-Lay had him start off in a delivery truck to get some experience. At 3 a.m., he’d be stocking shelves with chips and dip. “There’d be tears in my eyes,” he says. “It’s not that the job was miserable; it’s just that all my life I’d worked toward playing pro basketball, and night after night, driving the truck, I could feel it slipping away.”

Marcus knew that if he stayed with Frito-Lay, in a few years he could be making six figures as a regional manager. For a couple of months, he agonized over what to do. -Finally, after talking it over with his dad, he decided to quit. A pro team in Germany had invited him to try out. He went over, signed with the team, and after a week of terrible homesickness, blossomed into the league’s rookie of the year. Now he had other European teams clamoring for his services, with offers above $100,000. Still, if the weekend went well and he was offered a D-League contract, he said he’d sign on in a flash.

“I’d like to think I’m the only guy who scored four points a game in college who could play in the NBA,” he tells me.

We compare notes on our Game 1 showings. Marcus is a little bit down. He had ten points and eight rebounds but feels it’s not enough. “If they’re taking ten guys total, that’s one in twenty. I’ve got to be the best guy on the court at all times. I wasn’t.”

I feel both proud and despairing over my own performance. I’m clearly in way over my head, but at the same time, I’m pretty sure I outplayed my opponent, a conference all-star. “You just need to shoot more,” says Marcus. “I saw you in warm-ups—you got the range. Don’t be gun-shy. Bombs away.”

He gives me a pound.

“Bombs away,” I say.

the opposing coach in Game 2 is Joey Meyer, who used to coach at DePaul University and now helms the D-League’s Tulsa 66ers. When I lived in Chicago, I would go to DePaul games and watch him stalk the sideline; it’s deeply weird to see him huddling with his assistants before the game and pointing my way, deciding which of his players to match against me.

Meyer has his team fired up, and this game is a battle. They keep beating us to every loose ball, and the whistles all seem to go their way. I look for my shot, but I can’t break free of my defender, who’s got six inches on me. At halftime I’m scoreless, and our team is down five points.

In the second half, we turn things around. Anthony bangs his 300-pound body down low and hustles some second-chance points. Since I can’t get a shot off, I put the ball on the floor, driving past the guy guarding me, slashing through the lane, and releasing a finger-roll over the outstretched hand of the other team’s center. The ball goes high off the glass and in. I hear Joey Meyer screaming at his players, “Whose man is that? Whose man is that?” This may be my proudest basketball moment ever.

Late in the game, the score tied, Marcus gets the ball in the lane and rises up for a dunk but misses—the ball clangs off the back of the rim and into the other team’s hands. He comes to the bench and buries his face in his hands. I can’t tell if he’s embarrassed, frustrated, or disconsolate. I think of him back in the potato-chip aisle and find myself shouting in his ear like a boxing trainer. “Shake it off, Marcus! Just forget about it. We’ve got a game to win!”

Marcus lifts his head and smiles. When we sub back in, he plays possessed. Three times in a row, he calls for the ball in the high post. The first two trips, he nails fifteen-foot jumpers. The third time down, he spins in the lane, skips toward the hoop, and throws down a wicked dunk in traffic. Mikki Moore, who has come over to check out our game, lets loose a mighty howl.

We finish the day unbeaten.

“my dream’s not to be in the NBA,” Anthony tells me as we ride in the bus to Sunday morning’s game. Huh?

“My dream is to be a filmmaker.”

Anthony explains: A former high school star, he was making a name for himself on his community college team and hoping to transfer to the University of Maryland to play Div I ball. But he was also working two jobs, going to school—something had to give. He started missing classes and ended up kicked off the team. “I was so broke,” he says. “All I wanted was not to be so broke anymore. But time works in a funny way once you get a job.”

He snaps his fingers. “Five years went by like that. If you want to play basketball, don’t get a job.” Plan A was basketball, he says. But five years after leaving school, he realized he wasn’t a basketball player moonlighting as a mechanic, a gas station attendant, a security guard—he was a mechanic, gas station attendant, and security guard who had once played ball. He’d always been interested in film and video and seemed to have a natural talent for it. Now all he needed was $110,000 to buy a professional Viper FilmStream Camera to film a hood action movie he’d written. That’s what had brought him here to Texas.

“The NBA needs big fellas like me,” he says. “I’ve got good hands. I know my footwork. So maybe I bang in the D-League for a minute. Maybe I get called up. One season in the NBA—that paycheck—that’s all I need to set my filmmaking career in motion.”

I suggest that Anthony may be the only player at the tryout who sees the NBA as a stepping-stone. He laughs, lifting his mammoth frame out of the seat as we arrive.

“Okay,” he says. “I make the league, I might decide to stick around for a while.”

for game 3, our undefeated team is playing another 2-0 squad, coached by former San Antonio Spurs forward Jaren Jackson. This guy knows what it takes—he’s wearing a championship ring that I watched him win from my couch. More important, Chris Alpert has parked himself at the scorer’s table, flanked by two assistants. When the weekend’s over, what he’s really going to remember is what he sees in the next sixty minutes. For Anthony and Marcus—and all of our teammates—this is it.

Right out of the gate, I know I’m in trouble. Yesterday’s games have sapped me of my juice, and the guy I’m D’ing up scores twice in a row. At the other end, I throw up an off-balance shot that barely glances the front rim. Coach Walsh yanks me. “Don’t force it, Davy,” he shouts. “Find your rhythm.” I nod, but when I sub back in, I can’t find shit. Walsh pulls me out again, and I take a seat at the end of the bench, sucking breaths, close to tears.

