May the Best Move (or Punch) Win

Along Santa Monica’s Ocean Front Walk sits a haven for geeks of the game of chess. The International Chess Park, comprising a giant chess set and dozens of regulation-play chess tables, draws people from all walks of life. Including men, who, three days a week, will stand between the 2- to 3-foot-tall chess pieces and physically beat the crap out of each other. Legally.

In the midst of this strange scuffle, a giant bearded man will suddenly blow a whistle, and the two opponents will dash over to a chess table, remove their gloves and sit down to continue a game of chess.

Spectators will stop and stare, some even snapping a few pictures. But what they don’t realize is that they are witnessing the birth of a brand-new sport in the U.S. — a unique mashup of boxing and chess.

The bearded man, 6-foot-9 photojournalist Andrew McGregor, runs the Los Angeles Chessboxing Club, the first group in North America sanctioned by the Berlin-based World Chess Boxing Organization (WCBO). He stages competitions, teaches classes at the Chess Park and even competes. He hopes to help spread the sport to the rest of America, promoting brains and brawn by making both boxing and chess more approachable.

But Santa Monica pedestrians don’t know any of that. They just keep their distance.

“I don’t think they truly get that we’re doing both,” McGregor says with a chuckle. “I haven’t actually been spoken to by anyone.”

McGregor’s interest in chess boxing began seven years ago when he was in Budapest and spotted a flyer advertising an upcoming bout. The subject was intriguing. He was already a chess geek at school — and unbeatable among his circle of friends — but he just shrugged and walked on. The concept stuck in his head, though, and over the next six months, he would occasionally Google the subject.

Then, in 2008, while McGregor was on assignment in Africa, a chess friend of his e-mailed him a Wikipedia link about chess boxing along with the note, “You could be their Muhammad Ali.”

He kept following the sport through various European websites, and after grad school, he tried his hand at boxing. Unfortunately, it was a difficult discipline to grasp, but after former heavyweight champion George Foreman answered McGregor’s e-mail and passed along encouragement, McGregor was more motivated than ever.

“I asked around the boxing community [to find out] where the best gym was in L.A. I basically went in there, with all these hard-core fighters around, and said, ‘Hi, I want to do chess boxing! One round of boxing, one round of chess.’ They were like, ‘What?’ and pointed me to a trainer. ‘He’ll train you, whatever.’ ”

McGregor persisted, though, regularly working out at the gym; his boxing improved, and eventually he was sparring with pros. By this time he was also communicating through Facebook with chess boxers in Europe, and he had launched a website for his new chess-boxing club, which eventually partnered with the WCBO.

Intrigued by the enthusiasm, WCBO representative David Pfeifer flew to Los Angeles in early 2010 and met with McGregor. After the two chatted, McGregor said, “Let’s do an event. You’re here.”

McGregor sent an e-mail out to his friends, the local media picked up on the story, and more than 70 people showed up to watch the L.A. debut of chess boxing. Final outcome? Andrew “the Fightin’ Philanthropist” McGregor, the fledgling who became a boxer because of an e-mail from George Foreman, actually checkmated the established German competitor, David “Dr. King Kong” Pfeifer. Now McGregor was thoroughly hooked.

Pfeifer then explained to McGregor more about the origins of chess boxing, and the American finally learned how the sport began. Chess dates back some 1,500 years, and boxing may have emerged as early as 3,000 B.C. But the combination of the two is only seven years old. The sport’s roots lie in modern Europe, and they are an unlikely synthesis of Yugoslavian comics, French apocalypse, Dutch performance art and lager-fueled German nightlife.

As a young man growing up in Amsterdam in the late 1980s, Iepe Rubingh was introduced to comics via his father’s collection, and he read with great interest the 1992 graphic novel Froid Équateur (“Equator Cold”), by a Yugoslavian artist named Enki Bilal. Within the sci-fi tale of a futuristic Paris steeped in violence, panels depicted a 12-round boxing match, followed by an equally brutal game of chess.

Rubingh eventually moved to Berlin, where he established himself as the artist Iepe, a performance-artist prankster. But he never forgot Bilal’s powerful images.

One day in 2002, during a conversation with art friends about their mutual hobby of boxing, it suddenly occurred to Rubingh that one could appropriate Bilal’s concept and stage a match that combined both boxing and chess. They all agreed it couldn’t be a performance-art stunt. The two sports had to fuse together in such a way that either could decide the outcome.

Rubingh and his friends practiced the concept among themselves and mapped out a general rule book. A match begins with a four-minute round of chess, after which the chess table is removed from the ring, and fighters put on gloves and wale on each other for three minutes. The bout alternates between the two sports for 11 rounds, with one minute of rest between each. A win is determined by either a knockout in the ring or a checkmate on the board.

The Platoon cultural development center in Berlin staged the world’s first chess-boxing match in 2003, between Iepe the Joker and his friend, Luis the Lawyer. In addition to the traditional boxing announcer and ring girls, a chess expert provided play-by-play commentary, and the audience followed each chess move on video screens throughout the club.

Rubingh emerged victorious by checkmate, and shortly thereafter, he set about founding the World Chess Boxing Organization. When the WCBO’s first-ever world championship was staged a few months later at a sold-out concert hall in Amsterdam, between the same competitors, he won that also, as Luis the Lawyer ran out of time during the final chess round.

Publicity came naturally to Rubingh; as Iepe, he had already engineered massive art pranks that had stopped traffic in the streets of both Berlin and Tokyo. Promoting chess boxing was not going to pose a problem for him.

“Chess boxing is extreme physical stress combined with a huge mental test,” he told media at the time. “The adrenaline after boxing inhibits your ability to think, making the chess harder. Few people can still think straight after a right hook to the head. You need to be able to pull off that champion chess move while blood is pouring from your nose.”

The WCBO motto, “Fighting is done in the ring and wars are waged on the board,” spread throughout Europe’s chess and boxing networks, and more bouts soon followed. Chess-boxing clubs quickly began popping up in other countries, from Germany to England to Siberia.

In 2006, an ESPN broadcast about the odd sport caught the eye of David Depto, an engineer living in San Francisco. In the news segment, the WCBO said it was looking for American opponents to fight the German champion.

Depto had been a boxer for years, and he was no slouch at chess. So he sent the WCBO some information, and about six months later, the organization responded, asking for videos of his past fights. They also requested that he play chess with them online. He passed the test, and none other than the sport’s founder, Iepe Rubingh, flew out to California to meet him.

“We did some workouts together, ran some wind sprints through a park, played a few rounds of chess,” Depto says. “He liked what he saw, and so I got the fight.”

Depto was already in top physical shape, so he focused on working with a chess coach on a strategy that would mesh with his aggressive boxing style — and he prepared himself to be the first American to compete in chess boxing, which he had never even seen in person.

“I knew going in that I probably [wasn’t] going to be the strongest chess player,” he remembers. “But I’m also one of the more experienced fighters. Therefore, I wanted to develop a chess strategy, develop some moves to force the game to slow down. My goal was to go into the ring, get some shots, go for the knockout.”

In 2007, Depto flew to Berlin to fight the German champion, a 37-year-old police officer named Frank “Anti Terror” Stoldt. To Depto, it was clear that the Germans knew how to stage a bout. The ring sat in the middle of an underground nightclub, surrounded by alcohol, loud music and 1,200 fans screaming for bloodshed.

