My 10 Seconds of Entrepreneurial Genius.

I was sitting in a dive bar in Austin called LaLa’s with a couple of friends, and there was a rodeo – bull riding -- on the TV at the end of the bar. One of the friends was watching, and he said “Oh, there’s Bodacious”, and he explained: Bodacious was a bull so big, so mean, and so wild that he almost killed a couple of cowboys who tried to ride him, and finally they had to retire him. I went home to New York and logged onto the LexisNexis account that I used for years after a foolishly trusting Rolling Stone editor gave me the magazine’s password, and I did a little research. So that tells you how long ago this was: before the internet was very useful.

Bodacious (and the drag queen name never failed to amuse me) was indeed a legend. He was Sonny Liston. He was Moby Dick. 1800 pounds of mean. The way bull riding works is, you have to stay on for 8 seconds, or your ride doesn’t count at all. After that, you get off however you can, and then you get points for how well you rode – as does the bull for how hard he made it. Bodacious had had 135 riders, and only 8 of them made the full 8 seconds.

At the time, the most famous bullrider was a guy named Tuff Hedeman, who’d been world champion for four years running. He rode Bodacious once, and the bull pulled an astounding, gymnastic move, bucking his rear end up, which shot Hedeman forward, and then throwing his head back hard, which literally crushed Hedeman’s face, turning it into a mask of blood. It’s gruesome to see. Hedeman went through 12 hours of surgery, and permanently lost his ability to smell or taste. Another rider once wore a catcher’s mask and bulletproof vest to ride him, and still came off with a concussion and a bunch of broken facial bones. So they retired Bodacious and started breeding him, sending what are called 'straws' of semen to ranches around the country -- a very lucrative business.

I pitched the story to GQ, and of course they said yes, so I talked to Hedeman and a few other riders on the phone, and then flew down to Tulsa, where Bodacious was on display at a rodeo, like a carny side show. I had a pit pass and could go anywhere, so I stood next to the riders as they got on their bulls, and I’m telling you, these were toughest motherfuckers I have ever seen. They were little guys (a low center of gravity helps you stay on), and they’d climb onto these huge beasts in a penned in chute, wrap their hands tight around the harness, and then – Bam! – all hell broke loose. I took a bunch of pictures, but I'd remember the night well even if I hadn't, because Kevin Russell called me while I was out on the floor, to tell me that his first child had just been born.

So I said Hello to Bodacious, who absolutely did not give a shit about anything, and the next day I drove over to Paris, Texas, to talk to the guy who’d bred and discovered him (you can’t teach bulls to buck: you just have to put someone on their back and see what happens), then down to Tyler, where the breeding facility was. The very nice gentleman there showed me around and answered all my questions, but I really only had one: How do you get semen out of a ton of hostile beef? “Oh,” he said, “we lock him in a little pen so he can’t move, and then use the electro-ejaculator”.

This of course piqued my interest, so I asked him to show me. He went and got one: it was about the size of an NBA player’s forearm, and it had electrodes on the top side. And, not to put too fine a point on it, the way it works is they shove it up the bull’s ass and shock his prostate until he spontaneously ejaculates, catching the result in a cup at the end of a very long stick.

And here I had the one and only entrepreneurial idea I’ve ever come up with in my life. I could manufacture these things, significantly smaller to be sure, and sell them to sex toy shops around the world. I was thinking Chelsea alone would make me a millionaire. So I had one more question for the man, though I had to hem and haw a little bit while I figured out how to phrase it. “The bulls,” I said. “Do they…like it?”

I don’t know if this was a perfectly reasonable question, or if he was just a better comedian than me, but he kept an immaculate deadpan, and paused for just the right amount of time. “…I don’t think so,” he said, and all my dreams of wealth evaporated.