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ENTERTAINMENT FOR / APRIL 2014 


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A ood music is like sex, reaching between 
| | mthe ears to scratch at places in the brain 
nothing else can. The best of both can 
be found here in our Sex & Music issue, with 
help from some of the biggest stars (and most 
titillating ladies) around. Our music critic, Con- 
tributing Editor R т, kicks 
things off with Playboy's 2014 Music Guide, 
tipping us off to the year's up-and-coming hit 
makers. Then he joins with Craig Marks to 
give us a rundown of music's best F-bombs, 
ahilarious paean to jilted exes, flabbergasted 
Brits and pop's most controversial moments. 
In The Sound of Revolution, photojournalist 
Daniel С. Britt travels to the front lines of 
the Syrian uprising, where peaceful rebels 
fight tyranny with an illegal radio station as 
war rages on. Kurt Vile, whose soulful tunes 
are among the best in American rock today, 
shows off his style (and hair) in our fashion 
feature, while Stan Lee brings 91 years of 
wisdom to our Playboy Interview. The man 
behind our greatest superheroes explains 
how he helped Marvel put out 50 million 
comic books a year at his peak and 
divulges the true story behind the 
controversies that haunt him. His 
motto: Excelsior—"an old word 
that means ‘upward and onward 
to greater glory!” Nobody embod- 
ies it better. Investigative reporter 
Ethan Brown files a story from 
Chicago's violence-plagued South 
Side, where young rap stars are 
the product of, and contributors 
to, a murder epidemic. In To Live 
and Die in Chirag, Brown uncov- 
ers how Chief Keef and associates 
became hip-hop kings before turn- 
ing 21 and takes a look at where 
the chaos is headed. In Backstage 
Pass, a pictorial that hits all the 
right notes, photographer Tony brings 
acrew of scintillating Playmates to the storied 
Roxy Theatre for an unforgettable all-access 
party. Music journalist and MSNBC commen- 
tator Touré revisits a sad chapter in New York 
history in How the Central Park Five Still 
Haunt America, unwrapping painful details 
behind the case that robbed five teenagers of 
their youth in a city consumed by racial angst. 
Exposing the conflict between justice and 
power, he details the five's enduring struggle 
for redemption. In a world where superstar 
DJs earn $12.5 million a year, who wouldn't 
want to be a professional button-pusher? In 
So You Think You Can Deejay? writer Dan 
Hyman explores what it takes to drop a beat; 
tips from Afrojack will set you on your own 
road to EDM glory. lggy Pop has come to 
entertain you: The punk-rock madman lets 
loose in 20Q on dropping acid before his early 
gigs, touring without his front teeth and how 
every other band is a sack of crap. Turn on, 
tune in, drop out and flip the page: Welcome 
to an issue that shreds. 


PLAYBILL 


Kurt Vile 


Ethan Brown 


ENGINEERED WITH РАТЕМ 
WITH PIMA COTTON FOR T! 


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FEATURES 
HOW THE Я 
CENTRAL PARK 
FIVE STILL HAU 
AMERICA 


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THE SOUND OF АТАР jj 


REVOLUTION - 7 de \ FICTION 
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SONGS WITH 
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| NSFW lyricsin 
music history: 


TO LIVE AND-DIE 
IN CHIRAG 
Hundreds diein Chicago 
streets as violent teenage 
superstars become rap 
kings. ETHAN BROWN 
separates headlines 

from reality. 


This month's cover 
Stars Rachel Mortenson 
with a sexy update 
ofthe short short. Our 
Rabbit knowsjust 
where to go. 


SO YOU THINK 
YOU CAN DEEJAY? * 
As EDM stars rake in. 
millions, DAN HYMAN 
investigates whether Y 
justanyone can 
bea professional 
beat dropper. 


PHOTOGRAPHY, THIS PAGE 
AND COVER, BY TONY KELLY 


| 


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=-playboystore.eom 
27 


NEW 


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FOR HIM 


PRESS TO PLAY 


playboyfragrances.com 


BORN TO LOSE 
outlines the dangers of 
giving birth behind bars. 


READER RESPONSE 
Ourtechnology addiction; 
man-made global warming. 


STILL SAYING NO 


explores why psychedelic- 
drug research shows great 
potential but receives 
little financial support. 


HOME SWEET 
OFFICE 

JOEL STEIN proves your 
annoying office is the only 
thing keeping you sane. 


THE NANCY DREW 
SYNDROME 

untangles why women love 
TV crime shows (and 
Dateline's Keith Morrison). 


PLAYMATE: Shanice Jordyn 


COPS WHO LIKE 
GETTING THE 
FINGER 
With technologies 
allowing nanoscale DNA 
collection, the future of 
justice is precarious, as 

2 explains. 


KURT VILE ON 
MAIN STREET 

This rocker's tunes and 
style live in a world of 
theirown. Fashion by 


VOL. 61, NO. 3—APRIL 2014 


PLAYBOY 


CONTENTS 


THE SECRET 
GARDEN 

A day in South African 
model Shané's backyard 
puts a new spin on 
neighborhood fun. 


BOOGIE NIGHTS 
Miss April Shanice 
Jordyn keeps the 19705 
alive with a sexy private 
roller-rink party. 


BACKSTAGE 

PASS 

The historic Roxy Theatre 
in Los Angeles is по 
stranger to after-show 
antics. Thankfully, neither 
are our Playmates. 


WORLD OF 
PLAYBOY 

Sixty Playmates take a 
showstopping spin 
around L.A.; Solange 
Knowles and Nelly rock 
out with Playboy before 
Super Sunday. 


PLAYMATE 

NEWS 

Amelia Talon affirms 
gaming as our favorite 
hobby; Charis Burrett 
gives NASCAR fans yet 
another reason to cheer. 


209: Iggy Pop 


PLAYBILL 
DEAR PLAYBOY 
AFTER HOURS 
REVIEWS 

RAW DATA 
PLAYBOY 
ADVISOR 
PARTY JOKES 


Q PLAYBOY ON o PLAYBOY ON PLAYBOY ON 
FACEBOOK TWITTER INSTAGRAM 
ET SOCIAL Keep up with all things Playboy at 


facebook com/playboy, twitter.com/playboy 


and instagram.com/playboy 


PLAYBOY 


HUGH M. HEFNER 
editor-in-chief 


JIMMY JELLINEK 
editorial director 
STEPHEN RANDALL depuly editor 
MAC LEWIS art director 
JASON BUHRMESTER executive editor 
REBECCA H. BLACK photo director 
HUGH GARVEY articles editor 
JARED EVANS managing editor 
JENNIFER RYAN JONES fashion and grooming director 


EDITORIAL 
COPY: WINIFRED ORMOND copy chief; BRADLEY LINCOLN senior copy editor; CAT AUER copy editor 
RESEARCH: NORA O'DONNELL senior research editor; SHANE MICHAEL SINGH research editor 
STAFF: GILBERT MACIAS editorial coordinator; CHERIE BRADLEY executive assistant; TYLER TRYKOWSKI editorial assistant 
CARTOONS: AMANDA WARREN associate cartoon editor 
CONTRIBUTING EDITORS: BRANTLEY BARDIN, MARK BOAL, Т.С. BOYLE, ROBERT В. DE SALVO, STUART DYBEK, MICHAEL FLEMING, NEAL GABLER, KARL TARO GREENFELD, 
KEN GROSS, DAVID HOCHMAN, ARTHUR KRETCHMER (automotive), GEORGE LOIS, SEAN MCCUSKER, CHUCK PALAHNIUK, ROCKY RAKOVIC, STEPHEN REBELLO, DAVID RENSIN, 


WILL SELF, DAVID SHEFF, ROB MAGNUSON SMITH, ERIC SPITZNAGEL, JOEL STEIN, ROB TANNENBAUM, CHRISTOPHER TENNANT, DON WINSLOW, HILARY WINSTON, SLAVO] ZIZEK 


AJ. BAIME, LEOPOLD FROEHLICH editors at large 


ART 


JUSTIN PAGE senior art director; ROBERT HARKNESS associate art director; AARON LUCAS art coordinator; LAUREL LEWIS designer 


PHOTOGRAPHY 
STEPHANIE MORRIS playmate photo editor; MATT STEIGBIGEL photo researcher; 
GAVIN BOND, SASHA EISENMAN, TONY KELLY, JOSH RYAN senior contributing photographers; MERT ALAS AND MARCUS PIGGOTT, DAVID BELLEMERE, MICHAEL BERNARD, 
MICHAEL EDWARDS, ELAYNE LODGE, DAN SAELINGER, SATOSHI, JOSEPH SHIN contributing photographers; HEIDI VOLPE contributing photo editor; 
KEVIN MURPHY director, photo library; CHRISTIE HARTMANN senior archivist, photo library; KARLA GOTCHER assistant, photo library; 


DANIEL FERGUSON manager, prepress and imaging; AMY KASTNER-DROWN senior digital imaging specialist; OSCAR RODRIGUEZ senior prepress imaging specialist 


PRODUCTION 


LESLEY K. JOHNSON production director; HELEN YEOMAN production services manager 


PUBLIC RELATIONS 


‘THERESA М. HENNESSEY vice president; TERI THOMERSON director 


PLAYBOY ENTERPRISES INTERNATIONAL, INC. 


SCOTT FLANDERS chief executive officer 


PLAYBOY PRINT OPERATIONS 
DAVID С. ISRAEL chief operating officer, president, playboy media; 


TOM FLORES senior vice president, business manager, playboy media 


ADVERTISING AND MARKETING 
JOHN LUMPKIN Senior vice president, publisher; MARIE FIRNENO vice president, advertising director; AMANDA CIVITELLO senior marketing director; 
HELEN BIANCULLI executive director, direct-response advertising NEW YORK: SEAN AVERY luxury director; BRIAN VRABEL entertainment and gaming director; 
ADAM WEBB spirits director; KEVIN FALATKO associate marketing director; NIKI DOLL promotional art director; ERIN CARSON, marketing manager; 
ANGELA LEE digital sales planner CHICAGO: TIFFANY SPARKS ABBOTT midwest director LOS ANGELES: LORI KESSLER west coast director; 


LINDSAY BERG digital sales planner SAN FRANCISCO: SHAWN O'MEARA h.o.m.e. 


THE WORLD |: 
MANSION FROLICS 
OF PLAYBOY AND NIGHTLIFE NOTES 


Talk about stopping traffic. 
Sixty of our most popular 
Playmates filed onto the 
top of a double-decker bus 
and departed our Beverly 
Hills headquarters for a 
cruise around the City 

of Angels, much to the 
delight of pedestrians and 
rubberneckers, who were 
armed and ready with their 
smartphones. The tour 
ended at the ultimate L.A. 
attraction—the Playboy 
Mansion. Against a back- 
drop of all our beauties, 

E! News asked Hef what 

it was like to celebrate 

the magazine's 60th аппі- 
versary surrounded by 

60 women, to which he 
replied, “That's the way to 
do it!" The Playmate bus 
tour is part of our yearlong 
anniversary celebration 
Keep your eyes peeled for 
more victory laps. 


The big game was in New Jersey, but the big party was at the Bud 
Light Hotel Lounge on the other side of the Hudson River. Guests 
including Taye Diggs, Jamie Chung, Bryan Greenberg, Anders Holm, 
Adam DeVine and Aaron Paul enjoyed casino games, a Bates Motel 
themed room, performances by Nelly and Playboy Bunnies, as well 
as tunes from DJ Irie and guest DJ 
Solange Knowles. We rocked the boat. 


12 


ORAL REPORT CARD 
Sex: A Very Oral Report (January/ 
February) has to be one of the best pieces 
I've ever read. At 29, I'm able to person- 
ally identify with almost all the opinions 
expressed. I too am disappointed with 
the juvenile nature of guys my age. I'm 
disgusted by the political regression of 
our reproductive rights. Women live in 
an age of infinite choices, and it can be 
incredibly overwhelming. In an effort to 
sort through those choices, we compare 
ourselves and our experiences with those 
of others, but discussion of our sexuality 
remains relatively superficial because the 
details are still taboo. To accentuate my 
point about this lingering taboo, I'm not 
signing my real name in case someone I 
know reads this. Oh well, baby steps. 
Olivia McDowell 
Sacramento, California 


I find Jane Pratt's gender-neutral per- 
spective thought-provoking. Most of the 
mainstream media don't cater to a fluid 
spectrum of gender or acknowledge gen- 
der questioning within their audiences. 
If the media presented or framed their 
content in a way that was more inclusive 
of a range of gender identities and less 
committed, however subconsciously, to 
furthering traditional concepts of gen- 
der, might we slowly begin to form a 
more inclusive, understanding world? 

Madeline Shea 
Chicago, Illinois 


PAGING DAVID MAMET 
As a longtime fan of David Mamet's, I 
approached his essay Entropy (January/ 
February) with high anticipation. How- 
ever, after reading it, I have a question: 
What does it say? 
Richard Straub 
Morristown, New Jersey 


SIXTY NEVER LOOKED SO GOOD 
What a beautifully crafted and clas- 
sic PLAYBOY pictorial (Love on the Rocks, 
January/February). Alejandra Guilmant's 
interaction with David Bellemere's lens 
drew me into the scene. Bravo to all par- 
ties involved. The 60th anniversary issue 
is a treat, but these pages are a surprise 
gem to be savored. 
Scott O. Sheppard 
Orlando, Florida 


PAY TO PLAY 

Does BuzzFeed's Ben Smith really 
think sites such as Longform.org and 
Longreads.com are the future of high- 
quality long-form journalism (Tweet Victory, 
January/February)? Both rely heavily on 
repurposed content from such ink-on- 
paper institutions as New York, Wired and 
PLAYBOY. What will they do when their 
print sources cease to exist? As far as I am 
concerned, the biggest strategic error the 
print media have made is conditioning a 


Kiss Us, Kate 


The Immaculate Kate Moss (January/ 
February): Once again PLAYBOY restores 
my faith in the exquisite potential of 
the females of our species. 

C.P. Hall II 
Brookfield, Illinois 


Magnificent! A true return to form. 
This is the PLAYBOY I know and love, 
overstuffed with great literature, life- 
style and luscious ladies. 

Sam Shabrin 
Scottsdale, Arizona 


Kate Moss is a beauty for the ages. 
David Chandler 
Pendleton, Oregon 


whole generation of readers to believe it’s 
okay not to pay for content. 

Hugh Cook 

Hickory Hills, Illinois 


THE TIME IS NOW 
Alex Hall’s essay (Time to Adapt, 

January/February) is a welcome dose of 
reality on the subject of climate change. 
His cogent, matter-of-fact points remind 
us that, despite the naysayers’ best 
efforts, the science is undeniable and the 
problem will only get worse with time. It 
is indeed high time we got started. 

Tim Benner 

Silver Spring, Maryland 


Climate change is here to stay. We have 
no choice but to get used to it. Whether 
or not man’s burning of fossil fuels has 
aided and abetted in greenhouse gases is 
open to debate, but the fact that the earth 
has been heating up for more than 20,000 
years is not. Oceans will rise, storms will 
increase in intensity and carbon dioxide 
will increase in concentration. These facts 
are not debatable. It has all happened 
before, and it will happen again. 

Benjamin A. Greaves 
Seaside, Oregon 


SEX DRIVE 
Regarding Joel Stein's January/February 
Men column, I don't see how self-driving 
cars would castrate any man. I am a cyclist, 
and I personally hate cars. They pollute 
the air and take up space. But I would ride 
in a car that drove itself and was totally 
electric. A self-driving car means I could 
leave the club drunk and have sex with 
a woman at 60 mph. That seems like the 
ultimate expression of testosterone. 
Jared Fontaine 
Wheeling, West Virginia 


HUNGRY LIKE THE WOLF 
I am awestruck by your amazing Miss 
January shoot (Into the Wild). Roos van 
Montfort is beyond gorgeous, and the 
photography is captivating. It is a spec- 
tacular representation of true beauty 
and captures a wonderful seasonal atmo- 
sphere. It also marks the first time I have 
ever been envious of wolves. 
Damien Shalley 
Brisbane, Queensland 


MIGHTIER THAN THE SWORD 
The Battle for Picasso’s Mind by John 

Meroney (November) is a fascinating 
look into the CIA's covert operations 
to win a true culture war in Europe 
during the 1950s. This story was my 
first exposure to Tom Braden’s role in 
steering the art community away from the 
repression of communism by promoting 
modern art in France and Germany. The 
result was an explosion of artistic fervor 
that overwhelmed the Soviet realism 
movement. It is truly a bright spot in the 
CIA's portfolio. 

Daniel O'Donnell 

Loveland, Colorado 


ELUSIVE PARTY GUESTS 
Іп Напет’ With Hef (January/ 
February), І found the absence of Frank 
Sinatra and Elvis Presley very surprising. 
Didn't the Chairman or the King ever visit 
the Mansion? 
Lanny Middings 
Angola, New York 
Sinatra was Hef's guest at the Playboy 
Mansion in Chicago, and Hef met Elvis in Las 
Vegas. Although the King may never have vis- 
ited the Mansion, he once rented Hef's plane, 
the Big Bunny, to fly to a concert. 


E-mail LETTERS@PLAYBOY.COM or write 9346 CIVIC CENTER DRIVE, BEVERLY HILLS, CALIFORNIA 90210 


A ee ё > 
4. МС SARROMOTION 


NEW YORK 


THE BRAND THAT PUT BIG GAME PARTIES ON THE MAP 
ONCE AGAIN PROVED TO BE THE HOTTEST TICKET IN TOWN. 
With Playmates іп tow, we cruised to the Big Apple on Friday, January 31st 
to continue Playboy's 60th Anniversary celebration. The Bud Light Hotel 
Lounge, perched between the Intrepid aircraft carrier and Bud Light Hotel 
cruise ship, served as Playboy's star-studded enclave and entertainment 
mecca during pro-football's biggest weekend of the year. 


Spirited revelers checked-in for a decadent evening at the Bates Motel 
themed front desks before rubbing elbows with the likes of Aaron Paul, 
Laura Prepon, Taye Diggs, and the cast of Workaholics. Solange Knowles 
kicked off the festivities from the Buffalo Jeans DJ booth as partygoers got 
a taste of the good life inside the Playboy Club London build out— 
complete with a MINI USA themed casino, photo booth, and car displays. 


Guests donned polarized sunglasses that unlocked a voyeuristic look 
into the Bates Motel while party crusaders braved HISTORY’S® 
Vikings” ice bar before taking to the stage for a special performance 
by Nelly and Florida Georgia Line's Tyler Hubbard. Complimentary 
Bud Light and Jean Paul Gaultier "LE BEAU MALE” fragrance samples 
refreshed guests as DJ Irie closed out the night. 


Д: BEORIGINAL H =F BUFFALO Jak 


HISTORY. imus 


The History of a Legend: 


Now іп a sumptuous trade edition 


В 
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1 


HUGH HEFNER'S 


PLAYBOY 


The Life and Times of Hugh M. Hefner: An illustrated autobiography with highlights from Playboy's 
first 25 years. This six-volume anthology celebrates the sophistication and wit of Playboy magazine. 
With never-before-seen ephemera from Hef's private archives, along with a vast selection of 
personal photos, this is the definitive history of Playboy and its legendary founder. 

First published as a limited-edition series. Now available in a popular edition. Hardcover with 

25 fold-outs, six volumes in box, 1,910 pages. 7.0 x 9.8 inches. $150. ISBN: 978-3-8228-2613-3. 


CONTACT PLAYBOYSTORE.COM TO ORDER 


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PLAYBOY N N 


BECOMING 
ATTRACTION 


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Cathy Baron 


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ography by MICHAEL EDWARDS/ 


IMYPLACE.COM 


TALK |WHAT MATTERS NOW 


* The video for Alison 
Gold's “Shush Up” 
begins with the pre- 
teen singer covered in 
gold glitter and wearing 
agold lamé top and tiny 
shorts. She plays both 
aprison warden and 
aconvict executed by 
electric chair before 
evaporatinginto a 
gold rain that falls ona 
dancing crowd as she 
shouts, "Crank it or just 
shush up!" over a clubby 
house beat. 

Thisisthe fourth 
music video Gold's 
parents have commis- 


MUSIC PRODUCER 


sioned from Patrice 
Wilson, the 35-year-old 
owner of PMW Live, a 
vanity production com- 
pany that, for $6,500, 
provides aspiring stars 
acustom-penned song, 
amusic video, a photo 
shoot and promotion 
through the company’s 
YouTube channel. 

Raised between 
Nigeria and London, 
Wilson has worked as a 
fashion model, backup 
singer for a Slovakian 
pop star and manager 
of an air-conditioning- 
repair company. 


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But Gold and others 
come to Wilson because 
heisthe creator of 
“Friday,” a 2011 video 
featuring teen singer 
Rebecca Black war- 
bling, “Kickin' inthe 
front seat, sittin’ in the 
backseat/ Gotta make 
my mind up, which 
seat can I take?” Crit- 
ics deemed it the worst 
song in history, and 
itis one of the most 
“disliked” videos on 
YouTube. None of that 
stopped it from pulling 
in more than 230 mil- 
lion views. Black went 
on to appear on The 
Tonight Show andina 
Katy Perry music video. 
Lady Gaga called her a 
genius. Which is why 
these days people fork 


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overthousandsin the 
hope that Wilson will 
make them—or their 
offspring—the next 
viral-video sensation. 
“The reason they go 
viral,” Wilson says, “is 
because these songs are 
apart of me, things that 
Ienjoy.” Which explains 
“Chinese Food,” a 
previous Gold video 
about “chow mo-mo- 
mo-mo-mein” (14 mil- 
lion views). There's 
also “It's Thanksgiv- 
ing,” featuring Wilson 
ina turkey costume 
and drumsticks used 
as microphones (15 
million views), and 
“ABCDEFG,” another 
Gold video, in which a 
godlike Wilson trans- 
forms the singer's 


friends into puppets 
(8 million views). These 
videos are oddly lov- 
able, even ifthe lines 
between ignorance, sat- 
ire and self-awareness 
become a jumbled mess. 
At the very least, they 
have catchy hooks. 
That doesn’t mean 
they're all international 
hits. Wilson's YouTube 
channel is littered with 
sub-500,000-view duds, 
from tepid pop to love 
ballads to flavorless 
girl-group songs, none 
ofthem Grammy con- 
tende: "mimmune 
to critics now," he says. 
“Туе heard everything. 
If people want Patrice, 
ifthey want Fat Usher, 
let's give it to them.” 
—Tyler Trykowski 


PLAYBOY: 


ESCO: 
PLAYBOY: 
ESCO: 
PLAYBOY: 
ESCO: 
* Althoughitis legal in most states for women to go 
topless in public, many are still arrested ifthey try 
it. What gives? Actress, director and activist Lina 
Esco set out to answer this question in her upcoming 
indie feature film, Free the Nipple. For Esco—and 
supporters such as Miley Cyrus and Lena Dunham— 
the right to go topless is about equality. “No more 
double standards,” Esco Says.—Nora O'Donnell PLAYBOY: 
ESCO: 


Photography БУ ^ Mtn 


TALK |У/НАТ MATTERS NOW 


PASSION PLAY 


STUDIES SHOW MUSIC IS ONE OF THE BEST WAYS TO SET THE MOOD. SO WHY ARE 
MEN SO BAD AT IT? ONE WOMAN'S PLEA FOR BETTER PLAYLISTS 


was sprawled out on Nate's 
bed, waiting for the music to 
start. We had spent most of 
the night talking about music, 
and I was anxious to hear 
what he would select before 
slipping back into bed next to me. 


Unsurprisingly, we didn't last. Nate— 

and his flaccid taste in music—simply 

didn't spark any fire in my loins. 
“Wonderwall” was the song playing 


when I had outrageous make-up sex, 
the raunchy “Rocket Queen” when I 


when I lost my virginity, “Skinny Love” 


Music can transform an ordinary 
sexual experience into a mind-blowing 
one. Set the right tone and ГИ melt 
in your arms. Screw it up and I'll call 
it a night. In a study conducted by 
Spotify, more than 40 percent of people 
reported that music played a larger role 
in sexual arousal than their partner's 
touch. That means nearly half the time 
you think it’s your magic tongue, it may 
just be Usher who's getting her hot. 

“Music releases oxytocin, the same 
chemical released during orgasm,” 
explains Daniel Levitin, professor of 
behavioral neuroscience at McGill 
University and author of The World 
in Six Songs: How the Musical Brain 
Created Human Nature. So what's the 
best way to combine music and sex? 
“Women prefer music that’s sensual 
as opposed to raunchy. They want 
assurances that their man loves them. 
But if they’re looking to hook up, it’s 
different. Music that has the tempo of 
humping is more likely to get awoman 
excited.” In other words, music plus sex 
equals pleasure squared. 

That doesn't mean you have a license 
to build an iTunes playlist of every sex 
song ever recorded. However, it couldn't 
hurt to have a few sultry playlists for 
varying tastes ready at a moment's 
notice. “Women have a script about g 
what they're looking for,” says Levitin. 
“So the best thing a man can do to 
tilt the odds in his favor is alter the 
woman's mood.” Listen up, guys. We 
sure are.—Rachel Khona 


Suddenly Journey’s “Separate Ways” 
boomed from the speakers. By the time 
Steve Perry belted out, “Someday love 
will find you,” I was no longer in the 
mood. Then “Pour Some Sugar on Me” 
came on. Had Nate confused his wacky 


had quickie car sex. Music set the 
mood for what was to come: warm 
and tender lovin’ or knockdown, 
drag-out screwing. Would I have 
enjoyed the experience without 
the music? Yes. Did I enjoy it 


1980s mix with his sexy-time mix? more with the music? Definitely. 


> Get turned оп to Keir O'Donnell, an 
L.A.-based actor and designer whose 
lamps capture miniatures in the heat of 
the moment. “For a lot of people sex 

is still inherently taboo. The idea that it 
should remain behind closed doors is 
something | wanted to challenge,” he says. = 
These and less risqué versions are available 
for $200 to $350 at FreshBuries.com. 


LIGHTEN 
UP 


OUR FAVORITE NEW 
LAMP DESIGNER DOES IT 
WITH THE LIGHTS ON 


TAYLOR SWIFT 
IS BREAKING UP 
WITH EVERYONE 


A LOOK AT THE FUTURE OF AMERICA'S ^ 
BIGGEST BROKEN HEART 


2016 


INCOMPLETE 
ME 


> Swift's summer 
romance with 
Toronto Argonauts 
punt returner 
Tim Tebow is 
famously chaste 
and inspires 
"Incomplete Me," 
from her album 
Read/Option. 


* She's charming, beautiful and tal- 

ented, but Taylor Swift's status as the | 
princess оҒрор 1$ largely the result ofher | 
virtuosic touch with the maybe-kinda- 
sorta kiss-off anthem. Here are our bold 
predictions for the future relationships 
that will inspire the breakup queen's 
next big hits.—David Roth 


"They used to say 
1 was the captain 
of your cheerlead- 
ing team, /You 
were the neck- 
less embodiment 
of the American 
dream./But still it 
all felt incomplete 
when you tried to 
make it work, / You 
had to act like a. 
fullback playing 
out of position.” 


QUES 
2014 2015 


WRAPPED UP (DRESSING) 
IN YOU ON THE SIDE 


=> America's cotton 2 Chef Guy 


growers hire Swift Fieri creates the | 
to succeed Hayden menu for Swift's 
Panettiere as the restaurant Sad \ 
famous face іп Sue's Wings 'N' ^ 4 5 жат \ 
their “Fabric of Things, but this EH E ч 
Our Lives” ads, but song reveals Mw X 3 EU Nu o Ser 
unfortunately the things weren't x La d У, 
relationship isn't so chummy dur- 
exclusive. Shortly ing their Food 2017 
after filming her Network special, 
first commercial Classic Cars and FIRED 
for big cotton, Gravy Goatees: 3 Even though 
Swift sees a photo A Celebration Swift loses season 
of ex-boyfriend of Tan-Colored 18 of Celebrity 
Harry Styles American Food. Apprentice to 


former Toronto 
Argonaut and 


wearing a cotton Sample Lyrics 
T-shirt. Feeling татрте CYTES 


betrayed, Swift “Should've impeached Flor- 
writes “Wrapped known about ida governor Tim 
Up in You,” a kiss- you, should've Tebow, she never 
off to the fabric; heard what they admits which 
the song appears said./Can't trust shockingly crass 
on the soundtrack sunglasses on pretend TV bil- 
to the film Nicholas the back of his lionaire inspired 
Sparks's The head. / You took me her 2017 album 
Turtleneck. for a ride іп your Chapter 11. 
EIER muscle car,/But ЕТИ " 
Sample Lyrics work a deep fryer Sample Lyrics 
"I wonder, | won- with your eyes "A small town 
der why | let you closed, / You're lost in the brass, 
be all over me./1 going to get a scar." cologne and 


steak,/Those big- 
city boys won't let 
you slide on one 
mistake./Cotton- 
candy hair and 
shiny neckties,/A 
small-town girl 
just isn't right for 
ham-faced big- 
city guys." 


wonder, | won- 
der how naive a 
country girl could 
be./Every inch, 
every stitch, every 
betrayal such a 
surprise, /Тһе 
touch, the feel, 
the fabric of 
your lies." 


19 


E FOOD 


RESPECT 
YOUR ROOTS 


ANY GUY CAN COOK A STEAK; CHEFS TRAIN THEIR 
SIGHTS ON THE CARROT. HERE'S HOW TO KICK IT UP 


Carrots are threatening to unseat kale as the It 
vegetable. Ken Oringer, of Clio in Boston and Toro in 
Boston and New York City, is one chef taking them 
to the next level. He serves carrots hay-roasted with 
goat butter for a dish that’s as seductive as an oyster. 
“Odds are, people are going to like them unless you 
really screw it up,” says Oringer. Here he shares 
simple ways not to, with delicious results. 


HOW TO 
PREP 


в‏ ا 
соок‏ 


Тоѕѕ washed апа 
unpeeled whole 
carrots (peels retain 
flavor) with olive 
oil, salt and pepper. 
Roast carrots at 325 
degrees for about 
30 minutes until 
lightly browned and 
not crunchy. 


a — 


SLICE 
Heirloom carrots 
in a variety of 
colors make an 

insta-salad. Slice 
them lengthwise, 
then shave into 
ribbons with a 
vegetable peeler. 
Dress with a tart 
vinaigrette. 


HARKNESS 


SPICE 
You can add 
almost anything to 
carrots, but Oringer 
recommends 
intense cayenne 
pepper, cinnamon 
and toasted 
coriander seeds to 
play off the carrots’ 
sweetness. 


5 
z 
5 


Photography by 
DANNY КІМ 


ў е Бек ты А 
"ATHE CRIS JED ING TASTE OF BUD LIGHT. + ATO 


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ENJOY RESPONSIBLY 
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ES DRINK 


HARD 
CORE 


THINK ALL HARD CIDERS 
ARE WEAK AND CLOYING? 
THINK AGAIN. THESE FIVE 
SOPHISTICATED BOTTLES 
BLOW THE TOP OFF THIS 


DIVISIVE DRINK 


01100084. 


1. Virtue Cider 


Lig е 


2. Farnum Hill 


3. Hogan's 


— Former Goose 
Island brewmaster 
Gregory Hall crafted 
this effervescent 
French-style cider with 
heirloom apples from 
Michigan. Its smooth, 
lagerlike flavor can eas- 
ily replace the mimosas 
at the brunch table. 


Cidre Nouveau, $20 


Photography by 
TRAVIS RATHBONE 


— Made at a bucolic 
orchard in western New 
Hampshire, this light 
and crisp farmhouse 
cider goes down like 
seltzer. At 7.5 percent 
АВУ, it's stronger than 
most beers, so watch 
how many 750-milliliter 


— Although dry cider 
is making a welcome 
comeback in the U.S., 
our European friends 
have kept the tradition 
alive for centuries. This 
British cider is a little 
tart and peaty and pairs 
perfectly with a hearty 
ploughmans lunch. 


4. Domaine Dupont 


5. Sarasola 


-> For generations 
cider apples in Europe 
have been intricately 
bred and blended, and 
the French, naturel- 
lement, are leaders in 
creating complexity. To 
wit, this cider balances 
sour and sweet, floral 
and grassy with ease. 

^ oy > 


— Ready to get 
funky? This Basque 
sidra tastes like 
nothing you've had 
before, It's unfiltered 
(that's yeast floating in 
your glass), bubble- 
free and full of woody, 
musty and vinegary 
flavors. 
Sagardoa, $10 


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АСТІМІТҮ-5РЕСІҒІС 
SPORTS WATCHES 
ARE DIALED IN TO 
GIVE YOU THE EDGE 


* For all the wonders 
of smartphone apps 
geared to assist youin 
your sport of choice, in 
the field, these watches 
beat a fully loaded 
phone hands down. 
Тһеуте lightweight, 
ruggedly built, water 
resistant and outfitted 
with just the right suite 
of features targeted 

to your activity. With 
one of these devices 
strapped to your 

wrist, you'll be scoring 
instead of scrolling. 


Photography by DANNY KIM 


FOOT 
PATROL 


> This runner's 
watch can 
estimate your 
body's oxygen 
consumption, 
thus increasing 
performance 
and aiding 
recovery. 


Garmin Fore- 
runner 620, 
$400 


MANALOG 

> Sometimes 
the old ways are 
the best ways. 
Puma's classic 
sports watch 
doesn't need 

no stinking USB 
cable to tell you 
what time to 


get to the gym. 


Puma Iconic, 
$90 


THE 
MOTIVATOR 
> In addition to 
monitoring pace 
and heart rate, 
this watch can 
alert you to key 
hydration and 
nutrition points 


in your workout. 


Timex Ironman 
Run Trainer 2.0, 
$275 


GOT THE 
BEAT 

> Pair with 

the strap-on 
monitor to track 
your heart rate 
and calories 
burned on the 


oversize display. 


Under Armour 
Armour39, 
$200 


TAKE A HIKE 
> Equipped 
with flashlight, 
compass and 
thermometer, 
this armored 
waterproof 
watch is perfect 
for when you 


go off the grid. 


Nixon Baja, 
$150 


PROP STYLING BY AOMJAI 


sope 222; >> +++ 
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temm 
> 

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LI 
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Li 
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1 
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LI 


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SUCKER | 
PUNCH | 


COOL NEW SEERSUCKER 
BLAZERS NEVER 
LET 'EM SEE YOU SWEAT 


* Long before we had Lycra 
and other fabrics designed to 
wick away sweat, there was 
seersucker, which had the added 
benefit of actually looking cool. 
The puckered cotton weave was 
found to speed evaporation, 
making it the preferred fabric 
of British officers in India and 
Southern gentlemen. New jacket 
styles are ready to be dressed 
down for a hot night on the 
town. Here's how to wear it. 


GO CASUAL 

> Keep cool and casual 
with a dapper Haspel blue 
oxford ($195). 


REACH THE PEAK 

> Тһе peak lapels on this 
Haspel jacket ($695) draw 
the eye up and outward 
and make your shoulders 
look broader. Haspel knows 
what it’s doing; it was the 
first company to produce 
seersucker suits in the U.S. 


BE SQUARE 

> If you're going to dress it 
up, use a pocket square that’s 
the same color as your shirt 


GET WAISTED 

> Haspel teamed with New 
York fashion firm Shipley & 
Halmos to modernize and 
slim down its line. The 
trimmer waist is flattering to 
most body types, 


DOUBLE DOWN 

~ Double-breasted jackets are 
making a comeback. A seer- 
sucker DB is doubly dashing. 


Photography by JOSEPH SHIN 


HUNDREDS OF 


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ALL THE 
PRETTY 
HORSES 


Picture the scene: the Ford 
Rotunda at the New York World's 
Fairin 1964. Lee lacocca—a 
39-year-old auto man then unheard 
of outside car circles—stands by 
his boss, Henry Ford II. They share 
the stage with Walt Disney, who is 
cutting the ribbon for the launch 
ofa brand-new car called the 
Mustang. Within a week, Mustang- 
mania has swept the nation, lead- 
ingtoarecord billion dollars in 
sales the first year. No car launch 
has ever had such an impact on 
our culture at large. Fifty years 
and more than 9 million Mustangs 
later, Ford debuts the next genera- 
tion (hitting streets in the fall). 
Saddle up, we're going for a ride. 


Hot Body 


The new Mus- 
tang coupe and 
convertible retain 
the original's DNA, 
but the latest ver- 
sions have a wider, 
lower stance. The 
coupe features 
the return of the 
fastback, with more 
sloped rear glass. 


Bright Idea 


We love the 
shark-gilled LED 


headlight and tail- 
light designs, which 
add to the aggres- 
sive stature. 


Inside Job 


The aviation- 
inspired cockpit, 
with wraparound 
gauges and Ford's 
voice-controlled 
SYNC system, 
makes this ride an 
ideal rolling office, 
with all the feel of a 
German luxury car. 


Motor City 


Match a manual 
or paddle-shifted 
transmission 
to your pick of 
engines: a base 
3.7-liter V6 (about 
300 horsepower), 
a 2.3-liter turbo 
in-line four (305 


horsepower), or 
the GT package 
(pictured above) 
with a five-liter V8 
(420 horsepower) 
Pricing has not yet 


response, engine 
and transmission 
settings and the 
new upgraded 
suspension setup. 
Commuting? You 


been set have a blind-spot- 
warning system 

for changing lanes 

Command and adaptive cruise 

Performance control. Bonus: The 

launch-control fea- 

Flip a switch ture alters the rpm 


to sport mode to 
change steering 


for perfect zero- 
to-60 sprints 


A 


Engine: five-liter V8 
Horsepower: 420 
Torque: 390 foot-pounds 
Top speed: 155 mph 
MPG: TBD 

Price tag: TBD 


WHICH OF TODAY'S CARS WILL ВЕ THE HOT 
VINTAGE RIDES OF TOMORROW? 


junkyard dogs 50 years ago are going for bank at auction. 

But not just any cars—the right cars. To find out which of 
today's autos will be the hot vintage movers in their categories 50 
years from now, we turned to McKeel Hagerty (right), who runs 
Hagerty, the world's largest insurer of vintage autos. Jump in as 
he tells us which rides to drive and which to put in storage. 


