i got distracted and read this - it's really ... awesome.

December 31, 2001, 11:00 PM

What I've Learned: Michael Wright

At 8:48 on the morning of September 11, Michael Wright was a thirty-year-old account executive working on the eighty-first floor of the World Trade Center. Two hours later, he was something else. The story of his escape is the fastest 3,863 words you will ever read.

By Cal Fussman

Up to that day, I'd had a Brady Bunch, cookie-cutter, beautiful life. I now know what it's like to have a 110-story building that's been hit by a 767 come down on my head. For better or for worse, it's part of my life. There are things I never thought I'd know that I now know.

It was as mundane a morning as you can imagine. Tuesdays are usually the days I go out to see clients and make sales calls. I get to my office at a quarter to eight, eat a bran muffin, drink a cup of coffee, and get my head straight for the day.

I was actually in a good mood. A couple of us were yukking it up in the men's room. We'd just started sharing the eighty-first floor of 1 World Trade Center with Bank of America, and they'd put up a sign telling everyone to keep the bathroom clean. "Look at this," one of us said. "They move in and now they're giving us shit." It was about quarter to nine.

All of a sudden, there was the shift of an earthquake. People ask, "Did you hear a boom?" No. The way I can best describe it is that every joint in the building jolted. You ever been in a big old house when a gust of wind comes through and you hear all the posts creak? Picture that creaking being not a matter of inches but of feet. We all got knocked off balance. One guy burst out of a stall buttoning up his pants, saying, "What the fuck?" The flex caused the marble walls in the bathroom to crack.

You're thinking, Gas main. It was so percussive, so close. I opened the bathroom door, looked outside, and saw fire.

There was screaming. One of my coworkers, Alicia, was trapped in the women's room next door. The doorjamb had folded in on itself and sealed the door shut. This guy Art and another guy started kicking the shit out of the door, and they finally got her out.

There was a huge crack in the floor of the hallway that was about half a football field long, and the elevator bank by my office was completely blown out. If I'd walked over, I could've looked all the way down. Chunks of material that had been part of the wall were in flames all over the floor. Smoke was everywhere.

I knew where the stairs were because a couple of guys from my office used to smoke butts there. I started screaming, "Out! Out! Out!" The managers were trying to keep people calm and orderly, and here I was screaming, "The stairs! The stairs!"

We got to the stairwell, and people were in various states. Some were in shock; some were crying. We started filing down in two rows, fire-drill style. I'd left my cell phone at my desk, but my coworkers had theirs. I tried my wife twenty times but couldn't get through. Jenny had gone up to Boston with her mother and grandmother and was staying with my family. Our son was with her. Ben's six months old. It was impossible to reach them.

The thing that kept us calm on the stairs was the thought that what happened couldn't possibly happen. The building could not come down. After a while, as we made our way down, we started to lighten up. Yeah, we knew something bad had happened, but a fire doesn't worry you as much when you're thirty floors below it. I even made an off-color joke to my buddy Ryan. The intent was for only Ryan to hear, but things quieted down just as I said it, so everyone heard. I said, "Ryan, hold me."

He said, "Mike...I didn't know."

I said, "Well, we're all going to die, might as well tell you."

Some people were laughing, but not the guy in front of me. "I really think you should keep that humor down!" he said. I felt lousy. In hindsight, he may have known more than I did. Even though I'd seen physical damage, what I can't stress enough is how naive I was at that point.

Some floors we'd cruise down; others we'd wait for ten minutes. People were speculating, "Was it a bomb?" But we were all getting out. I didn't think I was going to die.

At the fortieth floor, we started coming in contact with firemen. They were saying, "C'mon, down you go! Don't worry, it's safe below." Most of them were stone-faced. Looking back, there were some frightened firemen.

When we got below the thirtieth floor, they started to bring down injured people from flights above. There was a guy with the back of his shirt burned off, a little burn on his shoulder. One woman had severe burns on her face.

We got down to the twentieth floor and a fireman said, "Does anyone know CPR?" I'm no longer certified, but I know it from college. That was ten years ago. You wouldn't want me on an EMT team, but if it comes down to saving somebody, I know how.

