Cinemorphosis

Category: culture

  • The Heartbreak of Micky Dolenz

    The Heartbreak of Micky Dolenz

    My parents liked to remind me that before IBM rescued my father with a job offer and transplanted us from Florida to California, we were so poor they sold blood to hospitals to help feed me. This family anecdote was repeated with the solemn gravity of frontier folklore, as though I had survived the Donner Party rather than early childhood. We lived in military housing in Gainesville called Flavet Villages, a collection of dreary barracks-style tenements that seemed permanently damp, exhausted, and spiritually defeated. Cockroaches crawled openly along the walls beside my crib as though they too paid rent and felt entitled to common areas.

    Nearby sat an alligator swamp whose odor drifted across the housing complex with biblical hostility. Around dawn and twilight especially, the air became thick with a feculent stench that smelled like Satan’s compost bin after a seafood boil. The swamp seemed less a natural ecosystem than a punishment assigned to the poor. Everything about Flavet Villages communicated scarcity, mildew, resignation, and the understanding that comfort belonged to other people living elsewhere.

    Then came the phone call from IBM.

    Just like that, our trajectory changed. My father packed us into a late-1950s Mercury and drove westward toward what had not yet become Silicon Valley but was already beginning to hum with technological ambition and California mythology. We rolled down Highway 101, exited at Tully Road in San Jose, and arrived at what, to our eyes, looked less like an apartment complex than a tropical resurrection.

    The Royal Lanai apartments embodied that distinctly mid-century California fantasy in which ordinary suburban housing attempted to impersonate a Polynesian resort through sheer landscaping optimism. The place radiated the confidence of an era convinced that lava rock, palm trees, and decorative stonework could transport middle-class renters into an exotic island paradise situated conveniently between a supermarket and a freeway exit.

    Dark volcanic rocks framed the walkways. Palmettos and fan palms swayed above flowerbeds bursting with oversized sunflowers and dense tropical greenery. The buildings themselves were decorated with rough lava stone and jagged field rock embedded into the stucco, as though cooled magma had erupted directly into suburban San Jose. Sprinklers hissed across the landscaping in the evening light while the California sun reflected warmly against the black volcanic stone.

    Compared to Flavet Villages, the Royal Lanai felt impossibly glamorous.

    We had crossed from swamp funk to Polynesian fantasy.

    From cockroaches to lava rock.

    From survival to aspiration.

    And though we were still renters living in an apartment complex beside a busy road, to my parents it must have felt as though IBM had not merely offered employment but delivered us personally into the American Dream wearing a short-sleeve dress shirt and carrying a briefcase.

    The monthly pilgrimage to the manager’s office to pay the rent filled my mother with a kind of triumphant delight. She treated the occasion less like a financial obligation and more like admission into respectable civilization. Before leaving the apartment, she would proudly hold up the giant green circular keychain embossed with our apartment number, the metal house key dangling from it like a sacred relic proving we belonged at the Royal Lanai. Then she would invite me to accompany her on the journey as though we were visiting royalty rather than paying one hundred dollars for another month of tenancy.

    The rent itself seemed magical in its perfect roundness: exactly one hundred dollars. Not ninety-eight. Not one hundred and seven. One hundred dollars precisely, as if the evenness of the number confirmed the elegance of our new life beneath the palms and lava rock.

    At five years old, I found these expeditions endlessly fascinating because nearly everything at the Royal Lanai felt luxurious compared to the swampy deprivation stories my parents told about Florida. The manager’s office in particular possessed the aura of a tiny tropical embassy of abundance. Behind the desk sat Betty, the matronly apartment manager, smiling with the patient warmth of a woman who had seen thousands of tenants pass through her domain and knew exactly how much the place meant to young families trying to ascend into middle-class respectability.

    Inside the office stood a humming water cooler beside neat stacks of tiny paper cups that I treated with almost ceremonial reverence. Nearby sat a glass jar overflowing with sugar cubes, and Betty always assured me they were mine for the taking. This struck me as extraordinary generosity. To a small child raised on stories of blood-selling poverty and cockroach-infested tenements, unlimited cold water and unrestricted access to sugar felt like evidence that we had entered a realm of unimaginable prosperity.

    The Royal Lanai seemed less like an apartment complex than a perpetual vacation for ordinary people. Everything shimmered with promise: the tropical landscaping, the black lava rocks warming beneath the California sun, the palms rustling overhead, the miraculous availability of chilled water and refined sugar whenever my childish whims demanded them. In my mind, paradise was not complicated. Paradise was a paper cup of cold water, two stolen sugar cubes melting on your tongue, and a giant green keychain proving your family had finally escaped the swamp.

    The monthly rent at the Royal Lanai took my parents a while to psychologically absorb. One hundred dollars a month may sound quaint now, but to them it carried the emotional weight of financing Versailles. To diffuse their anxiety, they invented an elaborate family joke that my mother might soon have to supplement my father’s IBM salary by returning to her former career as a flaming sword swallower in the circus.

    According to the mythology they constructed for my benefit, my mother had toured the circus circuit in Alaska before meeting my father. She was apparently a celebrated performer capable of swallowing blazing sabers while balancing on elephants or dangling from trapezes over crowds of drunken laborers eating salted peanuts. To authenticate the story, my parents explained that my mother remained close friends with the circus CEO herself, a powerful woman named Mrs. Dimes, who spent her days inside a cramped trailer-office counting ticket sales with ruthless concentration.

    “Do you want to hear Mrs. Dimes counting the tickets?” they would ask me with theatrical seriousness.

    Then they would direct me toward our heavy avocado-green rotary telephone and instruct me to dial P-O-P-C-O-R-N.

    What I did not understand, of course, was that this connected me to Northern California’s famous “Popcorn Lady,” the automated time service whose calm robotic voice announced the time every ten seconds. My parents convinced me this was Mrs. Dimes tallying circus receipts somewhere deep inside carnival headquarters while deciding whether my mother needed to return to sword swallowing in order to save the family finances.

    For a while I found the whole thing mesmerizing.

    I imagined Mrs. Dimes sitting beneath a dangling light bulb in a smoky trailer counting endless piles of tickets while tigers roared outside and exhausted clowns smoked cigarettes beside cages. The fact that my mother possessed a direct line to the upper management of the circus filled me with awe. It made adulthood seem precarious and theatrical at the same time, as though our entire middle-class existence hung by a thread and one poorly considered supermarket purchase could force my mother to pack her bags and rejoin the carnival economy.

    At first, the game amused me.

    Then one evening, something shifted.

    Perhaps I had become old enough to detect the real anxiety lurking beneath the comedy. Perhaps the repeated references to money finally penetrated my five-year-old understanding. Whatever the reason, the thought of my mother leaving us to join the circus suddenly struck me as horrifyingly plausible.

    I began sobbing uncontrollably.

    The image of her disappearing into some distant caravan of sword swallowers, ticket counters, and exhausted acrobats overwhelmed me completely. My parents immediately abandoned the Mrs. Dimes routine and never played the game again.

    But by then the damage had been done.

    Even at five years old, I had absorbed the terrible adult knowledge that paradise could be lost, that money was fragile, and that somewhere beyond the lava rocks and palm trees of the Royal Lanai lurked the possibility that your mother might have to run away and join the circus to pay the rent.