T he vintage-car market is smoldering. Cars thought to be 


2015 
FERRARI 
LAFERRARI 
— "Ferrari has held bragging rights for the greatest 
supercar in various eras,” says Hagerty. “This is the 
pinnacle of the Ferrari in the hypercar era.” Base 
price for this 963-horsepower hybrid: $1.4 million. 


2015 
MCLAREN 
P1 


— "McLaren owns the emotional high ground in the 
supercar world," says Hagerty. "There's just some- 
thing about this brand that people love." Base for 
this wildly cool British hybrid rocket: $1.15 million. 


“A gorgeous car, and the only Japanese car on 
this list," says Hagerty. Only 500 were built, and 
it's no longer in production. "It's an outlier, and it 
belongs in the club." Base in 2012: $375,000. 


2010 ap 
TESLA = 
ROADSTER È 


-> In the future, people will look to this era for the 
first great alternative-energy cars, says Hagerty. 
«рт 100 percent convinced we'll be buying Tesla 
Roadsters at auction.” Base in 2010: $109,000. 


2014 


PORSCHE 911 
CARRERA 


— “I think this all-new Carrera is the ultimate 
911,” says Hagerty. “While it's fun to think about 
the faster versions, this car is so good, it will be 
collectible for a long time.” Base: $84,300. 


2014 
BUGATTI 
VEYRON 
— "It's a technological tour de force, with over 1,000 
horsepower," says Hagerty of this 253 mph French 
machine. "Andthe production run is incredibly low." 
Pictured: the Veyron GS Vitesse, about $2.5 million 


2015 
PORSCHE 
918 SPYDER 


— “To have the first-ever sub-seven-minute verified 
lap time at the Nürburgring puts this right up there 
as the greatest performer right now," says Hagerty. 
Base for this hybrid Porsche: just under $900,000. 


2015 
CORVETTE 
206 


-> “| don't know anyone who has driven it yet,” says 
Hagerty of the 206, which was recently unveiled in 
Detroit. “But this із Corvette's first legitimate move 
into the supercar realm.” Base price: ТВО. 


2014 FORD 
MUSTANG 
COBRA JET 
— “Іп 50 years,” says Hagerty, “the Mustang will 
turn 100. People will look back and ask, “What are 
the great moments?'" They'll mention this 525- 
horsepower “off-the-shelf” drag racer. Price: $98,000. 


2013 MINI 
JOHN COOPER 
WORKS GP 


— “There has always been a place for smaller cars 
with smaller engines that give you a great experi- 
ence,” says Hagerty. This ride is Mini's most exclusive 
high-performance offering. Base: $40,000. 


TECH MA 


- Turns out your 
smartphone isa 
total gearhead. It 
can’t change your 
oil, but with these 
apps, it can make 
you a better driver. 


Уш 


GasBuddy, 


GASBUDDY 


free, all platforms) 
Your phone scopes 
out any neighborhood 
and finds you the 
cheapest fuel. 


PA 


Fusion 


($12.99, S) 
Clocks your engine's 
horsepower, your 
lateral Gs, miles per 
gallon and more. 


5 


TRAPSTER 
(free, all platforms 
Anonlinecommunity 
that maps speed traps. 
Beat the heat at its 
own game! 


REPAIRPAL 
a tforms) 

Like Angie’sListfor 
car-repair shops, it 

helpskeepyoufrom 
gettingripped off. 


Best 


Р 


BEST 
PARKING 
(free, all platforms: 
Where's the cheapest 
parking garage? Your 
phone can tell you. 


29 


TRAVEL 


COACHELLA CLASS 


PALM SPRINGS ROCKS DURING THE WORLD-FAMOUS MUSIC FESTIVAL. 
HERE'S HOW TO PARTY RIGHT IN THE COACHELLA VALLEY 


nage 


yunding 


fyou 


week ofth 
tocatch! 
playing 
pool parties wo; 


he hotels and m 
h cra: 


its and sounds. 


Dine in the 
Desert 


— Ditch your swim- 
suit and dress for 
dinner at Workshop 
Kitchen + Bar (C); 
the sleek interiors 
and farm-to-table 
cuisine would fit 
right inin a demand- 


where the year- 
1 round pool parties 3 
я are а local legend. Mun 
Hang Poolside Go Wild 


An official deal with 
festival promoter " 

After getting Goldenvoice guar- out nM 
a pair of psyche- antees A-list surprise Preak from the 
delic swim trunks at DJs and a rocking beats and booze, 
Mr Turk (and a bikini scene at the Hard and the desert is 
for your lady at sister Rock. Think speaker Where you сап 
store Trina Turk), it's sculptures and guitar Seat it out. With a 
time to hit the pool art everywhere. landscape straight 
parties where local out of a sci-fi 
DJs and Coachella epic, Joshua Tree 
acts make surprise National Park offers 
appearances all day the trippiest activi- 
and night. For easy ties in the valley that 
access to the festivi- don't require mind- 
ties, book a room at altering substances. 
these hotels: The Ace 
(A), the desert out- 
post of the hipster 
hotel chain, remains 
the gold standard. 
Boccie and croquet 
round out the out- 
door activities at the 
Saguaro (B) hotel, 


ing metropolis. 
Binge on a budget 
at Birba (D), where 
the brick-oven 
pizza is blistered 
just so. The mar- 
gherita is textbook 
Neapolitan, and the 
egg-and-pancetta 
pizza is the perfect 
hangover cure. 


It's dotted with 
roads that allow 
easy access to rock 
formations suitable 
for scaling or just 
plain gawking. 
Indian Canyons is 

a natural wonder: 

a babbling brook, 
flowers and grass 
in the middle of the 
desert. The coolest 
you'll get without 
jumping into a pool 
is 8,500 feet above 
the valley floor, on 
the Palm Springs 
Aerial Tramway, one 
of the longest tram- 
ways in the U.S. 


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BEST 
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THE EARBUD IS BETTER 
THAN EVER, SO LISTEN UP 


* Earbuds have spent years 
crammed in coat pockets while 
audio junkies heaped praise on 
headphones. But unless you're 
inthe studio, working with 
Drake, you probably don't need 
the earbud's bigger, clunky 
cousin. These days, earbuds 
deliver audio quality that rivals 
that of most headphones while 
sealing off outside noise so you 
can listen at lower volumes and 
save your hearing. Bring on the 
buds!—William O'Neal 


32 


1. 

NO SWEAT 

> Stuff JLab Audio's 
Epic earbuds in 

your gym bag. The 
lightweight earphones 
deliver the right mix 
of quality audio and 
affordability. The 
Cush Fins keep them 
comfortable, and the 
tangle-free cord (with 
universal mike) can 
handle life among 
your gym clothes. 


2; 

PITCH PERFECT 

> Serious audiophiles 
will want to head 
straight to the 
Sennheiser ІЕ 80 
Sporting a brushed 
metal housing and 
replaceable cable, 

IE 80$ sound and look 
spectacular. Plus, the 
adjustable bass output 
can be tweaked to 
deliver just the right 
amount of thump. 


3: 
TRANSFORME, 
> Need headphones 
that can handle every- 
thing from Rick Ross 
to Bob Dylan? Torque 
Audio's t103z uses in- 
terchangeable “valves” 
to alter the audio out- 
put. Pop the earbuds 
open and swap out 

the bass-heavy valves 
for something more 
mid-range-friendly 
when the mood hits. 


4. 

SILENT ТҮРЕ 

> Bose noise- 
canceling technology 
has been rescuing 
road warriors 

from yammering 
passengers for years. 
The earphone version, 
QuietComfort 20, uses 
an attached control 
module to adjust 

the noise-canceling 
and tune out the guy 
seated next to you 


5. 

ONES TO BEAT 

=> While everyone 
from hip-hop heads 
to pro athletes sports 
Beats headphones, 
the company also 
makes a solid 
еагрһопе. Beats Tours 
sound great and use 
removable wing tips 
to ensure they won't 
fall out whether 
you're working 

out or rocking out 


jlabaudio.com, 
$50 


sennheiser.com, 
$450 


torque-audio.com 


$180 


bose.com 


$300 


beatsbydre.com 
$150 


Photography by JOSEPH SHIN 


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34 


TRANSCENDENCE 


By Stephen Rebello 


ays Wally Pfister, “Т set 
my focus on story and 
performance. There was 
no point in my becom- 
ing a director if this 
movie was just going to be about 
visuals.” That may sound odd com- 
ing from the cinematographer for 
Moneyball, Inception and The Dark 


Knight trilogy, but Pfister is seri- 
ous about his directorial debut. In 
the sci-fi thriller Transcendence, 
Johnny Depp plays a dying scien- 
tist whose mind gets downloaded 
into a computer. “At the core of 

it, there is a love story about the 
effort to keep alive a relationship 
through technology,” says Pfister. 


“T was a director in training for 
the past 10 years, observing how 
Chris Nolan and other directors 


connected with actors. We had so 
much fun on the set that we were 
able to hunker down and make a 
serious film without the distrac- 
tion of bad vibes. Believe me, 
though, this ain’t a funny film.” 


VEEP: THE COMPLETE 
SECOND SEASON 


By Greg Fagan 


There is more to the premise of 
HBO’s political satire Veep than just 
having Seinfeld's Julia Louis-Dreyfus 
as the vice president of the United 
States. The West Wing-meets-The 
Office vibe established in Veep's first 
season still wears well in season two. 
While Louis-Dreyfus remains the 
focus, the writers up the stakes with 
story lines involving a hostage crisis 
that turns politically ugly and builds 
toward a prospective impeachment. 
It may not have the cinematic swag- 
ger of House of Cards, but Veep’s 
hilariously profane dialogue and 
satire more frequently hit their ta 
get. (BD) Best extra: Deleted scenes 
and four commentary tracks. ¥¥¥ 


UNITED STATES per — 


EMMY AWARD WAN 


JULIA LOUIS-DREYFUS 


VEEP 


THE COMPLETE SE 


E 


FLIGHT OF 
THE FALCON 


@: How is your 
chemistry with 
Chris Evans, who 
plays Cap in the 
sequel Captain 
America: The 
Winter Soldier? 

It's easy when 
you work with 
someone who's 
just a regular, 
down-to-earth 
guy who loves 
what he does like 
Chris. We've been 
friends for three 
or four years. We 
joke that we're the 
same person in a 
different body. 


@: How is your 
character Falcon's 
relationship with 
Captain America 
like or unlike Rob- 
in’s with Batman? 

It's the com- 
plete opposite. 
There's no leader- 
sidekick thing 
going on. We're a 
team of colleagues 
and friends who 
conquer a 
common evil 


Q: What's the 
toughest thing 
about doing a 
superhero movie? 
I'm a guy 
whose favorite 
sound is taking the 
top off a carton of 
fresh ice cream. 
Whiskey and ice 
cream are my two 
poisons. It's hard 
to give those up. 


Q: Will we see 
more of the Falcon 
оп-5сгееп? 

Marvel is so 
secretive. But if 
they tell me I'm 
in The Avengers, 
that's like being 
called to the big 
leagues, so you'd 
better believe | 
won't even know 

how to spell whis- 

key or ¡ce cream 
for about six 
months.—S.R. 


MUST-WATCH ТУ 


ҒАНСО 


TURN 


> FX has the Americans. It's the 
Cold War spies of ^ story of George 
The Americans, Washington's 
now here comes relatively unher 
* FX's small-screen spin-off rival AMC with alded espionage 
ofthe Coen brothers' popular what might be network, reluctant 
1996 film is not the stinker called The Colonia! revolutionaries 


whose efforts to 
undermine the 
Brits 


crucial role in the 


most cinephiles assumed it 
would be. In fact, it's actually 
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ACCORDING 
TO SPOTIFY 


* Number of 
pornographic- 
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Angeles County 
in 2012: 


* Number 
requested 
through Sep- 
tember 2013, 
after a law went 


NEW YORK 
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Kong this January. from sex alone. STOCKHOLM 
D listens to Abba 
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* In 2013 NFL 
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first time | 
in history, | 
more than | 


half of all 


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daily cocktail 
A ( intake to be six to ns, 
п drink 5 y] .6% а 
е; of the U.S. rate. In 1932 kickers 
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ony: & 67% of the time. 4 
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listens to Maroon 5 
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ни Е um 


GERMANY ITALY SPAIN RUSSIA 


50% 54% 64% 59% 


CN GE = . 
AUS куе; LONDON 


CANADA BRITAIN AUSTRALIA UNITED STATES listens to 


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38 


ISDEM UR nur 


Hale your cube? Ji could be worse 


hen I decided to work from 
home, I figured my new life 
would be manly. No boss con- 


trolling my time. Self-motivation. Utter 
freedom. I would be a man of intrigue; 
no one would ever be sure where I was. 
There would be midafternoon workouts, 
midafternoon drinking, midafternoon 
sex, midafternoon leaving right after 
sex because I really have to go do some 
work now. I would work from mountain- 
tops, South American beaches, sailboats, 
European capitals and—were it not, in 
my particular situation, technically an 
office—the Playboy Mansion. 

Instead, I am in a small room in my 
house, wearing sweatpants, a T-shirt and 
the underwear I slept in, which is the 
underwear I wore yesterday, which if I 
don't shower soon will be the underwear 
I wear tomorrow. I have examined the 
contents of my refrigerator 10 times. 
I have watched a fair amount of porn. 
Although I have not smoked any mari- 
juana, it’s unclear how my day would be 
remotely different if I had. 

Working from home is plenty masculine 
if you live in a log cabin and are a lum- 
berjack. That's because you’re not work- 
ing from home, you’re working from 
outdoors. But I’m actually working from 
home. From the place with the washing 


machine, dishwasher and vacuum cleaner, 
all of which I sometimes use in between 
work calls. And sometimes during calls. 
Which doesn’t sound professional to the 
person on the other end of the line. For 
the 15 years I worked in an office, my 
home was capable of taking care ofitself for 
eight hours a day. Now I find it constantly 
needs repairs and cleaning. Meals need 
to be prepped, groceries bought, Amazon 
shopped at. It turns out that if you're al- 
lowed to do whatever you want with your 
time, you will do very lame things. 

Offices are full of metal and partitions 
and machines that print or scan or vend. 
My house is full of pillows and beds and 
glass animals that I collected as a child 
and my parents mailed to me a few years 
ago. The point is: There is no way I 
would have put those glass animals on a 
shelf in my office, because other people 
might have seen them. 

But the problem isn’t just that my sur- 
roundings have domesticated me. It’s 
that other people want to domesticate 
me. I thought that being home all day 
meant my friends would invite me to 
baseball day games or to play tennis or to 
drive to Vegas. If they needed my help, 
I figured they'd think of me as Bruce 
Wayne, available for crime-fighting ad- 
ventures. Instead they think of me as 


Alfred. People need to be picked up 
from airports, and because I work from 
home, I am in the privileged position of 
being able to rearrange my schedule to 
do it. I can wait around for the cable guy 
and electrician. I can pick up and drop 
off things before the stores close. I am 
pretty sure that soon a friend is going to 
ask me to go to his kid’s parent-teacher 
conference for him. 

I feel myself becoming a put-upon 
1950s housewife, eager to hear my 
friends’ lame office stories. No, I don't 
miss sitting in meetings where the boss 
talks about himself while I pretend to be 
amused. I don't miss co-workers stop- 
ping by my office to tell me their boy- 
friend problems. I don’t miss people 
asking me to donate to their kids’ school 
fund-raisers. But I do miss having 
women in the office to flirt with. I have 
no office wife. No crush on the woman 
on the fourth floor with the tattoo on the 
back of her neck. I am forced to seek out 
that ego boost by flirting with baristas at 
cafés, which is the most pathetic kind of 
flirting, other than stripper flirting. 

In fact, just being in a coffee shop is 
emasculating. The floors are puddled 
with testosterone dripped by men “work- 
ing” on “projects” they “haven't been 
paid for.” I don't have an office, so I often 
ask people to meet me at a coffee shop, 
which is the equivalent of saying, “Let’s 
meet up at the unemployment office.” 
There is no way to end a meeting at a cof- 
fee shop, since saying “I really have to go 
to work now” and then continuing to sit 
there is utterly unconvincing. 

It turns out you need annoying co- 
workers and unreasonable bosses to 
complain about, because otherwise you 
turn soft. Everyone is nice to me all day, 
because the only people I see are people 
Pm buying stuff from. Complaining may 
not sound manly, but it turns out that 
complaining is just a socially acceptable 
way of saying how much better you are 
than everyone else. Plus, without that guy 
who comes by with those confusing rows 
and boxes and demands $5, I know noth- 
ing about sports. For all I know, the rows 
are crushing the boxes, or the boxes have 
been suspended for bullying their own 
box teammates in the box locker room. 

So I work in my backyard, typing and 
listening to music that’s way too loud. I 
feel soft. No one ever circumnavigated 
anything from home; no опе ever 
railroad-baroned from home; no one 
ever defeated the Spanish Armada from 
home. No one ever homesteaded from 
home. But then I think about the many 
great work-from-home heroes—not just 
William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway 
but Thomas Edison and Steve Jobs and 
every single one of the U.S. presidents. 
Although somehow Obama always looks 
like he’s showered. 


ARIEL SETZER/ARIELTHECRAZYCATLADY.ETSY.COM 


ILLUSTRATION BY CARLO GIAMBARRES! 


WHY WOMEN LOVE TRUE-CRIME SHOWS AND WHY THE 


few Christmases ago, my mom 
bought me a hammer. Not just any 
hammer but the kind you use if 
you're submerged underwater іп 
a car and the pressure becomes so 
great that breaking the window is nearly 
impossible. My mom saw it and thought, 
Now this is what Hilary wants for Christ- 
mas. It makes sense. I've seen enough 
Dateline NBC episodes to know that if 
you meet the wrong guy on the internet, 
he could knock you out, send your car 
into a lake and cash in on that quickie in- 
surance policy. But if you wake up—just 
in the nick of time—and find that ham- 
mer among all the crap in your backseat, 
you could survive. Thank you, Mom! 
My guess is no matter how many guys 
you meet on the internet, the chances 
of your being submerged in water in 
your vehicle are pretty slim. But there's 
clearly a market for this, which I think 
has to do with the phenomenon of fe- 
male fear. We are obsessed with being 
afraid. I know I am. If I'm trying to get 
something done on a Saturday and І flip 
past Dateline, 48 Hours, Snapped, I Killed 
My BFE Cold Case Files or I (Almost) Got 
Away With It, then I can kiss any plans 
good-bye. And if it's a marathon? ГИ be 
on the couch with my two cats, eating 
frozen Thin Mints all weekend. I was 
once late to a wedding because I was on 
the edge of my hotel bed, waiting to find 
out if a woman was in on her own kid- 
napping. She was! What a twist! Dateline 
host Keith Morrison's voice is like the 
bass music in a porno to me. I will listen 
to him talk about any crime. Anytime. 
Dateline is my favorite true-crime show. 
And I see my life and my friends’ lives in 
terms of Dateline episodes. I had a friend 


who went out with a guy she later discov- 
ered was a rare-book thief. She did some 
postdate googling, and there it was. He 
had taken a plea deal to avoid jail time 
and was helping the FBI locate other 
rare-book thieves. Where does he locate 
them? Match.com? 

It's hard not to think you're constantly 
being "Datelined." I was once robbed by 
a guy I met via online dating. We met 
at a public place, per my request, for 
a drink. He spent a few rounds telling 
me he'd seen UFOs and believed aliens 
were living among us. He was a devout 
Buddhist and said Buddhists have been 
hanging out with aliens for centuries. 
Apparently they're pretty cool. He said 
our government was keeping it secret. 
He was crazy but cute, so I nodded and 


kept saying, "Yeah, totally. Makes sense. 
Тһе government, right?" Then he asked 
if I wanted to get something to eat. And 
I did. But it meant getting into his car. 
Now, everyone who has ever seen even 
one episode of Dateline knows you don't 
get into a random guy's car, especially 
not a guy who has been ranting about 
UFOs, but I'd been drinking. We got 
into his car and I checked to make sure 
the passenger door opened from the in- 
side so I could jump out if I needed to. 
I also kept my cell phone in my hand. 
But I didn't need to jump out of the 
moving car or phone a friend. We had a 
burrito and he drove me home. My gut 
was right; he was a harmless alien-loving 


hippie. But when he dropped me off, I 
loaned him a copy of one of my favorite 
movies, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. 
And then never heard from him again. 
Stolen. My DVD was stolen! Maybe he 
was abducted by aliens, or maybe he 
wasn't that into me. Probably the former. 
It wouldn't have made the most dynamic 
Dateline, but Keith Morrison could have 
done something with it. The episode 
could have been titled "He's Just Not 
That Into UFOs." 

Dateline episode titles say it all: 
“Secrets in Pleasant Grove,” “Secrets in 
Seattle,” “Flying High at Cocktail Cove.” 
Datelining can happen anywhere, 
anytime: “In the Dead of Night,” “In the 
Middle of the Night” and—don't think 
you're safe when the sun comes up—"In 
Broad Daylight.” You want to have fun 
at the mall this weekend? Think again: 
“Terror at the Mall.” Don't think it could 
happen to you? “It Could Happen to 
You.” There is “No Safe Place.” “The 
Mystery in the Master Bedroom.” 
“Death and the Dentist.” “Murder at 
Sam Donaldson's Ranch”? There is even 
Datelining at Sam Donaldson's ranch! 

Guys hate my addiction to true-crime 
shows, but to me they're like adult Nancy 
Drew mysteries. You enjoy being as smart 
as Nancy and solving the crime. But more 
important, Nancy is always okay in the 
end. And therein lies the reason women 
love true-crime shows. І believe ІҒІ hear a 
story, it can't happen to me. Would any of 
us ever go anywhere with a van der Sloot- 
esque guy again? Nope. We have seen evil 
interrupted by a few commercial breaks, 
but we have seen it and gained power 
оуег И. So as long as there is a predator to 
catch, ГИ be watching. 


п 39 


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Is there such а thing as an anti- 
fetish? By that I mean something 
most people find attractive and 
sexy, or at the very least innocu- 
ous, that has the opposite effect 
on other folks? For me it's high 
heels. І can't stand them. Any 
other type of footwear—sandals, 
boots, flats—or no footwear at 
all is fine with me. But when І 
see a woman in heels, whether 
it's on the street, on TV or in 
your magazine, 1 immediately 
lose interest. A good percentage 
of the porn out there does noth- 
ing for me because of the prev- 
alence of heels in many of the 
scenes. Strippers? Forget about 
it. The biggest problem is that I 
don't understand what's behind 
my dislike. Have you ever heard 
of something like this?—C.D., 
Murfreesboro, Tennessee 

Of course. It’s called a turn- 
off. The possible reasons for your 
aversion are numerous: Maybe you 
subconsciously see spiky heels as 
а potential castrating weapon— 
а sort of footwear version of the 
vagina dentata. Maybe the added 
height they give a woman is threat- 
ening to your manhood. Maybe 
you suffered some early-childhood 
trauma at the hands of a woman 
in high heels. Maybe you have good 
taste in shoes and can tell that the 
high heels in most porn are cheap 
and tacky. But the important thing 
is you know what you like. Just 
don’t be a jerk and share your dis- 
taste with a woman in heels—try to 
see her for who she is, not what she 
wears. If it weren’t for male shoe 
fetishists and porn producers, it’s 
unlikely any woman would wear 
high heels in bed. 


Im considering a Prince Albert 
penis piercing. What kind of 
sexual advantages and disad- 
vantages will this present for 
me and my girlfriend?—D.M., 
Cincinnati, Ohio 

The biggest bummer about a 
Prince Albert (a barbell-like pierc- 
ing Ihat goes through the urethra at 
the tip of the penis) is the fact that 
you can't have sex or masturbate for 
upward of six weeks as you wait for 
the piercing to heal. Additionally you're at an 
increased risk for exposure to sexually trans- 
mitted infections through micro tears from the 
piercing. The upside to the Prince Albert is 
increased pressure and stimulation for you— 
and for her. But the latter can be hit or miss 
depending on her sensitivity and how your 
anatomies fit together. If it proves uncomfort- 
able, once you've completely healed you can 
always take out the piercing before sex. 


After we recently became engaged, my 
fiancée left town for her job. On her 


Swedish director 


PLAYBOY 


ADVISOR 


My girlfriend hates most of the porn she finds 
on the internet. Can you recommend some high- 
quality porn films that have a plot? We don’t want 
to fall asleep watching a boring French movie with 
characters who do nothing but talk about their 
problems.—G.H., Vienna, Austria 


return she called me at work to tell me 
she had a surprise. She explained that 
she was walking by a tattoo shop and 
decided to get one. She now has THE 
BOSS tattooed around her wrist in large 
bold letters. For those who aren't familiar 
with the phrase's alternative meaning, 
it’s worth looking up. I later found out 
that the session had been scheduled for 
weeks and the story she told me was a 
lie. When I asked her why she got the 
tattoo, she said she felt the need to sym- 
bolize taking control of her life and it 


rika Lust is widely regarded as the best 
producer of female-friendly pornographic films. Her website 
Lustcinema.com is a sort of Netflix of erotica. For a monthly 
fee you can access hundreds of narrative-driven adult mov- 
ies, many of them from Europe, that feature attractive men 
and women but with intelligence and production values rare 
in the adult-film industry. If a quickie is all you're after, 
Lust’s new site, xconfessions.com, features short films based 
on fan-submitted fantasies, one of which explores the erotic 
potential of watching your partner assemble Ikea furniture. 


wasn’t something that needed 
to be discussed. She knows I’m 
not big on tattoos, but I’m more 
concerned about her approach. 
I’m running low on respect 
and trust. Thoughts?—C.B., 
Toronto, Ontario 

We're not sure which alternative 
meaning you're referring to. Qur 
research leads us to Springsteen 
groupies, the acronym for "sorry 
son of a bitch" spelled backward 
and the British hip-hop artist 
Tulisa, who has THE FEMALE BOSS 
lattooed on her forearm. "The Boss" 
on its own isn't negative or insult- 
ing, and we can't argue with your 
fiancée's reasons for seeing this as a 
term of self-empowerment. Her not 
wanting to discuss it is where you 
might have a problem. Don't focus 
on the ink but on keeping the lines 
of communication open. 


In attempting to grow my first 
beard at the age of 26. I have 
been growing it since Septem- 
ber and do not plan to shave 
for a while. How long would it 
take for me to grow a beard like 
one of the Duck Dynasty guys'? 
Can you suggest any strategies 
to increase facial-hair growth 
and production?—C.C., Port 
Jervis, New York 

The bushy beard you're refer- 
ring to predates by centuries what 
many people have recently begun to 
think of as the Duck Dynasty beard. 
Variations on this impressive growth 
include what's known as sunnah in 
Muslim countries, a hipster beard in 
Williamsburg, Brooklyn and a skegg 
in Norway, land of the Vikings. 
Whatever you want to call it, there's 
not a lot you can do to speed the pro- 
cess, beyond keeping your testosterone 
levels up naturally, since male hor- 
mones can facilitate hair growth. To 
keep your levels elevated, eat health- 
ily, work out intensely and avoid 
stress. But growing a beard four to 
six inches beyond your chin can take 
several years, so patience is really the 
best strategy. 


Im 99 years old and about to 
graduate from college. Since as 
early as I can remember, I have 
lost interest in girls after dating and hook- 
ing up with them a few times. It's weird 
because I’m always crazy about the per- 
son, and then, like flicking a light switch, 
I have to end it. Am I just attracted to 
the wrong personalities, or what?—E.K., 
Chapel Hill, North Carolina 

If you were in your 40s we'd be concerned, 
but it only stands to reason that at 22 you 
would be playing the field. (In the U.S. the 
average age at which men marry is 29.) 
Down the road you might want to pay atten- 
tion to that "flicking a light switch" moment: 


41 


PLAYBOY 


42 


Are you addicted to the dopamine high of a 
new sexual partner, а buzz that always wears 
off at some point? On the first few dates, do 
you learn something about the women that 
you honestly don’t like? Time does reveal 
complexities in people that cause us to have 
to accept that they’re not there merely to make 
us happy. But that level of maturity comes 
only with age, so there’s no point in beating 
yourself up about not committing to every 
girl you hook up with. Better that you end it 
early rather than drag it out, as long as you 
do it as honorably and honestly as possible. 


One of my biggest nonsexual fanta- 
sies is to travel to London’s Savile Row 
and purchase a bespoke suit and pair 
of shoes. I know there are great tailors 
all over the world, many of them prob- 
ably closer to where I live, but this is my 
fantasy. However, I’m not sure how to 
answer the question about which side I 
dress on. I’m not even sure I know what 
the question means. I have an idea, but 
since I wear boxer briefs and am an av- 
erage guy, I doubt it has any relevance. 
What do I say when I'm asked, and how 
can I sound cool and sophisticated when 
I respond?—B.S., Louisville, Kentucky 

Indeed there are few nonsexual indul- 
gences as satisfying as having clothes cus- 
tom made for you. There’s a sensuality in 
the perfect fit, an intimate relationship with 
your garments that can border on fetishistic 
and that no factory-made suit can create. 
“Dressing left or right” is tailor-speak for 
which side your penis hangs to. In more trim 
styles of pants, a tailor can add a little extra 
fabric to comfortably accommodate the penis 
with minimal visible bulge in the crotch of 
the pants. No less a source than the online 
magazine Savile Row Style polled British 
tailors and reported that most men’s penises 
tend to dangle to the left. Don’t beat around 
the bush with a British tailor. During the 
pants fitting simply say, “I dress left. Do you 
think it’s worth adding a little extra fab- 
ric?” And don’t take it personally if they say 
no. It’s not an issue with loose-fitting pants. 
As for helping you figure out which side you 
dress, we politely decline. 


What's the cutoff age for family and 
friends who ask for an airport pickup? 
Tm 40, and at this age it seems to be 
an odd request to receive in a nonemer- 
gency situation —N.S., Fishers, Indiana 

Just because you're an adult on the cusp of 
middle age doesn’t mean everyone will stop 
giving you the opportunity to be helpful and 
gracious. We're more interested in the age of 
the people requesting rides. By the time some- 
one graduates from college or is capable of 
holding down a full-time job they've proven 
themselves to be capable of getting from point 
A to point B on their own. Having a job- 
less, childless and able-bodied person ask you 
to rearrange your schedule to pick them up 
at the airport can be annoying, particularly 
when it’s rush hour on a Friday. Don't be 
shy about saying why you can't do it: You're 
working, have dinner plans or are under the 


weather. It’s about your schedule, not your 
principles. That said, an extra hour in the 
car with a long-lost friend or the reward- 
ing feeling of doing a good deed can be well 
worth the time and effort. 


Would it be possible for you to cre- 
ate a cocktail especially for me? I'm a 
fan of blended Canadian whiskey and 
peppermint schnapps.—J.S., Pittsburgh, 
Pennsylvania 

That's just about the easiest question we've 
ever gotten. Creating a cocktail couldn't be 
simpler, since most drinks use the same few for- 
mulas. There's the sour, which is two ounces of 
spirit, one ounce of something sweet and one 
ounce of something sour. So let’s create a pep- 
permint whiskey sour for you with two ounces of 
whiskey, one ounce of schnapps and one ounce 
of lemon juice. Shake that over ice, strain and 
serve. Or just drink it on the rocks. Then there's 
the non-sour cocktail, which is two ounces of 
Spirit, one ounce of fortified wine and half an 
ounce or so of liqueur. So for you that would be 
two ounces of whiskey, one ounce of sweet ver- 
mouth and half an ounce of schnapps. Again, 
shake and strain, or drink it on the rocks. If 
those are too sweet and strong for you, there’s 
nothing wrong with the third, and easiest, for- 
mula: the highball. Ice, one and a half ounces 
of spirit and a sparkling soda of some sort. 
Club soda, whiskey and a dash of schnapps 
would be the driest version you could make. 


My wife and I have not had sex in 
months—no intimacy, no nothing, not 
even a kiss. We are both unhappy, obvi- 
ously. I believe she is cheating on me but 
have no evidence. I want to stay together 
because of our kids, who have become 
the highest priority in our lives. We never 
take time for ourselves. Our relationship 
started to decline when we had sex while 
she was pregnant. She said it made her 
feel fat, and ever since then it’s been 
downhill. I know when our youngest 
child reaches 16 or 18 our marriage will 
be over. Do I stay with her or get it over 
with? My kids are the most important 
thing to me and I need to see them every 
day, but the truth is even they know our 
relationship is over and use it against us. 
Should I find someone to have an affair 
with and tough it out? I know there are 
quite a few couples stuck in the same 
position —S.A., Ann Arbor, Michigan 
You're right. Many couples with kids find 
themselves in near-sexless marriages. And 
many couples get through it—but only with a 
lot of hard work, honesty and conscious effort 
to rekindle the sexual part of their relationship. 
Months without sex is nothing compared with 
the years couples who are worse off than you 
have endured and, it bears repeating, have 
made it through. Even if your wife is having 
an affair, that’s something you can overcome. 
Parallel unhappiness alone isn't reason enough 
to end a marriage. You’re not describing any- 
thing that doesn’t sound fixable. You admit 
that you never take time for yourselves, and 
that really is the first step. This is one of those 
instances when marriage counseling can help. 


You might also want to consider individual 
therapy if you can afford it. Having an affair 
will put off, if not entirely sabotage, the pos- 
sibility of salvaging your marriage. The fact 
that you're both in it for the kids should give 
you hope. Take that teamwork and extend it to 
taking care of yourselves. 


During an evening at a local swingers 
club my girlfriend and I met up with a 
couple we have known for some time. 
They told us they'd had a threesome with 
a transvestite. Answering our questions, 
the man said it was a great experience. 
His wife said that he'd done “everything” 
and that we should try it. We did, and 
indeed we had a great time and have 
done it many times since. І have not done 
“everything” with the transvestite—only 
fondling, kissing and some oral sex. 
My question is: Am I homosexual? 1 
enjoyed the experiences immensely and 
want to repeat them. My girlfriend also 
had a good time and, like me, wants to 
continue.—J.G., Bogotá, Colombia 
Sexual preference is on a continuum, and 
while most people identify as straight or gay, 
there's a world of gray out there. Maybe 
you're bisexual; maybe you have a trans- 
vestite fetish but aren't attracted to men. It 
sounds as though you and your girlfriend 
are both having fun and for the moment 
your relationship is going well. The fact that 
you're comfortably exploring alternative life- 
styles together means that whatever you end 
up doing, you're better prepared than most 
couples are to handle a definition of sexual 
preference that isn't stark black or white. 


| want to add а man cave to my house 
so I can host poker parties, watch sports 
uninterrupted and blast my music with- 
out waking up my wife or neighbors. 
I don't have a basement or a garage I 
can convert, so I'm thinking of having 
our guest bedroom soundproofed. But 
my wife thinks that's crazy. She thinks it 
will look ugly and decrease the value of 
our house. What do you think?—H.C., 
Scottsdale, Arizona 

We think your wife is right. What 
wouldn't be crazy or ugly is a prefab, free- 
standing modern man cave. The sleek 
models from Studio Shed—complete with in- 
sulation, double-paned windows and mini- 
malist yet manly good looks—are just about 
the quickest shortcut to an instant man cave, 
provided you have enough space in your 
backyard. The turnaround is less than two 
months, and for about $150 a square foot — 
depending on options—you'll soon be rock- 
ing out in privacy and style. 


For answers to reasonable questions relating 
lo food and drink, fashion and taste, and sex 
and dating, write the Playboy Advisor, 9346 
Civic Center Drive, Beverly Hills, California 
90210, or e-mail advisor@playboy.com. The 
most interesting and pertinent questions will 
be presented in these pages each month. 


EJFORUMES 


Prison babies Psilocybin New-school DNA 


Ds 


BORN TO LOSE 


Having a baby in prison need not be 
the brutal experience it so often is 


BY RACHEL R. WHITE 


very year approximately 2,000 
incarcerated women give birth 
in the U.S. This means the 
women go into labor basically 
alone, with a prison guard 
watching the entire time and a nurse 
going in and out of the room. No family, 
no phone calls. Sometimes the prisoners 
are shackled: A heavy chain and lock are 
placed around the belly, with cuffs at the 
legs and arms, a practice the American 


Medical Association has deemed unsafe. 
It's a grim reality. But into this scene en- 
ters the prison doula. 

A doula provides nonmedical assis- 
tance to a woman in labor. Prison doulas 
offer massage, a cool washcloth on the 
forehead and general coaching and sup- 
port. All over the country, grassroots or- 
ganizations of prison doulas have popped 
up. Most of them don't have a strong 
presence because of lack of funding, but 


ILLUSTRATIONS BY JUSTIN PAGE 


READER 
RESPONSE 


IPHONES MAKE US WEAK 


In “The New 9/11” (November) 
Chip Rowe points out that Amer- 
ica is vulnerable to cyber attack. 
Many vital systems—electricity, 
clean water, telecommunications— 
depend on networking. Should 
these be compromised, we'd be 

in trouble. But thinking about 
how we'd survive without such 
resources revealed for me some- 
thing much more elementary: 
Many people don't know how to 
live without modern conveniences. 
Think about electricity in con- 
junction with food preparation 
and storage. Now remove electric- 
ity from the picture. How would І 


cook? Would 1 need to start a fire? 
How? How do Іргезегуе my food? 
Maybe if we learned how to survive 
without the technology we depend 
on we could better protect our- 
selves and our country. Otherwise, 
our unpreparedness is a weakness 
just waiting to be exploited. 


Brendan DeBusk 
Madison, Wisconsin 


43 


44 


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READER RESPONSE 


HOT IN HERE 


Letter writers Joseph Kutch, Tom 
Hawksworth and Burr Passen- 
heim (Reader Response, January/ 
February) would have us believe 
the crap they spew is real sci- 
ence. But one would have to 

buy into the science put out by 
fossil-fuel-industry-funded think 
tanks such as the Cato Insti- 

tute and the Heartland Institute 
to believe global warming has 
stopped over the past 15 years 
and that the sun—not man-made 
CO, emissions—is responsible for 
warming over the past 40 years. 