“It was a lot of fun,” Depto recalls. “When I got into the ring, and they were playing the national anthem, it was overwhelming, representing the U.S. in this new sport.”

But the American wasn’t able to fully relax and land his punches. Then, Stoldt checkmated him in the seventh round.

Depto returned to Germany the next year and fought another bout in Cologne, against Swedish contender Konrad Rikardson. This time, Depto was more prepared. He won by a knockout punch in the second round.

“I got the feeling they were a little disappointed,” he says. “It went one round of chess, one round of boxing, and it was over.”

Depto was unable to compete in the championship that year, and he has been plagued with injuries ever since. But he’s had time to reflect on his career in chess boxing.

“I don’t think there’s been a ton of strategy yet,” he admits. “But because of the alternating rounds, there’s more opportunity for physical rest than just boxing. So the fighters are going to be much more recovered, fresh to go every round. Very few guys win with one-punch power. Most people win on the chessboard.”

McGregor agrees that the sport has not fully developed yet, but he says it’s incredibly addictive. The adrenaline rush of getting smacked in the face, then sitting down and trying to focus on the chess while trembling and sweating and dripping blood, creates an entirely new experience.

“I always want to win on the chessboard, because it’s more [impressive],” he says, laughing. “If you can orchestrate a checkmate when somebody’s trying to kill you, that’s pretty sick!”

Although the sport is new, says McGregor, regional differences have already become apparent. European cultures are often more fluent than Americans in chess, and Russians are particularly good at it. Fighters will wear headphones during the chess round to block out the crowd noise. Many competitors are professional boxers, and they refuse to use headgear in order to keep the experience more purely pugilistic.

In establishing a club in Los Angeles, McGregor realized he’d have to adapt the sport for U.S. sensibilities. It needed to have a modicum of safety. “For the American stuff, that’s not going to work,” he says. “People are not going to sign on to that.”

So he instituted amateur rules, with headgear strongly encouraged. After his club’s two bouts this year, McGregor says, the number of inquiries increased. “Lots of interest from men and women [in their 30s and] in grad school,” he says.

Getting in shape and having fun is one thing. But does this hybrid sport have any future as a legitimate revenue stream? Depto thinks that’s the missing link right now.

“For this thing to grow, there has to be sponsorship,” he says. “They can sell tickets to cover the events, but there’s not much money yet. Other guys who think the idea is novel are starting it in their own gyms. That’s been their growth model so far.”

And indeed, compared with boxing or chess, the absence of money in chess boxing is palpable. Matches display a refreshing lack of logos in the ring and around the venue. According to Depto, who traveled to Germany twice for fights, winning purses were “several hundred euros,” and boxers’ travel expenses were paid. But nobody appears to be chess boxing professionally as a primary source of income.

“There is no chess boxer — so far — who makes a living out of the sport,” says the WCBO’s David Pfeifer. “Most of us are working in different jobs. The WCBO does offer cash to the fighters who participate in championships. [But] it’s more of a thank-you for their hard work and preparation.”

For others who just love the sport itself, like McGregor, hurling a ton of marketing at chess boxing would turn it into another dodgeball league — all logo and no heart. To him, the grassroots origins of chess boxing and the physical and mental acuity it takes to compete are what make the sport special.

“I want to do it because it’s awesome — people can benefit from it,” he says. “People should learn how to defend themselves, but this is self-defense in a healthy fashion.”

He adds, “I think it’s going to blow up. I think it will become like snowboarding over the next 10 years.”

#  #  #

This article originally appeared in American Way magazine.

All of Chile is going ballistic. Islanders are already envisioning a new hospital and school. The mayor is demanding each resident should receive an equal share — $8 million apiece.

The American is aghast. For six years he’s made this journey to the tiny island, hunting for an 18th century stash of gold. Each October he returns here to continue his excavations, in obscurity. But as of today, his anonymity is gone forever.

All the money he has spent. The months of research. The wrangling of government permits. Only to have the treasure stolen away by a little wheeled robot named Arturito. Everyone in Chile is laughing at him. Despite his doctor’s orders, Keiser starts smoking again.

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Arturito was a four-wheeled, remote-controlled gizmo decorated with a rotating red light. Because the appliance resembled the Star Wars’ R2D2, it was thus nicknamed “Arturito,” or “little Arthur.” A ground-penetrating sensor was supposed to identify buried metals up to 50 meters. Its owner, Wagner Technologies, claimed previous successes: Arturito had located a cache of illegal weapons, and found the corpse of a missing businessman.

Within two days, Arturito discovered three separate treasure locations at Robinson Crusoe. Media immediately fell in love with the cute robot, that claimed the gold for Chile. There was no love for Keiser, the American. Reporters described him as “Gringo Loco,” and made fun of his remedial Spanish. Chile’s largest newpaper, El Mercurio, screamed the headline, “Bernard Keiser: ¿el gran perdedor? (“The Great Loser?”). All without anyone so much as sticking a shovel into the dirt to verify the claim.

And then the cute robot story began to unravel. Scientific experts expressed doubts as to the robot’s claimed “atomic gamma rays” and “antiplasma reactor” technology. Locals pointed out that Arturito’s locations, the jagged peaks of a mountain, were impossible. Spanish sailors would never haul chests of gold up the steep slopes. Wagner Technologies then suddenly announced it was forfeiting all rights to the treasure. Arturito’s inventor, a man named Manuel Salinas, gave a speech to a university physics class in Valparaiso, and was unable to explain how the robot even worked. The professor abruptly ended Salinas’ presentation, to a rousing ovation from students.

Within two weeks, Arturito was shamed into oblivion. Robinson Crusoe Island returned to its leisurely pre-robot pace. Fishermen continued trapping longostas. Tourists kept on bird-watching and scuba diving. And Bernard Keiser went back to excavating. He’s not here for the lobster or the scuba. He knows in his heart, the treasure is still here.

He doesn’t want to talk about Arturito. But he can’t not talk about it. Because of Arturito, everyone now knows about him. He’s even listed in tourist guidebooks.

“It was ridiculous,” Keiser says evenly, somewhat exasperated at having to explain it all over again. “Is it logical that if this thing can find the treasure, and it can find anything, go 50 kilometers into the ground — wouldn’t somebody be using this? Wouldn’t they be patenting it? Wouldn’t they be selling it to all the mining companies in the world? All the Exxons, all the Shells? What are they doing here? The whole thing is absurd.”

Almost as absurd as the idea of an American selling off his business and moving to an isolated island, to spend six years digging for treasure. And not finding it.

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Most people don’t bother hunting for treasure. The risk is too great, the odds too long. The obsession either pulses within your DNA, or you experience a bizarre epiphany and realize your true calling. In the case of 56-year-old Bernard Keiser, it is both.

Raised in Chicago by Dutch-Jewish immigrant parents, little Bernie had in many ways a typical Midwest childhood. He grew his hair long, listened to Chicago blues music, drove muscle cars. While attending college in Jacksonville, Florida, he noticed the ongoing efforts of legendary treasure hunter Mel Fisher.