So me and this other guy volunteer. We helped this one heavy, older man who came down huffing and puffing, and we kept our eyes out for anyone else. "Do you need help? Do you need help?" Nobody needed help. The stairway became wide-open. It was time to go. The other guy took off in front of me. We were going pretty fast.

Have you ever been to the World Trade Center? There's a mezzanine level, then you go downstairs, which is subterranean, into this big mall. Our stairwell exited out onto that mezzanine level. At that point, I could look out across the plaza at 2 World Trade Center. That's when I realized the gravity of what had happened. I saw dead bodies everywhere, and none that I saw were intact. It was hard to tell how many. Fifty maybe? I scanned for a second and then focused on the head of a young woman with some meat on it. I remember my hand coming up in front of my face to block the sight. Then I took off. As I ran, people were coming out of another stairwell. I stopped and said, "Don't look outside! Don't look outside!" The windows were stained with blood. Someone who'd jumped had fallen very close to the building.

It felt like my head was going to blow up.

I made it to the stairwell and got down. The mall was in bad shape. It must have been from chunks of the plane coming down. Windows were smashed. Sprinklers were on.

I saw Alicia, the coworker who'd been trapped in the bathroom. She'd seen what I'd seen in the plaza and was traumatized. She was crying and moving slowly. I put my arm around her. Then there was another woman -- same thing. I put my arm around the two of them, saying, "C'mon. We gotta go. We gotta go."

We were moving through the mall toward the escalator that would take us back up to street level and out to Church Street. There were some emergency workers giving us the "head this way" sign. I think they were trying to get us as far away from the fire as possible and out toward Church Street and the Millenium Hilton hotel.

I got to the bottom of the escalator, and that's when I heard what sounded like a crack. That was the beginning of it. I ran to the top of the escalator as fast as I could and looked east, out toward Church Street at the Millenium hotel. The windows of the hotel are like a mirror, and in the reflection I saw Tower Two coming down.

How do you describe the sound of a 110-story building coming down directly above you? It sounded like what it was: a deafening tidal wave of building material coming down on my head. It appeared to be falling on the street directly where I was headed.

I turned to run back into the building. It was the instinctual thing to do. You're thinking, If you stay outside, you're running into it. If you go inside, it might not land there. So I turned and ran into the building, down into the mall, and that's when it hit. I dove to the ground, screaming at the top of my lungs, "Oh, no! Oh, no! Jenny and Ben! Jenny and Ben!" It wasn't a very creative response, but it was the only thing I could say. I was gonna die.

The explosion was extreme, the noise impossible to describe. I started crying. It's hard for me to imagine now that when I was on the ground awaiting my doom, hearing that noise, thousands of people were dying. That noise is a noise thousands of people heard when they died.

When it hit, everything went instantly black. You know how a little kid packs a pail of sand at the beach? That's what it was like in my mouth, my nose, my ears, my eyes -- everything packed with debris. I spat it out. I puked, mostly out of horror. I felt myself: Am I intact? Can I move? I was all there. There was moaning. People were hurt and crying all around me.

Then I had my second reckoning with death. I'm alive, yeah. But I'm trapped beneath whatever fell on top of me and this place is filled with smoke and dust. This is how I'm gonna die -- and this was worse. Because I was going to be cognizant of my death. I was going to be trapped in a hole and it was going to fill with smoke and they were going to find me like one of those guys buried in Pompeii.

I sat there thinking of my wife and son again. It wasn't like seeing the photos of Jenny and Ben that I had on my desk, though. The images I had were of them without me. Images of knowing that I'd never touch them again. As I sat there, thinking of them, I suddenly got this presence of mind: I gotta try to survive.

I tore off my shirt and wrapped it around my mouth and nose to keep some of the smoke out. I started crawling. It was absolutely pitch-black. I had no idea where I was crawling to, but I had to keep trying. It's haunting to think about it now.

I saw a light go on. I can't say I was happy, because I was horrified, but that light was hope.