Anthony, too, seems to have run out of gas. He misses an easy layup and then gets his shot stuffed by a player six inches shorter than he is. We’re down a dozen points early, and Walsh is beside himself. He calls time-out and subs in Eric Dawson for Anthony. Anthony, looking dazed, puts a towel over his head and sags into his chair.

In the second half, Marcus goes berserk. He’s suddenly everywhere, wiping up rebounds, scoring on post moves, short jumpers, and fast breaks. It’s like someone’s moving him with a Nintendo controller. In one defensive series, he blocks shots by three separate players, then goes coast-to-coast and slams it down. Not until Jackson calls time-out and Marcus trots over to our bench does he even crack a smile.

We win by fifteen. Anthony and I don’t manage a single point, but Marcus scores twenty-four. Somehow, my disappointment is tempered by the knowledge that Marcus may have just earned himself a spot in the D-League. Once we’re out of the gym, he slumps against a brick wall and puts his head down, overwhelmed. When he looks up, his eyes are wet. “I want this so bad,” he says. “I didn’t even know how badly.”

two months later, I get an e-mail from Marcus: “I made the D-League!”

He’s writing from Switzerland, where he’s been playing with a European pro team called Benetton Fribourg Olympic. In Texas our final game had been our best of the weekend: We’d won by forty points (I’d scored seven and Marcus put up twenty-eight). Alpert and his scouting team wound up offering thirty players contracts, and five of those players were guys from my squad—Derrick Allen, Terrance Mouton, Eric Dawson, Andre Ingram, and Marcus.

Marcus is thrilled but conflicted. He likes his new team and his new coach, he’s had a strong preseason, and he’s making $120,000 to play basketball. What’s more, thanks to the proliferation of international players in the NBA, the league has begun to scout European teams. Should he stay in Switzerland or come back for the D-League? It’s not clear which path will give him the best chance of making the NBA.

“I’ve got a month or two, then I’ll have to make a decision,” he says in his e-mail. “Hey, you been ballin’ still?”

“Ballin’ outta control,” I write back. “Torched ’em last night at the Y.”

Yeah, I found out the hard way—I couldn’t hang. I was good enough only to keep from embarrassing myself. (I’d totaled fourteen points and fifteen assists.) Anthony, who scored three points in our final game, also came up short. But that’s kind of all right. There’s something about laying it all on the line that feels gutsy and noble.

“Plan A was the Viper FilmStream,” Anthony had told me as we spilled out of the gym at the end of camp. “But I can make my movie with a different camera. I’ll just go with plan B. You always gotta have a plan B, know what I’m saying?”

davy rothbart racked up a triple-double last night (over six games) at Slauson Middle School.

There's only one good thing about getting your heart crushed in a bitter breakup: You're about to experience your sexual second coming

by adam sachs

GQ, April 2008

i am on my knees, pretending to cry. My wife is standing above me. She’s got a suitcase, which isn’t a good sign. We are in the basement of the building we moved into six years ago. The ad in the paper compared the tiny space in a wobbly old carriage house in the West Village to a “Parisian tree house” (whatever the hell that meant), and we liked the sound of it and rushed in to buy it, though we weren’t even engaged. Behind a heavy gate, at the back of a green courtyard shaded by a lucky Japanese maple, our home lay outside the grasp of the world. Inside we chirped and whistled to each other in some made-up bird language that said nothing could ever go wrong. We baked salmon in puff pastry. We drank old Armagnac and laughed our asses off. We were warmly affectionate in that discreet but evident way that made other couples quarrel when they left our dinner parties. We flew to Paris and Tokyo and Capri and Sydney and Martinique and brought home exotic salts and jams, artisanal moonshine, and tins of jellied pigs’ trotters—whatever was precisely the least practical crap you could have, delivered to our fridge, where it remained unused, a climate-controlled gallery of preserved memories, best intentions, and harmless affectations.

We weren’t—I don’t think—total assholes about it. But baby, we were smug about love. We’d cracked the code. It was all so simple: Pick someone you like to do everything with and just be nice to them the whole way through. We were geniuses.

I can see it’s not her weekend bag. It’s the clunky rolling armoire, the fat one that’s always awful to coax up stairs and into taxis. You could fit a body in this bag. You could zip yourself in with a book, a flashlight, and a snack, and check yourself in for a long-haul flight to far away, which is exactly where my wife wants to be now: away, as soon as possible. Fleeing here, leaving me. I’ve always hated that bag. I hate this basement, too. Where I want to be is upstairs, where the light is warm, where our pictures and books and useless kitchen appliances are, where our history is collecting on the sloped floorboards: the thousand mundane things that add up to a life lived together, that keep piling up on top of each other until you get old and die together atop that mountain of shared experience. Or until somebody comes home one night and just topples the thing and walks out.

Knees bent, hands up (executionee-style), I ask her to reconsider. Let’s slow this down. The word please comes out of my mouth too often, too weakly, like the desperate fart of some terrified donkey. Everything seems off—the wrong film reel played at the wrong speed. There’s no continuity, no connection to the rest of our life. The number of conversations we’d had about this—about the possibility of things being over—was zero. For a month she’d seemed somewhere else, wandering through a fog of grief, troubled by thoughts she couldn’t or wouldn’t explain. But over was not discussed. Over was not on the table. Yet here it was. One minute the faint rumble of thunder from two towns away. The next: lightning bolt to the groin! Fatal, a bad way to go, couldn’t have happened to a nicer fellow. Except her speech to me left no room for niceties. Kindness was not one of its themes. Delivered wild-eyed in a voice I’d never heard before, it was all judgment, no plea, terms nonnegotiable: Bye-bye. All over. Move, now.

