It was still dark out when he got the news. He was alone in his room, and then suddenly, he was not. A slender red-haired woman who had appeared at his side whispered the words, “It’s you, Adam. People has chosen you,” then quickly and gracefully flung herself out the window. He could hear screams drifting up from the street. He wiped his eyes.
“It’s me.” A grin broke out across his face, and the power of it woke the rising sun. “It’s me.”
***
The rest of the day was a rush of Coronation duties — he was carried in a pearl daïs by retired Victoria’s Secret models (the angel wings, he learned, weren’t a costume; in fact it was incredibly difficult for them to hide it off the runway) to the ceremony, declared once and for all who wore that Miu Miu wrap dress best, had lunch with Ginnifer Goodwin, left a drunk voicemail for Cee Lo Green telling him how much he appreciated him.
He’d spent most of the day trying not to think about what came next. But it came just the same. The room was dark, and warm, and small.
“Bring forth the last king,” Faith Hill intoned. “Bring forth the lamb for the slaughter.”
Adam held back a gasp as a bound and beaten Channing Tatum was led into the room. His head was lolling forward, and a guard struck him with the butt of her rifle. “Look your king in the face,” she commanded. He spit a thin trickle of blood onto the ground and did his best to open his swollen eyes. He tried to manage a smile, then grimaced in pain.
“Fancy meeting you here,” he said. It wasn’t the greatest opening line, but under the circumstances, Adam considered it pretty damn good.
“Hi, Channing,” he said quietly, feeling sick. He couldn’t bring himself to meet Channing’s gaze. He looked dumbly at the stone knife in his hand.
The ceremony began. So quickly; without any warning. I’m not ready, Adam thought helplessly, and found himself giggling softly and absurdly. No one told me it was about to start. What kind of king doesn’t even know when his own coronation starts?
“And on the last day of the Sexiest Man Alive’s reign, he shall baptize the new Man in his blood, and with his blood shall the new Man be consecrated,” Mary J. Blige read from a book of human skin. Everyone was looking at him. Why was everyone looking at him?
“I’m sorry,” he said vaguely to the air, still looking at everything but Channing’s ruined face. “I’m really, really sorry.”
“It has happened before,” Channing said. “It will happen again. It will happen to you. Do it now.” Adam squeezed the stone knife so hard he felt the outline of it against his bones. He has a child, he thought. A wife and a child. “I can’t,” he heard himself say. “I can’t.”
Channing rattled his chains. “It’s the Sexiest Man Alive,” he growled. “I watched Bradley Cooper twitch in a pool of his own filth at my feet, and I showed him no mercy with these two hands.” There was blood on his mouth. “While I live, you cannot reign. Kill me. DO IT. Kill me. Kill me.”
Adam lifted a shaking hand and pointed the knife at Channing’s throat. “What I am about to do, I do for beauty,” he chanted.
“What we are about to do, we do for beauty,” the hooded crowd replied. Somewhere, the ghost of Ryan Reynolds smiled.
Adam moved the knife from left to right, and blood followed it. Blood covered his hands and his feet, and Adam knew that he was the Sexiest Man Alive in both name and truth. Channing lifted his eyes, and Adam finally felt equal to matching his gaze. His lips moved, but no sound issued from them.
***
When the servants entered to clear the room, they found hanging upon the wall a splendid portrait of Channing Tatum as they had last seen him, in all the wonder of his exquisite youth and beauty. Lying on the floor was a dead man, in evening dress, with a knife in his heart. He was withered, wrinkled, and loathsome of visage. It was not till they had examined the rings that they recognized who it was.
[Image via Ryanseacrest.com]
Tags: adam levine, channing tatum, people magazine, secret quotes from the picture of dorian grey, the sexiest man alive
Not one but several friends have indicated that I over-share Toast links in delight, which is no doubt transparent to your analytics engines, and they have complained that they would hold it against me except all of the shares are SO DAMN GOOD, and this is being added to the pile because cackling at work with the blood still cooling.
Golden-bough-tastic!
(I have no idea who Adam Levine is. Should I?)
You should rejoice and be glad in it.
These titles are simply meaningless.
Yessssss.
That last line is incredible
Totally unrelated except obviously related: I DON’T KNOW SOMETIMES I WANT TO HAVE SEX WITH HIM?
DO YOU REALLY?
Only occasionally! There all these pictures where I think he’s disgusting and then sometimes I think about how his body would feel against mine.
It would feel gross and weaselly. Be strong, Nicole. If you like tattooed, go for Beckham instead.
I support your feelings Nicole! Yes, sometimes he smiles, and you think, “do you *always* brush your dreams with broken dreams and misogynistic lies?”