In Florida, you couldn’t help but hear about Fisher. In the 1960s, the former scuba instructor was among the team to first discover the Spanish Plate Fleet, a group of 12 ships which sunk in a 1715 hurricane off the Florida coast. Fisher’s expeditions yielded millions of dollars in gold, and made him internationally famous. Like many in Florida, Bernard Keiser read treasure books, scuba-dived the waters, picked up coins on the beaches.

It was a youthful and short-lived obsession. Bernie returned to Chicago, and with a loan from his parents, co-founded a textiles company, Architex International. It wasn’t much of a stretch from the family business – his father sold drapes.

The timing was perfect, an ambitious son of immigrants, coinciding with the growth of America’s new office cubicle culture. Businesses were adding more employees, and demand was high for fabric-covered furniture and room dividers. Architex pushed its textiles to companies like Steelcase, and by the 1980s, the company employed over 200 workers, and operated a 50,000-square-foot warehouse.

The money was good, and Keiser worked hard for it. So he bought some toys. He owned a sailboat. He collected vintage cars. He and his wife raised two sons. But he never forgot Mel Fisher.

And then one day in 1996, he turned on the television and was captivated by a program on the Learning Channel, a documentary called “The Hunt For Amazing Treasures.” One treasure in particular caught his eye – the rumored stash of Captain General Don Juan Esteban de Ubilla y Echeverria.

In the early 18th century, the Spanish commander was in charge of ferrying booty from Mexican and South American colonies back to Spain. Along the route, Ubilla had supposedly stolen and hidden some of his cargo on a remote Chilean island, at the time called Más a Tierra.

Keiser watched as the program revealed copies of three letters, which described Ubilla’s treasure and its location. Two letters had turned up in England, and one was found in Chile. This last letter Keiser was most curious about.

“Something hit me, very funny about the document,” he remembers. “The words that were used. I thought, wait a minute. A Chilean does not write Old English. It’s different phrasing, different words. Very difficult to write.”

Keiser taped the program on his VCR, and watched it again and again. There was something about the document. “It had historical facts, that only a historian would know. Only someone from that time period would have known how to write it.”

He traveled to England, researching the letters in libraries, maritime logs, public records, newspaper archives. After six months of rummaging, he returned home to Chicago, his brain churning with facts and questions. He was in too deep. There was only one thing to do. In late 1996 he came to Robinson Crusoe Island.

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A fishing boat takes me to the rocky coast of Puerto Inglés (English Port), on the north side of the island. Since 1999, this small valley is where Keiser has been digging for Ubilla’s treasure. I don’t know what he looks like, but Americans are not hard to find. Only 600 people live here.

I walk past a group of Chilean excavators, working with hand trowels, and come to Selkirk’s Cave, a jagged hole in the hillside about 10 feet high. This cave was named for Alexander Selkirk, a Scottish sailor who was marooned on the island from 1704-1709. His experience formed the basis for Daniel Defoe’s classic novel Robinson Crusoe.

In 1968, the Chilean government renamed Más a Tierra to Robinson Crusoe Island, to promote tourism. It certainly wasn’t to promote historical accuracy. The fictional Crusoe character was actually stranded in the Caribbean instead of the Pacific. Crusoe had a sidekick (Man Friday), Selkirk was alone. And a neighboring island, Más Afuera, was renamed Alejandro Selkirk Island, even though Selkirk never set foot there.

A small bearded man sits inside the cave on a portable stool, sipping instant coffee. Bernard Keiser wears a yellow raincoat and safari hat with one side pinned up. His jeans are grubby with soil. A Kent cigarette lingers in his hand.

Is this Selkirk’s Cave, I ask.

“Well, it’s called Selkirk’s Cave,” he smiles. “But he never lived here. They just say that, for the tourists.”

We start chatting, and when the subject of Arturito comes up, Keiser sighs and shakes his head.

“Name me one high-tech innovation that came from Chile – there’s none,” he says in a flat Chicago accent. “I told them, ‘I don’t want to have anything to do with that company, that machine, with the little light on top.’ It didn’t pertain to anything here at all.”

We examine the walls of the cave, covered with names and dates and odd petraglyphs. This room is where Keiser first began his research, and he believes the treasure was once hidden right here, beneath our feet. He points out each carving. The name “ANSON.” A carving of a rose. An “AB” surrounded by a diamond. An S-shaped design, with three holes.

“Man has a reason for doing everything he does,” he tells me. “Especially in the olden days. When you see something, there must have been a reason for it.”

As he explains what each means, a whopper of a story begins to fall together. Some of it might be true, some is conjecture and guesswork, and weeks later, some details still doesn’t make sense. But an incredible tale nevertheless. Based on several years of research in England and Spain, his theory goes something like this:

In 1713 and 1714, Ubilla sailed to the island and stashed six to eight million pesos’ worth of treasures. He carved an S-shaped map of South America into the cave wall, and also the diamond shape, which was stamped into silver bars to denote purification. To hide his theft, Ubilla doctored the ship’s manifest, low-balling the total. But before Ubilla could return to retrieve it, he was killed in the Florida Plate Fleet storm.

Nearly 50 years later, on orders from English Lord High Admiral George Anson, sailor Cornelius Webb left Britain on a secret mission – to bring back this Spanish treasure in the name of the crown. In 1761, Webb found Ubilla’s gold hidden inside a tunnel of volcanic rock. His men used black powder to blow out the side of the chamber (creating what is now Selkirk’s Cave), and hauled all of it onto the ship. Webb carved the name “ANSON” into the wall, and added a rose shape, because the treasure contained a unique, jewel-encrusted rose.

The ship set out for England, encountered a storm, broke a mast, and was forced to return to the island. Webb’s men off-loaded the treasure, and reburied it back at Puerto Inglés (Keiser believes this new location is very near the cave). Webb then sailed to Valparaiso, the nearest Chilean port, for repairs. When alerted to a secret mutiny brewing, he blew up his own ship, killing all the crew members, and rowed away on a small boat. He was the only survivor.

Webb wrote two letters to Lord Anson, describing that he found the Ubilla treasure – including 864 bags of gold, 200 bars of gold, 21 barrels of precious stones and jewelry, and 160 chests of gold and silver coins – and that he reburied it. The second letter included the code words “yellow stone” and “Dschubba” (ancient name of a star in the Scorpio constellation). But Anson died before receiving them, and Webb died the following year.

The Ubilla story – and treasure, if there is any – sat dormant until 1950, when the letters came into the hands of Luis Cousiño, at that time the richest man in Chile. Cousiño decided to hunt for the treasure himself. He anchored his yacht in the island harbor, and excavated a portion of the hillside at San Juan Bautiste, the only village. Finding nothing, Cousiño gave up. The letters were passed down to his ex-daughter-in-law, Maria Beeché, who still lives on the island today.

Decades later, Beeché was interviewed for the buried treasure documentary. Keiser met with Beeche, and she shared her letters in exchange for a percentage of any treasure. He spent the next two years securing excavation permits from the Chilean government, and started digging in 1999. He’s coy about costs, but some say he’s spent millions of his own money.

Keiser gestures at the walls. “It took years of looking, trying to figure this all out. What it meant. So knowing this, all of a sudden — shit, it’s coming together.”

He lights another cigarette. “I think there isn’t anything more I could find. There’s only so much that was written. Like a detective, you can only go so far.”

