I first met Evan Wright, who took his own life on July 12 at age 59, in March of 1999, when I flew to Seattle to write a story about Seth Warshavsky, the internet porn entrepreneur who had secured the rights to the Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee sex tape. Evan did communications for Warshavsky. He accompanied me on a tour of his boss’s webcam-stripper operation—a vast warehouse converted into a soundstage where women undressed for customers paying a monthly subscriber fee. Although this was the era of dial-up internet, Evan assured me it was a thriving, profitable business. Warshavsky’s company, the Internet Entertainment Group, supposedly made $100 million that year, when most dot-coms were still losing money.
As a business writer for Time, I was used to solicitous publicists. But Evan turned out to be far more complex than the typical flack. To start, he knew who I was from a pseudonymous story I had written for Hustler several years before about the seasonal rioting of university students in South Korea. During my visit to IEG, Evan, who had been at Hustler when the story ran, interrogated me, asking detailed questions about structure and narrative. I had a blueprint: start with a scene, step back for a few paragraphs of exposition, then do another scene, more exposition, and a concluding scene. Evan was fascinated by that simple model. I felt flattered to be asked about my work. Part of Evan’s charm, I would later discover, was his patient listening and eager, genial interest in other people. Later, during his successful career as a reporter and a writer, this would serve him well. But at the time, it made me wonder: Why was someone as sophisticated as Evan, who could discuss and analyze nuances of narrative structure, working in internet porn?
Evan asked how much money I made at Time. I was making $60,000 a year and said so. He took a pen and wrote a number on a piece of paper, folded it, and slid it to me. This struck me as odd since we were alone in his office. The number was his salary: $80,000. He smiled at me as if I should now understand his secret.
Eventually, Evan would write a story about working for IEG. He would recount how the entire operation, the webcams and the strippers and the warehouse, was a Potemkin village designed to convince investors it was a viable business. Before he and I drove to the warehouse, he had telephoned strippers to come in and pretend to webcast. Everything he told me, about the profitability of the company, the dozens of women working 40 hours a week, even the web cameras—all of it was a lie. He would write about the writer from Time who believed it. Was his flattery also a lie?
Evan’s suicide has me questioning everything I knew about him.
It is a tribute to Evan that we became close friends despite that fraught beginning. After I left Seattle, he sent me a story he had written for LA Weekly: “Scenes from My Life in Porn.” That account, which described his experience as a writer and editor for Hustler, remains the best story about the industry during the 1990s I have read. At one point, he recalled compiling Hustler’s annual list of the most powerful people in porn—and even ranking himself. (And there it was: scene, exposition, scene, exposition, scene.) The piece was so good, he began to secure the assignments at Rolling Stone that would make his reputation, including the three-part series of Iraq War dispatches that he would turn into his prizewinning 2004 book, Generation Kill. When I’d become an editor at Time, I’d tried to hire him.
Instead, he wisely took Jann Wenner’s offer and embedded with U.S. troops.
It’s hard to remember after almost two decades, but accounts such as Evan wrote for Rolling Stone were a revelation: gritty and visceral while also shedding light on a new generation of American soldiers. He so completely won over the Marines he was simultaneously glorifying and betraying that it almost felt like he was creating a new genre: war reporting by an astute, humorous psychologist.
He blew right past my story structure to produce a kind of observationally close third-person journalism uniquely suited to his talents. Evan was funny and could write a scene about Marines, or skateboarders, or movie stars, that on its face read like just-the-facts reporting but actually revealed the absurdity of the entire fucking endeavor.
He used to say that writers are like cats when we get together: we puff ourselves up and bristle. Over the first decade of our friendship, especially as Evan became a far more successful writer than I was, there was some of that posturing. Yet finally, as the great flares of his early success—Generation Kill, the HBO miniseries based on it, and a couple of National Magazine Awards—settled into a steady career, we developed what felt like a more natural, mutually supportive friendship. He hosted a semi-regular poker game. We went on hikes together. He came over for dinner and met my parents. Evan wasn’t a drinker, so we often met at restaurants or delis.
