Ralph Lombreglia

Pub­lished in the Sep­tem­ber, 2007, issue of Esquire (actor Sean Penn on the cover). Available for free on the magazine’s Web site.

The Esquire pub­li­ca­tion of this piece involved some exper­i­ments that I still con­sider wor­thy and not mere gim­micks. Worked into the lay­out of the story itself (both in print and online) are first-person side­bars by sec­ondary char­ac­ters in the story. I wrote that mate­r­ial for this purpose—some of it from whole cloth, some of it adapted from my own out­takes. (And there were plenty of those. The man­u­script was nearly 80 pages at one point. It was sub­mit­ted at the ridicu­lous length of 39 pages and then cut—almost entirely by me, with fic­tion edi­tor Tom Chiarella’s gra­cious deference—to 28 man­u­script pages for publication.)

The first-person side­bars were inter­est­ing to do (the story is in the third-person), but even more fun (poten­tially) are the dead­pan ref­er­ences to the story pub­lished in other sec­tions of the issue. A book allegedly writ­ten by the main char­ac­ter, Ger­hard Hook­erdicker, was given a brief review. The char­ac­ter Ver­non DeCloud had a let­ter to the edi­tor. The Leisure Meter sec­tion sug­gested pre-ordering a DeCloud inven­tion that fig­ures in the story. There may have been a cou­ple of oth­ers. Some of these extra items were accom­pa­nied by Web URLs that redi­rected to the story on the magazine’s site. (The items on Hookerdicker’s book and DeCloud’s inven­tion made it to the online version.)

All of the pro­duc­tion inno­va­tions were (I believe) entirely asso­ciate edi­tor Tyler Cabot’s ideas, in response to editor-in-chief David Granger’s direc­tive to “do some­thing dif­fer­ent” with the piece. (I was offered the chance to invent this dif­fer­en­tial myself, but had no great inspi­ra­tions.) Tyler’s notion of break­ing down the magazine-membrane around the story was bril­liant, I thought, but Granger’s imper­a­tive had come fairly late in the process and there just wasn’t time to imple­ment the idea to the degree it deserved.

Nonethe­less, we all gave it a good bit of extra effort. Then the story came out and no one among the read­ing pub­lic—to my knowl­edge, not a sin­gle soul—noticed the Easter eggs scat­tered around the issue. Would it have been dif­fer­ent had there been fif­teen or twenty rather than only four or five? Maybe. Who knows. But every­body at Esquire threw them­selves into try­ing to do some­thing new, which gets a gold star in my book.