We walk around the valley, and he indicates spots that have been exacavated, where he’s planning to dig next. He points to a hillside of peculiar yellow rocks. This is apparently the “yellow stone” and “scorpion” mentioned in a letter. I squint, but I can’t see a scorpion. The crew dug up this area previously, and this year is going back in and widening the dig. They’ve found many artifacts that date from the time of Ubilla. But still no treasure.

Few in Chile believe Keiser’s story. The media is against him. He fired a crew of archeologists because they were too skeptical. The government is also an enormous pain in the ass. Keiser is allowed to excavate only from October through the end of March. After the end of each season, he is required to replace all the dirt and replant the area. He can’t use any backhoes or pneumatic hammers – all the work must be done with hand tools. If they’re unearthing a previously excavated area, only then are they allowed to use shovels.

But Keiser is thankful about one thing. He’s the only person with licensed permission to excavate on the island. Nobody else is going to find it. Maybe not even him.

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I drop by Keiser’s room at his hosteria, to see some of his artifacts. On the door is a sign that reads, “Bienvenido, Bernard Keiser,” with a little cartoon of a treasure chest and pirate flag. Fox News blares loudly from a TV. There’s a bed, a closet and bathroom. This is Bernard Keiser’s life. During excavation season, he lives in this room, keeping in touch with family through email and phone calls. The rest of the year he lives in Santiago, processing the artifacts and having them analyzed.

We look at photos of his Chinese porcelain fragments. A thermo-luminescence lab test determined them to be 880 years old. Other fragments date from the 1700s, pieces of bottles and ceramic vessels. As he says, it is very odd to find these specific items on such an obscure island.

It’s time for the big news. Keiser hands over a xeroxed page with drawings of various sailor buttons. It was common for sailors to change the designs of their buttons every few years. He points out a button design from 1715, the same that was found among the Plate Fleet in Florida. He now pulls out a circular tin and opens it. inside is a small metal button resting in a pile of dirt. It’s identical to the Plate Fleet button.

Keiser stabs at it with a finger. “Now how the fuck did that button get here on the island? It’s not just a button, it’s a very particular button. You just don’t find it anywhere. Finding something that exists in one other spot in the world – the odds are a zillion to one.” This is one of about 20 identical buttons, all found at the same location. His theory is that in 1713 and 1714, as Ubilla’s sailors were working hard to hide the treasure, the buttons popped off their jackets.

He shows me copies of the letters from Webb to Anson. Even if no treasure is ever found, it’s exciting to read a 300-year-old letter that lists $10 billion worth of gold and silver and jewels and porcelain.

But Chilean historians aren’t interested, he says. Neither are other treasure hunters. He’s pretty much alone. Does his family consider him Gringo Loco?

“They know me pretty well,” Keiser says. “They know I wouldn’t do something stupid. It’s well researched.”

I mention that all this must get frustrating, especially when he’s finding such specific artifacts.

“It’s very frustrating. Very emotional. You take in the criticisms. You have to be calm, do what you can do and that’s it. The one thing I know, is that it’s there.”

“Don’t you want to blow up the whole mountain?” I ask.

“No,” he answers ruefully. “I’d like to, but I know I can’t.”

He has given himself no deadline, he adds. It’s a cumulative effect that keeps him going. Each button and sliver of ceramic connects to his theories. He enjoys the patience, the detective work. In a way, the process isn’t much different from running a textile company.

“Just like when you start a business,” he says. “Are you going to ask someone who is semi-successful, the first year, second year, third: ‘How long are you going to keep the business?’ As long as you’re making money, basically, as long as you’re on the right track — you keep on going. This is the same thing.”

I ask if he ever feels like giving up. “Mel Fisher didn’t give up,” he says quickly. For 14 years, Fisher searched for the wreck of one ship, the Atocha, off Key West. And he finally found it. To treasure hunters, Mel Fisher was a god.

“He passed over the wreck site a number of times, not thinking that it was anything unusual,” Keiser continues softly. “Every morning he would say, ‘Today’s the day.’ Those famous words, for 14 years. And it ended up one day he found the cannons. He found the silver, gold, strewn over the floor of the ocean. They’re still finding things today.”

Keiser replaces the papers back into a file. “If the treasure’s here, we’ll see.”

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The Chilean press has moved onto other stories. Mayor Leopoldo González Charpentier had at first envisioned a treasure theme park, even building a monument to Arturito. But like a true politician, he added that the island’s “greatest treasure is its people.”

Locals still laugh at Arturito. That was silly. There might still be a treasure here, who knows, it’s a nice story. But when asked directly about Keiser, villagers start muttering to each other in Spanish, without translating. It’s a small community. Nobody wants to criticize too much.

On a boisterous night at the Village Daniel Defoe bar, a group of sailors are celebrating their recent voyage, in 30-knot winds, from Valparaiso. Out of six sailboats, two were forced to turn back, their crews vomiting in the rough seas. So of course the crews who survived the trip are flush with victory and mad with alcohol. Four rowdies are downing Pisco sours and pounding their fists on the bar, shouting in unison, “Juan Fernandez! Juan Fernandez!”

Keiser is the topic of discussion at a table of yachtistas. One of them relights his stubby Cohiba and leans into my face. “Bernard eez a nice guy,” he slurs loudly. “But I theenk, sometime? He believe too much, you know?

A scant 100 meters down the dirt road, Bernard Keiser sits on the bed in his hosteria room, checking emails, as Bill O’Reilly’s voice erupts from the TV. He opens another pack of Kents. Maybe tomorrow will be the day.

Outside the city’s Central Business District, however, a much older industry is still very much alive. A visitor strolling through Guanyuan Market might initially linger to take in the wondrous variety of rare flowers, birds, and reptiles. It’s the crazy noise, though, that will eventually win the spectator’s attention. A cacophony of incessant chirping carries over the hum of the crowd. It’s a familiar sound amplified to a deafening level — and it beckons everyone walking by to come and check out the crickets.

The merchants here display hundreds of their chirping wares right on the street, each inside a bamboo cage or a plastic container. Some crickets are for singing, others are for fighting — and all are for sale. Prices can reach the equivalent of several thousand U.S. dollars, an astonishing amount for an insect that will live only two to three months.

For centuries, China has regarded a cricket chirping around the house as good luck; a deluge of crickets means wealth will come to the family.

Under the Tang dynasty (618–907 AD), the Chinese began keeping crickets as musical pets. “Ladies of the palace” would catch crickets and carry them either in their bosom or suspended from their girdle. At night, the women would place the crickets near their pillow to provide solace during moments of loneliness. It’s said that the cricket’s song mirrored the concubine’s own sadness. With as many as 3,000 women per emperor — each hanging out with her own cricket — this made for very noisy evenings at the palace.

As the pastime grew more popular, citizens began sending thousands of their best crickets to the capital each year as gifts for the emperor. Then painters, poets, musicians, and politicians alike followed the emperor’s lead and began to keep crickets as pets, storing them in containers developed specifically for the little songmakers — containers that ranged from tiny cages wrought of bamboo and fish bones to clay pots, beautifully carved wooden boxes, and decorative gourds inlaid with ivory and gold. Eventually, cricket societies and clubs grew, encompassing all levels of hobbyists. Thus this appreciation, as with so many other customs throughout the world, began in the palaces but soon spread to the lower classes and to the villages.