And then other times he smirks and amidst the churning heat you think “you’re just bad enough to appreciate my dark side too, aren’t you?”
….or maybe that’s just me.
No yeah sometimes he’s on THIS IS THE VOICE and he’s just looking so intently at the stage and it’s horrible but I don’t know what to do
this is kind of my Nicklas Bendtner feelings except replace “looking so intently at the stage” with “being a useless douchebag” and yeah
Oh I totally do, but my loins have always had a soft spot for that wiry dirtbag look.
Ditto.
I’m not ashamed. I don’t see the disgusting. Don’t even see the dirtbag. Do see the abs and I get to be susceptible without shame. (“Like shame is something to be proud of” -Cordelia Chase.) To further steal original content, from an astute line from yesterday’s Reddit link, were he to walk down my pike “I’d put it on my CV.” Adam Levine’s bony ass would be mine forever and everyone would know because I would never shaddupabouddit.
yessssss
Channing rattled his chains. “It’s the Sexiest Man ALIVE,” he growled. “I watched Bradley Cooper twitch in a pool of his own filth at my feet, and I showed him no mercy with these two hands.” There was blood on his mouth. “While I live, you cannot reign. Kill me. DO IT. Kill me. Kill me.”
mallory i love you so much never turn on me
Do you, sometimes, in the deepest most private part of your heart, fear Mallory more than is seemly in business partners?
I hate and love her, as I hate and love myself.
She is precious to you in more ways than one.
Channing Tatum wrapped in chains growling “do it” at you.
I know EXACTLY how I feel about Channing Tatum, and This Is It.
The odd thing is, I don’t even know that much about him? But he seems very sweet and funny, in that kind of big friendly athlete who also sings showtunes kind of way. And there is a video out there of him and his pit mix doing “Dirty Dancing” together, which is where his dog jumps up into his outstretched arms and he spins her around over his head like Baby before giving her a big hug. I’m sold.
You can’t tell us about that without a link! Off to google.
Edit: here it is and omg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o5N3uJP79Cw
(breaks fingers in rush to youtube this)
I can’t promise you that. You know I can’t.
I know. I’ve always known. One day you will ask me to make The Great Sacrifice, and then my blood will be yours, and it will strengthen you, and then the walls of the city will shatter beneath your great rage.
I kind of adore Mallory so much that I desperately fear the inevitable discovery that she is a person who makes errors and will not always write Truth and Beauty in accordance to my personal tastes. I occasionally practice being sad about that. “Oh well,” I say. “You’ll still have texts from Lord Byron.”
I love this almost as much as I detest Adam Levine.
And thus, the universe is balanced.
They can kill his mortal body, but Channing Tatum’s spirit will ever appear to the drunk and lonely in the dead of night and perform the “Pony” dance just for them! YOU CANNOT TAKE THAT FROM US!
Well, shit, I know what I’m doing with my evening.
I can only assume that this is 100% accurate.
I just want Adam Levine to read this, and then our lives will have purpose.
Hell, I’m thinking of linking this to Channing Tatum on Twitter.
Already done. He needs to know what’s in store for him.
Good. Good.
The Sexiest Man Alive title to me has always implied a Battle Royale/Hunger Games challenge, taking place in a post-apocalyptic misandrist America, a land in which the women rule as an entire gender of despots. Several hunky shirtless men are dropped into an arena, and forced to fight to the death as the estrogen-frenzied crowd screams and hisses and catcalls and pelts them with tampons.
Only one man is left standing. He is . . . the Sexiest Man Alive.
I’m afraid I can’t really picture it, because whenever I try, it devolves into something like this: http://oglaf.com/sport/
It’s the “Alive” that does it.
I just don’t understand why Alan Rickman never steps up to the challenge.
I think he would literally annihilate the competition. There would first be a high noise on the very upper edge of human hearing. Then he would ignite like a neutron star and every living creature in a fifty-mile radius would blaze unbearably bright for a moment, then settle to the ground in a pile of ash.
British dramatic art schools tap selected students for a ceremony that involves torches, woad in improbable places, and a vow to seek length of days and appeal over the fleeting joy of one-year crowns. Idris Elba, Alan Rickman, Helen Mirren, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Maggie Smith, Tom Hiddleston…theirs is the slow warming fire that burns long and steady even as the brief meteors of People’s Hottests flare and vanish overhead.
104 weeks later, still hilarious.
*puts woad in an improbable place*
This is in no way defending Adam Levine as Sexiest Man Alive because A) Clearly Ira Glass is the sexiest man alive and B) It’s a super problematic, yet totally meaningless title anyway.