"Their propaganda is funneled 
through talk radio and cable ТУ 
hosts such as Rush Limbaugh and 
Sean Hannity. Global warming has 
not stopped in the past 15 years; 
in fact, the decade 2000 through 
2009 was the hottest on record. If 
the sun were responsible for the 
current warming, all layers of the 
atmosphere would be heating up; 
instead, the lower atmosphere is 
warming while the upper atmo- 
sphere is cooling. Those who deny 
the reality of man-made global 
warming are the polar opposite 
of alarmists—Pollyannas who stay 
willfully oblivious to facts so they 
can continue business as usual, 
sacrificing future generations on 
the altar of the almighty dollar. 


Jerome N. Cragle 
Mifflinville, Pennsylvania 
DEATH: A LIVELY TOPIC 


Reading Donald Hall's medita- 
tion on death ("Buying the Farm," 
January/February), I'm reminded 


BIRTH BEHIND BARS: SOME 2,000 BABIES ARE 
BORN IN JAIL EACH YEAR IN THE U.S. 


many organizations try to pay the dou- 
las, who have a tough job. Prison doulas 
come face to face with corruption: There 
are reported cases of guards verbally or 
otherwise abusing women in labor, and 
some doulas report shack- 
ling even when the prac- 
tice isn't legally required. 
One can only imagine the 
situation when there is no 
doula present. 

“This is one of the big- 
gest public-health issues 
of our time, and no one 
wants to look at it," says 
Rae Baker, coordinator of 
Isis Rising, a prison-doula 
program in Minnesota. Isis Rising offers 
birthing and child-rearing classes for pris- 
oners, as well as a doula practice. When 
the program started, prisoners had a 63 
percent rate of cesarean births, which is 


*This is 
one of the 
biggest public- 
health issues of 
our time." 


д NN d 
١ ХӘ / V 
ARV 
now down to three percent. (The national 
average is about 30 percent.) Baker cal- 
culates that keeping prisoners from hav- 
ing C-sections saves the state $50,000 per 
childbirth. Half the prisoners have natu- 
ral births, without drugs, thanks to the 
classes and doulas’ assistance. “Some of 
the women who have had children before 
told us this was their best 
birth experience,” зау 
Baker. “I think it translates 
to being a more connected 
mother" For Baker, it's 
about helping the chil- 
dren as well as the moth- 
ers. “These babies never 
committed a crime, and 
they deserve a fair shot 
at a fair life,” she says. “I 
want these women to have 
healthy babies.” Isis Rising is working on 
forming a national coalition for prison 
doulas. Baker is hopeful that together 
the organizations can find more funding 
from grants and private donors. = 


STILL 
SAYING 
NO 


Psychedelic drugs can 
help patients, but the feds 
remain stuck in the past 


BY TYLER TRYKOWSKI 


n 2012 the nation's largest under- 
writer of medical research—the 
National Institutes of Health— 
doled out $30 billion on research. 
But none of that money went to 
study the use of psychedelic drugs to 
treat human suffering. Consider the 
lot of smokers who hope to quit. The 


most effective smoking-cessation medi- 
cation is Chantix. As in most addiction 
programs, the drug is combined with 
counseling. Nearly a quarter of Chantix 
users go a year without smoking—if 
they attend at least 12 counseling ses- 
sions. If patients use the medication 
alone, fewer than 10 percent will quit. 


But Matthew Johnson, an associate рго- 
fessor at the Johns Hopkins University 
School of Medicine, suggests psilocybin 
can be much more successful than any 
known nicotine-addiction treatment. № 
psilocybin is administered in conjunc- 
tion with cognitive-behavioral therapy, 
80 percent of smokers refrain from using 
tobacco for six months. According to 
Johnson's study, 83.3 percent of pa- 
tients said psilocybin changed their ori- 
entation “toward the future so that long- 
term benefits outweighed immediate 
desires.” A 2012 analysis of six clinical 
trials found that LSD sessions doubled 
the odds that alcoholics would be 
alcohol-free at their first follow-up and 
for up to six months afterward. A pilot 
study also showed that MDMA, when in- 
tegrated with psychotherapy, cured 83 
percent of patients with post-traumatic 
stress disorder, versus 25 
percent of those who had 
been given just therapy. 
Such studies are part 
of a psychedelic-research 
renaissance that has been 
going on for the past 
quarter-century. But 
support from the federal 
government and ma- 
jor nonprofits remains 
absent—even when data 
suggest psychedelics can 
be useful. “They have 
the drug war and misinformation in 
the back of their minds,” says Virginia 
Wright, director of development at the 
Santa Cruz, California-based Multidis- 
ciplinary Association for Psychedelic 
Studies. “It's difficult to say yes when 


“All prescrip- 
tion drugs are 
dangerous. 
But what we're 
doing is not so 
harmful." 


PSILOCYBIN: SCIENCE BE DAMNED. 


funding psychedelics diminishes their 
standing in the community." The associ- 
ation's studies are approved by the FDA, 
but preconceptions are inescapable. 
“Тһе public doesn't know 
how drug development 
works," Wright says. "It's 
dangerous. All prescrip- 
tion drugs are. But if you 
compare prescription- 
drug development with 
psychedelics, what we're 
doing is not so harm- 
ful.” MAPS is currently 
conducting five trials for 
MDMA-PTSD treatment, 
after which it will pur- 
sue a $16 million Phase 3 
trial, the first of its kind. Researchers 
need that data for further trials. When 
asked why their work still faces such 
resistance, Wright says, “I think it's cul- 
tural, because if you look at the scienc 
it doesn't make logical sense.” 


PREDATORY 


ike Seay of Lindenhurst, Illinois lost 
his daughter in a car acci- 
dent in February 2015 
shocked to come ho 
one day this January to find junk 
om OfficeMax addresse 
ay, Daughter Killed in 
Crash, or Current Bt 
Everyone knows the National 
Security Agency watches us while 
play Angry Birds. But few 
of us know how closely 


by mark 
a rbing array of o 
al information. Want 


to buy a list of rape victims or 

HIV patients? How about Hispanic payday-loan 
applicants? No problem. Data brokers have 
built an industry that in 2012 generated 


$156 

ҮШІ 
Jj and their actions are 

rprisingly unt 
A recent Senate Cc 
merce Committee report 
points out that brokers prevent 
consumers from knowing 
when their private infor- 
g collected 
and to whom it is being 
sold. “It doesn't matter 
that the data 5 about 
'onsumer," Pam Dixon, 
Id Privacy 
mmerce 
er has all the 
rights, and the consumer has 

OfficeMax issued Seay anapology, blaming а “mail 
ing list rented through a third-party prov ' | 


FORUM 
y 


READER RESPONSE 


of a conversation I had with a 
Sudanese army general while on 
a diplomatic tour in Khartoum 
several years back. He vouched 
that army recruits from far-flung 
regions in Sudan proved difficult 
to train thanks to their whole- 
sale disinterest in taking cover 
under fire. Each soldier instead 
entrusted his fate to his amulets: 
thumb-size leather pouches 
encapsulating a handwritten 


verse from the Koran, shined 
with cheap black shoe polish and 
strung on a shoelace around the 
biceps. Later, on a trip to rebel 
territory in Darfur, I bartered a 
pair of Ray-Bans for a set of amu- 
lets from a one-armed Darfuri 
rebel, who I later learned went 
missing on the border with Chad. 
Returning stateside, I wore it out 
nights in Miami but can’t recall if 
it brought me any special luck. I 
imagine the amulets reposing in 
an attic after I die. 

Christian Deitch 

Los Angeles, California 


Happy to know Donald Hall 
refuses to go gently into that 
good night, at least in terms 
of his cranky complacency 
regarding his own death. As 
Dylan Thomas wrote, “Old age 
should burn and rave at close 
of day/Rage, rage against the 
dying of the light.” Thank you 
for publishing what might be 
some of the last ruminations of 
another great poet. 

Е Martin 

San Antonio, Texas 


45 


AMERICA 


‘texts and e-mails bring 
s closer? It doesn't seem 


hat way 


.. It's so much easier to be nasty 


FORUM 


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READER RESPONSE 


True story: My mother, even 
though she was still an active 
senior, decided to save the fam- 
ily the agony of making her "final 
arrangements." She called a 
friend and excitedly spoke about 
how she had made detailed plans 
for her funeral. She chattered 
about it as if she were planning 

a big event. Her friend felt com- 
pelled to say, "Congratulations. 
Have you set a date?" 

As a 10-уеаг cancer survivor and 
person with Parkinson's, I've had 
no choice but to accept my own 
mortality. My decision is to live 
each day to the fullest. When I go, 
I want my legacy to be the number 
of people I've helped in my life. 

Richard London 
Matthews, North Carolina 


When nearing the end and looking 
back at the life we've led, how 
we feel about the person we've 
become, what we accomplished and 
how we treated others can make 
the difference between peaceful 
acceptance and fear of death. 
Nancy D. Butler 
Waterford, Connecticut 


SAY IT WITH A :) 


Personally, I think human 
communication on the whole is 
going downhill thanks to texting, 
e-mail, instant messaging and 
social media ("The Smiley Face 
That Ate America," November). 


46 


and negative when you don't 
have to say it to a person's face. 
Human nature is to complain 
rather than compliment. 
However, texting has helped us 
in at least one way: We can now 


COPS 
WHO LIKE 
GETTING 
THE 
FINGER 


New DNA science changes 
the game for law enforcement 


BY CHIP ROWE 


wenty-five 
years ago fo- 
rensic investi- 
gators needed 
a blood or se- 
men stain the size of a 
dime to extract the DNA 
of a suspect. In the 1990s 
they needed a speck. To- 
day they need what can't 
be seen—as few as 70 of 
the 400,000 skin cells 
we shed each day. “Touch” or “trace” 
DNA has typically been used to inves- 


ТШ 


Ascientist 


needs about a 


nanogram of 
DNA to work 
up a profile. 


| 


tigate violent crimes. In 2008 a lab in 
Virginia extracted the DNA of a still- 
unidentified male from the long johns 
JonBenet Ramsey wore on the night of 
her death. Last year police in Wasatch 
County, Utah arrested a suspect for 
a 1995 murder after obtaining DNA 
from a cigarette he had discarded 
while officers were tailing him. The 
sample matched trace DNA recovered 
from granite rocks the killer used to 
bludgeon his 17-year-old victim. 
Buoyed by that type of success, іп- 
vestigators are now preserving DNA 
from crime scenes where perps haven't 
bled or ejaculated. In St. Petersburg, 
Florida police say trace DNA has led 
to arrests in 38 percent of burglaries 
over the past three years. In Houston 
about 75 percent of the 
more than 3,000 matches 
since 2008 have involved 
property crimes. In New 
York City about a third 
of DNA cases are related 
to property crimes. 
Because discarded skin 
cells are dead, scientists 
believe that sweat, which 
picks up free-floating 
strands as it moves 
through pores, is the 
key to trace-DNA readings. A scientist 
needs about a nanogram of DNA to 


% 


work up a profile. Holding a glass for 
60 seconds yields about half that, while 
touching fabric or wood for a minute 
is more than sufficient, 
as is rubbing cotton 
against a palm or fin- 
ger for 15 seconds. The 
more pressure and fric- 
tion applied, the more 
likely DNA will be left. 
The rougher the surface, 
the more cells will stay. 
Besides rocks, investi- 
gators have obtained 
trace samples from pistol 
grips, pocket linings, as- 
phalt, shoestrings and a 
victim's tongue. 

Skin cells are easily transferred, so 
one can't assume that finding a per- 
son's DNA on an object means he or she 
touched it. One investigator swabbed 


Investigators 
obtained DNA 
from asphalt, 


shoestrings 
and a victim's 
tongue. 


his own hand after shaking hands at 
a party, and a lab was able to extract 
the DNA of two of the people he'd met. 
There is a risk that ju- 
ries will fail to heed that 
disclaimer and innocent 
people will be convicted 
based on cells that mi- 
grated to a stolen item or 
a murder weapon. The 
fact that a person can be 
tagged so easily perhaps 
makes the report that 
Madonna takes a cleanup 
crew on tour with her 
sound less bizarre. "W 
can only enter [her dr 
ing room] after her ster- 
ilization team has left," a promoter in 
Portugal told the Daily Mir: "There 
will not be any of Madonna's DNA, any 
hair or anything." a 


TURNOFFS 


How to achieve total online privacy 


ritish software developer Robb Lewis earlier 
this year launched justdelete.me after seeing 
ets about the difficulty of closing a Skype 


ount. He ranks dozens of sites on how hard they are to 
vithout a trace. Among your friends for life: Blo 
Netflix, Pinterest and Starbucks. 
е Craigslist, iTunes, 
Pandora and Tid ketmast er. To return to your pre-1994 
tence, here's how to unplug from four popular servic 


Facebook м 


Click оп the account menu at top right. Select “Account 
Settings.” Clic urity.” Click “Deactivate your account.” 
Facebook will ur timeline (i.e., friends, phot 
want to come back.” 
help/delete 
e sent will always be visible. 


Google 

Under "Account Management,” click on "D 
account and data.” You will be shown a list of prod: 
ucts (e.g., Gmail, ger, YouTube). Click the box 
next to each to acknowledge you аге selecting the 


nuclear option. Enter your pa ind check the 
button for “Yes, | want to delete my account” and 
the one confirming you don't owe Google money. 
Click the “Delete Google accounts ' button 50006 


of time” before destruction. 


Twitter 


Blogger м 
You can't delete your account without also deleting your 
count, but you can create the sam by 
ing your blogs and editing your profile to delete personal data 
though residual copies may remain on backup systems). For 
required fields, you should enter false information, essen- 
tially a version of witness protection. To permanently 
disengage, uncheck the “Share my profile” button under 
“Edit Profile.” That will shut you out, though your bits will 

remain in digital orbit, presumably foreve 


FORUM 
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READER RESPONSE 


be in closer communication with 
our children in a way that wasn't 
an option 40 years ago. When 

I was in college, I spoke to my 
parents only once a week because 
of the cost of a phone call. I think 
it made me more independent 
and productive. 


Joann Perahia 
Port Washington, New York 


Only seven percent of the infor- 
mation in a message is carried 
in the words; 38 percent is in 
the inflection, prosody, emo- 
tion and other vocal aspects. The 
remaining 55 percent is in body 
language. When we convey mes- 
sages via text, we're reduced to 
only that seven percent. When 
ng, you might 
to communicate but 
instead communicate the oppo- 
site of what you intended. We 
use emoticons not necessarily to 
guarantee that the message gets 
interpreted correctly but rather 
to disqualify the worst interpre- 
tations. It's text, and not being 
there in the flesh causes things to 
get lost in translation. Emoticons 
were invented to fill that void. A 
smiley face may not make a joke 
funny, but at least the recipient 
knows the message is meant to be 
light-hearted. 

Benjamin Feibleman ^ 

New York, New York 


BUILT TO SPILL? 

Dean Kuipers's article on the 
growing conservative sentiment 
against tar-sands oil (“Don't Drill 


on Me," December) is excellent. Pp 


Thanks so much to PLAYBOY for 
covering such an important 
topic. Recent oil spills— 


from the BP disaster in 
the Gulf of Mexico to 
the ExxonMobil spill in 
Arkansas—have caused dire 
health problems for humans,” 
and the ecosystem. It's 
important for people out- 
side the green community 
to know about these facts. 
Chris Wynnyk Wilson 
Austin, Texas 


E-mail letters@playboy.com. 
Or write 9346 Civic Center Drive, 
Beverly Hills, California 90210. 


ТАКНВА КК 


Мо Одог, Мо Авһ 
х? No Tobacco Smoke, Only Vapor 
' On-the-Go Rechargeable Pack 


Visit us at blucigs.com/store-locator 


NOT FOR SALE TO MINORS. blu eCigs® electronic cigarettes are not a smoking cessation product and have 
not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration, nor are they intended to treat, prevent or cure any 
diseose or condition, ©2014 LOEC, Inc. blu™ and blu eCigs® are trademarks of Lorillard Technologies, Inc. 
(Photography by Francesco Carrozzini) 


blu 


CLASSIC 
TOBACCO 


manor never: DIAN LEE 


A candid conversation with the original genius behind Marvel Comics 
and most of the superheroes you’ve ever loved or watched on the big screen 


At 91 Stan Lee is what you might call a 
superhero emeritus. His epic adventures 
are mostly behind him and his powers are 
on the wane. (He can't hear or see so well, 
and a pacemaker regulates his heart.) But 
the comic-book writer who dreamed up 
Spider-Man, the X-Men, the Hulk, Iron 
Man and the Fantastic Four still works five 
days a week, travels wherever convention 
geeks gather and tops each autograph with 
his trademark “Excelsior!” 

The son of poor Jewish immigrants from Ro- 
mania, Stanley Martin Lieber (he later short- 
ened it legally) never became the novelist he 
aspired to be while growing up on New York's 
Upper West Side. But fantasizing about ra- 
dioactive arachnids, magnetic force fields and 
vixens such as Black Widow gave him a great 
living and a legacy that will outlive us all. 

In 1939 Lee’s uncle helped get him an as- 
sistant’s job at Timely Comics, a company the 
boss, Martin Goodman (a relative of Lee’s), 
later renamed Marvel. Showing early prom- 
ise providing text for Captain America, Lee 
was installed as a Marvel editor at the age 
of 18, an “interim” gig he ended up keep- 
ing until 1972. For much of that time Lee 
plodded away in the Marvel writers’ bullpen 
to the point of burnout. Only after his wife, 
Joan, a British former model, pushed him 


“Early in my career, before The Fantastic Four, 
I struggled. I felt I was never going to get any- 
where. Even afterward, I was embarrassed to 
say I wrote comic books. Part of me always felt 
I hadn't quite made it yet.” 


to create characters “the way you've always 
wanted to” did Lee's career take off. 
Between 1961 and 1965, in one of pop 
culture's most remarkable creative bursts, 
Lee, working with freelance artists includ- 
ing Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko, created the 
key characters in what became known as the 
Marvel Revolution. (Kirby's estate would 
later sue for pieces of that action.) Superhe- 
roes were no longer two-dimensional goody- 
goodies but quirky, angst-ridden and flawed. 
The Fantastic Four bickered. The Hulk and 
the X-Men struggled with their alter egos. 
Even Spider-Man, a character who came to 
Lee—or so the story goes—as he observed a 
Sly walking up a wall, was а wreck inside. 
Today Lee's creations are enjoying their wid- 
est audiences ever. After declaring bankruptcy 
in 1996, Marvel powered back with blockbust- 
er movies, digital entertainment and, yes, more 
comic books. Disney acquired the company for 
$4.2 billion in 2009, though, surprisingly, 
Lee didn't see a dime of that. By then he had 
formed his own company, POW! Entertain- 
ment. But he will always be Mr. Marvel. 
Contributing Editor David Hochman, who 
last interviewed Sean Hannity, spent a cou- 
ple of days with Lee at his Beverly Hills of- 
fices. “Stan has the sandpaper growl of a by- 
gone era, but he’s remarkably sharp, plugged 


“The added appeal of these characters is that 
they were extraordinary but ordinary at the 
same time. That made them relatable. Mr. 
Fantastic could be a real bore. Spider-Man was 
like a lot of teenage boys—confused, troubled.” 


in and quick with a comeback. We should all 
be as cool as Stan Lee at his age.” 


LEE: So PLAYBOY wants to know all about 
my sex life? 

PLAYBOY: If that's where you would like 
to begin. 

LEE: It’s interesting. Years and years ago 
the magazine was considering doing one 
of these interviews with me, but I guess 
it wasn’t the time. One of your editors 
said, “We know Stan Lee. We love Stan 
Lee. Stan Lee is a friend of Hef’s. But 
Spider-Man is more famous than Stan 
is." Does this mean I'm finally bigger 
than Spider-Man? 

PLAYBOY: The case can certainly be made. 
Тһе characters you created decades ago 
dominate pop culture. /ron Man 3 was 
the highest-grossing film in 2013. Mar- 
vel's The Avengers was 2012's biggest. X- 
Men: Days of Future Past could easily rule 
2014. Not to mention TV, publishing, 
merchandising and gaming. How do 
you account for the continued success of 
these vintage superheroes? 

LEE: It's because I wrote them so magnifi- 
cently, don't you think? Actually, I have 
a theory. May we become philosophical? 
PLAYBOY: Please. 


PHOTOGRAPHY BY LORENZO AGIUS 


"Growing up during the Depression, I saw my 
parents struggling to pay the rent. I was happy 
enough to get a пісе paycheck and be treated 
well. I never dreamed I should have $250 mil- 
lion or whatever that crazy number is." 


49 


PLAYBOY 


50 


LEE: It’s an extension of the fairy tales we 
read as kids. Or the monster stories or 
stories about witches and sorcerers. You 
get a little older and you can't bother 
with fairy tales and monster stories 
anymore, but I don't think you ever 
outgrow your love for things that are 
fantastic, that are bigger than you are— 
the giants or the creatures from other 
planets or people with superpowers 
who can do things you can't. 

The added appeal of so many of these 
characters is that they were extraor- 
dinary but ordinary at the same time. 
That made them relatable. The Fantas- 
tic Four had unusual powers, but they 
were also a kind of family with foibles. 
Mr. Fantastic, for instance, could be a 
real bore. And Spider-Man was like a 
lot of teenage boys—confused, troubled. 
He had problems trying to make his 
way in the world and coping with being 
a superhero. The Thing and the Hulk 
were disoriented monsters—monstrous 
freaks, as it were—which gave them a 
certain amount of pathos. The X-Men 
were magnificent misfits. Then you had 
Daredevil, who was blind but could do 
things better than most sighted people. 
I did not create Captain America, but I 
attempted to make him more than just 
a strongman who fought the bad guys. 
I tried to give him a personality and his 
own fears and hang-ups and frustra- 
tions. Or how about Doctor Strange? 1 
love that guy, a surgeon whose hands 
get shattered in an accident. He has to 
struggle to find his way and eventually 
learns magic in the ancient mystical tra- 
dition. He becomes the most powerful 
magician the cosmos has ever known. 
They haven't made a Doctor Strange 
movie yet, but they will. 

So you see, comic books to me are 

fairy tales for grown-ups. Iron Man, the 
Avengers, Spider-Man and all the rest 
are popular for the same reason “Jack 
and the Beanstalk” is still popular after a 
million years. They're good stories about 
characters that are like us but also larger 
than us. That's the end of my philosophy 
lesson. It should be carved in stone. 
PLAYBOY: From a creative standpoint, 
what were you experiencing during that 
intense period from 1961 to 1965 when 
you wrote The Fantastic Foux, The Amaz- 
ing Spider-Man, The Avengers—which 
included the characters Thor, the Hulk, 
Iron Man and Loki—Daredevil and The 
X-Men, among others? 
LEE: To be honest, 1 could have done it 
earlier; I could have done it later. It was 
only because my boss asked me to do it. 
For instance, after I had done Fantastic 
Four, Martin, my publisher, said, “Give 
me another bunch of heroes.” He also 
wasn't thrilled that our competition, 
DC Comics, had the Justice League. So 
I did what I knew how to do. I created 
another group of characters. 

First I had to come up with an origin. 
How does this group get their superpow- 


ers? Well, the Fantastic Four had been 
clobbered by cosmic rays. The Hulk was 
hit with gamma rays. Incidentally, I had 
no idea what cosmic rays or gamma rays 
were, but they sounded good. And they 
were the only rays I knew. I had run out 
of rays, so what the hell was I going to 
do for this new group? I took the cow- 
ardly way out and said they were born 
that way; they’re mutants. In fact I called 
them the Mutants. Martin hated the 
name, so we changed it to the X-Men. 
At a certain point we had every variety 
of superhero with every possible origin 
tale and power. 

PLAYBOY: Yet somehow they all lived in 
New York City. 

LEE: Oh, that was convenient for me since 
I lived there myself. To me, these charac- 
ters existed only if 1 could picture them 
around town. Tony Stark, Iron Man, for 
example, was very wealthy and lived in a 
mansion on Central Park. The Fantastic 
Four lived in the Baxter Building, which 
was farther downtown. They could then 
guest star in one another’s books. One 
day I wrote a story in which Spider-Man, 
who lived in Forest Hills, Queens, de- 


I have no standing at 
Marvel where I decide 
what projects get made, and 
certainly none at Disney, 
which now owns Marvel. 
Mostly I’m just a pretty face. 


cides he’s not making enough money be- 
ing a superhero and thinks maybe he'll 
join the Fantastic Four. There might be 
a buck in it for him. So he goes to the 
Fantastic Four headquarters and swings 
into the window. He says, “I want to join 
you guys.” They say, “We're not looking 
for anybody.” So he doesn’t join them. 

I had fun with all these characters be- 
cause I literally knew where they lived, 
as well as what their personalities were. 
All that was left for me to do was make 
up the villains, which was even more fun 
than making up the heroes. Until I ran 
out of animal names, I was okay. There 
was the Lizard, the Scorpion, Doctor Oc- 
topus, the Vulture, the Rhino. 

PLAYBOY: It sounds like fun, but the pres- 
sure must have been intense. By 1968 
Marvel was putting out 50 million comic 
books a year. 

LEE: Pressure is not the word. I was al- 
ways on the precipice. If anything went 
wrong, Га fall. You see, І was not only 
the head writer but I was also the editor. 
It was my responsibility to make sure the 
books were sent to the printer on time. 
If we ever missed a printing date, we 


had to pay for that printing time anyway, 
which would be thousands of dollars. 

Some months we were doing 40, 

50 books. And not only superheroes. 
You had all those other types too— 
My Romance, Her Romance, Their 
Romance. My publisher loved Westerns 
with the word kid in them, so I had Two- 
Gun Kid, Texas Kid, Rawhide Kid, every 
other kind of kid. In those days I was 
just grinding out stuff. 
PLAYBOY: What's your role at Marvel today? 
LEE: Mostly I’m just a pretty face they 
keep for the public. My entire career, I 
treated Marvel like one big ad campaign, 
with slogans like “Make mine Marvel,” 
“Welcome to the Marvel age of comics” 
and so forth. After a while, I became 
Marvel’s ambassador to the world. I’ve 
lectured in every city in the country 
probably two or three times. I've been 
to China, Europe, Japan, Australia and 
every place in between. Today, my main 
focus is my own company, POW! Enter- 
tainment, which stands for Purveyors 
of Wonder, and we have projects we're 
doing independent of Marvel. We have 
a television movie, another movie we're 
doing with partners in China, as well as 
one in India. We're doing a line of chil- 
dren's books and Stan Lee's Superhumans 
series on the web. 

I have no standing at Marvel where I 
decide what projects get made or who 
gets hired, and certainly none at Disney, 
which now owns Marvel. I'm a guy they 
hire as a writer or producer and also to 
go to conventions and do things like that. 
PLAYBOY: Just to be clear, you don't own 
any rights to the characters you created. 
LEE: I never did. I was always a Marvel 
employee, a writer for hire and, later, 
part of management. My role at Mar- 
vel is strictly honorary. Marvel always 
owned the rights to these characters. If 
I owned them, I probably wouldn't be 
talking to you now. 

PLAYBOY: Disney paid more than $4 bil- 
lion for Marvel a few years ago. Did you 
at least get a Tony Stark-like helicopter 
in the deal? 

LEE: I'll tell you something that just hap- 
pened. My daughter was looking at the 
internet the other day and read that 
Stan Lee has an estimated $250 million. 
I mean, that's ridiculous! I don't have 
$200 million. I don't have $150 million. 
I don't have $100 million or anywhere 
near that. 

PLAYBOY: Don't you think you should? 
LEE: No. 

PLAYBOY: George Lucas created fewer 
characters but could buy a country now 
if he wanted. 

LEE: Yeah, but George Lucas did it all by 
himself. He came up with the ideas. He 
produced the movies. He wrote and di- 
rected them and held the rights to the 
merchandising. It was all his. In my case 
I worked for the publisher. If the books 
didn't sell, the publisher went broke— 
and a lot of publishers did go broke. 


Marvel took a gamble doing what it 
did. The artist and writer took a gamble 
hitching up with the publisher by hop- 
ing the books would sell. 

You have to understand that grow- 
ing up during the Depression, I saw 
my parents struggling to pay the rent. 
My father was always unemployed, and 
when he did have a job, he was a dress 
cutter. Not very much money there. 
І was happy enough to get a пісе pay- 
check and be treated well. 1 always got 
the highest rate; whatever Martin paid 
another writer, 1 got at least that much. 
It was a very good job. I was able to buy a 
house on Long Island. І never dreamed 
I should have $100 million or $250 mil- 
lion or whatever that crazy number is. 
All I know is I created a lot of characters 
and enjoyed the work I did. 

PLAYBOY: One of the greatest Marvel char- 
acters has been Stan Lee. You appeared 
in the comic strips, in a column called 
Stan’s Soapbox and in Hitchcock-like cam- 
eos in the Marvel movies. 

LEE: I even played one character mod- 
eled after Hef, in ron Man. They were all 
fun to do. The one I got the biggest kick 
out of was probably in the Fantastic Four 
movie when I wasn't invited to the wed- 
ding of Sue and Reed, and they wouldn't 
let me in. I said, “But I’m Stan Lee,” and 
the security guy pushes me aside. 
PLAYBOY: Where does the comic-book 
Stan Lee end and the real you begin? 
LEE: Honestly, what you see is the real me, 
particularly if what you see is a wonder- 
ful, adorable, interesting, exciting kind of 
guy. Then, boy, they've got me pegged. 
Please say he said that with a laugh. 
PLAYBOY: Kidding aside, one issue dogs 
you and affects your legacy—the per- 
ception that you get too much credit for 
characters you created with artists such 
as Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko. You have 
gone out of your way to acknowledge 
their contributions and authorship, but 
the controversy lingers. Can anything be 
done to settle the situation and do right 
by these guys once and for all? 

LEE: I don't know what you mean by do- 
ing right by them. I always tried to show 
them in the most favorable light, even in 
the credits. There was never a time when 
it just said “by Stan Lee.” It was always 
“by Stan Lee and Steve Ditko” or “by 
Stan Lee and Jack Kirby.” I made sure 
their names were always as big as mine. 

As far as what they were paid, I had 
nothing to do with that. They were hired 
as freelance artists, and they worked as 
freelance artists. At some point they 
apparently felt they should be getting 
more money. Fine, it was up to them to 
talk to the publisher. It had nothing to 
do with me. I would have liked to have 
gotten more money too. I never made 
an issue of it. I got paid per page for 
what I wrote, the same rate as the other 
writers—maybe a dollar a page more. 

If you ask me, should they have 
been paid more? Then you have to say, 


shouldn’t John Romita have been paid 
more? Shouldn't Gil Kane have been 
paid more? Shouldn’t John Buscema 
have? They were all great Marvel art- 
ists. In other words, if somebody draws 
a strip and it becomes successful, do you 
go back? I don’t know. That’s the rea- 
son I've never been a businessman and 
never want to be a businessman. I don't 
know how to deal with those things. 
PLAYBOY: You were part of Marvel man- 
agement for many years. 

LEE: That's true. And twice, not once, I 
offered a job to Jack Kirby. I said to him, 
“Jack, why don't you work for Marvel 
with me?” I was the art director at the 
time. I said, “You be the art director. ГИ 
just be the editor and head writer, and 
you'll have that security.” He wouldn't 
do it. He didn't want to. I would have 
loved him to work side by side with me. 
I used to marvel at the way Jack drew. 
He would draw something as if it had 
appeared in his mind and he was just 
tracing what he had thought of already. I 
never saw a man draw as quickly as Jack 
did. "Come work with me, Jack," I said. 
But he said no. He didn't want a staff 


I didn't know what to think 
when Robert Downey Jr. was 
announced as Iron Man. І 
couldn't picture him. To me 
Downey wasn’t a superhero; 
he was Chaplin. 


job. With him, as with Ditko, I don’t see 
where they were unfairly treated. 
PLAYBOY: Kirby died in 1994. Do you re- 
member the last time you saw him? 

LEE: ГИ tell you, the last thing Jack 
Kirby said to me was very strange. I 
met him at a comic-book convention 
right before the end. He wasn’t that 
well. He walked over and said, “Stan, 
you have nothing to reproach yourself 
about.” He knew people were saying 
things about me, and he wanted to let 
me know I hadn't done anything wrong 
in his eyes. I think he realized it. Then 
he walked away. I went to his funeral, 
by the way. 

PLAYBOY: What was that like? 

LEE: Well, it was terrible. I mean, he 
shouldn’t have died so young. [Editor’s 
note: Kirby died at 76.] I stayed in the 
back row because I didn’t want anybody 
to see me. It was Jack’s funeral. His wife, 
Roz, saw me. She knew I was there. 
Then I left, and that was it. Jack was a 
great guy and so is Steve. I’m sorry any- 
body feels there’s any acrimony. I loved 
them both. 

PLAYBOY: Steve Ditko is in his 80s now 


but hasn’t made a public appearance in 
decades. Have you talked to him? 

LEE: I met him maybe 10 years ago. I was 
at the Marvel office. We talked fora while, 
very friendly. I said it would be great if 
we could do something together again. I 
would have liked that. I never knew why 
he quit in the first place. It might have 
had to do with the fact that I was trying 
to tell him how to do the stories. With 
the Green Goblin we didn’t know who 
the character really was. I wanted him 
to turn out to be Harry Osborn’s father. 
Ditko said, “No, I don’t want it to be. It 
should be somebody we don't know.” So 
I said, “Steve, the readers have been fol- 
lowing the series for the longest time, 
waiting to find out who he is. If it’s some- 
body they've never seen they'll be frus- 
trated." Anyway, I couldn't convince him 
and he certainly couldn't convince me, 
so that might have been what drove him 
away. But he never told me and we don't 
see each other anymore. 

PLAYBOY: On another note, a company 
known as Stan Lee Media recently sued 
Disney for $5 billion, claiming it was 
owed the rights to your characters. This 
must be irritating. 

LEE: It is incredibly irritating, because 
people think it's me. I did have a com- 
pany called Stan Lee Media, but it went 
belly-up. The fellow running it is now 
in jail. It was an unfortunate situation. 
For some reason people have spent years 
and God knows how much money claim- 
ing I gave Marvel the rights to the char- 
acters. Again, I never had the rights to 
the characters. The whole thing is based 
on sand. Unfortunately, I can't get them 
to stop using my name. 

PLAYBOY: Let's shift gears. Ben Affleck 
got mixed reviews a decade ago when 
he played Daredevil. What do you think 
about him being the new Batman? 

LEE: I think he's terrific. Daredevil wasn't 
as successful as some of our other mov- 
ies, but I think it wasn't written or per- 
haps directed as I had conceived it. The 
movie is darker, and they made so much 
of him and the church. That wasn't the 
Daredevil I knew. But Ben ought to do a 
great job as Batman. People say he's too 
old. Listen, from my perspective, he's 
still a very young man. 

PLAYBOY: Where do you stand on Tobey 
Maguire's Spider-Man versus Andrew 
Garfield's? 

LEE: When I first saw Tobey Maguire in 
the role, I thought, Here's the absolute 
perfect Peter Parker. When I saw Andy 
Garfield in the role, I thought, Andy's 
the most perfect. They're both great and 
they're both different. It's not like they 
cast the first guy off the street for these 
parts. People much smarter than I am 
about these things are casting these mov- 
ies. They do a fantastic job. 

PLAYBOY: What did you think when 
Garfield raised the idea in an interview 
last year that Spider-Man might be gay? 
LEE: Listen, I can't control what actors say 


51 


PLAYBOY 


52 


or how they behave. 1 can only comment 
on how they act, and like І said, Andy's 
terrific іп the role. І don't have a line in 
the sand about Spider-Man. І guess if he 
were fat and flabby and didn't look any- 
thing like a superhero, you might hear 
from me, but there's too much money 
invested in these films for them to goof 
around with casting or the basic concep- 
tion of who these characters are. 
PLAYBOY: Which actress has impressed 
you most in the Marvel movies? 

LEE: Jessica Alba was the girl in Fantastic 
Four, right? She was terrific. I really liked 
her. Who was the girl in X-Men with the 
short hair, very pretty? 

PLAYBOY: Halle Berry. 

LEE: Lovely girl. I spoke to her for a while 
and really enjoyed her performances. 
PLAYBOY: Of all the women in the 
comic-book world, who would you have 
wanted to go on a date with? 

LEE: I never thought of that. See, I’m go- 
ing to tell you something you may not be 
aware of: They were fictitious characters. 
PLAYBOY: But some were sexier than others. 
LEE: To me, the sexiest of all was Mary 
Jane in Spider-Man. 1 loved the idea. The 
way Га written it, Spider-Man's aunt May 
was continually trying to get Peter Parker 
to meet the niece of her next-door neigh- 
bor. “She's such a nice girl. I think you'd 
like her.” Well, to a teenage boy, hearing 
she's a nice girl is the biggest turnoff in 
the world. Peter, as I remember, kept 
avoiding meeting her. One day I made 
it the last panel of the story. He couldn't 
avoid it anymore. He said, “All right, ГИ 
meet her.” He opens the door and there’s 
this hot-looking babe who says to him, 
“Face it, tiger, you just hit the jackpot.” 
I don’t know why they didn’t put that 
in the movie. I just love that whole idea. 
“Face it, tiger, you just hit the jackpot.” 
He sees this sizzling girl, and he'd been 
expecting some drab nobody. 

PLAYBOY: The Marvel bullpen was such a 
boys’ club. You guys must have had fun 
behind the scenes thinking about which 
characters were having sex with each 
other and who had the biggest codpieces. 
LEE: Obviously we always talked about 
Mr. Fantastic and how great he would be 
for any woman, with the ability to stretch 
the way he could. But that was about all. 
PLAYBOY: These were colorful characters 
conceived in colorful times. Were psy- 
chedelics or other drugs involved? 

Lee: I’m not aware that any of the artists 
took drugs. It would shock me to learn 
that Kirby, for instance, was taking drugs. 
Or John Romita or Gil Kane. These guys 
were family men, hardworking guys, 
and they were simply that talented. Al- 
most any of them could have been major 
movie directors. When an artist draws a 
panel, he has the widest choice. He can 
make it a close-up shot, a long shot, an 
overhead shot, a strange angle, a head- 
on shot. And they would make these cre- 
ative decisions quickly and under major 
deadline pressure. Drugs? I don’t think 


they would have survived. They cer- 
tainly never came into the office in a dif- 
ferent mood, looking a little spaced out 
or whatever. And I definitely wasn’t do- 
ing drugs. I was never into them, and I 
know nothing about them. 

