Hella Nation: Looking for Happy Meals in Kandahar, Rocking the Side Pipe,Wingnut's War Against the Gap, and Other Adventures with the Totally Lost Tribes of America - Softcover

Wright earned his degree in medieval and Renaissance studies from Vassar College, an education he soon put work at Hustler magazine, where he served as "Entertainment Editor." In the late 1990's he began writing feature articles for Rolling Stone.

At Rolling Stone Wright focused on youth subcultures, from radical environmentalists to skinheads to sorority girls. His work is characterized by immersion in his subjects' worlds, detailed reporting and dark humor.

After 9/ll he pitched his editor on the idea that since the US military was "basically another youth subculture," he ought to be writing about it. He has covered the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

He is the recipient of two National Magazine Awards, one for reporting on the war in Iraq in Rolling Stone and the other for a profile published in Vanity Fair.

Generation Kill received numerous awards, including the J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize, the Los Angeles Times book award, a PEN USA literary prize and the Marine Corps Heritage Foundation's award for "Best History of the Marine Corps."

He is currently at work on two books for Putnam:

Hella Nation, a collection of essays and reporting to be published in the Spring of 2009

The Seed, a reported memoir of brainwashing to be published in the Summer of 2010.

Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright Page

Dedication

Introduction

NOT MUCH WAR, BUT PLENTY OF HELL

PISS DRUNK

DANCE WITH A STRANGER

WINGNUT’S LAST DAY ON EARTH

HEIL HITLER, AMERICA!

THE BAD AMERICAN

MAD DOGS & LAWYERS

TOUGH GUY

PORTRAIT OF A CON ARTIST

SCENES FROM MY LIFE IN PORN

FOREVER FOURTEEN

PAT DOLLARD’S WAR ON HOLLYWOOD

Acknowledgements

PUBLICATION CREDITS

ILLUSTRATION GUIDE

ALSO BY EVAN WRIGHT

Generation Kill

G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS
PUBLISHERS SINCE 1838
Published by the Penguin Group

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Published simultaneously in Canada

Pages 341-342 constitute an extension of this copyright page.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Wright, Evan.

Hella nation : looking for happy meals in Kandahar, rocking the side pipe, Wingnut’s war against the Gap, and other adventures with the totally lost tribes of America / Evan Wright. p. cm.

ISBN: 9781101032404

I. Title.

PN4874.W75A
814’.6—dc22

While the author has made every effort to provide accurate telephone numbers and Internet addresses at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author assumes any responsibility for errors, or for changes that occur after publication. Further, the publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

To the great American humorist,
cynic and realist Alan D. Wright, Esquire

There is almost no circumstance under which an American doesn’t like to be interviewed.

—A. J. Liebling

INTRODUCTION

After the publication of my book Generation Kill, some critics called my work “gonzo,” because reporting from the midst of combat as I did struck them as an act of gonzo journalism. For Generation Kill and now Hella Nation, use of the term is a misnomer insofar as “gonzo” speaks of writing that is more about the reporter than the subject. With few exceptions, my intent has always been to focus on my subjects in all of their imperfect glory. Gonzo journalism was born and died with Hunter S. Thompson, and lives on only in his writing. But not even Thompson himself was entirely gonzo. One of the most astute political observers of his time and a grand American humorist in the tradition of Mark Twain, Thompson was also a prodigious reporter. His Hell’s Angels stands as a classic of immersion journalism—in which Thompson’s adventures in gathering his material never diverted focus from his outlaw subjects—and was an early inspiration for my own reporting from inside American subcultures.

Portions of Hella Nation appeared in different form in Rolling Stone at a time when I served as the magazine’s “unofficial Ambassador to the Underbelly”—a title jokingly bestowed on me in an editorial published by Rolling Stone’s managing editor, Will Stone, in 2002. My primary subjects at Rolling Stone (and later at Vanity Fair) were people I found roaming the great American underworld, from runaway teens trying to make it as ecoterrorists, to Internet scamsters, to human growth hormone hustlers in Phoenix, to celebrity street skateboarders. The young combat troops I reported on in the Middle East represented a new kind of subculture, one that was often as misunderstood by civilians at home as it was by military leaders.