HOWEVER, I wanted to relate this anecdote. I saw Maroon 5 play several times while I was in college, including some smaller venues because this is pre-Voice, pre-AHS, and pre-Moves Like Jagger. Whatever. Anyway, ones of these times, it was 2003 and I was at the front of the stage at the Bluebird in Denver, so I got a a very close view for this particular show. Anyway, Adam was clearly the center of the show and he was wearing this pale white-grey flared tunic shirt, skinny jeans before they were popular, and of course, singing in his falsetto voice. Before he gave his encore, he also curtseyed to the audience a couple of times like he was British royalty. FEMALE British royalty. At that moment, he struck me as an incredibly gender-bending rock star, which was way hotter than the faux-emo machismo (I’m looking at you, John Mayer) that was super popular at that time. The gender ambiguity played as performative, certainly, but it didn’t play as false and it was a fascinating on-stage persona that Adam presented. Androgynous Adam Levine is way hotter than Masculine Heartthrob Adam Levine
Now, this was me at a time where I was taking many gender studies classes and also, was 19, but it still rings true to me that at least in previous incarnations, he was playing around with androgyny and it was interesting and way more compelling than this Sexiest Man Alive crap.
actually, if you were seeing maroon5 in 2003, they were probably opening for john mayer. (not that I was there or anything…) [[darty eyes]]
Haha, actually, yes, that is definitely one of the places that I saw them. The particular concert that I’m referencing had Gavin Degraw as the opener, so…basically more of the same.
THERE”S NO SHAME IN OUR FORMER CONCERT-GOING HABITS.
That’s right! I saw them opening up for Counting Crows and John Mayer in San Diego in 2003. I was there for Counting Crows (BECAUSE I LOVE THEM FOREVER SHUT UP EVERYONE) — we left during Mayer’s set. No one I knew had heard of them at that point, but they were really impressive — my best friend got their CD right away, and then they started to really take off not long after. (And then in 2008, I saw them AGAIN with Counting Crows, except this time Maroon 5 was the headliner.) The point of this story? Um, I go to a lot of Counting Crows shows?
IRA GLASS
WHAT IS THIS
Am I the only one hearing ‘Masculine Heartthrob Adam Levine’ in the same threatening/melodramatic manner as Actual Cannibal Shia LaBeouf?
I JUST read Picture of Dorian Grey so getting to the end added an extra layer of self-satisfied smugness to this already excellent work of (non-) fiction. I GOT THAT REFERENCE.
Did you get the Narnia reference? Mallory, that just made me love you more. Which I hardly imagined possible.
Adam Levine is at best a Summer Prince, never a Summer King.
Channing Levine? Adam Tatum? Who? I have some form of age-related blindness that prevents me from noticing these folks. I can see Cumberbatches and Hiddlestons quite well, interestingly enough.
I think this post should be submitted to Tin House as the ending to Shirley Jackson’s unfinished short story.
I’m not sure if it’s age-related blindness as much as it is cheekbone-related blindness–you’re clearly blinded by the sharp angles of the Cumberbatches and the Hiddlestons to notice anyone else.
Not that I can blame you or anything! I, on the other hand, will welcome all hot men, cheekboned or not, to my imaginary bedside. (Although .. do you have a soft spot for Daniel Dae Kim as well??)
If we’re talking cheekbones, let’s talk Cillian Murphy.
I wouldn’t be doing much talking with Cillian Murphy.
I must admit that when looking at Cillian Murphy, I am too blinded by his beautiful eyes and eyelashes to notice anything else. He has arms? legs? hair?
He is in fact just a floating set of eyes and eyelashes. Most people’s brains cannot process this and fill in a body around him but you have seen him for what he truly is.
(Although .. do you have a soft spot for Daniel Dae Kim as well??)
I do now!
ortberg, you are the queen of the internet
I was just looking over the list of past winners , and ugggh. The only one I’m definitely down with is Denzel in 1996. (Maaaaybe Hugh Jackman also.) The problem is, if Denzel ritualistically sacrificed 1995’s winner, Brad Pitt, how did Pitt come back to win it again in 2000? “People’s Sexiest Man of the Millennium — BRAD PITT’S REANIMATED CORPSE, COME TO CAST JUDGMENT UPON US ALL.”
What do you think went down with the Richard Gere/Cindy Crawford nod?
“Channing rattled his chains” has got to be the most perfect sentence in the history of recorded language. Calling it.
Another thing is A STONE KNIFE AAAAH
Did you get the Narnia reference? Mallory, that just made me love you more. Which I hardly imagined possible.
I wouldn't be doing much talking with Cillian Murphy.
1. Ben Affleck before Matt Damon?
2. Nick Nolte. Nick Nolte?! Nick Nolte.
O Gosh
This is fucking amazing.
The awesome thing is, knowing Channing Tatum, if you were to do this as a short film, he’d probably be game for it.