Esquire March 2022

I HAVE ONE SIBLING, A BROTHER NAMED DONNY. Because he’s seven years older, our childhood worlds rarely overlapped. When he was a high school senior, preoccupied with girls and Guns N’ Roses, I was in the fourth grade, building Lego pirate ships and mastering Super Mario Bros. 2. I was the good student; I liked school and got mostly A’s. Donny was the music guy, the fashion guy, the car guy. He drove an orange ’74 MG. The one time he helped me with homework, I was sixteen and reading The Great Gatsby. My American Lit teacher had assigned us a short paper on a Jazz Age–related topic of our choosing. The topic Donny suggested: the martini. You might say I was Donny’s student. He taught me to drive stick. Made me…

3 FEET HIGH AND RISING De La Soul The work of this groundbreaking hip-hop act was still not available for streaming at press time. Fine; it sounds better on a turntable anyway. Their debut is so good, even the skits are worth listening to. STRANGE ALLIANCE Tommy Keene If you know, you know. Keene is the great American power-pop cult figure; his ’82 debut goes for $100 on eBay. This is why I cannot pass a used-record store without dashing in and thumbing through the K’s. ANY K-TEL COMPILATION If you find a record called Fantastic or Hit Express, snap it up. K-Tel albums were like the Now series for the ’60s through the ’80s: perfectly eclectic snapshots of their cultural moments as they truly were, not as we immediately began to misremember them. SHIBUMI Tuesday Blue I mean, listen:…

OVER THE HOLIDAYS, I joined my family in helping our mother pack up her condo and move into a smaller place. Our parents kept a tidy house, but every home has one: the unfinished part of the basement, the cellar of misfit toys (and old rugs and cathode-ray televisions), the place where you put the boxes you packed hastily the last time you moved, or the time before that. These would need to be gone through carefully—a sample box would be three wax apples, a Learn Windows 95 VHS, and my father’s birth certificate—but we would need to be ruthless. Donate or pitch unless it was absolutely necessary to keep, for the neat and uncluttered life Mom deserves. Who cares if you’re euthanizing a memory? The point is to simplify,…

YOU LAND. YOU DRINK. AND NOT UNTIL THEN have you arrived. As the cradle of cocktail culture in America, such is the way to offcially commune with New Orleans. While the city’s best bars have always had their way of making classics a touch unique, over the past few years, some of its most tried-and-true cocktails have gone through an evolution at the hands of brilliant new bars with a deep respect for tradition. If you’re going to hang your drinking hat on a nongimmicky, unironic home-bartending trend this year, make it the revised classic NOLA cocktail. The most profoundly transformed classic is the Sazerac that Chris Hannah, one of the stewards of New Orleans cocktails, serves at Jewel of the South. And it is dead simple to make. The ingredients are…

FEW CARS SIGNAL SUCCESS, without feeling gauche or having the whiff of midlife crisis, like a Mercedes-Benz SL. It is the car Benz has produced the longest, with each version being distinctly of its era. A graceful Pagoda SL from the ’60s looks nothing like the technical marvel that was the R 129 SL of the dot-com-boom ’90s. A refined, relatively understated design with technologically interesting underpinnings has always been the through line of the SL. No wonder it’s the car of choice for high-earning renegades. Steve Jobs drove several. Bob Marley’s last car purchase was a 1980 SL. And Princess Diana drove a crimson-red 1991 Mercedes R 129 SL, partially as a middle finger to the royal family—she was only supposed to drive British cars. My dad bought his first SL…

The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue BY V. E. SCHWAB I’ve been sold on the idea of eternal life since I was six years old, so it says something that this novel finally cured me of it. Addie meets a guy. Sparks fly; clothes fly off. Addie wakes up first and starts counting down the minutes, for she knows that before the sun even rises, he will forget her. It’s a thing that Addie has lived with for 300 years. She gets eternal life, but in exchange, everybody forgets her. Then one day, somebody she met only once remembers her name. It’s the kind of book that makes you realize that not getting your heart’s desire might be a good thing. Ring Shout BY P. DJÈLÍ CLARK Lovecraft Country and Ring Shout might seem similar.…