In ancient Chinese agricultural societies, however, crickets were appreciated for an entirely different reason — their chirping was a crucial indicator of climate change. When farmers heard the Jingzhe (the waking of the insects) in spring, they knew that the time was right to begin plowing the fields. To pay tribute, farmers wrote proverbs and songs about the insects, artists rendered paintings of them, and children were told cricket fables. There was even the belief that, because crickets lay hundreds of eggs, the key to success in life was to have as many children as possible.

China developed the sport of cricket fighting during the Song dynasty (960–1279 AD); the fight is a natural outgrowth of interaction between two males who are competing for territory. The brave and valiant warrior spirit of a cricket in battle captivated audiences — and the cricket’s reputation as an intelligent and competitive insect with an added talent for making beautiful sounds grew.

Fighting was at first a sport for the upper class, as a means to display wealth. The lower class was attracted to the gambling element, though, and eventually the sport became aligned with slackers and societal problems. When the government prohibited the fights, the sport went underground. Only in recent years has the sport of cricket fighting again been officially allowed, and then only if no gambling is involved — or discovered.

A cricket fight in China is as ritualistic as a bullfight is in Spain — and there is equal respect for both of the creatures involved. As has been the tradition for centuries, two crickets are weighed and then matched up according to size, weight, and color. Both combatants are placed in a small fighting arena, with walls high and thick enough to prevent desertion. The cricket trainers stimulate their charges with a straw or a fine-haired brush, and then the insect warriors go at each other, antennae waving and jaws snapping.

Over the years, experts have outlined three main fighting styles: A cricket might stalk his enemy slowly, in a strategy of “creep like a tiger, fight like a snake.” Another cricket might lie in wait, attacking only when its opponent chirps, in the “listen for sound, look for the enemy” technique. A great fighter will use the “charge like the wind, valiantly forging straight ahead” method of champions.

Fights are usually face-to-face and eerily silent, except for the chirping and the scuttling of feet and wings, and they can be quite mesmerizing. A bout usually doesn’t last long, and it’s surprisingly PG, with minimal gore and carnage (a more fierce confrontation, though, might include one cricket flipping the other across the arena). The loser often runs away or simply stops fighting. Only occasionally does a match end in a fatality, with decapitation as the humiliating finale.

American expat journalist Aventurina King witnessed her first cricket match in the kitchen of a friend’s home in Beijing.

“White-collar workers in their 20s generally don’t participate in this activity,” King explains. “I would say it’s people [from] families that are still quite traditional who take this up as a hobby. On the weekends, they get together with their friends and see which one of their crickets is the best.”

It was King’s first cricket match, and her immediate impression was that, in China, having crickets as pets is nothing unusual at all. “It was cute. … Each cricket had its own water and food in a tiny bowl made of white-and-blue Chinese ceramic.” After some friendly wagers were placed, the match began.

“My cricket, the one I had bet on, bared its fangs and made a lot of noise — it sounded like the opera star Renée Fleming when she reaches the high A. It turned the other cricket over once or twice. After that, it seemed like a game of cat and mouse, with the opponent running around the bowl as my cricket chased it.” King’s cricket ultimately was defeated, and both gladiators were returned to their respective containers and rewarded with food and water.

“[Since neither] of these was my cricket, there wasn’t much emotion involved,” she says. “But I can imagine that for someone who has spent a lot of time training a cricket, things [could] get pretty heated during fights.”

Especially if there’s money at stake: The forbidden element of gambling is one of the causes behind the contemporary resurgence of cricket fighting. At matches where money is exchanged, the pressure is as intense as at a heavyweight boxing match in Vegas. Cheating — such as giving the insects stimulants — is not uncommon. Occasionally, cricket-fighting dens are even raided, resulting in police arresting the gamblers and confiscating cash and crickets. So-called luxury games, held in outlying provinces, switch venues for each match in order to avoid the police.

The majority of today’s cricket culture is aboveground, though — and accepted in society. There are even some cities, like Jinan, where fights are broadcast live on television. And Chongming Island, off the coast of Shanghai, hosts a six-day national cricket-fighting competition, drawing hundreds of fans and their combative insects from all over the country.
Beijing’s Chinese Culture Club also sponsors cricket matches. Mariel Escudero and Sonia Dupont, expats who live in the city and work on the Latin American website GRILA.net (Grupo de Residentes Ibero Latino Americano), recently attended a cricket lecture and workshop at Beijing’s culture center, which provides English-language services for non-Chinese residents. The class culminated in cricket bouts for all participants. “I found it fascinating,” Escudero tells me. So fascinating, in fact, that she and Dupont collaborated on an article about it for their website and even posted a fight video on YouTube.

It’s said that there are as many as 900 species of crickets in the world, and the Chinese cricket culture includes a number of variants.

The best singing crickets are said to possess thick wings with wide veins. (Only mature males make the chirping noise, produced by rubbing their forewings together.) A cricket can create as many as five distinct calls, including an after-mating sound and sounds that signify courtship or attack. Some insect keepers will alter the wings of their favorite crickets, applying a tiny amount of wax (at the correct temperature) to amplify the sounds.

Chirping has been calibrated in certain species to be able to actually calculate the temperature of their environment, which is known as Dolbear’s Law. (Depending on the species, a rough method is to count the number of times a cricket chirps in 15 seconds and then add 38; the sum should equal the correct temperature in Fahrenheit.)

For fighting, the Gryllus bimaculatus is favored for its aggressive nature, thick body, and length of up to one and a half inches. Found throughout Asia, Africa, and southern Europe, this cricket is considered the best chirper of all the species; it has a strong, clean sound, which adds more excitement to the fight.

Like a boxer or a wrestler, a fighting cricket undergoes training and medical care. Keepers observe their crickets’ behavior carefully, watching for signs of disease and extremes in temperature, which can injure them. Their strict dietary regime ranges from flies and blood-filled mosquitoes to boiled chestnuts, ginseng, and calcium tablets. Some keepers prefer to feed the insects corn, wheat flour, and sliced apple. Training might include putting a female in the jar with the male, to create agitation and aggression. Other keepers will have the fighter fast prior to a match, and as soon as the cricket starts acting sick, they’ll quickly feed it small red insects to rebuild its strength. There are no instances in modern cricket fighting of the use of illegal steroids. Not yet, anyway.

Victorious fighters are treated with the respect of sumo champions. A winning cricket is referred to as a general. Owners of such warrior crickets will often travel great distances to meet one another and to ensure that their heroes are well matched for another bout. The best crickets will fight as many as six times before they are retired or defeated.

A particularly noble fighter may be preserved under glass for eternity, or his likeness may be rendered in a painting. In 1999, in Shandong Province, one champion, dubbed King of the Insects, was valued at 100,000 yuan ($12,920) — a shocking amount, considering that the annual income in Beijing, one of the wealthiest urban centers, averages just 7,000 to 30,000 yuan ($904 to $3,876).

Commercial and residential expansion in China has led to the slow decline in the number of agricultural fields (where crickets originally were collected), so breeders now supply many of the country’s crickets used for retail purposes. Yet there are still specific areas where champion crickets grow in the wild.

