Gary loved balls. Not in a sexual way either. He always considered himself straight, and in a completely objective assessment he was. He had a healthy, average active sex-life with a string of willing women who looked back on their night with Gary with very few complaints. There was nothing about men or masculinity that turned him on, and he found penises to be repellent. But aesthetically, he couldn’t deny that he loved ballsacs. He loved their look, their smell, the gentle way they laid in folds across a thigh. And goddamnit why shouldn’t he?

Giacomo-Chapter 1

I once asked Giacomo what his favorite part of his “living art” was. And at first when he told me, I couldn’t believe it. It wasn’t the realization of his dreams. It wasn’t the huge media circus that inevitably followed them. It wasn’t even the wave of cash that poured in towards the end as he caved and let sponsors fork over ungodly amounts of cash to be involved in the periphery. It was the casting process. At first I thought he was bullshitting me, but once I’d had a chance to sit with it and mull the thought over, it made perfect sense. Because deep down what Giacomo loved most, and I think this is true to some extent of most artists… at least successful ones, what he loved most was power. That god-like moment where your choices create reality. And Giacomo was a jealous god. HE wasn’t happy with merely telling his actors and actresses what to do and where to stand , because just as it goes with the big man upstairs, you can tell people what to do all you like, but at the critical moment, they are free thinking beings and they will do what they will, beyond your grasp, and out of your control. But at that one moment before the cast was finalized, when he held the headshots in his sweaty hands, the choice was ENTIRELY his. With a simple yes or no he could make dreams come true or crush them under his heel. Everyone knows that power is intoxicating… Giacomo was simply the only man I‘ve ever known who would proudly admit it as his drug of choice.

Every time she took took the money, she left a little bit of dignity.

The Dooberstein Brothers

I once had the thought that maybe those gas station and chain restaurant signs you see listing the preconditions for service were designed specifically with the Dooberstein brothers in mind. But like the bumper sticker on the back of Hank’s beat-up VW bus said, “No Shirt… No Shoes… No Problems.”

In fact, as I think back, I can only come up with two memories where both weren’t bare-chested and footwear-free. The first was in the Oval Office, as they stood there with their huge grins and glassy eyes while the President pinned The Medal of Freedom onto their matching electric-blue Hawaiian shirts. The second was at the funeral of a fellow agent killed in the line of duty, when Charlie cried harder than any grown man I’d seen in my life and somehow seemed all the manlier for it; completely dignified and unashamed in his grief.

They may have been unconventional, and I know that we all joked about how they loved surfing even more than they loved their country… but at the end of the day I have never seen two men less fazed by gunfire, overwhelming odds, or the looming specter of death than Hank and Charlie Dooberstein.

After the incident at the Turkish embassy I got short with Hank in the medi-vac chopper, “You know you two just about died back there?” He looked at me with that zen-calm that was half natural temperament and half medical-grade marijuana and said, “We didn’t know what was in front of us, over the edge of that cliff....all we knew was that behind us were bad guys with big guns. So we jumped. Not much more to it than that.”

Look!

There’s a certain look, and this has been scientifically proven, but when a girl looks at you just so it unleashes a chemical in your hypothalamus that makes it physiologically impossible to say no. To anything. Robbing a bank, moving to rural Saskatchewan, piercing your nipples. Anything. Doesn’t matter how ridiculous, or ill advised, or against your deepest held moral principles. You can’t say no.

You can try to. You can actually say the words “no” or “I can’t” or I probably shouldn’t”, but you don’t mean it, and you know you don’t mean it. And more importantly, she knows you don’t mean it.

The worst thing is, there’s no telling when the looks going to come. It’s not as clear-cut as the rules around say Medusa. With Medusa you just learned not to look at all, or else you ended up stone.

But with this look, THE LOOK, you never really know. You can look at the same girl fifty, a hundred, even a thousand times, and still walk away completely unscathed. Then, one day, the perfect storm of emotion, and neuro-electric-chemicals and booze descends upon you and boom; the solid ground you’re standing on falls away and you’re in completely uncharted territory.

That’s the downside. The upside is you get to see that look. Is the trade worth it? Probably not. But I still advise anyone given the opportunity to take it and run. You will regret it, but still…

The World's Unlikeliest Con Man

When he told me his line of business I thought it was a joke or some kind of stock line to break the ice. He was unshaven, and the dark circles under his eyes only served to highlight and frame the broken capillaries spider-webbing the whites of his eyes. From the disheveled look of his clothes I guessed he had slept in them, maybe for more than just one or two nights, and from the bouquet of stale tobacco and rotgut whiskey that wreathed his body I wouldn’t have been two surprised to learn it had been on a park bench.

By the end of that first weekend, when I had just about run through my meager bank account, paying our way to Vegas, then Tijuana, then back to Vegas, and spent more in 3 nights than I had in six-months of bachelor living, I no longer harbored any doubts that I was in the presence of the world’s greatest living con-man.

The thing that set him apart, that both separated him from and elevated him above your average matchstick man was his refusal to lie. He never claimed to be a deposed prince who needed some soon to be generously repaid help. He didn’t offer untold riches as a return for a modest investment. He didn’t even use a fake name. Instead he did something much, much more devious. He told the truth.

But when that man told the truth, he told it in ways that even the truth wouldn’t recognize in a mirror as itself. He twisted logic to a point that when he’d made his case as to why you should do whatever it was he wanted, you not only agreed but felt stupid for wasting his time making him explain it to you. I don’t know if it was some special form of hypnotism that shifted the listener’s world-view, or if his was an Einstein-level of genius that the average man can never really hope to keep up with. He made rational arguments bend a flex like a boneless yogi, but to this day as I look back on each and every decision I made, to the decisions I watched others make, I still stand by everyone as the right choice.

In another time and place in the world he would have called a prophet… maybe even the messiah. Here… now he just just ate, slept, and drank for free whenever and wherever and with whoever he wanted. And all things considered I think he was happier that way.