If I could beat her to the door and outrun this, I would. But it’s too late: An unbelievable thing is unmistakably happening. I know I should be crying, am in fact doing everything I can to get some kind of results in that department. I scrunch up my face, trying to wring hot tears from my skull. Nothing doing. Something’s jammed. Everything is coming out the wrong way. It’s a miracle I don’t shit my pants instead— though a good rock-bottom pants-shitting would be as apt and futile a response as any. Dry-eyed, I fake it. But the sounds that come out—of swelling outrage, of fear, of howling injured love and piercing what-the-fuck confusion—the sounds are real.

Imagine all the sweet, quiet things you say to someone you love. Now see that person buckled at your feet, a thing to be stepped over. The face of my wife—that new and unwelcome mask of rehearsed confidence—is suddenly distorted by abject horror. She looks at me and simply screams.

*****

i always thought I’d be the one who’d fuck it up. Or feared that I could, anyway. As a travel writer, I live an easy, pampered life. And like many without real cares, I am not unfamiliar with the urge to drive the happy bus off the side of the mountain just to see what happens. Complicating this is that disease of the brain called chronic male horniness. I used to tell people that the world will never seem more teeming with beautiful, fascinating, fuckable people than on the sunny afternoon when you walk to the post office carrying a box full of your wedding invitations. It was a joke that, for me, contained some sorrow and more than the usual measure of truth. I never imagined that love and marriage would cure the body of its urges or rid the mind of its curiosity, but it’s a manageable affliction. You handle it. You don’t do what you often desperately want to do. Could there be a simpler definition of commitment and sacrifice? The point is: You make it to the mailbox and send those invitations despite the hotness of strangers and in defiance of the gloom of never kissing anyone new ever again. You do it because it feels right, because there is a satisfaction in going all-in, on betting everything on forever.

But then she left. The deal was off. And here is where I must thank the grunting, unkillable needs of my addled male mind. For all its ceaseless nagging—the pointless years of thinking, If I could fuck somebody on this subway car, who would it be?—the monomania occasionally redeems itself. During moments of trauma, an emotional endorphin kicks in to soothe the pain, and a little voice inside the little brain says: Now we get to see other people naked again.

Male friends wanted to talk about this. After the proper declarations of shock and compassion, and after checking to see that their wives weren’t in the room, they would delicately float the idea of a possible upside to the unraveling of my marriage. After much empathy, a married friend announced: “You were doing life in Alcatraz, and you broke out and swam to freedom.” A funny thing, this freedom. I was free to not know where my life was going. Free to recast, reimagine, regroup. Free to fail or flourish. Another friend (married, sane, kids) spelled it out explicitly: “To walk away with no ties, no guilt, no responsibilities. It’s the male fantasy.”

But it wasn’t my fantasy. I’d signed on for the cozy carriage house with the two songbirds building their nest. I didn’t want to be a divorced guy any more than I wanted to wear a guayabera or ride around on a Razor scooter. I liked being married, accepted its compromises because I believed in the payoff of long-term togetherness.

The night my wife left, I smashed a chair in our living room. “There is someone else,” she said, the pitiless cliché delivered less like an admission than a frantic alert about something she’d witnessed. There’s been an accident! Run, get help! The nearest thing was a wooden chair. It hit the floor and snapped (saloon-brawl style) into a half-dozen pieces. But all I wanted was to make things whole again.

That night, I fed the pieces of the chair into the fireplace and watched them burn and thought only: I will save this. I will make passionate declarations and write patient, beautiful letters that our children’s children will find and think, Holy shit, if this were any less dazzling or persuasive we wouldn’t even be here! I’ll be forgiving as a saint and deliberate as a killer. I will consult the experts, build coalitions and make bullet-pointed plans in motherfucking PowerPoint. I will outmaneuver this by superior wit and pure intention and be the bighearted superhero of love and—

And it didn’t work. What followed were the worst wintry, whiskey-chugging months of my mostly charmed life. We were on again and then off. I learned to cry. Mastered it. Had the stamina of a colicky infant on a turbulent transpacific flight. My friend Elizabeth said that every time she saw me, it looked as if I were trying to work out the world’s hardest math problem. I couldn’t solve it. But I tried. Someone fucked it up, and it wasn’t me. I was left with no alternative but to fill my life with new entanglements, new fascinations, new people.

So I went off to San Francisco to write, but mostly for distraction. An amnesiac trying not to remember. I played tennis all the time and drank beer and ate pizza and napped in parks and sat on benches outside coffee shops talking to strangers and generally tried to make myself better by making myself 18 again.

I started slow. I’d been jerked around so much that it took some time to reacquaint myself with intimacy and kindness. I met M., a pretty Tokyoite on life-hiatus in San Francisco. We had a chaste lunch and a couple of days later a drunken dinner. That night we ended up at a bar in the tenderloin. While M. was dancing, a stranger in a cowboy hat took me aside and urged me to action. “She likes you,” he said. “Now kiss her. Kiss her on the neck.” Thank you, wise Cowboy Hat Man, for recognizing the romantically rusty. We stumbled back to her place and broke all the vows I’d taken some years ago.

M. and I settled quickly into a quiet routine. While she was at work, I’d nap at her apartment and read Murakami novels. She would teach me Japanese words (wakinoshita, armpit), and I would watch her glide around her tiny apartment. I took great comfort in observing her slice okra, fill a glass with water, boil noodles. Whatever we were doing felt less like a passionate affair than like physical therapy—I was learning to walk again.