Luckily, I was buried with a fireman. I got over to him and stuck to this guy like a sticky burr on a bear's ass. He was frazzled, but he had it a lot more together than I did. I was like, "What are we gonna do?" You can't imagine the ability to have rational thought at that point. I was purely in survival mode. It wasn't like, The smoke is traveling this way, so I'll go that way to the fresh air. It's whatever presents itself.

The fireman looked like a big Irish guy. Big, bushy mustache. He had an axe. He was looking at a wall, and it looked solid, but when he wiped his hand on it, it was glass, a glass wall looking into a Borders bookstore. There was a door right next to it. He smashed the door and it spread open.

Everyone gravitated to the light. Now there was a bunch of us. People were screaming. We got into Borders, went upstairs, and got through the doors heading outside. The dust was so thick, there was barely any light.

At this point, I still had no idea what was going on. I didn't know if we were being bombed or what. I didn't know if this was over or if it was just beginning.

I took off into the cloud. I crossed Church Street, and some light started coming in, and I could see a little bit. I saw a woman standing there, horrified, crying, lost. I stopped and said, "Are you okay? Are you okay?" She couldn't speak. I kept going.

I went along Vesey Street, using it as a guide. It started clearing up more and more, and I got to an intersection that was completely empty. That's where I saw one of the weirdest things -- a cameraman near a van with the NBC peacock on it, doubled over with his camera, crying.

I was all disoriented. I saw a turned-over bagel cart, and I grabbed a couple of Snapples. I used one to rinse out my mouth and wash my face. I drank some of the other. Then I started running again. It was chaos.

Even though I'd been around these streets a million times, I was completely lost. I looked up and saw my building, 1 World Trade Center, in flames. I looked for the other tower because I always use the two buildings as my North Star. I couldn't see it. I stood there thinking, It doesn't make sense. At that angle, it was apparent how devastating it all was. I looked up and said, "Hundreds of people died today." I was trying to come to terms with it -- to intellectualize it. My wife's family is Jewish, and her grandparents talk about the Holocaust and the ability of humans to be cruel and kill one another. This is a part of a pattern of human behavior, I told myself. And I just happen to be very close to this one.

Maybe it seems an odd reaction in hindsight. But I was just trying to grab on to something, some sort of logic or justification, rather than let it all overwhelm me. I was raised Irish-Catholic, and I consider myself a spiritual person. I did thank God for getting me out of there for my kid. But I also tend to be a pretty logical thinker. I'm alive because I managed to find a space that had enough support structure that it didn't collapse on me. I'm alive because the psycho in the plane decided to hit at this angle as opposed to that angle. I'm alive because I went down this stairwell instead of that stairwell. I can say that now. But at that moment, I was just trying to give myself some sanity.

I was still running when I heard another huge sound. I didn't know it at the time, but it was the other tower -- my tower -- coming down. A cop on the street saw me and said, "Buddy, are you okay?" It was obvious that he was spooked by looking at me. Aside from being caked with dust, I had blood all over me that wasn't mine. He was trying to help, but I could tell he was shocked by what he was seeing.

I was looking for a pay phone to call my wife, but every one I passed was packed. My wife never entertained for a minute that I could be alive. She had turned on the TV and said, "Eighty-first floor. Both buildings collapsed. There's not a prayer." It was difficult for her to look at Ben because she was having all these feelings. "Should I be grateful that I have him? Is he going to be a reminder of Mike every time I look at him?" At the time, these thoughts just go through your head.

Finally, I got to a pay phone where there was a woman just kind of looking up. I shoved her out of the way. I guess it was kind of harsh, but I had to get in touch with my family. I dialed Boston and a recording said, "Six dollars and twenty-five cents, please." So I pulled out a quarter and called my brother at NYU. I got his voice mail. "I'm alive! I'm alive! Call Jenny! Let everyone know I'm alive!" It was 10:34.

I started running toward where my brother Chris worked at NYU. I'm the last of six in my family. The two oldest are girls, the four youngest, boys. Chris is the second oldest above me. The classic older brother. The one who'd put you down and give you noogies. He probably would have had the best view of the whole thing going on. But he'd left his office, thinking, My brother is dead. He walked home to Brooklyn across the Manhattan Bridge, unable to look back.

