Volume 4, Issue 50: Jaime Garcia

"His career was riddled with injuries he could never quite overcome."

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My first job out of college was at U. The National College Magazine, a one-year fellowship alongside two other recent journalism school graduates, from Florida and Michigan State. We put out a monthly magazine and also all lived together in a ratty but airy apartment in Santa Monica. Because we were all 21 years old, the apartment kept adding people to it as the year went along; I think there were 11 people, on and off, who stayed there total. Those first years post-college are the only time in one’s life, I think (I hope), when you can wake up and meet two people who now live with you, at least for a few weeks or so, on the way to the bathroom—and not find it all that unusual. It was a heady time.

August 1997, Century City, Los Angeles.

My roommates and co-workers were both a lot more fun than I was, particularly because I spent most of the year trying to convince myself I was depressed, as young people often do. And one of them was dating an older man. I don’t remember how much older than us he was: I was 21, so I surely thought he was 62 when he was probably more like 27. We had a nickname for him. His nickname was Sputnik. This is not because he was Russian, or an astronaut—that would have been a lot cooler. We called him Sputnik because, to us three 21-year-olds who had been out of college for only a couple of months and had no idea how to navigate the real world, he represented an exploratory vessel into the uncharted territory that was grownup life. My roommate would go on a date with him, like, to a fancy restaurant or something, where you had to wear something other than an oversized T-shirt, and then she would come back and tell us, mockingly but with undeniable fascination, all about the adult things he would talk about: Dental insurance, 401k plans, office politics, going to friends’ weddings, being old enough to rent a car. The Sputnik reference didn’t really refer to him, of course; it referred to her, to us, with her nights out with him a brief sojourn into her, and our, own future before returning comfortably to the weightless, consequence-free lives we were living—lives we vaguely knew we wouldn’t be able to pull off that much longer. She always had a certain look of excitement and fear on her face when she got back to our apartment: I can’t believe that’s going to be us so soon.

It was a lesson I tried to keep in mind as I got older: Hang out with people older than you. See your future. And hey: You might just learn something.

But the lesson I ultimately learned was a much more sobering one. Because as I’ve gotten older myself, I’ve learned that as people age, they don’t talk much anymore about their hopes and dreams, or whatever wisdom they’ve gathered among their travels, or their fears as they face an uncertain future. I always imagined, as you got older, your world would expand, that you’d be even more aware of the limitless possibilities of the universe. It has turned out to be the exact opposite. The older a person gets, I’ve discovered, the smaller their world gets. And they tend to want to talk mostly about one thing: All the things that are going wrong with their body.

It becomes more and more prevalent each year. When I lived in New York, I had one Sputnik friend who was 20 years older than me, and I was constantly needling him for, when I asked him how he was doing, giving me a rundown of all his ailments. It is to his credit that he had good humor about my taunts. “You’ll be this old someday,” he said. “If you’re lucky.”

And now I am 47 years old, and the last three old friends of mine I have seen, when we sat down to catch up, have said, at one point in our conversation, the word “colonoscopy.” (And I said it too.) We are at that age, after all. You gotta catch this stuff early. Before it gets too late.

This will of course accelerate: I’ve spent enough time with my parents over the last few years to be more than fully aware of the pending atrophy. (I think my father now has two different weekly pill containers.) I’m not ready for it. And I think you can tell by my relationship with my doctor.

My doctor is a very friendly, smart man, and he’s roughly my age, which means we run around in the same circles: I’ve seen him at tailgates, sporting events, even concerts. I’m fortunate enough to be pretty healthy: My cholesterol is a little high, I’m probably two-or-three pounds more than I’d like to be, I get stress-related headaches a lot. (I could go on but … I won’t!) On the whole, though, I’m holding up all right. I’ve yet to have an appointment with my doctor that has had much bad news; in fact, we usually just talk about our kids, politics, Georgia football—normal stuff. I feel like that’s probably a good sign. I’d be worried if every time I went in his office, he stopped me when I asked him how his life was and screamed, “No time for small talk! Everything about your body is an emergency!”

I like him. He’s a nice guy. Thus, whenever I see my doctor in public, I always come over and say hi like we are old chums.

And every time—every time—he looks and me, pauses uncomfortably, smiles tightly and says hi as friendly as he can, but in a way that makes it clear that this conversation isn’t going to continue, have a good one, I’m going to talk to someone else now. He’s affable about it. But he also makes skid marks going in the other direction. Every time. And then I’ll see him in his office a few months later, and it’s like we’re old best friends again.

I asked my mom, a retired emergency room nurse of 35 years who has spent more than her fair share of time with doctors, if there was any professional reason he might be wary of being friendly outside the office, or if he just didn’t like me.

