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"FacebookPinterest\n\nJimmy Kimmel yawns out loud a lot\u2014Acccchhhhhh!\u2014followed by a quick shake of his head, like an old man slogging through Samson Agonistes in a scratchy chair in a muggy library where no one will bother him. Acccchhhhhh! But he is not bored; he is no more and no less exhausted than the next workaholic; he has narcolepsy, has popped one Provigil a day for years to control it; he is also, these days, a very, very relad man. Acccchhhhhh! He is here in his office working on his monologue, which he has to give to the cuecard people within the hour because the show is about to begin. He's in jeans and a blue Tshirt and no shoes, and the wardrobe people just came in with his costume all steamed and ready. \"How stupid is it that a talkshow host has to wear a suit\" The only thing he likes about the costume is the tie, because he's pretty sure a guy's neck looks less fat when he's got a piece of fabric wrapped around it. He thinks he's fat. \"I'm a good twentyve pounds overweight, probably. They say I'm supposed to be 175 pounds or something. My head alone weighs like thirtyve pounds.\" He is less fat in person than he looks on TV. He never ercises. His back is eshy. His arms are somewhat pasty. Acccchhhhhh! Another person writing a monologue due within the hour might fret, might freak out, might need space! But he wears the triumphant tranquillity of a man who is done with all of that, the utter ease of a guy who has settled into the big droopy dog of his own skin.\n\nHis office is a spectacularly cluttered space in Hollywood's former Masonic temple, a few stories up from the El Capitan center, where Jimmy Kimmel Live!, which hasn't been really live since 2004, shoots \"livetotape\" four days a week at 7 p.m. Piles and piles of paper, magazines, family photos, snacks, nuts, withering grapes, withering strawberries, power cords, extension cords\u2014a place of work. He's got a set of bunk beds in the back for his kids, now teenagers, a worn brown suede sectional for his writers to sit on, a 1950s heavy steel desk for him to put his laptop and junk all over. He's typing. He's Googling. He's watching CNN on the atscreen; it's the last night of the Democratic Convention, and Obama is about to speak and the crowd is aquiver. Jimmy is watching, Googling, trawling for material. He is neither a sad nor angsty nor tragic clown. He is a content Catholic mensch blessed with distance, with a constant ifyoureallythinkaboutit wisdom. Everything is funny, everything is ridiculous, everything is so fucking preposterous. Like, even just ChapStick is ridiculous. \"People who use ChapStick have to have ChapStick with them at all times,\" he says. \"They have to constantly reapply the fucking ChapStick.\" The talkshow genre itself is completely ridiculous. \"In an hour from now, I'm going to walk out onto a piece of wood we've surrounded by lights and cameras, and I'm going to do a show for 250 strangers. It's so silly. You go out there and you do jokes and show funny little videos, and the audience laughs. But then you go sit behind a desk, and you're speaking to another person while they watch. It's like pornography. It really is. It's just so silly when you think about it. You're the host, and you're just rolling through people like a factory. They come, sit down, and then they leave. It's almost like you're giving inoculations. Even having a desk is a dumb thing. I'm not working at the desk. It's not like I'm there at that desk all day taking phone calls. The desk is useless. It's really stupid! The guests are people I've never met. They walk out, and now they're supposed to have a spontaneousseeming conversation with me. For between seven and ten minutes. Think about that. In front of a group of other strangers. Hey, you're gonna watch us have a conversation now! It seems normal because we're used to it. But it's not normal. It's totally abnormal. It's the least normal way you could possibly meet somebody. Meeting someone in a sex room on Craigslist is more normal than this.\"\n\nAnyway, he has to nish writing his monologue. He has superhuman laserbeam concentration, able to tune in, tune out. Acccchhhhhh! He's typing. He's Googling. He's considering the jokes that came out of this morning's writers' meeting, just outside his office, where there is a table big enough for twelve. Power strips and Mac Pros, sheets of paper covered with jokes. Guys, mostly guys, diving into everything new, everything that just happened and is happening.