Men's Journal

Pick up the September issue of Men’s Journal to catch a glimpse of the world’s best gear, tech, and toys in the Style & Design special; to descend into the real-life zombie underworld; to hear how one man came to terms with getting old; to follow ex-NFL star Roynell Young as he tries to right the path of Houston’s young men; and to read about Daniel Duane coming to terms with his father on a mountainside.

From Mischa Berlinski’s Into the Zombie Underworld:

About a month after I arrived in Jérémie, a rumor swept through town that a deadly zombie was on the loose. This zombie, it was said, could kill by touch alone. The story had enough authority that schools closed. The head of the local secret society responsible for the management of the zombie population was asked to investigate. Later that week, Monsieur Roswald Val, having conducted a presumably thorough inquiry, made an announcement on Radio Lambi: There was nothing to fear; all his zombies were accounted for.

Shortly after that incident, I started taking Creole lessons from a motorcycle-taxi driver named Lucner Delzor. Delzor was married with four children, but he kept a mistress on the other side of town. He told me that he had never so much as drunk a glass of water at his mistress’s house for fear she might lace his food with love powder. He loved his wife and children far too much to risk that.

One of my first complete sentences in Creole was “Gen vréman vre zonbi an Ayiti?” Or: “Are there really, truly zombies in Haiti?”

“Bien sûr,” Delzor said. He had even seen them: affectless men and women with a deathlike pallor, high nasal voices, and the characteristic drooping at the chin — men and women who he knew for a fact had died and been buried.

“Ayiti, se repiblik zonbi,” Delzor added. Haiti is the republic of zombies.

I was eager to meet a zombie for myself, and began making appropriate inquiries. Several weeks later, my wife came home from a judicial conference. Making small talk, a local judicial official mentioned the strange case of zombification that his courtroom had seen not several months before. The case was, he said, “un peu spectaculaire.”

I met Judge Isaac Etienne a week or so later at his unfinished concrete house in the village of Roseaux. Roseaux is on the sea, and the fishermen, their nets already in, were stretched out on the small grassy town square, drinking rum and playing dominoes under a dazzling midmorning sun. The judge was a boyish-looking man of 42, slender, wearing baggy surfer shorts, flip-flops, and a brightly colored Hawaiian shirt.

The dossier was, at bottom, a murder story, the judge said — but it was a murder story with the great oddity that the victim did not die.

From Pat Jordan’s You Get Old:

You get old, you get your hair cut at Supercuts, $12 for seniors, and then let it grow for two months until it’s curling over your ears and you look like a French diplomat. You were young, you went to a fancy salon, where the pretty blonde massaged your shoulders while cutting your hair, for $65 and a $20 tip. You get old, your wife says, “You’re not going out like that!” You say, “What?” You are wearing a ripped and paint-splattered University of Miami Hurricanes T-shirt, baggy shorts, and flip-flops. You haven’t trimmed your beard in days. You look like Jeremiah Johnson, if he lived in South Florida.

You used to wear $200 Tommy Bahama island shirts and $2,000 ostrich-skin cowboy boots when you went out. Your wife wore spandex minidresses and six-inch pumps. You looked like a successful drug smuggler with a high-priced hooker. You get old, you sell your cowboy boots to a thrift shop for $50 and buy the dogs new collars. You get old, your looks go. You don’t care.

You were handsome once, like a Greek god, with curly black locks and luxuriant chest hair. You still are, in your mind’s eye, even if your hair is so white you look like a ghost in photographs. You look at that photograph of an old man, and say out loud, “Jeez, I look like an old man!” Your friends call back, “You are an old man.” A young friend of your wife’s, maybe 35, picks up a photograph of you when you were 38 off the fireplace mantel. “Wow,” she says. “You were hot once.” You resist the urge to tell her, “I still am.”