Many great cricket fighters come from Zhejiang Province, from a town called Yuhang, where the pepper fields are said to lend a fiery disposition and incredible strength. Crickets from Luhua’s watermelon and soybean fields are also said to possess power and a hot temper.
But Shandong Province, south of Beijing, is still considered the ultimate birthplace for a fighting cricket. Folklore tells us that during an enemy invasion some 800 years ago, a Song dynasty emperor scattered his cricket collection at the foot of the sacred Mount Tai. The descendants of these crickets are said to be the world’s best fighters. It’s estimated that nearly half a million people travel to the county of Ningyang for crickets each year. Local farmers earn their main income just from plucking crickets from their fields and selling them to buyers from Singapore, Japan, and Hong Kong.

Demand for the insects is so high that many have been able to make a comfortable living as a cricket breeder in the big markets of major cities. One popular business model is to buy or capture young crickets, feed them special concoctions twice a day to increase their strength, and then resell them for profit.

It’s unlikely that citizens will once again send thousands of prized crickets to the emperor’s palace — nor will 3,000 concubines clasp a cricket to their bosom as they sleep in fitful loneliness — but it’s obvious that the hold this chirpy little insect has on this country is as strong as ever. And worth a buck or two

Green Day’s Billie Joe Armstrong stands at a podium to induct the notorious protopunk band the Stooges into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. After seven nominations, the group has finally been lauded by the music industry for its universal contribution and influence on the world of music.

“Their songs are like weapons,” Armstrong says to the audience during his induction speech. “It’s the sound of blood and guts, sex and drugs, heart and soul, love and hate, poetry and peanut butter.”

Then, three men in their 60s walk up to receive their awards; Stooge front man Iggy Pop fittingly flips the crowd the bird with both hands and with a snarling smile says, “Roll over, Woodstock, we won!”

Behind Iggy stands drummer Scott Asheton, along with another band member, James Williamson, whose presence is puzzling — incredulous, even. Because the last time James Williamson played with the Stooges, Richard Nixon was president. In fact, nobody in rock and roll has even seen him in more than three decades.

Later in the show, the Stooges take the stage to play a short set, and Williamson slips on a Les Paul guitar. As he launches into the opening chords of the classic Stooges anthem “Search and Destroy,” a shirtless Iggy belts out the famous lyrics “I’m a street walkin’ cheetah with a heart full of napalm!”

Not many suburban dads get a second chance like this. Playing in the Stooges is once again Williamson’s full-time job.

“I’m the poster boy for every old suit walking around who wants to be in a rock-and-roll band,” laughs Williamson, sitting at a restaurant in Palo Alto, Calif.

At this moment, the former vice president of technology standards for Sony Electronics must feel like the luckiest person in the world. He’s just rejoined the Stooges and is in the midst of an international tour. The 1973 Stooges album he co-wrote and played on, Raw Power, has just been reissued on Sony Legacy. And, next month, the album he recorded with Iggy Pop in 1975, Kill City, will be reissued as well.

Perhaps most important, though, is that he has reunited with his old bandmates Iggy Pop and Scott Asheton.

“There’s something about being buddies when you’re in your 20s,” Williamson says, sipping iced tea. “Scott and I, and Iggy, we go back so far. We’re just older versions of the same guys.”

In the late 1960s in Detroit, James Osterberg, aka Iggy Pop, joined up with brothers Scott and Ron Asheton and their friend Dave Alexander, and formed the Psychedelic Stooges, performing songs on junkyard instruments made of oil drums and vacuum cleaners. James Williamson was a friend but not yet a member of the band.

“The first gigs were wild,” he remembers. “There were no tune structures or anything. Everybody was so stoned; it really was quite an experience.”

Dropping the Psychedelic part, the Stooges released two albums and became a popular rock act around Detroit with songs like “No Fun” and “I Wanna Be Your Dog.” The key word back then? Unpredictable. Iggy might roll in broken glass, vault out into the audience, or smear himself with glitter and peanut butter — sometimes all in the same show.

Years later, musicians such as Jack White, Kurt Cobain, the Sex Pistols, the Red Hot Chili Peppers and Green Day would gush about the band’s innovation. But at the time, the Stooges were largely unknown. Their record sales were dismal, their label was disillusioned, members came and went.

The band needed to progress as a group, Iggy explains — and Williamson was vital.

“James was more advanced musically than we were at the time,” Iggy says. “I thought he had a lot of energy and looked right.”

So Williamson joined up, and he brought a faster and more complex sound to the band. But the music-industry suits still hated it. And the Stooges eventually drifted apart.

Soon after, though, Iggy Pop signed with David Bowie’s management company, and he and Williamson moved to London to make a new record. The two auditioned British musicians for a rhythm section, but nothing seemed to click. So they sent for Ron and Scott Asheton to help record the album.

enaming themselves Iggy & the Stooges, the band finally released the album Raw Power in 1973. Today, that album is considered a classic — the forerunner of a million punk bands — but back then, it was just another poorly selling Stooges record with no commercial potential.

Not long afterward, the band split with management, and what followed, according to Williamson, was “a death march” series of low-paying gigs across the United States. The tour culminated in 1974 with a nasty confrontational show at Detroit’s Michigan Palace. People pelted the stage with bottles, cans, jugs, shovels, M-80s, lightbulbs and eggs. At the end of the night, Iggy stood in the midst of the debris and famously announced, “You nearly killed me, but you missed again, so you have to keep trying next week.”

Unfortunately, there was no next week, because that was the Stooges’ final show. The performance was later released as a live album, Metallic K.O., with a photo of Iggy on the cover, knocked unconscious.

“After the Michigan Palace gig,” Williamson says, “we didn’t have to say anything to each other. That was it. Nobody wanted to do it anymore.”

The Asheton brothers decamped to Michigan and began playing in other bands; Williamson and Iggy holed up in Los Angeles, writing songs that would eventually appear on the Kill City album.

“The goal was to get a record deal,” Williamson says. “We wanted to seem somewhat accessible.”

Unfortunately, no record label was interested. So Iggy started his own solo career, and Williamson went to work at Paramount Recorders as a staff engineer, cranking out one-hit disco songs.

“I quickly found out that there’s only one thing worse than playing in a band that you don’t like, and that’s recording a whole bunch of bands that you don’t like. I finally walked away and just started a whole new life.”

Fascinated by the new personal-computer revolution, Williamson moved out of L.A. and enrolled in engineering school in Pomona, Calif.

He still kept a toe in the music industry, though, producing Iggy’s solo records New Values and Soldier, but he left halfway through the second album. “I quit and he fired me, all at the same time,” he says. “We didn’t talk to each other for probably 20 years.”

And with that, James Williamson gave his guitar to a friend and disappeared completely from rock and roll.

In 1982, WIllIamson was hired by microchip company Advanced Micro Devices in Sunnyvale, Calif. Married with a baby, Williamson found himself moving to Silicon Valley and landing smack in the middle of America’s burgeoning computer industry.

Instead of playing guitar in platform boots, Williamson was driving to work at AMD every day and flying to meetings around the world. In fact, he estimates he’s racked up nearly six million frequent-flier miles.

“I’m Executive Platinum now,” he laughs. “Working up to George Clooney status.”