\n\n\"Wow, O.J. was physically assaulted by his daughter. How great is that\"\n\n\"Michael Jackson's ftieth birthday is Friday. He doesn't look a day over 12.\"\n\n\"We could do a Fox News crawl under Obama's speech: \u2018Wah, wah, I'm a big baby, wah, wah, I'm a liberal crybaby.' \"\n\n\"We could have Michael Phelps with really gross webbed feet or something like that.\"\n\n\"Did you see Obama kiss Jill Biden It was a lip kiss. We should have them, like, really make out.\"\n\n\"Obama's getting his kids a dog. He wants a Bichon Kucinich. I hear they're very friendly.\"\n\n\"We should do, like, a public plea to buy Ralph Nader a comb.\"\n\n\"We should have Keith Olbermann actually biting Chris Matthews's head off.\"\n\n\"Some people say John McCain's new attack ad is condescending: \u2018Congratulations, black guy, on being black. I'm John McCain, and I approve this message.'\"\n\n At the morning writers' meetings, Jimmy rarely responds, rarely laughs out loud, doesn't want anyone to feel like a genius or an asshole. Some ideas get rened, get tossed out for debate and made funnier, but mostly Jimmy just types and grins and types, picking the jokes he likes and adding his own, writing it all down until he has produced a rough draft of the monologue, which he passes around. Writers are then sent off to revise, or to produce clips, and by the end of the day, Jimmy may or may not have scrapped most of it, and he gets to work on the nal draft.\n\nIt's just after 5 p.m., and he's here in his office, under immediate deadline pressure from the cuecard people but showing only the opposite of stress. Acccchhhhhh! Writers saunter in, saunter out, show clips. They are calm, like Jimmy. They could be college kids cramming for a test they are afraid to admit they care about. Jimmy cares about it but knows he'll ace it. It is not hard for him. Do anything more than a thousand times and it becomes a kind of breathing.\n\nHe's watching the convention, bemused by the spectacle. His interest in politics tends toward politicsaspopculture, which makes it fun. He's proud of his dad, who at this very moment is at the DNC pretending to be Wolf Blitzer, because his dad, a former bowling hustler turned IBM VP, looks almost exactly like Wolf Blitzer and therefore has the power to humiliate Wolf Blitzer and Ted Koppel (who can't gure out what the hell golf date Wolf is talking about) and an awful lot of other famous people simultaneously. Is there anything more beautiful \n\nHe's typing. He's ring emails back and forth to Jake and to Jamie, writers sitting on the suede sectional in front of him, both of them plugged into a common power strip. Acccchhhhhh! He types. He views a Flavor Flav clip, an Obama\u2013Jill Biden makeout clip. \"Play it in slow motion,\" he tells the producer. \"Then, when they part, have them come at each other again.\" He's thinking about Michael Phelps in a Speedo and wingtips, drinking scotch and smoking a pipe. He's Googling. \"Oh, my God, David Duchovny entered a treatment center for sex addiction\" he announces. \"Oh, my God. Did you see this\" He res the link to Jamie and Jake.\n\nUnceremoniously, he nishes the monologue, prints it out. \"I can't believe this about Duchovny,\" he says, goes into the back room and drops his jeans, pulls off his shirt, comes back in with his suit pants not all the way on, back to his computer, Googling, watching CNN, pitying Wolf, looking for his dad.\n\n Acccchhhhhh! The cue cards come in, and he practices silently for the rst and last time, just mouthing the words, underlining some with a fat red marker while makeup makes him up and wardrobe puts him together. Then the staff gathers, as they do each night, for a kind of pep rally that begins in Jimmy's office. \"Best show ever!\" they chant. \"Best show ever!\" Jimmy stbumps everyone, everyone he passes on the way downstairs\u2014each and every stbumpee shouts, \"Best show ever!\"\u2014until he disappears into the music, into the lights, into the applause of 250 applauding people who applaud at least in part because the blinking sign says: applaud! applaud! applaud!, which, he has to admit, is ridiculous from the getgo.