“Well, some doctors are hesitant to acknowledge patients when they see them in public, just to protect the patient’s confidentiality,” she said. “But by going up to him, you’ve made it clear you’re not worried about that.” She paused. “It’s possible he just doesn’t like you.”

“But honestly,” she said as I started the sad Charlie Brown walk out of the room, “he probably hates running into patients. I’m sure they’re always asking him for medical advice when he’s just trying to watch a game. After all, that’s what everybody still does with me, and I’ve been retired for six years. Even you.”

Andy Rooney once wrote that you should never be close friends with a doctor because once you are, you discover that in the world outside of medicine, they’re never as smart as you want them to be. “Once you’ve seen a guy not be able to change a tire, you’ll never let him operate on your heart,” he said. I always liked that joke. But when I think about it now, I don’t know how doctors can ever have any friends who are not doctors at all. My friends are constantly telling me everything that’s wrong with them, and I can’t do anything to help them. I can’t imagine how hard it is for a doctor walking around the world. They probably can’t go to the grocery store without someone asking them to take a look at this sore on their neck.

We once thought we were being so clever by releasing our Sputnik into the outside world, a satellite bringing back information from the world of the olds. Now I realize I was a lot happier living in ignorance. Young people, please do not ask us for advice or wisdom. We’ll only tell you about our joint pain. We can show you your future. But trust me: You don’t want to know.

HAPPY 20TH BIRTHDAY BLACKTABLE.COM

The Black Table, the website Eric Gillin, A.J. Daulerio, Aileen Gallagher and I founded out of a Bowery apartment that was mostly ash, bong resin and empty pizza boxes, launched 20 years ago today.

Nothing in my life or career would have happened without The Black Table. There are people who today have complicated feelings about The Black Table, but you should know that I am not one of them: I’m proud of the work we did there, even the stuff that isn’t very good, and it remains the most purely pleasurable professional experience of my career, even if nothing about it was actually, uh, professional. (We ran one ad, for roughly four hours, and none of us ever made a dime.) I cannot believe it has been 20 years. Cheers to Eric, A.J., Aileen, the brilliant illustrator Jim Cooke, and everyone else who got to be a part of it with me.

Here is a numerical breakdown of all the things I wrote this week, in order of what I believe to be their quality.

1. The Reaction to Demar Hamlin’s Collapse Is a Sign of Progress, New York. It’s OK to still care about sports, though.

2. My Big Annual Piece About Georgia Football, WSLS Podcast. Big game this weekend! I love writing this piece every year.

3. Edward Norton Movies, Ranked and Updated, Vulture. With Glass Onion: A Knives out Mystery.

4. Glass Onion Is the Perfect Holiday Movie, Medium. Well, it is.

5. The Thirty: Who Will Be Every Team’s Best Player in 2023? MLB.com. I’ve adjusted this for Carlos Correa three times now.

6. The Top Ten Movies of 2022, Medium. You’ve already read this.

PODCASTS

Waitin' Since Last Saturday, we recapped that amazing game, and we previewed the TCU national title game, which I am in the air on the way to Los Angeles to go write about this very second.

Grierson & Leitch, no show until next week, but you should listen to Dorkfest again.

Seeing Red, no show this week.

LONG STORY YOU SHOULD READ THIS MORNING … OF THE WEEK

“The Instrumentalist,” Zadie Smith, The New York Times Book Review. Zadie Smith on Tar, I’m not sure what you’re waiting for here.

ONGOING LETTER-WRITING PROJECT!

This is your reminder that if you write me a letter and put it in the mail, I will respond to it with a letter of my own, and send that letter right to you! It really happens! Hundreds of satisfied customers!

Write me at:

Will Leitch
P.O. Box 48
Athens GA 30603

CURRENTLY LISTENING TO

“The Next Storm,” Frank Turner. Thank you to the letter-writer—you know who you are—who demanded I listen to Frank Turner in the new year. Excellent call! I’ve been doing a deep dive into the English singer-songwriter, and this is the one I keep landing on as my favorite, a rocker about resilience and optimism that was written seven years ago but sure feels even more relevant now. I’m all in.

Remember to listen to The Official Will Leitch Newsletter Spotify Playlist, featuring every song ever mentioned in this section.

I’m on a flight to Los Angeles this very minute. Here’s a flashback to March 1996, the first time I ever went to Los Angeles, when I went to visit my old high school buddy Tim Grierson, where we shared a special moment on the beach. We will surely reenact this exact moment at dinner tonight.

Have a great weekend, all.

Best,
Will