Dateline, Portsmouth RI
Yesterday, after the YMCA team that I coach won their last game of the season in a defensive gem (my boy Kevin playing the role of Ultimate Disruptor!), I got fitted for a tux. The rental shop was very male, and gave off this Esquire vibe of modern manliness. No surprise, their coffee table was full of back issues. So I bragged to the guy fitting me that I have an article coming out in the June issue timed to the release of my book. It will be a look at the Pentagonís New Map a year after Iraq. Mark Warren and I are editing it now.
Anyway, the guy who fitted me up was impressed. I could have said Naval War College, or ìworked for Office of the Secretary of Defense after 9/11,î but I got the distinct feeling (and there is so much anti-Bush feeling everywhere I go) that these lines would have impressed little. Instead, he thought my writing for Esquire was distinctly cool, like a warm, moist breeze from a bottomless Britney or a bikini-clad J Lo Ö.
Which brings me to my own true love, my spouse Vonne, who, in her never-ending attempts to prepare me for the road ahead, is threatening to cut up my 15-year-old black trench coat I got at Fileneís Basement in Boston. Itís my lucky coat, I tell her, which I tore on a door at the Pentagon just before my first great brief in the building to senior admirals back in 1992. The tear doesnít look so bad, since I got that patch stuff that you iron on (I am a child of a child of the Depression) to cover the huge gash off the left pocket. But Vonne is undeterred, and I expect her to start waving my daughterís sewing scissors any minute nowóall Psycho-like.
So my son Kev and I will head to Providence Place Mall to buy me a new cell phone and a new trench coat (to go with my rented tux) later this morning. Then weíll meet up with Vonne and our other two kids. Iíll take the kids to Dave and Busterís for games and food, then a later movie (thinking Hildago), while Vonne will get the afternoon to herself after watching the kids throughout my sojourn with my Dad in WI.
Still, with all this manly improvement going on, it only makes sense to tell my story now about the role Esquire played in getting me to the verge of moving 100k units of a book with the one U.S. publishing house sporting the best recent record of generating best-sellers. Simply put, Esquire made me what I am today: a vain, shrill, self-promoting, ass-baring (no wait, that would be just Britney) bestselling wannabe.