When I got my first job in television, as a writer on Ray Donovan, I called him for advice. He was then a writer and producer on Homeland. That evening, he told me that when the door opens to television, you go through it. You don’t ask questions. The writers’ room, he insisted, was the greatest grift ever invented. He had run his own show and written dozens of scripts, but he still wasn’t sure he even knew what he was doing. It didn’t matter, he explained, because nobody else did either, and the showrunners rewrote everything anyway. “TV writers,” Evan once texted me, “even ones who are talented and can do a script better than me, are mostly idiots. It’s a fascinating phenomenon because many have learned about the world from watching other TV shows…so we’re turning out copies of copies of forgeries…and this is what informs the public of truth in the world.”
Meanwhile, Evan was writing his next book, about his teen years in Ohio, where he’d spent time in a cultlike program called the Seed. During the 1970s, his parents had sent him there for selling pot (actually catnip), in the hope that it would scare him straight. Instead, he and his peers were traumatized, and the Seed was eventually shut down. He had been working on this book for over a decade, and when we met, he would allege some fantastical new element: how, for example, some founders of the program might have gone on to the Reagan administration’s War on Drugs and after that to the CIA and finally to the MAGA movement. It was titillating, but at times it sounded like conspiracy theorizing. Evan had a somewhat tortured process, and I became suspicious that he was using the pretext of reporting to avoid writing. But then, I was never as good a reporter or writer as he was, and he had the prizes to prove it.
For a while, we met every couple of weeks to talk about a possible TV show about government agencies and their search for alien life. We met with UFO “experts” who turned out to be crackpots. I had trouble taking them seriously, and they could sense that. But Evan would charm them, making them feel understood and even good about themselves. It wasn’t that Evan pretended to believe them; it was that when they were in his presence, they became reinvested in the rectitude of their mission. I recalled him asking me about my Hustler story. He was a natural confidence man.
Eventually, he began seeing Kelli, whom he would marry. He once sent me this message: “I can actually tell you I love this woman. And got closer to her than I have to anyone in 20 years.… She’s kind of a joyous person in her way.” He also told me that for the first time in his life, he wanted to have children. “I don’t give a fuck about my own ambitions anymore,” he wrote. “My distaste of children was the idea that they detracted from the zero sum game of what I want for myself.” Within three years, he and Kelli would have two sons and a daughter, and Evan would settle into domesticity. They remodeled their house. He kept his office in Santa Monica. It looked like a version of happiness.
When a friend takes his life, one combs through memories looking for clues. Evan would recount experiences that would be harrowing for most of us yet in his telling were just another funny anecdote. Instead of being alarmed for him, I went along for the crazy ride. Now I regret not being more concerned. I knew Evan was struggling with his book, and I began to doubt that he would ever actually finish it. The last time we spoke, he said he was embarrassed about a new business he was developing: selling photos from when he was reporting from Iraq. He thought it was a little shameful to be making money from something other than writing. I told him that was ridiculous; I sometimes sold baseball cards on eBay. Who gives a shit? But perhaps if I had a look at his checking account, I would understand a source of his despair?
I keep going back to that first time we met, when he walked and talked me through an entire fake company and never let on for a moment that it was all lies. Now I wonder how much of himself he ever let me see. There was some great mystery to him, I now have to resentfully concede, that I utterly failed to fathom.
A couple of times in writing this, I wasn’t sure about some detail. My first thought was always to call Evan and ask. Then I remembered that he was no longer here, and I was overwhelmed with sadness. I always thought we would have plenty of time.•
If you’re thinking of suicide, call or text 988 to connect with the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline or visit speakingofsuicide.com for helpful resources.
Karl Taro Greenfeld is a novelist, journalist and television writer whose books include Speed Tribes,Triburbia, Boy Alone and The Subprimes. He has been a writer and producer on Ray Donovan, Tokyo Vice, Monarch, and See. His stories have appeared in Best American Short Stories, O. Henry Prize Stories and the Pushcart Prize anthology.