When my father read of the unofficial ambassadorship bestowed on me by Rolling Stone, he phoned to congratulate me on the promotion. “Underbelly is one step up from ambassador to the crotch,” he explained, referring to my previous job as an editor at Hustler magazine. I had started at Hustler in the mid-nineties as a triple-X-film reviewer and reporter assigned to cover the adult film industry. Like other hopeful college graduates in America, I had never had a strong ambition to wind up working in the porn industry. But when I found myself in it, assigned to interview porn starlets and write about the sketchy characters running the adult industry (such as my boss Larry Flynt), I drew on the work of New Yorker writer A. J. Liebling as inspiration.

While I did not delude myself that Hustler was equivalent to Liebling’s New Yorker, I liked to think that Liebling, who reveled in the Depression-era world of boxers, small-time swindlers, exotic dancers—“people getting by,” as he affectionately called them—would have appreciated the rich diversity of characters in Southern California’s Porn Valley. Liebling’s appreciation for the vernacular spoken by his streetwise subjects and his instinct for humor in even the grimmest of situations offered insight for how I might handle my subject matter. Describing his approach to writing, Liebling said, “The humor, as during a blitz, was rueful and concerned with the imminence of individual disaster.”

My career at Hustler began with an overdose of Xanax. I had been working a string of temp jobs in Los Angeles when a friend told me about an opening to be a copy editor at the magazine. I sent in a résumé, and a few days later I was called in for an interview. At the time I suffered from an imaginary form of social anxiety disorder. I had a fear of going into social situations that might induce a panic attack. This had never happened to me, but I had read about it happening to other people and developed a fear it might happen to me—a phobia of a phobia, as it were—which I medicated by popping copious amounts of Xanaxes before a stressful social interaction, such as a job interview. Without the crutch of a massive dose of tranquilizers, I feared that in the middle of an interview I might lose my mind and begin to sweat uncontrollably, speak in tongues and walk in aimless circles through the office of my prospective employer. On the afternoon of my job interview, I overshot the mark. I’d eaten a big lunch that day, and to compensate, I popped several extra pills before getting on the bus that would take me to Hustler’s offices in the Flynt Building on Wilshire Boulevard. Somewhere in Beverly Hills the bus broke down. I had to jog several blocks to make the interview. The exertion must have released a powerful wave of tranquilizer into my bloodstream. By the time a receptionist showed me into the executive editor’s office, I couldn’t feel my face.

Allan MacDonell, the executive editor, sat at a broad, uncluttered desk behind which panoramic windows offered a sweeping view of nothing—low, putty-colored apartment buildings and parking lots. In his late thirties, MacDonell wore thick black-framed glasses that gave him a passing resemblance to Elvis Costello. He had a raspy voice and mumbled like a character in Mean Streets. My difficulty in understanding him was compounded by the fact that the numbness from the tranquilizers was radiating from my spine in warm, liquid golden waves of heat. It was so intoxicatingly pleasant I had to concentrate not to slump face forward. Between MacDonell’s mumbling and the extreme effort it took to remain upright, I could only pick up snippets of what he was saying.

I pieced together that my résumé contained a typo, which disqualified me for the position of copy editor. I remember only disjointed pieces of the afternoon from that point on—shaking hands, walking across a floor that felt bouncy like a trampoline, trying to hold on to a No. 2 pencil as I filled out some papers. I came to the next morning in my apartment, wondering what had happened. I phoned Hustler’s offices and was put through to MacDonell. It was a confusing conversation—I’m sure for both of us—because MacDonell had offered me a job the day before, and I had accepted, and now I was on the phone with him trying to pretend like I knew that already.

It was only on the following Tuesday when I showed up for work and was led to a spacious private office—with a large TV and VHS player across from my desk and stacks of adult videotapes on the shelves—that I discovered I had been hired as Hustler’s entertainment editor, responsible for covering the adult industry. Later I would find out that my hiring had come about after the hasty departure of my predecessor, whose heroin problem had gotten so bad MacDonell had been forced to fire him. I was told that my predecessor’s heroin problem hadn’t been grounds for his termination. It was his other behavior, such as never leaving his office. One of my new coworkers explained, “The guy who had the job before you would come in every morning with a two-liter bottle of Pepsi, drink it all by lunch and spend the rest of the day peeing in the empty bottle, so he could hide in his office.” My colleague offered a tip: “Just make sure, no matter what you do in your office, you step out and walk around sometimes so MacDonell can see you. He gets freaked out if employees don’t seem to be able to walk around.”