PLAYBOY: Did you ever try marijuana? 
LEE: No. I hardly ever smoked а ciga- 
rette. I bought these thin cheroots be- 
cause you didn’t have to inhale. I would 
puff on them, but I eventually gave them 
up because I was burning holes in my 
sweaters. People read into the fact that 
I called the character Mary Jane, but 
honestly, I had no idea it was a nickname 
for marijuana. I never understood why 
people take drugs. They're habit form- 
ing and they can kill you. I didn’t need 
anything to pep me up or make me feel 
more creative, and I didn’t need them to 
help me with women. 

PLAYBOY: There’s a curious rumor 
online that you and Mick Jagger would 
occasionally go to bars together to see 
who could pick up women faster and 
that often it wasn’t Mick Jagger. 

Lee: Oh, it’s not true. But I will say, a 
woman will go with any recognizable 


People read into the fact that 
I called the character Mary 
Jane, but I had no idea it was 
a nickname for marijuana. I 
never understood why people 
take drugs. They can kill you. 


celebrity even if you're the ugliest celeb- 
rity in the world. That’s just the law of 
fame. I did pretty well in my day. I had 
a Buick convertible four-door Phaeton 
that used to impress the girls. But you 
can’t compete with rock stars. I’ve spent 
time with Aerosmith and Alice Cooper 
and Kiss. Gene Simmons actually put his 
blood into a vat of ink so we could say 
the Kiss comic books we created were 
printed with his blood. That’s the kind 
of thing girls are looking for. 

PLAYBOY: You've been married to your 
wife, Joan, for almost 70 years. What's 
the secret to a lasting marriage? 

LEE: Marrying the right girl. We get along 
fine even though we both have strong 
personalities. My wife, whom I adore, 
is half Irish and has a very hot temper. 
I remember years ago we were arguing 
over something and she got angry. She 
said, “ГИ show you!” and picked up the 
Remington Noiseless Portable typewrit- 
er Га used to write The Fantastic Four and 
Spider-Man and all the rest, and banged 
it against the floor. It shattered into a 
million pieces. I like to tease her and say, 
“Joanie, if we had that typewriter now, 


do you know what we could auction it 
off for?” 

PLAYBOY: Do you have Amazing Fantasy 
#15, the comic book in which Spider-Man 
debuts, hidden in a vault somewhere? 
LEE: No. I never collected them. In those 
days we didn't think of it. When we were 
doing these books we never knew the 
artwork or scripts would have any val- 
ue. We were in a small office. The origi- 
nal pages were very big and thick, and 
a book then had, like, 48 or 64 pages. 
After the book was printed, the printer 
would send the original pages of artwork 
and all the color proofs back to us. We 
had no room for them. We gave every- 
thing away. Some kid would come up to 
deliver sandwiches from the drugstore 
and we'd say, “Hey, kid, on your way out, 
take these pages and throw them some- 
where.” If one of those guys had brains 
enough to save some stuff, he’d be a very 
lucky man right now. 

PLAYBOY: Fewer kids read comic books 
today than they did in the heyday. Does 
that make you sad? 

Lee: I didn’t know they weren't. Really? 
See, I'm not much of a scholar about 
what's happening. I just do my own 
thing. But it’s not only comic books. Ev- 
erything’s changing. Everything’s being 
done on computer or iPhone or iPad. 
The whole language is changing. Words 
end up abbreviated because of texting. 
PLAYBOY: Do you have any advice for 
comic-book-store owners? 

LEE: If I were a comic-book-store owner, 
Га be wondering how I could get into 
electronic comics, digital comics or any- 
thing else. It’s not just comic-book-store 
owners I'm worried about. I'd be con- 
cerned if I owned any bookstore. But I 
don't know. I'm old-fashioned. I hope 
there will always be a little comic book 
for kids and teenagers and grown-ups to 
hold, because nothing replaces the expe- 
rience of turning those pages, of smell- 
ing those pages. But yes, everything is 
changing. In 10 years we probably won't 
recognize this world. Thank goodness 
we have other media. It's what keeps 
these characters alive. 

PLAYBOY: Let's talk about the new Agents 
of S.H.I.E.L.D. television series. Is it close 
to your original conception? 

LEE: It’s a funny thing about S.H.LE.L.D. 
I started it because there was a popu- 
lar TV show at the time, The Man From 
U.N.C.L.E., and I wanted to come up with 
a special group of my own. I called it the 
Supreme Headquarters, International 
Espionage, Law-Enforcement Division. 
I thought it was kind of cute. They've 
given the word new meaning now. To 
me, the greatest part about $.H.I.E.L.D. 
was Nick Fury, and I hope we get to see 
a lot of him on the show. He'd been in 
an earlier comic book of mine, Sgt. Fury 
and His Howling Commandos, and when 
I retired him, I got so many letters ask- 


ing where he went, I brought him back 
asa colonel. Connon page 122) 


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54 ¡Playboy Magazine April 204 


HOW THE 


CENTRAL 


PARK FIVE 


STILL HAUNT 


AMERICA 


In 1989 a brutal attack against a female jogger 
wrongfully put five young men in jail. No one doubts 
their innocence. And yet justice eludes them 


I. PROLOGUE 

It is one of the seminal stories in BY T 
New York City’s history, a tale so 

rich, so elaborate, so surprising and so tragic 
that it demands to be told and retold. It is the 
subject of a lengthy 1991 essay by Joan Didion 
called “Sentimental Journeys” and the 2012 Ken 
Burns film The Central Park Five. It's a story that 
centers on sacred city real estate and a horrific 
crime: a shocking gang rape in a public place 
that cemented middle-c New Yorkers’ no- 
tions about their vulnerability to those they saw 


RE as lawless, fearsome, monstrous 
ghetto youths. The word wilding 
remains a legacy of the case, lin- 

gering in the collective memory as a reminder of 

the violent potential of the underclass. 

The case of the Central Park Five is also 
about a rush to judgment leading to wrong- 
ful convictions that destroyed the lives of five 
teenagers who served a total of 37 years in 
prison for crimes they did not commit. More 
than two decades later, the case grinds on. 

Will these men ever find true freedom? And 


are the injustices they suffered worth the $250 million in 
compensation they are suing the city for? 

It began on the evening of April 19, 1989—25 years ago 
this month—when a group of 30 to 40 black and Latino kids 
assembled in Central Park. Some of them knew one another, 
but most did not. Some would later be convicted of robbery, 
assault and rioting in connection with violent incidents that 
happened in the park that spring night, incidents that led 
people to report that gangs of young men were attacking 
joggers апа cyclists. Police later told reporters the kids had 
said they were “wilding,” but it’s likely the cops nter- 
preted a reference to a hit song by Tone Loc called “Wild 
Thing.” That night a female jogger was beaten and raped 
and left for dead. When she was found she had lost 80 per- 
cent of her blood and was so covered in dirt and mud that 
at first police thought she was a homeless black woman. But 
she was white and 28 years old with an MBA from Yale and 
a job at a Wall Street investment bank. This woman, whose 
identity was shielded by the press for years, turned out to be 
one of those smart and ambitious New Yorkers who people 
say make this city great. Her name is Trisha Meili, and her 
tragic story set the city ablaze. Amazingly, she survived. 

Police arrested a slew of suspects. After spending the 
night in custody, subjected to brutal, reportedly violent 
police interrogation, five teenage boys had implicated one 
another—though not themselves—in the rape: Yusef Salaam, 
Raymond Santana, Antron McCray, Kharey Wise (he would 


later change the spelling of 


his first name to “Korey”) 
and Kevin Richardson. A 
narrative fell neatly into 
place, described later by 
LATER TOLD Didion as one in which 
WILDING. 


the city was “systematically 
ruined, violated, raped by 
its undercl: ” At the time, 
the idea that these five 
black and Latino teenagers 
were innocent until proven 
guilty was hard for most 
citizens to take seriously. 
Even members of many of 
the boys’ extended families 
doubted them. Mayor Ed 
Koch told the media he was 
calling the boys “alleged” 


rapists “because,” he said, “that’s the requirement.” Then he 
scoffed as if the word alleged tasted bitter in his mouth. 

The five were put on trial and s nvicted, even 
though, as a later report by the New У тїсї attorney's 
office noted, “there proved to be no physical or forensic е 
dence.” The case that resulted in their convictions “rested 
almost entirely on the statements made by the defendants,” 
though “the confessions had serious weaknesses.” Meili, the 
victim, was so badly beaten she could remember nothing 
about the attack or the attackers. 


SPORTS д 4 + + FINAL 


п DAILYeNEWS 


MEW YORICS PICTURE NEWSPAPER палат RES 


Park marauders call it 


WILDING 


„апі it's street slang for going berserk 


STORIES BEGIN ON PAGE 2 


Ж This was my first ШӨ Antron McCray! | grabbed her arm. 
сд уст Hid анас атн: other kid grabBRd one ай 
L rabbed Ber |605 and stuff T 


147 Anytime she was 

= 

smacking and saying 
па kept smacking 


All the confessions differed in ma- 
terial ways, according to the report: 
“Who initiated the attack, who knocked 
the victim down, who undressed her, 
who struck her, who held her, who 
raped her, what weapons were used 
in the course of the assault and where 
in the sequence of events the attack 
took place.” Jurors noticed these in- 
consistencies, and one said publicly 
that 16-year-old Korey Wise appeared 
to have been “pressured” by police to 
make self-incriminating statements. 
Another juror saw coercion in the vid- 
eotaped confession of Wise, a young 
boy frightened by detecti nto con- 
fessing, “as if he had been told to say it.” 

Still, even jurors who suspected the 
confessions had been coerced voted to convict. Such was the 
atmosphere in New York in 1989, when crack was rampant 
and there were 1,905 murders (compared with 419 in 2012). 
The boys were sent to prison, where they would collectively 
serve more than three decades behind bars. By 2002 all had 
been released but one, Korey Wise. That year a fellow in- 
mate approached Wise and apologized. Wise was confused. 
Thinking the apology was for a fight the two had had more 
than a decade earlier, he shrugged it off. But the man, Matias 
Reyes, who had been convicted of being a serial rapist, went 
to authorities and confessed to having raped the Central Park 


jogger by himself. His DNA was found in her cervix. He told 
police details of the crime they had never released and an- 
swered questions that had long befuddled investigators. The 
statute of limitations had passed, but the district attorney's 
office investigated and recommended that all charges against 
the Central Park Five be vacated and Wise released. 

It was a stunning reversal. Shortly thereafter, the Central 
Park Five and 15 members of their families filed a $250 mil- 


lion civil lawsuit against 
the city and the NYPD. 
Five teenagers wrongly 
IT WAS A convicted of crimes they 
STUNNING did not commit, robbed 


of their youth and pun- 
ished by long stretches in 
prison: Surely someone 
made mistakes here, right? 
Not so fast. The Central 
Park Five have suffered 
through a two-decade or- 
deal for which, so far, no 
one has admitted responsi- 
bility or even fault. Do the 
people of New York City 
owe something to these 
young men who lost their 
freedom, their youth and 
in some cases their fami- 
lies and their faith? For a 


DEPARTMENT 


decade the city has said no. The authorities have not even 
proposed a settlement, and the suit has inched through the 
legal process, proceeding at all deliberate speed. But now a 
day of reckoning may be at hand. The new mayor of New 
York, Bill de Blasio, a liberal with an interracial family, 
campaigned on ending the policing practice known as 
“stop-and-frisk,” confronting racial inequality and paying 
close attention to the needs of the black community. His 
predecessor, Michael Bloomberg, the city’s mayor for the 
entirety of the Central Park Five's lawsuit, was thought to 
be among those who kept the case from being resolved. 
Meanwhile the men of the Central Park Five are still wait- 
ing, still scarred by the presumption of guilt, still stuck in a 
prison, if only an invisible one. Wise, now 41 and the most 


emotional and bitter of the five, put 
it to me bluntly: “I want to be free.” 


1. From left, Wise, McCray, Richard 
son, Santana and Salaam attend a 
200 screening ofa documentary 


about their wrongful incarceration. кє 
1. Matias Reyes confessed to being II. DAMAGES 


the rapist. His DNA was found on Wise showed up for an interview at 
the victim, and he gave police his lawyer's office wearing black jeans, 
ченек black boots, a black long-sleeve cotton 

shirt and a black skullcap. He is ple: 
ant and polite, yet he still exudes the air of prison, as 
the habits of incarceration are a stench he cannot wash off. 
Asked if he’s still institutionalized, he says, “Very.” He sees it 
in small things, like wearing sandals in the shower, as well as 
in larger things, such as his penchant for isolation. “1 really 
don't give a damn whether you be close or not,” he says. 
“You ain't do my bid with me, І really don't give a damn 
about you like that.” 

Raymond Santana is 39 years old. After nearly six years 
in prison, he was released but found himself unable to find 
work. “Once they pull you up in the system and they see you 
have a rape charge, that's not gonna happen,” he says. “And 
if they say, “АП right, so you got a rape charge. What hap- 
pened?’ I say, “Well, you know, I’m the Central Park jogger 
case.’ And they go, ‘See you later, buddy.’ I reached the point 
where I was like, There’s nothing I can do; there’s nobody 
that’s gonna hire me, and I thought, I gotta just take this 
situation into my own hands.” So he began selling drugs. He 
lasted a few months before he was caught with 218 bags of 
crack in his home. He did four years, a sentence extended 
by his felony conviction on the rape charge, which had made 
him unemployable in the first place. He was released more 
than a decade ago but is still more comfortable in tiny rooms. 
“My room is very small at my father’s house. There are times 
when I go there and close the door, and I'm at ease. Because 
it feels like a cell, you know?" 

Yusef Salaam, 40, says he has not had a good night's 
sleep in decades. During the 


continued on page 126 


"You're damn right Pm angry! I was leading by three strokes when it started to rain!” 


HAD THE POET ROBERT FROST LIVED 


NEXT DOOR TO SOUTH AFRICAN MODEL SHA 
WOULD NEVER HAVE PE 
ES MAKE GOOD NEIGHBORS” 


“GOOD FE! 


eep up with the Joneses? No 
thank you. Their lives are 


y 
boring and their parties as 
tasteless as the ambrosia salad 
Mrs. Jones trots out at every 


barbecue. Visit instead with 
the fetching young woman next door— 
Shané, she insists you call her. Others in the 
neighborhood have called at nine р.м. and 


PHOTOGRAPHY BY 


ED THE LI! 


asked for the music to be turned down, but 
Shané dances to the suggestive tunes of our 
time in her bay window with the curtains 
drawn back. She welcomes guests and 
says the weather is too nice to be indoors 
but so hot that she needs to be sprayed 
down. Around the back is her lush garden, 
surrounded by greenery, where Shané 
creates her own private April shower. 


HENRIK PURIENNE 


j 

^ recap CP 

М ҒЗ ДАР > 
e қ 
IM. D 


Qe Me A й: 


THERE’S А BOLD 
NEW WORLD OF 
MUSIC OUT THERE. 
HERE’S YOUR 
CHEAT SHEET TO 
GETTING THE 
MOST OUT OF IT 


aa! 
vet 
хә 


MUSIC GUIDE 


j By Rob Tannenbaum 


Chancelor 
Bennett's 
father, Ken, 
was deputy 
assistant to 
President 
Barack Obama, 


but Chance 
(pictured at 
left) is unlikely 
to ever enter 
the political 
arena, given 
the number 
of times he 
mentions drugs 
on Acid Rap, 
his impressive 
mixtape. The 
young Chicago 
rapper “with a 
literary knack 
and a shitty 
little Мас” 
delivers clever 
rhymes with a 
relaxed chuckle, 
whether 
mentioning 
things he loves 
(LSD, Rugrats) 
or things he 
hates (Fox 
News, the 
Lakers). 


NE E THEWAR 
aoe tel {| ON DRUGS 


From the horrible city of Syracuse, New York comes this knock-you- 
down noise band fronted by Meredith Graves, who has well discarded her randu 
background in musical theater. Graves's singing is buried beneath chaos—she cl 
has a “weird, high, squeaky voice,” she's said, and unlike other punk singers, 
“I can't scream”— which gives Say Yes lo Love a heightened sense of someone 
being shouted down, buried or unable to find the right words. But the title is 
a hint: Graves hollers for all the tl she desires, and while similar bands are | 
sad ог scornful, Perfect Pussy's clamor is an act of celebration. In his ba 


BOMBINO 


> Imagine if Led Zeppelin hailed from West 
Africa and sang in Tamashek. Over hypnotic, 
hand-clapping grooves, musician Omara 
Moctar, nicknamed Bombino, plays distorted 
electric-guitar lines that can ripple and skip or 
stutter and attack. Produced by Dan Auerbach 
of the Black Keys, the album Nomad grows 

out of African and Arabian traditions, but it is 
likely to thrill many fans of Jimmy Page and 
Jimi Hendrix. Plus, you won't have to worry 
about liking the lyrics, because you won't 
understand them. 67 


68 


* In their best 
songs—"Nerve 
Endings,” "Amber 
Veins”—Eagulls 
doomy, buzzing 
guitars seem to be 
playing not so much 
notes as the essence 
of youthful angst and 


uctive energy. 
There are musical 
resemblances to 
Magazine, the Cure 
and other bands 
from the U.K. that 
started way before 
these five Leeds lads 
were even born 


SEVYN STREETER 


She was discovered on Myspace and had a few 
false starts, including the group RichGirl, which 
dropped the hot “He Ain't Wit Me Now (Tho). 
Instead of fading out, Sevyn Streeter came 
back, setting her wispy vocals to clattering R&B 


that can be serious (“В.А.М.5. 


abuse) or frisky (“Sex on the 


iling”) 


bout domestic 


= 1 


Because the 
Lumineers are literally 
the worst band in 
the world right now 
and Mumford & Sons 
aren't far behind, we 
remain skeptical of 
folk groups wielding 
banjos and songs about 
mountains. But we 
have found a happy 
exception: Hurray for 
the Riff Raff, a New 
Orleans band that is 
led by Alynda Lee 
Scgarra, a Puerto Rican 


up in the Bronx, and 
features a transgender 
violinist. Now that's 
Americana! Small 

Town Heroes showcases 
Seg 1's understated 
voice, which has a 

soft ache but also 
expresses resilience 
and strength. On "The 
Body Electric," she flips 
the traditional murder 
ballad around and vows 
revenge on the bastard 
who shot Delia down. 


3 


OMAR SOULEYMAN 


Sorry, Skrillex, but today’s fiercest 
electronic music is being created by a 
middle-aged Syrian wedding singer. Wenu 
Wenu, Omar Souleyman’s latest album— 
he has made at least 500 of them— 
updates dabke, working-class Arabic folk 
music, by transposing it to synthesizer, 
on which drone notes are wildly bent 
and twisted, then speeding it up to the 
tempo of techno. Pray that your own 
wedding is as ecstatic and unpredictable 
as Souleyman’s remarkable music. 


DIXIE’S 
CHICKS 


Ashley Monroe, Miranda Lambert, Pistol 


innies, Kacey Musgraves, Brandy Clark 


The men in country 
music seem to sing 
about nothing but 
trucks and boots. 
Lately, women are 
making all the best 
music in Nashville: 
Ashley Monroe, whose 
“Two Weeks Late” 
views an unwanted 
pregnancy with grim 
humor; Miranda 
Lambert, who has a 
nervous breakdown 
with the whole town 
watching in the rowdy 
“Mama’s Broken 
; the sin-loving 


Pistol Annies—a trio 
of Monrc 
and Angale 
Presley; the pro-weed, 
pro-homosexuality, 
free-thinking Kacey 
Musgraves (picture 
and Brandy Clark, 
who sings about 
cheating, pill 
addiction and the 
causal relationship 
between booze 
and pregnancy 

in “Illegitimate 
Children.” Guys, you 
have a lot of catching 
up to do. 


A MUSIC 
DOCUMENTARY 


ACTRESS 


Ghettoville, Darren 
Cunningham’s 
entrancing fourth full- 
length album as Actress, 
could be the soundtrack 
оҒа dystopian movie. 
Three hundred years 
from now, a survivor 
of the apocalypse 
finds a cassette tape 
of electronic music 
that’s been buried in a 
graveyard, where crust 
and decay have turned 
it into barely audible 


clues to the far-distant 
past. Cunningham says 
the music is inspired 

by the drug addicts 

and homeless people 
who populate his South 
London neighborhood, 
and though tracks are 
almost catchy (“Corner”) 
or funky (“Rims”), 

his preferred mood 

is distinctly slow and 
inky—like a muffled 
voice, or footsteps heard 
in the distance. 


THE CHAMPS 


Chappelle's Show co- 
creator Neal Brennan and 
sidekick Moshe Kasher quiz 
jocks, comics and actors on 
their podcast The Champs, 
but the best guests are 
rappers: Big Daddy Kane 
talking about throwing 
tampons into the crowd, or 
Too $hort recalling dealers 
who sprayed insecticide 
on weed. Please, Lord, let 
The Champs book Kanye 
= as a guest 


JOHN 
GRANT 


“You could be laughing 60 
percent more of the time,” 
sings John Grant, a recover- 
ing addict with a dazzling 
ability to calmly mix malice 
and comedy in his elegant 
1980s-influenced electro- 
pop. If you're not scared by 
a guy who uses the words 
supercilious and callipygian 
in the same song, start with 
his recent album, Pale Green 
Ghosts, and “СМЕ” It stands 
for “greatest motherfucker,” 
which Grant claims to be. 


КИНА 


REVOLUTION 


УЧУУ 


% ув 


ма ^. 


If he draws а blank for the 8:30 
block, Osama al-Salloum plays F; 
he could play only one voice on Radio 
Fresh FM all day, it would be Fair 
lloum, the singe ongs tie all 
ans together, especially now, as war tears 
their country apart. Fairuz—regal, softly 
lit, draped in a shimmering gown—is a 
78-year-old musical power who transcends 
everything. Not secular or sectarian. Not 
rebel or regime. Not Sunni or Alawite. Her 
songs lull Salloum into a state of peace, 
something he wants for all Syrians, and 
he loves to picture that feeling flowing up 
tiny underground radio station, 
through the FM radio waves and mingling 


. music 


of anger,” Salloum 
says. “She will bring you down, and you 
will be fre 
A desire for freedom—particularly free- 
dom of speech—and connection to the 
world beyond Syria motivated the Syr- 
ian uprising in the spring of 2011 and 
spired Salloum to launch Fresh FM two 
years later. The radio station is Salloum’s 
nonprofit, peacenik attempt to help top- 
ple embattled President Bashar al-Assad's 
regime. Peacenik because Salloum, a 


uz. If 


on a sound-engineering program in the Radio Fresh 
5, shoes and live mortar shells line iall of a 
pound in rural Syria. 3. A boy rides past a building destroyed 
in an air strike in the village center of Kafranbel, Syria. 


29-year-old petroleum engineer, refuses 
to pick up a weapon. There is no way, he 
reasons, that the social changes he dem- 
onstrated for under gunfire in 2011 will 
come about through violence. (One night, 
someone handed Salloum a pistol. “I felt 
power in my hand," he says. "I could kill 
a man and no one would ask why. A man 
should not have this power") 

And because one night, when the revo- 
lution was budding, he heard Fairuz and 
had a vision of a free Syria, a vision that 
he holds on to nearly three years later, a 
vision that connects Salloum to the armed 
rebels in the northern provinces. His 
school chums and soccer buddies, some 
now missing limbs but still alive, singing 
to themselves through the long nights, 
shooting, shivering and shooting in turns. 
Music in their brains, just like his. It had 
been this way since the beginning, when 

уопе gathered with protest signs in 
lage square in Kafranbel, Salloum's 
hometown. They sang revolution songs 


together. When regime soldiers opened 
fire, they sang louder. 


But not a fighter. “I am a 
coward,” he says unblinkingly when asked 
to ex plata the difference pence h 


ones with faces asked by black 
with commanders who ask, “Are you 
ready to die?” 

“Allah-hu Akbar,” they respond—"God 
is great.” They mean God is greater 
than they are, than bullets, than death, 
than this world that is only a trial before 


Salloum shakes his head. “І 
would rather die myself than kill,” he 
says. No, he is bound to them only by 
music. He lives in a mental space beyond 
Arab pride and checkpoints and fire ights, 
where speech is already free, someplace 


Salloum i is living i in exile. It is 
Іеввей а 


borden town in Turk 
limits. He fidgets in h ; 
in his left hand is а cigarette smoked 
well into the filter. Piles of shoes, stacked 


EN 


SE 


THE REGIME DOESN'T 
TAKE CRITICISM; IT 
TAKES PEOPLE AWAY, 
SALLOUM THOUGHT. 
HE LEANED IN TOWARD 
THE MICROPHONE. 


ists and fighte 
or two on the scuffed marble floor be 
jumping the border 


He doesnt feel like being photog 

It took 30 months of air strikes and 
tling with the shame of 
him to this е house in 


2 па this building in 

ometers from the 
se enough that he can drop 
bombe d-out home and his beloved 

franbel. 
mera ready, I ask him to relax 
. He refuses. 

"I want it (continued on page 134) 


ИШЕ 
HES 


ШІ PHOTOGRAPHY BY SASHA EISENMAN 


elvet roller skates laced up on a beautiful woman? 

We dig it. Back in the roller-disco heyday of 

the late 1970s, Hef transformed the Mansion's 

tennis court into a funky rink of rolling, bikinied 
babes. Roller-skating is trending again (thanks in part to 
Beyoncé's “Blow” video), so we outfitted our athletic Miss 
April Shanice Jordyn in socks, skates and little more, then 
whisked her off to a private rink for a neon-lit spin. “It was 
such fun. Growing up in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, I loved 
skating every weekend with my friends,” says Shanice, who 
now calls Phoenix home and first appeared in our pages 
representing Arizona State University in last October 
college issue. Some things you should know about M 
April: She was an MVP varsity point guard and a sprinting 


8 


Ф /shanicesordyn 


[ye 


champion in high school, she works as a dental assistant 
and a waitress, and she had never modeled before our 
scouts spotted her in Phoenix. Her favorite cocktail is a sex 
on the beach, she loves dancing, and she is, in her words, 
"down for anything!" “I love my jobs and my life,” she 
says. "When I'm not working or at the gym, I do my best 
to be a good Sun Devil and go clubbing with the Arizona 
State crowd." It turns out that Shanice celebrates her 22nd 
birthday this month. "I wanted to be Miss April and only 
Miss April, because it's my birthday month," the beauty 
proclaims. Any birthday requests? "Please, Hef, turn the 
Mansion tennis court back into a roller-skating rink so we 
can have my birthday party on it," Shanice says, laughing. 
“Г skate naked with pom-poms on the end of my skates!” 


© ashanice_orayn 


PLAYMATE DATA SHEET 


мм Oan Cc Jordyn 
SA AS HIPS | au b 
orc во lo? pe 4 


BIRTH DATE AS19972 O SSD 

amprrrons О ЖО Се, Mx PloONmotc Modeling AMbiHan 

OS For OS cem Ds ДИ +6 oca nz Made) ‹ 

rorn-ons. 1611, Leon, tot+-oQ06d, DOSKeHball- playing 

TONKS uno Nove mad Sung, 

rurnorrs: L M a dental assistant, and Dad tee are 

(YN, number one Moff, SO brush ona #055, 

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Jordans Gre justas Clean.) +» 

мү FAVORITE sans: DOF + Punks “Ger Lucky” ana AONNMin 

Pu Beyonce, especially “Blow, because He video 
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MY HERO: M е сооъ, hardworking Moher! 

PERFECT DATE: СОРОС Events Mites, amUSemen+ parks- 
а, active ЕЕ Wins Nou Dig kisses! 


осе m 
ee 


PLAYBOY’S PARTY JOKES 


Why do blondes look so hot when they drive? 
They don’t understand how to work the car’s 
air conditioner. 


А boy had his heart set on becoming an actor 
and finally landed a part in the school play. He 
ran home after classes, excited to tell his dad. 
“That’s fantastic,” his father replied. “Who 
do you play?” 

^I DAY a guy who's been married for 20 
years," the boy answered. 

His father said, "Maybe next time you'll get 
a speaking part." 


А Roman walked into a bar, held up two 
fingers and said, "I'd like five beers, please." 


Sorry,” the coed said to an awkward boy pur- 
suing her, “but I’m into bad boys.” 

“That’s great,” he answered. “I’m terrible 
at everything!” 


A man went to the movie theater's ticket win- 
dow a second time and said, “One more.” 
“For The Hobbit?” the ticket vendor asked. 
“No,” the man replied. “That’s my 
girlfriend.” 


A man was ina pub when an ugly girl came 
up to him, squeezed his ass and said, “Give me 
your number, sexy.” 

“Do you have a pen?” he asked. 

“Yes,” she answered. 

The man shot back, “Well, then you had 
better get back to it before the farmer notices 
you're missing.” 


Excuse те, ma’am, I’m conducting a survey,” 
said a voice over the phone. 
“Yes,” the woman said. “What is it about?” 
“We're asking people what they think about 
sex on the television,” responded the caller. 
The woman replied, “It sounds awfully 
uncomfortable!” 


The ambitious coach of a rh track team 
gave steroids to the squad. Although the ath- 
letes’ performances soared, one of the girls 
approached the coach with a problem, 
Hair is starting to grow on my chest,” she 

complained. 

“What?” the coach said in a panic. “How far 
down does it go?” 

She replied, “To my testicles.” 


Ап artist tried to concentrate on completing 
his painting, but the attraction he felt for his 
model finally overwhelmed him. He threw 
down his palette, took her in his arms and 
kissed her, but she pushed him away. 

“Maybe your other models let you kiss 
them,” she said, “but I’m not like that!” 

“Actually, I've never been compelled to kiss 
a model before,” he protested. 

“Really?” she said, softening. “Well, how 
many models have there been?” 

“Four so far,” he replied. “A jug, two apples 
and a vase.” 


Two farmers were talking across their fence. 
The first complained, “I can’t get my bull to 
inseminate any of my cows. Do you have any 
tricks you can share?” 

“I had a similar problem,” the second said. 
“So I went to a veterinarian, who gave me these 
pills for my bull. Ever since, he’s been fucking 
the cows’ brains out.” 

“Do you know what kind of pills these are?” 
the first asked. 

“I don’t remember the name offhand,” the 
second said. “But they taste like peppermint.” 


Ally (iman 


А man found a mysterious lamp and rubbed 
it. A genie popped out and said, “I will grant 
you one wish.” 

“Wow, one wish,” the man mused. “I'm 
afraid of flying, so I wish for a bridge from Los 
Angeles to Hawaii.” 

“Do you know how much of my power it 
would take to build a bridge halfway across the 
Pacific Ocean?” the genie asked. “Do you have 
another wish?” 

“Well, I suppose I would like to be able to 
understand women,” replied the man after 
some consideration. 

The genie answered, “About that bridge: two 
lanes or four?” 


Send your jokes to Playboy Party Jokes, 9346 
Civic Center Drive, Beverly Hills, California 
90210, or by e-mail to jokes@playboy.com. 
PLAYBOY will pay $100 to the contributors whose 
submissions are selected. 


э 
% 


XV 


"Sorry, sweetie, I'm not free tonight." 


TOLLIVER WANTED TO RETURN ТО KENTUCKY IN STYLE, 
WITH A NEW TRUCK AND A YOUNG WIFE. 
BUT THINGS DIDN'T GO ACCORDING TO PLAN 


DOWN 


A 


married last summer in Las Vegas at a drive-through chapel that I rented a convertible 

for, thinking it would make the event a glamorous memory, but mainly it turned out 
hot and dusty. Worse, she burned the back of her legs on the vinyl seat so bad she threatened to 
divorce me on the spot. If she left me, I think ГА miss her anger the most. It’s a kind of attention 
and Pve attached myself to the habit of having it around. 


“Хи here’s some think she’s my daughter or I’m her pimp, but neither is true. We got 


(2 У; Р) 
ILLUSTRATION ву Dyan Ж 


at 
“ 


ВУ РОВ 
TANNENBAUM 


PHOTOGRAPHY BY 
GAVIN BOND 


THE PROTOPUNK 
MADMAN ISN'T SO 
MAD ANYMORE. 
HE'S MAKING 
МОМЕҮ АМО 


AVOIDING AARP 


AND. 
STILL THINKS, - / THOUGHT—AND 


amazing thing І ever saw!” І had 
periods when 1 would decide to tour 
without any front teeth, thinking, 
That'll blow their minds! But I 
maintained a high level of craft and 
preparation behind the freak show. I 
didn’t perform bad concerts. 


Q2 
PLAYBOY: You've said the Stooges 
were “not once affected by total 
rejection and utter poverty.” It seems 
as if you knew it was a great band, no 
matter how many times people said 
you sucked. 
POP: Yes, I did. That was what tore 
me up. Not only that I thought we 
were so much better than other bands 
who were having an easy time of it but 
that I thought—and still think, with 
apologies—that they're all utter shit. 
[laughs] Almost all of the fucking rock 


business is an utter sack of dirty old 
filth, and should civilization fall, it will 
be their fault, not mine. 


Q3 
PLAYBOY: Which bands are utter shit? 
Do you want to name names? 
РОР: No, I can't do that. When 1 sit 
with you, I bring the politician with me 
so I don't have to go through the utter 
poverty and rejection again. We're here 
together, the politician and 1. Part of me 
thinks, Just tell the truth, that they're 
shit, and say exactly how you feel. And 1 
have to push that voice down sometimes. 


Q4 
PLAYBOY: Given the faith you had 
in the Stooges, do you feel vindicated 
now when people recognize the group's 
importance? 
POP: This has been the most secure 


and relaxed decade of my life. 1 see 
people really interested when we do 
shows. They're happy—more now 

than even three years ago. Of course, if 
you play the Austin City Limits Music 
Festival at five in the afternoon and 
somebody's mom brought them to see 
the Red Hot Chili Peppers, then they'll 
be tweeting, “This old band is stupid! 
Get them off the stage!” 


Q5 
PLAYBOY: Who is the best live per- 
former you've ever seen? 
POP: James Brown is fantastic. Tina 
Turner was amazing at a certain point. I 
was lucky enough to see Nirvana twice, 
in tiny clubs—fewer than 200 people. 
The second time, Kurt Cobain said, 
"You're a jinx. Every time you come to 
our show, we play like shit.” He called 
me one night, well past my bedtime, and 
left a message on my phone: “Let's get 
together in the studio.” І called him back 
to be polite. I was not dying to record 
with him. I don't ever want to do a 
Muddy Waters supersession, you know? 


Q6 


PLAYBOY: When you were growing up 
in Michigan as James Osterberg, your 
family lived in a trailer. Is that fact rel- 
evant to the kind of music you make? 
POP: In certain ways. It was a little 
trailer camp out in the boonies, by U.S. 
Highway 23, a two-lane blacktop. It 

was beautiful, surrounded by a stone 
quarry where you could go swimming 
and some deep forest where there were 
animals, and also bean, corn and wheat 
fields. І always felt different because 1 
lived in a trailer and the other kids lived 
in houses. 1 went to junior high in Ann 
Arbor, and my close friend there was 
Kenny Miller, whose dad, Arjay Miller, 
was running Ford Motor Company at 
the time. Kenny would take my work- 
book during class and write, “Osterberg 
blows dead dogs,” then give it back to 
me. A few of the meaner kids came out 
one day to visit and shook my trailer 

up a little. It caused a sort of anger that 
I keep. The strange thing was, people 
who didn't know me would later say to 
guys in my band, “That guy's a rich kid, 
right? Because he walks around like he 
owns the place.” 


Q7 


PLAYBOY: Just so there’s no lingering 
doubt, did you blow dead dogs? 

POP: [Laughs] No, I never did. I've 
never blown anybody. 


Qs 
PLAYBOY: Was there any privacy when 
you lived with your parents in a trailer? 
POP: No. Much later I realized that the 
big advantage (continued on page 138) 


* 
E 
5 

ES 

5 

р 
S 
B 
50 
Y 

E 

ES 

3 
$o 
5 

=, 

m 

33 
S 

З 


> 


“On second thought, 


THE 
NOTORIOUS 
B6. 


“FUCK YOL 
TONIGHT” 


Quiet-storm 
seduction sheathed 
in a dirty condom. 
Only the late 
Christopher Wallace 
and, ahem, R. Kelly 
could make such a 
hellaciously filthy 
and crass declaration 
of intent (“You 
must be used to me 
spending/And all 
that sweet wining 
and dining/ Well, I’m 
fuckin’ you tonight”) 
sound so bubble-bath 
romantic. Pro Tip to 
the Fellas: If you slip 
this onto one of your 
sexy-time playlists, 
you'd better hope 
your lady friend has 
a well-developed 
sense of irony. 


* 

IN OUR SEARCH FOR THE 
BEST NSFW LYRICS OF ALL 
TIME, WE LISTENED TO A 
LOT OF FUCKING MUSIC. 
LISTEN UP, ASSHOLES. 
THIS IS THE REAL SHIT 


By Craig Marks 
and Rob Tannenbaum 


TO HEAR THESE 
SONGS, GO TO: 


Alanis 
Morissette 


т 


Truthfully, 
the twisted 
accusation “Are 
you thinking of 
me when you 
fuck her?” isn’t 
even the most 
memorable 
blue line from 
Morissette's 
monster 1995 
breakthrough 
single. That 
honor goes 
to one of the 
greatest sexual 
humble-brags 
ever spat at 
an ex: “Would 
she go down 
on you in 
a theater?” 
Alanis, to her 
credit, never 
revealed the 
identity of 
the ungrateful 
moviegoer, 
but when 
Dave Coulier, 
best known 
as Uncle Joey 
on the goopy 
TV sitcom Full 
House, told 
an interviewer 
the song was 
probably about 
him, all of 
North America 
groaned a 
collective 
"Ewww." 