From AMD he eventually transitioned to Sony Electronics, where he took over the technology standards office of the Americas. But he never spoke to his co-workers about the Stooges.

Sony’s intellectual-property senior vice president, Toshimoto Mitomo, worked alongside Williamson for years and had no idea his friend once recorded songs with titles like “Open Up and Bleed,” and “Your Pretty Face Is Going to Hell.”

“James was always professional and convincing, and he had a great sense of personal style,” Mitomo says. “He did not look punk rock in his appearance, but he has always been punk rock in his spirit.”

Williamson’s wife had seen a Stooges show, but their two children had no idea of the influence the Stooges had wielded.

“Every so often, I would try to get some points. My son was way into Nirvana, and I’d say, ‘You know, those guys took a lot of stuff from my music.’ It’d be like, ‘Oh, yeah, OK Dad, right, whatever.’ It wasn’t until they went to college. My son’s buddies found out and they were like, ‘Dude, your dad!’ So my stock went up quite a bit,” he says.

While Williamson was racking up the AA miles, Iggy had reformed the Stooges in 2003 with Ron and Scott Asheton and Minutemen punk icon Mike Watt playing bass. The group was touring the world, introducing new generations to Stooges music. But in early 2009, the band and fans were shocked when Ron Asheton was found dead in his house of a heart attack at the age of 61.

Iggy called Williamson and, as so often happens when a friend passes on, they patched up their differences. Not long after, Iggy called again. The Stooges had grieved. But they still had upcoming shows booked. They needed a guitarist.

“I said I was flattered, but I had a day job,” Williamson says. “I turned him down.”

In a bizarre alignment of the stars, Sony began handing out early retirement packages. James talked it over with his family, and he did the math. Sony had offered a great opportunity. And he would have lots of free time. But standing onstage doing “Search and Destroy”? He had not played guitar in public in 35 years.

“I felt that these are my old buddies,” he says. “They needed me. They were running out of Stooges. I had to call him back and say, ‘By the way, I just took early retirement, so I could do this now, if you want to.’ ”

According to Williamson, Iggy then burst into laughter.

Word leaked out to the media about Williamson rejoining the band. Spectrum, a publication of the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers, even announced proudly: “IEEE Standards Board Member to Rejoin Iggy Pop and the Stooges.”

One thing though: The newly retired executive now had to relearn the guitar.

“If you could ever do it in the first place, you can still do it,” he says. “You’ve formed all those brain connections, you just have to get ’em back going again. It took a little while.”

Williamson rehearsed by himself, but he needed the feel of playing with an actual band. Fortunately, he had become friends with the staff of Gryphon Stringed Instruments, a music store in Palo Alto, Calif.

“I was shopping for a Martin D-28 acoustic guitar,” he says. “The guy behind the counter said he didn’t have what I was looking for, but he took my information.”

Gryphon employee Derek See looked at the name and address and exclaimed, “Are you the James Williamson from the Stooges?”

Williamson mentioned that he was rejoining the band, and See offered his own band to help him rehearse. The Careless Hearts play Americana roots rock, but at one time or another, all the members had played Stooges songs in punk bands.

The younger musicians were big fans, but they didn’t quite know what to expect at rehearsal. To them, Williamson just looked like a typical Silicon Valley computer square. And he didn’t talk much. Once the band booked a live show at the Blank Club in San Jose, however, it was clear he was committed.

“He was adding songs,” says Careless Hearts vocalist Paul Kimball. “He wanted to do this one, he wanted to do that one. We added ‘Louie Louie’ right before the show. James wants to end with Louie Louie? Really? I gotta learn those lyrics now too? Because the Stooges’ version is different from the normal version. Dirtier, by far. So I spent the last two days before the gig driving around, screaming curse words in my car.”

News of the September show quickly spread online. Fans from all over the U.S. showed up and packed the Blank Club to capacity. With the help of longtime Stooges sax player Steve MacKay, Williamson and the band ripped through 17 Stooges songs in a row. Videos appeared on YouTube the very next day. A recording of that night’s gig, James Williamson and the Careless Hearts, was later released as a CD and a DVD.

Williamson then met with the actual Stooges and worked through the repertoire, practicing for five to six hours at a stretch. Just as they were planning their 2010 tour, they received a last-minute invitation to Planeta Terra music festival in Sao Paulo, Brazil.

The guitarist admits he was nervous. “I’d never played for a crowd over a couple thousand. Now, my first gig is 40,000 people.”

Their show was televised throughout Brazil, and the Stooges (with Williamson) sounded fast, fun and better than ever. Next came the Hall of Fame show, and then 2010 tour dates began falling into place.

It’s not 1974 anymore, and certain elements of Stooges touring have changed. The band has agreed not to play too many back-to-back gigs, allowing for a day to recharge in between shows. There’s no longer carousing until 5 a.m. And, unlike the old days, everyone gets along just fine. “You gotta like the other guys you’re playing with, or you can’t really play with ’em,” Williamson says. “This was the only band that I ever found that with. We have a magic to us. It’s inexplicable.”

Derek See now tours with the Stooges as Williamson’s guitar technician. At every show, he watches the young crowds singing along to all the words. So why is the band so popular now?

“The Stooges wrote and performed music from deep in the heart straight to the depth of the soul,” See says. “They never pandered to anything that wasn’t true to themselves.” Paul Kimball is even more succinct: “Originality has legs.”

With Williamson, the Stooges have given themselves a three-year window, after which the band will reassess. “Some bands are so old that people are making fun of them, but they won’t stop,” Williamson says, and then laughs. “If we get to that point, I’m relying on my kids to tell me to hang it up.”

Readers reported seeing copies in Hollywood waiting rooms, in Manhattan shop windows, and one well-thumbed issue made it to a bar in Costa Rica. Media response ranged from positive articles (“the successor to Lenny Bruce”, to a bewildering reaction from USA Today (“astonishingly offensive”), to radio interviews and MTV News. We sold T-shirts, buttons, roadkill calendars, and “postal killer” caps, which were US Postal Service caps decorated with a bloody bullet hole.

Each issue was launched with a crazy themed party. We figured it would get listed in the media, and the freaks always came out of the woodwork and filled the room nicely. We produced way too many events, including several comedy variety shows, a diaper fashion show, a Gulf War anti-patriotism bash, a New Age book-burning at the beach, Bettie Page lookalike contests, two big nights with the Jim Rose Circus Sideshow, a weeks’ worth of parties in Los Angeles (with special guests Billy Idol and Jimmy Page), a “Battle of the Bands,” and a marijuana nostalgia warehouse “happening” featuring a stoner-rock band made up of the masthead.

There was lots and lots of drinking. The office received a steady stream of invitations to parties inSan Francisco, and the staff was determined to hit every one of them and stay until they kicked us out. Advertisers donated cases of beer and tequila and vodka. I vaguely remember attending a party for Pete’s Wicked Ale, and when the PR flacks told us we could take a case home, five editors immediately grabbed two cases each, and we hauled them on foot back to our office. We held editorial meetings at the Edinburgh Castle pub in the Tenderloin, and because of the alcohol consumption, it was necessary to call separate meetings just to write headlines.

We were banned from Safeway, and at least one prison, and received plenty of angry letters from upset parents. But for everyone involved, it would be the most fun anyone would ever have in the publishing industry.