You get old, small things give you pleasure that were once an annoyance. Throwing out the garbage, you meet a neighbor walking his dog. You pet his dog, pass the time. The mailman stops at your mailbox. He talks to you about his Brazilian girlfriend, then hands you the mail. Bills, a check, and — eureka! — four movies from Netflix.

From Paul Solotaroff’s profile Making Men:

Row by row in the spit-and-polish classroom at the rear of Pro-Vision’s shiny new building, heads tilt up and hands fold. Twenty-five black or brown boys in white shirts fix their gaze on the strapping ex-cornerback of the Philadelphia Eagles. He was once a hitter so ferocious he used to shatter his own helmet punishing tight ends going over the middle. As a boy, his temper marked him for jail till he lucked into football’s sanctioned war. He rarely blows his stack now, but when he does, look out. Young has spent two decades and nearly every NFL dollar he saved turning a storefront hangout into a powerhouse prep, a citadel on the hill for bottom-rung boys who’ve been kicked out of Houston’s worst schools. Emotionally disturbed kids who can’t read or sit still, sixth-graders who can’t do second-grade math — he wants the ones abandoned or deemed a menace by others. He’s made a second life of saving the lost, sanding grief and rage into rough-hewn poise and sending class after class of caught-up kids to success in high school, then college. But Young draws a line when it comes to thugging, and the boys in this room crossed it by trying to start a half-assed gang.

“You came to this school,” he says, “begging for help, saying, ‘Choose me over the 10 boys behind me.’ Hell, some of you so-called thugs bawled your eyes out then. But here you are now, claiming your little set. You all broke your contract with me.”

He is staring at a kid in the last row, a small light-skinned boy named Jacorey Miller. His hips are so narrow, he can barely keep his pants up when he gets to his feet to answer. “Sir, it wasn’t me, sir. That was my grandma did the crying.”

Young ramps his glare up, perhaps to keep from laughing. Jacorey is a scrappy child who can’t keep his mouth shut. Smarting off to teachers, baiting the other boys, almost all of them bigger and harder than him — he’s a teacup Yorkie barking at pit bulls. If he weren’t so bright, he’d probably have been kicked out months ago, sent back to the dreaded CEP, Houston’s dump-site school for lawless kids. “Son, you got the nerve to try something this stupid, bringing that foolishness into this temple I’ve built, and you think I’m up here playing?”

Jacorey, eyes burning: “No. Not really.”

From Daniel Duane’s My Father’s Mountain:

The 13,075-foot mountain towers over California’s central Sierra Nevada range, and I went up there to replicate the greatest climb of my father’s life. Back in 1988, when he was 49, he scaled one of the sheer rock faces on Seven Gables as part of an expedition with his friend Galen Rowell, a world-class high-altitude climber and adventure photographer. I had been invited along, but I was a novice at the time, only 20 years old, and felt intimidated, so I declined. Afterward Rowell published a report in the American Alpine Journal claiming several first ascents on major peaks, and he included a photo of my father high on Seven Gables, leaning away from the white cliff as he scouted the route above. For me, this was like being a novice surfer, hairing out of a Hawaii trip with your dad and his pro-surfer buddy, and then having Surfer magazine publish a shot of your pops getting barreled at Pipeline. In other words, it was hell, but awesome, too. Rowell gave my father an autographed color print of that image, and it hung framed in our family dining room, torturing me with self-reproach but also giving me the determination to become a better climber and maybe even a professional adventurer like Rowell.

Last year, I finally planned my own Seven Gables trip. I’d long since quit climbing, but this felt like unfinished business….

I had no interest in doing just any route on Seven Gables; I hoped to replicate Rowell’s photo of my father, but with me in his place, at the exact same spot on the mountain. That meant we had to sit there in the cold air, sip scotch, and hash out every nuance of our memories about the two men, from Rowell’s photographic motivations to my father’s actual climbing ability, to speculate about which route they would have picked. For me that meant unearthing and confronting some complicated feelings about both men, and myself.

Print this article