We spent an enormous amount of time in bed. In her shy, whispery voice she took to calling a part of me “Coit Tower.” (I’m sorry, but when your sincerest aspirations are meanly crushed by the person you trusted the most, there is nothing more essential to surviving the barely-hanging-on period than having a sweet girl address a part of your body by a charitable and ludicrous nickname.)

M. and I asked little of each other. One night, though, she said, “Are you happy?” It was an innocent question, but alarm bells sounded. Happiness was a dangerous-sounding thing, emotional hazmat that required expert handling. What business did I have messing around with happy? Hadn’t my marriage imploded only a few months ago? Lost, away from home, wandering through the still smoldering wreckage of life-as-it-was, I was comfortable with the image of myself as distant, distraught. But lying around M.’s apartment, my guest toothbrush hanging in the bathroom, I realized that the answer was, weirdly, unseemly, honestly: Yes.

This was the happiness of reduced expectations, of boiled noodles and the comfort of strangers. Transient, directionless, very possibly self-deluding. But whatever kind of happiness it was, I’d take it and take some more, please.

After my recovery period, I returned to New York and tried to relearn how to be single. I hadn’t dated in nearly a decade, and I wasn’t very good at it my last go-around. This time, though, it was different. I had a superpower of sorts, one which, like any other superpower, was born of some life-changing calamity. In a world of men who can’t commit, I’d committed and lost. I assumed divorce would mark me with a scarlet letter, an unmissable warning label announcing caveat emptor: this person has loved and lost—ask yourself why. But women seem unfazed. Some find it sympathetic, sweet, a turn-on in a way I find slightly necrophilic but am thankful for.

I am a lucky man. For better or worse and mostly by accident, I am a professional vacationer and food writer. I have fun for a living. In this I am well suited to the temporary immunities and sanity reprieve offered by divorce. There is velocity in escape. My plan was to go everywhere, do everything. Self-distract (not destruct) for as long as it took to feel I’d beaten this thing. I climbed mountains and raced cars and walked in the woods. I saw lions in the Serengeti, copulating ostriches in Ngorongoro Crater, and an angry grizzly bear in the Canadian Rockies. In Bombay I ate goats’ brains off the hood of a car and went sandboarding in the desert between Dubai and Abu Dhabi. One day, horribly hungover, I ran into my soon-to-be ex-father-in-law on a street in London. We embraced and went around the corner and ate lobster omelets and caught up on things, like the fact that his daughter was threatening to sue me for divorce on the grounds of “inhuman treatment” (you read that right) and “constructive abandonment” (look it up for a laugh). It was a civilized, surreal lunch. What else could we do? We liked each other, and we weren’t the ones who’d fucked it up.

When I stopped moving, I would think about the wrecked recent past or the unknowable future, and I’d feel slightly sick, so I kept going. Much of it is a blur. In Miami, I meet a French Canadian who explained to me the importance of watching me kiss his young, lithe, coke-snorting wife in the bathroom of a South Beach hotel: that these controlled indiscretions are how the fickle flames of wedded bliss are kept eternal. So I go to the bathroom with his beautiful 22-year-old wife and do my part on behalf of the strength and longevity of their marital union and to keep my mind from the brevity and dissolution of my own. In San Francisco, I meet a girl who is studying for a Ph.D. in happiness. I give her a bite of a chocolate-chip cookie, and she leads me back to her apartment, where she has a yellow pillow on her bed that’s shaped like a star and says future celebrity, and I fear for my own future, for my sanity. I interview a Scandinavian minister of trade—and ask his pretty press secretary to dinner. I meet girls on planes and outside bars and at weddings (thank God for other people’s weddings!) and in hotel lobbies and, once, on a sheep farm. I am consistently shocked to be playing again in the rumpus room of the single people. I know I forgot how strange it all is: What people do. What they look like. The things they say. The carnivalesque variety, excitement, and sadness of it all. Thank God for the hope and the pleasures of the first kiss, which— no matter how porn-trained the world becomes— is what you miss most of all.

In South Beach, I lost the French Canadians around 4 a.m. and fell in with a Persian woman who came to my room at 7 and was rambunctious and loud but also polite and said thank you when she left at noon. In Sydney one morning I asked a departing stranger for her business card. “Is that your way of saying you can’t remember my name?” she asked. (It was a very unusual name.) At a nineteenth-century members’ club in London, I was propositioned by a divorcée with an admirable economy of words: “You, me, bathroom, now.” (I declined; there was someone else there I liked.) Closer to home, in fact just outside it, I said good-bye to a guest one morning. She walked in one direction and I walked the other to the coffee cart at the end of my block. The coffee man watched her walk away and smiled at me ridiculously. I told him that she was a part-time professional cheerleader for the WNBA, which was true. (I did not tell him that I’d prepared for her stay by washing down half a Viagra tablet with a can of diet Red Bull, which was also true.) Today, he announced, I would receive a special discount of twenty-five cents. We smiled at each other ridiculously.

*****

it is night, late. I am sitting at my desk in the little office overlooking the red-leafed Japanese maple. The creaky old floorboards announce that somebody is awake and moving. I nearly whistle one of the old nutty birdcalls my wife and I would communicate with. I stop myself: That’s a dead language now.