On my way to NYU, I met this guy - -a stranger named Gary -- who had a cell phone. He tried and tried and couldn't get through to Boston. I said, "I gotta get to NYU" and left him. But he kept calling Boston and eventually got through to my family. At that point, four of my five siblings were at the house. My wife's father was on his way from New York with a black suit in the car.

The people at NYU took me in. They were great. I said, "I don't need anything. Just call my family." They kept on trying to get through. They couldn't, they couldn't. Finally, they got through.

I said, "Jenny, it's me." And there was a moan. It was this voice I'd never heard before in my life. And I was saying, "I'm alive. I'm alive. I love you. I love you. I love you." We cried and cried. Then the phone went dead.

At that point, I went into the bathroom to clean myself off, and suddenly I couldn't open my eyes anymore. They were swollen. I knew I wasn't blind, but if I opened my eyes toward any amount of light there was intense, intense pain. I didn't feel this while I was running. It seemed to happen as soon as I was safe and the adrenaline came out of me.

At the NYU health center, the doctors said, "Yeah, your eyes are scratched to shit." They put drops in them, but they needed more sophisticated equipment to see what was going on. I wound up having 147 fiberglass splinters taken out of my eyes.

Chris came back from Brooklyn to pick me up, and I held on to him and hugged him. Later, he said, "You know, Michael, this is why I stuffed you in sleeping bags and beat on you all those years as a kid. Just to toughen you up for something like this."

When we got back to my place, I collapsed and it all hit me. I cried like I've never cried in my life. I finally let loose, and it felt better. My brother helped me pack, and we got to Westchester, where my wife and family had gone. Jenny came running to the door. I can remember hearing the dum, dum, dum, dum, dum of her footsteps.

My mother was there. My dad. My father-in-law. They all hugged me. Then they gave me my son. I could tell by the noises he was making that he was happy. I hugged him and sort of started the healing process there.

Later, I went to Maine to sit by the ocean for a few days and get my head together. I saw all of my old friends. It was amazing. Everyone I know in my life has called me to tell me they love me. It's like having your funeral without having to die.

For a while right after, I wondered,

How the hell am I going to work again? How am I going to give a damn about selling someone a T-1 line? I had a list of people who were going to be my business for the next year, hundreds of people, all on my desk -- blown up. For the life of me, I can't dredge up those names. That will cost me a quarter of my income, maybe more. You know what? Who cares? I'm alive and I'm here. A big deal has gone to big deal.

I lost a friend in 2 World Trade Center. He was one of those guys you liked as soon as you met him. Howard Boulton. Beautiful person. His baby was born three months ahead of mine. He was on the eighty-fourth floor and I was on the eighty-first. The last conversation he had with his wife was by telephone. He told her, "Something happened to 1 World Trade Center. It's very bad. I don't think Michael Wright is okay. I'm coming home." I like to think Howard wasn't scared like I wasn't scared in the stairwell. I like to think that he heard a rumble like I heard a rumble and then he was gone.

I went to his funeral. To see his wife and his baby -- it would have made you sad even if you didn't know him. But it was much more loaded for me. Here was a perfect reflection of what could've been.

One of the hardest things I had to deal with up to this point -- and still do -- is that my brother Brian, who's one year older than me, has cancer. He and I are practically twins. He has germ-cell cancer in his chest. He recently told me that the good news is they can go in and get it. But the bad news is they might have to take a lung with it. Before September 11, maybe the fact that he was going to lose a lung might have thrown me for a loop. But I found out I love my brother for my brother. I don't love him to run up mountains at a brisk pace with me. My reaction was: Thank God they can get it.

Luckily, I've been well equipped to deal with this. I have a family that's unbelievably close and supportive and a lot of friends. I've been to therapy, and I can do the whole checklist: Do you have a sense of fear and not know where it's coming from? Yup. Can you no longer take pleasure in things you once took pleasure in? Yup. Claustrophobic? Yup. I have nightmares. I jump when I hear a siren. But it's the smell that haunts me. Talk to anyone who was within ten blocks of it and they'll tell you that. I had vaporized people packed up my nose, in my mouth and ears. For weeks, I was picking stuff out of my ears.