\n\nwhen he was a kid growing up in Las Vegas, the family having migrated from Brooklyn when he was 9, he'd hide in his room in agony when Uncle Frank and Aunt Chippy would go into their loud, dumb ghts. His best friend, Cleto, loved those ghts, would come over specically to listen to the ghts, to that weird, whiny ItalianBrooklyn style of saying nothing REALLY LOUD and really fast. Soon enough, Jimmy saw opportunity. He started taping the ridiculous things his relatives did, which he started noticing was a lot, really a lot, and he started playing the tapes to the laughter of friends.\n\nNow here he is, 41 years old, on a nightly talk show seen by millions, a show built around characters that are not just inspired by real people but are the actual people. He's basically just moved his family into the old Masonic temple and let 'em rip. Everyone always asks him if Uncle Frank\u2014the grinning old guy in the blue securityguard uniform who appears nightly and has no idea what is going on\u2014is his real uncle. That's Uncle Frank! And yeah, Aunt Chippy appears from time to time\u2014that's Aunt Chippy! (She divorced Uncle Frank years ago but has agreed to be buried next to him.) And Cleto is his band leader. That's Cleto! And that's Cleto's dad\u2014that's Cleto's dad\u2014on horns. And his cousin Sal, yeah, that's Cousin Sal, doing those hiddencamera pranks. And his mom appears from time to time, and of course, you've already met his dad.\n\nIt's folksy, it's kind of sweet, it's not sycophantic like Leno or cranky like Letterman or campy like Conan or brainy and ironic like Stewart and Colbert. It's just\u2026Jimmy. It's Jimmy's actual life. It's his famous exgirlfriend surprising him with \"I'm Fucking Matt Damon,\" and it's him retaliating with \"I'm Fucking Ben Affleck.\" It's personal, but at the same time it's bound. It's only the funny stuff, it's never earnest. It's never \"By the way, me and Sarah split.\" It's never \"Shit, I'm sad about Sarah.\" It's never, ever \"Here's what happened.\" It's not confessional, not political, not prying, not picking at anyone's scabs; it's honoring family by exposing its every adorable foible; it's respecting guests and letting them speak, instead of pouncing on every chance to get a laugh.\n\n\"I have a slower pace than most,\" he says. We're in his kitchen, in his Lake Hollywood home; he's making pizza, and I'm making the point that guests on Jimmy Kimmel Live! seem to talk more than they do on other shows, seem to have room for\u2026thoughts.\n\n\"I'm not scared of silence,\" he says. He's cutting basil with his kitchen shears, worried that if he puts the basil on before he cooks the pizza, it might shrivel into, like, bacon turds. \"I just don't feel like I have to fill every second of a conversation with sound,\" he says. \"I'll pose a question, and then I'll stop and listen for the answer, and then when they seem to be finished I'll ask the next question. I have great confidence in my ability to be funny. I really do. Maybe that makes me sound like a jerk, but I've always been able to be funny since I was a little kid, and so I don't have a lot to prove. I figure I have plenty of time to talk. I try to remember that the guests only have seven or eight minutes to talk, and this is a big deal for them, and their parents are probably watching, and I invited them on my show, and that I want them to leave and feel good about it.\"\n\nHe goes into the fridge, takes out the pizza sauce he made last night from scratch, offers me a taste.\n\n\"It's good, right\"\n\n\"It's good.\"\n\nIt's confusing, really. It's hard to believe that the guy snipping basil and proudly making his own pizza sauce is the same guy you first saw dryhumping a chimpanzee on Comedy Central. This is the guy who grossjoked his way to fame\u2014pee jokes, masturbation jokes, fart jokes\u2014with fellow manpig Adam Carolla on The Man Show\n\n\"People think I'm of belowaverage intelligence because of that show,\" he says. \"I find that. Which is a weird thing for me because, like, in school I was always the smartest kid. It's something I never anticipated would happen as a result of doing a comedy show. Like really, I mean, seriously\"\n\nThe manpig: He and Carolla were kidding. It was a sendup. Did everyone not get that No, everyone did not get that\u2014most especially the loyal fratboy audience Jimmy himself came to loathe. He thought of them, and thinks of them, as \"meatheads.