    It was then that I resolved to prepare myself for the inevitable by joining the circus alongside my mother. If financial catastrophe struck and Mrs. Dimes summoned her back beneath the big top, I would not remain behind abandoned at the Royal Lanai like some emotionally shattered civilian. No. I would reinvent myself as the Strongman: a towering muscular brute in leopard tights capable of snapping chains across his chest, bending steel bars, and hoisting wild animals above his head while astonished crowds applauded beneath clouds of cigarette smoke and popcorn dust.

    My spiritual mentors were not priests or philosophers but superhero comics. The Incredible Hulk, Thor, and Prince Namor became my prophets of muscular transcendence. Their impossible physiques convinced me that strength was not merely aesthetic but salvific. Muscles could rescue families. Biceps could repel humiliation. Triceps might even keep your mother from disappearing into itinerant circus labor.

    I therefore began training with whatever equipment the apartment provided. My parents’ heavy lacquered ceramic ashtrays became dumbbells. Luggage became resistance equipment. Every object in the apartment was reinterpreted through the feverish logic of childhood bodybuilding ambition. Somewhere between the lava rocks and the sunflower gardens of the Royal Lanai, I became convinced that physical strength was the answer to economic instability, emotional terror, and perhaps existence itself.

    Then came the Charles Atlas ads.

    Those advertisements struck me with the force of religious revelation. There was always the same tragic spectacle: a scrawny weakling being publicly humiliated at the beach while some square-jawed bully kicked sand in his face and stole his girlfriend with the efficiency of a hostile corporate takeover. But then the runt discovered the Charles Atlas system, trained with evangelical discipline, and returned transformed into a muscular avenger. The bully was defeated. The girl was reclaimed. Cosmic balance was restored. Civilization itself seemed to exhale in relief.

    The moral architecture of the universe suddenly became clear to me:
    Train hard. Build yourself. Never surrender. Muscles are destiny.

    This, I believed, was the true American Dream—not suburban comfort or upward mobility, but the ability to transform fear and humiliation into brute force through relentless self-improvement.

    If things became desperate enough, I could save my family.

    I could become the Strongman.

    My mother and I would travel the circus together, inseparable beneath the glow of carnival lights. We would swallow flames, bend steel, astonish crowds, and most importantly, pay the one-hundred-dollar rent on time. We would not be poor swamp people from Florida anymore. We would be winners.

    Thanks to an early literary diet of children’s books, superhero comics, and Charles Atlas advertisements, I grew up convinced that sheer grit and industriousness could conquer virtually anything. My optimism floated through childhood with absurd buoyancy, like a kite somehow suspended in a windless sky by pure American self-help mythology. I had absorbed the sugary gospel of Captain Kangaroo and internalized the moral propaganda of The Little Engine That Could with cult-like devotion. “I think I can” was not merely a line from a children’s story. It was my private war cry. Positive thinking plus relentless effort was supposed to produce triumph, prosperity, admiration, and perhaps eventually heroic forearms.

    Or so I believed.

    Then came October 16, 1967—twelve days before my sixth birthday—the evening my worldview suffered catastrophic structural failure while watching my beloved The Monkees. The episode was titled “I Was a 99-lb. Weakling,” and it detonated inside my young psyche like a philosophical pipe bomb. Until then, I had believed life operated according to comic-book justice: work hard, improve yourself, defeat the bully, reclaim the girl, restore cosmic order. But this episode introduced me to a far darker force, one nobody had warned me about because I was still too young to grasp the terminology.

    Irony.

    Not ordinary disappointment. Not bad luck. Irony—the grinning sadist of human existence that waits until you have exhausted yourself climbing the mountain before informing you the mountain has moved.

    The episode features my slender, goofy hero Micky Dolenz being publicly humiliated by Bulk, a grotesquely muscular beach tyrant played by none other than Dave Draper, a man built less like a human being than a refrigerated side of beef. Bulk steals Brenda, the bikini-clad beach goddess, directly from Micky’s orbit while radiating the effortless confidence of a man whose chest measurements could destabilize nearby weather systems.

    Desperate to reclaim his dignity, Micky joins Weaklings Anonymous and submits himself to a punishing training regimen worthy of Cold War experimentation. He lifts weights the size of Buicks. He gulps down fermented goat milk curd, a substance that appeared to possess the texture and emotional flavor profile of liquefied despair. Worst of all, he sells his drum set to finance his transformation, placing the future of the Monkees themselves in jeopardy. Everything is sacrificed on the altar of self-improvement.

    And why?

    Because the Charles Atlas narrative promised salvation.

    Suffer now. Train hard. Become magnificent later.

    Micky returns to the beach transformed into a muscular Adonis, his arms swollen, his confidence restored, fully prepared to reclaim Brenda and reestablish moral equilibrium in the universe.

    But then Irony arrives carrying a baseball bat.

    During Micky’s transformation into Hercules, Brenda has grown bored with physical brutes. Muscles are now gauche. Predictable. Vulgar. She has pivoted dramatically toward intellectualism and now desires a frail, pencil-necked pseudo-scholar whose chief accomplishment appears to be reading In Search of Lost Time at the beach while ignoring sunlight and human joy. The new object of her affection sits there clutching Proust with all the erotic magnetism of a graduate seminar on French memory theory.

    Apparently, somewhere between Micky’s bench presses and fermented goat secretions, the cultural winds had shifted.

    Bodybuilders were out.

    Pretentious literary anemia was in.

    As I watched Micky’s heartbreak unfold onscreen, my own little heart cracked alongside his. Every lesson I had absorbed about hard work, perseverance, and self-discipline suddenly felt suspect. The universe, I realized, did not necessarily reward effort. You could labor heroically, endure humiliation, drink industrial quantities of goat sludge, and still discover that reality had changed the rules while you were busy training.

    The revelation devastated me.

    It was like discovering that Santa Claus was not merely fictional but actively mocking you from behind the curtains of existence.

    After that episode, childhood optimism no longer felt trustworthy. The clean moral geometry of comic books dissolved. From then on, I wandered through life carrying the vague existential sadness of a tiny philosopher betrayed by television comedy. Somewhere deep inside me, Micky Dolenz was still standing on that beach holding his rebuilt muscles while Brenda walked away with a man reading Proust.

  • The Death of the Handshake

    The Death of the Handshake

    I grew up in an era that treated the handshake as a moral referendum on your character. A firm grip was not merely polite; it was a coded declaration of masculine competence. You were signaling that you possessed discipline, stamina, backbone, and enough latent violence to defend a small village if necessary. A weak handshake suggested spiritual decay, poor breeding, or a future career selling timeshares at a failing resort casino. But a strong handshake announced that you were dependable under pressure, capable of changing a tire in the rain, carrying injured comrades off a battlefield, and perhaps even grilling respectable steaks.

    I was fascinated that so much mythology could be compressed into five seconds of hand-crushing theater.