It started in 1988 when I approached a small magazine publisher in San Francisco with the idea of doing a satirical investigative magazine along the lines of Spy. Except instead of New York and the Ivy League, it would be about the America I knew – the Western U.S., filled with crackers and outlaws and freaks. It made perfect sense, San Francisco was the weirdo capital of America in the late 1980s, why not capitalize on the abundant natural resources available? At the time I was obsessed with the magazines of Robert Harrison from the late 40s and early 50s, titles like Confidential and Whisper. The graphics were bold and outrageous, and the language was tight, tales about fighting animals and VD in the Navy, and Frank Sinatra eating Wheaties to keep up his stamina during a weekend tryst. And yet in the day, these were the most popular magazines in America.

I wanted to pay tribute to this era, which looked like a lot more fun than most magazines I saw on the newsstand in the late 1980s. And we also set out to chronicle the nation’s growing subculture of bizarre behavior and fascination with apocalyptic information. All across America, kids were getting tattoos and piercings, Lollapalooza was touring, bands decorated their CDs with surgical photos and vintage cheesecake, fringe publishers were producing books and zines about Freemasons and UFOs and serial killers. So why not have some fun, right?

We met in a diner in the Tenderloin populated by transvestites, and discussed the idea. I came prepared with a five-year spreadsheet of numbers that were wildly exaggerated and completely unattainable. But we got past all that logical business stuff, and agreed he would handle the publishing and I would be the editor. Easily stolen desktop software was creating a miniature boom in publishing, and the Bay Area was already beginning to flood with cool magazines like On Our Backs and Mondo 2000.

A newsstand South of Market was our first office, and we launched The Nose in the spring of 1989 as a free insert in one of the city’s weekly newspapers. The cover story, about the local parking system, included tips on how to vandalize meters, and paint curbs with the same paint used by the city. On the day of our launch, Rob Morse, a columnist at the San Francisco Examiner, completely trashed our debut issue. Needless to say, his review put a bit of a damper on the launch party. We promptly printed up envelopes that read “THE MAGAZINE ROB MORSE HATES,” stuffed our issue inside of each, snuck inside the building which at that time housed both the Examiner and the Chronicle, and left one inside the mailbox of every employee at both papers. I don’t know what this accomplished exactly, but it made us feel better.

With each issue, we attracted more advertisers and more volunteer contributors, and after a few years we had a core group of editors who slaved over every piece of copy with the same precision as any magazine coming out of New York. We created funny departments like a Police Blotter column composed solely of items where police officers committed crimes against ordinary citizens. A pseudonymous “Paige Turner” compiled a weird news page. We ran gossip columns for publishing, business, and entertainment. Regular columnists included political comedian Will Durst, commentator Ian Shoales, weird vinyl expert Gregg Turkington, musical satirist J. Raoul Brody, and a dubious food critic named Earl C. Woodruff, a cranky retired Marine sergeant who nevertheless happened to know a great deal about everything from French cuisine, to smart drugs and the art of preparing chili for a thousand men in the battlefield. Woodruff was taken seriously by many readers. He received invitations to foodie events like the James Beard Awards, and was even mailed a sample pack of gourmet salsas, from the daughters of Barry Goldwater.

Because so many of the editors grew up reading MAD and National Lampoon, we occasionally produced parodies of popular magazines like Men’s Journal, and phony ads for a Kurt Cobain “Spoonbender” guitar pedal, and the Marlboro Adventure Team. And with a nod to San Francisco’s desperate appeal to tourists, we published a stand-alone map of the city, which featured historical sites like the Manson Family house, and the location of Billie Holliday’s drug bust. The mayor unwittingly contributed a very nice introductory letter. A couple of production companies met with us about creating a TV series for the Comedy Channel, but like so many meetings, it never went anywhere.

Dozens of contributors came from all over the U.S., and many have gone on to careers of their own, from comedians like Greg Proops, Patton Oswalt and Marc Maron, to book authors, TV producers, screenwriters, and a slew of writers and artists for magazines like Playboy, Maxim, Blender, Vogue, Esquire, Wired, Salon, Mother Jones, New Yorker, and the New York Times.

It’s been several years, but I still hold some favorite stories dear. I got to interview Spinal Tap and Bill Hicks, and check out Tijuana bullfights and the Branch Davidian anniversary. A freelancer from New Mexico wrote us a great feature about the Catholic Church’s “Club Ped” facility for wayward pedophile priests, complete with photos of the sun-drenched tennis court. A retired military photojournalist contributed one of the earliest stories about the secret Area 51 base in the Nevada desert, and The Nose was the first magazine to run photos of the base (technically, a federal offense). We did an amazing fashion shoot with the reclusive Anton LaVey, founder of the Church of Satan. A doctor acquaintance alerted us to the peculiar medical oddity of autoerotic asphyxiation with John Deere tractors, which became a terrific feature, “Love in Low Gear.” Legendary zine author John Marr provided a couple of tremendous stories about deaths at Disneyland, and heinous crimes committed by renegade Mormons. Page Six of the New York Post wrote up our official California execution application. A cover story about how to eat your dog, alongside Asian recipes that began with instructions like “Eviscerate and clean a puppy,” brought a slew of hate mail, particularly from Orange County. We once interviewed a homeless woman who claimed to hang out with Warhol and was once married to Jack Nicholson. And a Los Angeles writer wrote a great little essay about spotting Charles Bukowski at the racetrack, and following him around trying to get an interview.

In retrospect, I have to agree it must have been difficult to sell ads for a magazine that tells readers how to eat their pet. We lasted longer than most start-ups did, but I knew it wasn’t going to last forever. And maybe we pushed it too far, but how often do you ever get that chance? It all collapsed in 1995, when the publisher pulled the plug, scattering everyone to the winds. Everyone went on a month-long bender, and then went back to their lives.

One reason it might have tanked, I found out later, was because of our accountant, an alcoholic who wore an ankle bracelet because he had killed someone in a hit-and-run accident. He was always nice, but stunk of gin and had a perpetually red face. It seems incomprehensible to hire such a person to mind the books, but our publisher had a soft spot for people in AA. Except I don’t think this guy was attending all of the meetings.

Not long after he began doing our finances, the magazine ran out of money. He then worked for a law firm, and was caught forging a check for several thousand dollars. After getting released from jail, he apparently embarked upon a freelance criminal spree, robbing banks and running off to gamble away the loot in Las Vegas with his girlfriend. San Francisco police eventually nabbed him in a bank in the Marina District, waving a pistol. He went to prison, and the last I heard he was writing his memoirs about his time spent as a legendary outlaw figure. If you ever read this, Chris, thanks for nothing.

Some people have told me over the years, that “the Daily Show stole your idea,” or “The Onion ripped you off.” I don’t know if any of that is true, and I don’t really care. We were just making it up as we went along. The whole experience was like being on the Bonneville Salt Flats of publishing, just run it up until the engine blows and the wheels fall off. And they eventually did. But I wouldn’t trade any of those six years for anything. Maybe someday I’ll publish something more substantial about The Nose, but for now here’s the short version, and some scans of the pages. A big thank you to all the people who helped put the magazine together over the years, especially the editors who hung in there for so long.