CeeLo Green 


“FUCK YOU’ 


* The most irresistible F-bomb іп Top 40 histor 
Although CeeLo’s profane middle finger to a gold- 
ex and her Ferrari-drivi 


g beau had to be smuggled onto 
the charts as “Forget You,” you just know the censors 
didn’t have their shriveled hearts in it this time. Thanks 
to the combination of the track’s finger-popping Motown 
bounce, Green’s churchy tenor and the unbridled 
exuberance of the chorus's expletive—“I see you driving 
"round town with the girl I love/And I’m like, ‘Fuck 
you!’ ”—this is like getting cursed at by one of those bi 
yellow smiley faces. So fuck you! (And fuck her too!) 


Every music genre needs 
\ g 
ug ACE сен its “Take This Job and 
oreet Shove It," and thus this 


1990 anthem from North 
Carolina indie-rock lifers 
Superchunk became the 
protest song for Kinko's 
dead-enders in college 


towns nationwide who 


SUPERCHUNK 


dreamed of flipping off 


* Parents: If you happen upon your 
angelic, adorable five-year-old singing, 
"This is fucking awesome," blame 
Macklemore. And if you're not a parent, 
well, fuck that guy anyhow. 


they have sex all off 


In this early 


punk classic over Cleveland she swallows “I 


singer Chrissie etc. Finally, as had to,” and so 
Hynde has the 


hots for some 


the song peaks what you hear is 


she decides it’s Hynde spitting 
fuck off” at 
her fuck buddy 


with the same 


rock stud, and time to bail 


the feeling is Trapped in a 
world that they 


never made/ But 


entirely mutual 
She likes the way 


he crosses the 


ferocity Johnny 
not me БаБу/ I’m Rotten reserved 
street; he bruises 


her hip in bed 


too precious/ I 


had to fuck 


for the queen of 
England 


Except — 


their lazy bosses so they 
could devote time to 

their Pixies-influenced 
sock-puppet troupe. The 
competition is heated, but 
I'm working/But I'm not 
working for you!/Slack 
motherfucker!” could be the 
best use of the sweariest of 


swear words in a song 


AZEALIA BANKS 


(featuring Lazy Jay) 


* Thanks to her multifaceted use of the С word on her 
staggering debut single, fans of this Harlem rapper, 

à la Justin Bieber's Beliebers, have taken to calling 
themselves Kunts. (Kool!) At the end of the first verse, 
Banks brags that she's so fine even your straight 
girlfriend will want to "lick my plum." "I guess that cunt 
getting eaten," she repeats four times, in case you missed 
it the first three. Later, she taunts her competitors (Nicki 
Minaj?): “Who are you, bitch, new lunch?/I'm-a ruin 
you, cunt." Pro Tip to the Fellas, Part 2: Forget what you 
just read, and never, ever speak this word in any context 
(Exception: drunken Scotsmen. Then it's funny.) 


Prince 


"LET'S PRETEND WERE 
MARRIED" 


т 


It's hard as fuck 
to pick only one 
Prince song. We 
could have gone 
with "Sexy М.Ғ.) 
"Erotic City,” even 
“Irresistible Bitch.” 
In “Let's Pretend 
We're Married,” a 
frisky New Wa 
dance tune from 
the album 7999, 
a guy who's been 
dumped spots a 
single lady named 
Marsha and tries 

to seduce her 

with frankness 
and humor. 

“I'm not saying 

this just to be 
nasty /| sincerely 
wanna fuck the 
taste outta your 

mouth,” Princi 
hisses. A song 


couple: 


Korn | 


* Let's face it: Cursing is 
inarticulate. Humans have 
been speaking for at least 
10,000 years, and when 
angered the best response i 
we can compose is “Fuck 
you”? The grim rap-rock 
band Korn hinted at this 
paradox in its hilarious 
2003 song “Y'all Want а 
Single,” a petulant reply to 


rphy turned it ! 
its record label's request ' 


off when he drove 
his Porsche 928 

past St, Patrick's 

Cathedral in 1983. 


for a hit song. Jonathan 
Davis, who worked as a 
mortician before he was 
a singer, shouts 
that, fuuuck that, 
over, tallying 89 fucks in 
the song, an average of one 
every 2.2 seconds 


over and 


DEAD KENNEDYS 


* When you name your San Francisco-based punk band 
Dead Kennedys, releasing a single called "Too Drunk to 
Fuck" is no biggie. In 1981 the song remarkably reached 
the Top 40 on the U.K. singles chart; in listings the title 
was excised to "Too Drunk To." (To what? Gob?) Best 
You give me head / It makes it worse / Take 
out your fuckin' retainer / Put it in your purse." 


* Rap's three 
greatest diss 

songs are Jay Z's 
"Takeover," Nas's 
"Ether" and Tupac's 
"Hit Em Up." Jay 
Z's attack on Nas is 
methodical, rooted 
in the accusation 
that he'd made only 
one great album, 
Illmatic. In reply, Nas 
bundles a series of 
taunts at Jay Z: He 
calls him ugly and 

a sellout and dubs 
him Gay-Z (this was 
before Jay was on it 
with Beyoncé). But 
these are Hallmark 


friendship cards 
compared with 

the Tupac song, 
which is vicious 
and unrelenting, 
the Keyser Sóze 

of diss songs. Pac 
insults Biggie 
Smalls (^I fucked 
your bitch, you fat 
motherfucker") 
and everyone in his 
orbit, including Puff 
Daddy and Lil’ Kim 
Pac's flames ignited 
the East Coast-West 
Coast rap wars, 
which culminated 
in his and Biggie's 
murders 


Anti- 
Nowhere 
League 


т 


* Cursing: It's 
fucking fun! 
Just ask the 
loutish English 
punk group 
Anti-Nowhere 
League, who 
must have 
pissed their 
bondage jeans 
recording this 
1981 seven- 
inch B-side: 
"And | fucked 
a sheep/ And 
| fucked a 
goat/I've 
had my cock 
right down 
its throat/So 
what.” Ironically, 
“So What" 
became the 
band's meal 
ticket when 
metal superstars 
Metallica 
covered it on 
their Garage 
Inc. album 
"Metallica 
bought me a 
Harley," said 
lead singer Nick 
"Animal" Culmer. 


+ From the same New York antiwar freaks who gave you the smash hits “Coca Cola 
Douche" and “Kill for Peace"—not to mention the lyric “I’m not ever gonna go to 
Vietnam/I prefer to stay right here and screw your mom"—comes this mocking 
folk-rock hootenanny that's nearly the plot of a Jason Bourne movie. "Who can kill a 
general in his bed?/Overthrow dictators if they're Red?/Fucking-a man! CIA man!” In 
the late 1960s the FBI described the Fugs' debut album in an internal memo as "vulgar 
and repulsive." Thanks for the compliment, J. Edgar Hoover! 


FUGS 


“CIA MA 


TREY PARKER & MARC SHAIMAN 


“UNCLE FUCKA 


* When critics complained that South Park was nothing but fart jokes, co-creators 


Trey Parker and Matt Stone introduced Terrance and Phillip, whose cartoon show 
within the cartoon show revels in gas-based toilet humor. Early in Parker and Stone’s 
1999 feature film South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut, the kids watch a Terrance and 
Phillip movie in which the duo quickly bursts into a faux-Broadway tun: 
Fucka,” which begins, “Shut your fucking face, uncle fucka/ You're a cock-s 

icking uncle fucka.” Every adult in the theater leaves, but the boys remain 
seated, admiring (and soon imitating) this awesome display of filth. One of the songs 
from the movie was nominated for an Academy Award. It was not “Uncle Fucka. 


MARIANNE FAITHFULL JOHNNY 
Rage CASH 


Against the * The song, written by longtime 
Machine PLAYBOY contributor Shel Silverstein, 
tells the story of a guy who > 
PORE MISI up mean” because he was taunted 

for having а girl’s name. He vows 

т to kill the dad who named him 

Sue, and the song culminates in a 
bloody barroom brawl between the 
two. When Cash debuted “Sue” at 
San Quentin State Prison in 1969, 


Sex 
Pistols 


When “Killing 
in the Name 

became an 
unlikely U.K. hit 


* п December 
1976 the Sex 
Pistols shocked 
a nation of 


prim, umbrella- in late 2009. the inmates roared. It then topped 
carrying tea the BBC invited the country chart for five weeks— 
drinkers by R Against though only after Cash’s record 


swearing 
multiple times 
(a pair of shits 
and three 
fucks—a full 
house!) ona 


Machine company bleeped out “son of a 


an American bitch” and “damn.” In 1979 singer 
мазарда қадім Carlene Carter described herself 


hot for to a New York audience as "the gal 
pt fo 4 7 
authority—to who put the ‘cunt’ in country.” She 


didn’t know her stepdad, Johnny 


notorious for its 


conte 


м i play it li on 
CDI و‎ H i breakfast Cash, had flown to New York City 
were instantly ! show, politely to surprise her. “Му dad didn't 
on the front i requesting that speak to me for about a year,” she 
page of British ! Rage omit the said. Kinda hypocritical, no? 
newspapers, Fuck you, | 


with headlines won't do what 
such as FURY A 


FILTHY TV CHAT and 


you tell me 
refrain. Defying 
the network 
vocalist Zack 


For their 


de la Rocha 
debut album a fired off four 
they recorded fucks, causing 


“Bodies,” in millions of 
which Johnny 
Rotten swears 
not for fun or 
outrage, like 


most singers, : rid of it,” anda 


Brits to gag on 
their scones 
before the host 
shouted, “Get 


but at the horror BBC engineer 
of humanity. faded out the 
“Fuck this and rmance 


fuck that/Fuck | In effect, Rage 
it all and fuck a i had told the 
fucking brat,” һе ! B Fuck 


hollers, making — ' you, | won't do 
each fuck a H what you tell 
percussive splat. ! те." Who was 

i surprised by 


that outcome? 


SEX PISTOLS IN 


JUR LETTER’ 


storm, The Sun 
soon reported 


CHICAGO'S 


hen Lil Reese tells you 
Ш to get out of the car, 
you exit the vehicle as 

fast as you can. 

The tension began to 
boil at breakfast when 
Brandon, a paunchy white 
kid and perennial sidekick 
to Chicago's hip-hop elite, 
promised Reese a free 
necklace from а jeweler 
friend in Los Angeles 
who bills himself as “Your 
Rapper's Favorite Jeweler.” 
Now, in the backseat of 
a Chevy Malibu parked 
on Chicago's South Side, 
Brandon's generosity has 
been turned on its head by 
Reese, a brooding 21-year- 
old with bushy eyebrows and 
tattoos that crawl up his arms 
and onto his neck like lichen 
оп ап oak tree. Put simply: № 
you offer Reese a necklace, 
he's going to want it now. 

“Let me see that piece 
for a minute,” Reese says, 
tugging at the Medusa- 
head medallion around 
Brandon's neck. “No,” 
Brandon says, pushing Reese 
away. “This is sentimental.” 
A long pause. 


“What the fuck is sentimental?” Reese 
shoots back. 

“Reesie,” Brandon pleads, “he's 
gonna FedEx two chains to you. I prom- 
ise, yo.” His voice clears with sincerity. 
“On my mother.” 

Reese is unmoved. “Let me see it now,” 
he demands. 

“Reesie,” Brandon stammers back. 

“ГІ give it back when I get those two 
pieces,” Reese continues, his voice grow- 
ing cold. 

“Yo, Reesie,” Brandon says. “I’m 
going to New York and I want to wear 
my piece.” 

“Ethan,” Reese’s baritone booms from 
the back of the car, “step outside.” 

That is how I end up standing on the 
sidewalk on a crisp Chicago morning, lis- 
tening to a series of strained yelps and 
choking sounds emanating from the car. I 
scan the street for our driver, Idris Abdul 
Wahid, a.k.a. Peeda Pan. As manager of 
Glory Boyz Entertainment and Chief 
Keef, Chicago’s most explosive rapper, 
Wahid is a kingpin of the city’s young rap 
talent. He is also the crew’s fixer, facilita- 
tor, negotiator and all-around handler. 
At this moment he has parked us here 
and gone off in search of marijuana for 
Reese, who appears in no hurry to catch 
an impending flight. 

Behind me the car door is flung open 
and a red-faced Brandon clambers out 
with Reese clawing at his neck. He jerks 
free from Reese's grasp and makes а пеаг- 
Olympian break down the block. “Don’t 
pull that police shit,” Reese hollers after, 
hands cupped around his mouth. 

“What the fuck just happened?” Wahid 
asks with a grin, emerging from around a 
corner. But he’s less interested in details 
than in finding the flipped-out white boy. 
Calls go straight to voice mail, but three 
blocks later, a taxi appears with Brandon 
in the backseat. He huffs out, removes his 
luggage from our trunk, clambers back 
into the taxi and speeds off. Reese holds 
a rapacious smile, an internet beat-down 
video-star smile, one that seems to say, 
“What the fuck did he expect me to do?” 

But Brandon did offer Reese that 
jewelry, so Reese insists Wahid persuade 
him back into the car. Wahid gets 
Brandon on the line and convinces him to 
meet us at a nearby gas station. When we 
arrive, Brandon opens the door and eyes 
Reese with suspicion. He offers a truce: 
“We cool?” Reese assures Brandon they 
are in fact cool. 

In the spectrum of Chicago hip-hop 
violence and drama, the event is nothing, 
a minor blip in the explosive and preda- 
tory behavior of the city’s rising hip-hop 
stars, few of whom are older than 21. It 
doesn’t rank anywhere near the events of 
last May, when Keef proclaimed on Twit- 
ter that Katy Perry could “suck skin off of 
my dick” and that he would “smack the 
shit out her” after she had disapproved 
of his new single, “Hate Bein’ Sober,” or 

100 when video emerged of Reese pummeling 


1. Chief Keef's three-album deal with Interscope is reportedly worth 

$6 million. 2. Keef and crew in the straight-to-YouTube video for “Aimed 
at You.” 3. Young Chop began producing beats in his bedroom when he 
was 11. 4. Lil Reese signed to Def Jam and released a remix with Drake 
and Rick Ross. 5. Lil Durk's Signed lo the Streets made Rolling Stone's 2013 
list of top 10 mixtapes. 6. Lil JoJo was gunned down shortly after posting 
threatening messages and images 7. Ul Durk in the video for “Oh 
My God.” 8. Chief Keef in the video for “Russian Roulette. 


a young woman until she falls to the floor 
and is kicked several times as someone in 
his crew shouts, “Stomp her!” 

As Brandon resumes his place in the 
backseat, he sparks a blunt, signaling a 
brokered peace. Wahid steers the Malibu 
toward Midway airport, kush smoke 
curling in the air. For the moment, there 
is peace. Or at least as close as it gets in 
Chicago hip-hop. 


Despite constant fights (both real and 
online), lawsuits and arrests for crimes 
ranging from unpaid child support to 
illegal weapons poss on, as well as 
proud, unabashed affiliations with local 
gangs such as the Black Disciples and the 
Gangster Disciples, Chicago’s crews have 
not just thrived but totally dominated the 
hypercompetitive world of hip-hop. It is 
a decades-old formula for an art form 
whose most powerful statements germi- 
nated in areas experiencing epidemics 
of violence, drugs and poverty. Queens. 
Compton. Atlanta. New Orleans. The only 
difference in Chicago is that this genera- 
tion has a bigger voice: social media. 

“I know a thousand Chief Keefs,” 
superproducer Swizz Beatz declared in 
October, citing the commonality of Keef’s 
up-from-the-hood story. But what the suc- 
cess of Keef—an 18-year-old millionaire 
whose road to hip-hop fame was paved 
largely by YouTube views and street 
mixtapes—demonstrates to the thousands 
of wannabe MCs is that they can do what 
he did. Chicago’s moment is a genera- 
tional departure from previous musical 
revolutions, as a veritable army of Keefs 
have a democratized means of produc- 
tion at their disposal. Specifically, their 
music is distributed and promoted via 
Twitter, Instagram and visceral straight- 
to-YouTube videos. 

“I’m not sure any of this would 
have been possible without Keef,” 
s Andrew Barber, editor-in-chief of 
ago's influential hip-hop blog Fake 
Shore Drive, re erring to the current 
Chicago hip-hop renaissance. 

The ascendance of Chicago’s hottest 
young star began in 2011 with a series of 
YouTube videos featuring Keef, skinny 
with a mischievous grin and half-lidded 
eyes hidden behind a sprout of twisted 
dreads. Pounding tracks such as “I Don't 
Like” and “3Hunna” were produced by 
Young Chop, who at the age of 11 used 
a suite of pirated production software 
to birth the sound that would define his 
city: icy piano melodies, overblown bass 
drums and thwacking hi-hats, punctu- 
ated by screams and gunshots imbued 
with danger and ready-to-jump energy. 
His approach launched half a dozen 
young stars and invented the Chicago 
sound now nicknamed Drill. And the 
stocky, dread-headed teen did it from 
his mother's South Side house, where, he 
claims, it took 20 to 30 minutes to produce 
“3Hunna.” e 130) 


continued on 


101 


thoy; tuxedo, Y 
, by Paul Smith; y d 
Solid Pistols T-shirt, we m 


cmm king Ir 


Music and fashion can be fickle 
метте" things. But the prolific singen- 
songwriter keeps his music ала! 

his style classic and cool 


7 


gr 


pompadours, flannels, skinny 


Zeppelin or any other band that tran- 


ock and roll as a style state- the recent album Wakin on a Pretty Daze, 
R ment is ever evolving (witness looks as though he could be in MC5, 
ED 


suits), but one iconic formula 
endures as the ultimate definition. Think 
long hair, denim, leather. Kurt Vile, co- 
founder of the seminal band the War on 
Drugs and the fierce solo talent behind 


scends trends musically and sartorially. We 
kitted Vile out in rock-ready spring fash- 
ions and talked to the Philadelphia-born 
performer about how music and style can 
go effortlessly hand in hand. > 


by Danny Clinch at Rodeo Bar, NYC » Zaazvon by Jennifer Ryan Jones 
- Text by Wyler Tiykowski » Styling by Kathy Kalafut 


О: Who are your musical 
influences? 

A: I go through one 
obsession at a time. Lou 
Reed and the Velvet 
Underground, Bob Dylan, 
Neil Young—the greats, 
Today it's early-1970s 
Randy Newman, John 
Prine and some Steely 
Dan. Those guys are 
perfect songwriters with 
nuances nobody else has. 
Steely Dan will divide a 
room. Some people say 
it's too smooth for them, 
and I say, “Well, you're 
too smooth for me.” 


Q: Do your musical 
obsessions influence 
your style? 

А: Neil Young may come 
through in the hair, but 
it's not conscious. My 
style and clothes have a 
way of finding me. For 
our current tour, I was 
shooting for Bob Dylan's 
look circa 1966, when he 
was at his career peak—no 
pressure!—and I found 
sunglasses on a freebie 
table. My friend Emily 
Kokal from the band War- 
paint has an army jacket 

I borrowed in London 
because it fit so well, and I 
still haven't given it back. 
It's a big-family thing. I 
grew up with nine siblings 
and was used to hand-me- 
downs and borrowing, so 
my style is ап accumula- 
tion. I’m always thinking 
about it because you want 
to be cool on stage, but I 
also want everything to be 
as real as possible. 


А 


ДА. nM \ | 


Western shirt, 
$96, by "TT 


дамасы 
_ with distressed metallic 
lapel; $595, by BOSS Orange; 
strined denim shirt, 558, 
wilde) DE 


¢ e 
ELVIS FT es tone: 
scanf, $228, by 

* John Varvalos; sn 


i FIDEO 
Siu 3 


Q: You have an ability to 
make a jean jacket look 
like badass leather. ЕС 
you moving away 


(кета: now? е.) 7% 


| А: No way. I love the jea 
jacket; it’s classic. РИ LE 
try it again after a while 


m Ehu шашы, 


a be surrounded Im < — A 
it all the time. Same - 
77 thing. I want bright ==> 

colors as something 1 X 
Can | control. Itsa way 


mh T 4 ла AC 


О: Musici as -notti- 
rious fashion peséóeks. [^ 
Who has the bi i 
music today? ~~ e 
A: Nick Cave, no questioi 

I saw these photos of _ 
him from the 199 


He's a different kindof” 
badass. He can still put 
all of Coachella to — 
shame, easily, | 


О: Even by rock 
standards your hair is | > 2 
pretty impressive. Tellus 
about how it became part | ~ 
of your look. oo 

A: In high school I would 
say, “I don’t wash it for 

a week, and that’s | 0 


2009 we were аһош 
open for Dinosaur 
a friend said, “Dude, у. 2 
hair is too thick.” She cut | 


it right there, That's wl 

it clicked. МУ 6 
get older ГЇЇ cut it again, 
but if I cut it now I might 
look like an everyday 
dork. It's just kind of rock 
and roll. 


% and vest, $498, both by 
John Varvatos, sult print 
carp, $245, by Alexander 
McQueen, available at 
Mrporter.com; силот 

pull hand-tooled and 
hand-painted boots with 
gold eagles, $1,900, by 
Space Cowboy. 

< 

Leathen jacket, 605, 

$42, and denim 

е” $225, all by Rogue; 
denim crosáhalch, shint, 
$86, by Rockmount; seang, 
$198, by John Varvatos; 
silver buffalo-coin 
medallion, $650, by 

Helen Ficalora. 


7" $00 
THINK YOU , 
CAN DEEJAY? 


Everybody’ a DJ these 
days. Or so they say. 
А guide to making it 
(or at least faking it) 
in the worlds coolest 

profession 


ы ВҮ ПАМ НҮМАМ 


“This is a million- 
dollar sound 
system. Trust 
me, it works.” 
That's Emmett. 


He's not happy. 
The wiry middle- 


aged manager of 


John Barleycorn, 
a popular bro bar 
in Chicago's River 
North neighbor- 
hood, is grow- 
ing increasingly 
annoyed with my 
apparent incom- 
petence. I stand 
before him, sta 


ing down at two 
turntables anda 
mixer, trying to 
exude machismo 
while facing a 


firing squad of 


under-the-breath, 


moc laugh 
ter. Emmett sees 


me for what I am: 
a suckling pig in 
the fetal posi- 
tion, sucking on 
the teat of regret. 


What grand plans 
I had: the ambi- 


tious writer who 


believed he could deejay after a few weeks 
of private lessons. Now I'm a scared 
schmuck, one with the audacity, no less, 
to question the effectiveness of the audio 
system in Emmett's bar—a behemoth of 
inputs and outputs and AV cords and 
speakers providing big-testicled bass to 
the hundreds of patrons who regularly 
cram into this watering hole to worship at 
the throne of the almighty DJ. 

Тһе DJ booth overlooks an enormous 
beer-hall-size, dark-wood-furnished 
room. А small crowd is gathered be- 
neath. They're expecting something. 
Anything. When I decided to throw my 
hat in the DJ ring, my family and friends 
could only wonder, Can he actually pull 
it off? Did Dan really dub himself “DJ 
Lips" for his notoriously large smackers? 
Tonight is the culmination. Good-bye, 
sweat-inducing dreams of turntable fail- 
ure. No more late nights sneaking into 
my guest bedroom, strapping on head- 
phones and desperately attempting to 
blend two songs on my laptop. DJ les- 
sons, instructional DVDs, tips from trust- 
ed professionals: over. John Barleycorn 
has tasked me with deejaying for an en- 
tire hour. The speakers are primed and 
ready, Emmett tells me. 

"Don't fuck this one up, Lips." 


eejaying looks easy. Push some 
buttons, pump your fists, let 
the song build, drop a massive 
beat and the half-naked club 
honeys eat it up. It's why every- 
one calls themselves a DJ these days— 
from the greased-up, backward-hat- 


wearing, tank-top-rocking bros itching 
for opening slots in Vegas clubs to the 
basement-confined trolls uploading 
their masterworks to SoundCloud and 
praying for Facebook "likes." Blame it on 
the trickle-down effect: Those big-dog 
Тор 40 DJs, the Guettas, Aviciis, Tiéstos, 
Afrojacks—guys who look like they 
should be ruling the Swiss luge game— 
are the new rock stars. Dudes rake in six 
figures a show. But they're just props up 
there, pushing buttons, right? And plus, 
every celebrity now claims to be a DJ. 
Like that one A-list female pop singer 
who deejayed a gigantic Las Vegas club 
last year. Anyone can do it, right? 

“Um, there was actually another guy 
onstage deejaying while she fucked 
around and just showed her face," an 
executive at a prominent Las Vegas hot 
spot reveals to me, crushing my cock- 
sure swagger. 

Temporarily dejected, I call up Afrojack, 
the Dutch DJ who has produced some of 
the biggest pop stars in the world. He 
claims he could teach me to deejay in five 
minutes if he had the time. "Deejaying is 
basically just playing records for people," 
the superstar explains. 

Easy enough. 


10 


abian is unexpectedly ordinary. 

The Venezuelan-born 27-year- 

old son of a former teenage 

Latin rock star is wearing a gray 

turtleneck sweater and tight- 
fitting black denim. His look is more 
clothes-folding ). Crew employee than 
DJ instructor. “What did you think Га 
look like?” he asks me. “A douchebag?” 
I nod. “It's all right,” he says. “A lot of 
DJs are douchebags.” 

I like Fabian. 

We're in a nondescript building 
scrunched next to a culinary school 
on a rather unimpressive block of 
North Side Chicago. This is Scratch 
DJ Academy. I'm here to learn how to 
become a superstar. Eight turntable- 
and-mixer combos are situated on two 
rectangular tables in a sterile room 
oddly decorated with graffiti bunnies. 
We'll be using the technologically 
advanced Pioneer machines called 
CDJ-2000s. These high-tech devices 
have virtual vinyl platters; most 
major nightclubs use them nowadays. 
The rest are traditional turntables 
that play vinyl records. CDJs, I learn, 
make life easier: Rather than lug 
around crates of records, you can 
put all your tracks on a single thumb 
drive, plug it into the digital mixer 
and be slamming tunes in minutes. 


We're not saying every 
electronic-dance-music radio 
smash is exactly the same. 
Then again, most follow a 
similar formula. 


The СО] also analyzes each track's 
beats per minute (bpm) and allows 
you to set up cue points for where 
you want to start a song. If you insist 
on vinyl, there's an app for that (of 
course): Many DJs use advanced 
vinyl-mimicking software such as 
Serato or Traktor. We're truly living 
in the plug-in-and-play DJ era. 

What's there to even learn, then? 1 
know how to plug in a USB. 

Oh, how quickly my cockiness sub- 
sides. I realize I have not the first clue 
about how to even turn on the CDJ, 
let alone cue up a song. An hour of 
pathetic attempts later I am unreserv- 
edly humbled. 

Deejaying is a test of patience and 
timing, creativity and endless prac- 
tice. Even executing the simplest of 
blends—combining one song with 
another—proves an arduous task. 
My main challenge, beatmatching, 
or seamlessly blending one track 
with another, is brutal. If two songs’ 
beats don't line up, expect an audi- 
ble train wreck, Becoming a master 
beatmatcher requires a keen ear for 
rhythm and tempo, as well as an abil- 
ity to assess musical taste and style. At 
first I’m a lost cause. 

But slowly, with the benefit of the 
complementary computer program 
Rekordbox, I’m able to practice at 
home. At all hours. My wife tells me 
it has to stop. She starts to instantly 
recognize all my blends. She’s sick of 
them. I don’t care. I’m obsessed. 

By my fifth lesson I'm confident 
enough to finally attempt my own 
blend on the CDJs. Relying on their 
beat-recognition technology to assist me 
in my mission, I choose two songs with 
similar tempos—Robin Thicke’s “Give 
It 2 U” and Deadmau5's “I Said"—but 


THE CATCHY VOCAL HOOK 


AFROJACK’S 
ADVICE TO 
WANNABE DJ. 


The 26-year-old Dutch 


DJ, born Nick van 
de Wall, is one of the 
world’s most prolific 
pulling in 
an estimated $18 million 


beatmaste 


last year. He has 
produced cuts for big- 
time stars from Pitbull to 
Chris Brown. Naturally, 
dude started out just as 
clueless as the rest of 
us. “I started producir 
music on a PlayStation 
game,” he admits. We 
figured he'd know a 
thing or two about how 
to jump-start a DJ 
career. We gave him a 
ring, and he dished out 
killer advice. 


THE SWELL 


he beat slow 


0.00 / 12.35 


DO YOUR 
HOMEWORK 


+ As with any 
endeavor, you're 
best served if 

you know what's 
in store before 
you pursue 
deejaying. "Оо 
some tutorials 

on YouTube and 
use Google to find 
out whe 

classes; 

says. * 

just go there. Just 
try it. Success 15 
not as far away as 
you think.” 


scream? Do they 
shout? Do they 
start jumping? Or 
do they just stand 
around like, What 
the fuck is this 
guy playing?" 


EASE YOUR 
WAY IN 


* Take your time 
when you're 
first learning the 
craft—especially 
when it comes 
to the production 
game. "You have 
to try out every 
button; Afrojack 
says, comparing 
making music 
to flying a plane. 
fou don't go in а 
plane and try to 
fly right away. You 
download the flight 
simulator first and 
just learn” 


BECOME A 
BRANDING 
BEAST 


* You could be the 
most technically 
proficient DJ 

on earth, but 
everyone wants 
to party with a 
superstar. "The 
difficult part is 
creating an image 
for the people,” 
Afrojack explains. 
"The people 

want to go see 
you. They want 

to listen to your 
music live,” 


IT'S NOT 
ABOUT THE 
BENJAMINS 


* Sure, dudes like 
Afrojack make 
millions a year. 
But don't expect 
club owners to 
instantly start 
ponying up for 
you to deejay. 
"They didn't pay 
me money for 

a long time," 
Afrojack says. 
"They didn't even 
allow me to touch 
the decks, I was 
happy just to sit in 
the DJ booth. It's 
hard work. If you 
don't give a fuck 
and are just there 
for the fame, 
you're going to 
disappear really 
quickly." 


LEARN TO 
READ MINDS 


* Half the battle 
for a DJ at any 
level is knowing 
whether the 
audience 15 
feeling the music 
he or she is 
playing. "Music 
is a form of 
communication” 
Afrojack says. You 
have to read the 
crowd: “Do they 


THE DROP 

* Can't take the anguish? No worries: 
Here comes that massive, sweat-inducing 
electronic breakdown. Cathartic release— 
if only for a moment. 

See: Afrojack's "Таке Over Control” and 
David Guetta's "Without You" 


my head is too busy throbbing with self- 
instruction. Faders. Cue points. Tempo 
shifters. “Nudging” the track to keep 
up with the one currently playing on 
the speakers. Nausea sets in. 1 grow a 
pair and begin the process: І crank up 
the Thicke track, raising the input-one 
fader. I then look to the CDJ, which 
tells me the track is 


127 bpm; next І ad- кене лын 


just the Deadmau5  : 
track's bpm to match | 
it. Slowly І decrease 
the СО]; tempo 
shifter so it matches 
Thicke's. I must keep 
Deadmau5 in line 
with Thicke, so 1 fast- 
forward, or “nudge,” 

it to get it synced. 
Once Deadmaud is 
tempo- and time- 
adjusted, I press PLAY 
on the CDJ and slowly 
fade іп Deadmau5 by 
raising the input-two 
fader, and the two 
tracks become one. I 
gently lower input one. 
Thicke is out. Emotion- 
ally, so am I. 

"Not bad," Fabian 
tells me after the lesson. \ 
“You definitely pick it up `, 
a lot faster than most stu- 26 
dents.” Confidence. Then 
reality: Beatmatching is a multitask- 
er's nightmare. It's like trying to solve 
a calculus problem while receiving an 
under-the-table handie from the prom 
queen: nearly impossible but unbeliev- 
ably gratifying. 

Fabian's praise, for me and his oth- 
er students, is dangerous, though: In 
the year and change since Scratch DJ 


' 
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[- THAT VOICE AGAIN 


* Breakdown got your head in a tailspin? 
Come back to earth with the tortured 
vocalist; he or she is back but still in 
therapy, forever soul-searching 

See: Calvin Harris's “Т Need Your Love' 
and Avicii's "Wake Me Up" 


Academy opened in Chicago, enroll- 
ment has increased every term. Sure, 
Fabian says most of his students aren't 
naive enough to think they'll soon be 
headlining festivals. But as more peo- 
ple suddenly fashion themselves as DJs, 
a crop of unprepared, cheaper “tal- 
ent" emerges. This semester there's 
Ruben, early 205, quiet- 
ly confident with a bull 
‚  nosering and a pair of 
headphones wrapped 
around his neck; Jeff, 
upper 50s, wearing a 
soccer-dad windbreak- 
er, dragged here by his 
teenage daughter but 
now planning to fin- 
ish the entire yearlong 
DJ-certification course; 
and Ali, an early-30s 
rapper from Turkey, 
sporting mid-1990s- 
era Michael Jackson 
circular turquoise sun- 
glasses, here from 15- 
tanbul expressly for DJ 
classes. The vast major- 
ity of DJs, like Fabian, 
gig locally and rely on 
cash from performances 
to pay the bills. Now this 
/ new crop of DJs is sud- 
Suc" denly undercutting them 
= for bookings. 

“Тез affecting everybody 

in the DJ industry,” Fabian says. 


1 
1 
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D 
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' 
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1 


eel it, Dan!” Му brother-in- 
law Eddie, 34, is yelling at 
me. I’m standing in my sister 
and his suburban bedroom, 
hunched over an old-school DJ 
setup: two turntables and a mixer. My 


THE EMPOWERING OUTRO 


“ No need to feel bummed, The singer will 
figure his or her shit out, In the meantime, 
here's another gargantuan electronic 
breakdown to send you home flying. 

See: Tiésto's "Red Lights" and Avicii's 
"Hey Brother” 


newborn nephew, Dylan, cries as we 
blast house music steps from his crib. 
“Soft fingers! I want your hand cup- 
ping the edge of it!” Eddie, who dee- 
jayed more than a decade ago when 
he was in college, is teaching me how 
to deejay using vinyl—not that digital 
crap—with the subtlety of a snuff-film 
director. The touch, the feel, the exhil- 
aration of physically interacting with a 
record—deejaying without technologi- 
cal assistance—gets him off. 

I amuse him, trying to understand 
his rampant passion for meticulous 
old-school artistry. Still, I can’t help but 
wonder: Even if a DJ is a trained tech- 
nical wizard, a blending machine, if he 
doesn’t produce his own music, will he 
ever reach the top of the food chain? 

“It really has become a producer's 
game,” Bad Boy Bill says. Bill was 
ranked one of the top DJs in the 1990s 
but has never produced a far-reaching, 
crossover single. He still deejays for a 
living but is now forced to take any gig 
he can get, such as a recent suburban 
club show in a nearly vacant strip mall. 
He doesn’t harbor resentment, how- 


MUST-HAVE DJ GEAR 
FOR ALL LEVELS 


So you want to deejay? News 
flash, buddy: Those songs 
aren't going to play themselv 
Whether you're a wide-eyed 
beginner, midlevel mixmaster or 
cash-pocketing pro. equipping 
yourself with top-notch 
equipment is crucial. Luck 


you, these days the best gear is 


only a mouse click away. 


ever. “The thing that’s sad to me,” he 
says of millionaire production gurus 
half his age, “is when I see somebody 
up there using a preprogrammed set. 
They're not creating anything. They're 
more of a puppet." 

So it takes mad production game to 
be legit. Fair enough. The next day, 
I'm firing up my laptop and install- 
ing the top-notch audio-production 
software Ableton Live. For the next 12 
hours I stare helplessly at what looks 
like a nuclear reactor. Constructing a 
song? Ha! This shit is so damn com- 
plex Га beg for a synthesizer fart to 
emerge from my speakers. 

I'm beyond frustrated. I consult 
Afrojack. 

"Production is insanely hard," I 
tell him. 

"I could teach you to produce in five to 
10 minutes," he says. If he had the time. 


erhaps it's the ever-present 
alcoholic beverages I've been 
guzzling or the fact that the 
DJ performing after me gives 
me an approving fist-pound. 
But when my one-hour set concludes 
at John Barleycorn, I feel like a le- 
gitimate DJ. Sure, my beatmatching 


wasn't perfect and I made one glaring 
error— Trinidad James popped up by 
mistake during a Swedish House Mafia 
groove—instantly followed by my wife 
mock slitting her throat. I don't care. 
The attention. The approving head 
nods from the crowd. It's infectious. 

“Like, oh my God! That was so amaz- 
ing!" my overserved friend Blair tells 
me as I walk downstairs. I need a real 
opinion. I hunt down my best friend, 
Jason. He'd never lie to me. 

“How shitty was I, dude?" I ask him. 

“You weren't,' he replies. “It 
sounded like any other DJ when we go 
out to a bar." 

My brain goes into overdrive. I 
start thinking crazy thoughts: Maybe 
I'm, like, you know, a real DJ. Then I 
stop myself, remembering something 
Fabian told me. 

“There are so many wannabe DJs 
out there," he said bluntly. "It's a 
real problem." 

I know the truth: I'm a wannabe. 
You think I care? For the next two 
hours, three vodka tonics and several 
dozen congratulatory high-fives, I'm 
DJ *Fuckin'" Lips. и 


BEDROOM BEGINNER 


* Dive into the craft by 
grabbing an easy-to-use 
controller, which is an all- 
digital turntable-and-mixer 
combo. Go with the Pioneer 
DDJ-ERGO-V ($499, 
pioneerelectronics.com), the 
most cost-effective controller 
in Pioneer's fleet. We also 
recommend easy-to-use 
Serato DJ software (serato 
(сот), which comes free when 
you purchase your controller. 


ON THE GO 
* CDJs, or CD-based 
turntables, are the way 
to go. Not only are they a 
staple in most major clubs, 
they're fully compatible 
with laptops. No need 
to go crazy and buy the 
most advanced model, 
though: Two Pioneer CDJ- 
800MK2 decks ($799) and 
a Pioneer DJM-350 mixer 
(5599) to bridge the gap are 
all you need. 


CLUB THRASHER 
* So you think you're hot 
shit? Pony up the cash 
and invest in some top-of- 
the-line CDJs. Grab two 
Pioneer CDJ-2000NXS 
multiformat media players 
($1,999). They're the 
industry standard. You 
also need to snag a 
top-notch mixer: the 
Pioneer DJM-2000NXS 
four-channel linkable 
model ($2,499). 


“We're just having sex! It’s not like we're seeing each other.” 