    As a teenage weightlifter in the 70s, I therefore trained my grip with almost religious seriousness. Wrist curls, reverse curls, deadlifts, heavy static holds, and Farmer’s Carries became part of my private campaign to forge hands like industrial machinery. I wanted my handshake to communicate, instantly and wordlessly, that I was not some fragile suburban larva surviving on pudding cups and self-esteem workshops. No. I was a steward of fortitude. A disciple of calluses. A young man preparing his forearms as though civilization itself might someday depend upon my ability to squeeze another person’s metacarpals into submission.

    In Tom Bartlett’s essay “Will Americans Ever Lose Their Grip on the Handshake?,” the once-sacred ritual of clasping another person’s hand is reexamined in a post-COVID society where keeping your microbes to yourself has become more socially admirable than demonstrating frontier-man virility through palm compression. Bartlett is not especially alarmed by germs. What fascinates him are the men who transform the handshake into a grotesque form of dominance theater. These are not ordinary handshakes but ambushes disguised as greetings. Bartlett gives these overzealous apostles of grip strength colorful names: “knuckle-crunchers” and “arm-wrenchers,” men who approach introductions as though auditioning for medieval combat sports.

    The irony, of course, is that the handshake originated as a gesture of trust and mutual respect, a symbolic declaration that neither party was concealing a weapon. But somewhere along the line, a certain species of male insecurity hijacked the custom and converted it into a portable power struggle. For these men, decades of frustration, competition, humiliation, suppressed rage, and unresolved father issues are compressed into one catastrophic squeeze. The handshake becomes less “Nice to meet you” and more “Submit before my forearm dominance.” One can almost imagine the recipient collapsing onto the carpet clutching shattered knuckles while the aggressor walks away believing he has established alpha status in the corporate ecosystem.

    Perhaps, as Tom Bartlett suggests, we should retire the handshake altogether. But the replacement candidates come with their own peculiar humiliations. There is the hug, of course, that sprawling gesture of compulsory warmth favored by motivational speakers, yoga instructors, and emotionally overinvested acquaintances who smell faintly of essential oils. The modern hug often feels less like affection and more like a hostage situation with scented candles. Worse still, if your embrace comes from a former wrestler, CrossFit enthusiast, or retired Marine colonel, you may leave the encounter with compressed ribs and a revised understanding of your own skeletal fragility.

    Then there is the nod, celebrated by Bill Bryson’s Notes from a Small Island in its portrait of British suburban reserve, where receiving a nod after ten years of acquaintance constitutes the emotional equivalent of a marriage proposal. Charming as that sounds, the nod remains too chilly and aloof for most societies. It lubricates social interaction about as effectively as sandpaper lubricates machinery. A civilization cannot survive on eyebrow movements alone.

    No, the superior alternative—the one I have practiced loyally for the past decade—is the fist bump.

    The fist bump is civilization refined. Thanks to generations of televised athletes, it has become the universal gesture of camaraderie, encouragement, and mutual respect. Unlike the handshake, which can devolve into a testosterone hostage crisis, the fist bump contains no hidden aggression. It is a gentle punch, a tiny collision of solidarity. Two people make eye contact, extend closed fists, and allow their knuckles to meet with the satisfying precision of perfectly aligned jigsaw pieces. Nobody dominates. Nobody submits. Nobody leaves with crushed metacarpals wondering whether they need orthopedic reconstruction.

    The handshake belongs to a more primitive era, a time when men apparently believed friendship should feel like losing a thumb in farm equipment. It invites both illness and dominance theater. The fist bump, by contrast, asks for neither surrender nor pain. It is efficient, hygienic, egalitarian, and refreshingly free of rotator-cuff ideology.

    The handshake had a good run. Let it retire with dignity before another knuckle-cruncher sends someone to urgent care.

  • The Ghost Story of Sid Briggs

    The Ghost Story of Sid Briggs

    You can’t understand what it meant to be a teenage boy in 1970s California without inhaling the thick, narcotic perfume of banana-coconut tanning oil. It wasn’t a scent so much as a doctrine. You lay on a beach towel the size of a small sailboat and basted yourself in that viscous syrup as if you were preparing your own body for display. No one spoke of melanoma. The goal was simple: darken, gleam, radiate. Bronze was not just a color—it was a declaration of sexual arrival. For a teenage bodybuilder, it was mandatory. Muscles alone were not enough; they needed lacquer, shine, theatrical finish. We weren’t just building bodies—we were curating mythologies.

    The culture supplied its own scripture. Xaviera Hollander hovered over the decade like a secular saint of libido, her memoir The Happy Hooker tucked into suburban living rooms beside purple bongs that leaned like exhausted sentinels. Her voice—thick Dutch vowels, half invitation, half sermon—drifted through late-night radio, as intoxicating as the oil we poured over ourselves like maple syrup on pancakes. If Hollander provided the gospel, Eric Weber supplied the tactics. His book, How to Pick Up Girls!, read like a field manual for social siege warfare: pursue, persist, override refusal, wear resistance down to compliance. It was less romance than strategy, less courtship than conquest. And like all bad ideas, it traveled quickly among teenage boys who didn’t yet know the difference between confidence and predation.

    At Lake Don Castro in the summer of 1977, we found the living embodiment of this philosophy: Sid Briggs, a thirty-five year-old demigod in blue Speedos. He stood on the grassy knoll above the sand like a monument to self-belief—wavy hair, sculpted mustache, gold chain glinting against a chest that looked permanently backlit. A Playboy cooler at his feet, a boombox humming, a Frisbee orbiting his charisma—Sid was less a man than a recurring performance. We studied him like apprentices. His lines never changed. 

    Every Saturday I heard the following: Sid paid his uncle five hundred dollars for a custom paint job on his Camaro. His father owned expensive real estate in the Bay Area. He had helped manage his father’s properties since he was in high school. He was waiting to hear from a Hollywood studio for a small role as a fighter in a martial arts movie. Even though he never attended college, he had his own house in a desirable part of town called Parsons Estates. Sid would throw in the words “Parsons Estates” as if they were a magical mantra that would make stars sparkle over his coiffed hair.

    Every Saturday, Sid arrived at the man-made beach with a new blonde draped at his side, each one somehow more dazzling and surgically assembled than the last, as if he were upgrading girlfriends through a mail-order catalog of California delusions. They’d toss a Frisbee on the grassy knoll above the imported sand, laughing too loudly, performing youth and leisure for anyone within eyesight. Sid treated the entire shoreline like a stage set built exclusively for his mythology.

    That was when the lies began breeding like bacteria in warm water.

    He inflated his real estate career into the legend of a ruthless young mogul when in reality he was little more than a glorified rent collector for his father’s properties. He claimed to hold a business degree, though everyone knew he’d been booted out of community college after throwing a volcanic tantrum over not getting the campus radio disc jockey position. In Sid’s version of events, he wasn’t a failed student; he was a misunderstood prince denied his throne.

    Then came the aristocratic nonsense. According to Sid, his bloodline could be traced back to Belgian nobility. Somewhere, apparently, stood a family estate complete with a coat of arms, ancestral portraits, and a sacred genealogy book displayed in a special foyer like the Dead Sea Scrolls of mediocre white privilege. The more he lied, the more intoxicated he became by the sound of his own inventions. You could watch it happen in real time. One fabrication fed the next until he drifted into a narcotic haze of self-creation, trapped inside a fantasy version of himself that felt more pleasurable than reality ever could.

