I can’t recall if my pitch was emailed or typed-out and sent via snail-mail, but Esquire bit right away…assignment! Those were the days when it could take as long as two or three months between suggesting an article and seeing it in print. The other freelance piece [after the jump] was about private Hollywood poker games. It was either for GQ or Outside magazine; I honestly don’t remember.

Best idea I pitched that nobody wanted to run: A Playboy parody article called “The Girls of Bumblefuck.” The premise was that (a) the myth of the devastatingly attractive farmer’s daughter bailing hay in Podunk, Arkansas, was bullshit and (b) that beauty always follows wealth and power, hence the dishiest women are almost always found in big cities while women from one-horse, out-of the way trailer-park towns tend to be…well, not in the Ava Gardner or Angelina Jolie realm.