13 


PLAYBOY 


122 


STAN LEE 


Не was the toughest son of a bitch I ever 
created, and Kirby did a wonderful job 
with him. 

PLAYBOY: Many people don't know that 
your younger brother, Larry Lieber, 
helped create Iron Man and other charac- 
ters. How come he never got more acclaim? 
LEE: Larry was always a good writer and a 
good artist. He could do almost anything 
I asked him to do. Не scripted not only 
the first Jron Man but also the first Thor, 
and he still does the daily Spider-Man 
newspaper strips. The only problem is 
that Larry could be a perfectionist. It 
wasn't that he was faster or slower than 
other artists, but he had a hard time let- 
ting go of his drawings unless he was 100 
percent satisfied with them. He always 
worked on things even after I said they 
were great. 1 think it just made the whole 
process a little harder for him. 

PLAYBOY: Which Marvel character has sur- 
prised you the most in terms of its success? 
LEE: Probably Iron Man. But much of 
that success is because of the movie. I 
didn't know what to think when Rob- 
ert Downey Jr. was announced as Iron 
Man. I couldn't picture him. When I 
created the character, I kind of thought 
of Howard Hughes because he was an 
adventurer, an inventor, a millionaire 
in those days, and he was strange. To 
me Downey wasn't a superhero; he was 
Chaplin. But the instant I saw him I 
said, “He's Iron Man.” I think it’s the 
greatest bit of casting ever. 

Of all the characters I’ve done, Iron 
Man is the most popular with women. I 
get it. He's a billionaire and he's hand- 
some and glamorous, plus he needs 
somebody to look after him. He's got a 
weak heart. “Oh, if only I knew a man 
like that.” We got more fan mail from 
women for that book than any other. And 
now the movie has made him our most 
popular character after Spider-Man. 
PLAYBOY: Let's go back to the start of your 
career for a minute. Do you remember 
the first comic book you ever wrote? 

LEE: It was a prose story in one of the 
Captain America books, a two-page 
story set in type. Nobody read those 
stories. That's why they let me do one. 
But you couldn't call a comic book а 
magazine and get the magazine postal 
rates unless you had two pages of type. 
One day I was hanging around filling 
inkwells and erasing pages for the guys, 
and someone said, “Hey, Stan, we need 
a two-page story.” So I wrote one. And 
that was that. 

PLAYBOY: You went off to the Army in 
World War П and wrote military pamphlets 
with an elite group that included Frank 
Capra, William Saroyan and Theodor 
Geisel. What's your standout memory? 
LEE: That Dr. Seuss was slow. In the 
comic-book world, you live and die on 
your speed, but Geisel was slow. Most of 
them were slow. I was writing faster than 


all of them. One day the major who was 
in charge of our unit said, “Sergeant, will 
you work a little slower? You're making 
the other guys look bad.” I wrote all 
these training films about things I had 
no knowledge of. I remember I did one 
film, The Nomenclature and Operation of 
the 16 mm IMO Camera Under Battle Con- 
ditions. What got the most attention, 
though, was something I wrote about 
venereal disease. 

PLAYBOY: You wrote a sex manual? 

LEE: No, they needed me to help the en- 
listed men avoid disease. They were al- 
ways getting VD. So they had what they 
called prophylactic stations, little one- 
room buildings with green lights inside. 
After you'd had carnal knowledge of a fe- 
male, you would go to the pro station and 
get disinfected in the most horrible way. 
My mission was to tell the troops to go to 
the pro station after they'd had sex. So I 
drew a little cartoon of a soldier. There's 
the green light. Over his head there's a 
dialogue balloon that says, “VD? Not 
me!” They printed a couple million of 
them. I figure we probably won the war 
based on that. 

PLAYBOY: Is it true you continued to work 
for Marvel that whole time? 

LEE: That's right. Whenever I was free 
Га write something new. I bought а car 
with the money they sent me while I was 
in the Army. I used to pal around with a 
lot of the officers. Some of them were my 
best friends, majors and captains, even 
though I was an enlisted man. I wasn't 
supposed to pal around with them, so ГА 
wear an olive drab sweater so the rank 
didn't show. We went out and drank and 
had fun. But I was never a less than re- 
sponsible driver. 

PLAYBOY: Speaking of that, do you re- 
member the moment you thought up the 
phrase “With great power comes great 
responsibility”? 

LEE: The honest-to-God truth is I thought 
I made it up for Uncle Ben to say. But 
then somebody wrote to tell me Voltaire 
had said it in French a couple of cen- 
turies before. I never read Voltaire. I 
don’t speak French. I just liked the way 
it sounded. 

PLAYBOY: When did you first realize you'd 
created a worldwide sensation with your 
characters? 

LEE: There were a lot of moments. We'd 
get letters from all over and then visitors, 
including some famous ones. I remem- 
ber being visited by Federico Fellini. He 
came in and said he wanted to meet me. 
ГІ never forget. I had a tiny office at the 
end of a long hall. 1 get a call he's com- 
ing and see Fellini walking toward me, 
accompanied by four of his assistants, 
all dressed the same in black raincoats, 
all in descending order of height. Fellini 
was the tallest, and behind him were the 
four others. It was the funniest sight. 1 
wanted to talk about him and the mov- 
ies he'd made, 8% and all the others. 
He wanted to talk about Spider-Man. 
Years later he was nice enough to show 


my daughter around Italy and take care 
of her. It would have been interest- 
ing to collaborate with him. He would 
have been good with X-Men. Fellini and 
Magneto would have been an interest- 
ing combination. 

PLAYBOY: In the next X-Men movie, the 
1970s X-Men meet the modern-day 
team. Do you ever worry someone's go- 
ing to screw up your original characters? 
LEE: I don't even think about it. I know 
they'll usually come up with something 
interesting, and if they don't, something 
else will come up. The nice thing about 
stories is you can always find another an- 
gle that'll be good. To be honest, I let go a 
long time ago. I let go of these characters 
around 1972 when I became publisher. I 
was never a real publisher because pub- 
lishers are businessmen and I'm not. But 
as publisher, I stopped writing the books, 
for the most part. All these characters 
eventually find their way. 

PLAYBOY: The Hulk has always been es- 
pecially difficult. Even the popular 1970s 
ТУ show with Lou Ferrigno is more 
camp than classic. 

LEE: They've tried a green Hulk and a 
red Hulk and a blue Hulk. Everybody 
tries something, but I think everybody 
does it wrong. In the last movie he 
looked pretty good, and the actor was 
pretty good. But they made him too big 
and started changing his color. It's such 
a simple thing. It's like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. 
Hyde, the way I conceived him. He's a 
scientist who turns into a monster. He 
hates the monster, and he wants to cure 
himself of turning into it. The monster 
hates the scientist and doesn't want to 
become that weak nothing kind of guy. 
He likes being the Hulk. To me, as a 
writer, I could play with that and come 
up with a million plots. For some rea- 
son, Hollywood keeps making the Hulk 
this big, crazy brute. One day somebody 
should go back to the basics. 

PLAYBOY: Are you excited to see Avengers: 
Age of Ultron? 

LEE: Excited? Sure. But I have to be hon- 
est. I don't have any idea who the hell 
Ultron is. He was a character developed 
after I stopped being involved in the 
Avengers story. I was asking some guys 
in the office who Ultron is, but then my 
phone rang and I got busy and never 
found out. Marvel introduced so many 
characters and strange situations, it's 
hard to keep track of them all. 

PLAYBOY: True, but why haven't we 
created new superheroes? We still 
mostly rely on yours and a handful of 
others, such as Superman and Batman, 
to save the day. 

LEE: Well, publishers don't need new ones 
now. They needed them when I was do- 
ing them. My publisher would say, “Hey, 
Stan, that last one sold very well. Dream 
up another one—or four—for me." Now 
they don't have to say that. All they have 
to say is "When are we going to find the 
time to make a movie out of Ant-Man or 
publish another edition of Silver Surfer?" 


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124 


We have plenty of material in reserve that 
audiences love. And you know Hollywood 
appreciates a sure thing. There aren't 
enough opening weekends or TV chan- 
nels or bookstore shelves for all the titles 
Marvel alone plans to put out. It's not just 
Captain America, Fantastic Four, Daredevil 
and the rest. We have dozens to draw on, 
and fans are always asking, “Stan, when are 
they going to come out with a Black Pan- 
ther movie?” Incidentally, I would love to 
see a Black Panther movie myself. I know 
they're working on one. But then fans will 
say, “What about Ant-Man? Or the Inhu- 
mans? Or the Annihilator?” 

PLAYBOY: After decades of events such as 
Comic-Con and now your own Comikaze 
comic-book expo, you must get tired of 
geeky fan questions. 

LEE: I enjoy the questions and always try to 
give a funny answer. For example, they'll 
say, “Who could win, the Hulk or Ga- 
lactus?" Га say, “It depends on who's writ- 
ing the story.” “What makes you work so 
hard and do all these stories?” I tell them 
greed. Even if I’ve heard the question 800 
times before, I always try to give them an 
answer they don’t expect. Like “What su- 
perpower would you want?” I say, “Luck, 
because if you have that you have every- 
thing.” Actually, that one I believe. 
PLAYBOY: You mentioned Ant-Man a minute 
ago. What's the status of the movie version? 
LEE: It's coming along. [Editor's note: The 
film, directed by Edgar Wright and featur- 
ing Hank Pym, played by Michael Douglas, 
and Scott Lang, played by Paul Rudd, is 


BUCK NEKKID 


scheduled for July 2015.) What's terrific 
about Ant-Man is that he's small and can 
do a lot of things a normal-size person 
can't, but he's also incredibly vulnerable. 
The most important thing with any hero 
is he has to be vulnerable. If it's somebody 
who could never be hurt, that's no fun. 
One of the problems І always had with Su- 
perman was, how can 1 worry about him? 
You can't kill him, you can't hurt him. 
But with a guy as small as Ant-Man, there 
are so many things he can do, but every 
minute of his life he's in danger. There's 
this tension of thinking he'd better get big 
again fast. To give you another example, in 
the movies Batman has gotten more vul- 
nerable in recent years, and it’s made him 
more interesting. 

PLAYBOY: Speaking of Batman, what was a 
night on the town like with your friend and 
Batman creator Bob Kane? 

LEE: He was always late, first of all. We'd 
make a dinner reservation for 7:30, and 
Bob and his wife would get there at eight 
o'clock or 8:30. If we were half an hour 
late, they'd come half an hour later. It be- 
came a game. They were always later than 
we were. Then we'd sit down, and within 
a few seconds he'd say to the waiter, “You 
know who I am? I'm Bob Kane. I draw Bat- 
man. Look, ГИ show you." And he'd draw 
a little Batman. He was happy being who 
he was. You can’t fault it. He was never on 
time for dinner, but he loved Batman and 
loved being recognized for it, and we'd 
have a great time talking up these charac- 
ters. I've had a lot of good times. 


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PLAYBOY: Has it been an easy life for you? 
LEE: Life is never completely without its 
challenges. І have a new heart valve that 
was put in a couple of years ago. І һауе 
a touch of asthma. I get tired sometimes. 
But I haven't had a lot of angst. І mean, 
certainly early in my career, before The 
Fantastic Four, 1 struggled. I felt I was never 
going to get anywhere. Even afterward, 
I was embarrassed to say I wrote comic 
books for a living. I had a lot of shame 
about that. Even when I made a good liv- 
ing, my dad didn’t think of me as a suc- 
cess. He was pretty wrapped up in himself 
most of the time. Some of that rubbed off 
on me. I was always looking at people who 
were doing better than I was and wishing 
I could do what they were doing—Steven 
Spielberg or a writer like Harlan Ellison, 
or even Hugh Hefner. Part of me always 
felt I hadn’t quite made it yet. 

PLAYBOY: Did you ever go to therapy? 

LEE: Never had time, no. But if someone 
asked me for an evaluation of myself, Га 
say I'm a particularly normal, levelheaded 
guy. I'm just a guy who likes what he does. 
PLAYBOY: You started your career writing 
obituaries. Have you ever thought about 
what you'd like yours to say? 

LEE: I know mine is already written. It’s sit- 
ting there in the New York Times computers 
somewhere. It’s all ready to go. You can't 
stop it. I've had a happy life. I don't want 
anyone to think I treated Kirby or Ditko 
unfairly. 1 think we had a wonderful rela- 
tionship. Their talent was incredible. But 
the things they wanted weren't in my pow- 
er to give them. 

I'm always looking ahead, even at this 
age. You know, my motto is “Excelsior.” 
That's an old word that means “upward 
and onward to greater glory.” It’s on the 
seal of the state of New York. Keep mov- 
ing forward, and if it’s time to go, it’s time. 
Nothing lasts forever. Hell, I’m 91 years 
old. If I have to go while I’m talking to 
you, I’ve had a long enough life. Га hate to 
leave my wife and my daughter, but heav- 
en knows it's beyond me. And I don't even 
really believe in heaven. 

PLAYBOY: In the 700th issue of The Amaz- 
ing Spider-Man, Peter Parker dies in a battle 
with Doctor Octopus. 

LEE: Yeah, but he won't die. They'll bring 
him back, or it'll turn out he didn't really 
die. It's like Sherlock Holmes. I loved 
Sherlock Holmes when I was younger, and 
there were so many versions. He always 
made it out of every situation. You never 
run out of ideas. 

PLAYBOY: Maybe there will be a zombie ver- 
sion of Spidey. 

LEE: Zombies are puzzling to me. They're 
all the rage now, but I never understood 
them. Think about it: If I were dead and 
could come back to life, I wouldn't go 
around trying to kill people. I'd be saying, 
"Wow! I'm the luckiest guy in the world. 
Isn't this terrific? Hello, you wonderful 
person. Let's go out and have fun." If I go 
out in a flash but then somehow make it 
back, I'm not going to be angry. There's 
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126 


CENTRAL PARK FIVE 
Continued frm page 38) 


day he remains anxious and jumpy, as 
if chaos could erupt at any moment, as 
when he was in prison. “Just this week- 
end we were sitting on the stage of the 
Riverside Church," he says, "and the cur- 
tain was drawn behind us. All of a sud- 
den I felt somebody right there, and it 
was someone pulling the curtain closed. 
But that instinct came, and I was like, 
Oh, what's about to go down? You auto- 
matically know where the exits are. You 
kind of have it all mapped out—if some- 
thing happens I already know what to do. 
That's what I call an unhealthy reality." 
That constant sense of dread makes it 
challenging for him to maintain his com- 
posure at work. "In prison, if somebody 
looked at you wrong, you might be like, 
Where's my ice pick? In corporate Amer- 
ica, if somebody looks at you wrong, busi- 
ness is going to continue." 

For Santana too it's a daily battle to con- 
trol his emotions. "I could be a calm person 
and somebody could tick me off and that 
aggression can come out," he says. 

Except for Santana, all the Central 
Park Five have avoided re-offending, and 
they have all struggled to find meaning- 
ful work. Keeping money in the bank has 
been nearly impossible. The only one who 
seems to have a good job is Salaam, who 
arrived for his interview looking business- 
suave in a large overcoat draped over a 
nice, dark suit and tie. It's the fruit of many 
years of effort. "When I came home from 
prison I couldn't get a job. Every door to 
success was closed in our faces," he says. 
He eventually went to work for the orga- 
nization his mother started when he was 
in prison, People United for Children. His 
knack for computers led him to teach him- 
self web design, which led to work in the 
technology end of health care, which led 
to hospital administration. He makes about 
$100,000 a year but says he lives paycheck 
to paycheck because he has five biological 
daughters and three stepchildren. 

Kevin Richardson, 39, works in a geri- 


atrics center making about $33,000 a year. 
Santana is a clerk at a pension-and-benefits 
center. He makes a little less than Richard- 
son and has about $500 in the bank. Wise 
does not have a paying job; he survives on 
disability payments. 

For years after being released, most 
of them had to attend classes for sex 
offenders four times a month, paying 
$20 a class. "It was mandatory that we 
go to these classes," Richardson says. 
"And when they come around to ask us, 
"Okay, Kevin, what did you do?’ Га say, ‘I 
didn't do anything.' They don't like that 
exactly." They were perceived to be in 
denial. "We'd say, 'We don't belong here. 
We did not commit the crime.'" They got 
kicked out of many groups. 

They all say they lost their youth. “We 
feel—I feel—it's like I'm playing catch- 
up,” Richardson says. "I feel like we never 
got to reach our full potential as kids. And 
this sentence put a scar [on us] that you 
can't erase." 

Some of them lost family. "I came from 
a big family," Santana says, "and this case 
made all my family members think I was 
guilty, and they shunned me. They turned 
away from me. At the end of the day, all 
I had was my father, my sister and my 
brother-in-law at the time. That was it." (It 
wasn't until a recent screening ofthe Burns 
film that he was able to reconcile with his 
extended family.) Their years in prison 
damaged their parents. Santana says that 
while he was incarcerated his father began 
drinking to excess and his mother died 
of cancer. She passed away before he was 
exonerated. Wise's father also became a 
heavy drinker while he was away, and Wise 
believes he drank himself to death. He and 
his mother don't speak much anymore, 
he says, because she can no longer bear to 
hear about the case. "It's eaten her whole 
life up," he says. 

Antron McCray, 40, moved far away 
from New York, changed his name and 
tried to distance himself from it all in 
what some of the others have called a self- 
constructed witness-protection program. 
He is very private, sharing none of his past 


‘A word of advice: When you make your move, don't open with Тт the 
fastest man on Earth!" 


with those around him, reportedly work- 
ing the night shift as a forklift operator in 
a warehouse. “Не lost faith іп God," says 
Santana, who speaks to him often. “Не 
really was very bitter." McCray is the only 
one who does not appear on camera in the 
Burns film, and he has participated in few 
of the post-release events. 

Richardson too has seen his faith waver. 
He says he was raised a Christian, attend- 
ing church every Sunday, but this journey 
shook him to his core. ^I was questioning, 
Why did this happen to me? Here I was, 
average kid. I didn't get in trouble. I went 
to school. I went to a music school, for cry- 
ing out loud. I was into art. I was just your 
average 14-year-old kid. And I still wonder 
why this happened to me, why this hap- 
pened to us, why this happened to our 
families. And for a while, I lost my faith. 
Even though my mother always told me 
the truth would come out. She always told 
me that. But here I am. I did a prison sen- 
tence already. And I know....” 

He says the truth has still not come out. 

“What happened to the lady jogger 
was a bad, hideous thing. І mean, she lost 
80 percent of her blood. But it wasn't us, 
you know? So all that was going through 
my head. І know that's a bold thing, to 
question God, but I did. And as I say it 
today, І mean, God knew what he was do- 
ing as far as using me as well as the others 
as a tool. But 1 still don't understand, to 
be honest with you.” 

Of the five men, Wise seems the most 
deeply scarred, his pain barely contained 
beneath the surface. "If you're not bitter, I 
don’t want to be around you, because I’m 
bitter,” he says. “I’m very bitter. ГИ always 
be bitter. Because I’m not exactly living 
the life that Га really want to live. I want to 
live comfortably, not be harassed by those 
officers. I’m too old for that. I want to 
live comfortably, just function normally.” 
Instead, he says, he spends as much time 
on the case as he would on a nine-to-five 
job. “I just try to flip it and make myself 
into his lawyer,” he says of the kid he was. 
“Tm talking for him because nobody did 
in his time. I’m talking for him. He's been 
through hell. That kid dies every year. For 
13 years he died. So I'm being his lawyer. 
I'm telling people what he's been through. 
Im going to always be little Korey's 
advocate.” He’s tired, it seems, in his soul. 
He says it's not about the money anymore. 
178 about getting free of this never-ending 
war that's pulling down everyone around 
him. “Real talk,” he says. “A lot of sorrow is 
happening to the family. A lot of people is 
passing away. Cancer's spreading around 
like it’s a new dance. I’m just playing the 
survival game.” 


11. JUSTICE DELAYED 


The $250 million civil suit against the city 
and the police department was filed in 
2003. Eleven years later, it hasn't reached 
the trial phase, and even the deposition 
phase is, as of this writing, incomplete. 
“They said it was gonna be a long bat- 
tle,” Santana says of the attorneys. “It’s 
gonna take a lot of years.” Part of the 


reason the process has taken so long is 
understandable—this is a major case with 
20 plaintiffs to depose, dozens of wit- 
nesses to interview, multiple investiga- 
tions to comb through, pages of discovery 
and litigation over what information each 
side is entitled to. But the Central Park 
Five's lawyers say New York City's attor- 
neys have deliberately slowed the pace of 
the case, pouring molasses into the gears 
to make all this harder and more ardu- 
ous for the plaintiffs. Roger Wareham, an 
attorney on the case, says, “The clear, di- 
rected strategy is to make this last as long 
as possible. That certainly seems to be the 
theory. And then maybe you get defec- 
tions. People start to fall by the wayside, 
or by the time you depose certain people 
they've forgotten things because it's 24 
years ago. People just forget, or people get 
sick. People die.” 

Jane Fisher-Byrialsen, another of the 
Central Park Five's attorneys, agrees. “Part 
of what they're doing is subpoenaing every 
single public document on our clients— 
every Medicaid, every doctor they've been 
to, every employment, every school. I 
mean thousands of documents. They get 
those documents and review them—you 
know, if you've ever been in the hospital, 
maybe this doctor sees you for one minute, 
so then they subpoena more records. What 
are they going to find in there? Noth- 
ing that has to do with the case. They're 
hoping to dirty them up like they're bad 
people. It’s such an ugly thing to do. 
Korey's mom had a complete breakdown 
during her deposition. It was awful. It’s 
one of the worst experiences I've had in 
my life. They tried to make her look like a 
bad mom—clearly with the strategy that if 
there's either a settlement or a trial where 
damages are ordered, they're going to try 
to mitigate the damages by saying, ‘Well, if 
they didn't go to jail for this, they would've 
gone to jail for something else, ” 

Lisa Bloom, a civil rights attorney who 
is not connected to the case, says, “Even 
in a system riddled with unfair delays, 10 
years is absurd and outrageous. It is the 
judge's job to move the case along. Every 
defendant tries to delay. The system is fail- 
ing these wrongly convicted men every day 
this drags оп. That's the bottom line.” 

The Central Park Five's lawyers say their 
case rests in large part on the confessions 
central to the original trials—confessions 
elicited through intimidation, deprivation 
and force. The Central Park Five told me 
they made false statements because they 
were exhausted and sleep deprived after 
hours of interrogation, because they were 
told they could go home once they gave up 
the others and—in some cases—because of 
violence. Salaam says he heard the police 
beating up Wise. Wise says he was threat- 
ened and assaulted by Detective Robert 
Nugent. “He had a one-handed grip on my 
face,” Wise says, recalling what the detec- 
tive said next: “‘I want a story from you. 
You're not gonna leave outta here till I get 
a story from you.’ He slapped me twice 
with his right hand across my face.” 

The lawyers also contend the city is 
fighting so hard because some people 


close to this high-profile case grew rich 
and powerful from their work on it and 
cannot afford to have their reputations 
soiled. David Kreizer, one of the Central 
Park Five’s attorneys, maintains that for 
some people this “was their springboard 
into either their major career as a public 
servant or their major career in the private 
sector. That's certainly, I think, a big factor. 
I think those people are still politically con- 
nected to people who are still in power.” 
Several sources I spoke with say two peo- 
ple best fit this description: Ray Kelly, who 
was appointed first deputy commissioner 
in 1990, months before the trials began, 
and became commissioner the year the 
verdicts were vacated; and former assistant 
district attorney Linda Fairstein, who was 
part of the district attorney's office when 
they were arrested, was a leader of the sex 
crimes unit and assigned the lead attorney, 
Elizabeth Lederer. 

“At least from what we can see,” Ware- 
ham says, “Linda Fairstein has a large 
stake in maintaining the fiction that this 
was done properly, because a large part of 
her subsequent career as a novelist and an 
expert was based on this prosecution—not 
solely, but a large part of it. So to have that 
exposed as a lie, to have that exposed as 
real misconduct or criminal conduct on 
the part of the police department and the 
district attorney's office may have a lot to 
do with their unwillingness to settle, to 
make an offer. There’s no way they can 
convince me they did not know that these 
children didn’t commit that crime. My 
view is that they knew the children didn’t 
commit the crime, and they were going to 
get a conviction regardless.” 

Others close to the case say it’s silly to 
think the city would spend so much on this 
because of Fairstein’s book sales; they claim 
the real reason is that people believe the 
Central Park Five are guilty and acted in 
concert with the serial rapist who confessed 
to the crime. An in-depth report from the 
DA's office argues that an extensive inves- 
tigation turned up no evidence of the rap- 
ist having ever known any of the five, but 
some from the prosecution side see a riot in 
the dark involving a group of young men 
who did not all know one another. They 
point to blood on some of the boys’ cloth- 
ing, though none of this blood matched 
the jogger's. Meili lost an extraordinary 
amount of blood, but they say little got on 
the boys because she bled from the back of 
her head. People from the city’s side also 
point to semen on the boys’ underwear, yet 
none of their DNA was found on the jog- 
ger. Ultimately, though, these evidentiary 
questions are about attempting to prove 
their guilt, and people from the city main- 
tain that whether the boys are guilty is not 
the central question. 

“It's not about guilt or innocence,” says 
Howard Wolfson, former counselor to 
Mayor Michael Bloomberg, “but was pur- 
poseful judicial misconduct committed?” 
Michael Cardozo, who was corporation 
counsel—the city’s top lawyer—under 
Bloomberg, answered my questions with 
a written statement: “While we recognize 
this case has generated strong reactions, 


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PLAYBOY 


128 


our role as attorneys representing the 
city is to consider the specific, core ques- 
tion raised by these claims: whether there 
was any deliberate wrongdoing by police 
and prosecutors. The answer to the ques- 
tion, as shown by all the evidence, includ- 
ing evidence that is confidential and not 
available to people outside the case, is no. 
We have an obligation to protect all tax- 
payers. We are therefore moving forward 
with the litigation.” 

Sources familiar with the city's case dis- 
miss the notion that the lawsuit has taken 
a long time or that there is a strategy to 
slow the wheels of justice. They say this 
is a case with more than 100 witnesses, 
three major investigations and hundreds 
of pages of discovery, so it’s understand- 
able that it has taken this long. There was 
also a motion to dismiss filed in 2003 that 
was not decided until 2007. But sources I 
spoke to maintain that the city has spent 
more defending the suit than the price of 
a realistic settlement. 

People close to the case also say that 
even if one accepts, for the sake of argu- 
ment, that a confession is false, it does not 
necessarily mean it was coerced or ob- 
tained illegally. They say police interroga- 
tors took great care to interview the boys 
in a sensitive manner because they were 
young. They also feel there are enough 
consistencies within the statements of the 
five, and among the total of 39 who were 
questioned, to justify the conclusion that 
the boys were involved and that there was 
probable cause, given the information the 
police and prosecutors had at the time. 
As proof of the boys’ violent intentions, 


they point to the several other assaults in 
Central Park that night. 

The lawsuit could turn on the plaintiffs’ 
ability to prove a lack of probable cause 
and to prove actual malice in prosecution. 
Should the facts have led a reasonable 
person to believe the accused had com- 
mitted the rape? Were the confessions 
the product of illegal coercion? It’s a civil 
lawsuit, so the jury must weigh whether 
there is a preponderance of evidence; 
that is, whether the charges are more 
likely than not—rather than beyond a 
reasonable doubt, the higher standard of 
a criminal trial. If a jury believes the po- 
lice used threats, lies, false promises and 
violence to induce the false confessions, 
then the police and prosecutors could be 
liable. If the jurors find the police and 
prosecutors did not induce false confes- 
sions through improper coercion, then 
they could conclude there was probable 
cause to charge and prosecute and no 
constitutional deprivation occurred. It's 
impossible to predict which way a trial 
will go, because different eyes have drawn 
different conclusions from this evidence: 
А 1990 review by Judge Thomas Galligan 
rejected the idea of coerced confessions 
and found all constitutional accommoda- 
tions had been provided; however, Gal- 
ligan presided over the original trial, so 
his report was a review of his own work. 
In 1993 Salaam appealed his conviction 
from prison; it was upheld, but Judge 
Vito Titone dissented, noting significant 
problems with the interrogation process. 
Judge Titone’s harsh dissent blasts the 
work of Fairstein and her officers when 


“T was going to send you back, but I was just watching a few episodes 
of that Honey Boo Boo thing, and now I think I'll probably just kill 
everyone and let that be the end of it.” 


they interrogated Salaam, deliberately 
keeping him apart from three adult fam- 
ily members, including his mother. 

“What emerges from these facts is a pic- 
ture of law enforcement officers who were 
so anxious to extract a full and complete 
confession that they did everything within 
their power to keep this youthful suspect 
isolated and away from any adults who 
might interfere,” Titone wrote. “Further- 
more, there can have been no other rea- 
son for the decisions of Detective [John] 
Taglioni and Assistant District Attorney 
Fairstein to prevent defendant's aunt, 
'Big Brother' and mother from speak- 
ing to him other than to capitalize on his 
youth and isolation and to assure that he 
did not receive aid and advice from the 
supportive adults." 

In an interview with Newsday, Titone 
said, "I was concerned about a criminal jus- 
tice system that would tolerate the conduct 
of the prosecutor, Linda Fairstein, who 
deliberately engineered the 15-year-old's 
confession." He added, "Fairstein wanted 
to make a name." 

It was not the first time the NYPD of 
that era had been charged with cutting 
corners when they thought someone was 
guilty. The 1994 report of the Commission 
to Investigate Allegations of Police Cor- 
ruption, commonly known as the Mollen 
Commission, concluded that falsification 
was common. The report spoke of "a deep- 
rooted perception among many officers 
of all ranks within the department that 
nothing is really wrong with compromis- 
ing facts to fight crime in the real world." 
As one dedicated officer put it, police offi- 
cers often view falsification as "doing God's 
work"— whatever it takes to get a suspected 
criminal off the streets. This attitude is so 
entrenched, especially in high-crime pre- 
cincts, that when investigators confronted 
one recently arrested officer with evidence 
of perjury, he asked in disbelief, “What's 
wrong with that? They're guilty." But what 
if they're not? 


IV: A SEMBLANCE OF JUSTICE 


Some believe this case asks hard questions 
about what sort of city New York is—and 
what sort of society we are. At times it 
seems we are a nation that can overlook 
the destruction of black bodies and black 
lives while ensuring all possible protec- 
tions for white citizens. It seems a stretch 
to think that, even though the wrong 
people were convicted despite a paucity 
of physical evidence, everyone in law en- 
forcement was working with the best of 
intentions. But maybe they were. In New 
York the entwined issues of race and in- 
equality never really go away. In recent 
years, they have resurfaced around the 
police practice of stop-and-frisk, which in 
large part decided the Democratic may- 
oral primary in favor of Bill de Blasio. 
De Blasio, New York's mayor since Janu- 
ary, will have a great deal of influence 
over the future of the Central Park Five. 
Many people close to the case say Mayor 
Bloomberg was among those who be- 
lieved the Central Park Five should not 


Бе remunerated and his recalcitrance is 
why the suit has dragged on for years. The 
de Blasio administration may approach this 
matter differently. In a phone interview in 
February 2013, early in his mayoral cam- 
paign, de Blasio told me he sees the Central 
Park Five as emblematic of some of the ra- 
cial inequalities he talked about in his cam- 
paign. “Such willful miscarriage of justice 
by folks who worked for the city,” he said. 
“It’s unacceptable what's happened to these 
now not so young guys, and they deserve 
some semblance of justice.” Asked what he 
would do about it if he were elected, de Bla- 
sio, a former public advocate in the Bloom- 
berg administration, said, "I've spent four 
years of my life in the mayor's office, and 
I cannot believe this couldn't be solved by 
a mayor. This is the 
kind of thing that in 
the first week in of- 
fice, if I were mayor, 
I would order а 
settlement. I think if 
the mayor says that 
it has to be resolved, 
it’s solved. The Law 
Department doesn't 
tell the mayor what 
to do; the mayor tells 
the Law Department 
what to do. I cer- 
tainly would order a 
settlement immedi- 
ately.” In October, 
after winning the 
all-important Dem- 
ocratic primary, he 
said, through his 
communications di- 
rector, that he stood 
behind those words. 

To Salaam, Rich- 
ardson, Santana, 
Wise and McCray, 
the men trapped in 
this Kafkaesque jour- 
ney, the new mayor's 
promise must seem 
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Santana echoes this sentiment. “We feel 
like the Central Park Five have to tran- 
scend [our fate] and go into a different 
direction to help people with programs 
to take care of our kids in Harlem, some- 
thing that could get them off the streets. 
In 1989 nobody wanted to invest in us. 
We have to give back and invest in them. 
Somebody has to look out for them." 

Central Park was the starting point of their 
journey, but understandably the men say they 
don't go there anymore. "And it's a shame," 
says Richardson, "because it's a park that's 
open to the public. But I am not comfortable 
whatsoever. My mother to this day lives across 
the street, but I don't want to walk next to 
the park. I'll just go in a different direction." 
Wise longs to leave the city, the only place 


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an unarmed white person. This is like the 
notion of the crimalblkman (from “criminal 
black man”), a word coined by Katheryn 
Russell-Brown, a law professor and direc- 
tor of the Center for the Study of Race 
and Race Relations at the University of 
Florida's Fredric G. Levin College of Law. 
The word highlights how blackness and 
criminality have become synonymous in 
the public consciousness—and how black 
men are too often assumed to be guilty un- 
til proven innocent. These sorts of deadly 
assumptions allowed stop-and-frisk, a 
policing policy that encouraged police to 
place their hands on as many young black 
and Latino men as possible. For years in 
New York hundreds of thousands were 
stopped each year. More than 90 per- 
cent were found 
to be not guilty of 
any crime, yet they 
had to submit to a 
humiliating form 
of profiling before 
they were let go. 

In 2013 a federal 
judge found the pol- 
ісу to be unconstitu- 
tional, but in count- 
less incidents black 
men are approached 
with the presump- 
tion of guilt. This is 
perhaps why Tray- 
von Martin died. 
George Zimmerman 
spotted him in the 
distance and told a 
911 dispatcher that 
Martin was up to no 
good, on drugs and 


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had his hand on his 
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speak of themselves 
as living members of history—Salaam calls 
the group “the modern Scottsboro Boys.” 
None of them envisions a future that 
takes them far away from this terrible epi- 
sode in their lives. Salaam says if the city 
were ever to pay him, the money would go 
to help others who are wrongly convicted. 
“A lot of people think we want to be sitting 
on some beach somewhere sipping mai 
tais,” he says. “The reality of the matter is 
this will allow us to continue to fight against 
these types of atrocities. We don’t want to 
see 10 years from now another Central 
Park Five. We don’t want a Trayvon Martin 
in New York City. If you have money, you 
can choose to join the cause. You can help 
pay for people's legal defenses. It would 
make it a lot easier for me to be an activist.” 


he’s ever lived, longs to get away from the 
pain of being here. He dreams of moving an 
hour into New Jersey, which he speaks of as 
if it's far away. He says he's been stopped and 
frisked more than 10 times, and he senses a 
vendetta against him by cops who want to ha- 
rass him or catch him doing something. Even 
when he’s surrounded by his legal team in 
the middle of working through the case, he 
doesn't feel safe because the lawyers on both 
sides and the psychiatrists keep asking him to 
relive it, to talk about how he feels. He can’t 
escape it; it remains present in his life. And 
the deep dives into his past keep him bitter. 
“Shooter bias” is the principle, estab- 
lished in studies, that people are more like- 
ly to say they see a gun in the hand of an 
unarmed black person than in the hand of 


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һауе а gun, was not 
a criminal and had 
just a trace amount 
of marijuana in his 
system. But Zim- 
merman's assump- 
tions set in motion 
a deadly chain of 
events. The Cen- 
tral Park Five were 
caught in a web spun 
from the assumption 
of guilt. And no matter what happens—even 
if the Central Park Five are paid millions— 
their lives were tragically altered because 
they were assumed to be guilty. Indeed, no 
matter what happens to them, there is no 
reason it couldn't happen again today, no 
reason another group of black and Latino 
boys couldn't be rounded up for a crime 
they didn't commit, presumed guilty de- 
spite a dearth of evidence, convicted amid 
a heightened sense of civic tension and then 
marched into prison. It could happen any- 
where in the country, and without a stroke 
of luck that brings the truth to light, these 
boys could languish in prison for a long, 
long time. And who would believe them? 


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“'ЗНиппа” got big radio," Chop remem- 
bers, "20,000 plays the first day, then a million 
views on YouTube.” By the following spring, 
Kanye West had remixed Keef's "Don't Like" 
with heavy hitters Pusha T and Big Sean just 
as Keef inked a three-album deal with Inter- 
scope worth $6 million. His full-length debut, 
Finally Rich, appeared in December 2012, 
reaching number 14 on Spin's 2013 year-end 
list of best rap albums. Rolling Stone said Keef 
"seems unshakably confident but profoundly 
directionless. The effect із mesmerizing, and a 
little scary." Chop signed a deal with Warner 
Music Group, where he's currently working 
on Sean "Diddy" Combs's new album, as well 
as on a flurry of mixtapes and singles for a 
growing crew of Chicago stars. 

What they lacked in marketing budget 
Keef and company made up for by brilliantly 
exploiting their youth and internet savvy. 
Tweets, YouTube videos and Instagram posts 
were eagerly scooped up and reposted by the 
likes of Media Take Out, WorldStarHipHop 
and Complex Media. "These sites see millions 
and millions of page views every month," says 
media strategist Ryan Holiday, "and have 
their own celebrities and gossip. Guys like 
Keefare doing things just to get attention in 
this sphere." When Keef endured a series of 
lawsuits and arrests in 2013, he even earned 
his own news ticker on TMZ, titled "Saga: 
What's the Trouble, Chief?” For a moment 
it appeared the scene might collapse under 
the weight of perpetual chaos. 