\" Frat boys drooling over Juggies on trampolines, all the boobs and all the farting; you couldn't really blame those boys for expecting Jimmy to be a puker right alongside them. \"I had no fun doing that show. It was all work for me. When the hiatus came, I was delighted. I'd head to my house and go sit in front of my computer and think of something else.\" Jimmy was hardly a frat boy. He was a guy who had married his college sweetheart when he was just 20. He had two little kids he dragged around the country as he tried to get work in radio, which he sort of got, but he kept getting fired, until finally in 1994 he came to L.A. and landed a spot on KROQ. The exposure there led him to Comedy Central, to an Emmy for cohosting Win Ben Stein's Money, to The Man Show. In 2002, ABC came calling with the offer to do his own talk show. That was\u2026odd. \"I just couldn't believe they'd put so little thought into this decision,\" he says. \"I mean, it was like buying a house on the Internet.\"\n\nHosting came naturally to him, even if an audience didn't. It took a while for the show to catch on. \"After the first six months, I was hoping that the show would get canceled because I figured I really cannot live like this. We used to have to wave people into the show. We couldn't get guests. That was unpleasant. The audience is sitting there staring at you, and you have on people they've never heard of, and they've barely heard of you in the first place. That's just a terrible, terrible\u2014oh, it's terrible. And then a lot of people who do know you are expecting The Man Show and waiting for you to whip them into a frenzy, which I am not a frenzywhipper. It was terrible.\"\n\nSo he involved his family in the show, Uncle Frank and Aunt Chippy and Cousin Sal, because his family would, well, do it, and his family is funny. The network gave him a long leash. He trusted his instincts, enlisted people he loved; he gradually built a show he could believe in and eventually carved out a culture. The show, recent winner of its first two Emmys, now pulls in 1.64 million viewers, a distant third behind Leno and Letterman but fully woven into the fabric of latenight TV, most especially among younger viewers who know, instinctively, that neither Leno nor Letterman would ever fuck Ben Affleck.\n\nHe asks me if I want a glass of wine. He tells me to go ahead, jump in, taste the prosciutto. He is all host. Hosting has always been a kind of religion to him. He stayed up late last night making the pizza dough and the sauce, in anticipation of my visit. Hey, someone is coming to your house, you cook. His house is famously set up for football Sundays. Every game, every Sunday\u2014everyone goes to Jimmy's house, Hollywood's answer to a tailgate party. \"Are you married\" he asks me. \"Do not let your husband ever see this house. Guys cry when they see this house.\" It is guy paradise. He has TVs everywhere. He has TVs in the bathrooms, one in the kitchen, four in the dining room, a big one over the backyard grill\u2014seventeen TVs in all. He renovated his kitchen to resemble a restaurant, with a big circular booth on one end; the table is on hydraulic lifts. Push a button and it sinks to cocktailparty height; push it again and it elevates to dining height. \"The only negative is, unlike a garagedoor opener, there's no safety, so if you're sitting under it while somebody hits this thing, it will crush your legs.\" He also has hydraulics on the back kitchen window. Push the button and voil\u00E0: an indooroutdoor bar. \"I might have overdone that.\" He has a giant restaurantstyle glassencased pie refrigerator filled with beautiful puffy pies\u2014which at the moment are fake, which is odd in itself, but sometimes are real. He has framed family photos everywhere. He has an outdoor tap with everflowing, icecold IPA. He has a woodfired pizza oven out back by the pool and a hammock and a panoramic view of Burbank.\n\nHe decides to go ahead with the basil garnish. \"We'll try it, we'll try it,\" he says, bringing the pie outside to the oven. He sticks the pizza in, and we stand here and watch. \"We'll see. We'll see how this does.\" Burbank is aglow behind us, a lighted cityscape against a deep sky. It could be a backdrop for a talk show. He jabs at the pizza. He is not afraid of silence. He doesn't feel like he has to fill up every second with sound.