![]() About a decade ago, Simon & Schuster published a collection of some of my profiles called Fly Fishing With Darth Vader: And Other Adventures with Evangelical Wrestlers, Political Hitmen, and Jewish Cowboys. As I got older, so did my former subjects, it turned out. The Goat was my first man down, but he would not be my last. But liver cancer got him at the age of 58, before he could drop the hammer on Huggies. I thought The Goat would have a long, prosperous life, and would go on to sue many other worthy adversaries – perhaps diaper manufacturers for making diapers that caused rashes. It’s often hard for subjects to see themselves in a mirror, let alone some punk reporter’s funhouse version of one. When the story came out, he hated it, or pretended to, taking care to send me a tape of a more positive story done on him by 60 Minutes, telling me this was what real journalism looked like, and that I might ought to study it. We ate sherry-laced turtle soup and calamari stuffed with Gulf shrimp, and drank until we couldn’t feel our legs. The Goat slapped my back and refilled my glass and wouldn’t let me touch a check at his favorite watering hole, a former bordello. ![]() 38 out of his jacket to wave it around for show at a restaurant as we all ducked under the table, even if he was suing the people who made it. He introduced me to his A-Team of ambulance chasers, guys with names like “Alligator Mick,” who pulled a snub nose. When I profiled him years earlier, I was there to do a hit-piece. This was kind of like suing water for being wet, but everybody needs to make a living. He was a swashbuckling New Orleans trial lawyer with a velvet Cajun accent and coprophagous grin who tried to take down entire industries, like the gun manufacturers, for having the gall to make guns that kill people. When I opened the Times, I saw the obit for Wendell “The Goat” Gauthier. The first time this no-duh reality dawned on me, I was coming home on a train from New York. And so, after your subjects expire, your living monument often becomes their headstone, your old story ending up a footnote on their Wikipedia page, as their lives are fitted into the straitjacket of your tossed-off 1’s and 0’s. Time’s perpetual motion machine hurtles us all toward our expiration date. But then you realize lives don’t stay suspended as you captured them in a moment. When you’re young and dumb, you think these subjects will in some way stay in your life forever, or at least that you’ll have the souvenir – the living monument of the story you did on them. (We are always the last to know what the people in our orbit already know about us.) Even if your best friends are probably more onto you than you think. It is sometimes easier to tell a curious stranger things you wouldn’t tell your best friends. ![]() And since you are there to observe and probe, while asking gobs of invasive questions in the hope of painting a more vivid picture, you come to serve as that subject’s confessor: their priest, their bartender, their shrink. For a brief spell, your lives intersect, sometimes intensely. If you’re doing it right, the subjects often get under yours as well. When you make your bones as a profile writer, your life becomes a series of hyper-intense compressed relationships, as you attempt to get under the skin of subjects. ![]() But what I find myself missing most are the dead people. The squealing throngs of lusty women begging for more long-form. The reams of copy paper I used to steal for my home printer. Still, there are things I miss about the old life: the bountiful expense account and travel budget. Most of all, I don’t miss the hostile work environment, with office-mates at the Christmas party drunkenly dancing shirtless on my desk to South Korean boy-band BTS, saying, “Man, these chicks can sing!” (No names. The lone wolf in me enjoys having no editors, or fact-checkers, or even, for the most part, facts. (Maybe I should give them my contacts in Mumbai.)Īs a lifelong magazine writer, I don’t miss much about corporate-media life, if you can call what I did “corporate” - showing up for editorial meetings twice a quarter, then cutting out for a three-hour lunch. If I can help it, here, you will not be getting breaking news, or efficient bullet points, or Axios ’s patented Smart Brevity ™, which sounds like a swell name for a line of British skivvies. (I am in discussions with a Mumbai sweatshop to develop Slack Tide onesies, but these are early days.) I am not, nor will I ever be, a one-man Axios. By now, readers of these missives have likely ascertained that I have no ambitions to become a Media Empire. While I strongly encourage you to keep those subscriptions coming – Daddy’s medicine, Maker’s Mark, isn’t getting any cheaper - there is no HBO companion program, or live-events calendar, or even a merch store.
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