“Let's see who gives a fuck about Chief Keef 
in three years,” warned Shot97 radio personal- 
ity Star in an interview. But 2013 demonstrated 
just how deep Chicago's hip-hop bench runs. 
That January saw Justin Bieber, of all peo- 
ple, sporting a black baseball cap bearing the 
insignia of Treated Crew, a band of rappers, 
producers and designers fronted by Kanye 
West's longtime DJ Million Dollar Mano. The 
embrace arrived despite the fact that Chicago 
provides, as Mano told me, the “biggest fuckin’ 
uphill battle that every eccentric black man 
has. We have to jump and chase the chances, 
because there are none here.” 

Keef's success opened doors. Lil Reese 
signed to Def Jam. Lil Durk signed to French 
Montana's Coke Boys label. Smoked-out 
Chicago MC Chance the Rapper released 
Acid Rap, a brilliant mixtape that drew from 
gospel, Chi-town soul and the nasal twerpi- 
ness of fellow Midwesterner and eventual 
tour mate Eminem. Chance's mixtape went 
on to make best-of lists in Spin and Rolling 
Stone and on NPR, spawned a collaboration 
with Bieber and reached Billboard's top R&B 
and hip-hop albums charts. 

When Kanye drafted Keef for the queasy 
single “Hold My Liquor" on his Yezus album 
and performed Keef's “I Don't Like” ata 
hometown show with 20,000 fans screaming 
along to every word, it stood as proof positive 
of the scene's status as trickle-up tastemakers. 

As Barber tells me, “Keef, Durk and Glory 
Boyz made the world come to them.” 


e 
It’s the sort of cold December day when 


130 the temperature struggles to break into the 


teens and the sky freezes into an impenetra- 
ble gray. Merk Murphy, Wahid's longtime 
business partner and operations manager 
of Chicago recording studio Complex 2010, 
has barely settled into a black leather office 
chair when a frantic, staccato burst of buzzes 
rings from the intercom. Murphy, an affa- 
ble 33-year-old dressed in a Day-Glo orange 
North Face sweatshirt, camouflage pants and 
a black knit cap, scratches his beard, cocks 
one eyebrow knowingly and ambles toward 
the intercom. Because Complex 2010, a base- 
ment studio situated at 2010 South Wabash 
Avenue in Chicago's South Loop neighbor- 
hood, is the nexus of the city's triumphantly 
ascendant hip-hop scene, Murphy has grown 
accustomed to a constant stream of wannabe 
stars. "Complex," Murphy says. 

"Is Carmen there?" crackles the voice of 
a male no older than 18. 

“No,” Murphy replies. Silence. “Море,” 
he repeats. 

"Is this Complex?" the man asks. 

"Yes, sir," Murphy tells him. 

"We're recording for the Chicago 
Cyphers,” the man continues, referring to 
group freestyling sessions. 

"Who did you confirm that with?" asks 
Murphy, growing interested. 

Caught without business at Complex, the 
man pretends he didn't hear Murphy's ques- 
tion: "Uh, say that again?" 

Murphy sighs, knowing this won't be 
resolved over an intercom, and says he'll 
come up. 

Minutes later he slumps back into his chair 
with a weary smile. "Crazy shit," he says, 
shaking his head. "So many people use this 
address, man. Little cats trying to get their 
buzz up. I said, 'I don't know what the fuck 
you talking about. I don't know Carmen. I 
don't know none of that shit.' I wish I had 
something for him. It's cold and his crew was 
ready to spit. He gave me a couple of bars on 
the spot. Someone named Carmen told him 
to record his verses. And they were...." he 
trails. “I don't want to judge. He's hungry." 

Considering the short but storied history 
of Complex, it's no surprise aspiring MCs 
would attempt to bluff their way into the 
studio. The building and its surroundings 
are steeped in decades of Chicago musi- 
cal history. Seminal Chicago hip-hop outfit 
Crucial Conflict recorded here in the 1990s, 
and legendary blues label Chess Records 
operated nearby, at 2120 South Michigan 
Avenue. The Rolling Stones’ 1964 paean to 
the place, simply titled “2120 South Michi- 
gan Avenue,” got a nod from Chance the 
Rapper, who recently rhymed, “We invented 
rock before the Stones got through.” 

None of this is lost on Murphy. “That 
was the idea behind the location,” he says. 
“That and trying to create a new way for the 
younger cats. Muddy Waters and Record 
Row were decades ago. There was no place 
for the kids.” Today's gate-crashers care less 
about the past than the present. A flatscreen 
in the lobby cycles through heavyweights 
who have recorded here: Keef, Twista, Trini- 
dad James, Durk and Reese. 

The rise of Complex, which was founded 
by Murphy along with partner and pro- 
ducer Cayex Шаһ in 2010, mirrors the 
ascent of Chicago hip-hop, which has come 


with the speed and ferocity of a lightning 
strike. It was only two years ago, after all, 
that Murphy and Wahid discovered Keef. “I 
was looking at different Chicago artists on 
YouTube,” Wahid says. “I saw Keef’s video 
for ‘Bang.’ The second I saw it I told Merk 
we had to find out who this is.” 

“Bang” is easy to be blown away by. The 
minimalist masterpiece combines wobbling 
synths and gunshot snares as a dreadlocked 
Keef, just 16 at the time, dominates the cam- 
era, cocking his hand like a pistol and rapping, 
“I don't give a fuck why we going to hell /I'm 
gonna let this hammer blow like bang.” 

“Traffic was 100,000 at the time,” Wahid 
continues. “Today that's nothing, but then.... 
I told Merk to get a number. Nothing hap- 
pened. Then Dro [Rovan “Dro” Manuel, 
co-manager of Glory Boyz Entertainment] 
called me. He said, ‘I’m managing an art- 
ist now. Guess who.’ I said, ‘Chief Keef He 
was like, ‘How the fuck did you know that?’ 
I said, ‘It had to be.'” 

Keef had long called his crew from the 
South Side near 64th and Halsted streets 
the Glory Boyz. Under Dro and Wahid, 
it became Glory Boyz Entertainment, and 
Keef's views on YouTube skyrocketed from 
100,000 to nearly 1 million in the subse- 
quent months. Today “Bang” has more than 
7.5 million views. “We saw Keef at his grand- 
ma's house one day,” recalls Murphy. “Eight 
or nine months later he's a millionaire.” 


The beefs, gang-driven murders and head- 
lines about Chicago's homicide epidemic 
create an ominous atmosphere around 
Keef, Reese and Durk, like the hunted-down 
Biggie and Tupac before their deaths. It’s a 
schizoid existence, lived between Instagram 
and Twitter, mixtape releases and the real 
Chicago streets. Glory Boyz member SD 
insists on parking between cars when he stops 
for chicken wings near the South Loop one 
night, so he can eat unseen. When I run into 
Lil Durk on a frigid December night, he darts 
behind the counter at Exclusive773, where 
owner Steve Wazwaz moves everything from 
Pelle Pelle jackets to rolling papers to the new 
Nike Air Jordan Gammas—a one-stop shop 
for the hip-hop scene. 

After Durk relaxes and comes out to peruse 
the shop, Wazwaz holds court behind an ele- 
vated counter; it's more like a stage than a 
corner store. He's a hip-hop merchandis- 
ing maestro, boasting of moving $15,000 in 
clothing and $4,000 in electronics each week. 
Dozens of music videos have been shot here. 
Even the security guard, a formerly home- 
less man named Charles “Lincoln” Stevens, 
has his own hashtag, #LincolnBeLike, on the 
store's Vine, which has 137,000 followers. 

But Wazwaz can't help lamenting the 
estrangement of Chicago hip-hop from its 
hometown. “The majority of these rappers 
are in different gangs, В в, GDs," Wazwaz 
says, using acronyms for Black Disciples and 
Gangster Disciples. “That limits them. The 
clubs don't want these shows. Six cop cars 
and a fire truck showed up to my Lil Herb 
show. I was fined $20,000 after a shoot- 
ing on my block when Yo Gotti made an 
appearance.” However, Wazwaz couldn't 
care less about police heat. What arouses 


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132 


his anger is the perceived wholesale aban- 
donment of the South Side as a lawless war 
zone. “They won't even come to the store,” 
Wazwaz says. “We make our police reports 
over the phone.” 

A beefy customer haggles with Wazwaz 
over a pair of Gammas as we talk, and he 
lets them go for $100 less than the retail 
price. It’s one of many reasons Wazwaz is 
a beloved figure on the South Side. By the 
time I turn around, Durk is long gone, hav- 
ing retreated to Complex 2010. 

That night he sits beside Murphy's desk, 
fidgeting with his phone, in white jeans, 
white Nikes and a Pelle Pelle jacket. “It wasn't 
that bad at first,” Durk says of his South Side 
neighborhood, known as O'Block. “Then the 
murder rate got real, real bad. Gangs got 
kids involved now. Now you can't even come 
to them to solve beefs. Everybody wants to 
be known. When we came up there were rap 
beefs and murders, and they now try and 
blame it on rap. But that’s just politics to me. 

“You gotta separate yourself,” Durk con- 
tinues. "I've separated myself from all that 
Keef stuff, so if something does happen, they 
can say, 'Durk ain't got nothin' to do with 
that.' Police involved now; they try to solve 
murders, saying it's rap beefs fueling the 
murders. We got to watch what we say." He 
pauses and smiles. "Keef says his next mix- 
tape, Bang 3, is gonna raise the murder rate. 
What the fuck is that? Police could snatch 
him up. That's why I don't be on Twitter 
talking. Hell naw. Police watching." 

Durk's swipe comes as a surprise after a 
‘Twitter altercation this summer, when Keef 
accused him of disloyalty to their Only the 
Family crew. “Wat happen to OTF?” Keef 
tweeted. “U aint rockin wit it?” By the end of 
the summer, Durk told radio personality Sway 
he'd squashed it. But here the rivalry seems 
far from dead. Such is hip-hop in the online 
era, running at the speed of a stock ticker. 


In fact, after Durk lamented Keef's online 
blundering, one of his own associates, a 
young rapper named Clint “Rondo” Massey, 
posted pictures of himself on Instagram that 
led the Chicago Police Department to issue 
a bulletin warning that Rondo may be “in 
possession of a rocket launcher.” 

Even from a thousand miles away, they 
find themselves tangled with the law. Reese 
became the center ofa Florida stand-your- 
ground case this February when an African 
American teenager was fatally shot by a 
47-year-old white man, who defended his 
actions by saying the teen had been blasting 
thug music—Lil Reese’s “Beef.” 

Run-ins with the law are a constant 
among the Chicago hip-hop scene’s upper 
ranks, whether it’s Durk doing time in an 
Illinois jail on a gun charge or police clock- 
ing Keef at 110 miles an hour in his BMW 
one early morning in May 2013. 

The most dramatic may be a 2012 inci- 
dent involving Reese, Durk and a rapper 
named Joseph “Lil JoJo” Coleman. It began 
with a confrontation at a suburban nightclub 
between Reese and Durk, who are alleged 
Black Disciples members, and JoJo, a member 
of the rival Gangster Disciples. Soon after, JoJo 
released a taunting video called “Tied Up,” 
featuring a Keef look-alike bound in duct tape. 
A follow-up video arrived called “3Hunna К,” 
a death threat directed at Keef’s 300 crew. In 
the video, then 18-year-old JoJo and his affili- 
ates point automatic weapons at the camera. 
"I can't wait to catch 'em," JoJo warns. “This 
is not a diss song. Just a message." 

On September 4 of that year, JoJo posted 
a YouTube video with the caption "Caught 
Lil Reese in traffic again." In the video JoJo 
taunts Reese from a passing car, shouting, 
"Why you a bitch, boy?" Offscreen a man 
shouts, "I'ma kill you!” JoJo tweeted, “Im 
On %069 Im Out Here" soon after. 

That night JoJo was gunned down 


“Pm lonely. Pass it on." 


while riding a bicycle near 69th Street and 
Princeton Avenue. His murder remains 
unsolved. Keef raised public suspicion of 
300% involvement with a tweet: "Its Sad Cuz 
Dat Nigga Jojo Wanted to Be Jus Like Us 
#LMAO.” He claims his account was hacked 
and he never posted the message. 

Тһе video of Reese beating a young 
woman surfaced the following month. The 
series of events contributed to, as music 
critic Tom Breihan put it, "Chicago teenage- 
nihilist-rap fatigue” among fans like him. 

Indeed, Chicago hip-hop's biggest boost- 
ers appeared to be rethinking their support 
for the scene. Pitchfork Media pulled a 
video featuring Keef rhyming at a shooting 
range, which earned him a probation viola- 
tion. "Pitchfork's roots are in Chicago," the 
editor-in-chief wrote. "The gun violence that 
has plagued our hometown is something we 
all take very seriously. Many people have 
pointed out that this episode could be seen 
as trivializing gun violence, and we feel they 
have a good point." It was a decided tem- 
pering of the breathless excitement from 
Pitchfork and other critics that had helped 
propel Chicago MCs to fame in the first place. 

Even with a body count, the conflicts 
between Chicago rappers would likely be 
seen as little more than a continuation of 
hip-hop's long tradition of violence. But 
the rise of Chicago hip-hop coincided with 
some of the most high-profile homicides in 
the history of the city, earning it the blood- 
soaked nickname Chiraq. In January 2013, 
15-year-old Hadiya Pendleton was gunned 
down on the South Side by gang members 
who mistook her for a rival. Chicagoan 
Barack Obama mourned her death, saying, 
"What happened to Hadiya is not unique 
to Chicago. Too many of our children are 
being taken away from us." Michelle Obama 
proclaimed, “Hadiya Pendleton was me, and 
I was her." The gruesome murder arrived 
after a mind-numbing spate of violence: 
Five months earlier, eight Chicago residents 
were shot during a nine-hour stretch in a 
16-square-block neighborhood nicknamed 
"Terror Town. In this same period a total of 
19 Chicagoans were shot citywide. 

Despite the nicknames, Chicago's murder 
rate has declined from its 1990s peak, when 
an average of 900 were slain each year. There 
were 415 murders in 2013. "People don't talk 
about the fact that homicides are down," says 
Daniel Hertz, a master's student at the Har- 
ris School of Public Policy at the University of 
Chicago who runs the blog City Notes. "Most 
say, ‘I’m not sure I believe you.'” 

Hertz emphasizes, however, that the past 
two decades have wreaked havoc on cer- 
tain South Side neighborhoods. "The great 
crime decline is a fickle thing," he says. "The 
North Side saw huge decreases, but most of 
the rest actually got worse, including some 
neighborhoods that were already among the 
most dangerous in the city. This is a compli- 
cated state of affairs and explains why, in the 
face of a 50 percent decrease in homicides 
citywide over the past two decades, many 
believe the opposite is true, because in their 
neighborhood it is." In Chicago's eighth 
police district, on the South Side, Hertz 
points out, the murder rate has climbed 48 
percent since the 1990s. 


Criminologists have yet to get their heads 
around this, but there are a few theories. 
Ask MC Katie Got Bandz about the neigh- 
borhood she calls home, and her answer will 
echo that of her peers: "It's gone, but I'm 
still from there.” 

Katie grew up in Bronzeville's Ida В. Wells 
public housing development, which was 
demolished from 2002 to 2011. Merk Mur- 
phy called the Cabrini-Green housing projects 
home until they came down in 2011 after a 
decade of demolitions. Lil Durk hails from 
65th and South Normal, near the Parkway 
Gardens project, acquired in 2011 by Wells 
Fargo and real estate giant Related Compa- 
nies. “Our projects are gone,” Durk says. 
“Everybody split up into the neighborhoods.” 

Chicago’s gangs have splintered in 
response. While the city is home to long- 
established outfits such as the Vice Lords, 
the Gangster Disciples and the Black Dis- 
ciples, these organizations have seen their 
upper ranks decimated by state, local and 
federal law enforcement, resulting in splinter 
or faction crews. According to police, Durk 
belongs to a Black Disciples faction named 
Lamron, or Normal spelled backward, a trib- 
ute to his roots on South Normal Avenue. 

“The old regime is gone,” Murphy says, 
“and a lot of these leaders are locked up 
for decades. It's like what happens when 
a kid grows up without a father.” Lil Reese 
elaborates: “All my people in the feds right 
now. Ain't no leaders out here. It’s kids mov- 
ing up, trying to be leaders, and they ain’t 
doing it right.” 

This leaderless gang scene has created 
countless subsets of the established crews, 
thus swelling gang membership. There are 
an estimated 100,000 gang members in Chi- 
cago spread among about 600 gang factions. 
The increased number of gangs has spiked 
violence in the neighborhoods where they 
operate. In 2012 Chicago police estimated 
that up to 80 percent of murders and shoot- 
ings were gang-related. 

The war-zone atmosphere spawned the 
nickname Chiraq. Waldo E. Johnson Jr., а 
professor at the Center for Race, Politics and 
Culture at the University of Chicago, told 
the Chicago Tribune that the name reflects the 
anxiousness among the city's African Amer- 
ican and Latino males. “They have to be 
hypervigilant at all times. They don't know 
when they can let their guard down,” he said, 
“Even soldiers get time to step out of that.” 


After months of negotiation, 1 finally reach 
Chicago's most notorious soldier. “I’m in 
California on the beach, just chillin’,” Chief 
Keef says, sounding more on vacation than 
in court-ordered drug rehab. “Oh yeah, my 
rehab is on the beach. I ain't know the name 
of the place; it just cost a whole bunch of 
money to get in.” 

Keef’s world spins on a constant axis of 
chaos, but the fall and winter of 2013 will 
be remembered as the period when it all 
imploded. In November an Illinois judge 
ordered Keef to rehab after he tested posi- 
tive for drugs, thus violating the probation 
mandated after his speeding charge. Soon 
after, Keef packed his bags and flew to Prom- 
ises rehab center in Malibu, perhaps seeking 


refuge from Chicago hip-hop insanity. A 
month later, Keef fled to another undis- 
closed rehab center in California because 
of the “overwhelming media attention” he 
received at Promises. 

Perhaps the attention came from Keef 
himself: In mid-November, as Mayor 
Rahm Emanuel and the Chicago Police 
Department eyed year-end murder sta- 
tistics, Keef outraged critics by posting 
“#ImFinnaRaiseTheMurderRateUp” on Ins- 
tagram. In early December Keef clashed on 
Twitter with Offset, a member of the Atlanta 
hip-hop trio Migos, who threatened him: 
“Will be in Chiraq Next Week Pull Up @ 
ChiefKeef.” And on January 3 Keef tweeted, 
“Dis bitch wanna smoke АП my weed!”— 
something the judge will certainly remember 
when Keef returns for his next hearing. 

It seems social media, Keef’s greatest 
weapon as a 16-year-old nobody, has turned 
against him as a millionaire hip-hop star. 

"I was playin’ when I said I was gonna raise 
the murder rate,” Keef explains. “I was say- 
ing that I’m gonna have everything turned 
up again. I’m gonna be back to the old me 
instead of the leanin’ motherfucker that 
would record himself singing on Auto-Tune 
and shit.” Keef’s a perceptive critic of his own 
work; some of his tracks, including 20135 
“Go to Jail,” are Auto-Tuned into oblivion, 
and it’s easy to see how sipping lean—a mix of 
Sprite and codeine popularized in Houston— 
could have contributed to that woozy sound. 

The beach has refocused Keef. “Sosa’s 
New Year's resolution was to do everything 
he didn’t do,” Keef says, referring to himself 
by another of his nicknames. “Everything he 
passed up. Stop passing shit up. Do everything 
and be me.” In 2012 and 2013 he was a noto- 
rious no-show at awards ceremonies and his 
own concerts, landing him in legal trouble. In 


March 2013, promoters sued Keef, Wahid and 
Glory Boyz Entertainment in federal court 
over a skirted London concert. This new Keef, 
he promises, will be modeled after Lil Wayne, 
who branched out into fashion in 2012 with 
his skate-driven Trukfit clothing line. Keef’s 
clothing will be inspired by surfing. “I’m tak- 
ing lessons and shit,” Keef declares. Days later, 
he posts a photo on Instagram with profes- 
sional surfer Makua Rothman. 

But the lure of social media means more 
beefs, particularly with Migos. “They went 
to Chicago, but they couldn't see me,” Keef 
says with a laugh. “Where Chief Keef at? In 
rehab. Ain't even there. That was some fake 
shit. Niggas went to Chicago and knew I 
wasn't there, because if I was there, I would 
be on their ass. We'd be taking that thick-ass 
jewelry off their necks. We gonna take them 
Just to take them. We gonna give them to 
some of the shorties on the block so they can 
take pictures with ‘em. And that's it. That's 
gonna be the end of that story with Migos.” 

It's clear it will take more than sunny 
beaches and surf lessons to shake the old 
Keef. Rolling now, he promises more beefs 
in 2014 and says his foes should regard his 
Twitter feed as an early-warning service 
about coming assaults from him or his Glory 
Boyz crew. "I'm back to this old Sosa. Turn 
up. Get ready. I'm gonna get clubs shot up." 

Keef pauses for a breath. "I'm just crazy, 
man,” he says. “I don't give a fuck about 
what I say, you know? Serious. Actions speak 
louder than words. Can I really raise the 
murder rate offa CD? That's a whole bunch 
of bullshit.” He stops and laughs. “Can a 
murder rate really be raised off a CD? I 
mean, shit—I don’t know. It probably can, 
man. It probably can.” 


"Now they've gone too far!” 


133 


PLAYBOY 


REVOLUTION 


to be true,” Salloum says. Click. He sinks 
within himself, deliberating over the possibil- 
ity of truth in all this confusion. He's gone. It 
takes an hour, a pack of Gauloises Blondes, 
a hot meal and tea before he speaks again. 

But I know the song on repeat in Sal- 
loum's mind: “My Little House in Canada,” 
sung by Fairuz. His favorite. 

The war in Syria was changing. Salloum 
could hear it all around him. War hymns 
saturated the music. No one sang the revolu- 
tion songs anymore. No one sang Fairuz. He 
knew that. What Salloum couldn't know was 
that back in Syria, soldiers were about to kick 
down the door of the radio station, and his 
days of broadcasting Fairuz—and peace— 
into the Syrian airwaves were numbered. 


SONGS OF FREEDOM 


It is two months earlier, and а bomb tumbles 
lazily across the October sky toward me. Гат 
standing in hilly Kafranbel, Syria, roughly 
three hours from the Turkish border, when 
soldiers push the barrel bomb—an oil drum 
packed with TNT and scrap metal—from 
the belly of a government helicopter. Chil- 
dren scream as the bomb’s impact shakes 
buildings; an ominous claw of smoke rises 
up over the village. 

But it is a blessed day: The bomb misses 
the elementary school packed with refugees 
I've come to photograph. Salloum arrives 
shortly after the explosion to mingle with 
activists and protest artists and to swab a tin 
of hot lamb fat with hard bread. Rattled, he 
chews nervously. 

“This is what we live with. I must get out,” 
he says, more to himself than anyone else. 

Government soldiers have killed his 
uncle, and Salloum’s family home has been 
bombed twice. He refuses to return to 
it, even after the gaping holes have been 
repaired. Last he heard, another displaced 
Syrian family was occupying it. 

What is important is Fresh FM, and he із 
eager to introduce himself—and the station— 
to me. “I am Osama," he says. “I work at the 
radio station. You are a journalist? Would you 
like to see it? I will take you there.” 

The next day a group of boys stand 
among the rubble in the streets with their 
necks craned upward. Salloum sees them 
and listens. “It is a plane. It might kill us,” 
he says. A sweeping shopkeeper freezes with 
his broom. Kids yell to each other, “Bara 
jayah" (“Ап airplane is coming”). Girls play- 
ing nearby start to cry. 

Тһе structure that houses Fresh ЕМ 
stands out on a debris-cluttered block 
thanks to a brick facade dotted with squares 
of red, pink, yellow and blue. It feels more 
San Francisco than Syria. The building 
houses the Kafranbel media center and 
Karama Bus, a nonprofit that provides social 
activities for village children; Fresh FM is 
crammed into the rear of the basement. Sal- 
loum guides us past a coughing generator 
and a tangle of motorcycles to a metal door 
leading down a narrow, shoulder-width 
plywood hallway that branches off into 


184 claustrophobic, wire-veined rooms where 


staffers smoke, work and boil tea. The vibe is 
military efficiency meets activist squat. (Yes, 
that smell is definitely black mold.) A golden 
bust of President Bashar al-Assad, complete 
with black eyes, lipstick, a missing tooth and 
a Frankenstein forehead scar, looks down 
from the newsroom wall. 

"Have you met our president?" a staffer 
asks, smacking the statue gently on the 
cheek. "Say hi, Bashar." 

This is home, even if relentless bomb- 
ing has turned the buildings on either side 
into broken concrete accordions. Under Sal- 
loum's supervision the Kafranbel office has 
evolved from a drafty concrete-and-plywood 
dungeon into something of a geeky casbah. 
There is a small fireplace, a kitchen with 
a candy counter, free cigarettes and tea. 
Rich red, embroidered curtains insulate 
the rooms. Staffers seated on tasseled cush- 
ions handle Twitter, Facebook and broadcast 
algorithms from their laptops. Weekly trivia- 
contest winners come in to claim prizes and 
be interviewed on the air. 

Out on the street, café workers in the vil- 
lage square try their English on foreigners 
while listening to Follow Me, an on-air lan- 
guage lesson. Down the hill, a boy tunes the 
radio at his family's tire shop. 

"Are they allowed to say that?" the boy 
asks during a Fresh FM news report from 
the front line in Maarat al-Numan, a nearby 
city. His father hushes him and shrugs. "Lis- 
ten. How many dead?" 

Rebels learned the word hero from the 
Enrique Iglesias song of the same name. 
Fresh FM staffers regard Iglesias as the most 
influential Western artist to date and play 
him relentlessly. Salloum prefers Whitney 
Houston—"I Will Always Love You” is his 
favorite song in English—but lets it slide. 
"Tee Rush Rush" by Nasser Deeb also domi- 
nates the station's music blocks. 

From this bunker Salloum works on var- 
ious large-scale nonprofit projects, all of 
which fit into his philosophy of nonviolent 
resistance: constructing a media conference 
center in Kafranbel that will house foreign 
reporters in exchange for public conversa- 
tions with villagers; managing a logistics office 
and a rehabilitation program for wounded 
Syrians in Reyhanli. But he truly loves only 
the radio station. Fresh FM is his jewel. 

Salloum has been sleeping at the station 
to insulate himself from the sound of gov- 
ernment planes and bombs. Years of shelling 
have worn at his nerves. The sound of an 
airplane sometimes plunges him into a panic 
attack. Once, when air strikes shook the 
walls of his basement shelter in the station's 
back room, Salloum went into convulsions. 
His radio colleagues rushed him to a hos- 
риа! for a tranquilizer. 

"This is how we live," Salloum says. "The 
situation tests how much we believe in what 
we are doing." 

No one doubts Salloum's belief. From his 
laptop on a mat on the concrete floor, he 
operates a mobile communications desk. 
Resources from dozens of European and 
American humanitarian organizations— 
money, medicine and ideas—are rerouted 
based on Salloum's assessment of the situa- 
tion on the ground. It is his job because he 
can give those assessments in English and 


Arabic. He is trusted for his intelligence, 
humility and ability to break a project into 
manageable tasks. Salloum is like many of 
the young nonprofit workers from such 
places as Colorado and northern Califor- 
nia. Fashionably unkempt, unusually blunt 
(he once introduced himself to an Ameri- 
can nonprofit worker by asking, "Why are 
you so fat?"), an introverted virgin married 
to the undulating international conversa- 
tion of tweets and blog posts that he sees 
swelling like an ocean wave. That's the idea, 
anyway, and Salloum, the man behind the 
most listened-for voice on the radio waves 
in Idlib province, is an idea man. 

It was Salloum and fellow Kafranbel activ- 
ist Raed Fares who spent three months in 
Gaziantep, Turkey in the spring of 2013 
learning radio-broadcast techniques in work- 
shops funded by a nonprofit organization. 
Afterward, the pair used $5,000 and an out- 
dated laptop to produce a signal just strong 
enough to reach the FM dial on radios in 
local cars, shops and back rooms, where lis- 
teners anxiously awaited the day's war tally. 
(Today, Fresh FM's director of programming 
estimates the audience has grown to around 
90,000 listeners spread among the station in 
Kafranbel and satellites in Saraqeb—another 
village in Idlib—and Gaziantep.) 

To keep Fresh FM on-air from eight a.m. to 
one A.M., Salloum and Fares recruited Ahmed 
al-Bayoosh, a soft-spoken Kafranbel social- 
media guru. Bayoosh fills his days combing 
the web as their in-house statistician, analyz- 
ing battle results and counting war dead and 
missing people. Stone-faced, six-foot-three 
Abdullah “the Truck” al-Hamaadi came 
aboard as the de facto bouncer. They hired 
Hamood Juneid as a news reporter for his 
fearlessness—and for his black motorcycle, 
which carries him to stories both on- and off- 
road. Juneid knows everyone and greets all 
soldiers on the front lines, regardless of their 
rank or affiliation, the same way: “Kifak ya 
ars?” (“What's up, pimp?”) 

As Fresh FM grew, the staffers ate together, 
fed the chickens in the backyard together and 
smoked endless packs of cigarettes together. 
Fares grew into his role at the organization 
and even built a following in the United 
States after the Boston Marathon bomb- 
ing. In a photo he posted online, Kafranbel 
residents hold a banner: BOSTON BOMBINGS 
REPRESENT A SORROWFUL SCENE OF WHAT HAPPENS 
EVERY DAY IN SYRIA. DO ACCEPT OUR CONDO- 
LENCES. The culture-bridging message went 
viral, and Fares was quoted everywhere from 
The New York Times to BuzzFeed to NPR. 

If Fares was the backbone of Fresh FM, 
Salloum was the beating heart. Last summer, 
for the station's first broadcast, it was Sal- 
loum behind the microphone. For the first 
time in more than 40 years there would be 
a voice on the Syrian airwaves that sounded 
Idlibian. And that voice could say anything. 
His trembled. 

“This was the first time anyone in Kaf- 
ranbel heard a voice on the radio in their 
accent,” recalls Salloum, “the first time there 
was a voice from outside Damascus.” 

Salloum knew what happened to peo- 
ple who spoke out of turn. They were 
kidnapped by the regime and tortured, or 
shot in the night, as his uncle had been. 


The regime doesn't take criticism; it takes 
people away, Salloum thought. He leaned 
in toward the microphone. 

“Hello, І am Osama. I hope someone 
is listening.” 

Then he played Fairuz. 


SONGS OF WAR 


The fall olive harvest yielded less than in the 
two previous years of fighting, explain the 
tattered growers by the highway in Idlib. 
Those who worked the harvest last year are 
dead or haunted by the dead and dressed as 
though for mourning. Long, open stretches 
of soil set aside for vegetables are left half 
tilled in Hama. On the outskirts of the vil- 
lage of Kafra, a line of rebels pray in one 
such field before they attack an outpost 
manned by soldiers of the Assad regime. 
There is no cover from return fire because 
the trees have been razed for firewood. 
Commanders announce that the wounded 
will be left where they lie. Fighters ask God 
to guide bullets into their heads or not at all. 

"It's like going to work. We shoot at 
them. They shoot back. We have lunch. 
Sometimes they send a tank. We have tea,” 
says Abdul, 34, a sniper perched in a crum- 
bling villa in Maarat al-Numan. Abdul used 
to be a carpenter. 


He and five other men run from apart- 
ment to apartment in what were once luxury 
complexes, through man-size holes smashed 
in the walls, taking shots at regime soldiers 
and running for cover. The best cover is to 
shoot through two rooms at a target. The 
rebels move with the sun, searching for 
unbroken shafts of light that cut though 
the collapsed concrete. 

Hameed, a heavy machine gunner, has a 
saying: “Walla len kayiff” (“Tomorrow will be 
better”). When the heavy winter sky mutes 
the sun or when the fire dies before every- 
опе is warm: Walla len kayiff. 

The television in a sandwich shop 
plays Orient News, clips of gunfire and 
government-enforced starvation in Damascus, 
Hama and refugee camps. The sound of the 
TV overlaps rifle bursts from outside, some- 
where in the night. Rebel fighters chewing on 
dry shawarma sandwiches don't even blink. 
It has been a blessed day. The daily air strike 
that put a hole in the city center wounded 
only three. Two of the men were rushed to the 
hospital —one with a lacerated neck, the other 
with shrapnel wounds; he lost most of his large 
intestine in surgery. The third cursed God 
aloud moments after the bomb hit and was 
beaten unconscious by witnesses for apostasy. 

“They shouldn't have done that,” says 
Ahmad Saoud, a commander of one of the 


largest brigades of the Free Syrian Army in 
the city. “It’s getting cold. The people need 
their God close.” 

According to UN reports, since the con- 
flict began, more than 100,000 Syrians have 
been killed, many of them members of the 
Free Syrian Army, a disconnected collection 
of brigades fighting for a freer, more dem- 
ocratic Syria. Until recently, the generally 
ragtag group was plagued by petty bickering 
over weapons and funding, often resorting 
to extortion. They were outgunned from the 
start by Assad's government, which has used 
chemical weapons, planes, helicopters, tanks 
and even starvation to terrorize civilians. 

Then, in January 2012, the Al Qaeda- 
funded group Jabhat al-Nusra entered Syria 
with hundreds of foreign jihadist fighters 
hardened by guerrilla battle in Chechnya, 
Kosovo, Iraq and Afghanistan. The group's 
militant Islamic ethics set it apart from mod- 
erate Syrians, but its savage efficacy earned 
respect. In the past two years, al-Nusra has 
been credited with several rebel victories, 
including the seizure of a massive govern- 
ment weapons-storage facility reported to 
be the second largest in the country. While 
the group’s abilities were not questioned, 
its motives were. 

“Al-Nusra fighters are here for jihad. 
They're not revolutionaries. They're not 


You REALLY SHOULD ФЕТ THAT 
THANG А WATERPROOF CASE. 


PLAYBOY 


136 


fighting for Syrian rights, but they can 
definitely fight,” says Layth al-Midani, a 
Syrian American nonprofit worker who 
routinely deals with rebel groups to facili- 
tate aid distribution. 

The arrival of Jabhat al-Nusra caused 
a shift in the war. The revolutionary ideas 
behind the uprising took a backseat to the 
centuries-old conflict between Syria's Sunnis 
and the Alawite sect to which Assad belongs. 
By last fall, the democratic revolution had 
morphed into a Sunni fight to eliminate 
Alawites and Assad's Shia backers in Iran, 
the kafir—the infidels. The struggle was no 
longer a fight for free speech, but what were 
outgunned, war-weary Syrians to do? 

What they did was sign on. The melan- 
choly al-Nusra war song replaced the old 
revolution songs as one of the most pop- 
ular tunes in northern Syria. People sang 
it while they worked: “Greetings to Jabhat 
al-Nusra-ah-ah/Over apostates we will 
tri-uh-uh-uh-umph.” 

Midani hums the song while sorting bags 
full of donated clothing for refugees in 
Hama. The dry air carries the sound toward 
two boys wobbling down the road with a tub 
of dirty water in the refugee camp near the 
village of Atmah. A kilometer from an illegal 
path across the Turkey-Syria border, a man 
selling sodas, belts and socks sings it loudly, 
hitting every note. 


SONG OF THE CARROTS 


When a new homegrown war single pops 
up on YouTube, Ahmed, a long-haired 
25-year-old misanthrope, hears it at his small 
marble ranch house іп Reyhanli, a lifetime 
away from the violence that surrounds his 
Syrian home in Aleppo, where his brother 
led a brigade of rebel fighters. Ahmed and 
the rest of the family have moved to Tur- 
key for safety. Besides, Ahmed thinks the 
war is stupid. Wearing one of his three Pink 
Floyd T-shirts, he shuffles cards and repeats 
his mantra, “War sucks, man. No chicks,” 
between drags on a cigarette. 

The nonprofit workers he plays cards 
and smokes hash with claim Ahmed spent 
a few weeks fighting after the war began but 
soon quit. He played guitar a little and wrote 
songs until he quit that too. 

Ahmed has visited Aleppo a few times 


7 
IM FEELING LISTLESS, 
DOCTOR. ITS AFFECTING 

MY SEX LIFE..MEN 
ARENTAS INTERESTED, 


since—not to fight but out of sheer bore- 
dom. The first time he went back, regime 
soldiers who controlled the city captured 
and beat him, telling him that if they saw his 
face again he would disappear forever. They 
handcuffed him and threw him against the 
wall, demanding he hold still for a mug shot. 

“Can І have six little ones and one big one 
for my living room?” Ahmed asked. The sol- 
diers beat him again. 

Ahmed knows where to find whores 
and hash but still complains that refugee 
life lacks luster. There's nothing to do in 
Reyhanli. (With the influx of refugees and 
foreign fighters traveling to and from Syria, 
Reyhanli has tripled in size since 2011.) He 
hates Turkish food. Honking motorcades 
clog the streets whenever there's a wedding, 
and some weeks there are two or three a day. 
Partiers lean out of passenger windows to 
fire AK-47 rounds into the air. 

“They're taking our money and getting 
married,” Ahmed says. “Fucking losers.” 

He spends most days getting high and 
playing cards while execution videos play in 
the next room. He waits for bad news about 
friends to trickle in from beyond the border. 
Mostly he listens to music. 

One song in particular has been in his 
head since last May. He sings it as he shuf- 
fles a deck. The song is from a YouTube 
video of Free Syrian Army brigade com- 
mander Hassan al-Jazar, whose last name 
means “the carrot.” Jazar led one of the 
most secular FSA brigades in the city— 
Shuhada Badr, or Martyrs of the Full Moon. 
Known as the stoner brigade, Shuhada Badr 
became hometown-famous for a shaky You- 
Tube video showing a dozen or so fighters 
puffing and passing a joint while singing 
in Arabic, “We are the Carrots, we are the 
Carrots/ Hassan al-Jazar raised us.” 

Jazar was a notably corrupt leader who 
robbed, accepted bribes and was rumored 
to be behind several daylight kidnappings. 
But the Carrots were the real face of the 
Syrian conflict. Some of the small assem- 
bly of 400 Carrots were at the top of their 
medical-school class; there were also college 
dropouts, clerks, actors, rock musicians. 
They were young men who trolled for for- 
eign women online and liked smoking hash, 
according to Omar, 23, an Aleppo fighter 
who had friends in Jazar's brigade. “They 


WHY DONT 
YOU DIET? 


were the true Syrians,” he says, chain- 
smoking on a carpet in Reyhanli. 