There’s a knock, and a sweet girl appears at the office door. We don’t know each other very well, but well enough. She drinks my whiskey and has a habit of asking me in a vaguely dirty way who I am and what I’m doing here (in my bed). I used to fear that this apartment would feel haunted by the presence of the person I once shared it with, worried that it would always remind me of her exit, of broken vows and smashed chairs. But it doesn’t. A year has passed since our scene in the basement, and to my genuine surprise I didn’t even notice the anniversary until a few days later. I’d arranged to meet a girl at a birthday party who showed up late and ravishing. After everyone left or fell asleep, we stole my friend’s wine and ran back here—this is my apartment now—and talked until the sun came up, all worked up with the giddy energy of new things. It was, unplanned, a perfect day to mark a year in this uncharted territory. My friend Liz Gilbert wrote a book, Eat, Pray, Love, about the year of pizza and spiritual questing that followed her divorce. I had a different kind of year. My version would be called Drink, Fuck, Forget.

Part of the ugliness of divorce and deceit is that it can take away a sense of yourself, temporarily blind you to who you are. But a year later I was still me. It was a big day. A fuck-you-to-sadness kind of day. So this is the unasked-for second act.

Now the sweet girl is at the office door. She can’t sleep and wants to know what I’m writing about. So, for the hundredth time, the story behind this story keeps me from finishing it. The characters have a funny habit of announcing themselves, getting in the way, dropping by for a drink. The soon-to- be ex-wife e-mails with some bland, grim business. The divorce lawyers cook up some hideous homework for me. The phone rings. The doorbell buzzes. The second act continues to unfold in all its comic weirdness. And it is a kind of gift, isn’t it, to be consistently surprised by one’s own life? If I am lucky, I am also diligent, defiant, dogged in pursuit of the silver lining. Mostly, what I feel now is happy. That unlikely, welcome word again, and once again I’ll take it. This isn’t the life I chose or maybe deserve, but it is vivid, curious, and often thrilling. I’ll never thank my wife for subjecting me to the near-death experience of divorce, never forgive her lies or admire her idiotic choices. But I am happy to find myself afloat in the world, cured of commitment but not of love, without any clue what comes next.

adam sachs is a former GQ senior staff writer who frequently writes about travel and food.

Photo credit: Mauricio Guillen/My Best Fred

*****

When one of our former staffers moved to D.C., he discovered that what flies in Manhattan (black jeans, pointy shoes) doesn't pass muster among the pleated khakis and American-flag lapel pins of Capitol Hill

by greg veis

*****

I arrived at GQ in April 2004 as a 22-year-old schlub. I don’t say this to be falsely self-deprecating; I say it because it’s the sad, sad, God’s honest truth. Nearly every day for two years, I dragged my raggedy self into work wearing an untucked and baggy dress shirt, my hair frozen by gel, in jeans so ill fitting that they would’ve rendered any ass—let alone my ass—unidentifiable, a tiny protuberance awash in a sea of denim.

I mixed black and brown.

All of this would’ve been quasi-acceptable if I were an insurance adjuster or a back-room clerk at a Barnes & Noble. But I worked at GQ, home to some of the sharpest-dressed mofos I’ve ever met—guys who didn’t mind telling you that you looked like a Maloof brother. One particularly dispiriting day, a writer not known for his nattiness took a glance at my outfit—jeans, navy blue sneakers, a billowy brown-green-yellow-and-red vertically striped button-front—and scoffed, “You wear that to work?” He said he respected my willingness to embarrass myself.

There’s no use pretending things had changed all that much by last October, when I left GQ for a political journal in Washington, D.C. But I was getting better. I added a pair of slim-fit jeans to the rotation, along with some skinny ties and tailored jackets. In short, I looked like a New Yorker, maybe even one who had completed a summer internship at Bravo.

I wish it didn’t, but my improvement mattered to me. I liked that the folks who used to crack wise dropped the actually on the days they said I looked good. It meant I had completed a successful adaptation. And for those of us (I assume most of us) who like to look good but don’t have the stones to dress exactly how we want no matter what the situation, being in sync with your surroundings is key—right up there with personal style (defined loosely in my case) and comfort.

So then the strangest thing happens: I lug myself down to D.C., and all of a sudden I’m Mr. Fucking GQ. Apparently, what barely passed for fashionable in the Condé Nast cafeteria is cause for suspicion at the National Press Club. I can’t tell you how many times in my first couple of months here I was asked, normally by drunk girls, if I was gay.

“No,” I’d say. “I’m flattered, but I used to work at a men’s magazine.”

“Oh, well,” they’d respond sloppily. “You just dress kinda gay, I guess.”

Now, the District gets a bad enough rap for not being the most culturally edgy place—and I don’t mean to pile on. D.C. today is a lot different than the D.C. of ten years ago; there are now parts of the city just as plugged-in as the hippest hoods in Brooklyn. But that rumor about how everyone in Official Washington—Capitol Hill types, white-shoe attorneys, lobbyists—wears obscene amounts of Brooks Brothers? That shit is true! Also: pleats. Lots of pants down here be pleated. It’s crazy.

And like everywhere else, but perhaps even more so, there’s a premium on uniformity. You haven’t seen anyone testify before Congress wearing a suit from Rag & Bone, right? That’s because it would mark him as an outsider, just like my schlubby outfits did during my first days at GQ. I’m not suggesting you go all native and buy a cowboy hat if you get reassigned to Amarillo, Texas. (A friend of mine did that, a lawyer.) But context matters, particularly in professional situations.

So if you stop by the Brooks Brothers on Connecticut Avenue, you might spot me. I’ll be the one eyeing the seersucker, wondering why, just as I was finally starting to get a handle on things in New York, I chose to start over here.