I've been giving myself the space to be a little freaky for a while. I don't think this is going to turn me into Rambo or motivate me to go out and sleep with nineteen-year-old girls. Yeah, it's gonna bug me for a while. I'm gonna have some scars on my brain. But I don't think it's going to affect me long term.

I don't wonder, Why me? Some people say, "You made it out; you're destined for great things." Great, I tell them. I made it out, now why not put a little pressure on me while you're at it.

In the reflection of the hotel windows across the street, I saw Tower Two coming down. I dove to the ground and started crying. The explosion was extreme, the noise impossible to describe. That noise is a noise thousands of people heard when they died.

Read more: http://www.esquire.com/features/what-ive-learned/ESQ0102-JAN_WTC_rev?click=main_sr#ixzz0OKMG9Xx2

"Michael Wright Interview - September 11 Survivor -." Esquire. Web. 16 Aug. 2009. <http://www.esquire.com/features/what-ive-learned/ESQ0102-JAN_WTC_rev?click=main_sr>.

sam worthington ... *giggle*

While I am on Blogger, and have no muse whatsoever for class, I thought I would bring to your attention the September (and heavenly anointed) issue of Esquire Magazine. An other all star cover and article by one of my favourite magazines. I even forgot to highlight last month's (Gerard Butler - *drool*) Three words - yeah he is, said in a very 'Can he be any hotter?' Chandler-like tone..

Sam Worthington- known to most of you as Marcus Wright, the character who blew 'superstar' Christian Bale's John Connor out of the water, and anyone's minds who had him pegged for their next movie (thank the Lord omg - he only has one movie that's been publically announced so far) ... You will see him next in Avatar, then Clash of the Titans - he's even getting Captain Nemo in 2,000. And of course, the roles will keep coming. That thing sort of happens when a 'great' like James Cameron pegs you as the best actor of all time or such.

Anyway, I can't be on too much longer - I do have a deadline for homework, after all. But please, please check out the article on this guy - I don't know why, but I just adore him. He's awesome. He makes me want to send him out to dig a hole or do something else that will get him dirty then show him off to all the girls in the town and say, 'Look at this guy - he's hot and he isn't pretty like that thing you call a 'man' you've got on your arm'. I dunno - I have a thing for guys who can be dirty. I guess I like to be more delicate than the guy I'm with? *Shrugs*. Anyway - he's awesome, just check him out <3>

EDIT ::
And yay! A new Sam Worthington website!!! One of the best - he might just beat out Hugh Jackman for my Jon XD

(picture of a dirty sam worthington in titans - woo!!!)

Don't You Just Want To PUNCH Colin Farrell?

I think Chris Jones is my favourite Esquire writer.

The Original Plan called for me to pop down to Toronto--my former digs and what was until recently his workplace, filming A Home at the End of the World--and lull him into a false sense of buddy-buddy. You know, by guiding him through a big night out, maybe sharing an illicit after-hours bevy at the Matador, and, invariably, watching him drop his pants in Yorkville, because he's ever so proud that his dick has a European cut, or lack thereof. Then I was going to suggest, innocent as unsweetened apple juice, that maybe we could go to one of that city's venerable boxing halls, to Cabbagetown or Sully's, say, and just have a bit of a spar, for kicks like. And he was going to look at me, a little soft in the middle, and figure, "Yeah, all right then," and off we'd go, spitting into our palms and loosening up our shoulders like gentlemen.

Except I wouldn't be after a dance. I'd be looking to lay on a bit of a beating. Because I'm sick of the guy. I'm sick of seeing his cocky pug face smirking out from all these glossy soft-boy magazine covers--"Have you had sex with Colin Farrell yet?"--and reading about how fucking great his life is, and hearing about all of his drinking and smoking and humping of pretty young things, and, gee, isn't he just one of the goddamn swells? So, yeah, I figured it'd be a hell of a good cathartic exercise if I did everybody a favor and knocked out a few of his nubby mick teeth, derailing his wonderful roller-coaster existence for one big migraine of a day.