    By that point, the women were almost incidental. The true seduction was the performance. Sid didn’t lie to get the conquest. The lies were the conquest.

    I was eager to hear Sid’s lies because, if I’m being honest, I possessed a small talent for self-mythologizing myself. Watching Sid perform his fabrications was like studying my own bad habits through a carnival mirror. I wanted to observe what happened when a man fed himself a steady diet of invented grandeur and then mistook the swelling for genuine substance.

    My greatest obstacle to catching every word was the bees.

    The grassy knoll above the beach was infested with tiny white flowers, and the flowers, in turn, were infested with bees drunk on pollen and purpose. Their buzzing rose and fell in thick waves, sometimes louder than Sid himself. I’d lean forward in my beach chair, squinting through the sunlight, straining to catch the choicest portions of his nonsense as if I were listening to bootleg radio transmissions from a collapsing dictatorship. One moment I’d hear fragments about Belgian aristocracy or shadowy business deals, and the next moment the bees would surge into a collective electric hum, swallowing entire sections of his fantasy whole.

    Oddly enough, the interruptions improved the stories. The missing pieces forced my imagination to collaborate with Sid’s dishonesty. His fabrications became serialized entertainment, half confession and half hallucination, drifting across the hot afternoon air with the smell of Coppertone, cut grass, and imported saltwater.

    ***

    To be called “Bridge and Tunnel” in 1970s San Francisco was not a description; it was a diagnosis. It marked you as a provincial organism, a life-form that had migrated from the East Bay—Hayward, San Leandro, Castro Valley—regions the city regarded as a kind of cultural quarantine zone. By San Francisco standards, we didn’t simply live elsewhere; we existed at a lower altitude of refinement.

    My teenage bodybuilding friends and I would cross the Bay Bridge like contaminants slipping past a border checkpoint, only to be received with the sort of polished contempt reserved for the uninvited. The girls—urban aristocrats of posture and irony—would glance at us, lips tightening into a surgical line, and murmur “Bridge and Tunnel” as if naming a disease. The implication was clear: we had not arrived so much as oozed in, crawling through some damp civic artery to stain their carefully curated world.

    We did little to disprove their assessment. We spent our afternoons at the lake, marinating our skin in tropical bronzing oil with the reckless confidence of men who believed melanoma was a rumor. Between sets of posing and flexing, we argued with prosecutorial intensity over the great philosophical question of our time: Ginger or Mary Ann. This was not idle chatter. This was a loyalty test. Imagine a bare bulb swinging in a concrete cell, a man with broken teeth asking you to choose. Your answer wasn’t right or wrong—it was a measure of your authenticity.

    In truth, there was one answer: Mary Ann. Ginger was spectacle—too lacquered, too deliberate. Mary Ann had gravity. Especially in cut-offs. She was the apex until Daisy Duke arrived and raised the stakes, turning denim cut-offs into doctrine and ushering in a new era of televised exhibitionism.

    Bull, however, took these matters beyond reason. We didn’t realize the depth of his devotion to Gilligan’s Island until KTVU quietly removed it from the schedule. He responded as one might to a death in the family. He kicked his mother’s Sony Trinitron while wearing combat boots—an act of passion undermined by poor planning. The television survived. His shin did not. We spent the afternoon at Eden Medical Center watching him bleed through a makeshift bandage.

    We offered no sympathy.
    “You made us miss Pec Day,” Falco said.

    “And forget donkey calf raises,” I added. “You’re benched for a month. Congratulations.”

    Bull slumped in his chair, a chastened creature with curly hair and wounded pride. “Mary Ann’s gone,” he muttered, staring into middle distance as if mourning a lost lover.

    “At least there’s Jeannie,” I said.
    “Barbara Eden never lets you down,” he replied.
    “And Charlie’s Angels,” I added.

    Bull kept a poster of Farrah Fawcett in his room. Once a week, he arranged protein pills on a velvet pillow beneath it, as if offering tribute to a benevolent deity of blonde perfection.

    Reality intruded. His mother, unimpressed with his theatrical grief, demanded repayment for the damaged television. He had already failed a security job test at Gemco. He was supposed to run up a staircase while holding a fire extinguisher in fewer than fifteen seconds. He gave up midway, keeling over and trying to catch his breath.

    “What does it profit a man to have bulging muscles if he is not functional?” I asked.

    “Shut up, loser,” Bull snapped.

    He had rank—he and Falco were seniors; I was a sophomore with a loose mouth and poor instincts for hierarchy.

    Now, with a bandaged leg, he faced a new problem: no job, no training, no progress. Falco, ever the strategist, offered his usual solutions in single-word fragments.

    “Refrigeration.”
    “I failed that test three times.”
    “Take it again. Cold air builds muscle.”

    Bull shook his head. “Fifty bucks a test.”

    As always, we retreated into fantasy. We would win international bodybuilding titles, open a gym in the Bahamas, and spend our days in Speedos while sunlit goddesses delivered protein drinks in coconut shells and validated our existence. Bull embellished the vision with architectural details and swimsuit specifications. He looked almost peaceful.

    Which is why I had to ruin it.

    “And maybe,” I said, “while you’re selling memberships, you’ll run into Mary Ann.”

    “Shut up, loser,” he said again, clutching his leg.

    The pain had sharpened. Not just the injury—the realization. One impulsive kick had cost him weeks of training, a job opportunity, and delayed the imaginary migration to a tropical paradise where everything made sense and nothing required discipline.

    For the first time, Bull looked less like a future champion and more like what he was: a kid being forced to accept the fact that the Bahamas were postponed indefinitely. Accountability had arrived early. 

    Our concern for Bull evaporated the moment Sid Briggs burst through the ER turnstile, a spectacle wrapped in gauze and self-regard. His right hand was bandaged into a blunt white cudgel, as if he’d lost a fight with a plaster cast. The rest of him, however, was in peak exhibition form: cut-offs surgically trimmed, a white tank top clinging to a torso that glistened with oil. Whether he’d applied it before or after entering the ER was unclear, but the principle was not—Sid Briggs did not enter public space without proper lubrication. His neck carried enough gold chain and oversized pukka shells to suggest he had just taken first place in a luau dance-off, and he wore the prize with priestly seriousness.

    Sid’s hair was sun-bleached into submission, his mustache aggressively bushy, and his cheeks sucked inward, as if he were practicing for a portrait no one had commissioned. He looked pleased with himself in the way only a man can who has mistaken persistence for success.

    He recognized us and approached with theatrical urgency, holding up his bandaged hand like a prop. “Nasty bee sting,” he said, as if recounting a battlefield injury. He’d been tanning at Lake Don Castro when the incident occurred. The doctor, he reported, had warned him about a possible allergy: future stings could escalate, even turn life-threatening. 

    “The lake is a bee magnet,” I said.

    Briggs rolled his eyes at me with the practiced contempt of a man who has never allowed facts to interrupt his narrative.

    “As if I’m going to stop tanning at Don Castro,” he said. “That is my home, bro.”