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by mickey rapkin

it's not like you don't know what High School Musical is, though unless you have kids, you probably skipped it. Still, this silly name—Vanessa Hudgens—has somehow wormed its way into your consciousness. (Those photos didn't hurt.) With boyfriend Zac Efron in tow, her every move has been documented by the tabloids in what amounts to a string of Facebook mini-feeds. "If you have paparazzi," says Vanessa, 19, "you know you've gotten somewhere." Whoa. Her nudie snaps—sent to a boy like some modern-day love note—hit the blogosphere in September 2007. And it was a first-class poondoggle. "Honestly, you have your ups and downs," she says now.  "But it's over with and it's done." And it is done—a testament to the power of the Hudgens brand, a brand she's all too happy to illuminate for you. Of her sophomore album—out next month, still untitled—she says, "It's definitely more grown-up. But not to the point where I'm singing I'm so hot! I'm so hot! Boys want me. I'm so hot!"

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Click here for photo galleries of Jessica Alba, Hayden Panettiere, and all the Women of GQ.

Old Rivalry, New Blood

Joba Chamberlain and Jacoby Ellsbury are both under 25. They both possess otherworldly talent. They both share a Native American heritage. Unfortunately, one plays for the Yankees and one plays for the Red Sox

fact is, Red Sox versus Yankees jumped the shark in 2005. In 2003, Boston lost the ALCS to New York on a seventh-game, eleventh-inning walk-off home run—the most hyphenated and painful defeat imaginable, right? Wrong: In 2004, the Yankees lost the ALCS to Boston after leading three games to none—the worst choke in sports, ever. Even Stallone would hesitate to write a sequel to that, but the sports media didn't balk, furiously pimping the rivalry until even fans grew tired of their own players. But in 2007, two rookies, both Native American—Red Sox outfielder Jacoby Ellsbury, 24, who's half Navajo, and Yankees pitcher Joba Chamberlain, 22, who's half Winnebago—made the rivalry vibrate again. In his third big-league game, Ellsbury, like some mad figure out of Negro League legend, scored from second base on a wild pitch. In thirty-three games, he'd bat .353; in the World Series, .438. And Chamberlain, who routinely lit up triple digits on the radar gun, didn't allow an earned run in his first twelve games and threw a slider that may be the game's most unhittable pitch. For once we weren't talking about Manny's wandering attention span or A-Rod's roving eye. To watch the two rookies is to be witness to something fresh, thrilling, and especially in Boston and New York, rare: baseball without baggage.

With a new novel hitting shelves, the former Speaker of the House takes a minute to talk Obama, McCain, and the state of the Republican Party

By Wil S. Hylton

Stefan Zaklin/EPA/Corbis

*****

Ten years ago, Newt Gingrich fled the House of Representatives in a haze of ethics scandals and waning influence. Since then, he has spent much of his time rewriting history—literally—by authoring five historical novels that examine how a single change in history might have, well, changed history. The latest, Days of Infamy (out April 29th), explores the aftermath of Pearl Harbor. Here, Gingrich speaks to GQ's Wil S. Hylton:

What do you want readers to take away from this book?
The idea that surprise can be extraordinarily painful. I think the reaction to 9/11 should have been vastly deeper and more complex, like the reaction to Pearl Harbor.

Why did you choose a novel to talk about these issues?
Well, first of all, writing novels is fun. But part of the goal is to get people to think about history as an active process, not just dates and facts that you memorize. History could have been different.

How does your background in history influence your political ideas?
If you think about the current situation, it helps to remember Harry Truman running in 1948, or even Sarkozy in France. Sarkozy distanced himself from Chirac without being hostile. That's what McCain has to do with Bush. And what McCain is trying to achieve by explaining the dangers of the world to the public is like what Lincoln had to do in the Civil War.

McCain doesn't exactly have Lincoln's rhetorical skills.
In style he's closer to Truman, who did not have the rhetorical skills, but had passion.

Do you think that's enough against somebody like Obama?
If you mean three weeks from now, I'd say no. But over the next eight months, I hope so. I think it'll be a question of whether people think McCain has the better argument. I f the issue is who's the better performer, Obama will win. If the issue is who is right, McCain will win easily.

Do you really think people vote based on a deep analysis of who's right?
No, they vote based on summary judgment.

And you still think McCain beats Obama?
Look, I expected Senator Clinton to be the nominee. And I thought last August that McCain was gone. So getting my insight on the future isn't going to be very helpful.

Okay, back to the past. What happened to your party over the last eight years?
They went off the rails. That's it. They took a majority that took 16 years to build and they destroyed it.

How?
There was a fundamental misunderstanding about how to govern. The concept of red versus blue is a tactic, not a strategy. In the long run, in order to mobilize your base, you tend to become more intense and your positions become more vitriolic, and you drive away the independents. Then you are no longer a majority.

What does the party have to do to come back?
We have to remember that we are the party of reform. The Democrats should defend the bureaucracy because it's theirs. Republicans want the bureaucracy changed, not defended. Nothing we have seen on the border, nothing we have seen after Katrina, leads people to believe that this government can do anything effectively. People profoundly distrust this government. Republicans should remember that.

*****

by lucy kaylin

Photograph by Martin Schoeller

chances are that over the past few weeks, Marc Jacobs has done something outrageous. Maybe he’s at the center of a Spitzer-sized sex scandal or tapped Flavor Flav to be the new face of Louis Vuitton. There’s no evidence, as yet, of either, but the way the perfectly zany Jacobs narrative is hurtling along, anything seems possible. Consider the highlights of the past year: a porn star crowing online about threesomes with Jacobs and Jacobs’s former-escort boyfriend; a tune-up in rehab; allegations that his line paid bribes for use of New York’s 26th Street Armory for his shows; then starting those shows at least two hours late, turning the normally adoring fashion press into a pitchfork-wielding mob.