Trouble was, his people didn't go for it. Nope, I had to face him down on his turf instead, in L. A., at West Hollywood's splashy Chateau Marmont, where Farrell has an army of charmed zombies watching his back and a table waiting in a remote corner of the starlit garden bar, so he can chain-smoke his Camel Lights and watch the prom queens turned porn stars and, at first opportunity, call me a cunt.

I swallow it, trying to act something like a professional, at least until I find the right time to bitch-slap his eyes shut. But I have to give him a jab early on, just to take the edge off. The easy knock is on his hair, which he's dyed blond and spiked out of boredom, but he beats me to the punch: "I look like Beaker off the fucking Muppets." So I mention the Original Plan, or parts of it at least, and how, instead of letting me have a nice ride of things, everything's been arranged so that I have to miss my wife, and goddamn him for that.

"Toronto," he says. "SARSville."

"Oh, God, more people die of the fucking flu."

"I know. Relax. Look at you--the fucking Canadian getting his back up. All it takes is one four-letter word." Two, actually. But then he laughs, a disarming sort of laugh, and he orders us a couple bottles of beer--each--which disarms me a little bit more.

"It's just that with the whole mad-cow thing, too . . ."

"Yeah," he says. "You guys are fucked. Your days are numbered."

Now it's my turn to laugh, thinking that I'd been thinking the very same thing about him. And, okay, still am.

He fills the awkward silence that follows by taking in the scene, looking for easy marks, of which there are several, which gives me enough time to size him up, too. He's taller than I thought he was, but that's probably because I've somehow fallen for the half-truth that all actors are midgets. I'll have to go inside. His ribs are poking through his black CBGB's T-shirt and thus are ripe for the cracking, dictating a first shot to the body. Then maybe a nose job, because pretty boys--and this one's really pretty, all manly twitches and squints--can't much abide scar tissue, although he has a couple of tattoos, including a cover-up on his left forearm. (It used to say "CARPE DIEM . . . with my girl," and now it just says CARPE DIEM over a cross.) That means he can take at least a little bit of pain, so it won't be a one-punch KO unless I catch him dead sweetly.

Either way, Irish eyes will soon be crying. But first, I need to bring his hands down with a few soft lobs--there's more than one way to get inside--maybe by talking about, hell, I don't know. . . .

"What's the deal with S.W. A.T.?"

"Comes out in August, I think. It's a big wham-bam-thank-you-ma'am action-popcorn kind of deal, based loosely on a seventies TV show of the same name. It was just four months of, you know, too much testosterone, pushing each other in fucking locker rooms, with lots of guns and explosions and things."

He takes a pull from his beer and a cigarette, seemingly at the same time. "You know, it gets old real fast."

"Yeah?"

"Of course. I've been lucky enough to have jobs come my way, and I've taken them, and I've had a good time doing them . . . but I want to be fucking knocking around the block for a good while, I think. And I want to do stuff that keeps my interest in the job alive. It's not a tough gig--don't get me wrong. All I'm talking about is getting a little bit bored. It's like, I've got Alexander next, with Oliver Stone"--an epic production about Alexander the Great that will no doubt do wonders for the size of his head--"and that's going to be a mad fucking job. That'll be a fucking trip. And that's what I'm on about, trying to do different stuff just to keep it interesting."

He takes a breath, which is of the liquid variety, when we're interrupted by Constance, the garden's doting host. Constance's mother, turns out, was Farrell's guest at one of his New York premieres, which Constance reports was the thrill of his mom's whole entire life. Farrell aw-shucks his way through the thanks and praise, and then he makes a little gentle fun of Constance--who wishes Farrell was his boyfriend--but even if he's suddenly decent-seeming, I'm not having any of it. He's duped plenty of soft targets before, with his easily digestible tale of a soccer-playing father and a center-of-his-universe mother and a childhood spent roaming the wet cobbled streets of Dublin, kissing girls and kicking about. All that, of course, before getting into acting at his older brother Eamon's behest, and then being discovered on some London stage by the fluke of having Kevin Spacey in the audience, which led to his admittedly solid turn in Tigerland, which led to everything else since, including fame, fortune, and, tonight, having a price put on his peroxided head.