\n\nHe was going to be an artist; as a kid, that's where he aimed. He would stay up all night drawing with the TV on to keep him company. He discovered Letterman, became ignited, but didn't tell anybody at first. \"It almost felt like it was my secret or something. I really felt like his shows were\u2026me, you know\" He turned into a Letterman geek. He wore a Letterman jacket; the vanity plate on his Isuzu IMark read: l8 nite, as did the writing on his eighteenthbirthday cake. Never in his wildest dreams did he want to be Letterman. God, no. He wanted to make Tshirts and book covers with Letterman's face on them. That was his calling.\n\n\"You can't imagine how weird it is now. I'm flipping through the TV, I see Leno and Letterman and then I see myself. It's one of the strangest experiences you can have. Talk to him Do I talk to him Me and Letterman Talk No. No! He doesn't need to be bothered by me. I know enough to never contact him. He's a very private guy. I want to call him up every single day, but I never do. I don't know what I would say. God! No! I'd wind up stressing out about it, and it would be unpleasant for both of us, especially him.\"\n\nAs to the impending latenight shakeup\u2014with Leno's departure from NBC coming next year, Conan taking Leno's place, and rumors of Jon Stewart being lured to the networks\u2014he refuses to play into the panic. His guess is that Leno will end up coming to ABC. That would probably move Jimmy Kimmel Live! to 12:30, which, frankly, might be a better situation. A leadin from Leno trumps a leadin from Nightline in every conceivable way. He doesn't think Conan will bomb on The Tonight Show, but he doesn't see him ever reaching the masses the way Leno does. As for Jimmy Fallon, he has no idea. \"I don't, I don't\u2026I don't like to judge people before they go on. Some people you think are going to be great. I think most people thought Chevy Chase was going to be great. Disaster. He doesn't seem to have ever recovered from it, really. He went from movie star to disgraced talkshow host. You never really come back after a talk show. That's the thing. Even now, I hear people speak derisively of Arsenio. And I'm like, Arsenio was on for six years! I mean, really, that's how your memory serves you, that Arsenio was a failure His show was a big hit for a long time! But people glue that failure to your forehead. That's something I live in fear of.\"\n\nhe would like to introduce me to his toilet. He's touring me around the house, and one of the highlights is the toilet. The master bath is Hollywoodhuge\u2014teak, glass, a chandelier over the tub. The toilet is in a little closet by itself. It's white. Nothing spectacular. Except there's a little blue button on the side. \"It's the greatest. You press the button and it shoots water up your ass. I honestly can't recommend it more. It seems gross, I know, but when you actually get one it's the greatest. Stand back, because it's gonna squirt up.\" It squirts way up, a strong gusher. \"It's called the Swash, by Brondell. And it's heated. The seat is heated. And the water is heated. I would never joke about something like this. In fact, I've bought it as a Christmas gift for various people. Wait, stand back, I'll do it again.\"\n\nHe does it again. \"Nice, huh I use it constantly, six or seven times a day.\"\n\nI turn to the sink, ask him about the impressive array of gels, mousses, and sprays. \"I didn't have you as a hairproduct guy,\" I say.\n\n\"That's all Sarah's shit,\" he says. \"We haven't gotten around to\u2026.whatever. This is my sink over here. Most of this shit is stuff that came out of gift baskets and seems too nice to throw away, but I never use it. I use Magic Move Light. I put exactly this much in my hair every day. You rub it like this and you put it like this and it just has a little more, I don't know, hold or something. I oss. I oss maybe three, four times a day. I shower. I probably take a good twelve to fourteen showers a day. I'm not, like, a germaphobe. I'll eat gum off the oor. You know. It has nothing to do with that. I just like to be clean.\"\n\nWe go into the bedroom, not too huge, pretty modest, in fact. He likes the bed because it has builtin drawers underneath. Clever. He pulls one open. \"Oh, those are all Sarah's shoes. Huh.\" We look at the kids' rooms, marvel at the motherofpearl tile in their bathrooms; he says you can get it at Costco. The kids spend Wednesdays and every other weekend here, and the rest of their time with Gina, his exwife, who lives a few miles away. We look at the ercise room. \"This is all Sarah's equipment. I've never once used it.