    We laughed, not because it was funny, but because it was airtight. Sid Briggs without Don Castro would be like a peacock without a parking lot—technically possible, but existentially absurd. He lived there in spirit: beside the snack bar, beside his Playmate cooler, white Frisbee at the ready, launching pickup lines with the confidence of a man who believed rejection was a clerical error. Even now, the word “disco” conjures him for me—bronzed in Speedos, snapping his fingers to KC and the Sunshine Band as if rhythm itself were part of his personal brand.

    As he spoke, he sucked in his cheeks and scanned the room, locking onto a blonde nurse with the focus of a guided missile. “Well, amigos,” he said, adjusting his posture to maximum visibility, “I need to get back to the beach. The ladies are waiting.”

    He patted Bull on the shoulder—carefully, as if blessing a lesser mortal—wished him a speedy recovery, and strode back into the sunlight, a man convinced that even a bee sting was just another opportunity to be seen.

    ***

    About a month later, my bodybuilder buddies and I saw Sid in his usual spot, the grassy knoll, where he was tossing his Frisbee to two blonde girls in white bikinis. I had my towel spread out close by so I could study Sid’s methods among the drone of buzzing bees. I was half-listening to him talk about how amazing he was and half-reading my parents’ dog-eared copy of The Happy Hooker.

    That’s when I heard Sid give out an alarming howl.

    “Oh my God,” one of the bikini-clad girls said. “You stepped on a bee.”

    I saw the bee spinning in the grass for its final moments before it would die without its stinger.

    The bee sting’s effects were immediate. Sid began to sweat and limp while trying to walk through the pain. The two blonde girls looked at the wincing pick-up artist with concern. One of them asked if he was all right.

    “No big deal,” he said. “Just a little bee sting.”

    “Are you sure you’re okay?” one of the girls asked as the man’s body was covered with a shiny sheen of sweat.

    “I’m fine. Really, I am.”

    “I think you should sit down,” one of the girls said.

    “No, we can still play. I’m fine. Don’t worry about me.”

    By now, Sid’s foot had swollen into a giant ham. He looked down at the inflamed flesh, and his tumescent foot was proof of the severity of his situation. His eyes bulged with fear, and then he collapsed, and lying prone on his back he began to hyperventilate.

    An ambulance came soon after. Sid was in the throes of anaphylactic shock. The paramedics did their best, but Sid died on the spot.

    I was never the same after Sid died. The whole thing lodged inside me like a splinter beneath the skin. I obsessed over the details of his death with the unhealthy devotion usually reserved for unsolved murders and failed romances. I had nightmares. I stopped going to the beach with my buddies. The grassy knoll, the imported sand, the Frisbees arcing against the sky—all of it felt contaminated now, like the set of a sitcom where somebody had quietly died backstage.

    About six months after Sid’s death, a peculiar dream began visiting me with unnerving regularity.

    In the dream, my friends and I gathered at the lake at twilight for a wake. We sat around a bonfire drinking cheap beer while the last ribbons of orange light dissolved across the water. Then someone would fall silent and point toward the horizon.

    There was Sid.

    Far out on the lake, he appeared as a small silhouette walking across the water toward us with calm, impossible strides. No thunder cracked. No heavenly choir sang. He simply kept approaching, closer and closer, until he reached the shore, brushed lakewater from his pant legs, and sat beside the fire as casually as a man returning late to a barbecue.

    That was when he told us about his final moments.

    The paramedics were working frantically over his body, he explained, when suddenly he looked upward and saw the counterfactual version of his life—the life he might have lived had he not spent decades performing for strangers like a peacock drunk on its own feathers. In that vision he was no longer prowling the beach with pickup lines and fraudulent pedigrees. He was a husband. A father. He walked peacefully along the shoreline beside a woman who genuinely loved him. Four children orbited around them in bursts of laughter while two rescue dogs exploded through the surf in ecstatic loops.

    Everything glowed with an unbearable softness.

    The sky was pale blue, not dramatic enough for cinema but beautiful in the way honest things often are. Sunlight fell gently across the water as though the world itself had abandoned judgment. Somewhere in the distance there was music—not literal music, but the emotional equivalent of it, the kind that arrives when your nervous system finally unclenches after years of pretending.

    And in that impossible stillness, Sid turned toward God.

    Not toward status. Not toward women. Not toward applause. Toward God.

    He begged for another chance. He promised he would abandon the counterfeit life and live honestly at last. It was as if existence itself had paused to offer him one final rehearsal for redemption. For the first time in his life, he experienced something that required no performance whatsoever: peace stripped of vanity. Beauty without spectators.

    Then the bee venom reached his heart.

    That was the cruelty of it.

    Just as he believed grace had opened a door for him, his body failed. The bee won. Sid Briggs—master raconteur, counterfeit aristocrat, beach peacock, human smoke machine—died mid-negotiation with eternity.

    Around the bonfire, dream-Sid spoke to us without swagger, without embellishment, without the narcotic glaze of self-invention. He told us he was not a man to imitate but a cautionary tale with suntan oil on it. A fraud. An impostor. A man who had spent so much time manufacturing an image that he neglected the architecture of an actual soul.

    He made us swear we would not waste our lives chasing the same hollow performance.

    And once we promised him—once he was convinced we understood—he rose quietly from the fire, walked back across the water toward the horizon, and disappeared into the dark.

    A few years later, when I took music theory in college, I carried that dream with me to the piano. I tried to process Sid’s death the only way I knew how: by turning grief into melody. For nearly two years I worked obsessively on a composition called “The Ghost Story of Sid Briggs.”

    Almost fifty years later, I still play it.

    The notes have never dulled. Neither has the warning hidden inside them.

    Some performances do not end with applause or redemption. Some end with collapse. Too little truth. Too much theater. And no encore.

  • A Close Fight by the Frozen Peas at Trader Joe’s

    A Close Fight by the Frozen Peas at Trader Joe’s

    At exactly 8:00 a.m.—as reliably as a Swiss watch with a Costco membership—I entered my Torrance Trader Joe’s, continuing a ritual that has endured since 2005. Fifteen minutes in, I found myself in the pasta sauce aisle beside two sisters in their sixties, both with jet-black hair and the alert posture of women who have seen things. Then it came: a disturbance from the frozen food aisle.

    At first, I told myself it was the usual retail banter—clerks sparring, voices raised in mock aggression, the choreography of workplace camaraderie. That illusion lasted about three seconds. The tone sharpened. The volume climbed. This was no jovial joust. This was a kerfuffle in its purest, most unrefined form—the kind of word baseball announcers used when fists replaced fastballs.

    The dialogue, once decipherable, repeated itself with the stubborn clarity of a broken record:
    “Stop coughing on the food.”
    “Mind your own business.”

    Again.
    “Stop coughing on the food.”
    “Mind your own business.”

    The sisters and I exchanged a look of shared alarm—the silent agreement that this was not the sort of morning theater one expects while contemplating marinara. Around us, employees formed small, murmuring clusters, like villagers sensing a storm that rarely visits their town.

    I never saw the alleged cougher—the phantom menace—but I did see his accuser. He entered our aisle still simmering, muttering fragments of outrage like a man replaying his own highlight reel. He was a bodybuilder in his late twenties, performing that unmistakable gait: the lat-spread strut, shoulders flared as if perpetually stepping onstage. He carried a bag in each hand like ceremonial weights. Gray sweatpants. Turquoise T-shirt emblazoned with the word “Strong,” as if to remove all ambiguity.