That was before fighters from ISIS (Islamic 
State of Iraq and al-Sham) arrived. An out- 
growth of Jabhat al-Nusra, ISIS brought 
military precision and militant Islamic beliefs 
to the battle. At first welcomed by revolution- 
aries as skilled reinforcements, ISIS spread 
“like a virus,” says Juma al-Qassim, a media 
representative for the Free Syrian Army. 

ISIS quickly cordoned off a large swath 
of northern Syria, turning it into a caliphate 
complete with sharia courts that regularly 
handed down death sentences. ISIS forces 
set up a system of tightly controlled high- 
way checkpoints stemming from Aleppo to 
nearly all the major liberated cities and their 
outlying villages. These checkpoints turned 
entire communities into jihadist islands 
presided over by ISIS emirs—judges who 
were either indoctrinated native Syrians or 
appointed by cronies. 

The presence of ISIS quickly wore on 
native Syrians. ISIS gunmen routinely 
attacked shopkeepers, forcing them to hand 
over cartons of cigarettes to be burned in 
the street because the ISIS brand of Islam 
deems smoking haram—forbidden—and a 
distraction from religious practices. For the 
residents of Idlib, where nonsmokers are 
practically as rare as unicorns, it was a cul- 
tural slap in the face. 

All this weighs on Ahmed. “I have to 
do something. I'm sick of running, man. 
Maybe ГИ fight for a while, then I don't 
know,” he says. 

Last November ISIS executed Jazar, the 
Carrots’ commander, after nearly a month 
in captivity in Aleppo. His and the corpses of 
several of his closest men were tossed into a 
landfill on the outskirts of town. Ahmed has 
watched Jazar’s execution from two angles 
on YouTube. Jazar kneels, second from the 
right in a line of prisoners, surrounded by 
black-masked onlookers. The executioner 
reads a list of offenses before shooting him 
in the back of the head. 

“Не kept calling Jazar ‘brother, over and 
over,” Ahmed says. 

Some of the Carrots who didn't die with 
Jazar were hunted down. Most are in hiding 
or have taken up with other brigades. The 
Carrots’ anthem disappeared, replaced by 
songs no longer the product of silly, hopeful 


WHAT COLOR 
WOULD YOU 
SUGGEST? 


REALLY! 


YOU THINK 


young men sounding ош freedom over a 
toke. That part of the war is over. 

Now Ahmed watches a YouTube ver- 
sion of the ISIS anthem “Where Are Our 
Days?”—a solemn dirge that ominously 
marches along: “Alawites be patient/We are 
coming to slaughter you.” In the video, a 
young boy sits on a soldier's shoulders and 
sings while gesturing with a Knife as though 
cutting the throat of an infidel. 

“No one sings revolution songs anymore,” 
Omar says. “Now we sing for jihad.” 


SONGS OF JIHAD 


When I meet him, Yousef and six other FSA 
soldiers are cramming into a tiny sedan, en 
route to Gaziantep’s strobe-lit casinos to 
buy prostitutes. But you'd never know it. 
The men look like pious sectarians, wearing 
beards over traditional Islamic garb. They 
are native Syrians, yet they worry that ques- 
tioning at an ISIS checkpoint could lead to 
detainment, a sharia trial and execution. 
Before driving away, the men explain the 
best way to pass unhindered: traditional 
clothing, an AK-47 on the shoulder and 
the shahada—“There is no god but God and 
Muhammad is his messenger”—on the lips. 

“Every day there are Syrians executed 
in Aleppo. Foreigners executing us,” says 
Yousef, shaking his head. 

Checkpoint-speckled arteries separate 
the “state of Aleppo,” as the ISIS-controlled 
territory is referred to, from the rest of 
Syria. The black flag of the Islamic prophet 
Muhammad, which ISIS adopted as its sym- 
bol, flies against the gray sky. “They control 
who comes in, who goes out, everything. It's 
their land,” says Mohammed, a refugee, over 
coffee at the Hotel Alice café in Reyhanli. 

The Koran prophesies that the union of 
Syria with Jordan, Palestine and Lebanon 
preempts a bloody war between Muslims 
and nonbelievers. “They believe it is written; 
that’s why they come,” says Mohammed. 

After ISIS occupied his village, Moham- 
med stopped shaving and in public began 
to use a miswak—a small twig for cleaning 
teeth—which, according to Islamic stories, 
the prophet Muhammad (peace be upon his 
soul) recommends. 

Mohammed also keeps two jihadist songs 
on his cell phone: “They Made a Promise,” 
which features the chorus “The Assad fight- 
ers made a promise/Then we came and 
killed them all”; and “Time to Be Mujahi- 
deen,” with the chorus “We wished for years 
for the time we could be mujahideen /Hoo- 
ray for militant Islamic actions in Palestine, 
the Philippines, Chechnya and America.” 
He plays them in the car to help ease his 
way through ISIS checkpoints. 

“You have to look like them, act like 
them,” he says. 

Mohammed and Yousef have never 
met, but they have much in common. 
Both men were raised in small Syrian vil- 
lages in the north. Both still have family 
in those villages who now struggle to find 
food. During the protests that sparked 
the revolution, both remember singing 
“Jaana, Jaana, Jaana,” a slow, hypnotic 
revolution song. Jaana means “paradise,” 
and the chorus soars, “Paradise, paradise, 


paradise, our country is paradise.” Both 
men have forgotten the rest of the lyrics. 


THE LAST SONG 


Some nights, when the war came close, 
members of the Fresh FM family slept at 
the radio station, pressed along the concrete 
wall next to Salloum. 

The war was getting close to my guide 
and me as well. On December 4, Yasser 
Faisal al-Jumaili, an Iraqi freelance journal- 
ist from Fallujah, was shot dead at an ISIS 
checkpoint in Idlib less than 60 kilometers 
from the Turkish border. FSA fighters who 
broke the news to us speculated that it was 
related to his Western dress. They also indi- 
cated that we could be next. 

My editor advised me to get out and wired 
money for a plane ticket. I just had to make 
it safely out of Syria and into Turkey. So days 
later, we passed through an ISIS checkpoint, 
stowed in the back of a gutted ambulance. 
The air dipped below freezing as we waited 
for hours at the border crossing into Tur- 
key. Next to us, two Syrian women cradled 
sick infants. Tiny bare blue feet stuck out of 
each woman's colorful bundle. They sang 
soft lullabies, though their cracked lips were 
strained by the cold. Our ride out of Syria 
showed up that night. Theirs did not. 

On December 28 the war caught up with 
Fresh FM while Salloum was in Turkey. 
Shortly before midnight, 25 armed militants 
in ski masks stormed the building and forced 
their way into the radio station. They held 
six people at gunpoint, including Juneid, 
Hamaadi and Bayoosh, and demanded that 
radio staffers hand over any foreign journal- 
ists staying in the compound. By this time, 
there were none. Angered, the militants 
shouted sectarian insults at their six bound 
hostages: unholy, infidel, enemy of God, kafır. 

“When they called them kafi; we knew 
they were ISIS,” Salloum says. 

The intruders ransacked Fresh FM, taking 


everything from computers, generators and 
broadcast equipment to coffee, tea and candy. 
They emptied staffers’ pockets, scrounging 
for lighters. Then they loaded the hostages 
into trucks and drove them out of Kafranbel 
to what many assumed would be their death. 

I hope someone is listening. 

The Syrian people answered Salloum. 
After news of the raid spread, demonstra- 
tions exploded on Kafranbel's streets. Protest 
signs blasted ISIS, as well as the Assad gov- 
ernment. Local Syrians were now united 
behind two goals: to oust Bashar al-Assad 
and to oust the sectarian agenda of Al Qaeda. 

On January 3 native rebel groups across 
Syria unleashed an organized offensive 
against ISIS, eventually seizing its head- 
quarters in Aleppo. Many cited the raid on 
Fresh FM as a reason for the attack. 

These days, the roads in Idlib are relatively 
free of checkpoints. It’s a calm drive for Sal- 
loum from Reyhanli, past the Byzantine ruins, 
up above the valley walls to Kafranbel, even 
though he knows the war isn’t over. Planes 
still roar overhead, and peril still lurks around 
every corner—especially for those who have 
introduced themselves on the radio. In late 
January unknown assailants gunned down 
Fresh FM co-founder Fares near his home. Of 
the approximately 60 AK-47 rounds fired at 
him, one landed in Fares's abdomen, another 
in his shoulder. Neighbors heard the gunfire 
and carried Fares to the hospital. 

In February Salloum tells me over Skype 
that though Fares has not fully recovered, he 
will make it. So will the radio station. Fairuz, 
Enrique Iglesias and Nasser Deeb are back 
on the air, filling the space between news 
reports. Salloum is back in Kafranbel, meet- 
ing with his radio family, tweaking broadcast 
copy and chain-smoking. 

He runs one hand through his graying 
hair and sighs. “You have to be patient to 
work in a place that will explode." 


“We ran out of salted nuts.” 


137 


PLAYBOY 


138 


IGGY P ОР ымын 


of living in a trailer was that I learned to 
be civilized. Three people, day and night, 
in a 500-square-foot trailer—and that was 
the biggest one we ever had. Before that it 
was 400 square feet. My parents were very 
restrained people. There was no alcohol in 
the house. In fifth or sixth grade 1 got into 
music. If that hadn't happened, I'd probably 
be a fundamentalist preacher right now, a 
Jimmy Swaggart. "Send your dollars to me!" 


Q9 

PLAYBOY: After people meet you, they often 
say, "Oh, he was nothing like I expected." Do 
they expect a drooling, screaming zombie? 

ror: Some people do. When you're young- 
er, you're coming at everybody because 
you've got to show them who you are, and 
prove it. Later, if you get anywhere, it flips; 
they're all coming at you. You get crazy 
people coming at you. There's always some 
weirdness. The classic one is, I don't get 


a limo driver; he's a conga player. I don't 
get a plumber; he's a playwright. Long 
ago, during my different bachelor periods, 
some sexual partners didn't understand. 
They'd say, "Come on, you're Iggy Pop. 
Whip me! Beat me! Hurt me, hurt me." 


Q10 

PLAYBOY: So what is your taste in sex? 

рор: It runs dark. [laughs] I like darker 
tones. Skin tones and all the stuff that goes 
with the skin tone. But I'm not going to do 
a rundown. Sorry. Г am more private now 
than I formerly was. 


11 
PLAYBOY: Here's de thing that goes 
against type: You have an art collection, right? 
рор: When I was living in New York in 
the 1990s, the Broadway dancer Geoffrey 
Holder had a great Haitian art collection. 
He auctioned it off in Sotheby's basement, 
and I'd loved that art all my life. I was newly 
separated and felt like spending my money 
on something / liked. “I’m not going to have 


any 'family discussions' about this!" I went to 
Sotheby's and got quite a few things Geof- 
frey had. Hector Hyppolite is the most fi- 
nancially valuable of all Haitian artists, and 
I have one of his pieces through Geoffrey. 
I got a couple of Edouard Duval-Carriés, 
some Andre Pierres and George Liautauds. 
I can sit with a painting or sculpture for 
hours the way someone else watches a favor- 
ite TV show. I don't need things to move. 


Q12 

PLAYBOY: You probably don't take Orange 
Sunshine before shows these days. Are you 
done with booze and drugs? 

por: I drink red wine now. I'm partial to 
Bordeaux and Barolos. But I'm stone- 
cold sober on the job. Always. For the first 
five years of this century, I used—Zantac? 
Xanax? No, that's different. It's on TV; you 
get it at Walgreens for ladies to help them 
do their housework faster. Legal speed. 
I'd take one of those when I was doing the 
Stooges. Before that I was drinking three 
Red Bulls before a show, and I'd be burp- 
ing and sloshing around. I've been on the 
natch now, onstage, for about eight years. I 
have two or three big espressos in the after- 
noon in the hotel before work. That gets me 
awake enough to care. The person I am now 
couldn't write "I'm Sick of You" and record 
it with the same authority I had in 1977. If 
I did, people would be embarrassed for me. 


Q13 
PLAYBOY: What award would you like to win? 
POP: I have an assistant, and when we 
haven't spoken for a few days, I call him and 
ask, "Hey, Spencer, did I get the Nobel Prize 
yet?" And he says, "Nope." That would be 
good. Think of all the peace that has been 
caused by me and the Stooges, running 
around the world and calming things down 
by acting out all this violent stuff. 


Q14 
PLAYBOY: You've written a lot of songs about 
death, and last year's Stooges album was 
called Ready to Die. What will the first sen- 
tence of your obituary say? 

por: Oh dear. They'll probably call me "in- 
ventor of the stage dive.” I have a beach 
house in the Cayman Islands, where there 
are sharks. When Г go swimming 1 think, 
Boy, a shark attack would solve a lot of prob- 
lems. І seriously do not want to go into as- 
sisted living or a nursing home, so I'm hop- 
ing for a shark attack. That would be good. 


015 

PLAYBOY: You appeared recently іп a Chrys- 
ler ad, which surprised some people. You 
also licensed “Lust for Life” to the Royal 
Caribbean cruise line. How do you feel 
about doing commercials? 

ror: I've done quite a few, including for 
car insurance and perfume. Here's the way 
1 feel about it: I was angry all through the 
1970s, 1980s and 1990s, because I had to 
suffer through music that was pretending to 
be art but was corrupt. It was a commercial 
clothed as art by a businessman with a gui- 
tar, presented by some fat fuck in suspend- 
ers with a baseball cap at some goddamn 
horrible radio station that picks what crap 


people hear. І never did any of that with my 
music. None of it. When 1 do a commer- 
cial, you’re going to know it's a commercial. 
Most people who like what 1 do are aware 
of what I went through and are happy I 
can finally get a roof over my head and get 
paid—in some way, that I get justice. 


16 

PLAYBOY: When did your financial situation 
start to improve? 

pop: I started getting organized in the mid- 
1980s, after David Bowie recorded our song 
“China Girl.” It's still a very good earner. That 
was the beginning of my having any sort of 
success. І bought a place on Bleecker Street, 
and then 1 bought a house in Miami in 1998, 
and I've been there ever since. I lived in New 
York for 20 years. It’s a tough town. I won. 


017 

PLAYBOY: Bowie put out a very good album 
last year, and there have been rumors that 
he has cancer. Can you tell us anything 
about that? 

рор: I can't tell you anything about him 
whatsoever. We last spoke about 10 years 
ago. He called me to do a couple of things 
when he was curating the Meltdown arts 
festival in 2002, but 1 had a schedule con- 
flict. We had a nice chat, and that was that. 


18 

PLAYBOY: People к De were incredu- 
lous when you turned 66 last year. What 
surprises you most about getting older? 
рор: It's not so great! [laughs] Listen, I don't 
recommend getting older as a happiness 
strategy. Most of my life I've been indifferent 
to what other people feel. Now I'm soften- 
ing up a bit. That's surprising. Other than 
that, I miss my parents. I feel I didn’t do 
well enough for them. If I'd had a differ- 
ent career it would've been better for them. 
That bothers me. Especially my mother. 
She passed away in the mid-1990s, when I 
was still one of those obscure American fig- 
ures. I'd show up on some TV show and go, 
“Motherfucker! Motherfucker!" She'd say 
to my dad, "Oh, I wish Jimmy wouldn't say 
‘motherfucker.’” [laughs] I wish she could 
have seen some of my worldly success. 


Q19 
PLAYBOY: Do you collect Social Security? 

рор: No. I was told to wait—apparently the 
amount you get goes up if you wait. I had 
a gut instinct not to depend on the gov- 
ernment. I have three union pensions and 
my own pension. I’m not sure Social Secu- 
rity’s going to be there for me. Eric Cantor 
might say, “No money for you, Iggy Pop!” 


Q20 

PLAYBOY: Do you take advantage of the 
discounted movie tickets? 

рор: No, but my business manager has been 
trying for 16 years to get me to join AARP. 
Every year, he sends me a pamphlet with a 
little note: “Jim, you should really look into 
this. You get some great discounts.” And it 
goes straight in the trash, every year. AARP? 
I don't want to hear about the fucking AARP! 


ВАСКО 


She's а freckle-faced woman with а wispy- 
type mustache that you can't hardly see. Last 
night she had a dream I said something un- 
kind to her and she's been mad all day, won't 
even talk to me. One thing she don't get mad 
about is how I treat her. I've been married 
four times, and I know what women want— 
they want to think their hair looks good, their 
behind isn't big and their shoes are cute. 

A week ago І got the idea of going 
back to Kentucky for the first time in 30 
years, coming home in style with a new 
truck and a new wife and enough money 
to buy a piece of land. We drove two days 
and stopped at a roadhouse just over the 
county line. They didn't used to have bars 
here. Every few years the bootleggers and 
the preachers got in cahoots to keep liquor 
out, but the wet vote finally won. This joint 
had a jukebox, a pool table and a sink in the 
men's room patched with driveway caulk. I 
wanted to find out if my family name was 
still as bad as when I took off. There’s a gob 
of us Tollivers, good ones, bad ones and 
married-in ones. My branch was the worst. 

My wife was still stubbed up over her bad 
dream and wouldn't talk to me. I joined a 
Melungeon-looking man sitting alone, his 
hand pressed to the jukebox. He just smiled 
and nodded with his mouth clamped like 
somebody bored at church. I thought maybe 
he didn’t care for strangers, but the bar- 
tender said the man was deaf and liked to feel 
the vibrations. I played songs with a heavy 
bass beat and put my hand on the other end 
of the jukebox. We sat there looking at each 
other and I thought about the advantages of 
being deaf. For one thing I wouldn't have 
to listen to my wife not talking to me. Her 
silence was loud as a bowling alley. 

I ordered another bourbon and at- 
tempted conversation with the bartender, 
a big man wearing a T-shirt with a pocket 
puffed out from a can of dip. He moved to 
the far end of the bar to watch reality on 
TV. Me, I like my reality out in the world, 
but I kept that to myself. I tried talking to 
my wife, but she’d drawed back into her- 
self. She is younger than me and wears 
halter tops with tattoos poking out of the 
cloth part. She's got a wild streak that every 
fool before me tried to tamp down, but I 
don't believe in that sort of thing. She has 
a right to live how she pleases. Out in El 
Paso one time she took her clothes off and 
went swimming at a backyard pool party. 
I'm pretty sure some cowboys wanted to 
put the blocks to her but were too scared to 
try it. They knew I went about armed with 
a snub-nose .38, nothing fancy, a gun you 
could find at any swap meet. 

An older couple came through the 
door. The man wore a feed-store cap high 
enough on his head to show the bald spot 
he was trying to hide. They went straight 
to a table. He circled the chair twice like a 
dog ready to settle in while she unloaded 
her purse—a pack of long skinny ciga- 
rettes, a compact and a little plastic packet 
of photos. I told the bartender to put their 
drinks on my tab and raised my glass to 
them. He lifted a finger off his glass like a 


rural driver giving a wave. I figured I'd let 
them drink for a while before going over 
and seeing if they knew my family. 

My wife got tired of sulking in the corner 
and sat beside me like we were old bud- 
dies. That storm raging through her head 
had moved on down the road. She looked 
at the couple and pursed her lips to point 
at them, a habit she picked up from living 
with Indians out West. 

“You think they have sex?” she said. 

“I don't know. Probably not.” 

“Then what’s the point of them being 
together?” 

“Maybe they're happy,” I said. 

“You mean the reason why we have a lot 
of sex is we're not happy?” 

“No, I'm talking about them. Not us.” 

“Are you happy?” she said. 

I took a drink of bourbon and branch, 
thinking how best to go on. Her questions 
generally come in the yes or no variety, and 
either answer might set her off. It’s like 
talking to a cop, the only group of people I 
don’t much care for. 

“Reckon I’m like anybody,” I said. 
“Happy when I got something I want. Not 
happy if I don’t. It comes and goes.” 

“What I mean is are you happy in gen- 
eral. And with me?” 

“In general, no. With you, mostly. With 
our sex, always.” 

I grinned to myself, figuring I'd got out 
of that little trap pretty good. She finished 
her drink in one long swallow. 

“Let's have sex,” she said. 

“The closest motel's 20 miles away.” 

“I was thinking of the truck.” 

She gathered herself as if marching ой 
to join a parade and headed straight for 
the door. 1 dropped a 20 on the bar and 
followed her into the yellow dirt parking 
lot. Dusk was drifting into the tree line, 
but the August heat draped over me like 
a heavy coat. My truck was full-size with a 
toolbox bolted in the bed. І had a gun rack 
for a while, but the strap gave out and if 
I braked hard, the fake mahogany swung 
forward and hit me in the back of the head. 
One night Га had enough and threw it in 
the ditch and went on. 

An old pickup eased in the lot, pulling 
a dented horse trailer, sending up a cloud 
of dust that coated the world with another 
layer of dirt. Two boys got out of the truck, 
brothers by the looks of them, long-haired 
with boots and jeans and sleeveless shirts. 
The driver checked on his load. The trailer 
was too small and the horse stood sideways 
with its head hunkered down. I felt sorry 
for the animal but figured that rig was 
the best those boys could do. The driver 
headed for the bar. The other one came to- 
ward us in a shambling walk like someone 
who'd forgotten how to use his legs then 
got cured by a preacher. 

“Hidy,” he said. "I'm Bill. His retarded 
brother." 

"Uh-huh," I said. "Nice to meet you." 

He stared at my wife, something she's 
used to on account of that red hair and 
freckles spread over her face like little 
spots of clay. The driver joined us. He 
was about 16 and his clothes were too big 


on him. I wondered what it was like to 139 


PLAYBOY 


140 


wear hand-me-downs from a big brother 
like his. 

“Don’t pay him any mind,” the young 
one said. “He's Bill my retarded brother.” 

“Yeah,” I said, “he was just telling me that.” 

“15 that a mustache?” Bill said to my wife. 

Quick as a lizard, the young one slapped 
Bill in the back of the head. 

“Don't talk that way,” he said. 

"I'm sorry,” Bill said. “Okay, I'm sorry.” 
Then he turned to his brother. “Are you 
sorry you hit me?” 

“Yes, І am. Come on now, let's go in.” 

The young one headed toward the bar 
with Bill following like a pup. 

“Hey,” I said. “You ain't going to let him 
drink, are you?” 

“No,” the young one said. “But he's old 
enough to buy for me.” 

I half wanted to go inside with them, 
but my wife had the truck door open. The 
low sun streaked her skin like flame. I got 
in the passenger side and set one foot on 
the floorboards and stretched my other leg 
across the bench seat. The sun slid down 
the sky, leaving stripes of red above the tree 
line. The sound of katydids kicked in, and 
a rain crow moaned from a field. 

My wife had my pants open and was 
working me pretty good, then got the no- 
tion to try and tickle my prostate. She’d 
mentioned it a time or two and I said no 
way. Га had a medical exam along those 
lines, and that was all I needed of that par- 
ticular matter. But she wouldn't let the idea 
alone. Every couple of weeks she'd pick 
back up on it, reciting stuff she'd read on 


the internet—how it would increase the 
pleasure of orgasm. I told her I didn't have 
no complaints about the regular kind. 

I felt the pickup truck shift a little in the 
back. I kind of got distracted from my wife. 
Тһе truck rocked again and I figured some- 
body had climbed into the bed. I stretched 
my neck to see out the rear window, while 
reaching for the glove box. I eased it open 
and took hold of the .38. The effort forced 
a little grunt out of me, and my wife must 
have took that as a sign of encouragement 
because she started whirling her finger 
where I didn't want no whirling to happen. I 
felt the truck move slightly to the passenger 
side. A big hand pressed against the window, 
then the shadow of a face. I aimed my pistol 
and was getting ready to sing out a warn- 
ing, when my wife shoved her finger right 
up my backside and I shot wild through the 
window. The sound was terrible in the cab. 
My wife stopped what she was doing. 

"What the eff?" she said. "What the 
fucking eff?" 

I got out and leveled my gun. Bill sat in 
the truck bed, staring at his bloody palm. 
Window glass lay in his hair like a chande- 
lier. I sobered up quick because shooting 
somebody, even a retarded man in Ken- 
tucky, would put me crossways with the law. 

Across the narrow lot, the horse was hol- 
lering to beat the band, kicking against the 
gate. I saw Bill's brother run from the bar 
to the trailer and open the gate. The horse 
came bucking out, scared by gunfire, and 
galloped down the road. Bill clambered 
out of my truck holding his hand, saying, 


"Raises are based on merit. And who gives me the best hand job." 


"Okay, I'm sorry. Okay, I'm sorry. Okay, 
I'm sorry." 

Тһе bartender came outside with a shot- 
gun. Beside him stood the couple carrying 
the drinks I'd bought and I sent them a kind 
of half wave, which they failed to return. The 
deaf Melungeon peered through the win- 
dow and I wondered if he felt the vibration 
from all the gunfire. The horse sure had. It 
was out of sight and the two brothers were 
walking down the road after it. The younger 
one was wrapping Bill's shirt around his 
wound. I knew a man who shot himself in 
the hand while loading a flindock rifle and 
managed to fire the ramrod through his 
palm and into the air. He came out of it fine 
and I figured Bill would too. He probably 
didn't use his hand much but running it 
down his pants while window peeping. 

My wife scooted across the seat to the 
passenger side and I circled the truck and 
got behind the wheel. 

“We got to book it, baby,” I said. 

"No," she said. “We need to help those 
boys." 

"That's not a real good idea, I don't 
think." 

"Their horse is loose on account of us. 
We owe them." 

I pulled the ignition key from my pocket 
and didn't speak. 

"Do I ask you for much?" she said. "Do I 
ask you for anything?" 

She tipped her head and lifted her 
eyebrows, stretching freckles as the skin 
pulled. A tiny shard of glass clung to her 
mustache. I brushed it away. 

“Not really," I said. “No.” 

“Nothing,” she said. “No ring. No 
clothes. No shoes.” 

“I give you everything anyway.” 

“I know it,” she said. “You're nice. But 
I'm asking now." 

Тһе bartender had gone back inside and 
I figured he was already on the phone to 
the law. 

"Please," she said. 

"On one condition," I said. “Мо more of 
that finger business." 

I putthe gun in the glove box and drove. 
The light was sliding away, dark already in 
the east, the air in the woods black as a cow's 
insides. I swerved to pass the brothers, but 
my wife made me pick them up. Bill was 
scared until she said he could sit up front 
and he grinned as if it was a special treat. 
He held his hurt hand on his lap, wrapped 
in the bloody shirt. When he started in say- 
ing "I'm sorry," my wife hushed him by 
saying that we were all sorry. 

Half a mile farther we found the horse 
cropping grass, its coat gleaming with 
sweat, a long line of slobber running from 
its mouth. It was older than I'd thought, 
swaybacked and slow, and seemed more 
relieved than skittish when Bill got out. 
He began singing "Happy Birthday" in 
a rough whisper, out of key. His brother 
said it was the only song he knew. Hold- 
ing the bridle in his good hand, Bill led 
the horse along the road back to the bar. 
My wife walked with him. I followed in the 
truck, riding the brake against the high 
idle and wasting gas. The little brother 
rode with me. 


“How'd Bill get shot?" he said. 

“I ain't for sure,” I said. “Could’ve 
been somebody in the woods. Maybe he 
shot hisself.” 

“He don't have a gun.” 

“That shows good sense,” I said. “What's 
that horse’s name anyhow?” 

“I don’t know,” he said. “We just traded 
for him today. Aim to sell it in Mount Ster- 
ling. Now that money'll go straight to the 
doctor's bill.” 

A sad look came in his eyes and I saw a 
way out of things, maybe not a full way out 
but a little shortcut. 

“I might could use a horse,” I said. 

“It’s a good one,” he said. “That trailer 
hitch’ll fit this truck." 

We hemmed and hawed and by the time 
we got to the bar, we'd settled on a price 
that was higher than a cat's back. I didn't 
want a horse, don't even like them much. 
They're for bigwigs over in Lexington, 
but I felt kindly bad for shooting the boy’s 
brother and ended up owning a horse. 

A late-model Crown Victoria sat in the 
tavern lot, solid white with black trim and 
black wheels and a spotlight on the driver's 
side. I parked beside the boys' truck. We 
switched the trailer to my rig and loaded 
the horse. A fat man, six feet tall, came out 
ofthe bar. He wore a Stetson and boots and 
official clothes with no necktie. We all stood 
in the lot watching each other. I didn't want 
to talk first. Cops take that as a bad sign. 

"How'd Bill hurt his hand?" the cop 
finally said. 

My wife spoke before anyone else. 

"I shot him," she said. 

"Say you did?" the c 
at Bill. "That right, so: 

"I'm sorry," Bill said. "Okay, I'm sorry." 

He held out his hurt hand. The shirt 
wrapped it like a puff pastry with strawberry 
filling. A little breeze came out of the trees. 
Тһе horse stomped twice, rattling th t 
floorboards. I stared hard at my wife, trying 
to figure out what she was up to. There was 
no telling. She'd have made a good spy. 

“He kinda grabbed at me,” she said. "I 
did it without thinking." 

"Say he grabbed at you?" the cop said. 

"Yeah, at my bosom." 

Nobody said anything. The cop was 
probably thinking the same thing I was, 
that she didn't have a lot of bosom to grab 
at. I got no complaints, though. 

Тһе cop looked at Bill's brother. 

"Is that right, Harry?" he said. "Was Bill 
bothering her?" 

“I don't know. I was in the bar. I went to 
the bathroom and when I came out, Bill 
was outside." 

"Bill," the cop said. "Were you messing 
with that woman any?" 

"I'm sorry," Bill said. "I'm sorry." 

Тһе cop gave me the once-over. He was 
familiar in a vague way and I figured I 
knew his cousins. 

"You got anything to say?" he said to me. 

"I was around the side taking a leak. 
Heard a gunshot and came running." 

"Ain't that handy as a pocket on a shirt," 
the cop said. "Everybody busy draining 
their radiator when a shooting happens." 

He looked at the younger boy. 


said. He looked 


"How bad is Bill hurt?" the cop said. 

"Not too bad. A finger shot off is all." 

Тһе cop lifted his hat and wiped sweat off 
his forehead and spat in the dirt. It was some- 
thing he'd done a thousand times, the sort of 
thing people do to give them time to think. 
He made a clicking sound in his mouth. 

"All right," he said. "Harry, you run Bill 
to the hospital." 

"Bill don't like the hospital," Harry said. 

"Nobody does, son. But that stub gets it- 
self infected and he'll lose a lot more than а 
finger. Go on, now." 

"They nodded and walked to their truck 
and left. I wondered which finger was 
gone. My wife stood by the trailer talking 
to the horse. We'd all had a strange day, 
even the horse. 

“You look a Tolliver,” the cop said. 

“I am,” I said. 

“They's so many of you all, I can't hardly 
keep track.” 

“That's all right,” 1 said. “We can.” 

“Which bunch are you out of?” 

“Up on Clay Creek. I’m Big Joe's first 
boy. What's your name?” 

“Richard Martin,” he said. 

“I went to school with some Martin 
boys.” 

“Son, you went to school with me.” 

“Dickie Lee?” І said. 

He nodded. A grin wrinkled the middle 
of his face, a cockeyed set to his lips, high 
on one side and showing gum. І recog- 
nized him. He'd always had that smile, full 
of mischief the teachers said. 

“You growed some,” I said. 

“And you've gone gray-headed.” 

“Shit fire,” I said. 

“And save matches,” he said. 

We laughed at the ancient joke from 
grade school. Dickie Lee was a year ahead 
of me, fat even then but a lot shorter and 
always laughing. I remembered him get- 
ting beat on by a boy named Dwayne. Га 
thrown rocks at Dwayne till he let up, then 
hid in the woods. 

‘Are you a deputy?” I said. 

“No. A constable.” 

“I didn't know they had them around 
here." 

"It's a new development,” he said. “Sher- 
iff had 12 deputies and it wasn't enough 
and the county wouldn't give him no more. 
"There's four constables now." 

"Why they need so many?" 

"Drugs, son. Meth and oxy." 

"Whatever happened to that boy, 
Dwayne something or other?" 

"Johnson," he said. "Dwayne Johnson." 

“That's it." 

“He left out of here on an assault charge 
and stood gone 20 years. Lived in Florida 
with a different name. Came home for a fu- 
neral and I arrested him. He didn't know 
me from Adam's cat. But I don't forget 
things. You still yet good at throwing rocks?" 

"I'm out of practice." 

"Who's that girl to you?" 

“Му wife." 

"Ugly old bastard like yoi 

"It's a new marriage," I said. 

"I figured that," he said. "You let her 
carry a gun?" 

"It's mine. It's in the glove box." 


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"Concealed is against the law." 

“So is pawing at ladies,” I said. 

“Way I see it, we got a he-said-she-said 
situation.” 

The sun was almost gone and shadows 
lay in patches. I could hear my wife clean 
glass out of the truck cab, the horse stirring 
in the trailer. Either I shouldn't have come 
back or not left in the first place. 

"I'm sorry about your mom,” Dickie 
Lee said. 

“Been 30 years. But seems like no time 
and forever both at once.” 

“I know what you mean. I was over in 
Vanceburg seeing my daddy in a home. 
He’s got the Parkinson.” 

“That's a damn shame, Dickie Lee.” 

“He calls me that. Not many still yet do.” 

“Let's go inside and have a drink.” 

“I don’t fool with cocktails,” he said. 
“But I will take a Ale-8.” 

I fetched my wife and told her not to 
say anything, that it was all taken care of, 
and we went on in the bar. Everyone sat in 
the same place as before. The old couple 
waved this time. The deaf Melungeon was 
in his spot by the jukebox. Like everything 
in Kentucky, not much changed in here, 
no matter what happened. I remembered 
the old joke: What did Jesus say to the 
hillbillies before he died? Don't you all do 
nothing till I get back. 

I ordered bourbon and listened to Dickie 
Lee and my wife chat about dogs, church 
and football. As a Texan she could hold 
her own. I ordered another drink, trying 
to regain that cheerful feeling Га had a 
couple of hours ago. The music quit and 
the Melungeon stirred and my wife went to 
play some songs. Dickie Lee watched her 
go, and it seemed to me he was looking aw- 
ful close when she bent over the jukebox. 
She's got herself a pert little hind-end. 

"She really shoot that boy?" Dickie Lee said. 

“That's what she says.” 

"What do you say?" 

“I try not to disagree with my wife.” 

“That's a good idea in general," he said. 
"But specifics are different." 

“What's that mean?" 

“Could be one thing, could be another.” 

“Yeah,” I said. “What's the other?” 

“Maybe Га like to saw off a piece of that 
girl. Call it square.” 

I wasn't sure if he was joking or not. 
People say whatever they think then get 
stuck with their words later. Anybody can 
go crazy, even constables. 

“Guess you'll want me to throw the horse 
in too,” I said. 

"I'm serious, son,” he said. “Somebody 
shot one of God's children who never hurt 
a soul." 

“What about that he-said-she-said 
business?” 

“Law's a funny thing,” he said. “Best to 
have it on your side in general. But there's 
the specifics. Your window's shot out and 
there's blood in the back. Might be your 
prints on the gun. I’m giving you a chance 
to stay out of the jailhouse.” 

“My family won't like this,” I said. 

“Son,” he said, “you been gone a long 
time. What Tollivers ain't shot each other 
down, I personally took in custody. You're 


a mite short on family to back you up." 

He slid off the stool and ambled to the 
jukebox, waving away the Melungeon man 
as if batting off a gnat. I didn't know what 
to do. I watched him talk to my wife, feel- 
ing trapped and powerless. Her lie had 
doubled back on us and he'd seen through 
it clear as day. I could grab her and run, 
but they'd catch me and lock me up in my 
home county. If I told the truth, I'd wind 
up in jail too. 

I went outside, removed the .38 from 
the glove box and started wiping it with my 
shirttail, then quit. My prints ought to be 
on my own gun. If she stuck with her story, 
she needed to handle it too. I headed back 
across the lot to get her. I met them coming 
out the door. He was red-faced and smirky. 
I gestured with my head for me and her to 
talk privately. 

"He said he'd fix it all," she said. 

"Did he offer you anything?" 

"Like what?" 

"Money." 

"No," she said. "I'm not some kind of 
whore." 

"Okay," I said. "I'm sorry." 

"That's what that damn chucklehead said." 

"I thought you liked him." 

"I don't like anybody right now,” she said. 

"I don't want you doing nothing with 
that cop." 

*He knows you shot him. I'm no good 
at lying. What’! happen to me if you go 
to jail?" 

I nodded, trying to think. He could ar- 
rest her for lying to a cop, interfering with 
police business, even some kind of con- 
spiracy. But this way, I'd have something 
on Dickie Lee forever. 

"None ofthat finger stuff with him," I said. 

"Oh," she said. "You like that now?" 

“I just want one thing left for you and 
me only." 

She nodded, then kissed me quick and 
turned away. Her and Dickie Lee got in his 
car, and he drove behind the bar. The en- 
gine sound dropped to idle and the brake 
lights cut out. I tried not to imagine what 
was happening when I heard the suspen- 
sion creak. I wanted to run away. I wanted 
to drink the tavern dry. I couldn't believe 
I'd put my wife in this situation. I'd never 
felt this bad. I sneaked around the edge of 
the building and peeked in the rear win- 
dow. The light was dim. I saw a vast shad- 
owy bulk in the driver's seat and a quick, 
steady movement in the passenger side, 
the slight flash of red hair moving up and 
down. I stared transfixed, hating myself. 

I walked across the front lot to my truck. 
I thought about shooting my finger off. I 
thought about shooting Dickie Lee. Instead 
I opened the trailer gate and sang "Happy 
Birthday" to the horse as it moved backward 
onto the dirt. It lifted its head to stretch from 
the cramped trailer. I slapped the horse on 
its flank and told it to run, but it just side- 
stepped and stared at me. I stomped my 
boot. It wouldn't go and I couldn't bring 
myself to hit it again. Full dark had come 
and the stars were showing. I wondered if 
my wife and I would ever recover, or how. 


аа? 


EL 


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Playboy (ISSN 0032-1478), April 2014, volume 61, number 3. Published monthly except for combined January/February and July August issues by Playboy in national and regional editions, Playboy, 9346 
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