Our Man in Pyongyang

The history of my relationship with The New Yorker magazine is short. Growing up, I don't think my parents had a great deal of context for the cultural significance of the magazine. We didn't live in New York, so we didn't read it. I know it occasionally ended up in my childhood home - I can only imagine that free subscriptions accompanied airline frequent flyer miles or credit card offers, or perhaps our kindly neighbors, the Plotkins, brought it over to share an article of interest. I have a vague set of recollections pairing my general incomprehension of New Yorker cartoons with a broad-side joke on Carson or Leno or somewhere about the general incomprehensibility of New Yorker cartoons.

Four years in the carelessness of California and college didn't bring the New Yorker into much greater circulation in my world. Truthfully, only once I hit New York did I become a regular. And then, it was reading RM's issues second-hand, lazily on the couch in an overheating living room in those halcyon days of regular unemployment. Even though there were three of us living in the apartment, three of us checking the mail, reading a new copy of the New Yorker first hand was not allowed. This became abundantly clear one evening, as RM stewed as PT flipped through a new issue on a Tuesday evening. From then on, the lines were drawn, clear, and well understood. I can't be sure, but JW may have even secured a separate, second subscription - presumably to sit in the icy cool of his air-conditioned room.

For a little while, now, I've read the magazine, although I've been enjoying it less and less often. Now that I am living in ER's apartment, with ER's paintings hanging on the wall, washing ER's dishes in ER's sink after eating my food, and checking ER's mail, well, I've got a copy of The New Yorker on a daily basis once more. And, until today, it has largely disappointed.

But, today, wow. I don't know what Rebecca Mead must have thought when she walked in with her profile of Bobby Egan, but, wow. What a fun read. I don't even know where to begin. Simply: Bobby Egan is a regular guy who owns a barbecue restaurant in Hackensack, New Jersey. The profile photo shows him in a suit, holding a semi-automatic handgun in the galley of his kitchen. Mr. Bobby is a self-styled confidante of the North Korean government, having one day decided to start befriending ambassadors at the U.N. And, as I said, the story is a hoot. A sampling:

Egan says that he respects Kim as a leader, just as he respects Bush as a leader, although there are important differences between the two men. “Put it this way, O.K.? I’d rather have George Bush mad at me than Kim Jong Il,” Egan said one day at Cubby’s, leaning confidentially over the table. “I have no problem with George Bush coming in the restaurant and yelling and screaming at me. I would sleep real good that night. I wouldn’t want to get His Excellency Kim Jong Il angry. I wouldn’t sleep well that night.”

Although he admits to having been thrown in jail a few times, he has no felony convictions. As a young man, he was convicted on a misdemeanor: “We were all drunk and we parked out in a lot, and my dog’s running over to the firewood pile and bringing us firewood back, and we’re throwing the firewood in the pickup truck,” Egan said. “And we got arrested for taking firewood off the lot. My hunting dog did it. And I took the rap for it.”

Egan is a patriot of a particularly vivid stripe, and, having been denied a chance to fight for his country in Vietnam, he declares himself more than ready to kill for it, should duty call. “If you told me that to get bin Laden I’d have to physically eat him for dinner—his whole body—I’d say, ‘Well, we’ve got a lot of barbecue sauce. Let’s barbecue him.’ ”

According to Egan, he and Han used to joke about having the opportunity to fight each other if it came to war between the U.S. and North Korea. “I said to him, ‘When I get to you, I am going to yank all those teeth out with pliers before I kill you,’ ” Egan recalled. “He laughed and said, ‘You don’t even want to know what I’m going to do to you.’ ”

“I said, ‘I think you have to bring it up to another level,’ ” he told me. “I said, ‘Forget all this war rhetoric and all this crap. Don’t blow up a plane, don’t send another submarine to South Korea—don’t do any of that stupid stuff.’ ” Instead, he suggested, the North Koreans should show the Americans exactly what they had. And, in his telling, they listened. “I said, ‘You have them, right? Maybe you should test one. Maybe they have to see it.’ Four or five months later, the Koreans did that nuclear test. I called the Embassy that morning and said, ‘Congratulations, you are in the nuclear club now, boys.’ They were all happy and stuff. I said, ‘Watch the ball start rolling now.’ And it did.”

Seriously. The whole thing reads like this. Ten pages. Check it out. It's awesome.