    The shirt was soaked through, suggesting a recent campaign at the nearby UFC gym. He had not yet exited warrior mode. His face attempted a look of righteous fury, but it flickered—betrayed by the faintest hint of self-awareness. The room was not applauding. It was recoiling. The performance of dominance had misfired, and in its place lingered something less heroic: the spectacle of a man who had mistaken volume for authority and muscle for gravitas.

    For a moment, I caught a trace of chagrin in his expression, like a balloon losing air in slow motion. Still, he clung to a hardened stare, perhaps hoping to salvage dignity from the wreckage.

    As for me, I became invisible. I adopted the ancient survival tactic of the grocery store: benign neutrality. Eyes forward. No recognition. No acknowledgment. The last thing I needed was to be drafted into this man’s private war.

    At checkout, as the affable clerk scanned my items with the serenity of someone blissfully unaware of the morning’s drama, I felt the urge to recount the scene. It had all the ingredients of a fine anecdote—conflict, absurdity, a man yelling about respiratory etiquette in the frozen aisle. But I hesitated. The bodybuilder might still be somewhere in the store, prowling, listening, ready to defend his honor against anyone who dared narrate it.

    Perhaps next week, I’ll tell the story. Though by then, in a place like Trader Joe’s, the tale will have already spread—whispered from aisle to aisle, passed between cashiers, and filed away as one of those rare moments when civility briefly cracked, and the frozen peas bore witness.

  • The Protein Prophet Meets Late-Stage Capitalism

    The Protein Prophet Meets Late-Stage Capitalism

    You spent a lifetime preaching the gospel of whey protein to a congregation that greeted you with eye-rolls and the occasional “musclehead” slur. Undeterred, you carried yourself with the calm arrogance of a man who knows the future and is watching everyone else arrive late. While they dabbled in fad diets and moralized over carbs, you quietly mixed your whey protein scoops—one in the morning over your groats, another in the afternoon with yogurt—like a chemist of hypertrophy. You hit your macros. You built your muscle. You extended your health span. And best of all, you did it on the cheap.

    You were right.

    Which is where the trouble begins.

    Now the world has caught up, and like all converts, it has arrived with a fanaticism that would make you blush. GLP-1 users clutch whey like a lifeline to their disappearing muscle mass. Aging populations treat it as insurance against frailty. Influencers chant “protein-maxxing” as if it were a sacrament. Food companies, never ones to miss a profitable crusade, have stuffed protein into everything short of tap water—cereal, ice cream, pancakes, corn chips—each product whispering, You, too, can be righteous.

    The result? Demand has detonated. Prices have surged. The humble tub of whey—once the blue-collar ally of the disciplined lifter—now sits on the shelf with the smug expression of a luxury good. Up 50 percent. Maybe doubling next year. The powder of the people has been gentrified.

    So tell me, prophet of protein, how does it feel?

    You wanted vindication. You got it. You wanted the world to recognize the power of protein. It has. You are no longer a fringe eccentric. You are mainstream. You are validated.

    And you are paying for it.

    There was a time when you were a misunderstood zealot, buying your whey in peace, your habits dismissed as obsessive but harmless. Those were the golden years—the years of ridicule and affordability. Now the masses have joined you, and like all mass movements, they have driven the price of entry skyward.

    You didn’t just win the argument.

    You priced yourself out of it.

  • The New Gospel of Masculinism: May It Be Short-Lived

    The New Gospel of Masculinism: May It Be Short-Lived

    There are moments when the temperature of a culture reveals itself in a single, unsettling proposition. One such moment arrives when a public figure calmly suggests that women should not have the right to vote—and is met not with universal condemnation, but with a shrug, a debate, or worse, applause. Douglas Wilson, a 72-year-old preacher, has made such arguments, presenting them as part of a broader theological vision in which women are cast in supporting roles to male authority. This is not fringe theater performed in a basement. It has bled into the mainstream. That Pete Hegseth is associated with Wilson’s denomination is less an isolated curiosity than a symptom. What should be aberrant now passes as another point on the menu.

    In her essay “The Men Who Want Women to be Quiet,” Helen Lewis names the ideology underwriting this drift: masculinism. In this worldview, men are protagonists and women are props—non-player characters in a game whose rules were allegedly written by Saint Paul. The result is an ungainly mashup: scripture folded into the hustle economy, sermon braided with sports betting tips, theology seasoned with crypto schemes and supplement codes. It’s less a philosophy than a product line—an all-in-one kit for grievance, packaged for easy consumption.

    If this sounds marginal, Lewis argues otherwise. Masculinism, she writes, has become a unifying current, pulling together pastors and podcasters, politicians and online personalities into a loose but potent coalition. It thrives in a moment when many men feel displaced—watching women surpass them in education and professional advancement—and are hungry for a narrative that restores their primacy. Enter the influencer-preacher hybrid, eager to monetize that hunger.

    Wilson, by Lewis’s account, is willing to adopt tactics borrowed from professional wrestling—kayfabe—to amplify his reach. The persona is exaggerated, the provocations theatrical, the outrage intentional. The goal is not persuasion so much as provocation. Trauma becomes currency. The more offended the opposition, the more validated the performance. In this economy, cruelty isn’t a bug; it’s a feature.

    The rhetoric does not remain confined to gender. Figures like Nick Fuentes demonstrate how misogyny can serve as a gateway—an entry point into a broader ecosystem of resentment and prejudice. Repetition does the rest. Shock becomes familiar, then tolerable, then unremarkable. The grotesque is normalized through sheer exposure.

    This is, in part, the byproduct of a media environment optimized for reaction rather than reflection. In a landscape dominated by short-form content and algorithmic amplification, complexity loses to caricature. Men and women are flattened into types—heroes or villains, victims or oppressors—with little room for the inconvenient details that real thinking requires. As Lewis puts it, the masculinist imagination reduces women to trivial professions and men to blunt archetypes, a world rendered in crude strokes for quick consumption.

    Even cultural barometers shift. Joe Rogan, once loosely aligned with progressive politics, has drifted in a direction that reflects this broader realignment. The movement is not accidental; it is structural, propelled by incentives that reward outrage and certainty over nuance.

    And yet, there is a limit to how far exaggeration can stretch before it snaps. Lewis suggests masculinism may be entering its phase of overreach—the point at which its claims become so inflated, so historically tone-deaf and morally coarse, that they begin to alienate even sympathetic audiences. When grievance is equated with atrocities, when rhetoric collapses into parody, the movement risks discrediting itself.

    Whether that correction arrives soon enough is another question. For now, we inhabit a culture where the abnormal has learned to pass as normal, and where the loudest voices often mistake performance for truth.

  • A Society That Has Sacrificed Interiority for the Next Dopamine Hit

    A Society That Has Sacrificed Interiority for the Next Dopamine Hit

    In “Has College Gotten Too Easy?”, Joe Pinsker notes a curious inversion: grades rise as the quality of student work declines. He borrows a distinction from a Harvard sociologist—“easy” can mean lighter material or looser grading—and suggests the latter is doing most of the work. From where I sit, it’s both. Around 2010, as reading skills began to erode, writing instructors quietly trimmed the syllabus. Fewer essays, fewer books, and almost nothing long. The last time I assigned The Autobiography of Malcolm X, a 500-page climb, the backlash was volcanic. Students weren’t being asked to read; they were being asked to endure. It felt less like instruction and more like pitting a white belt against a black belt and calling it pedagogy.