He finishes firing his opening salvo of across-the-room stares, swigs back another great gulp, and settles more deeply into his chair. That's good, because it means he's getting comfortable, and comfortable men don't fight worth shit. I just need to keep him going, get him distracted while keeping my own head--when here comes another round. Which reminds me.

"A lot is made of your good times," I say, maybe a little too harshly. (Here, really, beats the black heart of my rancor: I can't grasp why his drunken stumbling through models and starlets and neovirginal pop singers the way he runs through cigarettes is so wonderfully goddamn refreshing.)

"Too much. I'm an actor, so the spotlight's on me."

"The stupid thing is"--what in the hell is about to come out of my mouth?--"anyone who had the chance to do what you're doing would be doing it, right?"

"Absolutely. Thank fucking God, man, I'm still alive. I haven't been in rehab--yet--and I'm golden, man. I work hard and I play hard. It's always been that way. But because I have this light shining on my fucking head, it's all, 'Ooooh, he's a bad boy,' or 'Ooooh, he's crazy.' It's ridiculous. If I sleep with more than two girls in a month, it's in all the papers, big fucking headlines: THE LUSTY LEPRECHAUN. It's . . ." He stops and smiles. "Actually, I kind of liked that one."

"You gonna have a costume to go with that?"

"Oh, yeah," he says. "A green codpiece, and that's it."

So we laugh some more, this time hard and genuinely, which isn't good. That, plus the drink--no, really, where do these keep coming from?--is leaving me in less of a mood for a bust-up. He's sitting there, manic and happy and benign, and now he's talking about his insecurities (how can he possibly be insecure?) and how he cares about what he does (I have a soft spot for people who care about much of anything these days), and I can't help thinking--

"You're always second-guessing yourself. You're never content with what you do. You're like a greyhound coming out of the fucking pocket, and there's a little hare in front of you--that's the fucking hare of contentment--and just when you think you're getting close to the fucking thing, the race is over and the fucking thing keeps going, and it's out of your sight and you're never going to catch it. I'm chasing something I'll never catch with this job: I'm chasing a feeling of peace that I don't think I'll ever experience. Believe me, not a drop of blood has ever passed through my fucking cock while I was watching myself. I do not get off on it at all."

--that he's spinning gold.

YET ANOTHER DRINK'S PUSHED BACK. A girl waves and comes over. She knows him, and there's a flicker of recognition in his muddy eyes, but he's not sure where to place her, except probably on her back. She invites him to a party on Saturday night, at a glass-walled mansion up in the hills, and as she's talking to him, she kneels down in front of him and leans forward to show off her rack, which looks to be natural. (He's not big on fake tits, by the way.) It's a little disturbing--especially seeing as she came here with some guy, who's now sitting at their table alone--watching this woman quite literally laying herself at his feet, and I'm thinking, Here we go. But Farrell's sister Claudine is up in his room--the four Farrell siblings are as tight as drums--and even if she weren't, he's not looking as if he's into the action. It's as though our moods have followed different paths, but to the same place, just enjoying the night and knowing that it's not going to rain for a few days and that there are so many worse things in the world than this.

He lets her down, but gently, and she goes back to the man who won't be in her dreams tonight. "Because you're an actor, you're thought to have a high potential for wanker behavior," Farrell says after he's complimented on his touch. "So instead of just being reprimanded if you're a wanker, you actually end up getting kudos for being half decent. Which is bullshit. It says something about the whole fucking thing, you know what I mean?"

As if to underscore his point, he's got waiters coming up and saying hey and smiling brightly just because he's greeting them by name, and the bartender sends over a glass of milk and two shot glasses as a dig because we're not drinking fast enough--"Get that fucking thing off my table!"--and then Farrell flat-out guarantees my peace by talking about his becoming a father, a calamitous event that will take place in short order, and he talks about it exactly like this, without question or pause or interruption:

"I'm so excited. I'm so fucking excited. It's the most amazing thing that's ever happened to me. There's nothing more important in the world than bringing a life into it. I mean, the world's a crazy fucking place, but it's also such a fucking beautiful place. The world is infinitely beautiful. And you just hope your child sees less of the other side of that coin. I see shit everywhere I fucking look--I see people being nasty, I see bullies, I see death--but everywhere I look, I also see beauty and I see generosity. And I want my boy--it's going to be a boy--to see those things. I guess you want him to see them both, sure, to see the good and the bad, but then you want for him to choose good. I don't know. I'm really excited about it, man. I'm not with her--we're not together--but she's an amazing fucking woman, man. Her name's Kim. We're going to be fucking mates, and we're going to respect and love each other and just raise the child in love. That sounds ideal to the point of idiocy, I know, but it's not impossible. I've seen families--the 'ideal' nucleus of what a family should be--fall to shit, disintegrate, and the kids be damaged. So I don't see why the blessed situation that Kim and I find ourselves in--which might not seem ideal to others, though I can't see how that matters a fuck--I can't see why it can't be the most beautiful, perfect thing. I'm having a boy. I'm having a little dude. And I cannot fucking wait. I'm really not that nervous at all--except about when I'm not going to be there, when I'm going to be sitting on a fucking horse in Marrakech shouting, 'I am Alexander!' and I'm going to want to be with him instead. And I know that's going to break my heart."

THAT'S ALL I NEED TO HEAR. And to drink. My brain's jumping around like I've been watching David Lynch movies, when up sidles--shit you not--a Portuguese water dog named Blue and its owner and its owner's friend, a middle-aged English woman in the publishing business who takes her place at Farrell's feet and starts making strange noises, like a bad Austin Powers impersonator trying to sound like a cat. She's kind of purring or growling or mewling or, more accurately, trying to pull off a combination of all three, which is really fucking bizarre. So I settle back, fresh out of hate, and give Blue a pat-pat-pat on the head and take the chance to watch the ritual, ringside.

The middle-aged English woman looks into Farrell's eyes and says, "Ooooh, you're mean" and giggles and bites the air. (She does me the courtesy of looking into my eyes, too, but then she makes a face and says, "You're creepy" and goes back to rolling around in front of Farrell.) And he's just sitting there, playing with her, batting her around like a ball of yarn. He turns away from her every now and then to deliver lines from magazine-profile heaven--"I've been accused of playing up my Irishness, but to be Irish is to have the fucking right to play up your Irishness," and "Fair play to Deepak Chopra, but I don't know if I want to know all the answers," and "Sometimes you hear people whispering about you in the supermarket, but they're probably saying, 'Is that Guy Pearce?' "--and then he turns back to her, and he's smiling nubby mick smiles that occasionally turn into laughter, and I can see how a twenty-seven-year-old Irish guy in the middle of all this weirdness might have a tendency to go off a bit and to drink and to smoke and to hump pretty young things. I can see that now. I can see all of it.

I order another drink--just one more, a nightcap--content to ease through the rest of the evening like a boat slowly passing through a canal. At last, my hands are well and truly down, and he looks at me, and he sees that the time is right.

He spits out a ball of cancer. "You know, the spotting of a cunt is usually in the energy of a person," he says. And just a little bit later, "Are you still looking for a fight, man? Come on, then. I'll fight you."

He pushes back his chair. And up he gets.

megan fox ... yeah

oh. my. gosh.

A wrinkle-free shirt is like a football uniform without grass stains: It makes you look third string. Hesitant. Pretty. It makes you look correct, yes, but life isn't correct; it's wrinkled. Anyway, wrinkles are a badge. They're evidence that we've hailed a cab or reached for our wallets or leaned back in our chairs or fought something. They're proof that we've moved. A wrinkle-free shirt is for someone who wants to cover his tracks. It's a safe choice, and in style, safety is not a virtue. Texture is. We should look flawless only when we're standing in front of the mirror in the morning and congratulating ourselves on how wonderful we are. Then, starting immediately, our clothes should start gathering a history. Attempting to convince everyone around us that we look this sparkly, this utterly without stain or spoil, is pretending we're someone we're not. It's hiding. And if it comes down to hiding, and it always does, then we'll just put on our jacket.

McCammon, Ross. "The Endorsement: The Rumpled Shirt." Esquire Mar. 2009: 76.