\" He says the TV in here is way, way too small, anyway.\n\nSarah is all over this house, even though she is no longer here. While the fact of the breakup after ve years was well publicized last summer, neither he nor she has ever spoken publicly about it. It was depressing. It sucked. They were the First Couple of comedy. They were cool. Or, she was. Being with Sarah had a way of signicantly elevating Jimmy's coolness factor.\n\n\"People are asking,\" I tell him. \"Everyone is asking why you guys broke up.\"\n\n\"They want to know for the wrong reasons,\" he says. \"They don't care about us. We don't represent anything to them. People like to gossip. It's human nature. You can't really blame them for it.\"\n\nI make the point that when you have two famous people who were so publicly famous together\u2014fucking Matt Damon, fucking Ben Affleck\u2014it's\u2026tough for the audience to be left hanging.\n\n\"If people are interested, it is by denition interesting. But it's not always as interesting as people might imagine it is. It's just, I wouldn't do that to her. I wouldn't discuss it in the media out of respect for her, and she feels the same way with me, you know\"\n\nWhat if he was a guest on his own show\u2014wouldn't he try to wrestle out an answer\n\n\"It's just not part of the deal,\" he says.\n\nI tilt my head to indicate I'm not sure I believe him. \"What if David Duchovny came on your show tomorrow You were pretty intrigued with that sexaddict story in your office today. You wouldn't ask about it\"\n\n\"Not unless he wanted to talk about it. No, I would not. Or, there's another thing. Like, Monica Lewinsky comes on my show. She knows why she's there. She's only famous for one reason. Therefore, I feel like I'm required to discuss it with her and she's required to discuss it with me. Otherwise she can decline the invitation to be on the show. But, you know, David Duchovny is not famous because he has this sex addiction, or whatever the story is.\"\n\nI ask him how he's taking to single life.\n\n\"There's no dating. There's no anything. I come to my house after work, I just wind up hanging around my family. Part of it is I don't want to be photographed out at some club. I went to Las Vegas recently. It was a family thing. I went out to dinner with some people, including the priest from the church I grew up with, and the reports are \u2018Jimmy Kimmel's over Sarah Silverman!' You know. I just don't want any part of that. It's not worth it to me. I'd rather just keep to my own little world and hang out with my kids and my cousins' kids. Something happens down the line as far as that stuff goes, it does, but I just keep to myself now. I'm too bitchy, anyway. I work all the time.\"\n\nHe has a house in Hermosa Beach. He likes going there. He bought his parents a house out there, too. So they hang out at the beach. Or here. He has his Football Sundays. His hydraulics. His pizza oven. His squirting toilet. He loves this house. He loves the drum set in the living room and the horns, the ready stage for Cleto and the band should they come over and decide to play. He moved here six years ago, after he and his wife divorced. His brother, Jonathan, moved in with him. \"We would walk around this place and say, \u2018Look, it's like our parents died and left us millions and millions of dollars! This is the greatest thing!' \"\n\nBut of course, Jonathan got married and moved on. You know how that goes. And then Sarah moved in, and then she moved on. You know how that goes. So now, yeah, it's just him.\n\n\"it was good,\" he says about the pizza. \"It wasn't great, but it was good. I would like it to be better: I'd like the crust to break when you pull it. You know That's what I want. It needs a little more water in there or something. I could have cooked the crust rst and then put the cheese on\u2014but at a certain point you turn the cheese into glue. I don't know. Stop that! No. Don't worry about that. I don't like guests to clean up. It makes me nervous.\"\n\nHe hauls plates over to the sink, waves me over, asks if I have a vacuum sealer in my house, or any other foodsaver system.\n\nFoodsaver system\n\n\"I believe rmly in the Magic Vac,\" he says. \"It's a little more compact than the FoodSaver.