And yet nothing has created a greater stir than his startling new look. Where he once had long greasy locks and the pallor of a shut-in, he now, at 45, has an iridescent blue crop, honking Harry Winston diamond studs, a gallery of tattoos, and a painstakingly ripped bod. After years of hiding in baggy sweatshirts while contemplating the beauty of others—of pondering any human facade but his own—Jacobs has discovered the consuming joy of narcissism. It’s his new addiction. Some would say, his midlife crisis.

“I don’t feel like I’m in crisis, and I don’t know that it’s the middle of my life,” Jacobs says, looking a little like Jeff Goldblum circa The Fly—large, dark, worried eyes weirdly belied by a dome physique. It’s a measure of how closely he is watched and the stir he has caused that even a self-described attention whore like Jacobs is starting to weary of the scrutiny. “Why is there this division all of a sudden between people in support of me and people against me? How did this happen? I haven’t done anything to anybody! I look at Karl Lagerfeld and John Galliano—everybody has their shtick. And just because this wasn’t my shtick two years ago, it’s a problem.”

As Jacobs tells it, before now he simply had no budget in his psyche for self-maintenance: “I didn’t care what I looked like, because I knew I’d be on the floor picking up pins or drawing all day.” It’s a Friday afternoon in his cluttered, loftlike office in SoHo where boxes of Wheat Thins are stashed next to packs of Marlboro Lights and cheapo lighters. His hair juts like a Mohawk—the effect is thrusting, roosterish, in contrast to the Pre-Raphaelite languor of the long-haired Marc Jacobs in the photo on the wall behind him. “I thought, Who cares about my appearance? They only care about what I’m making.”

Then he got the existential bitch-slap of ulcerative colitis, the disease that led to his father’s death when Jacobs was only 7. A nutritionist, Lindsey Duncan, recommended a monastic diet—no flour, dairy, sugar, or caffeine—as well as exercise. Jacobs was so enamored of the results he made the regimen his religion.

“The thing I love about the gym is not having to make choices,” he notes. “My trainer says, ‘You’re gonna lift this; you’re gonna do that ten times.’ Okay, great—just tell me what to do and I’ll do it. It’s the same thing with my nutritionist. All I have to do is follow instructions. I love that. This is not about ‘Would it be better in red or blue?’ There isn’t a lot of abstract, circular thinking involved. And it’s great. Those times are really nice for me.”

Because it’s hard being the decider—the face of a $5 billion business, the guy whose whims about pants width and buttons and colors can create an enormously lucrative global ripple. It’s hard being him. Torture, actually, much of the time.

*****

for years now, the Jacobs universe has been where everyone wanted to be. It radiates from that simple, ubiquitous sans-serif logo—a guilelessness, a downtown ease that never postures or preens. Consider the Jacobs signatures—retro cardigans and high-water pants with trainers for guys who look like they’ve actually read a book; slouchy, deconstructed sweaters worn with long, bulky skirts and flats for girls who don’t lead with their tits. The statement-making bags, the glamorizing of grunge, the pairing of fashion and anime…. If Ralph Lauren is a lifestyle, Marc Jacobs is an ethos. With his pitch-perfect instincts—say, using laconic, large-nosed Sofia Coppola in grainy, era-defining ads—he exerts an almost messianic pull.

But how can he be both a messiah and a mess? How can an industry titan, the most important person in fashion, be so fragile? Or is the fragility endemic to the success, the very thing that keeps us so riveted?

For a fixture in the haughtiest of worlds, Jacobs is curiously grounded about his work—he bristles when what he does is referred to as art. Whereas his competitors shroud themselves in mystique, Jacobs serves up his flaws and insecurities like canapés. “There are those gray, rainy days where it’s sad and you just think, God, I’m so lonely and it’s such a big world and there’s so much to do,” he says. According to Jacobs’s business partner of twenty-five years, Robert Duffy, “Marc is a very emotional person, and he takes his work extremely seriously. Some days it’s hard and some days it’s not—it depends on his mood swings. I don’t know if you’ve ever worked with a drug addict,” Duffy tells me over the phone while Jacobs sketches a shoe a few feet away. “Even though he’s been in recovery now for a while, it’s not an easy process. There’s the continual process of staying sober.”

Jacobs’s father was an agent at William Morris and his mother a receptionist. (His uncle was the president of the company, and Jacobs worked in the legendary mailroom during high school.) When I ask him what he remembers about his father, he rests his chin in his hand and stares off. There was a trip to Puerto Rico, to the circus… And then he was gone. Thus began a chaotic period of power dating and failed marriages for his mother.

Naturally, it’s the clothes he remembers best. “I hate the term ‘bad taste,’ but my mother wasn’t, like, a very chic person,” he says. “Jane Fonda in Klute was definitely one of her role models, much to my father’s dismay. But when I’d watch my mother getting dressed up to go out on dates and she’d be putting on three rows of false eyelashes and some hideous fox-trimmed brocade coat with a wet-look miniskirt and knee-high boots, I thought she was fabulous.”

The feeling wouldn’t last. After she relocated to be with one husband or another, Jacobs went to live with his grandmother in Manhattan, where he attended the High School of Art and Design. At a certain point he cut ties to his mother, as well as to his brother and sister, both of whom, he says, couldn’t be less like him. Jacobs says they reached out some years ago—to borrow money. “But that’s just a little detail from a story that’s way more complicated,” he notes.

I cast around, trying to figure out what could have happened. Did they have a problem with his being gay? I ask.

Jacobs scoffs at the suggestion—as if it were anything that simple.