    Something fundamental shifted at the same moment. The smartphone didn’t just arrive; it reprogrammed. We moved from readers to watchers. As readers, we practiced interiority—the habit of turning language inward until it took root. Sentences weren’t skimmed; they were inhabited. Ideas weren’t collected; they were argued with, revised, made to answer to memory and conscience. Interiority is not mere comprehension; it is a private workshop where meaning is built, not downloaded.

    Around 2010, that workshop closed early. In its place came what I’ll call dopaminergic exteriority: attention pulled outward by a conveyor belt of novelty—short videos, endless scroll, perpetual interruption—until thought has no time to cohere. The mind becomes a relay station for images, optimized for reaction rather than reflection. The inner dialogue thins to a whisper; the feed does the talking.

    The consequences show up in the classroom. Interiority tends to produce patience, skepticism, and a tolerance for difficulty—the raw materials of maturity. Exteriority produces the opposite: impatience, certainty without evidence, and a preference for the quick hit. Ask for Moby-Dick and you’ll get a highlight reel about “the great whale” in thirty seconds. The novel becomes a rumor; the rumor earns the grade.

    Institutions adapt. They always do. Assignments shrink. Expectations soften. Grades inflate to meet the new baseline of attention. Students, understandably, demand high marks for low friction; colleges, increasingly, oblige. The result is not a conspiracy but a convergence: a curriculum calibrated to the scroll.

    We tell ourselves this is access, flexibility, modernization. There’s some truth in that. But there’s also evasion. A watered-down education is what you get when a culture trades interiority for the next stimulus. We begin to prefer performance to thinking, identity to argument, and ease to effort. We stop reading the world and start skimming it.

    None of this is irreversible, but it is cumulative. Interiority is a practice; it returns when practiced. Assign the long book again. Require the sustained argument. Give students something that resists them. Not because difficulty is virtuous, but because without it, the mind never learns to stay.

  • From Hula Hoops to Holy Wars: When Fads Become Faith

    From Hula Hoops to Holy Wars: When Fads Become Faith

    A fad is a brief hallucination we agree to share. It arrives with a rush of hype, a whiff of urgency, and the faint threat that you’re already late. I came of age in the ’60s and ’70s, when the parade was loud and shameless: the Hula Hoop spinning on suburban hips, vinyl and spandex chasing the “wet look” like a costume department for perspiration, pukka shells clicking at the throat, CB radios chirping coded bravado, clackers smashing together with cheerful menace, 8-tracks thudding mid-song, streakers sprinting through polite society, bean bags swallowing spines, water beds sloshing like inland seas, lava lamps bubbling in slow hypnosis, and the Pet Rock—a joke that sold by the millions because everyone understood it was a joke.

    Two traits define a fad. First, it burns fast and dies young. Second, it requires distance to reveal how thin it was. Time is the solvent; it dissolves the glamour and leaves the residue of absurdity. We laugh because the stakes were low. No one built a moral code around a lava lamp.

    But something has shifted. The fad has learned to dress itself as a life. What used to be a passing amusement now arrives with a manifesto, a diet, a wardrobe, and a tone of sermon. A temporary preference hardens into a permanent identity. Call this Fad Apotheosis—the elevation of the trivial into the sacred, the conversion of a momentary craze into a governing philosophy. It is the difference between owning a thing and being owned by it.

    The present offers a crowded gallery of such conversions. Dietary choices expand into totalizing creeds; efficiency hacks become liturgies; aesthetic preferences acquire moral teeth. A person is no longer someone who eats a certain way or experiments with a regimen; he becomes the regimen, a walking billboard for it. The point is no longer practice but proclamation—signals sent to a tribe that rewards conformity with applause and dissent with exile.

    This inflation does not occur in a vacuum. A culture that reads less and scrolls more trades patience for immediacy and argument for alignment. Nuance is heavy; slogans are light. In that environment, a fad’s simplicity is not a bug but a feature. It offers clean edges, quick belonging, and the comfort of certainty. It replaces the slow work of thinking with the fast pleasure of declaring.

    The cost is not subtle. When identity is outsourced to trends, judgment atrophies. Public life begins to resemble a stage populated by performers fluent in lifestyle rhetoric and thin on competence. The same habits that turn a diet into a doctrine can turn a platform into a career and a persona into a credential. The result is a politics of surfaces—loud, confident, and frequently hollow.

    A society saturated with such performances doesn’t flourish; it frays. Attention splinters, conversation coarsens, and the serious tasks—those that require continuity, humility, and evidence—lose ground to spectacle. The nation doesn’t collapse in a single dramatic gesture; it erodes in a thousand small substitutions, trading substance for style until it can no longer tell the difference.

    The remedy is unfashionable. It requires recovering the ability to see a fad as a fad: a diversion, not a doctrine. It asks for a renewed appetite for depth—reading that resists skimming, arguments that resist slogans, and commitments that outlast the season. In practical terms, it means choosing people who do the work over people who perform it.

    Until then, we inhabit a curious landscape: a fever swamp of borrowed identities, where trends masquerade as truths and the trivial is worn like a creed. The exit is not complicated. It is simply difficult: step back, refuse the costume, and let the lava lamp return to being what it always was—pleasant, pointless light.

  • The Cologne, the Q-Tip, and the Bronzed Tyrant: A Memoir Without Euphemism

    The Cologne, the Q-Tip, and the Bronzed Tyrant: A Memoir Without Euphemism

    When Tom Junod discussed his memoir with Andrew Sullivan, he described a decision that feels almost subversive now: no contemporary therapy-speak. No “toxic masculinity,” no diagnostic shorthand, no tidy labels to anesthetize the mess. A book set in the ’60s and ’70s would speak in the idiom of those years. The wager is simple and risky: if you refuse the crutch of modern jargon, the character has to carry the weight. By that measure, Junod wins. He builds a father who does what Dashiell Hammett demanded of fiction—gets up, steps off the page, and stands there, unavoidable.

    The book—In the Days of My Youth I Was Told What It Means to be a Man—borrows its title from the Led Zeppelin song “Good Times Bad Times,” and the borrowing is apt. Junod’s father, Lou, is less a man than a doctrine delivered at high volume. He is a born pontificator with a salesman’s grin and a peacock’s vanity. He scents himself like a department store—colognes, sprays, balms layered into a cloud—and tans his body into a lacquered bronze that seems to announce itself before he enters a room. He sells handbags, favors turtlenecks, and at the beach reduces himself to a strip of fabric and a glare. He cleans his navel with a witch-hazel-dipped Q-tip and instructs his son to follow suit, as if hygiene were a moral philosophy.

    Compulsion runs through him like a live wire. If you prefer a term to describe his sexual compulsions, call it satyriasis and be done with it, but the word hardly captures the sprawl: gambling, philandering, bullying—habits that bloom into a personality. A man who cannot govern himself makes governance his obsession; he attempts to administer his household the way a tyrant administers a province—loudly, relentlessly, and with a curious conviction that control is the same thing as order. The result is a home pressurized to the point of fatigue, where even silence feels like a reprimand.