\" He gets out a little plastic tube, connects it to the machine, to the container of leftover pizza sauce, pushes the button and marvels at the sucking action. He opens his freezer, pulls out steaks, burgers, vegetable medleys, wants me to see all the foods enjoying an extended stay thanks to the Magic Vac. \"I'm proud of that,\" he says. \"It's how I spend my time. That, and shopping. Mostly either Costco or Costco.com. I stock up on gifts for people. Here, I'll show you.\" He leads me out of the kitchen, through his cramped office\u2014the floors are stacked with recent UPS deliveries from Costco.com\u2014and out the front door. It's high up here, you can see over the Hollywood Hills, and the pathway is lined with owers, and there's a playhouse; it was supposed to be for his kids to play in, but they never used it, so now it's \"The Gift House.\"\n\nInside, it's stocked oor to ceiling with bos, a warehouse full of gifts awaiting distribution. \"So what I do is if I see something I know will make a good gift, cuckoo clocks, Star Wars gures, pillows, I'll stock up on them. Or like, see, a Stink Blaster. Now, I know this is a good gift for, like, 8yearold boys. So I'll buy a bunch of them. So, like, the ecutive poker set, that kind of ran its course, I'll have to retire those. Bubblegum cigars, whenever somebody has a baby I'll send them bubblegum cigars.\"\n\nHe says he shops mostly late at night. \"Mostly online. All online. Yeah, I like looking at things, and I wind up convincing myself that I need this, like, I need this tiny policeofficer uniform for somebody's baby.\"\n\nIt's sweet. It might be kind of lonely. A guy who loves family, who is all about family, and there is no family here.\n\nIt's getting late, almost 1 a.m. We head back into the house so he can vacuumseal the Parmesan cheese before driving me back to my hotel. He swings by a wall of photos in the kitchen; did I want to see them\n\n\"There's me, Sal, Jonathan, my brother. That's me, you can see how skinny I was as a kid. Dopey kid. And Archie. My cousin Sal's little brother, Jack. This kid is unbelievable. He's so cute. Yeah, the whole gang is there.\"\n\nHe's smiling, admiring, tilting his head back like an old man at a museum.\n\n\"In this one you can see we're in a limo and Sal farted and everyone's covering their faces. And he's just atout delighted. He's never happier than when other people are unhappy.\" He's laughing, shaking his head, the kind of laugh that revs up and then back down with an audible ahhhhh. \"Oh, this is a great picture, too. This is my cousin Micki. My cousin Ann. Our cousin PJ. And there's Sal pulling Cousin Suzy's hair. Hilarious!\"\n\nHe says nothing about the picture, nestled among the rest, of him and Sarah and the kids in happier times, on the beach or somewhere where the sun glowed warmly.\n\n\"Wait, this is the best! This is a picture that my grandfather drew! Okay, so this is a trip that my uncle Frank went on with my grandparents. No, no, no, I'm not kidding. Oh, my God. This is hilarious! You see my grandmother bleeding Well, here they jumped off the train because they realized they were going toward Austria.\" He's cracking up. He's having trouble speaking through the laughter. \"They jumped with their luggage off this train! They had to go back toward Venice! This is the aftermath! Notice my grandmother bleeding and carrying this big bag. They're miserable. Look at Uncle Frank smiling! Carrying one little bag! That's perfect! It's so tting!\"\n\nI have almost no idea what he's talking about, but he's having so much fun laughing I can't help but laugh along. It's hard not to root for him. It's hard not to become invested in his life, even if you're just a passing stranger, barely an acquaintance. Aw, Jimmy. I want him to keep laughing. I want him to have a girlfriend. I want him to have a wife, a dog, someone to come home to. I want him to do good on that TV show of his. I want to pinch his puffy cheek and say, You're a nice boy, Jimmy, such a nice boy. I'm turning Jewish, or I guess Italian. I'm turning into his sister, or his fat aunt, his mother. Maybe this is what he does on TV. Yeah, this is exactly what he does. He brings you his family, and pretty soon you're a member.\n\nA couple of days after I get home from Jimmy's house, a mysterious UPS package arrives on my front porch. No note. Just a Magic Vac, a set of canisters, and a lifetime supply of bags.\n\nJeanne Marie Laskas is a GQ correspondent."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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