Not that he didn’t struggle with his sexuality, with “being the only kid in a big group that doesn’t want to play football and buy stereos and drive cars. When I went to sleepaway camp, I just kind of wanted to sit there and make an ashtray or do a lanyard necklace or paint my jeans,” he says. “And then to stand there and not be chosen for a baseball team—it’s like, force me to do something and then don’t choose me to do it. Okay, what am I supposed to enjoy about that process? How am I supposed to feel good about myself with all that going on?”

Clothes promised deliverance from all that, and Jacobs became obsessed with the possibilities. “I’d look at my babysitter and her boyfriend and long to be at an age where I could wear what they were wearing,” he says. Clothes had the stirring, transformative power of music—of rock, punk, and particularly grunge. “There was a beaten-down glamour about the whole thing,” Jacobs says, “something so kind of romantic and beautiful.”

In 1992, Jacobs, as vice president of women’s design at Perry Ellis, conjured a daring ode to grunge—Seattle plaids in silk and waffle shirts in cashmere. Though the show was a commercial failure and quickly got him and Duffy fired, the collection was a Jacobs landmark in the way it mined a cultural moment and turned alienation into something sort of beautiful. In 1997, Jacobs and Duffy were named artistic director and studio director, respectively, of the musty luxury-goods house Louis Vuitton, the chief perk of which was that parent company LVMH agreed to bankroll a line bearing Jacobs’s name.

Since then, the two have quadrupled Vuitton’s business, thanks to pure-Jacobs masterstrokes that signaled a new exuberance for the century-old house, like collaborating with the artist Takashi Murakami on a line of leather goods at the height of our collective fetish for all things Japan; Murakami’s candied, anime take on Vuitton’s stately brown logo spurred $300 million in sales in 2003. (Jacobs, the minister at the lucrative marriage of fashion and art, has collaborated on another line of bags with kitsch-appropriator Richard Prince.)

I find myself wondering if the ultimate revenge on a tacky mother is to become a worldwide fashion icon, though the theory would surely leave Jacobs cold. He is also blasé on the subject of his success, but he’s very clear on the role his own difficulties have played. Clothes, really, were the only thing he loved during a bleak and fractured childhood. “The pain,” he says, “is proportionate to the pleasure.”

I ask Jacobs if he’s ever curious about his mother—where she is, what she’s doing now. “Not at all,” he says mordantly. “Utterly cold on the subject. I never believed that idea that you’re supposed to love the members of your family. I hate the idea of obliged feelings—I just think that’s a huge waste of time. But I’ve had enough conversations with people to realize that I’m the oddball in this category. I can’t think of anyone as detached from their family as I am. Or as detached as I say I am.”

*****

it's thursday morning at New York’s David Barton Gym, where Jacobs is starting his day in the usual way: with a two-and-a-half-hour workout. Small and wiry, he rolls up on the balls of his feet as he moves from one end of the gym floor to another, greeting strangers, inviting scrutiny.

Closely tended by his trainer, Eric “Easy” Forlines, Jacobs grabs a pair of metal rings on the biceps machine, stares deeply into Easy’s eyes, and pulls down hard.

“Exercising is fun—the best part of my day,” Jacobs says with effort. “I’m such a catastrophic thinker that when anything happens, I figure I better just live life to the fullest—buy a diamond necklace, get another tattoo, work out with Easy.”

Between sets, they compare new tattoos—Easy’s got a Smith & Wesson revolver on his flank, while Jacobs reveals a midcentury-style couch, of all things, a couple of inches long, on the taut, tanned skin above his hip bone.

On the street after the workout, they swig protein drinks while reminiscing about the time they met, a year and a half ago, after a mutual hairstylist friend suggested they do so. At the time, the name Marc Jacobs meant little to Easy.

“Because my name wasn’t Dolce or Gabbana, he had no idea who I was,” snarks Jacobs, crouching in a tweed Dior coat and a tangerine cashmere scarf, huddled like a regular around his Marlboro Light—his last vice since swearing off everything from heroin to absinthe years ago.

By the time they met, Jacobs was already dieting. “I never saw the bigger Marc,” Easy says, behind aviator shades etched with mj, a Louis Vuitton gym bag at his feet.

“The fat guy that I kicked?” says Jacobs.

“The fat guy that we’d beat up if we saw him on the street,” Easy laughs.

“The soft, blubbery Marc Jacobs,” says Marc Jacobs.

Over the course of their relationship, Easy has seen the Jacobs evolution up close. “The contact lenses were a big part,” he says. “Then the hair got shorter and shorter. Then it got really short, and he’s like, ‘Damn, it looks good.’ Then the bling started happening. I was all for it. I said, ‘Dawg, you’re a superfamous fashion designer—like, what about some bling? Let’s do it!’ I can’t do it, so I live vicariously through all the awesome jewelry that he has.”

“Nooo, you get some,” Jacobs notes.

Easy hesitates, then offers his wrist, which boasts a gold Rolex—a birthday present from Jacobs. On the back, it’s inscribed love you dawg, mj. “I’m really proud of it,” Easy says quietly.

Then Jacobs holds up his own wrist, revealing the same watch, but with a black face. They put them together like power bracelets.

“We’re BFFs,” says Jacobs, glancing at Easy—so grateful for a sherpa in the foreign land of self-love.

Jacobs is what you might call a framily man; lacking any meaningful blood ties, he’s put himself in the hands of Team Jacobs (Easy, Dr. Duncan, his shrink, Duffy—even the chauffeur he affectionately refers to as “my boss”). He forges tight, obsessive relationships with people who can handle his compulsi