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Foreword by Mike Sager
1
Wounded Warriors
Meet Ringo, Wildman, Jo-Jo, Hazy, Sergeant D, Lt. Col. Maxwell, and the rest of the Devil Dogs at the Wounded Warrior Barracks at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina. From day one, the Marine Corps trained them to be lean, mean, killing machines. But what happens after the machine is broken? A report on the aftermath of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
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Generation H
At 28, Mark is bored with his music, with his nagging girlfriend, with the whole poseur scene in the funky East Village of New York City. Only his ten-bag-a-day heroin habit is keeping life interesting. He’s beginning to start thinking about quitting– again. Maybe this time he’ll actually do it.
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Big
Charles Van Dyke is six-foot-three, 650 pounds, give or take a few dozen. He is required by law to buy two seats on an airplane. He uses long brushes to wash himself, a specially designed portable personal bidet. His wife, Kathie, is five feet tall, 120 pounds. “She’s a committed cellulite surfer,” Charlie says with a wink. A fat man in a low-fat world.
105
A Boy and His Dog in Hell
The boy in the alley calls himself Zeke. He’s thirteen years old; he has a part-time job selling cocaine on a corner. He swears he didn’t fight no pit bulldogs to the death. He didn’t hang no dogs from no roof with telephone wire, neither. That’s what he told the judge, anyway. Life and death on the mean streets of North Philadelphia’s Little Puerto Rico.
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The Smartest Man in America
By some accounts, Christopher Michael Langan is the smartest man in America, with an IQ of 195. He is certainly the smartest nightclub bouncer in America. As he likes to say, quoting Kermit the Frog, “It ain’t easy being green.” Welcome to the HiQ Nation, where smartest, it turns out, isn’t necessairly best.
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The Ice Age
One night as he slept, special agents from the DEA entered Robert’s bedroom and planted a tiny speaker in his brain. Rick heard Samoan war drums; Connie thought her body was covered with bugs. Derek also thought he had a DEA implant– he used his to contact famous men from history. A report from Hawaii on the ravages of crystal meth.
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Kobe Bryant Doesn’t Want Your Love
Kobe Bryant may well be the most misunderstood figure in sports today. It is a tragic misunderstanding, for his sake and for ours. You can blame it on the press. You can blame it on the way the world revolves around fame and money. You can blame it on Kobe and his wife. Five days in Vegas with KB24 and his mamacita, Lady V.
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Thailand’s Home for Wayward Vets
After fighting in Vietnam, unwilling to return to America, these vets put down stakes in a place they thought would be better than home. From the sex bars of Bangkok, to the blood-red sunsets over the Mekong River, to VFW Post 10249 in Udonthani—what happens when you follow that wild hair to the end of the earth.
183
The Sharpton Strategy
Oh no! Here he comes again, leading another protest– hair luffing, flesh roiling and juggling beneath the silky nylon of his jogging suit, size XXL. He’s got Martin Luther King’s dream, James Brown’s hairdo, and a date with political destiny. “I just haven’t learned how to talk to white folks yet,” he says. At home and on the road with the Reverend Al Sharpton.
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Death in Venice
Back in the day, when gangs fought for turf and respect, V-13 ruled the streets of Venice, California—proud vatos in their Pendleton shirts and hair nets. They drove shiny low-riders and sold heroin to the miatas, the poor blacks across the street. Then crack arrived in the neighborhood and the tables turned. Life inside an LA gang.
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Hunting Marlon Brando
At first it seemed like just another exotic assignment: Go to Tahiti and find Marlon Brando. But the worldwide search for the legendary Method actor, the star of Apocalypse Now, On the Waterfront, and Mutiny on the Bounty, soon became a quest, and finally an obsession. One man’s journalistic coming of age.
Mike Sager is a bestselling author and award-winning reporter. He’s been called “the Beat poet of American journalism.” For more than forty years he has worked as a writer for the Washington Post, Rolling Stone, GQ and Esquire.
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