    Junod’s refusal to retrofit his childhood with modern language sharpens the pain rather than softening it. There’s a scene that lands like a held breath finally released: in Lou’s absence, the mother reappears as herself. Her face opens. Her voice steadies. When Tom reads her a poem, she brightens—really brightens—and offers the simplest, most generous counsel: read it aloud; the sound will teach you what the page cannot. It is a small moment, but it reveals the scale of what has been missing. When Lou is present, he occupies the air itself. He doesn’t just enter rooms; he consumes them, a man with a gift for turning oxygen into pressure.

    Listen to the audiobook—as Sullivan sensibly suggests—and Lou’s voice acquires a second life. You don’t merely read him; you hear the cadence, the certainty, the unearned authority. It is a performance you cannot switch off, which is precisely the point. The book’s power comes from that persistence. It is painful, yes, but the pain is disciplined into narrative momentum.

    If the experience feels familiar, it should. The era produced a certain model of man—postwar, unapologetic, loud as a virtue—who treated appetite as remedy and certainty as proof. He read “women’s magazines” out in the open, said things he couldn’t defend, and considered objection to his will a breach of etiquette. The code was simple: be emphatic, be unyielding, be right by volume. Junod doesn’t argue with that code; he incarnates it. He takes the template and gives it a name, a voice, a set of rituals so specific they become unforgettable.

    In doing so, he offers a quiet rebuke to our current habit of explanation. You don’t need a glossary to understand this man. You need a page, a room, and the patience to watch what happens when he walks in.

  • The Ballad of Roland Beavers

    The Ballad of Roland Beavers

    You can’t understand what it meant to be a teenage boy in 1970s California without inhaling the thick, narcotic perfume of banana-coconut tanning oil. It wasn’t a scent so much as a doctrine. You lay on a beach towel the size of a small sailboat and basted yourself in that viscous syrup as if you were preparing your own body for display. No one spoke of melanoma. The goal was simple: darken, gleam, radiate. Bronze was not just a color—it was a declaration of sexual arrival. For a teenage bodybuilder, it was mandatory. Muscles alone were not enough; they needed lacquer, shine, theatrical finish. We weren’t just building bodies—we were curating mythologies.

    The culture supplied its own scripture. Xaviera Hollander hovered over the decade like a secular saint of libido, her memoir The Happy Hooker tucked into suburban living rooms beside purple bongs that leaned like exhausted sentinels. Her voice—thick Dutch vowels, half invitation, half sermon—drifted through late-night radio, as intoxicating as the oil we poured over ourselves like maple syrup on pancakes. If Hollander provided the gospel, Eric Weber supplied the tactics. His book, How to Pick Up Girls!, read like a field manual for social siege warfare: pursue, persist, override refusal, wear resistance down to compliance. It was less romance than strategy, less courtship than conquest. And like all bad ideas, it traveled quickly among teenage boys who didn’t yet know the difference between confidence and predation.

    At Lake Don Castro in the summer of 1977, we found the living embodiment of this philosophy: Roland Beavers, a thirty-year-old demigod in blue Speedos. He stood on the grassy knoll above the sand like a monument to self-belief—wavy hair, sculpted mustache, gold chain glinting against a chest that looked permanently backlit. A Playboy cooler at his feet, a boombox humming, a Frisbee orbiting his charisma—Roland was less a man than a recurring performance. We studied him like apprentices. His lines never changed. 

    Every Saturday I heard the following: Roland paid his uncle five hundred dollars for a custom paint job on his Camaro. His father owned expensive real estate in the Bay Area. He had helped manage his father’s properties since he was in high school. He was waiting to hear from a Hollywood studio for a small role as a fighter in a martial arts movie. Even though he never attended college, he had his own house in a desirable part of town called Parsons Estates. Roland would throw in the words “Parsons Estates” as if they were a magical mantra that would make stars sparkle over his coiffed hair.

    Every Saturday Roland met a new blonde, somehow more beautiful than the previous one. He and at least one woman would play Frisbee on the grassy knoll above the man-made beach’s imported sand.

    On one such afternoon, my bodybuilder buddies and I saw Roland in his usual spot, the grassy knoll, where he was tossing his Frisbee to two blonde girls in white bikinis. I had my towel spread out close by so I could study Roland’s methods. I was half-listening to him talk about how amazing he was and half-reading my parents’ dog-eared copy of The Happy Hooker.

    That’s when I heard Roland give out an alarming howl.

    “Oh my God,” one of the bikini-clad girls said. “You stepped on a bee.”

    I saw the bee spinning in the grass for its final moments before it would die without its stinger.

    The bee sting’s effects were immediate. Roland began to sweat and limp while trying to walk through the pain. The two blonde girls looked at the wincing pick-up artist with concern. One of them asked if he was all right.

    “No big deal,” he said. “Just a little bee sting.”

    “Are you sure you’re okay?” one of the girls asked as the man’s body was covered with a shiny sheen of sweat.

    “I’m fine. Really, I am.”

    “I think you should sit down,” one of the girls said.

    “No, we can still play. I’m fine. Don’t worry about me.”

    By now, Roland’s foot had swollen into a giant ham. He looked down at the inflamed flesh, and his tumescent foot was proof of the severity of his situation. His eyes bulged with fear, and then he collapsed, and lying prone on his back he began to hyperventilate.

    An ambulance came soon after. Roland was in the throes of anaphylactic shock. The paramedics did their best, but Roland died on the spot.

    I was never the same after that incident. I obsessed over Roland’s demise, I suffered nightmares about it, and I stopped going to the beach with my buddies. 

    About six months after the incident, a peculiar daydream began visiting me with unnerving regularity. In it, I did not watch Roland die from a distance; I inhabited his final moments, seeing the world through his eyes. As his body failed, his mind seemed to step into an alternate life—a gentler, unperformed existence. He was no longer the peacock on the grassy knoll but a husband, walking along the shoreline with his wife, four children orbiting them in laughter, and two rescue dogs bounding through the surf. The air carried a soft, almost cinematic music. The sky was a pale, forgiving blue. Sunlight fell not harshly, but tenderly, as if it had chosen to console rather than expose.

    In that imagined reprieve, Roland turned toward something higher—toward God—and spoke with a clarity he had never shown in life. He promised to abandon the theater of conquest, to relinquish the hollow rituals of charm and pursuit, to grow into the man he had postponed becoming. It was as if the world had paused to offer him a final rehearsal for redemption. The horizon opened. A stillness settled over everything. And within that stillness, he seemed to experience, perhaps for the first time, a quiet and unadorned peace—a beauty that required no performance and asked nothing in return.

     And just as the possibility of redemption flickered into being—it was extinguished. His body failed. The bee won. His life ended mid-sentence.

    I carried that ending with me to the piano, where I tried to make sense of Roland’s death the only way I knew how. For two years I worked on “The Ballad of Roland Beavers,” a piece that refused to resolve cleanly because the life it memorialized never did. Nearly fifty years later, I still play it. The notes haven’t dulled. Neither has the lesson. Some performances end not with a bow, but with a collapse—too little, too late, and no encore.