If you could meet the minimum standards, the porn industry was a welcoming place to individuals like me who had grave personal problems. Though the business is a legal one, like the manufacture of assault weapons or the marketing of fortified malt liquor in poor neighborhoods, its existence is barely tolerated by the public. Given the social opprobrium under which the business functions, it’s tantamount to a black market enterprise. Like any black market, the adult industry is a place of rogues, borderline criminals, people with little to lose. If you are a screwup, an alcoholic, drug addict, nymphomaniac (of course) or freak, failure or deviant of just about any kind, it is a remarkably tolerant place.

My own decline had begun in high school. I had peaked around my junior year as a total nerd. A member of the debate team, I left school early whenever possible to attend lectures at the Council on Foreign Relations on the Strategic Arms Limitations Talks with the Soviet Union. In my free time I read Kissinger’s Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy and Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents. I wavered between dreams of attending Annapolis to become a military aviator and my volunteer work with Amnesty International writing letters to urge the release of “prisoners of conscience” held by foreign despots. I was torn by the traditional beliefs I had been raised with in the efficacy of militarism to promote Truth, Justice and the American Way and a growing personal conviction that the only proper course of action in a world of cruelty and horrors was absolute pacifism.

My crack-up began in earnest during a senior seminar on nineteenth-century European political thought when we came to the Russian nihilists, whose motto was “Smash everything that can be smashed.” According to my teacher, Bruce Carr, the slogan urged conceptual—not literal—action, to eradicate old, unworthy ideas by subjecting them to hammer blows of withering criticism and retaining only those that survive. The concept set the gears turning in my teenage brain. I resolved to live by subjecting every thought I held dear to extreme criticism, the more destructive the better.

In my career as a high school history student, the more I learned of the world and man’s inhumanity to man, the more I was afflicted by intense bouts of sadness, no matter how remote humankind’s injustices were in space and time, from the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan to the Defenestration of Prague. It was an intellectual-spiritual malady one of my teachers would identify as “weltschmerz”—a German expression for “world pain.” I would attempt to treat it for the next decade or so with puerile nihilism—as in “Nothing matters, nothing means anything anyway”—and bouts of intense drinking. In retrospect I am not sure whether the earliest condition I suffered from was weltschmerz or simple alcoholism.

On the Vassar College campus of the Reagan 1980s, where I did my undergraduate studies, Derrida, deconstructionism, political correctness and identity politics—of gender and sexual orientation since there were few students belonging to racial or ethnic minorities—were the rage. In most of the humanities departments, theory, as opposed to direct study of arts and letters, was paramount. Or perhaps this was my warped, incipient-alcoholic perception of things. In any case, the popular postmodern currents in the humanities departments did not withstand my nihilistic scrutiny. I dismissed the most important trends of my generation as bullshit.

I found refuge in a medieval and Renaissance studies program run by the history department. Students in the program—all three of us—were required to study ancient languages, in my case Latin and Old English. Languages appealed to me because acquiring them was based on the most elemental form of learning: memorization. And once you learned them, voices from the past seemed to speak directly, without being filtered by a professor quoting Kierkegaard and Foucault and Chuck D.

Historical inquiries within the medieval and Renaissance studies program were rooted in observable details—maps, architectural remnants, weapons and tools—and in testimony by witnesses as found in civic records, journals and other sorts of contemporaneous histories. Theory did have its place in the program. Several professors in the history department were under the sway of a theory of methodology referred to as the “Annales School,” named for the French journal Annales d’histoire économique et sociale, in which it had been developed in the 1930s. Annales historians rejected blind acceptance of traditional histories based on the words and deeds of great men, as well as Marxist theories of economic determinism, and advocated reexamining the past through detailed examination of data previously ignored by traditionalists—tax records, diaries, archaeological digs (especially of trash heaps, to see...